The Seduction of Elliot McBride hp-5

by Jennifer Ashley

  Juliana poured out the tea.

  “I wonder that your husband brought his Indian servants home with him,” Mrs. Dalrymple said as she accepted a cup and plucked a cake from the tray Mahindar held. “One had to put up with them in India, of course, but I like plain Scottish servants now. The Indian ones do creep about so, and most of them are blatant thieves. It’s unnerving.”

  Juliana looked at Mahindar, who kept his face completely blank. “Mahindar and his family are not thieves,” she said. “They are perfectly fine people.”

  “Mark my words, they’re not to be trusted,” Mrs. Dalrymple said, waving her tiny cake. “What on earth Mr. McBride was thinking, I cannot imagine. The Hindus find it bizarre to cook a chop, can you imagine, Mrs. Terrell? They eat no meat themselves.”

  “Mahindar is not Hindu,” Juliana said. “He’s a Sikh.”

  Mrs. Dalrymple shuddered. “Even worse. They are so bloodthirsty.”

  “I have not found Mahindar to be bloodthirsty in the least,” Juliana said. “What’s more, he speaks perfect English.” She gave Mrs. Dalrymple a pointed look.

  Mrs. Dalrymple paid no attention, being busy taking a bite of her cake. She chewed a moment, then her face took on a peculiar expression, and she started to cough. “Good heavens, help us. He has poisoned us!”

  Mahindar’s eyes widened in astonishment. Mrs. Terrell, who had been staring out the window and paying no attention, jerked around. Juliana quickly handed Mrs. Dalrymple a napkin and tried not to cringe when the lady spit out the chewed cake.

  “Poison,” Mrs. Dalrymple rasped. “You must send for the constable at once.”

  “Nonsense.” Juliana snatched up a cake from the tray and took a bite. The flavors were unexpected but ones she now recognized. “Cinnamon, cardamom, and a bit of black pepper, that is all. How lovely. Please extend my compliments to your wife, Mahindar.” She smiled, trying to convey to Mahindar that if he valued his sanity, he’d flee the room now.

  Mahindar made a polite bow. “Thank you, memsahib.” With dignity intact, he turned and silently departed.

  “You see what I mean about them creeping about?” Mrs. Dalrymple said. “And putting pepper into a cake? How ignorant. How foolish. Plain cooking is beyond them.”

  “Mrs. Dalrymple,” Juliana said, no longer bothering to keep her temper in check. “If you have come here to insult my servants and disparage my food, I must ask you to leave.”

  “You know very well why I came today,” Mrs. Dalrymple said.

  Mrs. Terrell nodded. “We’ve come to give you another warning, is all, dear Mrs. McBride.”

  Mrs. Terrell was about thirty-five but she might have been fifty, round faced, her hair going to gray, a woman who would die rather than stoop to artifice to cover the gray threads. She wore clothes made well of costly fabric, but they were painfully, almost boastfully plain. Her entire being shouted, My husband has money, but I am frugal and will never bring him shame…unlike some wives who wear gowns of dull poplin to receive guests.

  “Another warning,” Juliana said. “Please tell me what you mean.”

  “Mrs. Dalrymple has telegraphed to Scotland Yard, and an investigation has begun. Murder is a very serious crime, Mrs. McBride.”

  “Indeed, yes,” Juliana said in freezing tones. “So serious that one must prove it without doubt. It is not an accusation to be made lightly.”

  “And I do not make it lightly,” Mrs. Dalrymple said. “Archibald was a fine youth. Almost like a son to my husband.” She blinked her light blue eyes rapidly, though Juliana could discern no tears. “Mr. Stacy said he was off to visit your husband at his plantation one day, to see how he fared after his ordeal, and the next thing we know, Mr. Stacy is missing, presumed dead. A witness saw the two of them together, and then, Mr. Stacy was gone.”

  “What witness is that?” Juliana asked. “I would like to speak to him.”

  Mrs. Dalrymple gave her a wise look. “I will keep the name to myself. We have been advised to.”

  Juliana felt a cold chill but kept her tone confident. “Investigate away, Mrs. Dalrymple. Mr. McBride believes, however, that Mr. Stacy is still alive.”

  Mrs. Dalrymple jumped, and a bit of tea sloshed to the saucer. “Still alive? He can produce him, then?”

  Juliana hesitated. “Not at the snap of a finger, no.”

  “There, you see?” Mrs. Dalrymple said. “Your husband has told you he left Mr. Stacy alive in India, and Mr. Dalrymple and I are going to prove that he didn’t.”

  “She is adamant, my dear,” Mrs. Terrell said to Juliana.

  Juliana sat still and burned with anger. She had decided last night, lying in bed alone, to put her faith in Elliot. Yes, he might behave like a madman sometimes, but that did not mean he was wrong.

  Her natural fear in the face of Mrs. Dalrymple was that Elliot was wrong, and that whoever he thought was lurking in the woods was not Mr. Stacy.

  But no, Juliana had weighed all the arguments in her head before drawing her conclusion. She would stand by Elliot. She would not be like her mother, who’d disparaged Juliana’s father to all and sundry whenever she could. Juliana’s mother, a beautiful woman, had been hopelessly spoiled by her own family and had chafed at the quiet decorum of the St. John household.

  Juliana drew a breath to tell Mrs. Dalrymple to do her worst, when Elliot himself walked into the room.

  Juliana nearly choked on her tea. Elliot wore a threadbare kilt, scarred boots, and a linen shirt, all covered with dust and plaster, because he’d been helping the men saw, hammer, and haul away debris. His hair was also coated with dust, as was his face, and from this mess his gray eyes blazed with a wild light.

  “Juliana,” Elliot said, then broke into a Highland brogue so broad Juliana herself scarcely understood it. “I heard ye had comp’ny. Are these th’ wee lassies?”

  Juliana cleared her throat. “Mrs. Terrell, our neighbor, and Mrs. Dalrymple, her friend from Glasgow.”

  “Och, aye,” Elliot said. Then he spurted a string of words that sounded like, Gae nae leaver due gran doch blochen. Gibberish nonsense.

  “Quite,” Juliana said, pretending she’d understood every word.

  “What’s the matter, lass?” Elliot asked Mrs. Dalrymple. “Can ye nae ken yer own Scottish?”

  “I learned long ago to speak plain English,” Mrs. Dalrymple said. “That is the world today, Mr. McBride.”

  “Then it’s a foolish world.” Elliot went off into another speech that Juliana truly didn’t understand. The soft consonants and long vowels were not from a language she knew, nor did they sound like the Punjabi dialect Mahindar and his family spoke. However, she continued to sip tea as though nothing were out of the ordinary.

  Elliot had left the door open. Out in the passage, Komal’s voice rose in Punjabi, and they heard McGregor’s shouts. “Bring those back, ye daft woman! A man’s got a right to have a bottle or two stashed under his bed. That’s single malt. Do ye understand me? Och, now ye’ve let that goat in.”

  Bleating sounded, followed by the noise of hooves on the flagstones, accompanied by the ripe smell of frightened goat, and Priti’s laughing voice as she chased it down the hall.

  “I was right,” Mrs. Dalrymple said. “This is a madhouse.”

  Juliana rose to her feet. “Then the leaving of it will not pain you. Thank you for your warning, ladies. My husband and I will take it under consideration.”

  “You’ll do a sight more than that.” Mrs. Dalrymple slammed down her teacup and jumped up, Mrs. Terrell rising more decorously. “Mr. Dalrymple will speak to you, Mr. McBride.”

  Elliot nodded silently, as though he didn’t care one way or the other. McGregor burst into the room, a bottle of whiskey in each hand, Komal trying to wrest one from him.

  “Lassie, tell this woman t’ leave a man be. Ah.” McGregor stopped, his lively eyes taking in the shocked faces of the two visiting ladies. “Mrs. Dull Pimple. Taking your leave, were you? Good day, then.”

  As he bowed to
them, Komal wrenched a bottle from McGregor’s hand and held it aloft in triumph. Then she pulled her scarf over her face, and turned and faced the wall as the lady callers walked past her.

  “Come along, Prunella,” Mrs. Dalrymple said. “They’ve made their beds, and they must lie in them.” She looked at Komal’s colorful back. “You have to take a strap to them. It’s the only way they learn to behave.”

  McGregor came alive with rage. “Ye even think about laying a finger on her, I’ll shoot you dead. I’m laird here, and don’t ye forget it.”

  Juliana hurried past Mr. McGregor, who was waving the bottle dangerously. “You had better go quickly,” she said to Mrs. Terrell, half pushing the two women into the hall. “There’s no telling what he’ll do when he’s enraged.”

  Mrs. Dalrymple scurried to the front door, narrowly missing two workmen who came in with a load of stone blocks. “Out of my way, if you please,” she shouted. “You should be using the back door. The back.”

  She rushed out. There was bleating, and a scream, Priti’s voice admonishing.

  Juliana hurried out, followed by worried Mrs. Terrell, to find Mrs. Dalrymple in a tug-of-war with the goat. The animal had snatched at the fringes of Mrs. Dalrymple’s silk shawl as she’d run by, and now the goat busily chewed as Mrs. Dalrymple struggled to pull the shawl out of the animal’s mouth.

  “No, no,” Priti cried, shaking her finger at the goat. “Bad goat.”

  “Heathen child.” Mrs. Dalrymple raised her hand at Priti, preparing to slap.

  Rage flashed through Juliana, and she caught Mrs. Dalrymple’s wrist in a tight grip. “Do not dare to strike her. How can you even think such a thing?”

  Mrs. Dalrymple tried to wrench herself away, but Juliana was too strong. The goat, whether in disgust, or for reasons of her own, spit out the shawl.

  Juliana picked it up and thrust it at Mrs. Dalrymple. “Never, ever come to this house again.”

  She expected Mrs. Dalrymple to exclaim that the shawl was ruined or demand the price of it, but the woman only gave Juliana another furious look and turned away. But the look held a flash of cunning, despite the woman’s anger and fear, as though Mrs. Dalrymple knew something Juliana didn’t.

  Juliana didn’t like the look, but she was too angry to worry about it at the moment.

  “Mrs. Terrell,” Juliana said, keeping her voice deliberately calm. “I am afraid that as long as Mrs. Dalrymple stays with you, I cannot receive you here.”

  Mrs. Terrell remained cool. “I am sorry to hear that, Mrs. McBride.” She adjusted her gloves. “The ladies in this valley look to me for social leadership. I am afraid that they will follow my lead and not receive you. You’ve rather ruined yourself this day, I am pained to say.”

  She turned on her heel—taking care not to let her summer shawl flap anywhere near the goat—and followed Mrs. Dalrymple down to the gate, where an open landau waited.

  “Oh, really?” Juliana said to the air. “Well, we’ll see about that.” She looked down at the goat, still chewing on whatever piece of shawl it had managed to tear off. Juliana gave its head a pat. “Good goat,” she said, then took Priti’s hand and led her back into the house.

  She found McGregor prancing through the wide hallway. He linked his arm through a smiling Komal’s and danced her around one way, then switched arms and went the other. She still had one of the whiskey bottles, and Mr. McGregor kept hold of the other, passing it from hand to hand as he danced.

  Elliot was laughing.

  “It is not funny,” Juliana said with grim determination. “That woman is odious. But Elliot, she said she was having someone investigate you. She wants you charged.”

  “I can’t be charged for murdering someone still alive.”

  “I do wish Mr. Stacy would make things easy on us and show himself. Rather obstinate of him not to.”

  Elliot shrugged. “He does as he pleases. He might go back to wherever he came from without ever revealing himself.”

  “Not very helpful.”

  Elliot lifted his gaze from her to McGregor. McGregor had stopped dancing and was patting Komal on the shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, lass,” McGregor said. “I will never let that nasty female hurt you.”

  Komal actually smiled at him. Beamed, even. McGregor turned brick red and started to stammer. Komal snatched the second whiskey bottle out his hand and ran for the kitchen.

  “Blast you, woman!” McGregor rocketed after her, Priti happily following. They heard voices raised, in two different languages, down the echoing passage to the kitchen.

  “Poor old devil,” Juliana said, not stopping her smile.

  She turned back to Elliot, who leaned his hips comfortably on the back of the empire sofa, his kilt outlining his thighs.

  Even if he never spoke to Juliana of things important to him, she certainly could enjoy looking at him. And touching him. The wet heat of the bath hadn’t left her all day.

  “But, really, we must do something about the Dalrymples,” Juliana said. “They could be dangerous to you.”

  Elliot shrugged. “Mrs. Dalrymple is not Scottish, whatever she claims. She didn’t understand a word I said to her.”

  “My dear Elliot, neither did I.”

  He smiled. “In any case, I can’t be tried for murder if there is no body, no grave, no marker.”

  “You can be tried if he continues to be missing, as the man suspected of making him go missing if nothing else.”

  “The great British system of law makes them have to prove it.” Elliot went quiet. “But our Mrs. Dalrymple’s not wrong, lass. I am a murderer.”

  “You’re not,” Juliana said stoutly. “Not if Mr. Stacy is alive.”

  “He is.” Elliot’s hands tightened on the back of the sofa, the knuckles whitening through his tan. “I’m not talking of him. I’m speaking of other men.”

  “You mean in the army. In battles.”

  He paused again, as though gathering thoughts he didn’t want to think. “No. I mean when I was a prisoner. My captors taught me how to kill with my bare hands, and then made me do it for them.”

  Chapter 20

  Juliana stared at him with the surprise she did so well, the expression of not wanting to believe the horrors he told her. Her blue eyes went a bit wider for a moment. Elliot hated that, with everything he revealed, he’d shatter more and more of her innocence.

  Elliot lifted his hands and looked at them, callused and worn, the fingertips scarred where they’d been cut off, the nails surprisingly whole for having been pulled out and grown back.

  “They taught me how to put my hands around a man’s throat,” he said. “How to use my thumbs to crush his windpipe. How to press my fingers into his eye sockets and pull his cheekbones from his face. A man will fight so hard to live when he’s dying…”

  Juliana’s hand went to her own throat, slender with a sweet dusting of freckles. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to,” she said.

  “I helped them kill men in their rival tribe. They made me into an animal, and they laughed when their enemies died by my hands.”

  “Oh, Elliot.”

  At least she didn’t say, with the superiority of Mrs. Dalrymple or Mrs. Terrell, that the men he’d killed were only heathens and didn’t matter. They were men with lives and homes, with children and wives who’d wail in grief when they did not return.

  “When it was over, they’d lock me back up again.”

  Juliana came to him with slow steps, her gaze never leaving his face. She closed her hands over his, lifted each, and pressed a kiss to his scarred knuckles.

  “I know you had no choice,” she said. “They would have killed you if you hadn’t done it.”

  “But I should have refused. Obeying them makes me a coward by most standards. I should have resisted, even to death, before I did their work.”

  Her warm tear trickled to the back of his hand. “You had no choice,” she repeated in a whisper.

  It hadn’t
seemed real, those swift, silent battles in the night, Elliot chained and made to defend the camp from their rivals. In the cold blackness, Elliot had fought men who’d tried to thrust knives into him, his fear and obsessive need driving him on. He’d fought them because he’d refused to give up and die.

  “I had to live,” he said. “I was determined to live, whatever the cost.” He released her hands and brushed back a tendril of her hair. “To see you again.”

  Juliana looked up at him, lips parted.

  “It’s what drove me to live, lass, every minute of the day or night. To see you again. To hear your voice. To touch you…” Elliot drew his finger down her cheek. “They wondered at my resilience. They called me a demon or the walking dead, because I wouldn’t lie down and die. But I couldn’t. Not until I saw you again.”

  More tears trickled down her cheeks. Elliot brushed one away with his finger.

  “I didn’t understand myself what you were to me,” he said, “until I was in danger of never seeing your face again, or your sweet smile. Then I knew. You were my lass, Juliana. You always have been.”

  “But you came home.” Juliana took a step back, pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve, and wiped her eyes. “You came home and never said a word to me.”

  “I didn’t want you to see me until I’d healed. I was a broken man. But I realized I’d never heal until I returned to India and faced what I was, what had happened to me. Besides, Priti was in India. I didn’t intend to leave her there to be raised without a father. I went back to settle everything for once and for all before I returned to Scotland forever.”

  “But I might have married Grant in the meantime,” Juliana said. She sniffled, swiped at her nose, and tucked the handkerchief into her pocket. “I accepted his proposal because I thought I’d never see you again. You might have been too late.”

  Elliot let amusement slip through the shivering horror in his mind. “No fear of that. I had Ainsley keep an eye on you and tell me everything you did.”