One Little Sin

by Liz Carlyle

  He seemed grateful for the distraction. “Oh, I see the prettiest blossom of all!” he cried, snatching her up and lifting her high. “And I have plucked her from the grass!”

  Sorcha shrieked with laughter and allowed herself to be settled on his knee. Together, they observed the horses which came trotting past. “Back horse,” said Sorcha.

  “Black,” he corrected. “And here comes a hard one. A dappled gray.”

  “A dabble gay,” said Sorcha, pointing.

  Esmée watched them, amazed by the change Sorcha’s presence seemed to engender in MacLachlan. His eyes softened, and the hard lines of his face instantly gentled. Lips that were ordinarily curled with cynicism turned instead into a pure and honest smile, stripping away the years and tempering his jaded gaze.

  So often in her darker moments, Esmée found herself wondering what she saw in such a hardened, practiced rogue. Suddenly, she knew. It was this. The change which came over him in such sweet and carefree moments. He was a different man. Sorcha was a different child. And Esmée—well, for good or ill, she was changing, too.

  For almost half an hour, Sorcha sat thus, cheerfully jabbering about anything or anyone which passed by. When she tired of that, the child turned round and began to toy with the buttons of his waistcoat, actually managing to undo a couple. MacLachlan just looked down at her indulgently. But eventually, Sorcha began to wriggle her way back down his leg. MacLachlan let her go.

  Sorcha wandered a little down the hill and resumed her flower picking. MacLachlan’s eyes stared almost blindly as another rider passed. “The fashionable hour approaches,” he finally murmured. “The park shan’t remain empty much longer. I should probably go.”

  His words made Esmée’s heart sink a little. Without realizing it, she had begun to run her finger around the inside of her pearl necklace again. This time, unfortunately, something snapped. “Oh, no!” she cried, as pearls went flying. “Mamma’s necklace!”

  “Blast!” said Alasdair, as pearls went bouncing into the grass.

  “Oh!” Esmée began to paw through the pleats of her skirt.

  “Don’t stand up,” MacLachlan ordered. He was already on his knees, plucking pearls from the grass. “Hold on to what’s left of the strand. Here, have you a pocket?”

  “Yes, oh, thank you!” Esmée clasped the strand to her breast with one hand and took the pearls he handed her in the other. “It was Mamma’s necklace from her come-out. She gave it to me when I turned seventeen. Oh, what an idiot I am!”

  “We shall find most of them,” he soothed. “I know a good jeweler who can repair it.”

  But in a fraction of a second, the necklace was forgotten.

  Esmée looked up and screamed.

  Alasdair had no memory of leaping to his feet. Or bolting down the hill. The next moments moved as if he waded through water, even as the approaching phaeton flew across the earth. The occupants were chattering gaily, faces lifted to the nascent sun. They never looked at the path ahead. Never saw the child rushing toward the water, arms outstretched.

  “Sorcha!” The word exploded from his lungs, lost in the sound of pounding hooves.

  But Sorcha knew no fear. Everything happened at once. At the last moment, the horse shied toward the pond. The phaeton jerked right, almost overturning. Screams surrounded him. Esmée’s. Sorcha’s. The horse’s. His own. Hooves flew, and Sorcha fell. And then he saw the wheel, relentlessly grinding. Somehow, he snatched her, and the carriage flew past, churning up bits of yellow muslin and lace. And then there was just the child, still and bloody in his arms.

  Heart in his throat, he laid her down. Esmée was still screaming Sorcha’s name. On his knees in the grass, Alasdair cradled her face in his hands. “Sorcha!” he rasped. “Sorcha, open your eyes!”

  “Oh, God! Oh, God!” Esmée fell to her knees beside him. “Oh, Sorcha!”

  Alasdair felt faint. Men beaten near to a pulp in the boxing ring, or shot nearly dead on the dueling field, were nothing to this. It looked bad. Very bad. Blood streamed from a gash in her head. Her left arm hung at an awkward angle. Her muslin skirt had been half-torn from her dress. He had been too slow.

  Esmée was sobbing hysterically now, and stroking the hair from Sorcha’s forehead. “Is she…oh, God, is she?”

  Alasdair had already set his forefingers to Sorcha’s throat. “A pulse,” he choked. “I feel it.”

  There were voices above him now, disembodied yet strident. He looked up to see the phaeton flying through the gates at the corner below, almost overturning as it lurched toward Knightsbridge.

  “Gone to fetch a doctor,” said a strained voice at his elbow. “Good God, we did not see her! I am so sorry. Oh, poor child!”

  The screams had attracted a stout, blue-coated constable. He squatted beside Esmée, holding on to her arm, restraining her from embracing Sorcha. “Now, now, miss!” he cautioned gently. “Mustn’t move her a’tall. Wait for the doctor, now. He’ll want to check her bones and such. Yes, there’s a good girl!”

  “But her arm!” cried Esmée, covering her mouth with both hands. “Oh, God! Look at her arm!”

  “Happen it might be broke,” agreed the constable. “But p’raps only yanked from its socket. Young bones mend, miss, and quick-like, too! There, there! Sit still now.”

  Instead, Esmée leaned forward, grasping Sorcha’s tiny leg with both hands, as one drowning might cling to a bit of wreckage. “Oh, ’tis all my fault!” she wailed into the grass. “Oh, God! How could I? For a necklace! Oh, God!”

  Acting on instinct, Alasdair turned and dragged her up and against his chest. “Hush, now!” he scolded. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it is mine.”

  “How can you say that!” Esmée sobbed into his cravat. “It isn’t your job to watch her! ’Tis mine! Mine! And now look!”

  “Hush, Esmée,” he said again. “She’ll be all right. She will. I swear it.” He prayed to God he was right.

  Just then, ever so faintly, Sorcha’s lashes fluttered. Alasdair felt a fierce, urgent warmth pressing against the backs of his eyes, and realized he was crying.

  “Dislocated!” pronounced Dr. Reid gruffly as he straightened up from his patient’s bed. “Dislocated, but not broken.”

  “Christ, that’s my doing,” Alasdair rasped, his eyes never leaving Sorcha’s face. “That is—I think it must be. I remember yanking her—yanking her hard. And feeling something give. It felt sickening.”

  “A small price to pay,” said the doctor emphatically. “Especially when that wheel was close enough to tear her clothes half-off. A dislocation is nothing compared to being crushed beneath a carriage.”

  Alasdair pinched hard at the bridge of his nose. “I—yes, I daresay.”

  Better than an hour had passed since the accident, though it was mostly a blur to Alasdair. One of the young bucks from the phaeton had turned up with the irascible Dr. Reid in tow. Alasdair knew him vaguely; the doctor had attended more than one dawn appointment in order to stitch up “some damned overbred fool,” as he so charitably called the wounded. Blunt to a fault, Reid had no bedside manner to speak of—indeed, he’d already set Esmée on edge—but there was no one better at patching people up. And at this moment, Alasdair could have forgiven the devil himself, had he possessed that one skill.

  Sorcha lay, limp and frail, on a bed which looked too large for her tiny body. The very bed, in fact, which Julia had so recently occupied. Reid had demanded the nearest bedchamber, and Alasdair had carried her to it. Sorcha had whimpered, but never opened her eyes. Now Alasdair and Esmée stood on opposite sides of the mattress, Esmée quietly weeping.

  “But why won’t she wake up?” Esmée whispered. “Why?”

  The doctor was laying out a neat row of instruments on a fold of white linen. “Oh, she’ll come round tomorrow, I daresay,” he answered. “She’d likely have stirred by now, but I slipped her a dose of laudanum. No choice, really, with that arm hanging from its socket.”

  “Is she in pain?” asked Esmé
e fretfully. “Is she suffering? Good God, I need to know!”

  The doctor snapped his bag shut and set it aside. “Doesn’t feel a thing,” he responded. “Though we’re in for a long night. That gash was made by a flying hoof, but the skull is not fractured. She was lucky. If the blow had struck a temple, or the base of the skull, you’d have been burying her before the week was out.”

  Esmée made a little mewling sound, and buried her face in a handkerchief. Her hair had begun to tumble down, and her spirits had fallen with it. Alasdair tried to clear the knot from his throat. “And what of the arm, sir?” he asked. “What’s to be done for it?”

  “I’ve sent for someone,” said Reid, extracting his pocket watch and peering at it. “An old sawbones I know. We must relocate the joint whilst the child is still unconscious. The pain is prodigious otherwise. It’s a job best done by two, but my friend is in Chelsea setting a leg. He should be here by dusk—I hope.”

  “B-But what if he isn’t?” cried Esmée. “What will happen? Can it wait? Should we send for someone else? Time is of the essence, is it not?”

  Alasdair swallowed hard. “I…I could help, perhaps?”

  Dr. Reid scowled impatiently. “Not necessary!” he said. “I shall ice the joint to bring the swelling down whilst we wait. Then I’ll stitch up her head. What I need you to do, sir, is to take your wife to bed and pour her a generous tot of brandy.”

  Esmée crushed her handkerchief in one hand. “But I am not—I mean, we are not—oh! We are sisters, Sorcha and I. Besides, I dislike brandy excessively. And I certainly cannot leave her. Indeed, I shan’t!”

  The doctor cut a grim look in Alasdair’s direction, then jerked his head toward the door. Esmée sank down in a chair by the bed and laid her hand over Sorcha’s. Almost unnoticed, the men stepped out into the hall.

  “Take her upstairs, Sir Alasdair!” warned Dr. Reid as soon as the door was shut. “I’ll not have womenfolk hovering about, crying and asking questions, when there’s medical work to be done.”

  Alasdair hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s awfully stub—”

  “Hell and the devil, man!” the doctor interjected. “Have you ever seen a dislocated shoulder replaced?”

  Alasdair winced. “Yes, once,” he admitted. “But we were all drunk as wheelbarrows.”

  “Then you know it’s an ugly sight,” gritted the doctor. “But first I’ve got to put about a dozen stitches in the child’s head. And after all that, if there’s swelling of the brain, I’ll have to shave the child’s head and trepan her skull. Now, do you want her witnessing that?”

  “Trepanning?” he choked. He had heard about that horror from Devellyn. “Oh, God, no! I pray it doesn’t come to that!”

  Dr. Reid looked at him askance. “No, it won’t,” he grudgingly admitted. “I’ve seen enough such cases to know it. But mark me, that child won’t so much as crack an eye before the sun’s up. And if she does, I’ll just have to sedate her again.”

  “Yes, I shouldn’t wish her to suffer,” murmured Alasdair.

  “She won’t, if I’m left to do my job properly,” said Reid. “And the last thing I need is a fretful woman lingering over the bed all the livelong night and asking me every five minutes if the child is dead or alive or breathing too fast or thrashing too much or too pale, too hot, too cold, too—well, you take my meaning, I daresay!”

  Alasdair relaxed a little. “You are staying the night, then?”

  “If I’m left to do my work in peace, yes,” said the doctor. “Now, do us all a favor, Sir Alasdair. Go upstairs, the both of you—and stay put ’til you’re sent for.”

  Two minutes later, Alasdair was gently propelling Esmée from the room and up the stairs. “I wish to stay with Sorcha!” she protested, jerking to a halt on the landing. “What if she needs me?”

  He urged her toward the next flight. “She is in good hands, Esmée,” he said firmly. “She does not need you.”

  Esmée looked as if he’d just struck her. “Aye, you’d be right!” she cried. “She doesn’t need me, does she? I was of no use to her this afternoon. Just look what has happened!”

  As he had in the park, Alasdair pulled her against him reflexively. “Shush, Esmée,” he murmured against her hair. “Of course she needs you. But just now, the doctor must concentrate. He promises me she shan’t awaken—”

  “Aye, ’tis my very fear!” rasped Esmée.

  “—because she’s sedated,” he swiftly finished.

  Just then, Wellings came down the stairs. “Whisky,” he mouthed, as they passed. The butler nodded, and went on.

  Once inside the schoolroom, Esmée began to roam restlessly about, her eyes darting from one vacant corner to the next. Even to Alasdair, the room felt cold and empty without Sorcha’s cheery presence. He said nothing for a time, but merely watched Esmée, wondering, and yet knowing what was in her mind. She was blaming herself, just as he was.

  He felt as if he’d aged a decade since that terrifying moment in the park. He remembered laying Sorcha in the grass, and feeling, fleetingly, as if his life had just ended. As if it were seeping away from him inexorably, in the very blood which covered his child. And in one stark instant of truth, he had realized just what Esmée had meant when she had spoken so poignantly of Julia’s agony. To lose one’s child! Could there be a deeper, more cutting pain?

  Perhaps. Perhaps losing one’s sister. Or one’s mother. Poor Esmée. She had borne so much, and so stoically. He stood by the cold hearth, watching as she drifted through the room, picking up toys, then setting them down again, and neatening books which were already tidy, and all the while, silently weeping. Alasdair could bear her pain no longer. He went to her and took her hand lightly in his. “It isn’t your fault, Esmée,” he said quietly. “And it isn’t mine, much as I’m blaming myself just now.”

  She looked up at him, blinking back tears. “But I was responsible for taking care of her!” she whispered. “That was my job. My duty as a sister.”

  There was a soft sound at the door, and Lydia came in with tray. Wellings, God love him, had sent up a full decanter of whisky and two glasses, as well as a plate of bread, cheese, and cold meat, none of which would ever be eaten.

  “Thank you, Lydia,” he murmured. “You may work belowstairs the rest of the evening. Tell Wellings Miss Hamilton is not to be disturbed under any circumstance unless Dr. Reid sends for her.”

  Eyes sad, Lydia curtseyed, and went away. “Oh, Alasdair!” Esmée cried when the door was shut. “Oh, what have I done? What if she dies, too? I cannot bear it! I cannot!”

  Alasdair knew better than to belittle her fear. He, too, was still terrified. And for Esmée, death was all too real. She had just buried her own mother, a woman who, by all accounts, had apparently been young and vibrant. She had lost a father, and three stepfathers. Now her sister lay still and pale as death. Life no doubt seemed very impermanent to Esmée. He was struck with the strangest urge to pull her into his arms and kiss away her tears. But it seemed wiser to dab them away with his handkerchief, then pour her a whisky, and press it into her hand.

  “At least it isn’t frog water,” he said by way of apology. “Drink it.”

  “Thank you.” Esmée sipped without hesitation and resumed her pacing. For long moments, she kept it up, pausing only to nurse her whisky. Alasdair considered leaving. Considered ringing for Lydia to come back. But he wanted—no, needed—to be with her. So he did neither, and doomed himself.

  The sun had vanished from the sky, its rays warming the world beyond the schoolroom windows with shades of dusky rose. Darkness, and the intimacy which it so often brought, was but a moment away. Alasdair drained his glass, set it aside, and sent up yet another silent prayer for Sorcha’s recovery.

  “Och, what a soss I’ve made of this!” Esmée’s voice came out of nowhere, thick and husky. “I never really learnt how to take proper care of a child. We were used to a gaggle of servants, Mamma and I. They did everything.”

 
; “I think you have done a fine job,” he answered.

  But she went on as if she had not heard him. “I suspected, of course, that Achanalt would put me out,” she said, her voice taking on a hysterical edge. “But to put out a child? How could he? How? He must have known—oh, God! He must have known I was hopelessly incompetent!” She set down her nearly empty glass with an awkward clatter and let her head fall forward into her hands. “Oh, God, Alasdair! He must have wished for this!”

  Alasdair went to her and set an arm about her shoulders. He was no longer certain the whisky had been such a good idea. “You need to sit down, Esmée,” he said, looking impatiently about the room. “Good Lord, haven’t we any normal-sized chairs?”

  She lifted her head and looked at the little chairs as if she’d not seen them before. “In here,” she answered, her voice throaty.

  He followed her, foolishly, into her bedchamber. There, the canopied bed had already been turned down, and a warm fire burned in the grate. But the other bed, the little bed he’d bought for Sorcha, stood empty. Esmée passed by it and blanched.

  Alasdair took her by the elbow and urged her toward a pair of chairs which sat near the hearth. “Thank you,” she said. “You are very kind. I don’t know why I ever suggested otherwise.”

  Alasdair looked at her warily. “Even Old Scratch looks better through the bottom of a glass,” he murmured. “Why don’t you sit down, my dear?”

  Instead, she slid her hands up and down her arms as if she were cold. “I cannot be still,” she rasped. “I feel as if I might explode.”

  He took her gently by the shoulders. “Esmée, Sorcha will be all right,” he soothed. “She will.”

  “Will she?” she cried. “Alasdair, how can you be sure?”

  He tightened his grip, and gave her a little shake. “She will, Esmée. I know it. I believe it.”

  She sobbed, a deep, bone-shuddering sound, and fell against him, her arms going round his neck. And then he was holding her again, as he’d already done too often this dreadful day. Esmée was sobbing into his shirtfront as if her heart were breaking. Alasdair tightened the embrace and set his lips to her temple. “Whisht now, love,” he whispered. “All’s well. Trust me, Esmée. Just trust me.”