by Karen Ranney
The MacIain family would be among the gallantly and proudly poor.
Starving with grace had absolutely nothing to recommend it. She’d come close to doing exactly that in those last months in Washington. She had to dismiss the servants and leave the house Richard had rented. She took a room in a less genteel area of Washington in order to save money. She’d subsisted on the one meal allotted with her rent, sold all her gowns and jewelry, and contacted the legation weekly to try to arrange passage home. If they hadn’t picked up the cost of the voyage, she wouldn’t have been able to return to Scotland.
She analyzed her skills in those months, applying for positions without thought of pride or pretense. No one wanted a female bookkeeper or accountant. None of her experience at the mill was translatable to a paying position anywhere. She wasn’t a talented seamstress. Nor did she know how to trim bonnets. Factory work wasn’t an option since no manufacturing existed within walking distance.
At least when she lived in Washington she only had herself to support. Now there was an entire household.
Duncan had some investments not associated with the mill that would carry them for a few months, but what then? She didn’t have an answer other than finding employment. They had to outlast the war. Yet even once the blockade was lifted, was there any guarantee they’d be able to acquire raw cotton again? Would the Confederates win? If they did, could they produce and export cotton in time to save the mill? If they lost the war, would the fields be razed by the Union?
Everything was dependent on the Civil War, an irony that didn’t escape her. Yet the same war decimating the MacIain coffers was helping Lennox. He might even be the richest man in a city filled with wealthy men.
Did Lennox still treasure his friendships and care about people? If he did, why hadn’t he realized Duncan needed help? Why hadn’t he offered?
Duncan wouldn’t go to Lennox. His pride would prevent him from asking for help. The question was: how much pride did she have?
She stood, walked to her vanity and leaned her hands against the top, peering at her image in the mirror. Her cheeks were flushed. She brushed her hair into place, inserted a few more pins to keep the tendrils tamed, and applied a little salve to her lips.
She glanced toward Hillshead. Could she really go to Lennox and ask him for help?
Gloaming settled over Glasgow like a memory, making her recall a dozen times she left her house for Hillshead. Now she slipped out of the kitchen much as she had back then, smiling at Mabel and Lily before heading for the path Lennox and Duncan had worn into the grass as boys.
She hesitated at the arched bridge at the bottom of the hill. The structure had to be rebuilt every couple of years when the burn would outgrow its banks for a few weeks and become a river. Now the water gurgled and babbled as it fell over the smooth stones, as if telling her all the secrets since she’d last crossed.
She grabbed her skirts, trying to hold them away from the ground. She took the track winding through the pines, breathing in the pungent smell of the needles. Here it was almost dark, but she remembered the way.
The wind soughed through the trees, the branches clicking like a convocation of gossips.
Already a few lights had been lit, a sign this was not the proper hour for calling on anyone, let alone a woman on a man, even if she was a proper widow and Lennox was an old friend.
Should she simply wait until morning?
No, she might lose her courage by then. Better if she went and explained the whole sorry mess to Lennox so he understood. If there was any groveling that needed to be done, she’d do it. Hadn’t she done even worse things in Washington?
The house was an open box with the back of Hillshead shielding the three gardens. On the third floor the terrace outside the ballroom ran the width of the building. On either end of the terrace, steps curved down and around to the Italian gardens filled with fountains, gravel paths, and marble statuary.
Instead of going to the front, which she might have if the hour had been decent and this errand anything but surreptitious, she headed toward Hillshead’s back door. She’d come here often enough as a girl, either following Duncan, to his disgust, or acting as her brother’s messenger.
Was the cook the same? She’d been a lovely woman with graying hair and a well-lined face, but she had a contagious smile that made Glynis smile as well. Whenever she came to Hillshead, the woman had always offered her a selection of pastries. Sometimes she’d eaten her fill and sometimes she wrapped a few into her handkerchief and tucked them into her pocket, a present to Duncan for sending her to Hillshead.
The last rays of sunlight danced on the lush plants of the kitchen garden. The onions and peppers, lettuce and cabbages, grew so thick the tilled earth could no longer be seen. In a separate bed, herbs waved merrily in the breeze, fronds of mint and rosemary perfuming the air.
The ghost of the girl she’d been walked alongside, her face sunnied with a bright smile, her eyes sparkling with anticipation about seeing Lennox.
Had she always been a fool about him?
Yes.
The stark answer stopped her on the path.
This errand was too important to be rashly contemplated. She should take her time, marshal her arguments, perhaps even prepare a balance sheet for Lennox to peruse.
She would call on him at the yard. She’d dress in her best black dress with white cuffs and collar, with an attractive bonnet framing her face. She wouldn’t appear before him with stickers adhering to the bottom of her skirt and the wind pulling her hair loose from its proper bun.
That was the best thing to do. She wouldn’t go to him like a supplicant but an equal, a woman of the world. Her entreaty would be a businesslike matter, not a personal one.
The urge to come to him had been so basic she’d been impulsive again. The Glynis of her girlhood had simply come to Hillshead as she had so many times before.
A rough-hewn bench sat in front of the gardener’s cottage. To her right the path branched in three directions. One led to the kitchen garden she’d already passed. The second went to Hillshead’s flower garden. A third headed toward the formal Italian garden with its fountains and statuary. To her left was Glasgow itself, the house’s elevation revealing a panoramic view of the city and the River Clyde.
She walked to the bench, her shoes crunching on the shells. She sat, contemplating the sight of the city and the river. Her fingers trailed over the knurled wood of the bench. Here was something that hadn’t changed.
She tucked her feet beneath her skirts and remembered.
“I want to make the greatest ships on the ocean,” Lennox once said as he sat here, holding her eleven-year-old self captive with his plans. “Ships people will recognize just by looking at them. They’ll say, ‘Lennox Cameron designed her and it was built at Cameron and Company.’”
She’d listened, enthralled, as he mapped out his future. To the best of her knowledge, he made each one of his dreams come true.
When he was seventeen he announced he was going to Russia and wouldn’t be home for months. Sometimes she came and sat here, staring up at the window of his room and wishing him home.
On this bench he’d told her of school and his trip to the Continent, how he liked Paris but didn’t think it as impressive as Edinburgh. She’d been fifteen to his twenty. How odd that she was the more well-traveled of the two of them now.
Most of the memories of her childhood involved Lennox in one way or another. He was part of her life and she could no more cut him out of it than she could Duncan or her parents.
She tipped her head back and stared up at the stars peeking coyly from behind the edges of the clouds.
Fertilizer, roses, clipped grass, and the damp of the evening rolled over her. She was as far from Washington as she could possibly be.
“What are you doing here, Glynis?”
For a moment she felt like she’d conjured him out of the mists of memory. She slowly turned her head to see him standing there in the sha
dows, no longer a boy. Instead, Lennox was a man, one who, despite her wishes, still had the power to make her heart race.
Why did he still fascinate her?
Could it be the way he walked, as if he commanded the deck of a ship? Or his physique, with his broad shoulders, long legs, and wide, muscular chest?
She’d seen him nearly naked once, down to his underclothes. He and Duncan had been swimming, and when he emerged from the river she’d been unable to look away. At sixteen she’d known what the throbbing in her own lower parts meant. Ever since that day she wanted to touch him, measure his chest with her hands and let her fingers dance over his body.
Even now he made her think of things no other man ever had: wrinkled sheets, sweaty skin, and being kissed. She used to wonder what it would be like to be with Lennox, to feel his hands on her naked skin, to abandon herself to the pleasure of loving. With him it would be a world apart from anything she knew, anything she’d ever experienced.
She’d catch herself, make herself think of anything but Lennox. And she should do that now. She didn’t come here to lust after Lennox. She should stand, right now, and go back to her revised plan of calling on him at the yard. But the past lured her, trapped her in a silken web. She didn’t want to move or face the reality of the present.
For a few moments she wanted to be young again and innocent.
“I was thinking of all the times you and I sat on this bench,” she said. “It feels like forever ago. Those were quieter times, weren’t they?
“I’m not certain they were quieter,” he said, coming closer. “We were children. We had few responsibilities. Everything looks easy when nothing is expected of you.”
Expectations—she’d heard the word often enough in the last seven years. For a little while, she didn’t want to be reminded. Let her be a child for a time, if only in her memories.
“Do you remember when I put the beehive in your boat?” she asked, smiling.
“And returned the same day with your mother’s ointment. Your tricks would have been better if you hadn’t always regretted them.”
“I knew, almost immediately, that I shouldn’t have done it. I spent a great deal of my childhood regretting the things I did.”
“And not your adulthood?”
She wasn’t going to answer that question.
“You never retaliated for the nettles in your jacket and I always wondered why.”
“I was forbidden to,” he said. “First of all you were a girl. Secondly, you were five years younger than me, and maybe the most important reason, Duncan was your brother. I was under an oath to Duncan.”
She glanced at him, surprised. “Were you?”
He nodded. “I was to think of you like Mary,” he said. “Since Duncan was always a gentleman around my sister, I was to remember it.”
Had he remembered that oath in the anteroom? Did he still consider her Duncan’s little sister?
“I might admit to being a hoyden,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you were. A trial. A terror.”
She sent him a chastising look. “You weren’t perfect, Lennox.”
“I was the epitome of patience when it came to you,” he said.
She couldn’t say anything to counter his words because he was right.
“I remember when we used to sit here and watch the stars,” she said. “You told me about the great ships you’d build.”
“You told me how you wanted to work at the mill, become your father’s bookkeeper,” he said, coming to sit beside her.
She smiled. “I miss those days,” she said. “The future looked so promising.”
“Have you spent the last seven years making up for your childhood, Glynis?”
There was more truth to the comment than he knew. From the day after her wedding, Richard had put her through her paces, almost like a thoroughbred. She had a succession of teachers, people who informed her husband she was woefully lacking in ladylike manners.
Pride made her adept at all her lessons from the social graces—most of which she’d thought she mastered well enough at home—to memorizing the titles and names of everyone at the British Legation.
There wasn’t time to be a hoyden. Or to be rebellious, either. She learned because it was expected of her. Richard was the only person she knew on their voyage to Cairo, and he disapproved of her making friends among the passengers.
She had nothing to do all those miserable days but study. Yet the greatest lessons had nothing to do with Cairo, the diplomatic service, or the proper way to address heads of state. The most vital things she learned in that first year were personal: how selfish she’d been, how petty, spoiled, and insular.
The discoveries she made, however, had come much too late for anything but regret.
Chapter 13
“You haven’t said why you’re here, Glynis.”
There were certain times when nothing but truth would serve, as bluntly as possible.
“We need help,” she said. “The mill will close without an infusion of cash. We’ve no cotton and we can’t spin cloth out of straw.”
When he didn’t say anything, she stared off into the garden. The air was heavy with mint and onions, a curious combination.
“Give Duncan a loan.” She turned to him. “Aren’t you friends, Lennox? He’d help you if you needed it.”
“I’ve already offered. Duncan won’t take the money.”
She should have known he wouldn’t have turned his back on Duncan. Her brother’s pride was becoming an irritant.
“Then give it to me. I’ll say it’s an unexpected bequest from Richard’s estate. Something no one realized was there.”
He didn’t say anything. Had she been too abrupt?
“I wouldn’t ask, Lennox, but the mill isn’t just about us. Hundreds of people are employed there. If they lose their jobs, where will they go for their next meal? How will they pay their rent?”
“It’s a test of character you’re giving me, is that it, Glynis? Either I let the mill close or hide my benevolence behind your sainted husband?”
His comment startled her so much she retreated into silence.
“Richard wasn’t sainted,” she finally said. She took a deep breath. “I have no assets, Lennox, or I’d sell them.” She stood. “If you don’t want to help, then hire me as an accountant. My father trained me. I’m very good.”
He still sat there, one arm draped over the end of the bench. It was too dark to see his expression. She really should have gone to his office at the yard.
“Did he leave you nothing, Glynis?”
“Only regrets,” she said. Marry in haste, repent at leisure.
“Did you love him?”
“Is that important?” Did he want the truth in exchange for a loan? How much was she willing to sacrifice for the mill?
“Why did you marry him?”
She was not going to tell him she’d married because of a rumor, one that had sent her from Glasgow in tears.
“Does it matter?” she said. “I was his wife.”
He stood, approaching her with a grace he’d always had. She remained where she was, only tilting her head back when he stopped less than an arm’s length away. He’d been tall since he was sixteen, a man still in a boy’s body. Now he was all man.
“Duncan said you were engaged,” she said. “Why didn’t you marry?”
He didn’t respond. Lennox had always been exceedingly loyal. Perhaps he still felt that way about his once fiancée.
“I can’t imagine why a woman with any sense would break her engagement to you.”
“She didn’t break the engagement,” he said. “I did.”
“Whatever did she do?” she asked.
He studied her, making her wish she could read his expression again.
“Does it matter?” he asked, repeating her words.
She strode past him to stand at the juncture of the garden paths. In the past, the Camerons had put lanterns on poles on su
mmer nights, illuminating the garden. Now the moon performed the same task.
“I missed you,” she said. A comment she’d not expected to make. Once uttered, however, she could not call it back.
She turned and faced his shadow.
“When things were difficult I would imagine myself talking to you. I’d find myself asking, ‘What would Lennox advise me to do?’”
“I remember your never taking my advice as a child.”
She smiled. “I did, more often than you knew. I just never told you.”
“What was difficult for you, Glynis?”
He really shouldn’t use that tone of voice. Gentle, almost tender, as if he truly cared about her life in the last seven years. As if he cared about her.
Pride stiffened her spine and banished the hint of tears.
“I have to do something, Lennox. The mill is going to close. If that happens it will destroy Duncan.”
“I’ve tried to help,” he said, approaching her. “A half-dozen times at least.”
He was much too close. She took a step back.
Yet she’d been brave once, hadn’t she? She’d kissed him and remembered it for years.
Without giving herself a chance to talk herself out of it, she closed the distance between them. Placing her hands flat on his chest, she stood on tiptoe and placed her mouth on his.
His hands traveled from her elbows up to her shoulders and then down her back, settling at her waist.
Delight spread through her like a fast moving burn, carrying effervescent bubbles to every part of her body. She was lighter than air itself. She was laughter and joy and only his touch anchored her to the ground.
There was something elemental in kissing Lennox. His hands pressed against her back, slowly sliding up and down, making her conscious of two things: her skin tingled beneath his fingers and delight was being replaced by need.
Oh beloved.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on.
She wasn’t that removed from her ancestors. A few generations earlier she would have been attired in a skirt made of plaid, her clan’s brooch pinned on a fold of cloth. Strong, fearless, and proud, she would claim her mate with a glance. He would bow to no man, but he might well surrender to her.