by Christi Caldwell, Eva Devon, Elizabeth Essex, Anthea Lawson
Another fraught, stony-faced look passed silently between the two elderly sisters.
“Aunt Molly?” Elspeth faced the eldest of the two. “Do you mean to tell me she has written to me previously?”
“We thought it best,” Molly repeated, “to keep you from the influence—”
“The iniquitous influence,” Isla amended.
“—of That Wastrel’s family.”
Elspeth braced herself for the lecture she knew would be coming following the mention of her long-dead father. John Otis had done three things to earn the sobriquet of “That Wastrel”. First, he had fallen in love with her mother, the Aunts’ lovely youngest sister, Fiona, which had led to pregnancy, Elspeth’s birth, and shortly thereafter, her mother’s untimely death. Secondly, he had written a book so scandalous, licentious and popular that it had subsequently been banned from publication. And lastly, he had, in his grief over his young wife’s death, slowly drunk himself to death, leaving his only daughter to the tender care of the only family she had left in the world—her devoted, but strict, spinster aunts.
“We wanted to wait until you were older,” Aunt Molly tried to explain.
“Old enough to know better,” Isla added.
Well. She was certainly old enough now, wasn’t she, now that she was a dashed spinster?
“Aye, there be a letter, too.” The dray mon slapped into her palm a thick, expensively papered letter with Elspeth’s own name in an elegant scrawl across the front.
“Michty me.” Elspeth gave vent to her frustration with forbidden Scots cant. “What else have ye twa been keeping frae me?”
Chapter 2
“I’m sure you know why I’ve called you here, Hamish.”
Hamish Cathcart, third, last legitimate, and nearly forgotten son of the Earl Cathcart, did not know why his father had summoned him to the dark-paneled book room of his Edinburgh townhouse. Nor did he particularly care. His father’s summons only ever amounted to one thing—Hamish was to shut his smart mouth and do as he was bid.
Which he did do. Sometimes.
Sometimes he played the dutiful third son, and obeyed. And sometimes he only gave the appearance of obeisance, and quietly found a way to do what he wanted without ruffling the earl’s carefully preened feathers.
Today, however, was not going to be one of those times. Because today he had a very strong hunch he knew exactly what the auld mon was working himself into a fine lather to say—Hamish was going to be cut off.
“You can’t think I intend to finance you all of your days. And you can’t expect that after I’m gone, your brother, William, will simply pay you an allowance indefinitely.”
On this point, Hamish did agree with the tightfisted auld bean. He did not think his allowance—indifferently given and indifferently received—would continue indefinitely. Which was why he had never spent the money his father doled out to him as the auld mon assumed, on cheap wine, cheaper women and off-key song. Hamish had, instead, invested it. But with investment came risk. And although risk had its rewards, it also had its downfalls.
And at the moment, Hamish had rather fallen down.
Yet he was more than sure that he could revive himself, just as he always had, and make another modest fortune. An idea was poised at the back of his brain—poised and not entirely formed. Not without—
“—a wife.”
Ye gods. Hamish’s wayward attention snapped back to the auld badger. “I beg your pardon?”
“Did you hear nothing I said?” the earl snorted.
“I distinctly heard you say the word ‘wife’.” Hamish pronounced the word with the same wariness one might speak the words “serpent” or “debutante” or “debt collector”.
“Indeed.” The Earl Cathcart slapped the flat of his palm against the desktop, as if that explained everything. “You need a wife. With a suitable fortune. Luckily, you’ve got your hair and your teeth, if not a great deal of ambition, or steadiness of character, so we ought to be able to take a good pick of the available heiresses. I’ve drawn up a list—”
“We?” Hamish didn’t care if his tone was swimming in sarcasm.
A sarcasm his father willfully ignored. “Of course your mother will have her candidates as well, but I should think I know far better what a young man of your character requires, eh?” The earl allowed himself a chuckle. “I’ve my eye on a few fillies that should take your fancy enough to make it no chore to get an heir off her.”
Hamish shoved the distasteful idea of equating a lass to a brood mare out of his mind, consigning it to the rubbish heap that was the only suitable receptacle for his father’s crude, patronizing view of the world. “As I am not the heir, I’ve no need to get myself one.”
When that pleasantly snide observation elicited no discernible reaction, Hamish tried the prick of a more pointed probe. “And need I remind you of the unhappy state of your own arranged marriage? You’re hardly a recommendation for such an arrangement.”
His father looked down his impressively long nose. “Don’t be crass.”
“And arranging to take a lass to wife with the same callous calculation as if she were a mare at a fair is not? I am not being crass, but factual.” Even if Hamish and his siblings had not been witness to years and years of continuous marital sniping and discord, Hamish’s illegitimate half-brother, Rory, was proof enough of their father’s infidelity.
And yet his father called Hamish unsteady.
His father was not best pleased at this display of logic. “And what, you fancy yourself in love?” This time it was his father’s voice that dripped with sarcasm.
“Heaven forfend,” Hamish laughed off the idea—he was unsteady, not unhinged. “Not at all, sir.” He was too busy for anything so time-consuming as love. “I have other plans to secure my future than shackling myself to some unknown lass.”
“Better someone unknown,” his father advised darkly, “than someone for whom you’ve too much regard.”
Though he was no poetry-spouting romantic, Hamish immediately rejected such a dismal view. He had friends enough with good marriages—the aforementioned half-brother, Rory, and his lovely French wife, Mignon, came immediately to mind—to know that regard for one’s partner in life was not only preferable, it was positively necessary. “That is your opinion, sir. I, myself, will not contemplate marriage without it.”
But the sad truth of the matter was that there was no lass for whom he felt such regard. No one at all.
“So be it.” His father stood. “From this day forward, I am done with you. The ledger”—he clapped the account book open before him shut—“is closed. If you care not for the benefit of my advice and counsel on the matter of getting a wife, I will leave you to the dubious pleasure of your mother’s tender”—his tone carried all the weight of his distaste for his wife of thirty years—“cares. Good luck with any wife she might find for you. Prim, priggish lasses like she’s made your sisters—so missish they could curdle milk with their sour looks.”
As Hamish would rather be made to walk naked down Edinburgh’s High Street than spend two minutes with any such woman, he softened his tone. “Forgive me, Father, if I appeared ungrateful. But I simply don’t share your urgency for my marriage. I am not so done up without your money that I don’t have a feather to fly by. Far from it. I am not so frivolous or imprudent as that.”
Indeed, he had not been frivolous at all—he had just had a run of bad luck, was all. Yet he was sure he could revive his fortunes sufficiently to make marrying for money entirely unnecessary.
But his father knew nothing of Hamish’s business ventures. And Hamish needed to keep it that way—gentlemen, even unsteady third sons of earls, did not engage openly in trade. Nothing would be surer to ruin his business prospects like the scandal of the earl’s son dirtying his hands with work.
“You have until Whitsunday to pick a bride. Your mother will like a June wedding.” Earl Cathcart flicked an imaginary bit of fluff off his immaculate sleeve before
he regarded his son through narrowed eyes. “If you’re smart—though you show little sign of being—you’ll avail yourself of this list of gels”—he thrust a sheet of foolscap at Hamish—“before your mother provides you with a suitably prim list of her own. Believe me, even if she’s never spoken of it, she has one.”
Unfortunately, his mother had, indeed, spoken of it. A son did not reach the recklessly dangerous age of eight and twenty without his mother offering the name of at least one “suitable” miss. “I understand you, sir.”
“Good.” The earl crossed the room and held open the door. “Whitsunday.”
Hamish placed his hat on his head, pulling the tricorn down low over his eyes, so his father could not see the hot flare of scorn in his eyes.
Whitsunday was less than five weeks away—an entirely ridiculous deadline. But Hamish would beat it.
Bollocks to Whitsunday.
Chapter 3
What the Aunts had kept from her was the astonishing fact that Lady Augusta Ivers, her father’s sister, had, for four and twenty years, sent not only birthday greetings, but also yearly invitations for her niece to visit. But this year, the lady had cannily sent an invitation—the trunk—too big for the Aunts to hide.
Elspeth stared at this present as if it were a unicorn instead of a spider. To think that all these years—all these years she had worked so hard to be content with her lot—she might have seen something of the world beyond the confines of her small, muddy corner of Midlothian.
In the doorway, the dray mon hefted the trunk as if it were kindling. “Where d’ye want it put?”
“Not inside! We’ve no room—” Isla shut the door against both the trunk and the eyes of curious neighbors, who had begun to gather by the gate.
Elspeth felt her heart plummet straight from her chest to land with a splat on her muddy shoes. “Michty me.” What good was a present from a mysterious, scarlet aunt if she could not even open it to find out what lay inside?
“If ye don’ want it”—the dray mon shrugged—“I’ve direction to take it back. Paid for tha’ at t’other end, herself did.”
“Herself?”
“Leddy Augusta Ivers, as they was talking aboot.” The dray mon balanced the load on one broad shoulder. “She sayed as I wus to gie it ye, or bring it straight back tae herself.”
“Take me with you.” The words were out of her mouth before Elspeth could even gather the presence of mind to wish them back.
But she didn’t wish them back. She wanted to go. She had never wanted anything so much in her entire life.
“Please.” She spoke both more firmly and more politely this time, even though her heart was clattering in her ear like the off-balance spinning wheel in the corner of the parlor. “Would you please take me with you?”
“Tae Edinburgh?” The driver’s bushy eyebrows rose up, poised in consideration.
Elspeth held her breath, shocked by her own temerity in standing up for herself. Of daring to want something that had seemed so far out of reach for so long, the possibility of which hadn’t even existed until a moment ago. “Please, will you take me with you?” She caught her breath and, with it, her nerve. She had to convince him or forever lose her chance. “You do go straight back to Edinburgh, do you not?”
“Aye.”
“Could you not take me there as well?”
The driver stroked the grizzled ends of his ginger whiskers in contemplation. “I s’pose I could. For a price.”
And here was the fox in the henhouse—Elspeth had absolutely no ready money of her own. But she did have ready wits. “Lady Ivers already paid you to bring me the trunk, and bring it back, did she not? If you take me with it, as she asks in her letter”—Elspeth held the missive out as if it did verily contain such a request—“Lady Ivers will surely reward you handsomely for the service.” This was a rather delicate piece of fibbery, but Elspeth was prepared to risk the mortal sin of a potential lie for the potential reward—the chance to escape this stifling village.
To escape spinsterhood.
Mercifully, the dray mon warmed the idea. “Aye. She might at that. Well, come on ye then.”
Relief and excitement made a hot, breathless brew of her insides. “Will you bide here a short while, so I can gather my things?”
And do the harder thing—tell the Aunts what she had done.
The driver turned his squint to the sky, as if gauging the hours of daylight. “No more’n t’irty minutes,” he warned. “Or I’ll g’on without ye.”
“I’ll be back,” she swore. “So help me, I will.”
The Aunts were waiting at the door in forbearance of another of Elspeth’s unseemly displays of rash behavior, though they could have no idea just how rash she had truly been. Or how rash she was yet prepared to be.
“Elspeth,” Molly chided. “Come away inside. But mind your boots. You’re covered in mud.”
“I’m not coming in.” There was nothing for it but to give them the uncomfortable truth. “I’ve asked the dray mon to take me to Edinburgh. To Lady Ivers.”
The tight-lipped silence that greeted this proposal told Elspeth exactly what the Aunts thought of such an idea.
“You cannot want to go to her.” Aunt Molly’s shocked tone allowed it to be impossible.
“She can’t want you,” was Isla’s less kind answer.
Elspeth turned away the cutting remark as if it were an errant dirk—her aunt’s impotent jabs were fast becoming too dull a weapon to truly hurt her now. “But she does want me. She says so in her letter. And after all these years of so faithfully”—she chose a word her Aunts could not depreciate—“writing to me without response, I feel I must answer, and even atone, for my years of silence.” Years of silence that her aunts knew could be laid at their feet.
“That’s hardly necessary,” Aunt Molly began with an attempt at a grim sort of logic.
“Because she’s hardly decent!” Isla was too scandalized to admit logic. “She’s wicked.”
Elspeth disagreed as politely as possible. “She seems very decent, as well as civil and ladylike, in her letter,” she countered in a carefully mild tone.
“That is as may be”—Aunt Molly was clearly searching for excuses—“but, I’m not sure that it’s advisable…or proper…”
“Why?”
Aunt Molly’s pale face colored, as if she could hardly bring herself to answer. “The lady is of…dubious moral fiber—thrice-married and thrice conveniently widowed.”
“Those Otises. Bad blood, the lot of them,” was Isla’s more unguarded opinion.
As “the lot of them” included Elspeth and her own tainted share of the blood her late, unlamented father had bequeathed her, she felt the need to defend the family. “Lady Augusta can hardly be held to account for her husbands dying. Or is it that you think she’s had more than her fair share of them?”
The moment the hasty, unkind words were out of her mouth, Elspeth wished them back, biting her lips together as if she could swallow such ungrateful meanness of spirit whole and unspoken. Her Aunts had sacrificed to raise her, and had kept her out of love—a stifling version of love, but love nonetheless.
But Molly, bless her, was equal to the truth. “Perhaps, Elspeth. Yes. You are right that not all of our circumstances are the product of choice. Sometimes one must take what life offers, and simply make the best of it.”
Elspeth felt as if her heart might break, so sharp was the pain in her chest. The Aunts had, indeed, made the best of it all—their genteel poverty due to absence of opportunities, lack of education, and reduced circumstances.
Heat scratched at the back of Elspeth’s eyes, but she could not give in to the choking pity. Not now, when it felt as if the whole of her life depended upon it. “Then perhaps you understand that I might wish for a change in my circumstances, at least for a short visit. Just this once.”
Because before she put on the lace cap of the spinster, and consigned herself forevermore to their forgotten corner of their Sco
tland, Elspeth Otis had a few things she meant to do.
If true love had not found her, she meant to go out into the wide world, and find it for herself.
Chapter 4
Hamish strode up the damp, stone staircase out of the Princes Street Gardens taking the steps two at a time. He had to keep moving—he always thought better on his feet, with the wind in his face and an idea between his teeth. It might take him all day to climb to the top of Calton Hill, or even Arthur’s Seat, but by the time he arrived at the top, he was sure to have thought of a solution to his rather dire dilemma.
“Hamish Cathcart?” A woman’s voice penetrated the fog wreathing his brain. “Where are you off to in such an all-fired rush?”
Hamish turned to find Lady Augusta Ivers at the bottom of the stair, and retraced his steps. “My dear Lady Ivers.” He bowed over the hand the elegantly clad widow offered. “Delighted, as always, to see you, my lady.”
Lady Augusta Ivers was a well-known fixture in Edinburgh’s society, as admired as she was universally liked. She could always be counted upon to have some fresh and interesting intelligence about Edinburgh and the world—her circle of friends and correspondents extended to the continent and beyond.
“Well enough,” she answered in her usual polished, self-possessed way. “But enough social palaver. You are just the man I was hoping to see. I have been meaning to speak to you about a proposition I think might suit both of us equally.”
Hamish was instantly leery—in his eight and twenty years he had entertained any number of “propositions” from widowed ladies. But he had never thought Lady Ivers the type—although younger than her late husband, she had been entirely devoted to Admiral Ivers. “How may I be of service to you, my lady?”
“A business proposition, Hamish, my lad. Not that I’m not flattered.” Lady Ivers flashed him a knowing, but kind smile. “Have you an office where we might speak privately?”