And committing further indiscretions? Between them, that question was fair even if the answer lay beyond Hannah’s grasp.
“I learned you had procured that license. Malcolm must have guessed, and he let it slip. I could not find a way to tell you…” That she loved him, that she wanted to spend the rest of her days and nights with him, but that she was leaving him all the same.
“So you’re telling me now, after scrambling m’ wits in five minutes flat?” That he could manage any pretensions to humor was a testament to the depth of his gallantry.
“My wits were scrambled the moment you stepped onto the platform, sir. They’re scrambled still.”
His arm came around her shoulders. Her throat began to ache.
“Not scrambled enough, I’ll warrant. I’m sorry, Hannah. It’s harder when we know what we’re giving up.”
How could he be so damnably philosophical?
“So we’re not engaged? That license doesn’t create an engagement?”
His lips grazed her temple. “It’s just a piece of paper. You’re free to tend to your responsibilities, and I’m free to tend to mine. I’ll squire you about Edinburgh for a couple of weeks, maybe show you Balfour if you’re interested, and then put you on one of my fastest ships bound for Boston.”
A list of tasks to be completed, or a recipe—for heartache.
“Thank you.”
“You are not welcome, Hannah Cooper. I have business in Boston, you know. I could visit there from time to time, once I spend a few years playing earl here to everybody’s satisfaction.”
“You need heirs, Asher. Don’t torment me with what-ifs, maybes, and perhapses.”
“I’m asking you to plan, Hannah.” His voice was very gentle, his grasp of her hand loose. “Plan for that day you’re larking around the shops, picking out a book to give a friend or to read to your hundred-year-old granny, and you look up, and there I am, across the street. I might have a touch of gray at my temples, my hair will likely be shorter, and our eyes will meet. Plan for that day, and the regrets and desire that will deluge us both.”
And he might be holding the hand of a small boy who resembled him, or have on his arm a pretty, wellborn Scottish countess. She turned her face to his shoulder. “I hate you.”
She’d have no husband at her side in that bookshop, though, which was a consolation of sorts.
“Then you also hate the part of you that is responsible, loving, and loyal. I’ve tried, but I cannot hate these things in you. I can resent them, though, just as you must resent them in me.”
His ability to see the situation clearly only made her determination to leave him that much more of a burden. “I want you to rant at me and wave the license in my face and tell me I have no choice.”
“We all have choices.” More humor, however bleak.
And he was right, blast him to Halifax. Hannah did have choices.
“I choose two weeks in Edinburgh, two weeks at Balfour, and then you will find me that ship.”
“A month, then. We’ll have one more month.”
For him that seemed to settle something. For Hannah, it only raised the question of how she’d endure her life when that month was over.
And then, because he had not and would never take her choices away, she entrusted him with one of her heartaches. “The last letter from my grandmother? She asked when I was coming home. She’s never asked that before, and I haven’t heard from her since. My brothers have stopped writing.”
He remained silent for a time, the sound of the train rolling north reverberating against Hannah’s soul. “Tell her you leave in a month. Tell them all you’ll be leaving me in one month.”
He kissed her, a soft press of lips against her mouth, no insinuation or reproach to it. Just a kiss.
As he offered her an ironic little bow and withdrew to the parlor car, Hannah knew that kiss for what it was: they might kiss again, they might even lapse again if she had the strength to endure such pleasure and passion, but that had been a kiss of parting, a kiss good-bye.
***
A man wasn’t worth the name if he sought to hold a woman by a confluence of desire, misunderstanding, and guilt. For Asher to accept this conclusion required no great love, no feat of sacrifice. Common sense said a female as convinced of her conclusions as Hannah Cooper was would eventually resent any marital choice imposed on her, and resent the man who’d imposed it.
When Asher returned to the parlor car—where else could he go?—his brothers were still in their shirtsleeves, playing cards, drinking just enough to dull the restlessness, and trading desultory insults to pass the time. Their company was at once comforting and oppressive.
“It’s Asher’s turn to hold the bairn.” Connor offered this pronouncement but made no move to pass the infant along.
Asher poured himself a drink and remained standing at the scaled-down version of a sideboard bolted along the wall. “You take turns with him, then? The deal passes to the left, the baby to the right?”
Gil cracked his jaw and tipped his chair back onto two legs. “Bring the whiskey here, why don’t you, or at least pour a man a wee dram.”
Asher set the decanter in the middle of the table, next to a pile of red, blue, and yellow chips. “Aren’t you all up past your bedtimes?”
“Tell it to the lad,” Connor grumbled. “Though I’ve no wish to sleep among the fartin’, snorin’ lot of you when I ought to be sleepin’ wi’ me darlin’ wife.”
“Take the baby,” Ian said, speaking up for the first time and spearing Asher with a look. “It’s your turn.”
“I’m not anybody’s nanny, Ian.” Asher took a seat next to his brother and heir. “Connor can teach the boy how to fart and snore, assuming the lad doesn’t already know. I suspect he does, and his mother thinks him quite the braw fellow for it.”
Ian shuffled a deck of cards and let them riffle back into order between his hands. “And you know how to hold a sleeping baby.”
God above, not now.
Gil’s chair scraped back. “If I join Malcolm in the gents’ car, then I have a prayer of getting to sleep before you lot come lumbering to bed. Do your farting out here, if you please. Open a window, and the ladies will pretend not to notice anything come morning.”
“We’ll be in Edinburgh come morning,” Connor observed. “It’s always good to get back to Scotland.”
He rose and laid the baby against Asher’s chest, apparently willing to risk letting the lad tumble to the floor—which, of course, Asher could not allow. He tucked the boy into the crook of his arm while Connor and Gil tossed back whatever remained of their drinks and moved off to find their beds.
“You will admit the earth is not shaking,” Ian said, gathering up the chips. “The sky is not falling. Your heart is not ceasing to beat.”
Asher used his free hand to reach for his drink. “And I will admit my brother is a bleating fool. Take this baby.”
Ian started separating the chips into piles—blue, red, and yellow. “He’s happy where he is. Never rile a sleeping baby. I can smell the woman on you.”
Which might be why the child was content. Asher sat for a moment, exploring sensations. The baby had the solid feel of a child in good health. He was cozy and warm in his dress and blanket. Every few moments, his little mouth worked in a memory or a dream of suckling.
Beneath all those observations, clinical observations, was an awareness that Asher held life against his body, and not just any life. This child might someday become Earl of Balfour.
“The protectiveness does you no good,” Asher said, arranging the blanket more snugly around the sleeping child. “You want to keep them safe, but to keep them safest, you must allow them to suffer. I hate that.”
“Is this how you convince yourself that allowing Miss Cooper to return to Boston is the best thing for everybody? You might get a bairn or two or ten on her, and she’d never endure the inconvenience?”
The child made a noise, not a sigh, not quite a sou
nd of sleeping-baby distress. Asher tucked him closer, catching a distinctive and wrenching whiff of clean-baby scent for his trouble.
“You know little, Ian, and you judge much.”
The chips stacked higher, as many red as blue and yellow combined.
“I know what it is to be an utter ass where the woman of my heart is concerned. I know what it is to let theories of duty and honor get tangled up with truths fashioned in the soul. I know what it is to be weary and afraid, Asher, and I can promise you this: the only thing that makes the whole burden bearable is to have the love of the woman your heart has chosen.”
“My heart has chosen a woman who has other obligations. I suspect Hannah’s stepfather is abusive to all in his ambit, and that means she has not only her granny riding her conscience, but also her brothers, her mother, very likely the household help, and the beasts in the stable. She is the Countess of Boston, or her little corner of it.”
Ian stared at a blue chip. “A man’s home is his castle. The Americans have taken on that much of the common law, so the bastard is free to terrorize all in his personal kingdom. How does Hannah think to stop him?”
“She has money; she has lawyers; she has wits and determination that have likely been beaten out of the others. All she needs is some time to get her hands on the money, and she’ll be able to send her brothers off to boarding school, set her granny up in style, and I don’t know what for her mother.”
Though Hannah likely had a plan of some sort. Why hadn’t he asked her about this?
“You have money; you have solicitors; you have determination. I’m not sure about the wits.”
Asher gave in to temptation—to instinct—and cuddled the child to his chest. “Neither am I.”
At that rejoinder, Ian sat back and regarded him out of tired green eyes. “A woman’s courage is different from a man’s. We pillage and plunder. They endure. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I suspect the race would die without their version of courage much sooner than it would without ours.”
The lateness of the hour, the topic of the discussion, and the weight on Asher’s heart—a month was little more than four weeks—made further thought difficult. “Marriage has turned you up philosophical, or perhaps it’s the whiskey.”
“Marriage, Asher MacGregor, has made me happy. Con, Gil, and Mary Fran would say the same. I bid you good night. Don’t let the boy drink too much, or I’ll never hear the end of it from his mother.”
And just like that, before Asher could protest, whine, or strategize a countermeasure, Ian had disappeared into the gentlemen’s sleeping coach, leaving Asher… holding the baby.
The parlor car sported a couch, a well-cushioned, sturdy affair positioned beneath the windows on the far wall. With the one-handed efficiency of a man holding a baby, Asher stashed the decanter back in its bracket, found an afghan in the sideboard, doused the lights, and arranged himself on the couch, the sleeping child swaddled against his chest.
In the darkness, the rhythm of the train brought sleep closer, and memories closer as well.
“Do you know, lad, for a long time I hated my father. He left my mother and went home to Scotland, there to die. Eventually, I understood a man must sometimes make his way, leave his loved ones, and be about his other obligations. I don’t like it, but it’s the way of the world.”
He brushed his lips across the infant’s downy crown, the sensation bringing back more memories, memories both sweet and piercingly sad. “I hated my mother next. She let him go—she didn’t have to, she might have made the journey with him.”
Though for the first time, Asher had to wonder if she’d suspected she was carrying, in which case, thirty years ago, the journey would have loomed as a risky ordeal—to the child at least. The thought made his hand on the child’s back go still, and his mind come to rest as well.
“She could have been worried. Afraid for her child, unwilling to see her husband’s journey put off for another year.” And of course, afraid for her man, assuming she loved him.
“In any case, I hated her for years, for letting him go. And for dying.” The hate wasn’t in his heart now though. As Asher rummaged through his emotions, the sleeping baby tucked close, he couldn’t even find the anger or many traces of bewilderment.
“They did the best they could. You’ll find that realization a great comfort at some point. Recall your uncle Asher told it to you first.”
And Asher was doing the best he could, too, but that was no comfort—no comfort at all.
Eighteen
Hundreds of miles north of London, the light was different. This was the first thing Hannah noticed as she stepped down from the train. Then too, she had a sense of the train reaching dry land, of endless motion coming to a halt, and the body needing to make an adjustment.
“It’s chilly here, for being almost summer.”
Asher would not drape his coat around her shoulders in broad daylight, nor did he look chilly in the kilted attire he’d donned for the day. “By local standards, we’re in for a sweltering day.”
They waited on the platform as the rest of the family debarked, porters dispatched baggage, and the welfare of the baby, the cat, and various expecting women was inventoried.
They’d be dividing up into coaches at any moment, so Hannah slipped her arm through Asher’s and led him a few steps away. “I’ve a question for you.”
He patted her hand, not as a lover might, but as a patient host would. “Ask.”
“How did you know?”
One swift glance, a perusal that felt to Hannah as if Asher could assess her very memories. “Your trunk was sitting in the mews, labeled for Boston and headed for the docks. It was not laden with mementos and fripperies, so I concluded you intended to follow it to its destination.”
Of course. A simple deduction for a man as observant as Asher MacGregor. Fiona’s cat started to yowl, an aria of feline discontent that could last indefinitely.
“Where will we be staying?”
Asher turned at an angle that would allow his family to remain in his line of sight. “You will stay with me, Ian, Augusta, and wee John. Mary Fran and Matthew have their own place, as do Con and Julia. I expect Genie and Gil will stay with Con. When they come north, Spathfoy and Hester have the choice of staying at his place or with his mother, though Lady Quinworth positively dotes on my brothers.”
When and how these arrangements had been worked out, Hannah did not know. She was simply grateful to Augusta for providing the chaperonage that permitted continued proximity to Asher. “You’ve never called the baby by name before.”
This earned her a twitch of his lips, maybe impatience, maybe humor. “We’re drinking companions now. He vows I’m his favorite uncle.”
Hannah drew back to study Asher, because the observation wasn’t simply self-mocking. Somehow, on this trip, the baby had become not merely an infant, occasionally noisy, often malodorous, but dear enough on general principles. He’d become “wee John,” another obligation, another person for the reluctant MacGregor patriarch to love.
Hannah’s only warning that the morning was to become livelier was a hint of lilac on the brisk morning air, and then a substantial lady dressed in the height of lavender fashion came swooping along the platform.
“Why, Balfour, you certainly do make a commotion when you arrive to town.”
The lady leaned close, as if a kiss to her cheek from any passing earl was only her due. She was a handsome woman of a certain age, red-haired, with a vaguely familiar smile, and the air of a fit and fashionable Amazon.
“If it isn’t me favorite marchioness.” Connor, for once smiling himself, greeted the woman with an audible smack to both of her cheeks. Two liveried footmen took a nervous step closer, though the lady motioned them back with a wave of her gloved hand.
“And Gilgallon.” She accepted a kiss from him. “If my own son can’t be bothered to come north yet, I will content myself with what charming company I can find. You must all join me
for breakfast. I insist.”
“What about me?” Fiona had barged her way between the kilted knees of her uncles, the protesting cat in its hat-box cage still making a racket as she set the thing at her feet. “Am I invited for breakfast too?”
The marchioness dropped to her knees and opened her arms, the gesture at complete variance with her elegant attire, liveried footmen, and the lacy parasol she’d allowed to fall to the ground. “Fee! My darling little Fiona! How much you’ve grown, and how I have missed you.”
The child bundled in for a long tight hug, while Hannah watched and tried not to label the emotions this succession of affectionate greetings had engendered.
Except that envy figured prominently among them, too prominently to ignore.
When the marchioness rose, she had Fiona by the hand. “I feel a kidnapping coming on. These things tend to strike whenever my darling Fiona comes to town.” Over the child’s head, the lady aimed a look at Mary Fran, who with Matthew had remained on the perimeter of the family circle. “You won’t object to a short period of captivity for your daughter, will you, Lady Mary Frances?”
Though this marchioness strolling about the platform in the rays of morning sunshine was clearly a self-possessed woman of both title and means, the smile she beamed at Mary Fran carried a hint of vulnerability, too.
A hint of pleading.
Matthew caught Mary Fran’s eye in one of those silent marital dialogues Hannah was also coming to envy.
“A few days of being stuffed with cream cakes never hurt any child,” Mary Fran said. “Never hurt a cat either.”
The marchioness’s smile faltered then blazed anew. “Cats, rabbits, uncles—if Fiona loves them, then they’re welcome in my houses. But, Balfour, you are remiss.” Still holding Fiona’s hand, the marchioness turned her smile on Asher. “Word of your engagement has preceded you. You must introduce me to your fiancée.”
Beside Hannah, Asher froze, while the marchioness’s smile became bright enough to guide lost ships through dense fog.
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