Chapter Seventeen
“What were you and Mr. Rochester discussing so intently?” Annabel asked her just after Mal had left.
Georgina was still at the pianoforte, trying and failing to work up the enthusiasm to play something.
She wanted to tell Annabel everything, she truly did. But Annabel would invariably tell Theo, and then Georgina would be locked in her room forever or sent to a convent. Neither option sounded appealing.
And she didn’t think either option was quite fair, either. Good Lord, men did stupid, foolish, reckless things all the time, and no one ever worried about their virtue.
“Do you know much about him?” she asked instead.
“Not much. He tutored Lord Monteith’s sons. Honestly, I was imagining someone older—but I suppose Lord Monteith never said his age.”
“He didn’t say anything inappropriate to you, did he?” Theo asked.
Once he told me to tell him what I wanted from him, and then we kissed, and I still remember the heat of his mouth against my skin. I still remember his taste.
“He’s a schoolmaster,” she said irritably. “What would he possibly say to me?”
Theo didn’t look convinced. “Don’t associate with him too much. I didn’t like the way he was looking at you.”
To be fair, Theo didn’t like many things. Georgina bit her tongue before she could ask how exactly Mal had been looking at her.
Annabel pinched her husband’s elbow. “Theo!”
“He’s beneath her,” Theo said, in his usual blunt way. “She could do much better.” He faced Georgina again. “You could do much better. You’re still young yet—you don’t have to settle for someone just because they’re in close proximity.”
“I know that,” she said.
“Why do you assume she would be settling? What if she falls in love?” Frances asked.
“She could just as easily fall in love with a baron. Or maybe a viscount.”
“Theo,” Annabel said, “you don’t even like the aristocracy that much. And you didn’t choose the most suitable person. And neither did Eleanor or Robert.”
“You were far more suitable than a pugilist,” Theo said dourly. “If I’d been in Edinburgh when Eleanor met MacGregor, I might have—”
“Made Eleanor miserable instead of letting her choose for herself?” Annabel asked pertly.
Theo ignored that. “The fact is, Georgina hasn’t fallen in love with anyone yet, so with all things equal, she might as well look to someone more suitable.”
“But why?” Annabel exclaimed.
“Because that’s how things are supposed to be. What is the point of this title if I can’t give my family opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise had? Just because Eleanor and Robert squandered those opportunities doesn’t mean Georgina will, too.”
Annabel looked exasperated. “You are ignoring the fact that Eleanor and Robert are both quite happy with their squandered opportunities.”
“I know. And of course I’m pleased that they’re happy. But Georgina can be happy and find someone suitable. It’s not too late for that.”
“Perhaps I won’t marry at all,” she cut in. It wasn’t as if she’d given much thought to the prospect before now. She’d been happy enough, living in the Highlands, free to spend her days how she wished.
And after her visit with the physician, marriage had seemed an even more distant matter. Something that she wasn’t quite sure how to navigate, even if she wanted to. Annabel and Theo both jerked their heads toward her. “What?”
“You’ve called me a hellion more times than I can count, Theo. Why would someone want me for a wife? And why should I submit to being with someone who might think it’s their right to control me, or to curb my interests?”
Frances patted her shoulder as though she approved. After Frances’s husband had died young, she’d never been tempted to marry again. There was more than one road to happiness, after all.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Theo said.
Annabel was a little more soothing. “I think you could find someone like that. You simply have to choose wisely.”
She had found someone like that. Mal had never once tried to cage her to keep her safe. But she’d left Mal, on a sickbed, in the middle of a starless night, and now he looked at her like he didn’t know who she was.
And if that thought twisted her stomach into knots…well…she would just have to learn to live with her stomach in knots.
“Theo certainly doesn’t try to control me,” Annabel added.
“No,” Georgina conceded. “But he has curbed you a little, hasn’t he? When was the last time you went out to wrangle Highland ponies?”
Color had risen in Annabel’s face. “But Theo was concerned for my safety, and I didn’t think it was an unreasonable request. And anyway, I don’t have time for that sort of thing anymore, between Llynmore and Maria and the school.”
“I don’t care if something is a little unsafe if it’s something I want to do. I don’t want to have to worry about what someone else expects of me.”
Theo sighed. “That’s simply part of growing up, George. You have to learn to think of others. You have to learn that the world doesn’t revolve around you alone.” When she didn’t answer, he sighed again. “You’ll know what I mean when you have children of your own. It changes your perspective.”
The pain that seared her was as brutal as it was unexpected. She pushed up from the piano bench, feeling like her chest had been cleaved in two. “If I don’t marry, I won’t have children, will I? So I can be self-centered and immature for the rest of my life.”
“That’s not what I meant, George.”
But she was already slipping out from under Frances’s reassuring touch, and Annabel’s concerned gaze, and Theo’s half-exasperated one, and then slipping out the door.
…
Before, Georgina had been running to feel alive; now it felt like she was running to live. After a restless night, she rose at dawn. Went across the moors and down in the dales and over the peaks. Misty rain clung to her dress and skin and beaded in her hair. With each step, her foot was sucked into mud. An hour or two later, the sun attempted to break through the clouds. Such was the fickle nature of Highland weather.
Georgina welcomed it—the tempestuous wind that blew across the moors and brought the faintest tinge of peat smoke and salt, the clouds that came and went, the quick, cold rains, the shining warmth of the sun, the thick mists that covered the land like a shroud. In the Highlands, the earth was a living, breathing thing, with its own desires and whims.
Somehow, when she was too tired to go any farther, she ended up at the door to the schoolhouse, as if she’d been pulled there by an invisible thread. She heard Mal’s voice, a soft rumble, and the string tightened.
Whatever force that led her to him was too powerful to fight. She hesitated only a moment before she stepped inside, pulse racing.
Mal was the first thing she saw, sitting at a table in the back, with one elbow propped on the surface as he leaned forward. A ray of light slanted through the windowpane and caught in his sandy hair, bringing out glints of red and gold.
Unobserved, she could trace the lines of his form, relearn his wiry strength, notice the shadowed hollow at the base of his throat and the rough skin of his knees underneath his kilt before his legs disappeared into dark stockings.
The children were scattered in groups around the tables. At Mal’s table, a row of toy soldiers waited. He nudged two of the soldiers so they fell away from their neat, orderly row with a clatter.
“If you take away two soldiers, you have—”
“George!”
“No,” he said, in long-suffering sort of voice. “If you have five and take away two—”
“You’re not dead!”
She paused in the process of removing her shawl—which was simply an excuse to look away from Mal. It wouldn’t do to be seen ogling him. “No—thank goodness! Why would you think that?”
Mal’s gaze lifted. Something in her stomach fluttered at the familiar gold and green, so bright and lush in the sunlight. “Have ye come for a math lesson?”
“Did you bring sweetmeats?” the boy asked, almost at the same time.
“I already gave you sweetmeats,” Mal said. “You don’t need any more.”
“But, sir—”
“Here”—Mal shoved a scrap of paper toward him—“solve this. Use your brain.”
“My brain hurts!”
“It’s good for you.” Mal shot him an unimpressed look and stood from the table, and Georgina had to fight the urge to take a step back. His presence was so much larger, so much more than his body could contain. There was a lithe, contained strength in each step he took, each subtle movement.
Georgina knew she shouldn’t be here, but she didn’t want to go back to Llynmore quite yet, either. She had overreacted the night before, overreacted and snapped at her family and stalked off, just like a self-centered, immature person would. She winced, remembering.
“What are ye doing here?”
That was a good question. One that she didn’t know how to answer. “Are the others here?”
Mal crossed his arms over his chest. “Nearby.”
“You seem to be settling into teaching.”
He snorted. “It’s a little bit like wrangling sheep, but you don’t just have to worry the sheep are going to get trapped in a bog or walk off a cliff, you also have to worry about their minds.”
Her mouth twitched. “It sounds demanding.”
“It is demanding.”
“It sounds like you enjoy it.”
“I—” He broke off, abruptly. “I’ve only been here two days.”
She propped her hip against the desk at the front. “What will you do when the real Mr. Rochester arrives?”
“If he arrives. He’s a week late—maybe he got sucked into a bog. Anyway, I won’t be here long.”
Georgina’s chest pinched. She opened her mouth to speak, but someone else beat her to it. “Do you two fancy each other?”
Georgina jolted. It was Abigail, the girl who liked to swear in Gaelic.
“You’re standing verra close together.”
“We’re discussing adult things,” Mal said. But Georgina noticed he’d moved back a step.
“Like kissing?” She giggled.
Ridiculously, Georgina felt her cheeks heat.
“Are you finished with your problem?” Mal asked.
Abigail sobered quickly. “No, sir.”
He looked down at her paper. “When you subtract larger numbers, you have to carry the one, like this…” He took a graphite pencil from the table and began to scribble something. A little notch formed between his eyebrows as he worked.
“But what do I do here?” Abigail asked, voice tight and frustrated.
Georgina watched as Mal helped the girl with a gentle patience that surprised her. Though perhaps it shouldn’t. Mal had been a soldier, and later, a leader of sorts. Discipline wasn’t always a result of firmness; sometimes it was bred from understanding. From kindness. Sometimes you had to know when to be hard and when to be soft.
Suddenly, it occurred to her that Malcolm Stewart would make a wonderful father. She could picture him with children—weaving extravagant tales while they sat at his feet, or teaching them how to read. In her visions, they were hazel-eyed. She wondered if having children of his own might fill the void his family had left behind. Might make up for some small part of all he’d lost.
She pushed the thought away before she could examine it too closely.
“Let’s talk outside,” Mal said, when Abigail took the paper from him and began to work on her own.
Georgina noticed that Mal left a few feet of space between them as he followed her to the door. She probably shouldn’t have been hurt by that, but she was.
Outside, she turned to face him. The mist was cool on her face, and welcome. She needed something to combat the flush that hadn’t quite gone away.
Kissing. No, they hadn’t been discussing kissing, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t think about it…all the time.
“What are you doing here?” Mal asked flatly. Anything soft inside him, anything warm, had been pushed down during the walk between the desk and the door. All his vulnerabilities were locked away, somewhere Georgina couldn’t find them.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t know,” she said again. She shouldn’t care. He hadn’t forgiven her. Maybe he never would. Wanting his forgiveness with a nearly visceral ache was ludicrous. “Why are you playing at being a teacher? Are you going to retire from thievery?”
His mouth twisted. “Why would I do that?”
She lifted a shoulder. “I assume teachers have a longer life expectancy than thieves.”
“I’ve seen comrades fall around me. I lost my entire family in one blow. I’m not particularly afraid of dying, lass.” They both paused. He hadn’t called her “lass” since he’d found out who she really was. The sound of it caused a sweet ache in her chest.
“The music box…” she started, stopped. She was unsure—for what seemed the first time in her life—of what her next step should be. Of how to move forward. “It was my mother’s. When I had smallpox, she would play it for me. I barely remember the last few days of the illness, but I remember the sound of the music box. When I was better, she gave it to me, and she told me to keep it safe for her. And I did, for years. I did, until you took it.” She drew a deep breath. “I couldn’t let it go, Mal.”
“So that makes it all right—lying to us, making us care about you…” He trailed off angrily.
“I don’t know if it makes it all right, but that was the reason. It wasn’t a lark, and I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I simply wanted it back.”
“Was any of it real?”
She understood what he was asking, but she didn’t know how to answer. Everything she’d felt had been real. But at the same time, the situation had been so unreal, so detached from everything she knew. That kind of emotion, inexorably mixed with the seduction of freedom, heightened by the thrill of danger…it wasn’t sustainable, was it?
She settled for saying, “It wasn’t a lie.”
For a long moment, Mal looked off into the distance. “Change feels so gradual until it’s happened, and then one day you look around you and wonder where the hell you are. This land is never going to be what it used to be.”
Georgina followed his gaze across the moors. The gray sky stretched endlessly overhead; white mist was collecting in the depths of the valleys. “My brother was a soldier, too,” she said suddenly.
Mal harbored such hatred of the aristocracy; she knew he looked at them and saw the landlord who’d shown no mercy to his family. But not all of them were heartless—her brother wasn’t. She wasn’t. She didn’t know why it seemed so important for him to realize that.
He turned back to her. “Arden?” he sounded surprised. “Did he have someone buy him an officer’s commission?”
That was what many wealthier people did, but they hadn’t been all that wealthy when Theo joined the army, and he had wanted to prove himself anyway.
“No. He was infantry, just like you.”
“Just like me,” he echoed. “I doubt that.”
“Perhaps you should talk to him and find out.”
“I’d rather not waste my time.” Just then, a loud shriek cut into their quiet conversation. Mal turned. “I need to go back before they kill each other.”
He disappeared into the schoolhouse, shutting the door firmly behind him. Georgina stood alone for a moment after he left. Stood alone, and wondered if that was the last time she would speak to him.