Chapter Sixteen
“Elspeth? Elspeth, are you listening to me?”
The insistent query penetrated the sad fog of her brain only an instant before Aunt Isla gave her a swift poke in the side. “Yes, Aunt, I’m listening.”
Isla’s lined pink face was puckered with worry and disapproval, though she seemed otherwise to have recovered rather miraculously from her brush with mortality—this morning she was well enough to take a glass of milk, and come out of her room so she might supervise Elspeth’s work from a chair under the arbor. “Your attention has been everywhere but on your tasks. Had your head turned in the city, I’ve no doubt,” she sighed. “Telling you all sorts of falsehoods—like your parents being married. Unforgivable.”
Elspeth sighed to cover the humiliation that threatened to overwhelm her like the runaway rose pulling over the arbor. “Yes, Aunt.”
It hadn’t been her head that had been turned, but another, less intelligent part of her body. Which might have been her heart.
Or something even more susceptible.
But she couldn’t tell Aunt Isla that, now could she? “I did not have my head turned by the city, Aunt Isla,” she tried to reassure her. “Indeed, I came home because I much prefer the quiet life, here, where everything is comfortable and cozy and easy.”
Or so she had kept telling herself for the past four days. Over and over as she did her chores, tidying the parlor, shaking out the rugs, or pouring the weak, watery tea. Over and over as she dutifully sang hymns at Morningsong, or walked stolidly home from the kirk, or drew water from the well.
And especially in the lush garden, full of color and scent, when she leaned back against the sun-warmed wall, and her body remembered the feel of his braw strength pressed tight and strong to hers. The warmth of his chest. The span of his hands as he had cupped her head and kissed her lips—
“Elspeth!”
Elspeth looked at the rose blossom she had just lopped off, fallen at her feet. “I’m sorry, Aunt.” And she was sorry. Sorry that Isla’s worry that Elspeth would leave for Edinburgh again made her so snappish and fretful. Sorry that she wanted to leave anyway, even when she knew how badly it discommoded the Aunts, who really did need her home.
“What on earth ails you, child?”
“Nothing, Aunt.” Nothing that the courage of her convictions and a far greater share of daring would not cure.
“And what is that infernal noise? That shrill—”
Elspeth stopped long enough to listen—on the other side of the garden wall, someone in the lane was whistling. Loudly.
Aunt Isla stretched up like a hare to peer around the hedge. “It’s some ramshackle fellow, lounging along the fence like a reprobate. Like to steal us blind if we let him.”
A jolt of terrible pleasure bolted into her veins, and shot Elspeth onto her tiptoes to keek over the wall. Because the ramshackle fellow at the gate was none other than Mr. Hamish Cathcart. Who looked likely to steal only kisses.
He had come. He had come for her.
Her joy and excitement made her skittish with hope. “I’ll just go see what he wants, shall I?” Elspeth didn’t wait for the permission she knew would not come, but bolted over the wall.
“Elspeth!” Aunt Isla clung to her like a cobweb. “Your ankles. And you forgot your cap!”
The dratted lace mobcap hung like a hangman’s cowl from her aunt’s fingers. “Thank you, Aunt.” Elspeth reached back for it because she knew she must, but rather than put it on her head, she folded it deep into her pocket. “I don’t want to dirty it with my soil.”
Elspeth closed the gate firmly behind her, wiped her suddenly damp palms on her apron, and tried to speak as if her heart weren’t hammering against her ears like the blacksmith’s anvil—he had come, he had come. “Mr. Cathcart.”
“My very dear Miss Otis.” He smiled, tipped his hat, and glanced around as if he were not quite sure of his welcome. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Fancy that, indeed.” It made her irrationally happy to see him again. “How did you find me?”
“Lady Ivers set my course.” He gave her that roguishly self-deprecating grin. “And once I found the village, I inquired of the badgers, who were surprisingly tight-lipped about your whereabouts. But your neighbors”—he nodded back down the lane where two women pretended not to be straining to hear their conversation from their own listing gates—“were kindly more forthcoming.”
They had a veritable crowd for Twelve Mile Burn village—her own relations strained and peered over the wall at her back.
“What does he want, Elspeth?” Aunt Molly had joined Isla in the garden, their noses practically twitching like march hares. “Tell him to go away!”
“Yes, Auntie.” Elspeth hardly knew where to look—at his lovely hands that had held her tight, or his lovely warm brown eyes that crinkled at the corners with humor, or that smiling mouth that had once covered hers with bliss. “I’m afraid you’re to go away.”
“I heard.” He tipped his hat cordially toward the garden wall. “But I don’t think I shall. Not when I’ve come all this way to find you.” His voice got a little quieter. “You ran away.”
Elspeth felt her face flame so hot it was a wonder she didn’t go up in a puff of white smoke right in the middle of the lane, like some fairy tale witch. If only he would not look at her so—with that charming gleam at the corner of his eye, as if he were thinking about the last time they had been together. As if he were just waiting her word to lead her into another secluded garden.
But the nearest secluded garden contained the Aunts, who were unfortunately right about her—she had a weakness, it seemed, for rogues.
“I didn’t really mean to run away.” It only seemed fair to give him the truth. “But my Aunt Isla was deathly ill.”
He looked over at the Aunts, bristling with hostility and rude health. “She seems quite recovered.”
“Aye, but—”
“So why haven’t you come back?”
Elspeth didn’t have a ready answer, though she had asked herself the same question over and over once it was clear her Aunt Isla was, indeed, going to recover. But she also remembered the degradation of being called “a bit of muslin,” as if she were no more than a rag. The familiar mortified heat suffused her face. “I didn’t belong there, Mr. Cathcart. I was…out of my depth.”
“Out of your depth? Elspeth Otis.” His voice was as teasing as it was chiding. “I think you hadn’t even begun to plumb your own depths.”
“Elspeth? Elspeth!”
This time, the cry from the garden held real alarm. And only Aunt Molly’s head was visible on the other side of the wall.
Elspeth immediately vaulted the wall with no care for her ankles. Aunt Isla lay in a heap on the grass path—Aunt Molly was at her side cradling her head.
“Did she fall?”
“Fainted.” Aunt Molly’s voice was thin with concern. “Her heart is just not strong.”
Elspeth took Isla’s wrist and felt her reedy pulse in confirmation. There was no need to tell her that it was she who had upset her aunt’s fragile health by entertaining roguish gentlemen in the lane.
But that roguish gentleman had evidently followed her over the garden wall, and was even now bending down to take the frail old woman into his arms. “Show me where to take her.”
Elspeth could only point the way through the single French door into the tiny back parlor and hope that the terrible thrill of being carried by such a man wouldn’t send poor Isla to her grave. “On the settee. I’ll get her hartshorn.”
“It’s in her pockets,” Aunt Molly instructed from the doorway, as if she were too afraid of Hamish’s rather overwhelming presence—his head nearly scraped the timbers of the low parlor ceiling—to even attend to her sister.
“I found it.” Elspeth knelt by the side of the settee to waive the vial in front of her aunt’s pale nose. “Take a deep breath, Aunt Isla.”
“Oh my.” Isla’s thin black lashes fluttered open. And then she set eyes on Hamish hovering behind Elspeth. “Oooh, no!”
She had to get him out. “Thank you for your assistance, Mr. Cath— Sir,” she amended, as she gestured back the way they had come. “If you’d just wait outside?”
It took a delicate bit of maneuvering to usher Aunt Molly out of the doorway and over to the settee so Hamish could go out, but it was soon enough accomplished. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”
Hamish grinned even as he shook his head. “After coming all this way to find you? Not a chance.”
“But you must. Your mere presence—”
“Yes, I see. But if you cannot leave—and I see that you can’t—then I must remain. Until I can convince you.”
“Convince me of what?”
“That you belong in Edinburgh. With me.”
A different sort of heat swept down her throat, and headed for those lower depths. “Wheesht!” She cast a worried glance over her shoulder at both the Aunts, who might be dying, or at the very least aging rapidly, but still had ears like hungry barn cats.
“What is he still doing here, Elspeth? What does he want?”
“He’s looking for work, Aunt. Gardening and the like.” It was the only thing she could think of at a moment’s notice that might be plausible—as long as the Aunts hadn’t taken too close a look at Mr. Cathcart’s ink-smudged hands.
“Aye, mistress,” Hamish raised his voice and answered for himself, cheerfully tipping his hat again to the ladies of the house. “Looking for a bit of honest work.”
“Don’t have any work for vagrants.” Aunt Molly’s tone was firm.
“You’d know best, mistress,” he answered, all charming Scots fealty. “Tho’ a mon can’t help notice ye’ve a powerful lot o’ repairs that need doin’ to the place—that eave looks dicey, and ye stand in certain need o’ new thatch. I could have the whole of it patched and as snug as a sealskin within an afternoon. And take a good pruning to that runaway rosebush, as well.”
The Aunts turned as one to look through the window at the rose that looked as if it were making a meal of the rickety arbor. Somehow, he had managed to hit upon a topic guaranteed to play to her Aunts’ pride—they had always taken great care in the upkeep of their cottage and garden, but as the years had gone on and their vigor had been sapped and their finances had slowly dwindled, things couldn’t be as meticulously maintained as before.
But the idea that he—this earl’s son from Edinburgh—would actually do such work was comical. “Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you?” she warned in a whisper. “You can’t possibly know anything about thatch.”
“Can’t I?” His smile didn’t falter.
And it made her acutely uncomfortable. Because she liked it. She wanted to curl up in its warmth like a cat in a sunbeam. “What do you really want, Mr. Cathcart?”
“Hamish,” he insisted. “I thought we were friends.”
Friends didn’t kiss as if they were going up in flames in dark gardens.
But perhaps she was the only one who remembered that incendiary kiss—Cathcart had more practical considerations upon his mind. “And I also thought we were associates. I’ve typeset the first few chapters, and brought them so you could see.” He pulled his coat back enough to reveal a packet of printed sheets stuffed beneath his waistcoat. “And as your publisher, I have also come to pay you. Two hundred and fifty pounds. You left before we could settle things in a satisfactory manner.”
She had, hadn’t she? She had run home like the scared little field mouse she was, hiding herself in her country burrow. But he had followed her. How flattering. And troublesome. “You could have just left it with my Aunt Augusta.”
“I tried—Lady Ivers confessed she didn’t know if you were coming back either. So I set off to find out. And here I am.”
“Elspeth! Why is he still here?”
Elspeth craned her neck to look over her shoulder at the ever-attentive aunts. “We can’t discuss this here.”
His smile widened, spreading that mischief around. “Well then, Miss Otis.” His voice was warm with wicked amusement. “I can only hope you have a better, more private, place in mind.”