Chapter Twenty
Disapproval hung as thick as the scent from the rose vine outside the garden door by the time Elspeth made it home. Even at a run, she had arrived home well after the Aunts had already returned from the village kirk.
“We missed you at services, Elspeth,” Aunt Molly began in a voice laden with reproach.
“I am sorry.” And Elspeth was, deeply so. She had not missed a Sunday service—barring illness, which had only happened once, when she had come down with a fever—in all the twenty odd years she had lived with her Aunts at Dove Cottage. “I woke early and thought it was a fine day for the thatching, and once we got working, I seem to have lost track of the time. Though the roof is well finished and very stout now, so you’ll have no worries it will leak come winter.”
“The work might have waited on a Sunday, Elspeth,” Aunt Molly chided. “What has come over you? It isn’t like you to miss something as important as divine services.”
“Yes, Aunt. I am truly sorry.” There was really nothing else Elspeth could say.
But she would not regret her morning. She would not allow anything to dim her memory of her last few hours with him. What a lovely going away present those last golden hours had been.
“I’ll just get your breakfast eggs started on the boil.” She headed for the kitchen fireplace.
Aunt Molly stepped into the doorway, blocking her way. “Where did you get that creel?” Her aunt turned toward the garden, almost as if she could see through the worn bricks and boards to the dusty collection of auld fishing gear in the shed. “It’s been years since we’ve had any new fishing equipment here.”
“No.” Elspeth swallowed the dry apprehension in her mouth, but gave them the honest truth. “It’s not new. I just dusted it off so we—”
“We?”
“No. I mean, I caught the fish. For you. For breakfast, since I missed kirk, and I—”
But Aunt Molly had not been born yesterday, nor even the day after. “Elspeth Otis.” She looked at Elspeth over the top of her spectacles. “Your neck is going all pink.” She had always been able to detect even the flimsiest fib when Elspeth had been a child. “Were you with that tramp?”
“He’s not a tramp—he’s a gentleman. I met him in Edinburgh,” she admitted.
“Edinburgh?” Aunt Molly still did not comprehend. “If he’s a gentleman, what was he doing in our roses and on our roof?”
Elspeth gave up all prevarication. “Because he has come here, to Dove Cottage, to find me.” Even in the midst of being caught lying, she took a sort of perverse pride and pleasure in that knowledge. “He was only pretending to be a gardener.”
“Pretending?” Aunt Molly’s hand rose to her throat, as if the word itself were poison.
“Yes, Aunt. Because he’s not really a gardener or a thatcher.” Because Elspeth was tired of pretending, too. “He’s a publisher of books. And he’s publishing my book, or rather my father’s book.” She corrected her presumption, but the subtle difference was lost upon the Aunts who stared at her as if she had finally run irretrievably mad.
It was Aunt Molly who finally spoke. “I refuse to believe it.”
It was such a simple, little word, refuse, but it hit Elspeth with the force of twenty years of denial. Twenty years of holding back. Twenty years of being called, “Elspeth!” in that disparaging tone, of not being legitimate, of never being thought good enough.
“Refuse all you like. It’s my legacy from my father, my fortune, those books. And I refuse to listen to you disparage him any more. I won’t hear another word against him.”
“Nay,” Aunt Molly swore, as if she could deny Elspeth any such legacy. “There is nothing you need from such a man. Have we not given you everything you need? Have we not given you a home and made you feel welcome?”
“Nay.” It was Elspeth’s turn to deny the charge. “You have. But—”
“It’s that devil’s cub, Augusta Ivers, who’s turned your head, and turned you against us.”
“Nay!” Elspeth wouldn’t hear of it. “Aunt Augusta was everything kind and encouraging—”
“Encouraging you to consort with strange men!”
Elspeth prayed for patience. “Not consorting, Aunt. Contracting—working with him the same as any author.” If one kissed every author one contracted, and thatched their roof and fished for their breakfast in the morning sunshine.
“Have you lain with him?”
The blunt question felt more like an accusation. “Nay! How could you ask such a thing?”
Her voice was hot and tight and scratchy with the pain—the pain of knowing she was breaking their frail old hearts as well as her own.
“You’ve changed since you went away, Elspeth. We hardly know you anymore.”
She hardly knew herself anymore. Perhaps she never had.
But it was past time.
“Perhaps I have.” She firmed her voice, refusing to be cowed—refusing to regret. “Perhaps I’m not afraid of changing. Perhaps I want to be transformed.”
She had wanted it, with all her soul.
“That huzzy encouraged you, no doubt.” Isla finally said her piece.
Hurt and anger banked for twenty years lent Elspeth’s voice righteous heat. “Speak of me how you will—how you always have, as if I’m not good enough. But you leave Lady Augusta Ivers out of it. She has been nothing but kind and generous and thoughtful—”
“And I suppose we haven’t?” Aunt Molly’s voice was becoming shrill.
Even through the hot sting of the tears burning her eyes, Elspeth tried to stay calm, tried to listen and modulate her own voice, even as her anger made her voice shake. “That’s not what I said.”
“You’ve said quite enough, Elspeth Otis.” Aunt Molly’s tone was as emphatic as it was feeble. “Quite enough.”
“Blood will out, I’ve always said,” Isla said, as she clutched her sister’s hand for support.
“Aye,” Molly sniffed. “And I’m afraid to say it’s true.”
There was nothing more Elspeth could say. Nothing more that she wouldn’t regret.
She was so tired of being not enough. Of working so hard to be something she was not. She didn’t want to be sweet and polite and obedient and do as she ought anymore. She wanted to live.
Blood would out, they said. Well, perhaps it was time to make it so.