Chapter Three
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—invitations which the sisters Murray had always declined. But this year, the canny lady had sent something besides the invitation—the trunk—which was too big for the Aunts to hide.
Elspeth stared at both the trunk and the now-opened letter. It was as if she had awoken to find a tame unicorn in the garden. To think that all these years—all these years she had worked so hard to stifle her indecorous curiosity, to keep her idle daydreaming to herself and be content with her paltry lot—she might have seen something of the world beyond the confines of her small, muddy corner of Midlothian.
In the lane, the dray man hefted the big trunk as if it were as light as 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 accept it to find out what lay inside?
“If ye don’ want it”—the dray man 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 man balanced the load on one broad shoulder. “She sayed as I wus to gie it ye, or bring it straight back tae herself.”
“Could you take me back with it?” 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. “I’d be sore obliged if you would please take me with you.”
“Tae Edinburgh?” The driver’s bushy eyebrows rose up, poised in consideration.
Elspeth was 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—but she held her rain-splattered ground. “You do go straight back to Edinburgh, do you not?”
“Aye.”
Her heart spun faster—she had to convince him or perhaps forever lose her chance. “Could you not easily take me there as well?”
The driver stroked the grizzled ends of his ginger whiskers in contemplation. “I s’pose I could. Fer a price.”
And here was the fox concealed 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 pretended to consult the missive from Lady Ivers 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 for the potential reward of escaping her stifling village and her stifling life.
Of escaping spinsterhood.
Mercifully, the dray man warmed to the idea. “Aye. She might at that. Well, come ye on then.”
Relief and excitement made a tangled skein of her insides. “Will you bide here a short while, so I can gather my things?”
And do the hardest thing yet—tell the Aunts what she had done.
The driver turned his squint to the sky, as if gauging the hours of daylight left. “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 just inside 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. “Mind your skirts and boots. You’re covered in mud.”
“I’m not coming in for more than a moment.” There was nothing for it but to give them the uncomfortable truth. “I’ve asked the dray man 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 even before they erupted in speech.
“Are you run mad? 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 deflected the cutting remark as if it were an errant spindle needle—her aunt’s inflammatory but impotent jabs had long become 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 polite but grim sort of logic.
“Because she’s hardly decent!” Isla was too scandalized to admit any logic. “She’s wicked.”
Elspeth disagreed as politely as possible. “She seems very decent, as well as civil and ladylike, in her letter.”
“That is as may be”—Aunt Molly was clearly searching for excuses—“but I’m not sure that it is 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 bit 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.”
Heat scratched at the back of Elspeth’s eyes—the Aunts had, indeed, made the best of it all—their genteel poverty due to absence of opportunities, lack of education, and reduced circumstances. 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. When opportunity was so close. “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 Scotland, Elspeth Otis had a few things she meant to do—if true love had not come to Twelve Mile Burn to find her, she meant to go out into the wide world, and find love for herself.