The MacGregor's Lady Page 9

  “I am the only family you have left who doesn’t curse your very name,” Malcolm said. “Babies are being born up at Balfour, you know. Ian, Connor, Gilgallon, and Mary Fran are all happily married and having fat, healthy Scottish babies, given wonderfully Scottish names, swaddled in clan plaids and sent to sleep with the old songs. My cousins don’t invite you up there, don’t mention you might like to bide with them while the Queen is larking about Deeside with her royal consort.”

  “That is none of your affair. How much, Malcolm?”

  Bless the old boy’s fixity of purpose. “I want more than a season of finery in which to advance your schemes. I want security in my old age, something you’ve enjoyed for an obscenely long time.”

  Fenimore couldn’t help how old he’d become, but he definitely deserved to be twitted for living off his deceased wife’s wealth in such a miserly fashion.

  Malcolm compared the overstuffed elegance of the Fenimore study with his garret in Paris, a cramped, noisome space alternately freezing and sweltering by seasons, a place holding few meaningful memories and too many bottles of wine when a man needed decent whiskey in his veins.

  The baron batted a gnarled hand in the direction of the bellpull. “Ring for Draper. He’s not yet departed for points south.”

  Malcolm obliged. Yes, it was a petty command, and yes, the baron could easily have reached the bellpull in a few steps, but Draper’s presence would signify an intent to be bound by any terms struck.

  Then too, as Malcolm studied Fenimore’s increasingly frail form he had to allow that maybe the baron wasn’t unwilling to get up and ring for his man of business, perhaps he was unable.

  ***

  The trip to the Royal Menagerie shifted something in Asher’s regard for Miss Hannah. The first time he’d seen the Menagerie, he’d been an adolescent. He’d pleaded a sudden, pressing need for the jakes, and as soon as he’d had some privacy, he’d given in to tears. He’d never quite known why, and it hardly mattered now. Taking Miss Cooper to see the lions hadn’t been the least bit gracious on his part; it had been… a test.

  Rude, presuming, and not at all kind.

  Maybe she’d sensed that, and maybe she’d wanted to cry a little too, for the lions, which was to say, she’d passed the test. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed, for himself, for her… none of it made much sense.

  In any case, the tenor of his sightseeing trips with Miss Hannah moderated, and the weather followed suit, shifting from bitter to brisk, however temporarily.

  She liked the parks most of all, and was content to stroll the walks on his arm, saying nothing for long stretches as she bobbed along beside him. She also liked to browse the shops, though not for herself. She was forever sending little gifts—ribbons, trinkets, scented gloves, sketches—home to her grandmother, and she’d occasionally ask him questions about this birdsong or that flower.

  “Do all Englishmen know their flora and fauna as well as you do?”

  “I can’t answer for them one way or another. I haven’t a drop of English blood in my veins.”

  She referred to him as English to tease him, or to ensure he paid attention.

  Paying attention to Hannah Cooper was becoming all too easy, even when she merely occupied the place beside him on a quiet bench. Hyde Park was never entirely deserted, but in late morning, the nannies had taken their charges back to the nurseries, the shop girls weren’t yet taking their nooning, and the fashionable crowd was still abed.

  “Is that why you don’t sound English?”

  “I sound English compared to you.” When he was sober and could ape the accents he’d heard at university, he sounded much more English than she. Ian, next in line of Asher’s siblings, had found that university accent uproarious until he’d acquired one of his own.

  Miss Cooper scuffed a half boot over the dirt beneath their bench and tried unsuccessfully to hide a smile. She liked being from Boston, however many and varied her other dislikes might be. “You don’t sound American, Asher MacGregor, but then one hardly knows what an American accent might be. We’re so lately full of Irish and Scots. Before that it was French, Dutch, and English. We’ve many Africans as well.”

  “Slaves.” He didn’t miss that aspect of the New World at all.

  “Not in Boston.” Her spine straightened, and lest he be treated to an abolitionist homily, Asher gestured to a bed of tulips several yards up the walk. A few early stalwarts suggested the entire bed would be a bright, bobbing yellow in a few weeks’ time.

  “I am hopelessly in love.”

  She left off scuffing her boot. “I beg your pardon?”

  He was bad to tease her like that, though she was a woman much in need of teasing. “That’s what an English gentleman would know about yellow tulips, that they stand for the sentiment ‘I am hopelessly in love.’”

  “I’ve heard of this symbolic bouquet nonsense, though if you ask me, a yellow tulip ought to be simply a yellow tulip.”

  That was her common sense talking, trying to deliver a little homily of its own. Asher leaned a touch closer, so he could catch a whiff of her scent. She used lavender soap, as most of his household did, but twining through that came a hint of something sweet and clovery.

  “I declare my love for you.”

  “Sir, you will not… Oh.”

  He’d done something no English and few Scots would have dared attempt in Hyde Park in broad daylight: he’d plucked the first red tulip to bloom from a tightly planted drift.

  And his crime—surely the English would have made appropriating a single, temporary bloom a crime—was worth the risk, because for the first time in his experience, Miss Hannah Lynn Cooper, late of Boston and points north, was blushing and bashful.

  She didn’t turn as red as the tulip, but she colored up nicely and ducked her face to stick her nose in the flower. This was foolishness—tulips bore hardly any scent—and it resulted in a smudge of orange-yellow powder on the end of Miss Hannah’s nose.

  “A proper Englishman would be glancing nervously about at the trees right now.” Asher withdrew his handkerchief. “He might be twitching his nose, making discreet signals that you’ve become unpresentable.”

  “Unpresent—” She didn’t rear back when Asher dusted off her nose. She frowned though. “Am I presentable now?”

  “We’re working on it. A few more trips to the modiste, several more to the milliner, and my hopes might be rewarded.”

  Abruptly the frown became a scowl. “And here you were doing so well, Balfour. But no, you must ruin a perfectly lovely spring day with talk of the coming debacle.”

  Her nose, once again free of unintended cosmetics, was aimed toward the sky. He liked that nose. In its angle and dimensions, that nose spoke of confidence and honesty. A nose such as hers might be coaxed to do some nuzzling in the right company on a cold night—provided such company did not start prosing on about marriage and dowries first.

  “A suitable engagement would hardly be a debacle, Miss Hannah. You have an unnatural aversion to marriage and family if you believe that. It can be wonderful, to have a family.”

  He hadn’t meant to say the last part, and she was regarding him again in that studying way of hers, suggesting she knew he’d revealed more than he’d planned to. “You have a family, I take it,” she said. “Where are they if they’re so wonderful?”

  The pain of her question was spectacular, all the more so for being unexpected. The ache hit Asher bodily, constricted his airways and coiled in his gut, and then ricocheted around in his mind, leaving a trail of guilt, loss, and rage.

  “I’ve sent for some of them. By the time the Season starts, I expect two or three of my siblings will come down from Aberdeenshire for the express purpose of helping me fire you off.”

  He didn’t deserve their aid—Ian in particular had already served well above and beyond the call of duty—and neither did Hannah deserve his foul mood, but of all the things he might have been prepared for her to ask, the
whereabouts of his family was not among them.

  “I have half brothers,” she said as she twirled the red tulip between gloved fingers. “They are spoiled rotten, and I love them. I want a home of my own and babies as much as the next woman, but I already have a family. Tossing aside the family I have for the family I dream of having hardly washes.”

  She was in spectacular form today, casually pummeling every bruise on Asher’s soul, and without even knowing the havoc she wrought.

  He forced himself to focus on the plain sense of her words. “You refer to your not-quite-sainted grandmother, whom you must protect at all costs. An Englishman might not bow as easily to your stepfather’s schemes, or the right Englishman would have wealth of his own.” So would a Scotsman, for that matter, but Ian, Gilgallon, and Connor were happily married.

  Miss Hannah sat forward and braced herself on the bench with both hands, hunching her shoulders in an unladylike attitude. “My grandmother depends on me, and I owe her. When Papa died, Mama would have let all the help go, taken to her bed, and remained there all her days. Grandmother stepped in and maintained order, even though my mother treated her miserably. When Mama married my stepfather, it was my grandmother who alerted Papa’s lawyers to the need to see to my fortune.”

  “She sounds very devoted.” Also meddlesome, and not even an impoverished Englishman wanted to marry into meddlesome female relations.

  “She is mine to love now, so this foolishness of a marriage in England will not do.”

  Hannah Cooper was living up to her nose, demonstrating a determination that boded ill for the coming social Season, and she intended to have her debacle on Asher’s watch. Because that would not do either—for his sake as well as hers—Asher tried for some honesty.

  “If you do not take, if you are shunned or ridiculed because you engage in outlandish behavior, word will reach my uncle and very likely your parents as well.”

  “My stepfather is not my parent.”

  “Nonetheless, he’s in a position to make you miserable.” Just as old Uncle Fen would make Asher miserable.

  She said nothing for a time, confirming Asher’s sense the damned stepfather had made Hannah miserable already.

  “Shall we go, sir? Aunt will be rising from her nap, and it looks to be threatening snow or sleet.”

  She didn’t get to her feet. Already, she’d absorbed enough English etiquette to resort to the weather for a change of subject and to wait for his assistance before she rose—or maybe her hip was paining her from all their tramping around.

  “Your aunt will likely sleep through dinner again.” Enid slept most of the time, in fact, which was the reason—most of the reason—Asher had sent for reinforcements. A chaperone asleep at the switch was no sort of chaperone at all, and servants would hardly keep such a development to themselves.

  He rose and extended a hand down to her. “Come, it does look like the weather might turn nasty.”

  As they made their way back toward Park Lane, Asher casually noted each species of bird, tree, and flower around them. In the Canadian wilderness, such knowledge could spell the difference between a full belly and an empty one, between life and death.

  And yet, here he was, far from the wilderness, in a land where a man learned of flowers only so he might speak symbolically through them in courtship, and the women—the ladies—understood such sentiments easily.

  ***

  Ian MacGregor, heir to the Earl of Balfour, loved his brothers and loved them dearly. This was likely why he also wanted to bash their idiot heads together regularly.

  “Asher is laird, head of this family, and holds the title—if he summons us, we go.” At Ian’s opening salvo, Connor and Gilgallon exchanged younger-brother looks that presaged mutiny, or at least a long, tiresome spate of arguing.

  “I agree with Ian.” Their sister, Mary Fran, spoke up from the love seat she shared with her husband, Matthew. They held hands, their laced fingers resting on Matthew’s thigh, Mary Fran’s lap being rather less in evidence than it had been several months ago. “I’d quite honestly like to spend time around our brother,” Mary Fran said. “He holed up at Balfour for most of the winter, like some sort of monk. If we avoid him, he might as well still be trapping bears or whatever he was so happy doing in Canada.”

  He hadn’t been trapping bears—or not merely trapping bears. Ian knew that much.

  “I’ll pour.” Ian’s wife, Augusta, left his side to tend to the hospitality, though adding whiskey to his brothers’ tempers wasn’t necessarily wise.

  Gilgallon, the most charming but also the most hotheaded, led the charge. “Asher disappears for so long he’s declared legally dead, then pops up last autumn with almost no warning. Royal decrees are issued, he snatches the earldom back from you, and then at the first sign of spring, he’s off to frolic in London?”

  Augusta served the first drink to Gilgallon’s blond, English wife, Genie, the second to Con’s beloved, petite Julia. Genie passed the drink to Gil without taking a sip, which was interesting—and might explain why Gil would rather linger in the North, glued to Genie’s side, even with spring approaching.

  “A London Season is hardly a frolic,” Genie said, English refinement echoing in every syllable. “A newly minted earl with a mysterious past will be mobbed, and he won’t know what’s about to hit him.”

  Connor, the most quiet and blunt of the siblings, spoke as Julia took a delicate sip of her drink. “Asher is no stranger to a dangerous wilderness. I’m saying he might not want us Trooping the Colours in full regalia. He wired Ian. Let Ian scout the situation. The rest of us can get down there on a week’s notice or so.”

  “Spathfoy and Hester have been biding in the South since autumn,” Ian said, because the family now included Augusta’s cousin Hester and her English earl. “Asher’s invitation was to his entire family, and I agree with him. We haven’t all been under the same roof since Grandfather’s funeral.”

  A man who’d impersonated the head of the family for a few years could pull rank like that. Mention of their departed grandfather had Gil downing his whiskey and Connor reaching for Julia’s hand.

  “If Asher has been racketing about the Canadian mountains these past years, then he’s going to be a curiosity among the English,” Mary Fran said. “We can’t leave him on his own any longer, not if he’s asking for our help.”

  Another silence descended, this one thoughtful.

  “We needed his help,” Gil said, his tone more bewildered than angry. “For years, we needed his help, and he let us think he was dead.”

  “The family has his help now,” Ian said. “His shipping venture is thriving, and I get the sense that’s not his only commercial success. Every MacGregor on two continents can apply to Asher for assistance now.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing Town in spring,” Julia volunteered. “Winter takes so long to give up its grip this far north. Then too, some shopping might be in order…”

  She let the suggestion hang, but Ian felt the other women catching the notion like hounds grabbing the scent of the fox.

  “I’ll no be squirin’ ye around the damned shops,” Connor muttered.

  Julia patted his hand and kissed his cheek. “I do so love to show you off in your kilt, Husband.”

  Connor’s mouth, usually so grim and unsmiling, turned up in an indulgent grin.

  And that settled it. Without shouting, without breaking furniture, without negotiating, they were all going south—and without forcing Ian to reveal confidences he’d promised Asher never to divulge.

  ***

  Whenever Balfour came upon Hannah, her emotions went in two directions: first, she resented his intrusion, and it always felt like an intrusion. She’d look up to find him lounging in a doorway, his expression impassive, arms crossed while he studied her in handsome and inscrutable silence.

  She never knew how long he’d been lurking, poaching on her privacy while he quietly regarded her.

  After she wrestled that resentme
nt under control, she’d then have to tuck Grandmother’s letter away—she read it very frequently—which created a second resentment, like an echo. The letter was her only link with home, her only link with what mattered most to her in life, though that was not Balfour’s fault.

  And pulling against those resentments, like some great beast of burden, came the memories of feeling safe and warm in Balfour’s embrace, of accepting a single flower from him as he teased her in the park, of his resolutely downward gaze as they discussed caged lions.

  “You are hell-bent on ruining your eyes, Miss Hannah.” Balfour ambled into the parlor and turned up the lamp. “Are you ready to go in to dinner?”

  He didn’t ask about Aunt Enid, which was considerate of him. “I am.”

  She folded the letter, rose, and crossed to the rack of cue sticks on the opposite wall. When Balfour extended a hand down to her, she took it, noting as she always did the slight rasp of his calluses against her fingers and palm.

  Progress down the stairs was slow.

  “Your hip is paining you. It hurts worse on the days when we walk in the park, doesn’t it?”

  Her hip was killing her. “Or perhaps on the days when it snows, or the days when I get out of bed.” Or the days when she contemplated what would happen when she arrived back in Boston without a husband.

  He tucked her hand over his arm. “Would you rather take a tray in your room?” Dark eyes regarded her not with impatience, which would have been welcome, but with honest concern.

  “I am being difficult. I do apologize.”

  “Your grandmother has written only the once. You miss her, and you worry for her.”

  This was Balfour’s attempt at consideration, cataloging the aches and pains about which Hannah could do nothing, and yet, his honesty was a comfort too.

  “Grandmama can only print—her eyesight is very poor—and she doesn’t want to spend postage on an exchange of gossip.”

  Balfour paused with her while a footman opened the dining-room door. “Is that an exact quote from her letter?”

  “Close enough.”