Chapter 3
… We arrive at Strathrannoch tomorrow. Do you recollect the bit in the Vindication in which Wollstonecraft claims that the only way for women to achieve spiritual vigor is for them to first run wild? Well—let us hope she was not wrong.
—from Lydia Hope-Wallace to Selina Kent, Duchess of Stanhope and patroness of Belvoir’s Library, posted from Dunkeld
Lydia was not certain she had ever, in her entire life, so longed for oblivion.
It was not the first time she had vomited in public. It was also not the second, nor even, lamentably, the third. (The third had been a rather unfortunate incident involving her next-oldest brother Ned and a not-very-grief-stricken widow whom Ned had been attempting to charm. At her own husband’s funeral.)
It was, however, the first time Lydia had vomited in front of a man to whom she had recently offered her hand in marriage.
She had liked these slippers. They were pale green and pointed, with huge floppy bows on top. She’d thought, when she put them on that morning, that they would give her a burst of courage when she looked down and glimpsed their optimistic adornments.
They were now a horrifying, ruined, utterly unmentionable metaphor for the outcome of her fondest hopes and dreams.
Independence. A life of her own devising. A partner who did not see her as an object of pity.
Everything she’d imagined—all of it as insubstantial as smoke.
Her total humiliation had been made worse by the fact that rather than permitting her to lapse into another swoon, they had instead all very decorously introduced themselves. Strathrannoch’s estate manager, Mr. Palmer—a bespectacled older man with deep brown skin—had been the very picture of soothing comfort. In between words of consolation, he’d fetched her a warm blue-and-green plaid and a wet cloth. Lydia was not sure whether to use it on her face or her slippers.
Mr. Trefor, the stable master, had been tasked with securing chairs for the room, which was mostly empty, aside from scattered books and a few incongruous children’s toys. The state of the castle’s interior did not surprise her, from what she knew of the Strathrannoch earldom’s finances. She supposed that the furniture and candlesticks and anything else that might fetch some coin had been carted off and sold.
Eventually, Lord Strathrannoch himself returned from a long absence, bearing a pot of tea and a hefty bottle of whisky. He added a hearty splash of the whisky to her teacup and then rather grimly filled his own cup nearly to the brim. She could not discern if he looked worried or furious, and when she caught herself staring at his face, she lifted her teacup to her mouth, abandoned decorum, and gulped.
The alcohol-laced concoction brought some feeling back into her fingers, and after a moment, she lifted her gaze to the men arrayed across from her. Mr. Palmer was the first to speak. “Are you feeling better, my dear?”
She was not feeling especially better. But she nodded anyway.
“She’s here because Davis tricked her,” said Lord Strathrannoch bluntly. “Meant to take her fortune, no doubt. If I was not already of a mind to kill the bastard when we find him, I’d be plotting murder now, damn it.”
“When you find him?” Lydia asked in surprise.
At the same time, Mr. Palmer’s brows rose over his wire-rimmed spectacles. “Take her fortune? However did he mean to do that?”
A roomful of eyes swung in her direction. She made a small, involuntary whimper. There was nothing— nothing —more calculated to discompose her than a vista of interested strangers peering into her face.
She directed a pathos-filled glance at Georgiana, who gave a delicate shrug.
Lord Strathrannoch reached over and poured some more whisky into her teacup. Mr. Palmer coughed meaningfully, and Strathrannoch added a splash of tea as well.
Lydia drank again, grateful for brothers, secret liquor stashes, and Ned in particular, whose commitment to the proper behavior of society ladies was negligible. She did not even cough at the whisky’s endless burn.
And when she felt herself capable of it, she stared down into the teacup and, as quickly as possible, explained her marital intentions toward the Earl of Strathrannoch.
Her former marital intentions, back when she’d thought she’d known the man. This whisky-pouring giant was a stranger who had seen her faint and vomit in close succession. A wedding did not seem imminent.
“I’d meant to propose a mutually beneficial arrangement,” she informed the teacup. “I am an heiress—”
“Very rich,” put in Georgiana helpfully.
Lydia shot her friend a brief glare. Georgiana did not look repentant.
“I would not have come empty-handed into the agreement,” Lydia went on. “It was not purely self-interested. I had something to offer.”
She felt absurd saying the words. She had money . That was what she meant. That had been her enticement: The Strathrannoch estate needed money, and she could provide it.
She knew she had other good qualities. She was clever and well-read. She had a head for figures. She’d had a hand in the elections of at least half of the decade’s most progressive Whigs and had personally organized the downfall of a corrupt MP who’d championed the death penalty for political protestors.
She was an excellent sister, recent deceptions notwithstanding. She tried to be a good friend.
It was just that, in her plan to propose marriage, her inheritance had seemed by far the most appealing part of her person, and she’d intended to capitalize upon that.
It felt surprisingly painful to say so aloud.
“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Trefor. “Why would Davis pretend to be Strathrannoch? What could he have hoped to gain?”
“For God’s sake,” said Strathrannoch, “he wanted her blasted fortune. Thought to play her like a fiddle, get her money for himself somehow.” His ears had gone rather red again; he looked furious.
Lydia shook her head, compelled to set him straight despite her instincts urging her to hide underneath the plaid. “I don’t think so. I don’t see how he could have known of my fortune. My identity is closely guarded by Belvoir’s—I would trust the patroness with my life. In fact, I do trust her with my life. I could be charged with sedition and imprisoned for those pamphlets.”
Mr. Palmer nudged his spectacles up his nose. “If not for money, then perhaps for information. You said you spoke of politics?”
“Yes,” Lydia said slowly. “It’s possible. I assume he was a radical, looking for more information about radical causes?”
The three men all made various noises of scorn and disbelief, and she blinked.
“There was a time when he was,” Lord Strathrannoch explained, “but that time is long since passed. A few years ago, he became a great pet of some of the Scottish peers—always entertaining, always the merry charming flirt.”
Lydia felt ill. “It’s impossible. He disparaged them in his letters. He was never more scathing than when he spoke of the Duchess of Sutherland—”
“One of his fastest friends,” Strathrannoch said.
Her mind reeled, and she licked her lips. “I had expected that a Scottish earl would be horrified by my more radical beliefs—the abolition of the aristocracy, for one. But he was never horrified. In every possible way we seemed to be in agreement. Even my most outrageous ideas, he… he…”
She looked up at Strathrannoch. The real Strathrannoch, plainspoken and disheveled and casually exploding everything she’d thought she’d known.
“Your brother lied,” she said. “Didn’t he? He lied about that too. He agreed with whatever it was that I said, not because he felt the same but because—because he wanted something from me. If not my money, then the information I provided him in all those letters.”
It had been a fantasy, all of it, from start to finish. Her friendship with Strathrannoch. Her carefully embroidered dreams.
She could never be the woman from the pamphlets. Her family—her loving, absurd, wildly protective family—had been right to shield and cosset her.
She had been wrong to believe that she could stand on her own.
Strathrannoch looked furious, his big hands opening and closing on his teacup. “I’m sorry, lass.”
Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes, and she absolutely refused to let them fall. “Don’t be.”
“Not just because of Davis’s actions,” he said. “But because I must ask something of you, and I fear that doing so makes me not so very different from my brother.”
She looked up at him, his tight jaw, his grim mouth. “What do you mean?”
“I need you to help me find him.”
At this pronouncement, there was a small but decided clamor.
Mr. Trefor looked outraged. “You cannot mean to ask this poor girl, after all she’s been through—”
Mr. Palmer, meanwhile, appeared delighted. “What an excellent idea! Strathrannoch, I do not give you enough credit for cleverness.”
“I—” Lydia said. “I—I’m not certain—”
Strathrannoch quieted them all with a slight lift of his deep voice. “I would not ask if it were not urgent.” He hesitated, then seemed to steel himself to go on. “A month ago, Davis came to stay with us at Strathrannoch Castle. He had not spent so much time here in years. I thought perhaps things had changed between us. He seemed so interested in the estate, in the tenants and my work.” He laughed, and it was a brief, bitter sound that clutched at Lydia’s insides. “He was, in a way. He stole something from me. A prototype I had built—an object of my own design.”
“Your design?” She did not know what he meant. Was the man not an earl? What sort of designing did he do? She glanced again at the boiled-leather smock he wore. Was he a painter ?
“A rifle scope,” Strathrannoch said.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Imagine a telescope,” Mr. Palmer put in, “mounted to the top of a rifle. Imagine how far and how clearly you could see through it—and how precisely you could aim your weapon in that case.”
“I don’t understand. You design weaponry? Are you an especially avid hunter?”
Strathrannoch made a sort of growling noise. “For God’s sake, no. I’m a farmer. I make plows. Reaping machines. Sometimes I mess about with engines. I’d thought”—he rubbed at the back of his neck—“I’d thought to make the rifle shot more accurate, if I could. Sometimes shots go wild and the tenants are injured, you see.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “You are an inventor?”
He looked as uncomfortable as Lydia herself. His throat had gone pink, and his hands—she could see now that they were flecked with small burn scars—rotated his teacup rather madly. “I make things, that’s all. For the tenants and the villagers. Little things to ease their way.”
“And you invented this—this rifle telescope? And your brother stole it?”
“Aye. He asked plenty of questions. How the device worked. How far away you could be from your target and aim true.” She could see the muscles of his jaw work. “A hundred leagues. Do you know the kind of damage that could be done with a weapon like that? When the Duchess of Sutherland cleared her lands of the farmers who’d been there for generations, she had them driven out, their homes burned. But not all of them wanted to leave. Had her men a weapon of this kind, there could have been a massacre.”
“You think he means to use this weapon of yours—and the information I gave him—to do violence?”
“Aye. I can think of no other reason that he would have stolen the rifle scope.”
She could feel her heart beat hard, doubling, tripling in pace. Her brain tried to keep up, to take in the facts. The man she’d corresponded with these last three years had deceived her, had lied to her for information and meant to use what she’d told him to work against everything she believed in.
“I think you can help us,” Strathrannoch went on. “Write to this Belvoir’s. Find out what they know. And while we wait for their response—let me look at your letters and see what information Davis might have let slip.” He looked at her, his multihued eyes hard and direct on her face. “Please, lass. I need your help.”
Her heart clenched. Her throat constricted. Speech seemed suddenly beyond her, as absurd and impossible as flight.
She leapt to her feet. “No,” she got out. Her voice sounded strangled. “I’m sorry. No.”
Georgiana stood as well. “Lydia?”
She felt humiliation crawling across her skin as she looked at the three men who’d been so kind to her. Mr. Palmer, Mr. Trefor. Lord Strathrannoch.
She was going to let all of them down.
She could not change her life. This was what she was—a foolish spinster. A woman who wrote pamphlets instead of living. Who blushed and cried and fainted too easily, whose emotions swam through her body like physical things.
“I can’t,” she said. She felt almost frantic to get away. She wrestled with the blue-and-green plaid Mr. Palmer had given her, trying to pull it off her body while Bacon turned bemused circles at her feet. “I’m sorry. You don’t want me here. I’ll write to Belvoir’s. I promise I’ll write to them. I’ll tell them to send you whatever they know. But I cannot—I cannot—”
She couldn’t stay here.
She had imagined Strathrannoch Castle so many times—had pictured herself here, living here—a marriage of practicality and convenience, to be sure, but nonetheless a marriage. Her own off-kilter happily ever after.
Had she really thought she could change her life? Upon what basis would such a mad fancy have seemed possible?
She knew herself. She could scarcely manage the trials of a routine dinner party. Why had she thought she could succeed at something as outrageous as this?
She finally managed to get the plaid off her body, letting it fall onto the chaise behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
There was no sense in trying to control the shaking of her hands or her voice, but she picked her way carefully across the floor, her letters clutched in her hands. At least this time she would not swoon.
“Miss Hope-Wallace,” Mr. Palmer said gently.
And at the same time, Strathrannoch’s voice rasped out from behind her: “Wait. Wait a moment.”
But she couldn’t wait. She couldn’t even turn back to look at him, or the burn at the backs of her eyes would turn into hot flooding tears of embarrassment.
That, Lydia felt, would be too far. The full cornucopia of indignity.
She could faint. She could vomit. She could make a perfect ninny of herself by proposing to a complete stranger.
But she would not cry in front of all of them, in front of their gentle sympathy and fresh-brewed tea.
Instead, she hiked up her skirts in one hand and ran.