Chapter 7
… I can no longer satisfy myself with the common phrase “Ladies have nothing to do with politics.” Female influence must, will, and ought to exist on political subjects as on all others.
—from H to the Earl of Strathrannoch, received and read by Davis Baird
The next day, Lydia allowed Arthur to lead her up onto the ramparts. Her legs had to work twice as fast as his to keep up on the stairs, and she was panting slightly by the time they reached the top.
He, of course, did not appear to be breathing hard. He had an insultingly well-muscled bum and robust thighs to carry him up three flights of stairs, and brawny shoulders to match from his work at his forge.
She realized she had grown more breathless, rather than less, as she stood next to the earl beneath the blue bowl of the sky, and forced herself to stop thinking about the musculature attached to his physical person.
He held a drawing of the rifle scope in his large, burn-stippled hands, but rather than show it to her again, he let it flutter to the ground.
He pointed out into the middle distance, in the direction of the road that she and Georgiana had taken up from Dunkeld. “Do you see the pine tree there? The tallest one, scraggly near the top?”
She blinked. “I see dozens of pine trees.”
He caught her chin between thumb and forefinger and angled her face up, out past the guardhouse where she had been looking and farther still.
She shivered. He dropped his hand.
“There,” he said roughly. “Do you see now?”
She nodded. She seemed to have forgotten the connection between speech and the relevant parts of her mouth.
“When we first made the rifle scope, Huw tested it out. He shot a red grouse out of that tree, so distant I could not see the bird at all without the lens. I didn’t believe him until we rode down there and found it, a cluster of red feathers, dead at the foot of the tree.”
She swallowed hard and looked up at him.
“This is no game,” he said. “We must find Davis. The damned scope is too dangerous, and I—” His hand tightened into a fist. “I need to get it back.”
“I understand,” she said. “I promise. I will do everything that I can to help you.”
He picked up the sketch that had fallen to his side and shoved it in his trouser pocket. “Thank you,” he said gruffly. He did not look at her. “This would not be possible without you.”
She felt heat rise in her cheeks, but he did not turn his face to see. They were both silent as he led her back down into the heart of the castle.
She took his terrifying demonstration seriously. She had written to Belvoir’s the previous evening to request any information they had about Davis. Barring disaster, the mail coach would take five days to deliver the letter; they could expect another week for a reply.
But there was more she could do in the interim. She was convinced of it.
Over the next week, Lydia reviewed Davis’s letters and Georgiana elected to interview the staff at Strathrannoch Castle. Georgiana was a Gothic novelist and a skilled researcher, possessed of a consummate ability to ensorcell others. Before she had revealed herself as a scandalous writer, she’d pretended to be an empty-headed debutante in order to avoid detection, a ruse which had fooled Lydia completely. Now, three years later, Georgiana used her unique talents to procure information about the sensational and the supernatural, gathering anecdotes to incorporate into her writing. She seemed delighted by the prospect of a mysterious investigation at Strathrannoch.
Research had, in fact, been her purported reason for accompanying Lydia to the castle. Back in London, she’d made a very convincing case for why her newest novel required a personal tour of a derelict Scottish estate—something about ghosts and portraits and decaying ruins.
In truth, Lydia suspected that her friend had wanted to protect her. Georgiana had not wanted Lydia to journey alone, and she’d known precisely how to convince Lydia that she was not motivated by pity or doubt.
The staff at Strathrannoch Castle, however, turned out to number rather fewer than Lydia might have guessed, even with her knowledge of Strathrannoch’s dubious finances. After conversing with Mr. Palmer and Mr. Trefor, Georgiana had found only Willie, the groom; Fern, the lone chambermaid; and Rupert, Fern’s seven-year-old son. Evidently, the Earl of Strathrannoch had been the only one in the vicinity willing to hire seventeen-year-old Fern, who had turned up in the village with a two-month-old baby and no husband to speak of.
Georgiana’s reports were consistent: Davis Baird was a charming fellow, easy on the eyes and possessed of a great talent for winning adoration and affection. Rupert seemed the only one who had not been taken in by Davis’s most recent performance—Rupert’s hero worship, it seemed, extended only to the earl and not to his brother. The boy seemed generally convinced that Strathrannoch had slain giants, wrestled crocodiles, and placed the moon in its orbit about the earth.
Given the presence of zebras on the estate, Lydia supposed the crocodile tale might have some basis in fact.
While Georgiana deployed her information-gathering talents amongst the staff, Lydia found herself in close proximity—again—with Strathrannoch himself.
He wanted to examine all of Davis’s letters, a desire which flustered her. In fact, everything about the man flustered her, in a physical fashion altogether different from her normal anxiety around strangers.
In truth, after her first few days at the castle, Strathrannoch no longer seemed like a stranger. Somehow—between the zebras and the degu and the exasperated fond looks he sent toward young Rupert when the boy turned up in his office with a flying squirrel ensconced in his hair—Lydia no longer felt the painful reserve that marked her interactions with people she did not know. She’d become comfortable in his presence, at least comfortable enough to speak to him openly and without too much distress.
No, her physical reaction to the man was decidedly not anxiety.
When he entered the downstairs drawing room in the late afternoons to meet with her, he generally seemed to have come from some work with his tenants. He always looked rather fierce, and once he shouted for Mr. Palmer’s assistance—something about seeds and tomatoes and mad old Scots with no sense of agricultural timing. He wore his shirt open about the neck—always, except at dinner—and his sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms taut with muscle and gleaming with curly golden hairs. His beard had thickened since her arrival, but it did not disguise the sulky shape of his mouth.
Lydia found it all immensely distracting, particularly when he pulled a chair up to the desk beside her and asked to examine whatever it was that she was reading.
He was interested in everything. He wanted to know about her pamphlets, her politics, her exchanges with his brother. She perused his office one evening before dinner while he sorted through her correspondence and discovered that he was extensively well-read and possessed of notes and papers upon nearly every subject she could think of. Evidently much of the Strathrannoch library had been sold in an effort to raise funds, but he had made his own careful notes on hundreds of scientific texts. He informed her—the tops of his ears slightly red—that he was a member of a circulating library in Edinburgh, which he visited monthly to keep up with advancements in agricultural technology.
“Did you go to university there?” she asked curiously, resuming her place at the desk by his side. “One of my brothers graduated a few years ago from the Royal College of Physicians. Your scientific curiosity reminds me of his—I think you would get on.”
But when she looked at him, he was frowning again, his fingers tense on the quill that he held over one of Davis’s letters. “No,” he said shortly. “Neither of us went to university, though Davis was schooled at Eton.”
She blinked. “Was he? Why, he never spoke of it, not once, in all his letters.”
“Aye, well, he couldn’t have done, could he? Or else you might have known it wasn’t me writing the letters.”
“What do you mean?”
“He went.” Arthur hitched one shoulder in a shrug. “I didn’t. So he could not mention it.”
She did not know what to make of that. It was not unheard-of— the heir being kept at home to learn the estate and its husbandry, the younger son sent off to school.
But it was not so very common, either. And from what little she had gleaned of the previous earl these last days, she did not imagine he had been a particularly good teacher.
“Davis spoke only of Scotland,” she told Arthur. “I would not have guessed he had lived in England. Here—he mentions Argyll and Buccleuch. In this one, Glencoe—”
Arthur looked up sharply. “Glencoe?”
“Yes, I think that was it. He said you had a house there—he remembered it most fondly.”
She could see the tension rise between Arthur’s shoulder blades, could feel it in waves from his large form. Her body was always attuned to such things, ready to predict catastrophe from the stiffness in someone else’s tone or the harsh line of their mouth.
But she did not think Arthur was upset with her. He looked back down at the letters, his curling lashes falling over his eyes. “Aye, we had a summer house in Glencoe. Our father sold it when Davis went to school. I would not have thought he remembered.”
But Davis had remembered. The stories had been drawn in such vivid colors, his scene-setting sharp and precise. She’d laughed aloud at his anecdotes of tumbling into the water while fishing for trout with his bare hands, of stealing apples from a tree he’d later learned belonged to his own father.
It occurred to her now, as she watched Arthur compel his fist to uncurl, that Davis had never, in any of his letters, mentioned having a brother.
Had it been a fear of accidentally revealing himself? A wariness about referencing himself in the third person?
Or was it something altogether darker? A desire to pretend that he was the Earl of Strathrannoch—and that the brother who currently held the role had never existed?
Lydia did not know what to think. And she wondered—a strange ache rising in her throat—if Arthur had noticed. If it had hurt him to read the letters.
But he shook his head, rejecting the very notion of the house in Glencoe. “Argyll, Buccleuch: Those two are not a surprise. Those are the homes of his great friends these last years—the aristocrats who favor him.”
Yes, Arthur had mentioned this—that Davis had not been a critic of the Scottish aristocrats whom they’d discussed but rather a friend to them. It was almost impossible for her to accept.
She withdrew a writing-covered sheet from the stack of correspondence, one she’d read so many times that the ink had worn down where the page was folded. “I find it difficult to believe that Davis supports Argyll and Buccleuch and Sutherland. It must be an act. Did you not read this letter?”
She found the lines she wanted quickly enough. “‘Sutherland is beginning to wear a depopulated and ruinous aspect. The duchess sends a posse of men to eject the Highlanders from their dwellings—homes in which they have gone through all the stages of their lives, homes endeared to them by a thousand ties and circumstances—’”
“ Homes which are then burned before their very eyes . Aye. I recall the words.”
She raised her eyes from the letter to find Arthur’s face. “You can read this and truly believe that he supports what Sutherland and the others are doing in the Highlands?”
She had admired this letter—its plainspoken sympathy, the care it evinced for the Highlanders whose homes had been ruthlessly destroyed.
“Aye,” Arthur said. “Because Davis did not write those words. I did.”
Her lips parted, and the moment stretched as she sought speech. “I beg your pardon?”
She could see, even beneath the beard, that his jaw was tight. His hand opened and closed on the desk. “I wrote down the stories the crofters told us. The ones who came here from the Highlands. We tried to find a place for them on our lands or, failing that, the means to move them to the Americas. I wrote their stories and then I sent them to the newspapers, and some of them were printed. That’s where Davis got the words, I suppose. From my own damned pen.”
She blinked several times in quick succession and reminded herself to close her mouth. Arthur had written these words? Had been the author of the sentiment she had so admired?
She scarcely knew what to feel. A bizarre twist of betrayal—though why this revelation should disturb her almost more than everything else Davis had done, she did not know. She felt unsettled, almost unmoored.
She had not truly known Davis. Of course she had not; she perceived that perfectly well by now. He had wanted something from her—information, political gossip that she was privy to. His letters had been filled with lies.
But perhaps in some small way, she had known the man he’d pretended to be. She had known the Earl of Strathrannoch.
Her fingers on the desk were inches from Arthur’s, she realized. It would be easy to slide her hand over to his. To soothe the unhappy tension there. To ease her palm along the muscular line of his forearm and—
She coughed, then cleared her throat, then finally transferred her fingers to her lap. “I thought you did not care for politics. When I first arrived with the letters, you said that you could not have written them because you were not interested in political causes.”
“The Clearances, the crofters—’tis not politics, lass. ’Tis people’s lives.”
She shook her head in automatic negation of his words. “All politics are about people’s lives. Our experiences are what drive our politics—our experiences and our sympathy for the lives of others.”
“Is that so?”
“Of course. I told you about my pamphlet on debt reform, did I not?”
“Aye.”
“My maid, Nora, came to work in our home at fifteen because her father was sent to the Marshalsea.” She pressed her lips together in remembered outrage. “The whole family was forced to either live with him in debtor’s prison or else work off his debt— his debt, not their own.” She made herself unclench her fingers, which had locked together in her lap. “It’s wrong . And what’s more wrong is that our own father came from debt—my grandfather, the Marquess of Vye, was deeply mired in generations of it—and yet his treatment was entirely different because he was a member of peerage. The whole system ought to be burned down and built anew.”
Strathrannoch had a peculiar expression on his face as he looked down at her. “Aye,” he said slowly, “perhaps you’re right. I have always…” He hesitated, as if searching for the words. “It has always seemed to me best to do what I can for my own land—my own people.”
Yes. She had seen that in him from the first.
Her sex, her unmarried state, her natural reticence—all of it had led her to come at politics in the shadows, always working just out of sight. But this man—blunt and softhearted by turns, somehow rough and gentle at the same time—tackled the problems of his world differently, with his sleeves rolled up and his hands set to a plow.
She admired that. She admired him.
“I’m sorry,” she said impulsively. “I’m sorry Davis took your rifle telescope. I’m sorry I don’t know where he might be.”
There was a short, cautious pause as he took her in, his face close to hers. She could feel the weight of his gaze, the peculiar gravitational pull of his body beside her own.
“Yet,” he said finally. “We don’t know where he is yet. I’ll find him.”
She glanced back down at the letters they’d been examining, and her mind, which had been a trifle hazed by the combination of his eyes and voice and general proximity, suddenly sharpened. She slipped one of the letters free, and then another, lining them up on the desk.
“We should plot these sites on a map,” she said. “Both of us, together. Some of them I’ll know how to find—the estates, the villages he mentions—but others I’ll need you for. The cleverest little dry-goods store , he says here, or the burn where I fished as a boy . You would know those places—I would not. If we mark them all out, perhaps they’ll give us some indication of his whereabouts when he wrote the letters or a sense of the location of his allies.”
She realized as she turned to him that Arthur was gazing at her, surprise and something else on his face, a deeper curve to his bottom lip than she had seen before.
Admiration? Or—no, not precisely admiration.
Pleasure.
His hand flexed on the desk and his smallest finger somehow brushed hers. She wore no gloves when writing. His skin was warm against her own.
“Aye,” he said roughly, “I’ll do that.”
His hand came away from hers and she clutched her quill, cool against her heated skin, as he rose to find a map.