Chapter 19 #2
I will not show hurt. This milk sop cannae hurt me! She wouldnae last a minute in the highlands!
“If he wished to discuss his future,” she said, “he might have done so with his wife. Instead he sends for you. That speaks of cowardice. Not affection.”
Charlotte shrugged. “Believe what makes you sleep at night.”
She moved past Isla, skirts whispering. The scent of her perfume something floral and cloying, drifted in her wake.
Isla stood for a moment, staring at the closed door. It had been left ajar when Charlotte emerged. Now it was shut once more, the lock gleaming innocently. Her hand lifted of its own accord. She set her palm flat against the wood.
“Is that true?” she whispered. “Did you send for her? Or did she send for herself?”
The door, stubborn, said nothing. Fury came to her defense first. How dare Charlotte walk Wexford’s corridors like a queen?
How dare she imply that Isla’s marriage was a temporary inconvenience, a political bandage to be peeled away when the wound healed?
How dare she make light of Strathmore’s humiliation, of Isla’s fear?
Under the fury, hurt. She had begun to believe, cautiously, foolishly, that the warmth between herself and Edward meant something.
That the kitchen in London, the moonlit parlor, the hayloft, the laughter in the stables were not accidents but steps toward trust. Charlotte’s smugness lodged like a stone in that hopeful path.
Did Edward send for her? Has he been playing me? Confiding in that chit about matters he cannot share with his ain wife?
Isla could imagine it too easily. Edward, weighed down by responsibilities and ghosts, turning to the woman who had known him since boyhood, rather than to the inconvenient Scot he had married out of necessity.
You are a fool, Isla Drummond.
She turned on her heel and walked away from the locked door, spine held as straight as any sword. She passed a footman, who bowed.
“Your Grace,” he murmured.
The title scraped. In her rooms, she closed the door more gently than she wanted to. Edith looked up from the trunk she was airing.
“Is something wrong, m’lady?” the maid asked.
“Nothing,” Isla said. The lie tasted bitter. “Everything. I do not know.”
She crossed to the window and looked out. The view took in the south lawn, the distant shimmer of the training field where some of the younger horses were being put through their paces. No sign of Edward. No sign of Charlotte either.
“He is free to invite whom he wishes,” she said aloud, to the glass. “This is his house.”
“Your house too,” Edith ventured.
“Legally,” Isla said. “My heart does not seem able to keep up with the paperwork.”
She pressed her forehead briefly against the cool pane.
She had left Strathmore to save her brother from ruin.
To be a bridge between their failing estate and the security of Wexford.
Now Strathmore was ash, their creditors bayed louder than before, Glenmore whispered in London, and Edward, whose friendship she had begun to value as much as any bond, might be planning a future in which she did not figure beyond a name on a register.
It was intolerable. Not because her pride could not bear being set aside but because the thought of staying under a roof where she was not wanted in more than name felt suddenly like a slow suffocation.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Edith said quietly. “I can hear it from here.”
Isla turned. “What?”
“When you get that look …” Edith mimed it, eyes fixed, jaw set. “…it means you’ve made up your mind about something and the rest of us had better make room for it.”
Isla huffed a laugh that was almost a sob. “Do I truly look like that?”
“Like a child who’s decided to climb the tallest tree in the village,” Edith said. “Yes.”
Isla crossed to the trunk and laid her hand on its edge. “If Strathmore is half destroyed, Alistair will need help. Real help. Not just letters. Not just money he does not yet have.”
Edith’s brows drew together. “You mean to go.”
“Yes.” The word settled into place like a stone finding its riverbed. “I mean to go to Perthshire. To see with my own eyes what remains. To make certain no one is hungry or homeless who need not be. To stand on my own hearthstone, even if it is cracked.”
“And His Grace?” Edith asked carefully.
Isla hesitated. Edward’s face rose before her, earnest over a ledger, amused over a mare’s stubbornness, quiet in the flickering light of a kitchen candle, lines of worry drawn around his eyes.
“He has his mother to advise him,” she said. “And Lady Charlotte, apparently. He does not need me to tell him how to arrange his rooms or his heart.”
Edith opened her mouth, closed it again, then said only, “He will notice you are gone.”
“Perhaps,” Isla said. “Perhaps not.”
She closed the trunk lid gently, as if to test its hinges.
“I will write to Alistair,” she went on. “Tell him I am coming north. He may try to dissuade me, but he will not succeed.”
“And His Grace?” Edith persisted.
“I will … inform him,” Isla said. “As courtesy demands.”
The ache in her chest pulsed. She pushed it down.
“Better a ruined house I love,” she murmured, half to herself, “than a whole one in which I feel like a trespasser.”
She squared her shoulders, reached for paper and pen, and began to write.