Chapter 10
“Your solicitor arrived last night from Hawick,” Mary said from the doorway of Ruark’s bathing chamber.
He stood at the water basin, swishing soap from a razor as he raised his gaze and locked with Mary’s in the glass.
She stood behind him, her hands on her ample hips, her lips pursed in a straight line.
Water dripped from his wet hair onto his bare shoulders.
He wore a clean pair of leather breeches but little else and those he had dragged on after Rose left his chambers.
Ruark had gone to Hawick last week for many reasons, one being to assess Stonehaven’s accounting books.
Ruark needed to know his father’s business transactions these past years.
If there was a connection between his father’s death and Hereford, it would be found in the accounting books, many of which were missing from Stonehaven, but which he had hoped his father’s solicitor had copies.
Most importantly, banking transactions were always duplicated.
If he could find proof, anything to connect Hereford to his father’s death, there may be another way to end this standoff with Hereford.
“Where is he?”
“I took the liberty of informing him you take your breakfast in the dining room at eight and that he may await your presence there.”
Ruark finished wiping the soap off his face. “Thank you, Mary. I will be down directly.”
Mary remained in the doorway. Ruark finally turned, waiting for her to speak her mind. “I know the lass is no’ the first woman to be used as a means to an end . . . and she be the warden’s daughter—”
“Do I need this dressing-down, Mary?”
Recognizing that the tenor of the reprimand coincided with his mood warned her that even for her there were limitations to his patience.
“Lady Roselyn has refused to see the modiste,” Mary said before taking her leave.
“I was just to see her and told her I have arranged one to visit tomorrow. After much searchin’, I learned of a modiste living in Hawick and made provisions to bring her here.
I would use that French highbrow Lady Roxburghe brings over from Paris three times a year. But I did no’ think we have—”
“Why did Lady Roselyn decline the offer for a modiste?”
“She informed me that she was convent raised and would no’ face her father being anything more than who she was, her father be damned. She asked me to thank you for your consideration, the gist of her comment bein’ along the same sentiment. She does not need your charity.”
Christ.
Ruark intended to see that when it was time to face her father, she would do so as exactly who she is: the daughter of an earl, not some impoverished supplicant beneath that man’s regard.
Fifteen minutes later, he was trooping down the hall, adjusting the lace on his wrist. He dismissed Jason to attend to his breakfast as he passed the lad, then he was standing before her door.
He reached for the knob, paused, then he decided to knock rather than barge inside.
For a moment, considering this, he braced his palms on the door frame.
The door opened. Her eyes widened, and it was as if he’d stepped into bright morning sunlight. “My lord.”
He had been wholly unprepared for her effect on him, only because she had not left his thoughts, and he already considered his mind and senses finely attuned to her.
He was wrong. She stood in a bright patch of the sunlight filtering through the high window from her bathing chambers.
Her plaited copper hair crowned her head in a wreath of red-gold glory.
She had changed her clothes and now wore homespun, but the simplicity of the dress merely refined the complexity of the tall woman beneath. The common accented the uncommon.
After what they had already shared between them, Ruark was surprised anything could make Rose blush, but she did as she found his eyes on her, and suddenly he was remembering the journey they had shared in the glade.
There wasn’t a part of her he had not touched.
A part of her that he did not want to touch again.
“Sunlight becomes you,” he said.
“I was just thinking about you,” she said not unkindly, reaching around to drag up something behind the door. “This is for you, my lord.”
She gave him a knapsack made from a patchwork of wool and muslin.
Curious at the clinking and odd weight of the thing he peered inside to find it filled with silverware, napkin rings, and a chalice as she informed him, “I have no more need of such as I have every intention of going to my father when ’tis time. ”
“Is that right?”
“I have not made the decision lightly. But you were right when you told me that night at the river that there was nowhere I could go that my father would not find me. So I have decided to make this simple for all of us.”
“If there is another way?”
“After what you have told me, I know there is not.”
Her words banished the softness that had momentarily incapacitated him. Though he grudgingly admired her courage, he did not intend to hand her over to Hereford.
“I do not need your protection, my lord.”
The steel in her words told him she did not want his protection. His first instinct was to parry her steel with his own. But he did not. He had forgotten his purpose for coming to her room but as Mary rounded the corner, he had not forgotten his solicitor was awaiting him.
“Our chaperone has arrived,” he said, then leaned a hand against the doorway until his face was near hers. “You wish to meet your father on your terms? Give Mary one of your dresses to take to the modiste for measurements. Let her make you something . . . simple.”
“Simple?”
Hell, he probably knew more about lady’s garments than Rose did.
“Something provincial. Silk. Velvet. Emerald in color,” he said.
The color of her eyes. He would have added, with all the proper undergarments and accoutrements, but he would choose to leave those details to Mary’s discretion.
“You wear simple very well,” Ruark said.
“You want to meet your father as you are? Never go into the wolf’s den looking like a sheep, my love. ”
“Even with your infusion of gold, you still do not have enough to pay the ransom, my lord.”
Ruark stood at the window across the table from his father’s solicitor, who was tucked quite eagerly into a meal of bannocks spread with molasses.
Ruark had been distracted for the last half hour, staring outside at the parkland, half reading Mr. McCurdy’s pile of papers, half woolgathering before he’d forced his thoughts back to the task at hand unprepared for the news just delivered to him.
What Ruark found on Stonehaven’s balance sheets stunned him.
“You are telling me, Stonehaven’s coffers are nearly empty?”
“Except for what you put there, my lord. You could sell the last of the Roxburghe fleet of ships. The Black Dragon itself would be of interest—”
“ ’Twill be a bloody cold day in hell before anyone gets his hands on the Black Dragon,” Ruark said. “What has happened here in thirteen years?”
The lines of strain tightened around McCurdy’s mouth.
“This place has fallen on rough times. His lordship lost a fortune when other investments failed this past year. The crops and rents haven’t produced enough to pay the debts.
Then the village fiscal embezzled the rest, though we’ll never know for sure where that went. ”
“Where is he?”
“Dead, my lord. Six weeks before your father died. He tried to leave here during a snowstorm. Duncan caught up to him, only to find him dead, frozen solid beneath his horse and no gold to be found. Thieves most likely got it all. He left a wife, three sons, and a wee lass behind.”
Ruark didn’t know the details behind the fiscal’s death last winter, except the eldest son, Rufus, was one of the hostages taken with Jamie.
“Your father got himself involved with some shady dealings, my lord.” McCurdy then remarked that in his opinion all power politics was apt to be dirty business as evidenced by the current situation involving his brother and the young woman held hostage at Stonehaven.
Ruark turned back to the window, his mind sifting through Stonehaven’s financial problems to something more subtle. “Have you been able to find any information on Elena Kirkland Lancaster, Lord Hereford’s dead wife, or on Kirkland Park, her ancestral home?”
He had not expected McCurdy to know anything given the time constraints from when Ruark had asked, and was surprised when McCurdy replied, “I didn’t find much about the wife, but her ancestral home and the entire area around Redesdale sits on land that was once part of a larger crown charter of the barony granted to Lady Hereford’s great-grandfather by Charles the First. The patent, the deed of settlement, has since expired. ”
“Then none of Kirkland Park is tied up in entail.”
“The grandfather was a smart old codger, though. He put the family’s wealth in trust just after Lady Elena gave birth to her daughter. All of the funds are vested in consuls, an annuity that pays its six percent to the estate yearly.”
“Then someone has to know the girl is alive, or Hereford would not be receiving funds. Who controls the trust?”
“Friar Tucker does,” a feminine voice said from the doorway.
Recognizing it, Ruark turned into the room. McCurdy clamored to his feet, nearly spilling a cup of tea on his shiny blue satin breeches.
Rose stood in the shadows backlit by the gray light coming through the corridor’s window. He could not see her face, only the shape of her shoulders and waist, the curve of her hips and breasts perfectly feminine. Her hair seemed to pull color from the darkness.
“My apologies,” she said. “Mary implied breakfast was being served and you were in the dining room. I had not expected to find anyone else here.”
’Twas a lie, he knew, since Mary had been the one to send the solicitor to the dining room to await Ruark.