Chapter 39
Chapter
McGann looks around the room wildly. All eyes are on him, and he doesn’t know what to do.
Catherine said duke. That he’s the Duke of Barclay. Of all the preposterous shite.
Except—
The way she looks at him, with some mixture of pity and sympathy and incredulity and shock, tells him she isn’t being preposterous. She’s being honest and what she’s said is true.
He reacts the only way he knows how; he turns on his heel and limps out of that room as quickly as possible.
“Andrew,” he hears Catherine say behind him, but he keeps moving, back to the carriage that’s conveyed him and Rogers here.
“Wait!” she calls. “Please!”
He makes it to the carriage and opens the door before he finally stops and turns back to her. “Get in, lass.” He gestures inside. Catherine clambers up and he follows, leaning his weight back on the squabs.
“I’m sorry,” she says and reaches for his arm.
He feels like stone beneath her touch and wishes he didn’t. He wishes, so much, that everything could be now like it had been before. Before he’d ever asked for that cursed box back.
“I shouldn’t have announced it aloud like that,” she says. “I should have—I wish I’d—”
He puts his hand on top of hers and pulls her in closer to him so that her head fits between his shoulder and his jaw.
“Shhh,” he murmurs to her. “It isn’t your fault.
It’s my father’s, that bloody arsehole. I wish he’d just left me here with my gran instead of hauling me back to Scotland.
” He rests his head on top of hers. “I don’t understand why he didn’t.
It would have been so much better. So much easier for everyone. ”
Catherine nuzzles into him slightly. “I don’t know,” she says and sighs.
“Why do fathers do anything? You might choose to believe the best of him, that he married your mother and brought you back to Scotland because he wanted to do his best by both of you. But the peerage—and Barclay’s mother, when he remarried—made that impossible. ”
She pauses briefly. “But you don’t have to. You might believe he was a weak-willed, selfish man who made a series of discordant decisions that have made your life very hard.”
“Hard,” he snorts. “How about hell?”
“Alright then, that made your life hell.” She squeezes his arm.
“My father insisted I marry but left me no provision to see it done. He married my mother for her money and then disallowed her to even mention the family company it came from. The only truth of it is we had rotten fathers,” she says.
“And whether that was because they were spiteful or weak-willed or just heedless doesn’t much matter.
To me anyway. They’re dead now, Andrew, and we’re here.
We’ve lives to live; ones they no longer control, and we get to choose how we think of them.
And how we think of ourselves. What we leave behind and what we carry forward is up to us. ”
The carriage comes to a stop outside his little cabin. The wind has begun to whip and clouds obscure the sky. A storm is coming; he can feel the threat of it raising the hairs on the back of his neck.
“Will you stay with me awhile?” he asks as they alight from the carriage.
“Of course,” she says and follows him inside.
He knows he ought to go and see his gran, but he doesn’t. He’ll have to tell her he’s the goddamned Duke of Barclay and he doesn’t want to. Not until he can come to terms with it himself.
He’s avoided his relation to the duke and that side of his family for his entire life. He hated that part of himself. Reviled it and kept it a secret as best he could. And that was when he was only a duke’s bastard son.
Now—
Bloody hell.
Catherine may be right that he gets to choose how he thinks of his father and how he thinks of himself, but he knows it won’t be as easily done as said.
Banishing the thoughts of himself, the ones he’s absorbed from his father and his brother might very well be the hardest thing he ever has to do.
And it’s not a thing done only once; he’ll have to do it over and over again for the rest of his life.
How does he even begin, when turning his mind to the thought that he might be the duke—the actual Duke of Barclay—is like looking directly into the sun. The idea of it scorches right through him, leaving only a crumbling ash in its wake.
“Would you like to talk about this further?” Catherine asks when they’re safely inside the cabin.
“Nay.” He sits at his table while she perches on one of the stacked fruit boxes.
“It might help to devise a plan,” she says.
“A lot has happened, Andrew. And there will be a great deal to do. The House of Lords has a special Committee that oversees titles, even Scottish ones, and I’ve no doubt Barclay—” she pauses, “or whomever he is now, will challenge you. Good heavens,” she goes on, “the entailment must reset to you, and there is Scotland to consider. They’ve their own court, I believe.
The Court of Lord Lyon? Yes, I think that’s it. I wonder why—”
“Menace,” he cuts her off. “I’m tired. And my damned leg hurts. And while it delights me to no end to see you planning, lass, what I really want to do right now is hold you in my arms.”
She stops speaking and stands, staring at him with those eyes that are so damnably, oceanically blue a man could drown in them.
“Oh.” She says it softly. “What more do you want?”
He reaches out his hand to her to draw her near.
“I want to be back on my ship with you in my arms and weeks to go before we arrive in any port. Somewhere far-flung and desolate except for us. And less bloody hot. I want to not think about this catastrophe a moment longer. Not tonight anyway. And I want, for just once in my life, to have a good choice to make instead of a long list of shite ones.”
“You’ll make something good of this, Andrew,” she says so earnestly that he very nearly believes her. “I know you will.” She cocks her head. “Listen.”
The rain he knows has been coming begins to fall. And not the slow-forming drizzle of London, either. This is something else entirely—a sudden, torrential, tropical downpour.
“Aye. I hear it.”
“Will it flood the roads, do you think?”
“Likely. For a time, anyway.”
“Well, then. I suppose I’ll just have to stay here and pretend we’re back on The Elphame.”
She tugs lightly on his hands so that he rises. Pain floods through his leg at the movement, and he knows he fails when he tries to cover his flinch.
Catherine watches him move and knows it hurts him. She nearly tells him to wait, that there’s no rush, but he turns to look at her with so much want in his eyes that she doesn’t.
She’ll give him whatever she can, because she wants the same.
To be here, together, in a world apart from everyone and everything else.
To lay in his arms and hold him. To inhale that scent of his—peat and rain and oceans and mountains and wild ginger and plumeria.
The best of Scotland and Jamaica. Just like him.
The best, she thinks, of everything.
She settles herself on the bed of grass and beckons him over. He tries again to cover the grimace he makes when he moves but she notes it anyway. She wonders how it makes him feel, a man who’s always been so hale, now hobbled. Another thing they’ll have to speak of—but not tonight.
Tonight is for love. For kisses and embraces and intimacy. For delicious dreaming and that blissful dichotomy of passion and trust that she’s only ever felt with him.