Chapter 9
April 14, 1803
Clara and Mr. Cobbledick were now friendly acquaintances, so that when a wheel spun off the coach within view of a pub, the coachman walked her into the yard and bullied everyone into entering the building so that she could sit at one of the outdoor tables without being gawked at.
The innkeeper’s wife emerged with a glass of cool lemonade. “Would you like me to take your cloak, miss? I could beat off the dust, and sponge it down.”
“That would be marvelous,”
Clara said gratefully. She’d had no trouble dressing herself since her traveling garments were designed for ease, but it had been demoralizing to watch her clothing and her boots, sewn from the softest pale yellow kid leather, turn brown with dirt. She stood up to pull off the cloak and handed it over. “Do you think you might wash some of my other garments as well?”
After the innkeeper’s wife bustled over to the carriage and returned with an armful of dusty clothing, Clara opened up her book and plunged back into Melliora’s adventures. Sometime later she took off her bonnet, because she liked to feel the sun on her face, and moreover, because she had decided that she didn’t care about freckles.
Her mother cared about freckles. Adventurers like herself and Melliora didn’t have time to worry about such trivialities.
A few hours later, she became gradually aware of the conversation happening on the other side of a large window standing ajar at her right shoulder. Two men were talking about a woman, but not, thank goodness, in the disgusting manner that the prince used when muttering to his friends about her.
“If Venus had a figure, that’d be it,”
said one man, who sounded quite young.
“Course Venus has a figure. She’s a goddess, ain’t she?”
“Yeah, but does she have that . . . is she like that?”
“No one’s like that, not normally,”
the other man said after a pause. “She might be one of the princesses, one of the king’s girls. There’s three or four of them.”
“Look at her on top,”
the first man whispered, an ache in his voice that made Clara blink. “I know she’s not for the likes of us, but I never seen a woman like that. You can tell she’s sweet, and I bet she smells sweet too. I’d wager she bathes every week.”
Clara couldn’t help smiling. If anyone was sweet, it was that boy.
“Her hair is like a field of daisies with the sun shining on them.”
Her eyes widened. He was talking about her. She was stupefied, like when Violetta—the other heroine in Love in Excess—disguised herself as a boy, Fidelio, and then revealed herself to her true love.
“You’re right about that. She’s definitely too good for the likes of you,”
the second man said, sounding amused.
“I cannae believe what I see,”
the longing boy continued. “She knows how to read, and she’s more beautiful than I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime. If she was mine, I’d stand beside her all day long.”
The yearning note in his voice was oddly healing. Clara glanced over her shoulder at the window, but leaded glass caught the sun and cast the indoors into shadow.
“Don’t let her hear you!”
The boy sighed so deeply that she had to squeeze her lips together so as not to burst out laughing. Cobbledick waved at her from the gate, so she finished her lemonade and stood.
Before picking up her bonnet, Clara turned slightly so she was facing the window, raised her hands, and tousled her hair so that curls tumbled down her back. Then she said cheerfully, “Good day!”
before whipping around, grabbing her bonnet, and heading off.
From inside the pub, she heard “Jesu alive, son, did you faint?”
She arrived at the coachman’s side giggling madly.
He smiled. “It’s good to see you smiling.”
“I’m a very sunny person.”
But then . . . she hadn’t been, had she? Not lately. “Normally I’m sunny,” she amended.
That evening she looked at herself in the glass after climbing out of her nightly bath. Prince George’s attentions had made her loathe her breasts, but that was absurd. Her breasts were nicely shaped, and before George came along, she liked them.
She still had no wish for a husband, but there was something very heartening about realizing that the opinion of London society was not necessarily that of the world. Now that she was on an adventure, she was part of that world, not the London world.
When they reached Edinburgh a couple of days later, Clara insisted on touring all the bookstores before they set off again. Back in the carriage, she happily sorted a tall stack of novels. She’d even found a new work by Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, that hadn’t been published in England yet!
Thinking that perhaps the inhabitants of the castle liked books as much as she did, she had bought another copy of The Castle of Otranto as a welcome gift—and also to reread, since she had left hers at home.
Of course, CaerLaven Castle wouldn’t be haunted the way Otranto was. She and Mr. Cobbledick had taken to eating their meals together, and when she shared a few details about that particular haunted manor, he rolled his eyes and snorted.
“Manuscript found in a Catholic household, you say? Dating back to the Crusades? Them’s all madmen; I’ve heard it’s eating moldy bread that drives them round the bend. I rarely go to the kirk meself.”
“It was a literary ploy,”
Clara said, trying to explain that the novel was only disguised as a manuscript belonging to an ancient Catholic family. In reality, it had been written by the son of one of England’s prime ministers.
“That don’t make any sense,”
Mr. Cobbledick declared. “Either it is or it ain’t. If there’s ghosts running around, it’s due to the Catholics for certain. They have all sorts of beliefs about devils and the like. Me mam told me that if I met a ghost, I should break a string of rosary beads at its feet. That’s evidence right there.”
When they reached Inverness, Mr. Cobbledick took the opportunity to visit his youngest daughter while Clara browsed the city’s only bookstore, emerging with the postillion carrying another stack of books.
“Elsbeth says the master of the house is making advances on her,”
Mr. Cobbledick told Clara that evening. They were only an hour or so away from CaerLaven land, but they had stopped at a large inn, as Clara wanted to bathe so that she might arrive the next morning properly attired for a castle.
“That’s horrid,”
Clara said. “As I told you, my betters have done the same to me. You scarcely know what to do, because you can’t kick a man who’s more powerful than you, can you? I lost . . . well, I lost more than a possible spouse when I fought back. Elsbeth has to be careful.”
“I don’t know why he’s after her. Elsbeth ain’t like you. She’s well enough, but not beautiful as you.”
“You think I’m beautiful?”
Mr. Cobbledick snorted and said, “I thought that bookseller would follow you into my carriage like a duckling, he was that infatuated.”
“Because I bought so many books.”
“Nay, I heard him. He called you something. I didn’t like the sound of it, but he didn’t seem to be offering offense.”
“Erato.”
Clara could feel herself turning pink. “The muse of lyric poetry, romantic poetry in particular.”
“There you are,”
the coachman said. “Elsbeth ain’t brave the way you are.”
Brave and beautiful?
“I’m not very brave, actually,”
Clara confessed.
“When that future king pawed you, you didn’t faint, did you?”
“I struck him,”
Clara acknowledged.
“Kept him off you, didn’t it? Very brave. Men don’t like to be struck, least of all kings.”
“He wasn’t pleased,”
Clara agreed. “I have an idea, Mr. Cobbledick. As you know, I left my maid, Hortense, back in London. Why don’t you fetch Elsbeth tomorrow and bring her to me at the castle? She can be my maid!”
“I told you, housekeepers don’t have maids of their own.”
“I don’t see how they can complain if I pay her wage myself. You’ll take me to the castle early tomorrow morning, Mr. Cobbledick, and I’ll explain that my maid will arrive soon. It’s only three hours to Inverness. You can bring her back before nightfall.”
The coachman couldn’t get his head around the idea. “You’d be the only housekeeper in this country with a personal maid.”
Clara tossed her head. “They’ll take me as I am. They sent all the way to London for a housekeeper, which suggests they are desperate.”
“Elsbeth don’t know about curls and frills the way such a lass might do,”
Mr. Cobbledick objected, his eyes caught by Clara’s hair. “From the sounds of it, she’s up at dawn, hauling ash buckets and spending half the day in hiding so as to stay out of the way of that lascivious master of hers.”
“We have to rescue her!”
Clara declared.
“Elsbeth will be fine where she is,”
he said uneasily. “Perhaps she’s exaggerating her master’s interest. Why would he pay attention to a wee beastie like my daughter?”
Clara leaned over the table. “I don’t suppose you’ve read Pamela?”
He shook his head. “I don’t read. That is, I can read signs and the like, but I don’t read as a matter of course.”
“Poor Pamela is a fifteen-year-old maidservant who is assaulted by her employer. She ends up married to him—”
“Well, that ain’t happening, since Elsbeth’s master is married already.”
“Even worse,”
Clara said. “The future king of England is married as well. More to the point, I’ve read the novel twice, and I still cannot reconcile myself to Pamela’s marriage, being as her master assaulted her several times and kidnapped her as well.”
Mr. Cobbledick frowned. “That don’t sound like the kind of book that a young lady should be reading.”
“It’s considered an improving text,”
Clara told him. “The subtitle is Virtue Rewarded. Why, I expect that thinking about Pamela’s plight as deeply as I had led to me striking the prince!”
“I would blame it on His Majesty’s English blood,”
Mr. Cobbledick said heavily, “but Elsbeth’s master is a Scotsman born and bred.”
“Tomorrow morning you’ll take me to the castle, then turn around directly, help Elsbeth pack her trunk, and bring her there as well.”
“Trunk? She don’t have a trunk. She’s got a satchel, if that. She won’t know how to be a maid to the likes of you.”
“I’ll teach her everything she needs to know. She has to keep my ringlets under control.”
Mr. Cobbledick eyed her head and said nothing.
“I know,”
Clara said with a sigh. “My hair’s twice the size it was in London, don’t you think? I wash it every night with soap, but it’s as if all this fresh air is making it puff up like a dandelion.”
He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure that Elsbeth will know the solution.”
“We can figure it out between us, Mr. Cobbledick. I need her help, I truly do. Most of my bonnets won’t fit on my head any longer.”
“I have to return to Glasgow directly,”
the coachman admitted, twirling one end of his mustache. “I’d rather do it without worrying about Elsbeth. I’m supposed to fetch a glass bathtub, if you can credit it, to this same castle.”
“Bathing in glass sounds dangerous,”
Clara said dubiously.
“They’re paying me double because it will take the whole of me carriage.”
“If Elsbeth is anything like you, I will be happy to hire her,”
Clara said, beaming at him.
She smiled even more widely the next morning when they arrived at the castle bright and early. The castle was . . .
It was everything.