Chapter 19
On saying goodbye, Fiona suggested to Caelan that she take a carriage to Inverness the following Monday and return with a couple of maids, a cook, and a footman. “And perhaps a butler?”
“A butler?”
He looked at her, aghast.
“The household quarters out by the stables are large enough, and in case you haven’t noticed, you’re to be a married man soon,”
his sister said, laughing like a hyena.
“Clara said no.”
Though he’d made up his mind to ask again, more romantically this time.
“So she told me. She didn’t pretend to be a housekeeper in order to seduce you, did she?”
“She didn’t even know who had hired ‘Mrs. Potts.’ She could have ended up anywhere in the Highlands.”
The idea made his stomach clench, because it would have been easy to find herself in danger.
“Clara can take care of herself,”
Fiona said, scoffing. “She may be small, but she’s fierce. That’s Shakespeare, isn’t it? See, I know some literature!”
He shrugged. “Close enough.”
“You’ll have to convince her. Alfie, is that lump under your coat a puppy? Put it down, please.”
“He loves me,”
Alfie said.
“He’s too little to be away from his mother,”
Caelan told him.
“I could stay here with you tonight,”
Alfie said, turning to Caelan. “Not only because of Thursday.”
“Thursday?”
“That’s the puppy’s name. What’s more, Clara has the book, the helmet book. What will we do without the story?”
His face was woebegone.
“I would miss you if you moved in with my brother,”
his mother observed.
“If you ask Mrs. Potts, she may lend you the book so you can read it yourself,”
Caelan said.
“I can’t read yet!”
Alfie wailed.
“A good reason to pay more attention to Mrs. Lowe,”
Fiona said unsympathetically.
“Mama!”
“Return that puppy to its mother, please.”
After Alfie dashed off, Fiona turned back to Caelan. “I suppose once you marry Clara, I’ll be hearing about any number of cracked plots.”
“Yes,”
Caelan agreed. He didn’t try to hide the jolt of happiness that thought gave him. Hell, who would have imagined that a woman with a carriage full of books might stop at his castle?
Fiona pointed out the obvious. “You could woo her by traveling to Inverness and bringing back half a bookstore.”
“She brought the other half with her,”
Caelan said. “She arrived with stacks of books but left her clothing behind on the carriage.” He hesitated and then said, “I don’t know how to woo her, Fiona. You know what it was like with Isla.”
“Not much wooing to be done when you’re desperately in love,”
Fiona agreed.
“Something like that.”
“Too late to change that story,”
his sister said, glancing at him. But she added, more softly, “Just because you didn’t woo Isla doesn’t mean you can’t do it now. Considering the state of the castle, you should start by convincing Clara that you’re not a beggar. Have you shown her the stables?”
“Not yet.”
“I could bring over Isla’s diamonds and Mother’s rubies.”
Caelan shook his head. “You can keep them.”
“Nonsense. They belong to your next wife. I have my own set of rubies from Nan, remember?”
“I don’t think Clara would like Isla’s diamond circlet,”
Caelan said, trying to imagine it on top of a tall mop of sunlit hair.
Fiona nodded. “I suppose you’re right. Jewels and French doodads won’t do the trick.”
Caelan didn’t say a word, but somehow his sister caught his thought, because she poked him in the side and started laughing. “It’s doing you good to have to chase a woman, rather than the other way around.”
Alfie ran past them and disappeared into the carriage. “Goodbye, Uncle Caelan!”
“Seriously, I’m happy for you, darling boy,”
Fiona said, kissing his cheek.
“I’m no boy.”
“You seem like it when you look at her,”
she chortled. “Puzzled, like a boy who’s discovered girls. You’ll figure it out. I like her.”
“So do I.”
The words tumbled out of his lips. “She wants more.”
“Then give her whatever she wants.”
Easy for her to say.
He didn’t want to play the part of Romeo again.
“Compliment her hair,”
Fiona advised. “Mountains of the stuff is a blessing and a curse. Hers is truly beautiful.”
“I like her smile even better,”
he said, the words coming unbidden to his lips.
His sister beamed. “So do I.”
The next few hours were spent tending the bonfire his grooms had made of the worm-ridden furniture, an irony that didn’t escape him. If he’d been a fanciful man—which he was not—he’d have said that the flames were taunting him for his mistakes.
Such as marrying for love.
At last the fire dropped to smoldering, and he felt comfortable leaving it to his coachman. Long strides took him down the path to the loch, where he stripped and dove in, cold water breaking over his head.
Walking through the front door a half hour later, he saw that the flagstones in the corridor now shone a warm chestnut. All day the stone walls had reverberated with the clamor generated by people and furniture going up and down the steps. Now the only sound was a warbled ballad about a brokenhearted sailor.
In the kitchen, the old table was gone, as well as the broken-down chair. The bread oven was not only clean but held a sweet-smelling loaf wrapped in a clean napkin. He looked into the courtyard and found Elsbeth singing while hanging up a sheet as white as snow. Puppies tumbled around her feet.
“Where is Mrs. Potts?” he asked.
“She is taking a nap in the study, laird.”
Elsbeth showed no surprise at the idea of a housekeeper napping in the master’s private room; Clara’s disguise as Mrs. Potts had obviously been shattered.
“She will want a bath when she wakes. Can you please send a groom to the village to buy a tin tub for use until we receive the new bathtub?”
“I’ll do so immediately.”
“Was there something else?”
he asked, because she was giving him a minatory look that reminded him of his nanny.
“That shirt, my lord.”
She pointed to a large pot boiling over the fire.
He glanced down at linen spotted from loch water and not as white as it could have been. With a sigh, he yanked it over his head and tossed it to Elsbeth. He’d be lucky if any of his shirts survived the next few days.
Back in the kitchen, he realized that the ragged curtain had been torn down and the window glass scrubbed to a shine. The corner that used to hold battered pans was as empty as the dining room opposite, since the table and dusty wall hanging were gone and the stone walls free of cobwebs and grime.
When he was a boy, the dining room table had been a slab of oak passed down through the family. It had been nicked and dented but polished to a shine. Isla loathed it on sight, and so it had disappeared, replaced by a French table that belonged in a different sort of castle, with airy turrets and marble floors.
One level up, the drawing room seemed much larger without such formidable furniture. He paused, remembering Isla’s joy when the round rug arrived. Her eyes had shone as she clapped her hands, her squeal echoing through the castle.
Further back, in his childhood, the family and dogs used to throng here, he and Fiona playing fiddlesticks, his mother reading, his father bellowing about a crofter who had angered him.
Finally he sighed and turned away, climbing up to the study.
The door was ajar, and he slipped through. The shattered bed had been hauled away. One side of the room now held a long line of potato crates filled with paper.
Clara was lying on her side, curled on the red sofa that Isla had rejected as inelegant. A book had fallen from her fingers to the floor. Her kerchief had slipped off, and her hair lay against the red velvet like golden lace.
He walked over and came down on his haunches beside her. A smell of bleaching powder hung about her shoulders, overpowering the flowery aroma that had clung to her skin in the morning.
Taking ungentlemanly advantage of her slumber, he examined her face. She had absurd lashes, like butterfly wings.
From the moment Clara hollered “Bravo!”
after he caught that trout, she’d surprised him again and again. His mother had read novels, but not with Clara’s passion. Who else turned books into a filter through which she saw the world? To her, literature was a lens; seeing him in a kilt made her think of soldiers in Macbeth.
Through that lens, daily life became an adventure. And Caelan a hero, absurd though it seemed. He ran a finger down her cheek. “Clara.”
When her eyes opened, she smiled hazily for a delicious moment. Blood rushed through his body, stiffening his cock and prickling his skin.
“Hello, laird,”
she murmured.
“Caelan,”
he corrected her.
“Lord MacCrae.”
She was teasing him, laughter running under her voice like water in a shallow stream. Isla had never teased him. His first wife revered him, loved him, sometimes hated him. She had never laughed at him, teased him, or disagreed with him. Isla would have been greatly offended by Clara’s manner. She would have stiffened and informed him later that Clara was impertinent and ill-bred.
He had a strong suspicion that Clara was a member of English nobility. Ill-bred she was not.
“My name is Caelan,”
he said stubbornly.
She stretched, arching her back so that her breasts—
He sprang up and walked away, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Have you been in the loch?”
she asked, sounding more logical. Then, sitting up, “Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?”
“I went for a swim to rid myself of ash and dirt after the bonfire. Elsbeth confiscated my shirt. I thought I’d grab one here, but I don’t see any.”
Shirts and sheets had disappeared.
She yawned. “There are two in a box in the corner. I tried to make sure that Isla’s flowers weren’t damaged by furniture, Caelan, but I’m afraid that some were flattened on the west side. Hopefully the blooms will spring back up overnight.”
He shrugged, walking over to the window and looking down. The moat looked the same to him. Off in the distance, he could see hazy smoke rising from the dying bonfire.
Behind him, Clara shook out her skirts and then walked over to stand beside him. Her hair had toppled over one shoulder, baring the curve of her neck, vulnerable yet strong. He wanted to lick it until she whimpered. Suck a purple patch that every man could see. Pull off that wedding ring and put his own in its place.
“Will you marry me?”
he asked conversationally.
Next to him, she jumped and gave a little squeak of alarm. Not precisely what a man hoped to hear after he proposed.
“No.”
“I’m asking the question, the way you suggested I should.”
“Well, don’t. I already refused. What will you do for furniture? The castle is rattling like an empty drum.”
Caelan shrugged. “I’ve a crofter who can make me some.”
“You’ll have to sleep here.”
She nodded at the velvet sofa. “I tested it for you, and it’s very comfortable.”
“I’ve had many a nap there,”
he told her. “If you were ordering furniture—which you won’t, because you refuse to marry me—what kind would you choose?”
She hesitated, and he nudged her shoulder with his own. “To put it another way, what kind of furniture will you order for your own castle?”
“I am tired,”
Clara said.
He wrapped an arm around her, pretending to steady her. “Well?”
“I need to take a bath.”
“I asked Elsbeth to buy a tin tub to use until the other arrives. You’re avoiding the question.”
“I don’t know, do I?”
she burst out, frowning up at him. “I suppose . . . I suppose I want bookshelves like yours.” She reached out and ran a hand over the shelves closest to them. “They’re so beautifully curved. How on earth did you order something that fit the tower wall so precisely?”
“They were made by Auld Magnus, the same crofter who will be carving new beams over the winter. Now I’ll be asking him for furniture as well.”
“‘Auld’ as in old?”
And at Caelan’s nod, “You have bookshelves in the study, but I would put them in the bedrooms as well. What’s a nursery without books?”
“I suppose you read in bed?”
“Of course I read in bed. Every night, even here.”
Clara sighed. “It’s not safe to read by candlelight. You should order more oil lamps.”
Caelan’s fingers curved around her soft, rounded shoulder as he pictured Clara intent on a book, a flickering candle casting light on the page. Catching fire.
“Think of my hair,”
she continued blithely, having no idea of the knot in his stomach. “It would go up like a torch.”
“You should never read while alone.”
He wrapped one hand around her bottom and lifted her up to the windowsill, leaning her against the glass. “I’m removing the candlestick from the nursery.” He stepped forward, bumping into her knees.
“We shouldn’t,”
she said, but her eyes didn’t say no. They were wary but welcoming.
“Just a kiss.”
He bent to her lips with a mindless feeling of gratitude. “Tell me if I’m too rough,” he murmured sometime later, but she couldn’t answer if she’d wanted to, because he dove back into kissing her, and their breath was as tangled as their tongues.
A long time later, Clara drew away, gasping. Caelan tried to think what to say, because the only sentence in his head was Will you marry me?—and she’d already refused.
“I feel like the blaze that could have happened in my bed,”
she said abruptly. He started grinning as he watched her cheeks turn pink. “I didn’t mean it that way!”
“I’d be happy to be the fire in your bed,”
Caelan said, chuckling deep in his chest, because she was so damn perfect. “I’ll burn you up, lass.”
“Good lord, that is terrible,”
she groaned.
“Might my kisses convince you to change your mind about marrying me?”
When he nipped her earlobes, she shivered. “I’m not good with compliments, but if kisses would convince you, I’ll happily stay here all night.”
She shook her head before she gave the question any thought, but he knew more about her now. He had an idea about how to court her. As far as he could tell, no one had put her first. Not her mother, nor the man who sent her running to the Highlands.
That thought sent a chill through Caelan.
How was he any different? Isla had come first.
“If you married me, I’d be a jealous son of a bitch,”
he told her, choosing blunt truth. “I’d want to take you morning, noon, and night. I’d want to tup you in the courtyard under the apple tree.”
“Play sacrificial maiden on that stone table?”
She laughed.
She laughed. At that?
“Do you have any idea how extraordinary you are?”
He kissed her again because kisses were so much clearer than words.
Courtship took time. Caelan knew that, but something about Clara drove him to a frenzy, and it wasn’t due to the absurd notion that he was waking up after two years. It was all her: the woman who mocked him, refused him, kissed him, told him stories. “I thought I’d show you around the stables,”
he said when they finally drew apart again. “The estate isn’t only a decrepit castle.”
“The castle is not decrepit, merely dusty,”
Clara stated. “Are the stables far away?”
He lifted her down from the windowsill, took her hand, and drew her out of the room. “Around the castle in the other direction from the loch. I know you’re tired, but a walk in the twilight will do you good.”
As they walked around the moat, she pointed out the crushed flowers. “Hopefully they’ll recover by tomorrow. Bluebells seem to be rugged, for all they look so delicate.”
Like you, he thought, but he didn’t say it. They were Isla’s flowers, after all. “They have grown like weeds,”
he said instead. “It’s—well, the soil is rich, isn’t?”
“Because this used to be a moat? Did water from the loch run around the castle?”
He shook his head. “Not for one hundred years. But what did, and does, run off here are the privies.”
Clara giggled. “Isla’s moat is so beautiful because the toilets empty out here?”
“Hundreds of years of CaerLaven shite, if you’ll forgive the vulgarity of it.”
She was laughing so hard that she couldn’t get her breath.
Caelan caught her around the waist and started kissing her neck. “Fiona told me I should give you compliments. I don’t think she’d approve of this conversation about shite.”
He began nipping her neck with his teeth and then licking the sting away. It fogged his mind. “I never told Isla why they grew so well. She couldn’t get them to thrive in the courtyard. She would have said I was being vulgar if I told her the truth.”
“Well, you were. Are.”
He tightened his arms around her and kissed her temples.
“You don’t want me to say her name aloud,”
Clara said, after a while.
“I’m trying to work it out in my head.”
“I didn’t know your wife, but she loved beauty, didn’t she? She loved your beauty, and she made you an elegant home, a fairy-tale castle.”
“All those things are true.”
“I would prefer to be comfortable rather than elegant, though I am very appreciative of people like Isla who create beauty wherever they are.”
“I wish she could hear you talk about her.”
Frankly, Clara was very glad that Isla wasn’t there since she wouldn’t appreciate her husband hugging another woman.
“Life is messy,”
Caelan added. “Privies make flowers grow. Yet Isla couldn’t tolerate even a mention of shite in her presence. As if we didn’t all do it.”
Clara didn’t know what to say. “I suspect many ladies would dislike the reference,”
she offered.
“Did you know that Versailles, the French palace that Isla most fancied, stunk like a privy? People squatted wherever to do their business. Isla imagined perfection, but things never are, are they?”
“Rarely,”
Clara agreed. “My mother had a perfect daughter in mind, but that’s not the daughter she got.”
Caelan took her hand but without saying anything, which she appreciated.
The path continued into the woods. “A track goes through the forest to the village, but it takes two hours,”
he said a while later, “whereas it’s fifteen minutes by carriage through the pass. The pass isn’t safe on horseback, though. If a horse shied, horse and rider might pitch straight down the side. Rory and I should dig into the mountain and create a wider road, but neither of us minds being cut off now and then.”
They broke out of the shadow of trees into the pasture that housed the castle’s outbuildings.
“We still call this the stables, but other buildings have joined the stables proper,”
Caelan announced, feeling a beat of pride. He’d inherited the castle, but he’d designed the rest himself.
Clara’s eyes rounded. “It’s like a small village!”
“We’re standing at the middle of two horseshoes, facing opposite directions,”
he explained. “That curve to your right holds the actual stables, with room for horses, some cattle, a pig or two, and a yard in front. The smithy’s there and a few outbuildings. The curve facing the other direction is a servants’ hall, with a kitchen, buttery, and laundry, bedrooms on the second floor, and a kitchen garden in front.”
“I love the balcony that runs in front of the bedrooms. Why on earth were your sheets being sent to the village if you have a laundry?”
“I don’t have a laundry maid. The rooms are all empty except for the one shared by Elsbeth and Maisie. The coachman beds down over the stables with a couple of grooms.”
“The household deserted you after Isla died, when you were distraught with grief? Do those people still live around here?”
She sounded as fierce as a Scotswoman. He couldn’t help laughing. “It wasn’t like that. ’Twas a terrible shock for everyone, as Isla fell ill one morning and was gone two days later.”
Clara squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know what to do with myself. The butler disappeared a week later, and the housekeeper with him. Isla’s personal maid left and took a good deal of Isla’s things. I didn’t discover it for a week, and then I couldn’t see chasing after the woman all the way to Glasgow. Besides, what was I to do with a silver brush and mirror?”
“Without a mistress of the house or a housekeeper, the rest of the staff drifted away,”
Clara guessed.
He nodded. “I wasn’t throwing myself around sobbing, but no one wanted to be around me, and that’s the truth. Everywhere I went, people were grieving for Isla and bemoaning my broken heart. I couldn’t go to the pub without someone weeping on my shoulder. It became easier to stay in the study and be by myself, so I wrote my first book.”
“It sounds dreadfully lonely.”
“That first year, Fiona came every day with Alfie. She sent Rory around too, until I begged him to stop wasting my time. He was mad for fly-fishing, and after a while, he got me interested.”
“And now you’re writing a book about it.”
“Only because so much of what has been written is total rubbish. Here’s the laundry,”
he said, showing her a spacious room with two stone sinks and a huge table for ironing.
“The table is lovely,”
Clara said. “Auld Magnus?”
“Aye. He lives in one of the crofter’s cottages for free, and when I need furniture, he makes me something. CaerLaven hosts around fifteen crofter families, give or take.”
“Did the household servants live in the south tower before you built this?”
“When my mother was alive, yes, but Fiona wanted a bigger household. We sunk lead pipes from the castle to here and threaded bell pulls so that we could ring for help. Most of the staff preferred to live here. Scots don’t like being locked up like birds in cages. This way, the household is living close by, but each person has their own door.”
Clara nodded. “Sparrows rather than canaries?”
“Exactly. Want a look at their kitchen?”
She glanced around at the stove, the fireplace, the cupboard, the sturdy dishes. “I’m going to say the obvious, Caelan. This is much cleaner and nicer than the castle’s kitchen.”
“It wasn’t a matter of grief,”
he said, unable to keep his voice from sharpening. “I never liked having people racketing about until I couldn’t even think. And I dinnae give a damn about dirt. As long as I have a cup of tea in the morning, I’m set.”
She nodded and walked back out into the courtyard. “Where are the crofters’ cottages?”
“They’re spread around the estate, each man having his own plot of land.”
He gestured to the west. “We brew whisky back in the woods, since it makes a stench. The crofters took up brewing with a will. Most of them have a still of their own.”
“Fiona told me that your people are all wealthy thanks to that brewing. I do believe you’re the best laird I know,”
Clara said, smiling up at him.
“I’d take that as a great compliment if I didn’t suspect that I’m the only laird you know.”
“I read,”
Clara protested, unsurprisingly. “More than a few novelists write about the sad state of servants abused by their masters. Or merely bellowed at, as in my mother’s household.”
Her mother sounded like a harridan. Deciding not to share that observation, he said, “I'd like to take you fishing one of these mornings.”
“You’ve no need to fish for your breakfast any longer. Elsbeth could bring back seeds from the market tomorrow so your kitchen garden has something growing in it.”
“Fishing is a joy, and I want to teach you,”
Caelan said. “What if there’s a storm and we can’t get over the pass? We might starve.”
She rolled her eyes. “We’d take the path through the woods. You’d never let me—I mean, anyone—starve.”
He let the truth slip from his lips. “I’d never let you starve. I don’t care so much about the rest of the Highlanders.”
Clara squinted at him. “I’m not marrying you, remember? Think of it like the first half of Love in Excess, when D’Elmont quickly falls for a couple of women, only to discover that his true love is Melliora.”
Showing remarkable self-restraint, Caelan managed not to laugh. Instead he drew her so close that their bodies touched. “Do you think I could fall for a woman with such a fanciful name?”
“My mother regretted naming me Clara. She thought having a servant’s name had made me—”
She broke off, a good thing because Caelan was on the verge of deciding that he needed to travel down to London and have words with her mother. You couldn’t challenge a lady to a duel, but you could chastise her. Fiercely.
“Luckily, I adore the name Clara,”
Caelan murmured, tightening his arms. To his infinite pleasure, she relaxed against him.
One side of her mouth curled up. “Oh, you do, do you?”
He nodded. “I fantasize about making love to a woman with that name. In fact, it could be that I only want women named Clara.”
His voice had dropped into a deep tone that said a great deal without words.
She stilled. Then: “You might wish to warn Fiona. She’s hiring maids for you, and she might come home with a Clara. Two Claras.”
“Clara is a lovely name,”
he said, tipping up her chin. “The best name.”
She cleared her throat. “We should return to the castle. Elsbeth was heating a bath for me—a proper one, rather than a pailful of water.”
“Sure you don’t want to try the loch?”
he offered.
“No!”
“We could wear clothing?”
“Absolutely not!”