Chapter 21
April 22, 1803
The next morning, as Elsbeth helped Clara dress, Caelan kept shouting up the stairs every ten minutes, informing them both that the fish were biting, and it was time to go.
“Are you sure you want to indulge him?”
Elsbeth asked in a hushed voice.
“Indulge him?”
“My older sister says that it’s better to curb male expectations. Women have to train men to behave, especially when the man in question is the master of the house. I tried to follow her advice in my last position, but it didn’t work.”
“Is your sister also a housekeeper?”
“Aye, she is. After me mum died, she took care of our da and me. Then she took a husband, but because she didn’t train him in time, she chucked him out and took up a position with two old ladies. This way she doesn’t have to fuss about men at all.”
“What if she moved here to become the laird’s housekeeper?”
Clara asked, inspired. “I’m worried that the castle will fall into disrepair once we leave.”
Elsbeth hesitated.
“You want to be his housekeeper,”
Clara guessed. “Of course you do!”
“I do enjoy being your maid,”
Elsbeth said. Their eyes met in the mirror as she added a few more pins to keep Clara’s curls in place. “Your hair poses an unusual challenge. But I like cleaning more. Cooking, too. The laird says he doesn’t want a large household. I thought I could be his cook as well, since he likes plain cooking.”
“He has simple tastes,”
Clara said rather hollowly. She had pictured herself and Elsbeth tooling about in Mr. Cobbledick’s carriage, but Elsbeth’s eyes were shining at the idea of running Caelan’s castle.
“He said that as long as I bring him a cup of tea when he shouts for it, we’ll get along fine.”
Down below, Caelan shouted, “I will leave without you, Clara. I’m serious!”
Elsbeth shook her head, one side of her mouth crooking up. “He’s awfully opinionated about the things he wants.”
Clara blinked at her. Surely she couldn’t mean . . . Yes, Elsbeth did mean that, because her maid’s eyes were mischievous.
“Some men are like that,”
Elsbeth said demurely. “They know exactly what they want.” She tucked in a last pin. “Generally speaking, they get it.”
“There you are,”
Caelan said impatiently when Clara reached the bottom of the stairs. He eyed her. “What on earth took so long? You aren’t wearing any of those face paints, or a frilly gown, or any such foolishness.”
“No, I’m not,”
Clara said, walking past him into the kitchen. “I haven’t eaten.”
“I made you a piece of bread and cheese,”
Caelan said. He waved a cloth wrapped around a lump.
Clara opened her mouth to protest, but he caught her hand and drew her out of the castle’s perpetually open front door, over the moat.
The last thing she saw was Elsbeth laughing.
“When you’re fishing for trout,”
Caelan said informatively, striding along the path, “morning is best. In the afternoon, the trout come up to sip insects from the surface, so that can work too. Do you know what a fly is?”
“Two wings and a buzzing noise,”
Clara said, dropping his hand so that she could eat her bread and cheese.
That led to an avalanche of information about horsehair and silk threads. She let him lecture her, enjoying the way the smoky brown tree trunks stood out against pale green leaves and lush moss starred with tiny white flowers. “Did Isla try to plant bluebells here?”
she asked.
“I don’t think so. She rarely came this way. She thought the loch was loud and cold, and raw trout were slimy. She didn’t like me to go fishing.”
A few minutes later, Clara stood on the riverbank, watching as Caelan cast a rod over the stream. “See how my fly floats? A trout beneath the surface will think it’s a mayfly or a large midge.”
“What about a trout above the surface?”
She burst out laughing at his expression. “There are flying fish, you know. I’ve read about them.”
He snorted. “In the same book in which you read about giants? Your turn.”
He handed her the rod. “Nudge it up so it looks as if the mayfly is bobbing up and down.” He cast his second rod into the loch.
Twenty minutes later, Clara moved to sit on a large slab of rock, jamming her rod between two smaller stones at her feet. “The fish aren’t interested,”
she said, propping her chin on her hands. “I wonder what would happen if the mayfly floated below the surface of the water, or if it were brightly colored? If I were a fish, I’d be intrigued by a golden mayfly since I wouldn’t have seen it before. You could use a shiny bead.”
“Would you try to swallow a golden fly?”
Caelan objected, not without justification.
Clara tried not to obsess over his body as he flipped his line across the water again, because that was uncouth and unladylike and plain bad manners. “Why not? If I were a trout, I’d be horribly bored. If I dismantled that mouse reticule you saw, I could use beads from its eyes and wire from its whiskers to make a better fly.”
“Better?”
he growled, but then laughed. “All right, you make a better fly, Mrs. Potts.”
“We can have a contest,”
Clara cried, inspired. “You can wade out into the water and try to catch a fish with your fly and then with mine. Frankly, I don’t think trout are lurking by the shore.”
“You may be right,”
Caelan said, bobbing his rod again.
“Thankfully, I have a book with me,”
Clara said, pulling it from her pocket. “Would you like to hear Elizabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia? The bookseller in Glasgow described it as ‘wildly romantic and irreproachably moral.’ The cover claims that the story is ‘founded on facts,’ but we should take that with a grain of salt.”
“Flying squirrels!”
Caelan exclaimed after a few minutes. “There’s no such thing. Squirrels don’t have wings any more than fish do.”
Clara shrugged. “Helmets are rarely found on the moon.”
“So this family is in exile, pretending to be named Springer?”
he said sometime later. “Elizabeth Springer . . . meet Clara Potts!”
“Not fair,”
Clara said. “Surely you don’t think I am disguised due to ‘some great criminality’ or ‘unjust tyranny’?”
“I’m reserving judgment until you finally decide to tell me why you fled to the Highlands,”
Caelan said. “Though I admit that the heroine’s description as ‘docile and submissive’ doesn’t suit you. I prefer the mother. What do you think past ‘the first season of youth’ signifies? Is she forty or eighty?”
“She’s old, like me,”
Clara said.
“Old? You’re not old!”
“Twenty-five is a spinster.”
“Nonsense. What was that last sentence again?”
“‘Studious to gratify every wish of her husband, be it ever so trifling, she watched his every look, to learn what could promote his comfort or pleasure.’”
Clara rolled her eyes. “That’s absurd. I’ve never seen anyone behave like that.”
“Isla—”
Caelan said, and then stopped.
“She was in love with you,”
Clara said hastily, trying to cover up her embarrassment. She never should have assumed that his experience of marriage bore any relation to depressing London marriages. “I imagine people in love often study each other’s wishes. I wouldn’t know. I shouldn’t have ventured an opinion.”
“So no one’s fallen in love with you?”
Could there be a more humiliating topic of conversation? “No,”
she said flatly.
“And you haven’t felt the emotion yourself?”
She shook her head. After all, what she felt for Caelan was raw desire with a dollop of affection, which was not the same as being in love.
Caelan nodded, looking unsurprised.
At least he accepted the truth, unlike Prince George with his loathsome attempt to convince random bachelors that they should fall in love with her. Or buy her outright. “You and Isla were very lucky.”
He glanced at her. “Any number of men will fall desperately in love with you, Clara, if you give them a chance.”
All evidence to the contrary. But she didn’t say it.
“Would you mind if I waded into the stream?”
he asked, tactfully changing the subject.
“Are you planning to strip off your clothing? I could return to the castle.”
“No, don’t leave,”
he said, his eyes flashing to hers. His expression was warm. More than warm. “Hell, I’ll go into the stream in my kilt if you want me to, although Elsbeth will lecture me about pleats. I like to talk to you and fish at the same time.”
Clara bit back a smile. She felt warm, but it wasn’t infatuation. It was . . . friendship. Lovely, giddy-making friendship.
“I want to hear more about the heroine in that novel,”
Caelan added. “She’s planning to make her way to Petersburg alone, which reminds me alarmingly of a young lady I heard about who hopped into a strange carriage and made her way to the Highlands.”
“Pooh!”
Clara said, giggling.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll take off my shirt and kilt. I’ll keep my smalls on.”
Clara nodded, her cheeks heating—because how could she say no? She wanted him to take his clothes off. Of course she did. Any woman under the age of eighty would nod. The fact his thick thighs made her feel achy was natural, albeit embarrassing.
He yanked off his boots, threw his garments onto a bush, and waded into the loch.
Rather than returning to the novel, Clara found herself considering Caelan’s propensity to strip off his clothing. He wasn’t thinking about her as a vulnerable woman when he disrobed. When he inquired whether she’d be affronted, it didn’t occur to him that his almost-naked body might seem dangerous.
Because he wouldn’t have dreamed of snatching at her, the way Prince George had done.
If she warned him not to strip in front of other women, he’d probably be irritated, the way he had been when people thought he’d let the castle go to ruin because he was brokenhearted. She believed him, as far as that went. He preferred to be alone, and he didn’t mind dust. He preferred to be naked.
Truly, his second wife would be a very lucky woman, as long as she didn’t mind the fact that the lovely Isla had apparently studied to gratify his every wish. He had done the same for her. That much was obvious, given the dreadful stuffed owl in their bedchamber.
How could he sleep with those yellow eyes gleaming at him in the night?
“Go on,”
Caelan said, bracing himself against the current and glancing at her over his shoulder. “Do you want to bet that Elizabeth is about to meet a young man?”
His smalls were made of light cotton; now they were wet, and the garment clung to his arse in a truly scandalous manner.
Clara looked hastily down at the book. “She’ll either meet the hero—or the villain.”
Sure enough, Elizabeth ventured out at night and encountered a man.
“An extremely foolish decision,”
Caelan said, interrupting, the way his nephew did. “Don’t ever wander into these woods by yourself at night.”
“I’m not sure about that,”
Clara said, laughing at him. “What if I met a man like this? ‘His countenance was youthful and his air majestic.’”
“The only man you’d meet in my woods is me,”
Caelan said. He struck a pose. “I’ve entered the story! Barring the youthful countenance, of course.”
“You’re youthful enough,”
Clara said. “But majestic?” She eyed him. His smalls were clinging to his thighs. Truthfully, he was majestic, like an elk on a mountaintop—which was such a foolish comparison that she would rather have died than repeat it.
His mouth twisted. “Let’s keep reading and see if the fellow knows how to fish.”
She was startled by a flash of darkness in his eyes, but she must have been wrong, because he started laughing when the hero’s first reaction was to scold Elizabeth: “‘You should not have ventured here alone . . . You run great hazard.’”
“Didn’t I say as much when you first turned up at the loch by yourself, and me as naked as a jaybird?”
Clara was glad that his wry expression had disappeared; there was something about it she didn’t like. “I don’t remember that,”
she said with dignity.
“There I was, naked. And there you were, utterly delicious. That fellow thinks her a ‘vision,’ and that’s exactly what I thought of you.”
“Angelic?”
she asked, and now her voice was dry.
“Actually, I thought you were a lady of the evening,”
Caelan said, throwing her a laughing glance. “Hired by Fiona to prove a point.”
Clara wasn’t sure what to make of that. Torie’s husband had had a gorgeous mistress, but comparing her to Clara would have been likening an eagle to a sparrow.
“I do have something in common with the heroine of this novel,”
she said, changing the subject. “Elizabeth’s hair reaches in large ringlets ‘almost to the ground.’ Mine goes out rather than down, but we both have too much hair.”
“As to that, I—”
At that moment, Caelan braced his feet and snapped his line. Once the trout was out of the water, she could see it was much larger than the one he’d caught when they first met.
“Bravo!”
Clara shouted.
“Lunch,”
Caelan said a moment later, wading in to shore, looking very satisfied.
She took one look at his drenched smalls and turned away. His stomach was sculpted in the front in a way that caused water to run in rivulets as if down shallow canals.
“Right,”
she said briskly. “Will you chop off its head?”
“I thought you might want to do that.”
Caelan threw the fish down on the butchery rock and conked it on the head with a rock until its tail stopped flapping. “Since you have ambitions to be a housekeeper and all.”
Clara looked down at the fish, which seemed to stare back at her with a cold eye.
“Adventure!”
Caelan prompted, amusement bubbling in his voice.
He didn’t think she’d do it. “Right.”
Clara took the knife. “What do I do?”
He bent his head and kissed her fleetingly on the mouth.
“One does not kiss one’s housekeeper.”
“Nor one’s fishmonger, but I am mad with desire.”
His husky voice made Clara feel so shy that she turned back to the fish, adjusting her grip on the knife. “I’m going to chop off the head, because his expression reminds me of a man I don’t like, with large, staring eyes.”
She thumped down with the knife.
Caelan picked up the fish head, laughing hard. “So the fish had an expression, did he?”
“He eyed me in an impertinent fashion. I’m sorry his head ended up in your lap.”
She cut off the fish’s tail and then followed Caelan’s instructions. Her hands grew slimy, abruptly reminding her that she’d stopped agonizing over the seagull’s shite, to use the Scottish term.
Later they cooked the trout in the outdoor fireplace. Clara didn’t let herself think about the way Caelan kept touching her and kissing her, little kisses on the top of her head, on her nose, lightly on her mouth.
They liked each other. At one point, after she told him the fish was the best she’d ever tasted, he had a look in his eye as if—
But he turned away, remarking it was marvelous she wasn’t revolted by raw fish. Her mind kept going back to the idea of marrying him. He had asked her, after all. An impossibly handsome, brilliant laird had asked her to marry him. Her first proposal.
Yet she had to be pragmatic about the depth of the relationship Caelan was offering, and her ability to be happy in such a union. She would always be second to his real wife, the one he had fallen in love with, wooed, and cherished.
She couldn’t take that—and she had to keep reminding herself of that fact.
A lesser man might have pretended to feel more than desire, but Caelan hadn’t. She deserved more than a man who winced at the mention of his lost beloved’s name. Actually, if she happened to marry another widower, it wouldn’t matter . . . because she wouldn’t fall in love with him.
But Caelan? It would matter with him, although she refused to allow herself to voice why.
The light dwindled down to flickering candles while they sat in the courtyard, talking of everything from their parents to their schooling.
“I can’t believe you read so much, since Lady Vetry kept firing your governesses,”
Caelan said, turning a glass in the candlelight so the red wine gleamed like banked embers.
“I can’t believe that you were able to live in such disarray, if not plain squalor,”
she retorted. Then she jolted, remembering Isla’s death. “I didn’t mean—”
“It wasn’t grief,”
he said impatiently. “I told you that, didn’t I? What’s more, I told you before that I’m hardly a gentleman, Clara, and I meant it. Isla found life with me a terrible shock.” He eyed her over his glass. “You seem fairly unmoved.”
“You’re a gentleman in the ways that matter,”
Clara told him. “You love and protect your family, and you would never threaten a woman.”
“I did kiss you,”
he prompted, a wicked light brewing in his eyes. “I would do more if you allowed me.”
“But only if I allowed you. I can trust you. That’s the definition of a gentleman. Of a hero, in any of my books. The happy books, at least.”
He rose and then sat down on the stone bench beside her. “The evening air is growing colder, and I’m sure that a gentleman would offer his bodily warmth under these circumstances.”
She relaxed against his side, relishing his arm around her, not because he was warm, but because he smelled so good. “You may hold me,”
she observed a few minutes later, because somehow she had ended up on his lap. “But that’s all, Caelan. Sunday morning I’ll accompany you to the kirk, and after the service I’ll leave with Mr. Cobbledick.”
His back stiffened; she found herself stroking his arm the way one might an agitated cat.
“I’m sorry,”
she said. “I like you a great deal . . . so much. But I can’t marry you. I want more than you can offer.”
His arms tightened around her. “I can’t fight with that.”
He sounded tired all of a sudden. “What if I read more novels?” he suggested.
Clara’s heart squeezed into a little ball. She turned to look up at his face. “You will find a woman who is perfect for you.”
“Never.”
She bit her lip because he sounded so certain. “Why not?”
She couldn’t stop herself from running her hand through his rumpled hair.
He shrugged, which Clara took to mean that all his love died with Isla. She couldn’t argue with that, so she said it was time for bed. They went up the stairs, and he handed her a lantern rather than a candle so that she didn’t set her pouf of hair alight.
When he left her at the nursery floor and continued up to the next level, Clara swallowed hard. She’d never been able to stop loving her mother, no matter the clear evidence that her feelings weren’t shared.
She couldn’t do that to herself again—yet if she was honest with herself, she had already fallen desperately in love with Caelan.
As wildly in love as he had been with Isla, back when she was the “bonniest lass in the whole of Scotland,”
according to her mother. Even thinking of Caelan’s expression when he told her about Isla’s death made her feel sick.
No one could choose their parents. But one could choose how much anguish to feel as an adult, as a wife, and Clara was determined to make wise choices. Her throat tightened up at the idea of leaving the castle, but she’d made up her mind.
She would find—not anyone better, because there was no one better than Caelan—a man who wouldn’t rip her heart to pieces because he couldn’t bear to hear his dead wife’s name spoken aloud.