Chapter 31
By the time they arrived in the village, rain was coming down in sheets, and they were both soaked the moment they stepped out of the carriage.
Mrs. Gillan ran into the foyer as a footman took Clara’s drenched pelisse. “You’re wet as a hen. I have your dear sister-in-law here as well. She ducked in when the rain began.”
Sure enough, Fiona stuck her head out of the drawing room. “Hello, dear! It’s coming down buckets, isn’t it?”
Elsbeth went downstairs to dry off and Mrs. Gillan took Clara upstairs, Fiona trailing behind. They walked into a bedchamber that felt as if it were designed for a princess. The curtains and bed hangings were embroidered with roses, and an artist had painted thickets of the flowers around the walls.
Mrs. Gillan picked up a fluffy pink shawl and wrapped it around Clara’s shoulders. “We’ll be lucky if you don’t catch a cold. I’ll fetch you some dry clothing and some tea.”
When their hostess was safely downstairs, Clara cleared her throat. “Fiona, do you happen to know whether this was Isla’s chamber?”
“It wasn’t,”
Fiona said, glancing around. “It’s a bit much, isn’t it? I hardly need to say that Isla had a hand in the decorating. I was very fond of her, but I’d be the first to say that she had mad ideas. She was like a magpie, wanting everything shiny and pretty.”
Clara sat down on the bed and burst into tears.
“Bugger it,”
Fiona exclaimed. She sat down, gave Clara a one-armed hug, and patted her shoulder.
“What on earth happened?”
she asked, pressing a handkerchief into her hands when Clara finally stopped heaving with sobs.
“I can’t be Isla,”
Clara hiccupped. “I wouldn’t say this to anyone else, but you know it’s true. I will have to live my whole life not being Isla.” She stopped and mopped away some more tears. “I won’t spend my life moping, but it’s so hard!”
“Bugger it,”
Fiona muttered again. “My brother is an idiot, but things will be better. I promise they will.”
Clara was so tired that she fell backward and stared up at the ceiling. “I suppose you’re right,”
she said drearily. “If you’ll forgive me saying it, I wish that I hadn’t married Caelan.”
“I’m so grateful you did. I think the two of you will have a wonderful life together,”
Fiona said stoutly.
“Perhaps.”
The crying made her sound croaky.
“Caelan will be a marvelous husband and father, by which I mean he’s nothing like our father. Did you have a wrangle?”
“Not really. He was comparing the two of us, and I realized that even when . . . even when we’re together intimately, he’s still thinking about her.”
Fiona drew in a sharp breath. “He didn’t! Not at that moment!”
“He was thinking about it, and I guessed,”
Clara said miserably.
“My brother is naught but a daft eejit.”
“His comparison wasn’t negative. I know it’s selfish, but I always thought my husband would be mine alone.”
She caught her breath on another sob.
Fiona cleared her throat. “My understanding was that Isla wasn’t welcoming in the bedchamber. She was fastidious, even as a young girl, and bed play isn’t.”
Clara gulped. She couldn’t repeat what Caelan had confided. “Caelan told me Isla was very elegant,”
she said instead. “A true lady.”
“She was a dreamer. She grew up here, in the village, and yet she thought she could live like Marie Antoinette,”
Fiona said. “Never mind the fact that Marie lost her head. Isla wanted the grandeur, not the reality.”
Mrs. Gillan bustled back in just as Clara sat up and said, “The most important thing is that Caelan still loves Isla so deeply. He told me so this afternoon, and I simply couldn’t bear it.”
Mrs. Gillan’s eyes widened in horror, and she dropped into a chair, pressing a handkerchief into Clara’s hands. “I miss Isla too. But that man has got to pull himself together. Allowing the castle to go to rack and ruin!”
She took in a deep breath. “Insulting his wife!”
Clara sniffed. “He didn’t mean it as an insult. He’s helpless, because Isla meant so much to him.”
“He’s a fool is what he is,”
Fiona said ferociously. “Anyone in that church could tell that my brother is mad for you.”
“I won’t say it wasn’t difficult for me to accept,”
Mrs. Gillan agreed, “but life has to go on. I don’t want the laird throwing himself on my daughter’s grave like some witless version of Romeo. He should be a man.”
“He’s manly,”
Clara said wearily. Then she blurted out the truth. “I’m in love with him, as much as Isla ever was, I’d guess. I’m such a fool, because he told me that he’d never fall in love again. I knew that he’d never return my feelings, and I married him anyway.”
“He’ll love you in time, Clara. Give him a chance. Men are slow.”
“You didn’t have much choice about the marriage,”
Mrs. Gillan added. “If I understood Lady Bufford, your mother would have suffered had you not married the laird.”
“Lady Vetry doesn’t care much about me,”
Clara confessed, more tears welling up. “She would have disowned me, and society would have exonerated her. She’s always been ashamed of me, and I’m sure that she was relieved to be rid of me. Another scandal would have put an end to society’s questions about where I am and what I am doing.”
“Are you talking about your mother?”
Mrs. Gillan sounded horrified.
Fiona wrapped her arms around Clara. “Thank goodness you found your way to the Highlands.”
Clara wiped away a few more tears. “I’ve been a disappointment because she always . . . Well, the truth is that she would have loved a daughter like Isla. Beautiful, fashionable, ladylike.”
“You are beautiful,”
Fiona said. “Haven’t you noticed the way Caelan watches you? How all the men do, for that matter? Except my husband.”
Mrs. Gillan sat on the edge of Clara’s bed and took her hand. Clara gave her a wavering smile. “Lord, but you do have a lovely smile,”
Mrs. Gillan said. “Isla had loved the laird since she was a little girl, and he came to love her back, but he wasn’t mad for her, if you know what I mean. It would have been very distressing for her if he was.”
“I see,”
Clara murmured. A germ of hope lit her breast, but she ruthlessly crushed it. Caelan might be mad for his current wife—but to be brutally honest, he was mad for the way Clara desired him.
That wasn’t like being desired for oneself. For who she was. Tears welled in her eyes again.
“Enough of that,”
Mrs. Gillan said bracingly. “This house has seen all the tears it can bear.”
Clara nodded.
“When you have a baby, I claim the right to be its grandmother,”
Mrs. Gillan continued. “I’ve no doubt that Isla is up in heaven, praying for that. I think she sent you to the Highlands so that you could alight at Caelan’s gate, clean up her castle, and have babies.”
It sounded nice, if improbable.
Rain began lashing the windows. Clara hunched her shoulders. “Mrs. Gillan, would it be a terrible imposition if I had a bath? I am wet through to my chemise. I love my pelisse, but it is truly an inadequate garment in a storm.”
“Of course!”
She jumped to her feet and yanked on a bell pull. “I’ll tell your maid and have the footmen bring in a bathtub immediately.”
Fiona kissed her cheek. “I’ll be running out to my carriage the moment the storm lets up, as Rory frets about the pass in the rain. But I’ll visit you tomorrow.”
“You can visit her here,”
Mrs. Gillan said. “Clara will have a bath and go to bed. You’ll be running a fever next.”
“I’m never ill. My voice is hoarse from all the crying.”
“I’m a mother, and I know best.”
Clara almost protested, but then she saw that Mrs. Gillan’s eyes were sharp with nerves that had more to do with Isla’s fever than Clara. She soon found herself bundled into bed in a clean, pressed nightgown, being spoon-fed chicken soup by Elsbeth.
“I’m not ill,”
Clara told her maid. “We should return home.”
“Mrs. Gillan already sent a groom through the woods to tell the laird that you’re spending the night here.”
She didn’t want to go home. By tomorrow her feelings wouldn’t be so raw, and she could go back to pretending that she didn’t love her husband. “May I have some more tea, please?”
It was comforting to be wrapped up in warm blankets while Elsbeth braided her damp hair and told her stories she had gleaned about the Gillan household. “’Twas terrible when their daughter died. Isla was the apple of their eye. Their two other children both died at birth.”
“How dreadful,”
Clara said.
“From the sound of it, that girl had a charmed life. She went from her mother’s house to her husband’s and always had everything she wanted. This is a pretty room, isn’t it?”
“Fiona said this wasn’t Isla’s room.”
“Aye, hers is down the corridor painted in bluebells. They brought an artist all the way from Inverness to paint flowers on the walls because she loved them so much. It goes to show,”
Elsbeth said thoughtfully, tying off Clara’s braids with a bit of worsted. “I would have been wildly jealous of her when I was a girl, thinking that she had everything—the handsome laird in love with her and the parents who gave her whatever she wanted—but she didn’t have them for long, did she?”
“No.”
“The master was lucky that he met you,”
Elsbeth said.
Clara couldn’t bring herself to answer.
Mrs. Gillan trotted in a few minutes later, holding a tray with two bowls. “I brought more chicken soup. I haven’t been eating as much as I ought.”
She looked ruefully at her wrists. “My arms are thin as twigs.”
So they both ate soup while Mrs. Gillan told stories about how naughty Caelan and Rory had been as young lads. Clara fell asleep in the midst of a story about how they had cut all the flowers in the churchyard and presented them to Rory’s mother for her birthday.