Chapter 18
Sarah had evidently not slept well the night before, and the lulling motion of the carriage was too much of a lure. Douglas watched as she rested her head against the cushioned corner and closed her eyes. In moments, she was asleep.
Douglas hadn’t slept any better, but he would rather watch Sarah than doze.
They’d been married only a matter of weeks, and in that short amount of time, he’d seen her grieve for her mother, bristle at her father, care for those in her keeping, and engage in herculean tasks for the benefit of Chavensworth.
She was passionate about those people and subjects that interested her, and too damned vulnerable.
She was also an eternal distraction, as if he carried a miniature of her in his mind.
After consulting his pocket watch, he decided to stop for lunch. They’d switched out the horses twice today and made excellent time. This afternoon, they’d be at Kilmarin.
“What do you say, Florie, that instead of eating in the carriage today, we make an adventure of it?”
She smiled brightly because his suggestion also meant that Tim would be able to relax as well, and the two of them would be able to share a meal.
“I would like that, sir.” She glanced over at Sarah. “Shall I wake Lady Sarah?”
He shook his head. “Let her sleep,” he said. “We’ll set up our picnic, then wake her.”
A quarter hour later, that was exactly what he did, entering the carriage after they’d set up a meal on a grassy brae.
Tim and Florie had moved some distance away, and he’d not encouraged them closer.
For one thing, they’d been married barely six months.
For another, the class system in England wasn’t as rigid as some societies he’d known; but all the same, Tim and Florie wouldn’t have been comfortable eating with them.
He entered the carriage and sat beside Sarah. Her bonnet had come askew, and he reached over and slipped the bow free, carefully removing the bonnet from her head.
She started, her hand reaching up to touch her cheek, then her eyes opened, at first a little confused, and they filled with emotion.
“I was dreaming of my mother,” she said softly.
“You will,” he said. “For some months, I think. It’s a way of saying good-bye.”
She nodded and looked out the window.
“We’ve stopped,” she said.
“I thought we deserved a relaxing interlude.”
Douglas reached out with his hand, and after a quizzical look, she placed hers in it, allowing him to lead her from the carriage and up the hill. A red squirrel spotted them and danced in alarm back to the seclusion of the Scots pines woodland.
The skies above were a pale blue, nearly covered in fluffy white clouds with flat bottoms. The hills were indigo turning to gray when the clouds, racing like skiffs on a current of air, passed over them.
They climbed higher, the path running close to the edge of the cliff. As a precaution, Douglas put himself between Sarah and the overhang.
At the clearing, he halted, hearing her indrawn breath with satisfaction.
Below them was the River Tay, gleaming like a sterling snake through the emerald countryside. To the north were the Cairngorm mountains, stretching into the Highlands. To the west were the Loch Earn hills. The air seemed softer here, diffused, as though seen through a fine mesh.
He was home, and his heart knew it, seeming to expand with each mile.
“What is that?” Sarah asked, pulling her hand free and pointing to their left.
“Tulloch’s Folly,” he said. “The tower on it was built last century by one of your ancestors.”
“Does that mean we’re close to Kilmarin?”
“A few hours, no more,” he said.
“Does anyone live there?”
He shook his head.
“Then why build it?”
“I believe it’s an homage to the castles on the Rhine in Germany,” he said. He pointed down to the River Tay. “We have our own version of the Rhine, but no castles.”
She pointed to the right, to the ruins of another structure on a hill below the one on which they stood.
“What’s that, then?”
“That’s the castle of the White Lady,” he said, his smile beginning from somewhere within him and spreading outward.
“I heard about it as a boy. I don’t remember who it belonged to, if I ever knew.
But it’s rumored to be haunted by a girl who fell in love with a manservant and was banished to her third-floor bedroom.
She threw herself from the window, evidently. ”
“Good heavens.”
He reached for her hand again. “You mustn’t be saddened by such an old tale, Sarah. Who knows if it’s true?”
They walked several feet away from the path and the cliff, and only then did she see the blanket and the basket.
He released her hand, and she gracefully settled herself on the corner of the blanket.
“How do you do that?” he asked.
She looked up at him.
“With your skirts. You look like a flower sitting there, and you did it as gracefully as if you were curtsying.”
She looked startled by the compliment.
“I’ve been trained to do it,” she said.
“Do you go on many picnics?”
“I used to,” she said. “My mother and I would take our noon meal beneath the oak to the south of Chavensworth. It’s a lovely place to sit and read or talk.”
“I’m surprised you allowed yourself a respite from all your duties,” he said, sitting on the opposite corner.
“When I was six years old, I began my training. That’s when it first was made clear to me that I was the daughter of the Duke of Herridge, and consequently different from other people.”
He didn’t comment.
“I was encouraged to act in a decorous manner at all times, and remember that people would look to me, the only child of the Duke of Herridge, for clues as to my father’s character. I was never to shame him. Never to embarrass him. I was never to do anything untoward.”
“A paragon of virtue, in other words.”
She smiled faintly. “Perhaps.”
“If I had any questions as to how I should act, my mother was my mainstay. She was a source of information for most things. In London, I had my aunt to consult.”
“Your mother didn’t accompany you to London?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “My father didn’t allow it.”
With every conversation, he was beginning to understand her a little better, and as he did so, he realized how very insular a life she’d lived.
“I have no doubt that you were the perfect duke’s daughter,” he said.
“My life has been proscribed by my behavior.” She hesitated for a moment, then continued, “By expectations of my behavior.” She looked directly at him, her gray eyes unflinching. He was reminded of that afternoon in the Duke of Herridge’s study. “But I don’t know how you want me to act, Douglas.”
She began to arrange the food, unwrap the cheese from the muslin and slice it thinly. He was unaccustomed to being waited on, but he found it a heady experience to have his wife serve him.
“You couldn’t have said anything that pleased me more,” he said.
Now she looked confused. Good.
“I want you to act like yourself, Sarah. Not as you think is proper. Not as you believe people would wish you to act, but the way you feel.”
He reached out and grabbed one of her gloved hands between his. She was always covered up, always shielded, always protected from the gaze of others. He wanted to see her naked in the light of day, and although now was neither the time nor the place, he gave a moment or two of thought to it.
“I didn’t have the chance to tell you how exquisite you looked, standing there in our bedroom. Your legs are magnificent, your waist and hips perfect. May I say, Lady Sarah, that you have a magnificent derriere.”
“You said that.”
He was both amused and pleased to see the flush on her cheeks.
“You smiled,” she said.
“Is that why you went back to the cot, because I smiled? I was delighted, enchanted, overjoyed. Why shouldn’t I smile? I’m surprised I didn’t dance a jig.”
She looked startled again.
Slowly, he began to remove the glove, one finger at a time. She didn’t protest, remaining compliant. His gaze was on their hands, and when he glanced at her, it was to find that she was doing the same.
The air around them was still, a summer silence, as if nature itself were waiting. Not even a cricket chirped.
He turned her hand over and unbuttoned the button that stretched across her palm.
One by one, he extracted her fingers from the silk.
When her fingers were finally free, he removed the glove from her wrist, tossing it to the other side of the blanket.
Now their hands were joined, palms touching.
Hers was warm, warmer than his, as if an inferno burned inside her body, and it was only expressed secretly like this.
“It’s perhaps not fair,” he said. “You, a proper and virtuous duke’s daughter engaged in a liaison with an adventurer.”
“We aren’t engaged in a liaison,” she said. “We’re married.”
“Until the day we consummate this union, Lady Sarah,” he said, “this is nothing but a dalliance.”
“And once we have, you will treat me with the decorum I have come to expect of men in my presence?”
He lifted his head to look directly at her.
“Do you mean will I cease embarrassing you? Will I never speak of your breasts again? Or your bare back? Or the texture of your skin?”
“I really wish you wouldn’t say such things,” she said.
“Perhaps once we lie together, Lady Sarah, I will have other things to mention. The gasp of surprise as I enter you, for example. Or how your nails cling to my shoulders when you take your release. Or how your nipples harden into little pebbles as if they’re seeking my tongue to soften and warm them. ”
“Did you not hear me?” she asked.
He leaned closer to her. “Understand this. You’re free to say anything you wish to me. I’m as free to disregard it.”
Slowly, she withdrew her hand from his and clasped her two hands together. She stared down at them fixedly, not at him.
He put his fingers beneath her chin and tilted her head up.
“Instead of a dalliance, Lady Sarah,” he said, “I think you and I shall have a love affair. If it goes no farther than my skin needing the touch of yours, and your body craving mine, then so be it.”
She looked away, then back at him. He could feel her tremble beneath his fingers and wanted to smooth his hand over her cheek.
In actuality, he wanted to do more, to pull her into his embrace and warm her as he placed both hands on her back, pressing her closer.
He would croon to her, soft syllables that meant nothing other than to convey comfort.
He would ease her into passion and away from fear, until passion became more commonplace and fear only rarely felt.
He sat back, reached for some cheese and a jar of ale, and smiled at Sarah, unsurprised when she looked away rather than smiling back at him.
“Tell me about your grandfather.”
She prepared a plate for herself, then finally answered. “I don’t know anything about him. Donald Tulloch. Is Tulloch a common Scottish name?”
“Around Perth it is,” he said. “Was there a great deal of antipathy between your mother and her parents?”
“I’m not sure it was antipathy,” she admitted. “Occasionally, I think my mother was very sad about their rift. She never commented upon it, but more than once she said that two people can make a family. She and I were as much a family as any large group.”
“There’s every possibility that your grandfather won’t see you. Are you sure he’s even alive?”
“He was as of a month ago,” she said. She glanced at him. “I had my solicitor make inquiries.”
“You knew this day might come.”
“I was more concerned that my father would exile my mother to Scotland. I wasn’t sure where we would go, so I wanted to ensure that my grandfather would take us in.”
“Does he know you’re coming?”
She shook her head. “No, I never communicated with him, and I asked that my solicitor not inform him of my interest. But from what he was able to understand, my grandfather is alive and the head of the family.”
She fell silent. Was she wishing that Morna Herridge had been as long-lived as her father?
“But you don’t know anything else about him, or about Kilmarin?”
She shook her head again. “Do you?”
“Kilmarin is probably to the inhabitants of Perth what Buckingham Palace is to a Londoner. Parts of it are spectacularly ugly, and other parts are beautiful, a monument to what man can create.”
“My mother never said. In all those years, she rarely mentioned Scotland at all. It’s as if a door simply closed on that part of her life.”
He didn’t respond. What could he say? Sometimes, for the sake of survival, an individual had to wall off certain parts of his—or her—past.
“Is there no one you wished to see in Perth?”
“If there had been, I would have come home a long time ago.”
“There’s no one you would wish to see again?”
“Are you fishing for information, Lady Sarah?” he asked with a smile. “I was too young when I left Scotland to have broken many hearts.”
“But you have broken some,” she said. It wasn’t a question as much as it was a comment.
“Should I pretend to have been celibate since birth?”
She looked intrigued at the question, enough that he began to shake his head.
“I have your bottle of scent,” he said, and watched, delighted, as her face began to bloom with color. “Shall I return it to you? Or keep it in case we are forced to sleep apart again?”
Perhaps the key to winning Sarah’s heart was to keep her off-balance, long enough that she didn’t realize she was being wooed.