Chapter 3 #2
He could go entire weeks without hearing his own name, unless he was in company with his siblings.
Inside, inside his very sense of himself, he felt the impending loss of some part of his identity with each use of more formal address.
He couldn’t reverse this sense of loss; he relied on his family to do it for him by frequent use of his given name.
And now he knew he was not alone in his sense of isolation. Even proper little spinsters from the backwaters of Oxfordshire could suffer the same gnawing fear that if nobody ever called them by name, a part of them would eventually cease to be.
· · ·
“They ride well for a trio of proper ladies.” Gil made the observation grudgingly, because women who rode well were women who’d had the luxury of spare time to learn, indulgent male relations to teach them, and good horses to learn on.
“Mary Fran could have come along if she’d wanted to,” Connor replied. “She’d rather terrorize the staff and concoct spells and incantations to shrivel the baron’s pizzle.”
“Hush, you.” Gil nudged his horse forward to keep in step with Connor’s younger mount. “Mary Fran hates that sort of talk.”
“Then she shouldn’t go dancing naked under the Beltane moon, should she?”
Gil did not ask whether Con was speaking figuratively or if he’d really seen their sister comporting herself without clothing by moonlight. God knew, Mary Fran was entitled to a little eccentricity, but Ian would be beside himself if she’d gone that far.
“The widow…” Con hesitated, his gaze on Mrs. Redmond, Miss Genie, and Miss Hester riding up ahead. They made a pretty picture even on the less-than-elegant mounts available from the Balfour stables.
“She seems the friendly sort,” Gil said, hoping to inspire Con to speak whatever piece he’d intended to speak. Miss Genie was petting her horse, stroking a gloved hand over the mare’s crest with a slow, easy rhythm that had the muscles over Gil’s shoulder blades relaxing.
“She’s the wealthy sort,” Con said. “Or was when she married into the Daniels family.”
“I’ve never held wealth against a woman.”
Con shook his head, so Gil resigned himself to patience.
Con and Mary Fran were close, just as Ian and Asher had been close.
Between those pairs of siblings, there had always been unspoken communication, while Gil struggled along parsing meaning as best he could and resorting to blunt inquiry more often than not.
“She said she does not want her niece to be married just for her wealth.” Con stretched up in his stirrups then settled back into the saddle.
“Said that befell her, and she wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
I told her I was sorry she’d been treated that way, which is hypocritical when my own brother intends the same thing toward her niece. ”
Connor would loathe feeling hypocritical even more than he loathed running a glorified guesthouse for wealthy English pains in the arse. And of course he would apologize for a marriage Julia Redmond probably hadn’t even found truly bothersome.
“She wasn’t scolding you, Connor. She was making a chaperone’s version of small talk.”
Con indulged in one of his infernal silences, which might presage a silent exit, a grunted curse, or a startling profundity.
“She was confiding in me, or something.”
Gil knew himself to be handsome, knew Ian was handsomer, and knew Connor was… Connor was the braw fellow who ought to be watched and never was. His gruff ways, his indifference to refined dress and manners, and his rare, bold smile earned him all manner of female attention.
But confidences?
Gil ordered himself back to the topic at hand: “Ian isn’t an unfeeling brute. He’ll make Miss Daniels a passable husband.”
But as he spoke, Gil recalled the pathetic relief in Genie Daniels’s eyes that morning at breakfast when this outing—sans Ian—had been suggested. She’d had the trapped-prey air Gil felt every time he donned evening attire or stood up with a proper young lady at the local assemblies.
A look of such hopelessness, Gil had to wonder at it. “Let’s catch up to them.” He nudged his mount stoutly with his heels. “You can smooth the pretty widow’s feathers, while I flirt with the sisters.”
Connor said nothing, urging his horse to a canter and then falling in beside Mrs. Redmond, whose mare was winded enough that walking the rest of the way to the barn would be a kindness to the horse, if not exactly a kindness to her escort.
“Come, ladies, I can show you a path that will let us canter through the woods.” Gil offered them the smile useful for getting him his ale before any other patron, but only Hester returned it.
“I’m not in shape for any canters through the woods,” she said. “Particularly not after sitting on that train for an eternity. You and Genie go, and I’ll keep Aunt company.”
“Miss Genie? It cuts through the woods, where Her Majesty sometimes likes to walk and His Highness has been known to ride.”
Shameless of him to use such bait, but effective.
“We’ll take a groom, of course?” She glanced back at her aunt, whose horse was toddling along beside Con’s at the most sedate walk.
“We will,” Gil assured her. “Lavelle! You’re with us.”
The red-haired Lavelle, mounted on a sturdy cob, looked mightily relieved at the prospect of a meander through the woods. He fell in fifty paces back like the good but lazy lad he was. Gil well knew the last man back to the stables had fewer horses to put up.
Genie’s mare had to be as fatigued as the other mounts, so Gil kept them to an easy trot until they approached the woods, then slowed to a walk.
He waited for his companion to catch up before speaking. “Our woods abut those of Balmoral, though elsewhere, there are smallholdings between the two properties.”
“Have you met Her Majesty?”
“I have.” Victoria was downright neighborly at times, for a queen.
Just another clucking, fussing, well-to-do mother with a large brood to keep track of and a doting husband at her side.
“I’ve hunted and fished with Albert as well, and met such of the children as are old enough to be out and about. ”
“The royal couple must be very much in love.” Her voice was so wistful, Gil glanced over at her. Her expression matched her melancholy tone, at variance with the sunny, breezy day.
“They’re up to at least a half-dozen children, and chronic rumors of more on the way,” Gil said. “If they’re not in love, they’re certainly making the best of their situation.” He tried his signature smile on her again, but she just looked… sad.
“Do I offend, Miss Daniels?”
She shook her head. “Marriage is such a daunting prospect, and to be married and the monarch…”
Marriage was daunting, or marriage to his brother? Or marriage to any Scottish title? “What about it daunts you?”
She swallowed. “There’s no hiding anything in a marriage, not if your husband doesn’t want to leave you any privacy.
There’s no freedom, no hope. You can risk your life giving the man babies, and then he can take them from you and you’ll never see them again.
You’re trapped, a slave with no hope of manumission save his death—or your own. ”
Gil’s brows rose as she spoke. These were desperate words from a woman who’d had her pick of the swains from three London Seasons. “What is your mother doing right this minute, Miss Daniels?”
She turned a puzzled expression on him. “I don’t know.”
“I’d hazard your father doesn’t know, either. For all the weeks he’s up here with you, for all the weeks he’ll be shooting grouse in Northumbria, your mother will have complete independence from her entire family.”
The lady fiddled with the reins. “She will not. Papa has the servants in his pocket, and they’ll tattle on her in an instant. He believes a man’s home is his castle and his word is law within his own walls.”
She turned her face straight up into the sunlight pouring through the pines above them, as if she’d entreat heaven itself for agreement, while Gil struggled for something to say. Things went from bad to worse when she started to cry, which was no damned help at all.
“For God’s sake.” He caught Lavelle’s vacant gaze and nodded in the direction of the stables. The groom obligingly turned back the way they’d come, while Gil reached over and pulled Miss Daniels’s horse up. “Madam, this will not do.”
He swung off and came around to lift her from the saddle. She was boneless with her upset, sliding down his length like an exhausted child, then leaning on him, weeping softly.
“I can’t do this.” Her voice was low, miserable, and heartfelt. “I can’t impose on your family’s hospitality and let my father spend his precious coin when I have no intention of considering your brother’s suit. It isn’t… sporting.”
Sporting? What an odd notion in the politics of mutually advantageous matrimony between English and Scot.
“Come sit.” He took off his riding gloves and pulled her by the hand to a nicely situated boulder. When she was seated beside him, a shaft of sunlight gilding her hair, he fished out his handkerchief. “What is this really about?”
“I don’t know you, Mr. MacGregor, nor would I burden you with confidences even if I did.
” She took his handkerchief and daintily blotted her eyes.
“I apologize for this unseemly display. I simply do not want to marry like this, not your brother, not any titled man my parents might put up to the task.”
More tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, and Gil wished he might in that moment follow Asher into the wilds of Canada. “Ian will treat you with utmost civility.”
Except when he was swiving the woman witless in service to the damned title. There probably wasn’t a civil way to conceive heirs, not for a Scotsman and his wife.