Chapter 9
Traveling with Elspeth was a challenge.
Not for the usual reasons one often heard about bad traveling companions. She never complained, she wasn’t fussy, and she never ever wandered off (granted, the last was difficult to do on a ship).
No, the challenge came from the fact that she was so damned delighted by everything. She loved the ship, she was entranced by the coastline, she even enjoyed the meals. No one enjoyed meals on a ship.
Except Elspeth.
They’d been on the ship for less than twenty-four hours, and she’d charmed them all.
The captain found every reason to chat with her, and all the sailors called her ma’am and doffed hats when she passed by.
And everyone had the same look in their eyes when Elspeth stood near Struan, or smiled at Struan, or chatted with Struan.
The look asked Why?
Why was a woman like her with a man like him?
He never wanted to answer that question.
Fortunately, Elspeth was easy to steer. If she started asking about topics he’d rather avoid (his scars, his military service, his utterly appalling secret deal with her father that resulted in her being handed off like a calf at market), he could redirect her attention to literally anything, such as a rocky coastline or a bird in flight, and she’d plunge (rhetorically speaking) directly after it.
Maintaining physical distance from her was also a challenge. Though in some ways it was easier than he expected, in other ways it was impossible.
He’d been careful of her the whole trip, often asking if she needed anything or if she felt well.
And he’d gone out of his way to, well, go out of her way.
He had informed her as soon as they boarded the ship and he showed her to her cabin that he would refrain from seeking her out until she had actually reached her new home and had time to adjust.
He had expected to see relief in her face when he told her the news, but he had not expected the genuinely warm smile she’d given him as she said, “You are so thoughtful! In truth, I am a little worried that I might have some seasickness, and I assume that would hamper my experience of…anything else.” She hadn’t looked him in the eye as she said those words.
She couldn’t know what to expect on a typical wedding night, and he felt a stab of remorse when he realized that this lovely young woman wouldn’t ever get a typical wedding night.
In the first place, what was to have been her wedding night was spent at sea.
And in the second place, she was married to him.
That was going to entail a lot of adjustment from ideals to the more sobering reality.
After disembarking from the ship at Wick, they stayed at an inn not far from the harbor. Struan told her that they’d leave early the next morning and should reach his home by the end of that day. “No point in traveling in the dark to save a few hours tomorrow.”
So he was sleeping alone again tonight. Which was why he was wide awake, staring at the top canopy of his bed, listening to each creak of the building, the muffled sounds from the common room below, the breath of wind and distant lap of waves.
True, he rarely slept well now, due to the lingering aches and pains throughout his body.
But tonight was worse, because he was also thinking of the woman in the next room.
Elspeth, the beaming, kind-hearted woman who never seemed to think ill of anyone or anything, and who was now shackled to him, a morose bastard who really should be shut away so no one else had to put up with his brooding.
This marriage was a mistake. A failure on every level.
Well, not every level, because he’d certainly acquired a beautiful wife.
He remembered watching her leaning against the side of the ship, her purple dress lightly dampened by the spray from the endless waves.
He could see more than he was meant to, and it all rushed back now to plague him, alone in his bed.
Her nipples had hardened in the cold ocean air, and they’d pressed against the fabric of her bodice in a way that he couldn’t ignore.
Her hair had come slightly loose in the wind, and he’d wanted to both tuck the strands back in, gently, but also to unleash it all and wind it around his hands as he kissed that perfect pink mouth.
It was confusing to simultaneously feel aroused, feel like a heel for being aroused, and then feel like feeling like heel was actually being ungrateful because the woman arousing him was in fact his wife, and shouldn’t he be aroused by his wife?
Yes, except for the fact that she didn’t know why she was his wife. And if she ever saw him without the shield of his clothing, she would not be aroused.
She’d be horrified.
He woke in the morning in a mood halfway between sour and not-sour. He attributed the sourness to not sleeping, and not-sourness to the fact that he’d get home by tonight.
The remainder of the trip was overland in a closed carriage. They departed after an early breakfast, and the road thinned out to an increasingly bumpy track, through a decreasingly populated countryside.
“I thought there’d be more farms?” Elspeth asked at one point.
“There used to be. I remember seeing barns and crops and livestock. But many landlords have begun clearing the land for other uses.”
She frowned. “Is not the best use of the land to provide a home and living for the people on it?”
He agreed, though he didn’t have the clear head to discuss the finer points of the emerging Scottish economy. She smelled good, and it was distracting.
At one point, she said, “Oh, I remember something I meant to say ever since the wedding. I never properly thanked you for the flowers you sent each day before we married. They were all beautiful. How did you know I adore lilies? And you even got yellow, which is my favorite!”
Struan had some idea how Calan (who had sent the flowers without Struan’s aid—or indeed knowledge) got that information. But he wasn’t about to tear down the illusion his friend had worked hard to put up. So he said, “If I told you how I knew, you’d be less impressed.”
“I assure you I wouldn’t, but I can’t for the life of me think how you figured it out,” Elspeth said.
Because you’re too innocent to think of bribing the servants to share information about the family. Aloud, he said, “A good magician never reveals his secrets.”
“Oh, I knew it! I bet you did use magic. Waking up to such astonishing blooms, seeing them and smelling them…when they’ll not be blooming for months in the outside world. It really is as if you cast a spell.”
“Only the spell of paying for a grower at a glasshouse to pick them,” he said wryly (for that was how Calan performed his “magic”). “I’m afraid the only spell I have is money.”
“Yes, we asked around about you, me and Mairi.”
“And? What did you learn?” he asked, keeping his impulse to panic at bay. Was she about to drop the mask of innocence and lay into him for his despicable bargain?
“Only that you were from the north and you were an officer in the army, and that you were thought to be wealthy. All of which was no use to me! I wanted to know if you were kind and noble.”
“I try to be kind,” he said, hoping that was true. “I don’t know what it means to be noble.” As soon as he finished speaking, he worried that it might be the other way around.
“That doesn’t matter now. I could tell in the church that you were everything I hoped for.”
“You could?”
“Yes, of course. And I thought that you might have gone about courting me the usual way, but I understand why you didn’t, and really, it’s all right because your way was wildly romantic.
Few ladies can say they were swept away by a mysterious gentleman, but I’ll always have that story to tell, even when I’m terribly old, and it will still be romantic. ”
Talking to Elspeth would require him to practice paying attention.
She moved so fast in conversation that it was difficult to keep up.
He normally rode alone, in quiet. But Elspeth wasn’t good at being quiet.
And she had so many questions. Elspeth was interested in all of it—the sparsely treed land, the shifting shoreline, and the occasional hints of prior habitation, like standing stones and ruins.
She may have asked Struan how much longer a few too many times.
“You’ll know when we arrive,” he assured her finally, “because we’ll stop moving.”
“Oh, very well,” she said, chastened. “But do tell me the moment the house and land comes into view, please? I don’t want to miss it.”
Eventually, the inevitable result of traveling in a carriage occurred, and Struan started to doze.
Even Elspeth drifted off, curling up on the opposite bench, looking astonishingly comfortable wrapped in the plaid blanket that was always kept in the carriage—Scottish weather not being known for its stability.
They stopped for a midday meal and to change horses, and then, at last, the carriage started to roll past slopes and ridges that were painfully, heart-achingly familiar to Struan.
Home was so near.
He looked across the carriage to his wife, who’d fallen asleep again.
In sleep, her natural enthusiasm was banked, and he got a glimpse of her unfiltered by her intense personality.
Her face smoothed and softened. Her lips were pink, the upper lip indented in the center to make a perfect bow of her mouth.
Light brown lashes rested on her skin, and slightly darker eyebrows made a nearly straight line above her eyes—not much of a curve there at all.
It was, all in all, a pretty face, though not exactly arresting in repose.
Much of Elspeth’s beauty came from her animation, her interest in the world around her.
Asleep, she looked much more…well, fragile wasn’t the right word.
Innocent.
The sort of innocence that came from too much faith in others.
The sort of innocence that got people hurt.