Mad About the Marquess (Highland Brides Book 2) (33 page)

But Quince ignored his call, paying neither Alasdair, nor the father of the group any mind, and instead went right to the woman, speaking to her in an earnest tone too low for Alasdair to hear.

Alasdair lengthened his stride.

“The Reverend Talent,” she was saying. “West Kirk, also known as Saint Cuthbert’s.”

Alasdair stopped dead in the middle of the lane, as if his feet refused to take him any nearer the hated name. The damn vicar again. What was the clergyman to his wife? He kept cropping up at the most damnably inconvenient moments.

“On the west side of the city. Take this”—Quince passed something to the woman—“and tell him I sent you. No, don’t tell him that.” She contradicted herself again. “Say nothing of me. But go to him. Have you got that?”

The man and woman exchanged a look. “Aye,” answered the woman. “
Thoir mo shoraidh le dùrachd.
”

It had been many, many years since Alasdair had heard the Gaelic tongue spoken, and he had spent a great deal of the intervening years speaking French, so he had little understanding of what words were exchanged between the peasant woman and his wife, only that it sounded vaguely like a blessing.
 

“It is the least I can do.” Quince nodded briskly. “
Soraidh
. Farewell to you all.”
 

They all—the travelers as well as he—watched her return to him. “I didn’t know you spoke the Gaelic. What was that all about?”

“I gave them direction to a friend.” Her sharp shrug told him she wasn’t going to say more—she was too angry.

Alasdair felt his own confused ire rise in response. “Friend?” The image of the vicar rose like a ghost before his mind’s eye. “The Reverend Talent is your friend?”

She shook her head. “Nay. But more importantly, he will be a friend to them.”

The sour twist in his gut surprised him. He hadn’t thought himself capable of such rampant, sustained jealousy. But jealous he was. “Why are they any concern of his? Or yours?

“Whose concern should it be?” Quince had been striding purposefully for the carriage, as if getting there and getting underway might forestall the argument she felt bound and determined to start. But clearly she had changed her mind—she rounded on him, hands on hips. “You saw them, Strathcairn. Clearly they are dispossessed, and poorer and needier than church mice. Did you not see the pinched look on that woman’s face?”

He had, but then again, he had seen thousands like her—in Edinburgh, London, and Paris. “Aye. But what—”

“Then you could see that she’s been going without, to make sure her children and family have more. She’s starving herself to feed them.” Quince leveled the pointed blade of her gaze at him. “When was the last time you were fed, Strathcairn?” Her tone was rife with reproach.

“You know it was this morning. And what the devil has this got to do with me?” And where in the hell had this come from—this crusading creature all concerned with the poor, when not a day ago she had been a heedless, larcenous flibbertigibbet, bound on doing nothing but causing trouble?
 

“They came from Cairn land.” She threw the words at him like an accusation—an opposition M.P. could not have addressed him with more disdain.

“Yes?” He looked at their retreating backs—the family were not anyone he recognized, but he had not lived at Cairn in many years. “There are many families on Cairn land and—”

“But not so many as before.”

“Nay. Not so many as before,” he agreed cautiously. “My grandfather did start to resettle people. It’s been a terrible problem with the land being too hardscabble to support—”

“And so you’ve just thrown them out. With nowhere to go. Evicted and
starving
!”

He was buffeted back by the force of her anger and conviction—all that passion aroused against him, the man who had just rearranged the whole of his bloody life to save her. The thought made him want to get in the carriage, slam the door in her ungrateful face, and leave her misguided, ill-informed arse in the middle of the lane to find her own damn way home.

But chances were she would not find her way home, and then where would they both be? Chasing each other down the highway with flintlocks.

It was not, as she had so accurately predicted, a pretty picture.

So he took a deep breath, summoned all the rhetorical logic and political acumen he had spent the last five years acquiring, and tried like the devil not to shout. “Firstly, we are not yet on Cairn land, and if it is true that those people came from there, I cannot believe they would be starving. And secondly, while it did become necessary for my grandfather to move tenants off unprofitable crofts, he evicted no one. And neither have I. We are offering new jobs in carding mills we are building, or offering to buy out their leases and not simply end them, which is more than fair, and more than any other landlord that I know of has done, and damn expensive. So don’t you dare accuse me of things which are not true and you don’t know a damn thing about.”

His voice, now that he was through, had clearly risen enough to still be echoing through the trees.

But Quince was not intimidated in the least—she advanced upon him, one small insistent step at a time. “But you are part of the government which says that it is perfectly legal, and perfectly sound policy to move the people off their land.”

“It’s not their land, Quince. And it’s not that simple.”

She turned away. “Feeding people should be simple, if you ask me, which you don’t because—”

“Which I don’t, because I do not want to lose the last shred of my temper while arguing with my wife in the middle of a back country lane.” He moved to hold the door open for her. “Let us please return to our journey.”

She was not in the least bit amenable. “I’m not sure I want to make it.”

The words were a slap in the face, hard and stinging. So he swung back, pointing his own finger at her face. “You, my Lady Cairn, have no choice.”

He did not say he would toss her over her shoulder and carry her all the way to Cairn like a sack of grain, because he was not an idiot. Or a savage. He was Carin, and he was a gentleman. So he would damn well act like one.

He modulated his tone through sheer will alone. “I would be happy to discuss the merits of clearing agricultural land for pasturage, and entertain any real solutions to this terrible problem that you might like to put forth, at some other time, after I had had a chance to see for myself what changes my grandfather and his factors have wrought at Cairn. But I would bid you to please not accuse me of things without foundation or fact.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, still mutinous. “It is a fact that they have been made to move.”

“It is a conjecture until we can discover the facts at Cairn. Only then will I be happy to entertain whatever solutions you may have to propose—
if
you have anything to propose. But in the meantime, I would ask you to get into the damned coach.”
 

He only just managed not to shout the last. But she got into the damned coach, and the journey recommenced in utter silence, save for the continuous grind of the wheels, and the rhythmic stamp of the horses’ hooves against the grit of the road.

But not even the interval of some five and forty minutes could soften his young wife’s indignance. She seated herself as far away from him as possible, in the backward facing seat, and hugged her arms around her as if she were trying to hold herself together. And she was eyeing him with disfavor.
 

Alasdair was conscious of neither provoking, nor being provoked into, an argument.
 

But Quince was of a more bellicose frame of mind. “All right.” She put up her chin. “Go ahead.”

“I beg your pardon?” He would make her work for her snit. “I have not the pleasure of understanding you, Lady Cairn.”

“You’ve been
admirably
silent since this whole farce began.” Her sarcasm was as sharp as ever. “But I can practically see the questions eating at your brain like a maggot. Have at it.”

Alasdair managed to keep his temper by retaliating in kind. “By this farce, do you mean your flight into highway robbery, or our resulting marriage?”

She tipped that chin up in challenge. “Both.”

“All right then, if you insist.” He uncrossed his feet, and sat up. “I do have a question—why? Why did you take my buttons, and all those other things? Why did you rob Sir Harry Digby? And why in hell did you rob my coach?” It
had
been burning a hole through his brain, trying to understand what would drive a lass to such a dangerous, heedless act.

Her answer was immediate. “To get money.”

It was an answer designed to say both as much, and as little, as possible. And for some reason that Alasdair could not yet put his finger upon, it did not ring true. “That is ridiculous, Quince. Your father is not rich, but he is a gentleman, and you’ve a sizable enough fortune.”

The narrow-eyed look she sent him was so disdainful, it was scathing. “Looked into it, did you, before we eloped in this romantic fashion?”

“Eloped?” He hoped he gave her back an even more venomous dose of sarcasm. “An elopement is predicated upon a great deal more enthusiasm than you have brought to the current proceeding.”

“I’m as enthusiastic as I can be with an arm torn up by a ball, and a husband who does not trust me.”

The accusation was another slap—another blow to his good intentions—however true. “I trusted you enough to marry you.”

She scoffed. “You should not have done. I warned you, Strathcairn. I’m not good. I’m not nice, or obedient, or ladylike—I never have been. It’s your fault if you ever believed I might be.”
 

“Aye. I can see that now.” He did himself the favor of looking out the window into the dappled shade of the forest, in order to draw an even breath into his lungs. She
had
told him she wasn’t good within moments of their meeting, and he had the proof in her nearly suicidal, heedless behavior. So why did he continue to persist in his belief—his hope—that she was, under all that nerve and cheek, something better than she appeared, when the truth was that not only wasn’t she good, she was barely even
good enough
?
 

“I’ll try to remember,” he said, more for his own benefit than hers. But she was very, very clever, and very good at turning conversations. “You’ve done it again. You’ve managed not to answer my question.”

She looked out the window herself. “What a dog with a bone you are, Strathcairn.”

He would not rise to the bait of her derision. “Considering you’re the bone…” He answered with as much cynical amusement as he judged prudent, before leaned back in his seat, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Back to the question at hand—why would you steal for money when you have plenty?”

“I don’t have plenty. You of all people should ken that my fortune, as you call it, goes to my husband, not to me. It’s not as if I’ve been able to draw off the interest on the money my father set aside for my portion, to spend as I will. No, my fortune has nothing to do with this.”

 
It was a surprisingly heartfelt diatribe. So heartfelt that he asked himself to accept it as truth. For the time being. “So what do you need the money for? Debts? Cards—though I’ve never seen you gamble?”

“That’s because I’m not allowed.” She looked out the window briefly, as if she had not yet decided how much she would tell him, or how much fuel she wanted to pour on the bonfire of her anger. “I’ve long been forbidden the pleasure of card games, because early on I figured out how to cheat, and cheat well. And both my mother’s and father’s friends objected to being summarily fleeced by a lass still in the schoolroom, so my parents forbid all card games.”

“Ah.” A pity he had never played against her. A pity, and a very good thing, seeing as his grandfather had taught him all the dirty card tricks in the book so he could defend himself against cheats. What interesting card games he and his wife might have against each other. “So you found your thrill elsewhere.”

She met his eye only briefly. “I did, as you so sagely discovered that night that now seems so long ago.”

It seemed a lifetime ago. “And so instead of cheating at cards, you decided to steal.”

“Aye, I did,” she admitted without qualm. “I liked it, so I became very good at it. I stole all the items you were searching for in Edinburgh—the snuffboxes, vinaigrettes, card cases, lorgnettes, as well as your buttons. Three years’ worth. It was all me.”

The heady rush of vindication was tempered by the knowledge that she had so clearly, and so thoroughly, and so often, lied to him. “How?” was all he could manage at first. “How did you take my buttons?”

“Cut them right off your coat, with you none the wiser.” She didn’t try to hide her pride—he could hear it as loudly and clearly as a clanging gong.

“Were you deliberately trying to embarrass me? Or get my attention?”

His question surprised her—she frowned as if it had never occurred to her, and immediately shook her head. “Nay. It had nothing to do with you. Quite the opposite.”

“Well, you’ve got my attention now, haven’t you?”
 

And neither of them were pleased about it, were they?
 

Chapter Twenty-One