Mad About the Marquess (Highland Brides Book 2) (44 page)

He shook his head in dogged disagreement. “Where there is a will, my lady, there is a way.”

Quince was tired of polite, well-couched double-speak. “Let me speak plainly, Mr. Talent. I regret, sir, that there is no longer a will. I cannot help you in Edinburgh. I am mistress of Cairn now. My responsibilities are here.”

The reverend continued to be everything inconveniently obstinate and ridiculously sure. “Surely as the mistress and Marchioness of Cairn, you can find a way to support the Lord’s work both here and at home?”

Home. Just yesterday she might have used the same word to describe Edinburgh, but on Talent’s lips the reference felt strange. And wrong.
 

“Nay.” And to make sure he felt the prick of her point, she sharpened up her sarcasm. “You are very sure about a great many things, sir—things which you want other people to do
for
you.”

But nothing could ruffle the reverend’s calm. “It is easy to be sure in the Lord, my lady. Surely you know this. Surely you have always known that when one is doing the Lord’s work, the ends can be made to justify the means.”

Holy sainted fishmongers in a stall. It was nothing more than what she had always thought, and often said to herself to justify her thievery. But somehow, from Reverend Mr. Talent’s mouth, the platitude seemed completely and catastrophically wrong.

He carried on in the same vein. “And you, my lady, have always been willing to aid West Kirk and the poor we serve—why just last week, a family came to us, saying that you had met them upon the road, and sent them to us.”

Of all the times to be caught out as a saint. “Aye. I did send them. And that is what I will continue to do here at Cairn, should the need arise. I did my best to support you, as I could, and when I could, Reverend. But I can no longer do so.”

“My lady.” He shook his head. “You are too important to us to simply let go.”

Quince’s frustration got the better of her. “Let me be sure I understand you, Reverend Talent”—she borrowed Alasdair’s words—“with no double-speak, or idiotically polite euphemisms. What exactly do you expect of me?”
 

He was unembarrassed—nay, eager—to share his plans. “I think it would be beneficial to both of us, my lady, if we were able to continue on as we were before. Without Lord Cairn’s interference.”

Quince felt as if she would scream if she had to explain herself one more time. But she bit her tongue, and made herself speak plainly. “I have told you that I cannot do so.” The time had come for a change. The time had come for her to put away childish things.

“I think I would behoove you to do so, my lady.” Talent’s easy smile was unnerving. “The West Kirk can ill afford your departure, and you can ill afford the stain to your reputation should people—should Lord Cairn, among others—discover what you have been doing.”

The chill sliced through her spine, leaving her numb with fear—not for herself, but for Alasdair. But she had to be absolutely clear that her fear was well-founded. “And just what have I been doing?”

“Giving away what was not really yours to give, was it, Lady Quince?”

Oh, holy, holy, holy.
 

Well-founded, indeed.

“How do you ken that?” Her breath was nothing but a ghost of bravado.

“I made it my business to know all that I could about our most dependable donor. You are not the only observant person in Edinburgh, you know, my lady.”

Oh, holy gaping holes to hell. She had been more than wrong about Talent—she had been utterly deceived. “I’m not?”

“No. You are very easily recognized, a well-known young woman, and easy enough to follow, or set beggar children to following.”

She was stunned into silence, sick with shock. She had thought herself so clever and rare, so careful and successful, it had never occurred to her that she was being watched as carefully by the despicable likes of the Reverent Talent, as she had been watching others. “I suppose you are to be congratulated, sir.”

He preened just the tiniest amount, putting his hand up to smooth his lapel. “Thank you, my lady.”
 

Vanity, thy name was Talent. But perhaps she could use than twisted vanity to some purpose. “You’re supposed to be a mon of God, Reverend. And yet you’ve been sneaking about, following me?”

He was not in the least bit ashamed. “While you were sneaking about giving stolen money to the church? Yes. The Lord truly works in mysterious ways.”

She struck back with the sharpest weapons to hand, her wits. “And blackmail is one of the sacred mysteries of the church now, is it?”

He laughed, and the sound echoed strangely in the empty church. “Yes, I suppose now it is. The ends always justify the means for our Lord.”
 

She was beginning to see the twisted lines of his logic. She was only ashamed to admit that hers had, until quite recently—until nearly that very minute—been the same.

“Of course,” he went on. “But your Lord Cairn, he’s another question entirely.” He smiled.
 

The effect was chilling.

To combat the sense of mortal cold, she was desperate for some fire to throw in his face. She was on the verge of telling him in no uncertain terms that Lord Cairn was well aware of her larcenous habits, if not her support of Talent’s church, but something that must have been prudence stopped up her mouth.
 

She did not always have to rush in where angels feared to tread.
 

“What do you mean?” she asked instead.

“I mean that unless you want your Lord Cairn, the Minister in charge of justice, to know that you’ve been the one stealing from Edinburgh society for the past three years, you’d best find something new to steal, Lady Cairn. Your castle looked prosperous enough. You can send the things directly to me. No need to involve your friends Jeannie or Charlie Smith anymore, is there?”

Oh, that was the last of it. Alasdair’s name was nothing compared to Jeannie and Charlie. Alasdair could look out for himself and Cairn, but Jeannie and Charlie, whom she thought she had protected, were vulnerable. Talent’s cruelly casual mention of their names left her gasping. Heat choked up her throat and burned behind her eyes. And made her furious.

“Thank you, Reverend Talent, for making yourself so clear.”

He smiled and bowed, oblivious and impervious to her sarcasm. “You understand me then, my lady? We must let nothing stand in the way of doing the Lord’s work, and glorifying his name.”

Her throat was tight, and her eyes burned with unshed tears just waiting for her to be free of his loathsome presence before they could fall. There was absolutely nothing witty or clever she could possibly say to him that wouldn’t give away the totality of her disgust and her fear.

 
But she tried anyway. “I understand you perfectly, Dr. Talent. Perfectly.”

But she had absolutely no idea what on Earth she was going to be able to do about it.

The rain came down so hard Alasdair could make out nothing of what Quince and Talent were saying beyond a word or two, but he could pick up some sense of tone of voice—Talent’s low and in control, Quince’s defensive and increasingly emotional. But increasingly emotional about what, he had no idea.
 

He had almost given up torturing himself with the ineffectual eavesdropping, and given in to his desire to simply charge into the kirk in a straightforward manner, and strangle the lies out of the damned interfering reverend, when the old oaken door of the church slammed open, and his wife came pelting out from under the gloom of the stone porch.
 

His guilt over listening without making his presence known kept him pinned to his place along the wall, and he could only watch as she passed so close that he could see the raw look upon her face—beneath her hood, her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, her nose was pink and dripping, and her face was suspiciously blotchy.
 

She was crying.

Quince, who never cared what people said. Quince, who had shrugged off more of his best insults the first evening they had met than most men could endure in a fortnight of debate in the House of Commons. Quince, his unapologetic, unassailable brat, was weeping.

He was beyond astonished—his chest contracted with something uncomfortably close to fellow feeling. And anger.

And all the questions that had been swirling around in his head dissolved into only one—what could that bastard Talent have said to make his wife cry?

On second thought, another question intruded—was it he, with his insistence upon marrying her, and bringing her to his corner of the highlands, cut off from all her friends and family, who had made her cry?

Alasdair could find no answer in her ravaged face, or in the composed face of the Reverend Talent, who came out to watch her depart, and then turned up his black collar, and headed toward the village, leaving Alasdair alone to decide.
 

And try as he might, he could not. The strong sympathy he had felt only moments ago was met by an equally strong, more painful feeling—rampant, distrustful jealousy.
 

This man, Talent—what the devil was he to Quince?

A suitor, at least. No man followed a lass who was not his wife to the highland village of her husband without being quite strongly attached to her. But was she equally attached to him? Alasdair didn’t think so—if Quince had not kissed half the lads in Edinburgh, she certainly had not kissed someone so stodgy as a vicar.
 

But there was something between them. Something to draw the clergyman one hundred and eight miles north from his home parish. Something that upset Quince deeply enough to make her weep.

Alasdair took a deep breath, and purposefully knocked the back of his head hard against the cold, stone wall of the kirk, as if he could smack some sense into his brain, when what he really wanted to do was smack the Reverend Talent down to the ground, and leave him there, wallowing in the mud.

But that was not the way of the rule of law. He was Cairn—he had to
be
the law, and the law did not go about beating people up just because they had discommoded one’s wife.

Especially if it was really Alasdair who had done the discommoding.

He forced his feet in the opposite direction from Talent—he did not completely trust himself not to set upon the damn fellow, and beat the bloody pulp out of him.

But neither did he trust himself with Quince at that particular moment.

She had warned him that she would make him a bad wife. She had insisted that they wouldn’t suit. What if she did share her fellow feeling with Talent? What if she did want to leave Cairn? What if she wanted leave him?

Nay. The thought was a punch to the gut. It was not to be borne. But bear it he must, even if the aching doubt brought him to a bloody standstill in the cold rain. Even if the hot pain cleaved his chest like an axe blade. Even if everything within him roared out in protest and denial—she was his.
 

She was
his
wife. His joy and his burden and his weakness—the chink in the armor he had manufactured of his life. She was the temptation he could not seem to resist.

Yet resist he must, even if he did not want to give her up. Because he could not keep her, like a pet in a cage, locked up in Cairn for his pleasure. Quince was no one’s pet, least of all his.

But if she were going to leave him, he had much rather not watch.

He turned his steps toward the wild moor, and the scouring solace of the windswept hills.

Chapter Twenty-seven