The MacGregor's Lady (22 page)

“I shall return in a few weeks, and then things will be better. I promise. Give my love to Mama when you safely can, and watch out for Grandmama.”

Give
my
love
to
Mama
when
you
safely
can.

One line, but enough to convey a disturbing realization to a man reduced to sneaking affection behind garden hedges: Hannah worried for her grandmother, understandably, if excessively. She worried as well for her younger brothers, and for her mother too. The mother he’d thought did not care enough to write even once to her daughter.

Or perhaps, the mother who
could
not
write to her daughter.

Asher tightened his embrace, and for a long time, sat in the garden shadows, thinking and holding the woman he could not stop proposing to.

Twelve

Thirty years working for the Baron Fenimore meant Hogarth Evan Cletus Draper—“Howie” to his septuagenarian half brother, though only to him—felt some genuine loyalty to the old lord. Losing his baroness less than five years into the marriage, his one true love, had to be hard on a man who wasn’t likely to come across any more loves, true or otherwise, in the course of a long and spectacularly cranky life.

A sense of duty and a desire to visit the fleshpots of London were enough to see Draper eventually journeying south at the baron’s request. Duty, prurient inclinations, and an entire armed infantry regiment would not have been enough to inspire Draper to set foot on one of those thunderous, smoke-belching dragons of progress known as locomotives.

“Give me a trusty steed any day,” Draper confided to his mount. “You don’t leave a fellow covered in soot hours later, half the realm away from where he woke up. Never been inclined to cast up my accounts when on horseback.”

Unless of course he’d been overimbibing. For a mature Scot of Highland extraction, overimbibing took time, effort, and the sort of stupidity generally commandeered only by the younger males.

“Show me the locomotive that will get you home when you’re in your cups, take you right to your own stables, peaceable-like, and at a kindly walk that don’t alert the neighbors to your lapses, and then wait for you to find the ground and a bush you might avail yourself of before taking his own self off to his stall.”

Young people were all in a hurry these days, racketing about, when the tried and true methods of travel might leave them time to think, to plan, to sort out such cryptic guidance as the old baron had imparted.

“‘Keep an eye on things and see Balfour wed,’ says the laird.”

The horse flicked an ear.

“Not very specific, but then, the laird has been friendly with the poppy juice lately. Makes a man forgetful.” Though no less cranky.

The Earl of Balfour was a strapping fellow whom the ladies would no doubt mob with their interest, and whose title the parents would eye covetously. “And yet, the laird thought the lad might need some nudging toward the altar.”

Nudging MacGregor to the altar would take a team of plow horses, two teams if the fellow were inclined to be stubborn. “Just like the laird.”

On that profound bit of irony, Draper took out his flask—he didn’t journey so far as the privy without it—and tipped the contents to his lips. “Nigh empty, and us barely halfway to Berwick.”

The surrounds were desolate, but only in the way the lowlands could be, an altogether greener, more rolling desolation than the Highlands boasted. And why the desolation should matter…

Draper roused himself from his itinerant reveries to inventory his situation.

“Horse, you are not going unsound on me, are you? Locomotives don’t go unsound, though they explode and crash and whatnot.”

The horse lifted its tail and commented at some length on that observation, but Draper’s senses had not lied. The beast’s gait was getting uneven behind. A stone bruise, a close nail in the shoe, or just damned bad luck.

“Badly done of you, my friend. The nearest inn is five miles back, and…”

Draper’s gelding plodded around a sharp curve and through a stand of trees to present his rider with more bleak terrain, but this vista was graced with a tidy smallholding, complete with sheep byre, stock barn, and cottage.

Hospitality would be forthcoming, particularly when Draper got out his wallet or the farmer produced his jug. Draper dismounted, loosened the girth on his ailing beast, and prepared to rely on Scottish good manners for the loan of a mount, or at the very least, a refill for his flask.

***

“Whatever did the English people have to give up to gain a royal promise of access to all this land?”

Hannah’s question was posed to the company at large. Julia, Connor’s blond, pretty wife, answered.

“The land was in royal hands from the twelfth century, but Charles I came out here to escape the plague in London. When he decided to enclose the Richmond estate, the locals extracted a promise of access to the land. To appease his subjects, Charles agreed.”

Asher watched as Hannah’s mental gears spun for the space of a wink.

“He sounds like an agreeable fellow, as monarchs go, though isn’t Charles I the king who was put to death by his subjects?”

While his sisters-in-law and his sister debated the niceties of regicide versus tyrannicide, and Malcolm tried to interject a list of Richmond Park’s various attractive features, Asher stepped away to check the girth on the bay mare Hannah would be riding.

“Did you invite Malcolm to London knowing he’d appoint himself the Season’s master of ceremonies?” Ian asked, patting the mare’s glossy quarters.

Asher speared his brother with a look over the mare’s fundament. “I didn’t invite him at all. I thought you were the one who collected him in the general remove from the North.”

“He occasionally bides in Edinburgh, but in recent years he’s more often found in Paris or Rome.”

As head of the family, laird, earl, whatever Asher’s post was called, he ought to have known that. “He’s here now, and I for one am grateful for a whiff of fresh air and some greenery, regardless of who organized the outing.”

The next few minutes were absorbed with seeing the ladies onto their horses, deciding which party would ride in which direction, and sorting out grooms to accompany the various groupings. Asher was not disappointed to find that Malcolm had assigned him to Hannah’s exclusive company.

He boosted her onto the horse, organized her skirts over her boots, and waited while she took up the reins.

“Why are you glowering at me, Balfour?”

She’d taken to using his title when they were in company, a habit he positively loathed.

Asher turned his glower on the groom at the horse’s head. The man removed to his own mount with a nod and sat waiting several yards off, as immobile as a garden sculpture.

“If I’m glowering, it’s because I am concerned for your welfare on a ride of some duration. Will you be all right?”

“You mean because of my…” She fiddled with the reins. “I’ll be fine. Riding doesn’t bother my leg, though hacking in the park hasn’t done much to challenge my stamina.”

“I can’t imagine it would, not when every fortune hunter in the city has to lurk on the Ladies’ Mile, waiting to tip his hat to you.”

She smirked at him, looking both smug and smart atop her horse. Malcolm was fussing at the groom, directing the man to change horses and issuing last-minute instructions to all and sundry.

“And you’re off to the woods, correct?” Malcolm asked Hannah.

“I am in Lord Balfour’s hands,” Hannah replied, though Asher thought her tone ironic. “If he’s to show me the woods, then I’m off to the woods.”

In the several thousand acres of Richmond Park and its policies, there were a number of woods, at least one of them of significant size. Asher waited for the groom to mount up, then aimed his own horse—at the walk—in the direction of the largest wood.

The rest of the group set off in various directions amid laughter, teasing, and Malcolm’s reminders to gather back at the starting point in two hours—not a moment longer—for a picnic meal Mary Fran was already seeing unloaded from the coaches.

“You seem to be enjoying Malcolm’s company,” Asher observed as his horse ambled along beside Hannah’s.

“Malcolm is charming, as are all the MacGregor men.”

The comment sounded sincere. He ought to tell her the picture she made in a forest-green habit was charming too, particularly when she’d worn her hair in a fat braid that dangled in a loop over her right shoulder. “You find Connor charming?”

“Of course I find him charming. Charming and full of blather are two different things. Malcolm is charming
and
full of blather.”

The groom had dropped back far enough to give them privacy, but something in Hannah’s expression suggested the conversation might veer off into areas more personal than Asher was willing to allow.

“Have you come across any eligibles whose suit you’d consider, Hannah?”

She did not so much as turn her head to scowl at him. “I have not, nor will I.”

“I’ve heard from your stepfather.”

She petted her horse with a slow stroke of her glove down the beast’s neck. “Oh?”

“He presumes on our mutual connection with Fenimore, and asks that I forgive a father’s concern for his daughter, but would I please consider allowing my solicitors to act as his factors should settlement negotiations ensue with an eligible
parti
.”

Had thunder rumbled in the distance—had cannon fire started booming over the distant hills—he could not have more effectively killed the joie de vivre Hannah had brought to the outing. Her horse gratuitously shied at a puddle, and Asher saw her give the reins forward in a tacit display of self-discipline.

“Have you written back to him, told him I have no intention of marrying and am a burden on the household generally?”

She was braced for him to mock her, to resent her, to treat her as a nuisance because she’d rejected his proposals. Would that he might.

“Hannah, from the number of times your stepfather referred to you as lovely, and the heavy innuendo in his financial references, I got the impression he was trying to pander to my pecuniary interests without outright asking how much it would take to make you my countess. Just how much do you have in trust?”

She named a figure that quite frankly astounded.

“I suppose I should not be shocked,” Asher said slowly. “I’ve traded in the New World for a mere five years and found it quite lucrative. Your father probably had decades to build his fortune.”

“He did—he was somewhat older than Mama—and he also said the fur trade used to be a considerably easier business because the game was more abundant and the competition for trappers, pelts, and buyers much less.”

Rather than dwell on her stepfather’s nasty little epistle, Asher instead posed question after question to Hannah regarding her father’s business. She answered with both knowledge and enthusiasm for her topic, until they were in view of the large woods on the Thames’s side of the park.

At Hannah’s suggestion, they cantered the distance to the wood, and to the extent Asher could determine from surreptitious glances, Hannah remained comfortable in her saddle.

They’d wandered some distance among stately trees and startled a herd of red deer in a grassy clearing when a shout from behind had Asher drawing his horse up.

“That’s the groom,” Hannah said, bringing her mare to a halt. “He sounds exasperated.”

“Your lordship? Milord? Oi!”

“Over here!” Asher nudged his horse down the path, with Hannah falling in behind.

The groom stood beside his dappled cob, stroking a hand over the beast’s shoulder. “Come up lame, ’e ’as. Poor blighter must ’ave picked up a stone.”

Except examination of all four hooves showed no stone embedded in the frog of the horse’s soles or wedged against its shoes.

“You’ll have to walk him back,” Asher said. “Can you find the way?”

The groom squinted up through the trees, saying nothing. From his accent, he was a city man, and Richmond was more primeval than much of the shires themselves.

“We rode in with the sun to our right shoulders,” Hannah said. “If you keep the sun to your left shoulder, you should find your way back easily enough.”

City man he might be, though the groom’s smile suggested he understood her reasoning. “Right you be, miss. Come along, ’orse. We’ve a ways to walk.”

With a slight bow in Hannah’s direction, the man departed down the track they’d just traveled, the horse stumping along behind him.

Asher wanted to ask if their misadventure in Scotland had motivated her to gauge directions by the sun, but she turned a troubled expression on him. “Shouldn’t we accompany him back to the meeting point?”

“He’s a grown man, Hannah. Part of the purpose for bringing a groom along is precisely so there’s somebody in the party who can take a lame horse in hand—”

He fell silent. Her concern was not for the sturdy groom, but for the appearances.

The proprieties. They were alone, deep in an overgrown woods, not another human being within eyesight or earshot, and both of marriageable age.

Abruptly, the moment became
interesting
.

***

The longer they were in London, the less Hannah could read Asher’s—Lord Balfour’s—moods and expressions. Today he was in casual English riding attire, which meant tall field boots, breeches, waistcoat, and riding jacket all done in buff, brown, cream, and green. The ensemble complemented his robust complexion beautifully, and the way he sat a horse…

Some men rode well, and some men rode with such an intuitive feel for the horse as to raise the activity to an effortless dance. Horses responded to that sort of assurance.

Hannah had responded to it.

“Let’s water the horses,” Asher suggested. “If you want to go back, we can, and we’ll overtake the groom easily.”

“Provided he doesn’t get lost.”

He gave her an amused look. “You’re concerned for the
groom
, Hannah?” He lent the word a mocking emphasis, alluding subtly to bridegrooms, and somehow to himself as well.