A Scandalous Scot (11 page)

Since he didn’t want to startle her on the stairs, he waited until Jean was on the landing and moving toward him.

Nevertheless, she made a sound like an abbreviated scream at the sight of him.

Reaching out, he grabbed her upper arms to keep her from falling. For several moments she trembled beneath his hands. He wanted, curiously, to pull her close, wrap his arms around her and just hold her until she was still and calm.

Instead, he dropped his hands, forcing himself to move several feet away.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

She bolted.

He went after her, grabbing her arm before she descended the steps.

“Don’t go,” he said, the second time he’d done so. Why couldn’t he just let her go, leave him to his solitary pursuits?

Because loneliness was a damn difficult companion.

She stopped, turned around and stared at him.

“I didn’t go to the Long Gallery tonight, because I thought you might be there,” she said in a rush of words. “And here you are. I truly do want to avoid you. How can I do that if you’re always where I am?”

“No one has ever come out and admitted they were trying to avoid me,” he said. “Even though they were.” God knows the last year he’d been rebuffed by more people than he could count.

“I don’t want to intrude upon your privacy,” she said, blushing.

Was she remembering this afternoon?

Suddenly, he was as well.

He moved back and turned, so she wouldn’t see evidence of his sudden recollection.

Until returning to Ballindair, he’d had some control over his libido. After all, it had been some time since Lillian welcomed him into her bed. His wife had a way of banishing him for any infraction. He hadn’t known it at the time, but she was busy juggling her many lovers. When she had time, she accommodated him.

What was it about this plain maid that intrigued him?

Perhaps it was her way of speaking directly to him, something he’d not experienced for a very long time.

“Were you ghost hunting?” he asked, glancing at her over his shoulder.

That was the wrong thing to do, to express any curiosity about her actions. He should simply have dismissed her and sent her back to her room.

“No,” she said. “I wanted something to read.”

Another surprise.

His wife never read, never willingly entered the library in his London home, or a bookshop. He wasn’t even certain she could read.

“What kind of book does a maid read?”

“Must I be defined by my occupation?” she asked, frowning at him. “Are you forever labeled earl? What does the earl read? What does the earl eat? What does the earl do?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m almost always defined by my title.”

At his words, her face carefully assumed a blank expression. He preferred her frown.

“What do you read, Jean? Novels?”

“Good God no,” she said, startling him. “Why on earth would I want to read about histrionic females? They’re all wandering from one disaster to another. I don’t need to read about such things when my life has been the same.”

She clasped her hand over her mouth and looked at him in horror, as if the words had become sentient beings, overcoming her will and escaping by themselves.

Once again she incited his curiosity. More, he wanted to smile in her presence.

“We have quite a few books on the history of the Murderous MacCraigs,” he offered. “However, I’m not entirely certain that particular selection of reading material will lead to a dreamless sleep.”

“I don’t mind dreaming,” she said. “In fact, I much prefer my dreams. In them, I’m intelligent and witty and I don’t make mistakes.”

“I like your mistakes,” he found himself saying. “You’re very honest, and that’s rare to find. I should think you would cherish that quality of yours.”

“I think, perhaps, you’ve misjudged me. I haven’t been all that honest.”

“Isn’t honesty a good trait for a maid to have? Or have you absconded with my silver?”

She looked startled.

“I don’t mean that kind of honesty,” she said. “I mean the kind where you lie to yourself and tell yourself everything will be all right. Or when you talk yourself into doing something even when you know it’s wrong.”

“Internal honesty?” he asked, feeling the most absurd wish to smile.

She nodded.

“And how have you been internally dishonest?”

He didn’t think she would answer, but she did.

“I lied to my sister. I fibbed to the housekeeper.”

“Dastardly deeds.”

She nodded again.

He knew it was wrong to ask, but he was somehow unable to bite back the question.

“What did you lie about?”

To his surprise, she shook her head and wouldn’t speak.

“How did you come to work at Ballindair?”

She looked away, concentrating on a shelf of books. One hand reached out and touched a gilt edged spine, fingers straying over the title. Was she all that interested in animal husbandry?

With her silence came a feeling of shame. He should have been inured to that emotion, and it was curious to experience it now. But he knew, by his very position, he was coercing her to remain here.

“It’s not important,” he said. “I was merely making conversation.”

She retreated into that irritating silence again.

“Get your damn book,” he said.

She didn’t.

Nor did she move. Instead, she turned her head, studying him as if he was an insect she’d never seen, some repulsive specimen that horrified her at the same time it fascinated.

“What happened to your wife?”

Of all the things she might have said, he was the least prepared for that.

“I divorced her,” he said, giving her the truth. “Does that shock you?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. When she did speak, her words surprised him again.

“I wasn’t raised to be a maid,” she said. “It’s an honorable profession, however. Anything you do well is honorable, don’t you think?”

“Would you be an honorable man if you were a very good thief? Or an honorable woman if you were an accomplished harlot?”

She didn’t have an answer to that.

He moved to the other side of the bookcase where he couldn’t see her. His fingers trailed across the tops of the books, irritated when he found a layer of dust on them.

“Do you clean in here?” he asked.

“Not recently, no,” she said, her voice low. “Mrs. MacDonald rotates the staff.”

Did he imagine the tone of pity in her voice, as if she understood he wanted to banish her at the same time he wanted to force her to remain?

“What have you been doing recently?”

“Working in the laundry. And being a scullery maid.”

“What does a scullery maid do?”

“Dispose of garbage and clean pots,” she said, and now there was a note of humor in her voice. He wished he hadn’t moved away from her. He would’ve glanced at her then, to see if there was a small smile on her lips.

“And floors, and tables, and more pots, and dishes, and silverware. And anything that needs to be cleaned. Or scrubbed.”

“Is the laundry a promotion?”

“Anything is a promotion from the scullery,” she said. “But before you arrived, I was an upstairs maid. The scullery and the laundry are punishment, I’m afraid.”

He walked around the end of the bookcase in order to see her. “Why are you being punished?”

She smiled at him, then glanced away, her attention once more on a book. “I was unpardonably rude to a certain earl.”

“Perhaps he deserved it,” he said.

“Perhaps he did,” she said, her smile deepening.

“Shall I speak to the housekeeper?”

Her smile abruptly disappeared. “I hope you won’t, Your Lordship.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll be moved back to my normal duties soon enough. And if you do speak to the housekeeper, it would undermine her authority.”

“Plus, she’d resent you for my interference.”

She shrugged but didn’t answer.

“Have I no influence even in my own home?”

“I think you have more influence than you know, Your Lordship. People wish to please you. Everything they do is for that singular reason.”

“Do you wish to please me, Jean?”

She took a step back, and he regretted the question the moment she moved. He’d frightened her, somehow. Or played lecher, more like.

How did Andrew do it? How did Andrew convince all those women he seduced that he wasn’t to be feared? Would Jean have listened to him? Or believed Andrew, for that matter? He knew, suddenly, she wouldn’t have been any more receptive to Andrew’s blandishments than to his rusty conversation.

Was that what he was trying to do, seduce a maid? The thought brought him up short. Surely he wasn’t that lonely. Or that dishonorable.

“Where is the book about the ghosts of Ballindair?” He’d get the book, then banish her, the wisest course.

“You don’t believe in them,” she said.

“Is it necessary to believe in something to study it?”

She tilted her head and regarded him solemnly, like the wren she was. “I think it requires an open mind, Your Lordship, to fully study something. Not a mind narrowed by suspicion and disbelief.”

Now that was surprising. “Are you given to philosophy also, Jean?”

She didn’t answer.

“Tell me more about the French Nun,” he said. “Why does she insist on haunting Ballindair? Is it to punish the Murderous MacCraigs somehow? Inspire them to change?”

“Do you think a ghost could have altered the behavior of your ancestors?” she asked, her smile back in place.

“I don’t,” he said. “A cudgel, perhaps, would have had more effect.”

She laughed, an odd sound in this room dedicated to contemplation and learning. The fact he’d made her laugh gave him a strange and curious warmth, as if he’d just consumed a particularly fine single malt whiskey.

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked, abruptly curious.

She blinked at him, as if processing the question before answering it. “Seeing anyone?”

“Are you stepping out with anyone? Or are you engaged? Hell, are you married? Do I employ married maids?”

She had that look on her face again, as if she couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or insulted.

“Isn’t that a very personal question, Your Lordship?”

“So was wanting to know about my wife,” he said.

She folded her arms and began to tap her shoe on the floor, for all the world like his nurse when she’d been impatient with him. How many decades ago had that been?

He folded his arms as well, the two of them staring at each other in identical poses. Surprisingly, she wasn’t much shorter than he. Nor did she look remotely like a maid at the moment. In fact, she had a countesslike appearance, the look on her face reminding him oddly of Lillian at her most intransigent.

However, Jean did not spark in him a desire to retaliate. Probably because he had no emotion invested in the woman. Or perhaps it was simply because he knew, in some deep part of himself, that she was in the right. He had no business asking her if she was involved with someone.

She dropped her arms first. Then he did, each of them smiling at the other. Did she wonder at their sudden amity as much as he?

“You do,” she said. “Employ married maids, that is.”

Would she answer his other questions? When she turned to leave him, he got his answer—no.

“Are you one of those women who wish to remain a mystery, the better to deepen her allure?”

She began to laugh in earnest as she descended the staircase. The sound of her rich and tantalizing laughter gradually faded into nothingness, as ghostly as those specters she hunted.

W
hen Jean reached her room, her heart was still pounding, less from the possibility of being discovered outside the fourth floor at this hour than for another reason entirely.

He was divorced. A shocking thing, for a man to turn his back on his vows, to abjure his wife.

Why had he done so?

That was the reason for his return to Ballindair, then. The Earl of Denbleigh was a figure of scandal.

But he thought she was mysterious.

And womanly.

And alluring.

He’d wanted to know if she was married, or to be married, or even interested in someone. Surely that was not a question an employer normally asked?

Perhaps he was just being kind to a member of his staff. Would he have talked to anyone about books? Or about the ghosts of Ballindair?

Or was she simply guilty of thinking too highly of herself?

What a foolish girl she was.

She’d seen him, even after she’d not wanted to see him. It hadn’t been dreadful at all. She’d entirely forgotten about the sight of him naked. Almost, perhaps—very well, she hadn’t.

She closed the door of her room softly behind her and began to unbutton her dress.

“Where were you?” Catriona asked. “The library again? One of these days you’re going to get caught, Jean.”

Jean turned, her back to the door, facing the shadows surrounding her sister’s bed.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I went to look for a book to read.”

Too late, she realized she’d left the library empty-handed.

Catriona sat up, lit their lone taper, and stared at her. She didn’t say anything, but her look was accusation enough.

“I couldn’t find anything interesting to read,” Jean said, removing her dress and hanging it on the hook beside the door. Clad only in her shift, she sat on the edge of her bed. “It’s no good looking at me that way, Catriona. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Her sister blew out the candle. They were given only one a week, so had to be judicious in its use.

“You lecture me on propriety all the time, dear sister,” Catriona said. “Yet you see nothing wrong in wandering through Ballindair at night.”

Catriona was right. She’d been foolish. But sometimes she needed to be alone. Sometimes she needed to pretend her life was other than what it was. This time, she left the room when she shouldn’t have, and flirted with her employer. If Catriona had behaved in such a fashion, she would’ve lectured her for hours.

Instead, her sister remained silent.

Jean got into bed, staring up at the dark ceiling. Her heart was still beating too fast, and a warm feeling was spreading through her, a feeling she’d never experienced, and one that troubled her more than just a little.