Amanda Scott (21 page)

James raised his eyebrows. “Would you, indeed? I thank you for the vote of confidence—I think.”

Lady Rothwell made an unladylike sound. “If that is how you feel, Rothwell, believe me, I would not object to having my son’s escort in place of yours. You
can
leave everything to him.”

With a gleam of mockery in his eyes, Rothwell shook his head and said, “I am sorry to disoblige you, ma’am. Though I have no doubt of James’s ability to see you safely to Rothwell Park, I do doubt his ability to transport you there against your will, and since it is by my wish that you are going at all, it is also my responsibility to see that you make the journey safely.”

If he expected gratitude, he did not get it, and when Lady Rothwell turned away, clearly displeased, Maggie knew without question that their journey was unlikely to prove a pleasant one.

Nor did it. Although hostilities stopped short of outright war, neither Lydia nor her mother pretended to feel anything other than resentment at being transported from town to country, and the dismal weather did nothing to soothe their tempers. When the four carriages required to carry them, their servants, and baggage left London, the air was chilly and damp, and rain began to fall before they reached Stevenage. On the second day, having left the Great North Road at Stamford, as they neared the village of Oakham, the rain began to fall harder.

Huddled in furs beside Lydia in the gently rocking second carriage, Maggie was grateful that they were not in the lead coach with her ladyship and Maria Chelton, the rather taciturn woman who had served as her maid for many years. Lady Rothwell, having felt a headache coming on, had moaned and groaned so much that at the first break in the weather Lydia had asked if she would not rest better if she and Maggie were to ride for a time with Rothwell and James.

The two men had been passing the time playing piquet, but when the change was made they had welcomed the young women with evident pleasure. James, moving to the rear-facing seat to make room for them, said, “I did not expect to be kept confined like this. Generally, it is possible to ride nearly every day until mid-October, but this is too much. We’ll have snow before long!”

Rothwell had descended to help Lydia and Maggie into the coach, and when he took Maggie’s hand, she had smiled at him. Now, as he sat opposite her, she remembered the warmth of his responding smile and kept her gaze lowered, reluctant to seem as if she were encouraging his attentions.

Lydia sighed. “The road is a mass of puddles. We can never make Rothwell Hall tonight.”

James laughed. “Or in any weather, you goose. Bless me, it is more than fifty miles yet!”

“Is that so far? It is no more than half past one, and I know Ned frequently makes the journey in two days. I thought since we were traveling with him, we would do so too.”

“When Ned travels, he goes by post chaise with no more impediments than Fletcher and a portmanteau or two,” James said, still chuckling, “which means he can travel more than ten miles an hour on some roads. Even on the Great North Road, which is one of the best-kept in England, I daresay we went no more than eight in any hour. And I can tell you, too, Ned never stops at Stevenage his first night out of London. But then,” he added with a teasing look at his sister, “he never lingers until nearly eleven o’clock before
beginning
a journey, either.”

There was nothing Lydia could say in answer to that, for the delay had been as much her fault as anyone’s. No sooner had the dowager ordered her servants to repack her trunk for the third time, having made certain that some object or other that would be quite indispensable in Derbyshire had truly been packed, than Lydia had suddenly remembered some item of her own that might well have been overlooked and had to turn out another box or bundle to be certain it had not.

Rothwell had shown more patience than Maggie had thought he possessed through all the minor crises, and James, too, had been completely resigned to the delays, making no complaint even when his mother, having climbed into her coach and settled herself, suddenly demanded to know if her hartshorn and distillation of nightshade had been packed. Since everyone was quite sure they had been, it was even more annoying to be informed that she had not wanted them packed away but required them to be near at hand throughout the journey, so that Maria Chelton had to unearth them from the bottommost container in the baggage coach. Even now, both men showed merely amused forbearance at Lydia’s annoyance.

She glared at them. “I trust we will get there tomorrow and that you are not telling me we have another two days of this to endure. Mama does not think it right for Maggie and me to ride with the two of you, even if you are my brothers, and I daresay she will only allow it for a short while. I just hope her affliction is not the onset of something dreadful, or she will give it to us both before we reach Rothwell Hall. If she lets us stay in this coach another hour, I will be surprised.”

Rothwell said placidly, “We will reach the Park tomorrow.”

When Lady Rothwell insisted they stop at the George Inn in Melton Mowbray, he said he thought she would be more comfortable at the Flying Horse in Nottingham. She resisted, but Rothwell’s will prevailed, and Maggie saw that he exerted himself to be patient. The dowager felt better the next morning, relieving Lydia of the concern that they would all take her illness, so it was a shock to everyone when, upon their arrival at Rothwell Park, Fletcher, who had scarcely been near the dowager, descended from the servants’ coach only to faint dead away on the ground at his master’s feet.

L
ADY ROTHWELL, DESCENDING FROM
her coach as a number of persons hurried to assist the fallen valet, said tartly, “It is a wonder that we have not all succumbed to this ague, what with being rattled and bounced all the way from London with such uncivilized haste. Good gracious, do not bring him near me, you fools! Take him into the house through the buttery porch. Come, Maria, let the servants deal with all this. I must rest.”

Maggie, waiting while Lydia gave her orders to the servants, who were attempting to deal with poor Fletcher and the baggage, noted that Rothwell Park House, situated on a bold eminence on the east side of the River Wye, looked exactly as she had expected the ancient noble residence to look. The coaches had approached over a triple-arched stone bridge and up a short slope, through a high gateway, into a paved courtyard. Until then, the high crenellated walls and towers, which had provided her first view of Rothwell Park, made the place look like a medieval castle. Now, looking at the beautifully weathered gray stone house that formed the central block, she could see that it was an ancient baronial residence to which numerous additions had been made over the centuries.

James reached into the coach to fetch a fur muff and shawl that Maggie had left inside, and when he smiled as he handed them to her, she was glad his mother had gone into the house. Lady Rothwell’s attitude had grown more brittle and steadily more protective the longer they were on the road together, and Maggie realized the dowager was concerned lest her plan to marry her son to a wealthy Englishwoman might be imperiled. Then, as she returned James’s smile and let him tuck her hand into the crook of his arm, she caught Rothwell’s gaze on them and realized the dowager was not the only one to misinterpret James’s kindness.

Mistaking her slight frown for anxiety, James said gently, “Fletcher is in no danger, I promise you. He has merely taken Mama’s cold. He always finds it impossible to sleep well whilst he is traveling, and attempting to please Mama—an impossible task—has undoubtedly added strain to what is always a difficult job. With a good rest, he will soon be as good as new.”

Turning her back on the now scowling earl, she replied, “I hope you are right, Mr. Carsley, but Fletcher’s illness will mean a delay in my departure, will it not? His lordship will not want to travel without him.”

He agreed, then clearly thinking the point a trivial one, he shouted at Lydia to let the servants do their work, and come inside.

Maggie saw that Rothwell had brought order to the chaos in the yard with a few well-chosen words, and he soon joined them. They entered the house through the great hall, which exemplified the typical medieval arrangement, even in Scotland, and where Maggie could easily imagine medieval de Carsleys dining on the dais at the upper end, separated from their retainers by a great salt dish. There were two huge fireplaces. The walls were paneled and hung with loose arras tapestries looped back on iron hooks at the doorways, and a gallery providing access between upper floors ran the full length of the vaulted chamber.

From the hall, they passed through what was plainly the dining room, the ceiling of which had been painted with red and white panels containing heraldic emblems, then went up a short flight of stone steps, through a pair of dog-gates, past more tapestries, and came at last to what Lydia announced was the long gallery. She added, pulling her cloak tighter around her, “Now, Maggie, will you confess that I was right and Rothwell Park House is no more than a great, cold medieval pile of stones?”

“It is very large,” Maggie said.

Lydia nodded. “Large, freezing, and full of drafts. ’Tis monstrous cruel of Ned to imprison us here. His rooms are here, at the north end of the gallery, but mine is up one more flight of stairs, and you will be near me. I will help you settle in.”

“Don’t get her too settled,” Rothwell said behind them. “She leaves for Scotland in the morning.”

Lydia stared at him. “I thought you were going with her.”

“I am.”

“But you cannot mean to travel without Fletcher!”

“It will be a grave inconvenience to do so,” he said with a sardonic look, “but cruel though you have named me, I am not so cruel as to drag him along when he is ill, and I do not propose to wait until he recovers. Come, puss, do you think me unable to dress myself?”

“Lud, can you?”

James and Maggie, and even Rothwell himself, laughed at her wide-eyed amazement, but they all learned, just as soon as they gathered for dinner, that Lady Rothwell took a dim view of the notion that the Earl of Rothwell might travel without his valet and general factotum at his side.

“You cannot do that,” she said flatly when his intention was made known to her at dinner. “The fact that you choose to visit a barbaric land is no excuse to behave like a barbarian yourself, Rothwell. You must take Chelton.”

“I am sorry to disoblige you, ma’am, but though I recall that Maria Chelton’s husband briefly served my father, I scarcely know the man and have no intention of taking him with me.”

“And just who do you think will maid this young woman?” the dowager asked, shifting ground so swiftly that Maggie suddenly found herself the focus of every eye in the room.

Rothwell said patiently, “One of the maidservants can go along to look after her.”

“What can you be thinking? You will compromise her reputation beyond mending if you force her to travel alone with you, protected only by a dim-witted chambermaid, and one of your own, at that, accustomed to following
your
orders!”

His annoyance showed, but he said evenly, “If you can suggest an alternative, ma’am, I am willing to hear it.”

“Certainly, I can. Maria must go with her.”

A heavy silence fell, and it was Lydia who recovered first, exclaiming, “Mama, you could not get along without her!”

“I am quite willing to make the sacrifice,” Lady Rothwell said grandly. “I will not have it said that I allowed Rothwell to take advantage of any young woman. Moreover, Maria has spent so little time with Matthew this year that he has dared to complain of her neglect. Now that she is here, he would be most displeased to see her sent off to Scotland with Rothwell.”

Rothwell said dryly, “There is no need to displease anyone. I will leave Maria here with her husband and take some other dragon to look after Miss MacDrumin’s reputation.”

Lady Rothwell said calmly, “A married couple will lend a greater degree of respectability to your journey than can be gained by any other means short of my accompanying you myself—and I do not intend to set foot in such an outlandish place—but whether you like it or not, Rothwell, Miss MacDrumin must have a proper companion, or her father, if he is any sort of gentleman at all, will be outraged by the slight to her position.” Maggie, bristling at the dowager’s casual defamation of Scotland, was surprised when Rothwell conceded to the plan at once. He said, “No doubt you are right, ma’am, and your solution will certainly get Fletcher’s vote, at least. He is as convinced as Lydia is that I shall be poorly turned out if I am forced to do without him, and although Chelton will not measure up to his London standard, Fletcher must agree that the man will do well enough in the less civilized environs of Scotland.”

When the dowager nodded serenely, Maggie snapped, “I’ll have you know, sir, that Scotland is perfectly civilized, more so in many ways than England is!”

James laughed. “You will not convince Ned or Mama of that. I daresay they both believe all Scotland is full of aborigines who gibber at visitors in some sort of foreign tongue.”

“Not
all
Scotland,” the earl said with a smile, “merely the Highlands. No, no,” he added with a sudden, unexpectedly warm look at Maggie, “sheathe your claws, Miss MacDrumin. I promise you, I am jesting. I admit I know little about your Highlanders other than that they can be formidable on the battlefield, but I’ve already learned that many of them are better educated than I thought, and although I intend to remain in Scotland only long enough to see you safely home and look over the estate, I am certain I shall learn much more about them before I return.”

“You know, Ned,” James said thoughtfully, “I believe I’d like to have a look at the Highlands myself. I’ve never so much as set foot in Scotland, you know.” He grinned at Maggie. “My education is sadly lacking, too, but I am certain I can find any number of subjects to paint, and no doubt you will be delighted to set me straight about the numerous misconceptions I must have developed over the course of my misspent life.”