Mad About the Marquess (Highland Brides Book 2) (35 page)

“What?” Quince stepped back. She did not understand him, and clearly he did not understand her. “Nay—”

“Yes!” Strathcairn’s ire echoed up the stair hall like thunder. “Understand this, my lady. Sebastian is not only under my patronage, and my protection, he is my friend. And I will not have him insulted by you or anyone, especially not by my wife. Not in my house. Not in the house I have offered him as his own. Not in the house I have offered
you
.” Strathcairn practically hurled the words at her. “You’re all for charity and the relief of the poor, all for beneficence, but only for those who look and speak exactly like you, is that it?”
 

He flung his hat across the foyer, as if he wished he could dispose of her as forcefully and easily. “Let me be very clear. I am an abolitionist, as are all the members of Mr. Pitt’s cabinet. I may not be one of the orators whose speeches are copied and sold in copperplate pamphlets, but that cause is as near and dear to me as Cairn itself. It is a part of who I am, and what I have accomplished, and I will not stand by and let a spoiled lass with too great an opinion of herself, and too small an opinion of others, get in my way. Do I make myself very clear?”

“Eminently.” Quince swallowed the lump of her pride. He thought she objected to Mr. Oistins simply because of the dark color of his skin, and not because he could stand in judgment of her past misdeeds. “But—”

“Do I make myself clear?” he roared.

Quince jumped at the force of his anger. “Aye.” It was impossible not to be intimidated by him. Impossible not to be utterly humiliated by his assessment of her character.

“I’m disappointed in you, Lady Cairn.” He straightened the fall of his immaculate coat. “Now, I’m going out to speak to my friend, and I will expect that by the time I have returned, you and your obnoxious opinions will have vacated my front hall. Do you understand?”

“Aye, but—”

He was through listening to her—or not listening to her, as it appeared. He had already turned on his heel, and left her standing in the hall alone, with a small army of servants nearby, pretending they had not heard every single word.

It was all suddenly too much—the failure and humiliation and marriage and pain. The ubiquitous ache she had held at bay in the excitement and hope of their arrival had returned with a vengeance. A vengeance named Strathcairn.

Every muscle and sinew shook from the strain. And the hot press of tears she had staved off with cheek and bravado and laudanum could no longer be stopped. Stinging heat spilled from her eyes, and trailed salty tracks down her cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut to block it all out—the ignominy and humiliation, the eyes of the secretary, the ears of the servants, and the words of condemnation from her husband.
 

There was no blank slate.
 

But she would recover. She always did. But not now. Not now, when she could barely think for all the pain.

“There now, my leddy.” Mrs Broom appeared from somewhere to put a gentle hand to her shoulder. “Ye must be fair done in frae yer journey. There, there, poor lamb.”
 

Quince had never, not once in all her life been called any such pitiful, docile thing as a lamb. She swiped at her itchy eyes with her bandaged arm, and tried to salvage her pride. “I’m not delicate, Mrs. Broom. I’m only in pain.” She swallowed and sniffed, and got her chin up, even if it did wobble. “You see his lordship shot me the day before yesterday.” She took some savage satisfaction in saying it. “So I will admit to being rather done in as a result.”

“Oh, gracious me! Sech a thing.” The woman's face was creased with shocked sympathy. “We’ll get ye up right away. Ye just lean your wee self against me, and let Mrs. Broom put it all tae rights.”

If only. But Quince did lean against her, and let the housekeeper lead her upward, deep into the gray pile of stone, even if she had no confidence that her life could ever be restored to rights.

Chapter Twenty-two

Every time he thought he had reached an accord with her—every time he thought they had come to a place where they might finally agree and settle into something more than intermittent sniping—Quince showed her true colors. And Alasdair was left wondering at the enormity of the mistake he had made.

He had been so sure. So sure that she was more than the shallow, heedless, larcenous, feckless flibbertigibbet she took such pains to appear to be. But clearly he had been wrong.

Alasdair strode up the stairs and into his private chamber, flinging off his gloves along with his foul mood. But the gloves landed on the floor—the chamber was bare.

“If I may, your lordship?” McNab hovered at the door. “I’ve taken the liberty of having your belongings moved to the laird’s suite of rooms, sir.”

The laird’s suite was a grand sounding, but rather drafty set of ancient rooms in the older part of the castle. They were spacious and well appointed, but lacked some of the refinements the rooms in the later, more up-to-date parts of the buildings possessed.
 

But he was laird now—he was Cairn. If he insisted upon keeping his old rooms, where he had been happy and comfortable, it might be seen as some sort of an omen of lack of enthusiasm and commitment to Cairn. It was bad enough he had brought them a new, untried, unwilling, and very likely unworthy marchioness—he couldn’t act like an unwilling marquess himself.

Mrs. Broom bustled past him with a steaming tray, headed down the corridor toward the newer wing. She bobbed him the shallowest of curtseys—so shallow her miff was palpable. “Very newly wed, are ye, my lord?”

“Aye, Mrs. Broom.” The housekeeper’s long tenure at Cairn—she had started as a housemaid the year his grandfather had come into the marquessate—had earned her the privilege of familiarity. “Only Tuesday last.”

“Two days.” She made a brusque sound of disapproval. “And was that afore, or after ye shot the poor lassie?”

Of course. Of course, the moment his back was turned, Quince would have been busy selling her particular brand of woe. “After. But no matter what my wife says, her injury was an accident, Mrs. Broom. An unfortunate accident.”

“Most unfortunate,” the housekeeper agreed. “Fair ript up she is. Lucky ye didn’t take the arm off.” Her round face was as puckered as a lemon. “If I may be so bold, sir?”

As if he might stop her. “In the twenty-six odd years I’ve known you, Mrs. Broom, when have you not?”

She pulled herself up to her full height of five feet. “I might caution ye, not only tae greater delicacy with a new young wife, but tae better aim.”
 

Her salvo fired, Mrs. Broom sailed off down the corridor, leaving him in a sea of recrimination and regret. But it was not a sea he intended to swim in overlong—
he
was not the one in the wrong.

Alasdair found the door to the laird’s chamber, a cavernous, circular room within the stone walls of the old turret tower.
 

He had not entered the room in a very long time. It had been his grandfather’s, and still seemed filled with reminders of the old gentleman’s likes and dislikes—the big carved Tudor bed was hung with tartan, glass-fronted cabinets were full of oft-read books, and before the massive fireplace was a single, worn leather chair.

But when he stood in the middle of the room, Alasdair did not hear the ghost of his grandfather teaching him how to tie a proper feathered fly-fishing lure, or showing him the outlines of the Labrador coast in his atlas. What he heard was Mrs. Broom as clear as a mountain burn, chivvying her charge. “Now ye drink that down, my leddy, and rest, and get yerself better.”

“I warn you, I don’t like laudanum, or opium, Mrs. Broom.”

“Och, we’ve none o’ that here. Ye just gie that a try.”

“You are a treasure, Mrs. Broom,” said his young wife, sounding sweet and kind and everything biddable. “Whatever Cairn is paying you cannot possibly be enough. Ooh”—Quince made a near erotic sound of pleasure as she took a sip of something—“Holy painted castles, that’s full marvelous.”

Alasdair felt his body go instantly hard. There was no chance in the world that he could maintain his resentment in the face of such provocation.

“Go way wit’ ye, and drink that doon.” He could hear the pleased smile in the housekeeper’s voice. “I’ll come and check on ye myself, but we’ll see to gettin’ ye a lass of your own, as soon as ye feel up tae it.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Broom. You are a wonder.”

“That’s all right, lamb. Get a good rest.”

“Thank you, I will.”

A lamb, his young wife was not. And she could rest after he had had his say.
 

As soon as the door to the hallway had closed behind Mrs. Broom, Alasdair strode through the connecting door from his chamber to find Quince with her eyes closed, propped up against a mountain of pillows like a doll beneath the massive, embroidered canopy.
 

But he could tell by her breathing that she was awake. “Would you mind very much not bribing my servants on your very first day here?”

She didn’t even open her eyes. “Charity begins at home, Strathcairn.”

Alasdair
, he wanted to shout. But he had shouted at her not so very many minutes ago. And that had got him exactly nowhere.

He strove to keep his voice at an even volume. “So it does. And there is charity of the spirit, as well as of the purse. So I might also ask if you would please refrain from constantly advertising my mistake to all and sundry.”

“Which mistake? The one I made in entering a life of crime? Or the one I made in thinking to steal from you, not once but twice? Or the mistake where you shot me? Or the one I made in entering a marriage with a mon who is never going to let me forget my mistakes? There seem to be many mistakes and regrets to choose from.”

She had not committed mere mistakes—she had committed crimes. But with Quince, he decided it was best to deal with only one problem at a time. “Do you mean to tell everyone in the highlands that I shot you?”

Her mouth tipped up into a smile full of private amusement. And naturally, she only answered part of his question. “Not everyone. Only sympathetic types like your Mrs. Broom.” She took another indelicate, slurping sip of her tea. “But the question, if you ask me, which you don’t, but which I will ask anyway, is if you mean to let your Mr. Oistins tell everyone in the highlands that your new Marchioness of Cairn is a robber and a thief?” She held up a finger to correct herself. “Former robber and former thief.”

He was very glad to hear her say “former”—her words were at least a statement of some intent to reform. “But what on earth makes you think that Sebastian would ever do such a thing? Have you just assumed he will because of—”

“His eyes,” she said cryptically. “What is to keep him from laying information against me?”

“He is part of us, of Cairn.” To Alasdair the answer was obvious. “By your illogical way of thinking, what is to keep me from doing the same?”

But far from reassuring her, his answer had the opposite effect—her eyes opened wide, even as the rest of her went still.
 

“Oh, holy painted trollops. I am so stupid.” Her eyes grew bright and shiny, and she passed a hand over her face to hide her welling tears. “I thought you wanted me because you liked me, despite yourself. But you don’t really. You don’t want me—the real me—at all, do you? You only want to stop me, to make sure that I couldn’t possibly keep going, or thwart your plans, or embarrass you.”

“Aye. To some degree,” he agreed. “Surely you understood that you couldn’t possibly go on?”

“I suppose I did understand that. But I thought it was a decision I had made. But it wasn’t, was it? It was a choice you made for me.” She turned away, nearly upsetting the teacup. Which spurred him closer to the bed to whisk away the cup before it was spilled across the counterpane.
 

But immediately he did so, Alasdair detected the pungent bouquet of strong whisky. “Have you been drinking?”

“I’ve been drinking tea,” she sniffed. “Or rather a tisane of Mrs. Broom’s own devising, she said.”

Alasdair held the delicate bone-china cup up to his nose. “Tis straight Scotch whisky, lass. Which goes a long way toward explaining the tears.”

“I am not crying. Though it does explain why the tea is rather peaty.”
 

“You’re drunk, lass, and only feeling sorry for yourself.”