In Your Wildest Scottish Dreams (12 page)

Her mother sat on the bed next to her. “What was I supposed to say, Glynis? You had agreed to marry him. Nothing I said would’ve made any difference.”

Had she truly been that headstrong? Yes, she had. Perhaps nothing anyone said could have dissuaded her from her decision. She’d desperately wanted to be away from Glasgow, Scotland, and, most of all, Lennox.

Still, in all these years, she’d never heard anything in her mother’s letters remotely critical of Richard. When she said as much, her mother smiled.

“Marriage is forever, my darling child. I knew he was going to be your husband for the rest of your days. He was your choice.”

A very bad choice, another remark she wouldn’t make.

She made a mental note to retrieve the Derringer and tuck it into her reticule. As long as Baumann was around, it wouldn’t hurt to have some protection.

Eleanor’s expression clouded. “God forgive me, though, I’m glad the man is no longer in your life. Not that I would wish an early death on anyone, but it does seem providential, doesn’t it?”

It had been an answer to a thousand prayers, yet another comment she wouldn’t make.

“I do hope you at least chastised him verbally. Threw something at him. How dare the man frequent a brothel!”

Glynis smiled, amusement bubbling from deep inside. How very dear her mother was. In her world, people were either black or white, either good or evil. There was no gray for Eleanor MacIain.

“I can assure you I wanted to pitch something at him, Mother. But it was just easier to go along with the situation as it was. Nothing I said ever affected Richard in any way.”

She didn’t like seeing her mother angry, especially since it did no good in this case. Richard was far beyond any earthly punishments.

Eleanor reached over, tucked a tendril of hair behind Glynis’s ear.

“Did he ever hurt you, my darling girl?”

She shook her head. Physically, Richard had never touched her. Did his constant barrage of criticism count? What about his conscious cruelties like refusing to allow her to come home for a visit? He hadn’t even returned to England when his own mother died. Any emotion he felt was reserved for the diplomatic service.

“It’s glad I am that it’s over and you’re home,” Eleanor said. “What’s done is done.”

She turned her head and studied her mother. “Why didn’t you tell me Lennox was engaged?”

Time stretched and pulled and twisted itself while she waited.

Finally, Eleanor said, “You still feel the same about him, don’t you?”

She shook her head. “Too much has happened. I’m not the same girl I was back then.”

Her mother glanced at her but didn’t comment. Did she believe her?

“It was a very short engagement,” Eleanor said. “Before I knew it, the wedding was canceled.”

“Duncan said her name was Rose.”

Her mother nodded. “Rose Hollis. I quite liked her.”

Is she pretty? Accomplished? Had she kissed Lennox? Had he held her in his arms? From whom did she get those answers? No one. She would have to quash her curiosity. She didn’t want her own past examined; it was hardly fair to want to know everything about Lennox.

She tilted her head back, studying the ceiling. She wasn’t sad but she did feel empty, as if all her memories had been dumped from the trunk where they’d been carefully stored. Nothing was left of the impulsive girl she’d been.

She was Glynis Smythe, widow of the late British attaché Richard Smythe, accomplished Washington hostess, and master spy.

F
or three days Glynis thought about what she discovered on the trip to the mill and how close they were to disaster.

Duncan was doing what he could. He’d left for London the day before, the stated purpose to sell some English property. She suspected he had other plans, but he didn’t confide in her.

She stood up from her secretary, placing her hands on the small of her back and stretching. She stared at the figures she’d taken from the ledgers for hours but couldn’t see a way out of their situation.

If they did nothing, the mill would slowly grind to a halt. As it was, Duncan hadn’t paid some of his vendors and payroll was a huge outlay of dwindling cash. Even if they let the rest of the employees go, they’d still have expenses, unless they closed the doors and walked away.

The MacIain family would be among the gallantly and proudly poor.

Starving with grace had absolutely nothing to recommend it. She’d come close to doing exactly that in those last months in Washington. She had to dismiss the servants and leave the house Richard had rented. She took a room in a less genteel area of Washington in order to save money. She’d subsisted on the one meal allotted with her rent, sold all her gowns and jewelry,
and contacted the legation weekly to try to arrange passage home. If they hadn’t picked up the cost of the voyage, she wouldn’t have been able to return to Scotland.

She analyzed her skills in those months, applying for positions without thought of pride or pretense. No one wanted a female bookkeeper or accountant. None of her experience at the mill was translatable to a paying position anywhere. She wasn’t a talented seamstress. Nor did she know how to trim bonnets. Factory work wasn’t an option since no manufacturing existed within walking distance.

At least when she lived in Washington she only had herself to support. Now there was an entire household.

Duncan had some investments not associated with the mill that would carry them for a few months, but what then? She didn’t have an answer other than finding employment. They had to outlast the war. Yet even once the blockade was lifted, was there any guarantee they’d be able to acquire raw cotton again? Would the Confederates win? If they did, could they produce and export cotton in time to save the mill? If they lost the war, would the fields be razed by the Union?

Everything was dependent on the Civil War, an irony that didn’t escape her. Yet the same war decimating the MacIain coffers was helping Lennox. He might even be the richest man in a city filled with wealthy men.

Did Lennox still treasure his friendships and care about people? If he did, why hadn’t he realized Duncan needed help? Why hadn’t he offered?

Duncan wouldn’t go to Lennox. His pride would prevent him from asking for help. The question was: how much pride did she have?

She stood, walked to her vanity and leaned her
hands against the top, peering at her image in the mirror. Her cheeks were flushed. She brushed her hair into place, inserted a few more pins to keep the tendrils tamed, and applied a little salve to her lips.

She glanced toward Hillshead. Could she really go to Lennox and ask him for help?

Gloaming settled over Glasgow like a memory, making her recall a dozen times she left her house for Hillshead. Now she slipped out of the kitchen much as she had back then, smiling at Mabel and Lily before heading for the path Lennox and Duncan had worn into the grass as boys.

She hesitated at the arched bridge at the bottom of the hill. The structure had to be rebuilt every couple of years when the burn would outgrow its banks for a few weeks and become a river. Now the water gurgled and babbled as it fell over the smooth stones, as if telling her all the secrets since she’d last crossed.

She grabbed her skirts, trying to hold them away from the ground. She took the track winding through the pines, breathing in the pungent smell of the needles. Here it was almost dark, but she remembered the way.

The wind soughed through the trees, the branches clicking like a convocation of gossips.

Already a few lights had been lit, a sign this was not the proper hour for calling on anyone, let alone a woman on a man, even if she was a proper widow and Lennox was an old friend.

Should she simply wait until morning?

No, she might lose her courage by then. Better if she went and explained the whole sorry mess to Lennox so he understood. If there was any groveling that needed to be done, she’d do it. Hadn’t she done even worse things in Washington?

The house was an open box with the back of Hillshead
shielding the three gardens. On the third floor the terrace outside the ballroom ran the width of the building. On either end of the terrace, steps curved down and around to the Italian gardens filled with fountains, gravel paths, and marble statuary.

Instead of going to the front, which she might have if the hour had been decent and this errand anything but surreptitious, she headed toward Hillshead’s back door. She’d come here often enough as a girl, either following Duncan, to his disgust, or acting as her brother’s messenger.

Was the cook the same? She’d been a lovely woman with graying hair and a well-lined face, but she had a contagious smile that made Glynis smile as well. Whenever she came to Hillshead, the woman had always offered her a selection of pastries. Sometimes she’d eaten her fill and sometimes she wrapped a few into her handkerchief and tucked them into her pocket, a present to Duncan for sending her to Hillshead.

The last rays of sunlight danced on the lush plants of the kitchen garden. The onions and peppers, lettuce and cabbages, grew so thick the tilled earth could no longer be seen. In a separate bed, herbs waved merrily in the breeze, fronds of mint and rosemary perfuming the air.

The ghost of the girl she’d been walked alongside, her face sunnied with a bright smile, her eyes sparkling with anticipation about seeing Lennox.

Had she always been a fool about him?

Yes.

The stark answer stopped her on the path.

This errand was too important to be rashly contemplated. She should take her time, marshal her arguments, perhaps even prepare a balance sheet for Lennox to peruse.

She would call on him at the yard. She’d dress in her
best black dress with white cuffs and collar, with an attractive bonnet framing her face. She wouldn’t appear before him with stickers adhering to the bottom of her skirt and the wind pulling her hair loose from its proper bun.

That was the best thing to do. She wouldn’t go to him like a supplicant but an equal, a woman of the world. Her entreaty would be a businesslike matter, not a personal one.

The urge to come to him had been so basic she’d been impulsive again. The Glynis of her girlhood had simply come to Hillshead as she had so many times before.

A rough-hewn bench sat in front of the gardener’s cottage. To her right the path branched in three directions. One led to the kitchen garden she’d already passed. The second went to Hillshead’s flower garden. A third headed toward the formal Italian garden with its fountains and statuary. To her left was Glasgow itself, the house’s elevation revealing a panoramic view of the city and the River Clyde.

She walked to the bench, her shoes crunching on the shells. She sat, contemplating the sight of the city and the river. Her fingers trailed over the knurled wood of the bench. Here was something that hadn’t changed.

She tucked her feet beneath her skirts and remembered.

“I want to make the greatest ships on the ocean,” Lennox once said as he sat here, holding her eleven-year-old self captive with his plans. “Ships people will recognize just by looking at them. They’ll say, ‘Lennox Cameron designed her and it was built at Cameron and Company.’”

She’d listened, enthralled, as he mapped out his future. To the best of her knowledge, he made each one of his dreams come true.

When he was seventeen he announced he was going to Russia and wouldn’t be home for months. Sometimes she came and sat here, staring up at the window of his room and wishing him home.

On this bench he’d told her of school and his trip to the Continent, how he liked Paris but didn’t think it as impressive as Edinburgh. She’d been fifteen to his twenty. How odd that she was the more well-traveled of the two of them now.

Most of the memories of her childhood involved Lennox in one way or another. He was part of her life and she could no more cut him out of it than she could Duncan or her parents.

She tipped her head back and stared up at the stars peeking coyly from behind the edges of the clouds.

Fertilizer, roses, clipped grass, and the damp of the evening rolled over her. She was as far from Washington as she could possibly be.

“What are you doing here, Glynis?”

For a moment she felt like she’d conjured him out of the mists of memory. She slowly turned her head to see him standing there in the shadows, no longer a boy. Instead, Lennox was a man, one who, despite her wishes, still had the power to make her heart race.

Why did he still fascinate her?

Could it be the way he walked, as if he commanded the deck of a ship? Or his physique, with his broad shoulders, long legs, and wide, muscular chest?

She’d seen him nearly naked once, down to his underclothes. He and Duncan had been swimming, and when he emerged from the river she’d been unable to look away. At sixteen she’d known what the throbbing in her own lower parts meant. Ever since that day she wanted to touch him, measure his chest with her hands and let her fingers dance over his body.

Even now he made her think of things no other
man ever had: wrinkled sheets, sweaty skin, and being kissed. She used to wonder what it would be like to be with Lennox, to feel his hands on her naked skin, to abandon herself to the pleasure of loving. With him it would be a world apart from anything she knew, anything she’d ever experienced.