The driver heaved his bulk down onto the lane. “Frae Edinburgh,” was his terse answer. “Sn’ Andrew’s Square.”
His words doused her aunts more effectively than any downpour—they shrank back into the doorway, as if the dray might contain some great calamity instead of what was undoubtedly some commonplace item—for nothing outside of commonplace ever occurred in their village.
“Nay!” Aunt Isla gasped.
The driver barely raised a bushy brow. “A trunk, it be,” he said as he began untying ropes and peeling back the tarpaulin to reveal the most battered, unprepossessing, commonplace old trunk Elspeth had ever seen. “Where d’ye want it?”
“I’m not sure.” Besides the fact that Elspeth could not imagine how or why she should be sent a trunk from Edinburgh, her aunts’ reactions told her they would be loath to allow the thing into the cottage. “D’you know what it contains?”
“Iniquity!” Aunt Isla’s thin voice was sharp with frantic accusation. “She needs nothing from that huzzy. Nothing, I tell you! Take it back, take it back.”
Elspeth had rarely heard such language from her aunt. “What huzzy?”
The Aunts exchanged one of their long moments of silent communication before it was somehow tacitly decided that Aunt Molly would answer. “That Wastrel’s sister,” she said at last, pursing her thin lips in distaste. “She has a house, so we are told, on St. Andrew Square in Edinburgh.”
That Wastrel being her late, unlamented father. Of whom Elspeth was never to speak.
“Den of vipers,” Isla added in a fervent whisper. “All of a piece.”
A piece of what, Elspeth did not ask. She was too busy overcoming the curious shock of learning she had any other kin in the world besides the two elderly relations in front of her, let alone a woman who lived so close as Edinburgh. The metropolis was a little over twelve miles to the north and east, but for Elspeth, who had never been allowed to venture farther than the next wee village, it might as well have been the farthest reaches of the heathen Americas.
“Why did you never tell me?” She would have reckoned at the advanced age of four and twenty she might finally be judged safe from becoming a huzzy merely by association.
“Because a more scandalous, scarlet woman of Babylon never lived,” was Isla’s fervent opinion.
“We thought it best,” was Molly’s more decorous judgment.
“But she, this scarlet woman”—and if a lass was to have an unknown relation, how intriguing, and somehow inevitable, that she should be a scarlet woman—“has known of me? Well, clearly she has”— Elspeth answered her own question—“for she has sent me a present. On my birthday. But how strange that she should never have written me before.”
Another fraught, stony-faced look passed silently between the two elderly sisters.
“Aunt Molly?” Elspeth faced the eldest of the two. “Do you mean to tell me she has written to me previously?”
“We thought it best,” Molly repeated, “to keep you from the influence—”
“The iniquitous influence,” Isla amended.
“—of That Wastrel’s family.”
Elspeth braced herself for the lecture she knew would be coming following the mention of her long-dead father. John Otis had done three things to earn the sobriquet of “That Wastrel”. First, he had fallen in love with her mother, the Aunts’ lovely youngest sister, Fiona, which had led to pregnancy, Elspeth’s birth, and shortly thereafter, her mother’s untimely death. Secondly, he had written a book so scandalous, licentious and popular that it had subsequently been banned from publication. And lastly, he had, in his grief over his young wife’s death, slowly drunk himself to death, leaving his only daughter to the tender care of the only family she had left in the world—her devoted, but strict, spinster aunts.
“We wanted to wait until you were older,” Aunt Molly tried to explain.
“Old enough to know better,” Isla added.
Well. She was certainly old enough now, wasn’t she, now that she was a dashed spinster?
“Aye, there be a letter, too.” The dray mon slapped into her palm a thick, expensively papered letter with Elspeth’s own name in an elegant scrawl across the front.
“Michty me.” Elspeth gave vent to her frustration with forbidden Scots cant. “What else have ye twa been keeping frae me?”
Chapter 2
“I’m sure you know why I’ve called you here, Hamish.”
Hamish Cathcart, third, last legitimate, and nearly forgotten son of the Earl Cathcart, did not know why his father had summoned him to the dark-paneled book room of his Edinburgh townhouse. Nor did he particularly care. His father’s summons only ever amounted to one thing—Hamish was to shut his smart mouth and do as he was bid.
Which he did do. Sometimes.
Sometimes he played the dutiful third son, and obeyed. And sometimes he only gave the appearance of obeisance, and quietly found a way to do what he wanted without ruffling the earl’s carefully preened feathers.
Today, however, was not going to be one of those times. Because today he had a very strong hunch he knew exactly what the auld mon was working himself into a fine lather to say—Hamish was going to be cut off.
“You can’t think I intend to finance you all of your days. And you can’t expect that after I’m gone, your brother, William, will simply pay you an allowance indefinitely.”
On this point, Hamish did agree with the tightfisted auld bean. He did not think his allowance—indifferently given and indifferently received—would continue indefinitely. Which was why he had never spent the money his father doled out to him as the auld mon assumed, on cheap wine, cheaper women and off-key song. Hamish had, instead, invested it. But with investment came risk. And although risk had its rewards, it also had its downfalls.
And at the moment, Hamish had rather fallen down.
Yet he was more than sure that he could revive himself, just as he always had, and make another modest fortune. An idea was poised at the back of his brain—poised and not entirely formed. Not without—
“—a wife.”
Ye gods. Hamish’s wayward attention snapped back to the auld badger. “I beg your pardon?”
“Did you hear nothing I said?” the earl snorted.
“I distinctly heard you say the word ‘wife’.” Hamish pronounced the word with the same wariness one might speak the words “serpent” or “debutante” or “debt collector”.
“Indeed.” The Earl Cathcart slapped the flat of his palm against the desktop, as if that explained everything. “You need a wife. With a suitable fortune. Luckily, you’ve got your hair and your teeth, if not a great deal of ambition, or steadiness of character, so we ought to be able to take a good pick of the available heiresses. I’ve drawn up a list—”
“We?” Hamish didn’t care if his tone was swimming in sarcasm.
A sarcasm his father willfully ignored. “Of course your mother will have her candidates as well, but I should think I know far better what a young man of your character requires, eh?” The earl allowed himself a chuckle. “I’ve my eye on a few fillies that should take your fancy enough to make it no chore to get an heir off her.”
Hamish shoved the distasteful idea of equating a lass to a brood mare out of his mind, consigning it to the rubbish heap that was the only suitable receptacle for his father’s crude, patronizing view of the world. “As I am not the heir, I’ve no need to get myself one.”
When that pleasantly snide observation elicited no discernible reaction, Hamish tried the prick of a more pointed probe. “And need I remind you of the unhappy state of your own arranged marriage? You’re hardly a recommendation for such an arrangement.”
His father looked down his impressively long nose. “Don’t be crass.”