Page 60 of The Trouble With Dukes
“I like when you say my name,” he whispered, when they’d satisfied the immediate need for kisses. “Somebody greets this Murdoch fellow, and I look about to see who he might be. Colin thinks I ought to start going by James instead of Hamish.”
“Don’t you dare.”
She’d pleased him. Hamish gazed off down the path, but by the curve of his cheek, she knew he was trying not to smile.
“You speak the Gaelic to me more and more, Meggie. Did you know that?”
“Don’t start going by James, please. I know you as Hamish, and that’s your name. Now tell me why you joined the army.”
His posture shifted. Very likely, the smile had disappeared. “Why do you ask?”
Because she could ask him anything, and he’d answer honestly, not with cousinly discretion.
“You love your home, you’re the oldest, the head of the family. I don’t gather you enjoyed any part of being a soldier, and yet, you served for years. I can’t reconcile what I know of you with your past.”
He unwrapped the reins from the brake and asked the horses to walk on. “Would you rather marry a man who thrived on war? Some said I had an aptitude for it, when I wasn’t disobeying orders, setting a bad example for my brother, or getting captured by the French.”
Despite the smooth path beneath the horses’ feet, Megan had somehow steered the conversation to boggy ground. The breeze had picked up too, and she smelled a shower coming their way.
“Iammarrying you, and Wellington apparently had an aptitude for war, much to England’s great relief. If war thwarted a French tyrant, then I’m glad somebody in Britain was proficient at it. The Portuguese, Spanish, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Poles, and Italians weren’t having much luck without us.”
Hamish was silent for a good hundred yards, while greenery went by in a verdant blur. Megan had little sense of her bearings, which would have alarmed her had she been in anybody else’s company. Whether they were near the Serpentine or Park Lane, wandering Kensington Gardens, or about to come out along Rotten Row, she did not know.
Hamish was beside her, and Hamish would see her back to the Moreland mews. The heavens could open up, thunder and lightning shatter the skies, and Hamish would see her safely home.
“After the Forty-Five,” he said, “many a Scottish family was put off the land they’d worked for centuries, particularly in the west of Scotland. They couldn’t speak English, didn’t know how to read or write in any language, and the whole notion of documentation making a land transfer legal and binding … they didn’t grasp that. After Culloden, a Scottish lad was often promised land in exchange for taking the king’s shilling. He didn’t join up to fight for king and country, or even for the coin. He joined up in hopes he’d be rewarded with a few acres, so his family wouldn’t starve.”
An uneasy shiver prickled over Megan’s arms. “But the Scottish regiments are among the bravest.”
“The Scottish regiments have to be the bravest. They’re always deployed where the fighting is expected to be the worst. The military is smart about it too. In the army, a Scotsman can strut about in his plaid, hear the pipes, march to the drums. At home, these were long forbidden, though they’re fashionable now. So the Scots joined up, and to the horror of the French and the amazement of all the lordlings idling about with their purchased commissions, those farm boys and village lads fought like blazes for their own.”
Megan wrapped her hand around Hamish’s arm, for the shivery feeling had become a chill abetted by the freshening breeze.
“You fought like blazes for your own.”
Hamish urged the horses to pick up their pace, from a walk to a trot. “I fought beside my men. I all but stole requisitions, argued with generals, mislaid orders, and waged a war within a war to see that as many of my subordinates got home to claim their patch of Scottish ground as possible. I keep Napoleon in my prayers, Meggie. Because of him, a few acres of Scotland got back into the hands of the families who deserve them.”
This view of war was complicated and uncomfortable, also intimate—unique to Hamish MacHugh, which made it a precious confidence.
“I did not fight for fat, nancy George,” he went on, “or poor mad George, or any of the damned Georges who came before them. Do you think me a traitor, Meggie?”
“Of course not.”
They trotted along for few minutes, suggesting Hamish had driven them in a great, green circle. Hyde Park was hundreds of acres, but eventually, all paths revealed it to be exactly what it was—a bucolic oasis in the middle of increasingly dense human habitation.
Megan waited for Hamish to say more, but the silence stretched on. Had she given the wrong answer? Why had the discussion—much less the weather—become so bleak?
“Charlotte fancies herself a Whig,” Megan said. “Mostly, she likes to argue. Charlotte is frightfully smart.”
“Siblings tend to think that of themselves.”
“Charlotte is a great supporter of radical notions, freedom, equality, and fraternity prominently among them. She will harangue you about the decline of the monarchy, and the philosophical weakness inherent in the divine right of kings, until you want to leave the room with your hands clapped over your ears.”
Thunder rumbled off to the north.
“I do love you,” Hamish said. “Not only because you think leaving the room is a great rudeness.”
Megan ignored his attempt to distract her, because she had the sense her next words mattered. A lot.
