Page 37 of Tremaine's True Love
“You hate Edward Nash,” he said quietly. “I’d like to know why.”
* * *
Tremaine suspected that just as shepherds passed songs, remedies, flasks, and sheep lore around the campfire, schoolgirls traded insights about all manner of feminine wiles and artifices. One trick girls were apparently taught was that men were fascinated by women who fluttered.
Ladies fluttered their eyelashes, their painted fans, their graceful hands, their embroidered handkerchiefs, much like birds displayed their plumage when trying to attract a mate. Women fluttered their dower portions before the eligibles, and when they’d bagged their man, they flutteredhimlike a prize before all the other mamas and young women.
Lady Nita must have skipped this chapter of the young ladies’ manual of marriageable deportment. Sitting atop her inelegant horse, she was still, calm, and all the more interesting because of it.
“Hatred is a strong emotion, Mr. St. Michael, also unchristian.”
“Hatred is a human emotion. I hated my parents for years, my mother in particular.”
Tremaine had dented Lady Nita’s monumental calm with that disclosure and disconcerted himself more than a little.
“I could never hate my family,” she said as the village came into view. Haddondale was a snug collection of shops and a tavern around a green, and it also boasted a handsome steeple on its house of worship. Lady Nita affixed her gaze to that distant spire.
“I might resent my siblings,” she went on. “I might be vexed with them, but never hate them. I suspect their sentiments toward me are similar.”
She provoked their admiration and bewilderment, not their vexation. “They worry about you,” Tremaine said, “whereas my parents shuffled my brother and me off to my grandfather in Scotland, where we knew nobody, struggled with the languages, and were consigned to considerably reduced circumstances without any explanation.”
Lady Nita gave him the same look she’d worn when diagnosing his Oxfordshire sheep. Considering, interested, determined to get to the bottom of a puzzle.
“Tell me more, Mr. St. Michael. Scotland is reported to be beautiful, and surely your grandparents loved you?”
What had that to do with deciphering Gaelic or subsisting on endless servings of mutton? Tremaine had refused to eat mutton or lamb since leaving Scotland, and he now spoke Gaelic mostly to communicate with his shepherds.
“Grandmama died before I was born,” Tremaine said, “and, yes, in his way, Grandpapa loved us, but his way is stern. My father was titled and obscenely wealthy and very much a proponent of the status quo in France. This, of course, did not sit well with the people starving on his lands while he dressed in silks and grew stout on endless delicacies.”
Or so Grandpapa had explained, but what did a homesick boy care for politics?
“France has been troubled for some time,” Lady Nita said. “Your parents sent you to safety, from which one could conclude they cared for you.”
A memory rose, Tremaine’s last image of his mother as she scampered up the gangplank of the ship that would take her back to her husband and his wealth, her wide skirts dancing in the wind. She’d been fluttering her silk handkerchief in the direction of the sons she’d never see again.
Maybe that memory explained Tremaine’s intolerance for fluttering.
“My father cared for the title,” Tremaine said, turning his collar up against the cold, “and he cared for appearances. We were to visit Grandpapa for only a summer, but Grandpapa refused to send us boys back to France. He demanded that Mama also remain in Scotland, and the comte refused Grandpapa’s invitation on Mama’s behalf.”
“Did that invitation include your father?”
“Of course.” Grandpapa had been at pains to explain as much to the comte’s bereaved young sons. Tremaine’s ire had only increased, to think Papa might also have been saved by accepting a little familial hospitality. Rage at his mother’s desertion had taken years to fade.
“I gather your parents did not survive the Revolution?” her ladyship delicately inquired.
“They didn’t see most of the Revolution.” For which Tremaine had learned to be grateful. “They were victims of their own discontented peasantry and arrogance. They fell ill—lung fever, typhus, measles, I’m not sure which—the harvest was poor, and the physician did not dare treat them in the midst of ongoing riots.”
“Arrogance befalls many of us, but I gather you begrudge your parents their portion.”
No matter which way the lane turned, the wind seemed always to be coming straight at them. Now, Tremaine resented Lady Nita’s calm, wanted to push her off her horse and then gallop away, like the furious boy he’d been so many years ago.
“Scottish doctors are among the finest in the world,” he said. “They don’t distinguish between the intellectual and practical aspects of medicine, as the English still do. In Scotland, there’s no genteel separation between the physician, who literally doesn’t get his hands dirty, and the barber-surgeon, who deals in ignorance, blood, and death, often in that order. Had my mother remained with us, she might yet be alive. I have long wondered how my grandfather could allow his daughter, a woman whom he dearly loved, to return to a country in chaos, much less abandon her own sons.”
Grandpapa was alive and enjoying his wee dram morning and night. Also still quite stern, though Tremaine no longer found fault with sternness.
“Have you ever fallen down the stairs, Mr. St. Michael?” Lady Nita put the question mildly.
“I have not. Why do you ask, my lady?”
