Page 38 of Tremaine's True Love
“Perhaps you’ve seen others fall, inebriates, the naturally clumsy, small children. When we fall, our instinct is to put out our hands to break the fall, though that way, we often injure a wrist, a thumb, or forearm. Even if we can manage to break a fall, we’ll usually also suffer injury to a hip, the knees, even the shoulders when we land.”
Her ladyship was waltzing around some female point, though Tremaine had seen others lose their footing often enough to know she also recounted simple facts.
“Did Mrs. Nash suffer a fall?” he asked.
“Well, of course,” Lady Nita said, combing gloved fingers through Atlas’s dark mane. “They all say they’ve suffered a fall, but when we fall, we do not land on our eyes, do we? A blow that leaves bruises around the eyes is generally of a different nature.”
What was she going on about?
“If somebody delivers that sort of blow to me, my lady, I’ll return it with interest or call the fool out.” Though few took on a man of Tremaine’s dimensions when sober.
“Elsie Nash dare not return the blow, Mr. St. Michael, and your mother might have been legally unable to remain with you in Scotland. A married woman ceases to exist as a legal person, she has no more rights than your horse, no more rights than Susannah will have should she marry Edward. Think of your sheep, Mr. St. Michael, in the hands of a careless shepherd. That might well have been your mother’s fate.”
What had the law to do with a man’s moral obligation to keep the members of his household safe? To keep the mother of his children safe?
They’d reached the edge of the village. Tremaine suspected they were also nearing the limits of Lady Nita’s self-restraint, and if the topic didn’t shift, she’d turn her destrier about and go tilting back to Stonebridge.
“I had a violent temper as a boy,” Tremaine said, though he hadn’t exactly planned that admission. “After my parents died, I was in scrape after scrape, until I hit a cousin two years older than me. She was also bigger, taller, faster, and by far the more scientific pugilist. Grandpapa threw me to the sheep after that.”
Tremaine could still recall the startling, fascinating pain of being clobbered stoutly on both ears in the same instant. He’d sunk to the dirt like a rock tossed into a well, and thanked God his cousin hadn’t gone after him with her booted feet.
Lady Nita combed out a braid she’d plaited into the horse’s mane. “Your grandfather threw you to the sheep? Not to the wolves?”
No wolves, but all manner of demons.
“When the shepherds drove the flock up to the higher pastures that spring, I was sent with them. They were a rough lot, but good people. Between the shepherds, the sheep, and the fresh air, I was at least able to attend my studies come autumn. I spent much of seven years in those summer pastures.”
Tremaine had had his first whisky there, his first adolescent heartbreak, his first serious brawls, all among the high hills and lush pastures of the Scottish summer. Those memories defined him in a way he wasn’t comfortable sharing, even with Lady Nita.
This was her village, so Tremaine let her lead him around the right side of the barren green.
“Were you angry at the sheep?” she asked.
“I was angry at everything, at everyone, at God himself. I was the angriest boy who’d ever flung rocks at trees or broken off sapling after sapling out of sheer fury. I regret that destructiveness now.”
This time of year, the center of the village was an acre of dead grass with a bank of dirty snow along one side. Two huge oaks stretched bare branches to the pewter sky; a pair of enormous ravens hunched amid them.
“You regret a boy’s displays of grief?”
That terrible temper had been grief. Grandpapa had seen that as easily as Lady Nita had.
“Much of the Highlands used to be oak forest,” Tremaine said, “but that far north, trees grow very slowly. The forests were decimated to build ships for the Royal Navy—replacing them would take centuries, if anyone were of a mind to do so. I should not have killed trees in an effort to blanket the very hillside with my orphaned rage.”
Her ladyship halted her horse before a tidy Tudor establishment, the Queen’s Harebell, according to the signboard luffing in the chilly breeze.
“We can grow more trees, sir, but we cannot grow another Tremaine St. Michael or another Digby Nash. I’m sorry you lost your parents, sorry you had only the company of sheep and nature to ease your loss. Your mother loved you, or you would not have mourned her death so passionately.”
More female logic, and more truth. Tremaine had also mourned his father and, more recently, his brother. He was bloody sick of what few people he cared for going to their eternal rewards.
Abruptly, he wished he and Lady Nita were not perched atop their horses in the middle of the village street, where all and sundry might see them, because an urge plagued him to kiss the woman who understood small, violent boys and raged against small, violent men.
He swung out of the saddle and came around to assist the lady from her horse. Lady Nita unhooked her knee from the horn and slid down the side of her gelding, right into Tremaine’s waiting arms.
“I had the shepherds too,” he said. Inanely. “They’re a philosophical lot, unless somebody threatens their flocks. They lent me their books, answered my questions as best they could, taught me their songs and how to hold my drink.”
“They taught you how to live despite your anger,” Lady Nita said, her hands braced on Tremaine’s arms. She stepped back, and he let her go, both relieved and reluctant to put this topic behind them. “I gather you never struck another female?”
The question allowed Tremaine a smile. “I’d got the worst of the encounter, which I suspect was why Grandpapa let me confront Agnes. She had a reputation Gentleman Jackson would envy. Grandpapa sent me away thereafter, in part for my own safety, lest my opponent’s five sisters finish what I had so foolishly started. I dowered Agnes with a tidy farm eight years ago, and she’s raising a brood of sturdy girls with her equally sturdy husband.”
