Page 28 of The MacGregor's Lady
“You’re right in some ways. I am a Colonial by your standards, and that means I’m closer to the lions. We have them in America, mountain lions with no great ruff, but enormous teeth and claws. When I visited my cousins north of Harrisburg, I heard them. Lions don’t roar in the New World, they scream.”
He tapped his spoon against his teacup. The porcelain looked tiny in his hand, the teacup absurdly decorated in blue pastel birds and delicate yellow flowers. She plowed on because he said nothing, but stared at his tea.
“I see the pelts baled up on the wharves. I see the men who spend winters hunting the furs. As a young man, my father was one of those men, and he talked to me of his trapping. He routinely braved conditions like those we faced in Steeth. He went months without hearing another human voice, Lord Balfour. He heard the wolves howling, the lions screaming, the woodpeckers searching for their dinners. He heard the snow melting and the ice cracking as the lakes and ponds thawed. You wouldn’t expect such a man, so full of life and courage, to enjoy being caged up and gawked at like those poor lions, would you?”
The look he gave her was so piercing, it was as if he didn’t see her physical form, but some other manifestation of her. Her words maybe, or her soul.
“Your tea will get cold, Miss Cooper.” He set his cup down, having finished the contents in a single swallow.
“You think I’m daft,” she said, dutifully taking a taste. “I shall certainly go daft if I have to prance around from now until July, pretending I haven’t a thought in my head. What’s in this tea? I like it.”
“Lavender. I enjoy it for a change from time to time, but we can try a different flavor of tea at each shop.”
Where had Asher MacGregor gone? For surely, only the platitudinous Lord Balfour had sat down to tea. “So there’s to be more tramping about, cooing at lions?”
“You didn’t see anything today that you’ll write to your grandmother about?”
Hannah accorded him points for not coming back with a biting rejoinder. “Oh, I’ll write to her. I’ll tell her you can barely see the sun for all the coal smoke here, and the air stinks of it incessantly, which probably accounts for Aunt’s many megrims. I will tell her they’ve had grand churches here for nigh seven hundred years, and yet the Christian charity is so lacking, people probably froze to death on those church steps this very winter. I’ll tell her the wealth of the British empire has long since been acknowledged as coming from her colonies, and yet those colonies still—even decades after the American example—have no representation in the most civilized government in the world.”
“Is that all?”
A lift of his eyebrow and a particular heat in his gaze suggested her verbal rebellion had distracted him from his melancholy, so she forged ahead.
“Your Prince Consort has made a life’s work of bettering the condition of working men, and yet they despise him for his efforts. Your queen leads her empire but has increasingly little to do with the government thereof. This is an improvement, however, over a king who was mad and a regent who built palaces while his former soldiers starved in the streets. The Americas are better off without you English.”
“You are a very opinionated lady,” he said, rising. “One might say you’re even rude—though I do not—but you are wrong: I am not English. My title is Scottish, and my patrilineage is exclusively Scottish.”
This seemed to matter to him, though Hannah was more concerned with the topic under discussion. “I see with my own eyes what’s before me.” She rose as well, and turned her back to him so he might settle her cloak on her shoulders. “I cannot afford to doubt my own eyes, Lord Balfour. I should go mad if I did.”
She wasn’t sure, but she thought he might have given her shoulders a smooth pat—a caress?—as she fastened the frogs at her throat. When she turned sharply to look at him, his expression was as severe as ever.
How she missed the man she’d eaten roast hare with outside Steeth, the man she’d cuddled with.
He tossed some coins on the table and held out his arm. “Come, we’ll lose the light, and the streets get icy when darkness falls.”
Something about their exchange had stifled his running commentary on the wonders of London, and Hannah missed his voice. Missed having at least that much of him attending her.
“I’m not like a lion,” she said as they approached his phaeton. “I won’t bite everybody who tries to extend me kindness.”
“Won’t you?”
Was that humor in his eyes? “You’re the one who was so accommodating when a freezing night loomed, and has become such a pestilentiallordnow.”
And then, when he should have handed her up—always a tricky undertaking, and one Balfour monitored closely—he surprised the daylights out of her.
“I’m sorry for that, for being such a pestilential lord. Perhaps you were a more accommodating guest out on the moor, or more… something.” An apology and a backhanded sort of admission, while he kept Hannah’s hand grasped in his own.
“I was half-tipsy. I can hardly be expected to observe all the finer points of etiquette with a man who escorts me to the bushes.” With the only man toeverescort her to the bushes.
“You weren’t going to go alone, and you won’t go alone into the ballrooms, Boston.”
And with those few words, Hannah again felt the sort of warmth she’d experienced on the wintry moor, a sense of safety and well-being, of resting in good hands.
“Neither will I let you face those ballrooms alone, Asher MacGregor. You’d get to pacing and flicking your tail, and then whatever would I do for an escort?”
Hannah clambered up into the carriage as the horse stomped a big back hoof in the mucky slush. Nimble as a cat, Balfour dodged back in time to preserve his boots from the worst of what might have befallen them.
Six
