Page 60 of The MacGregor's Lady
Asher tightened his embrace, and for a long time, sat in the garden shadows, thinking and holding the woman he could not stop proposing to.
Twelve
Thirty years working for the Baron Fenimore meant Hogarth Evan Cletus Draper—“Howie” to his septuagenarian half brother, though only to him—felt some genuine loyalty to the old lord. Losing his baroness less than five years into the marriage, his one true love, had to be hard on a man who wasn’t likely to come across any more loves, true or otherwise, in the course of a long and spectacularly cranky life.
A sense of duty and a desire to visit the fleshpots of London were enough to see Draper eventually journeying south at the baron’s request. Duty, prurient inclinations, and an entire armed infantry regiment would not have been enough to inspire Draper to set foot on one of those thunderous, smoke-belching dragons of progress known as locomotives.
“Give me a trusty steed any day,” Draper confided to his mount. “You don’t leave a fellow covered in soot hours later, half the realm away from where he woke up. Never been inclined to cast up my accounts when on horseback.”
Unless of course he’d been overimbibing. For a mature Scot of Highland extraction, overimbibing took time, effort, and the sort of stupidity generally commandeered only by the younger males.
“Show me the locomotive that will get you home when you’re in your cups, take you right to your own stables, peaceable-like, and at a kindly walk that don’t alert the neighbors to your lapses, and then wait for you to find the ground and a bush you might avail yourself of before taking his own self off to his stall.”
Young people were all in a hurry these days, racketing about, when the tried and true methods of travel might leave them time to think, to plan, to sort out such cryptic guidance as the old baron had imparted.
“‘Keep an eye on things and see Balfour wed,’ says the laird.”
The horse flicked an ear.
“Not very specific, but then, the laird has been friendly with the poppy juice lately. Makes a man forgetful.” Though no less cranky.
The Earl of Balfour was a strapping fellow whom the ladies would no doubt mob with their interest, and whose title the parents would eye covetously. “And yet, the laird thought the lad might need some nudging toward the altar.”
Nudging MacGregor to the altar would take a team of plow horses, two teams if the fellow were inclined to be stubborn. “Just like the laird.”
On that profound bit of irony, Draper took out his flask—he didn’t journey so far as the privy without it—and tipped the contents to his lips. “Nigh empty, and us barely halfway to Berwick.”
The surrounds were desolate, but only in the way the lowlands could be, an altogether greener, more rolling desolation than the Highlands boasted. And why the desolation should matter…
Draper roused himself from his itinerant reveries to inventory his situation.
“Horse, you are not going unsound on me, are you? Locomotives don’t go unsound, though they explode and crash and whatnot.”
The horse lifted its tail and commented at some length on that observation, but Draper’s senses had not lied. The beast’s gait was getting uneven behind. A stone bruise, a close nail in the shoe, or just damned bad luck.
“Badly done of you, my friend. The nearest inn is five miles back, and…”
Draper’s gelding plodded around a sharp curve and through a stand of trees to present his rider with more bleak terrain, but this vista was graced with a tidy smallholding, complete with sheep byre, stock barn, and cottage.
Hospitality would be forthcoming, particularly when Draper got out his wallet or the farmer produced his jug. Draper dismounted, loosened the girth on his ailing beast, and prepared to rely on Scottish good manners for the loan of a mount, or at the very least, a refill for his flask.
***
“Whatever did the English people have to give up to gain a royal promise of access to all this land?”
Hannah’s question was posed to the company at large. Julia, Connor’s blond, pretty wife, answered.
“The land was in royal hands from the twelfth century, but Charles I came out here to escape the plague in London. When he decided to enclose the Richmond estate, the locals extracted a promise of access to the land. To appease his subjects, Charles agreed.”
Asher watched as Hannah’s mental gears spun for the space of a wink.
“He sounds like an agreeable fellow, as monarchs go, though isn’t Charles I the king who was put to death by his subjects?”
While his sisters-in-law and his sister debated the niceties of regicide versus tyrannicide, and Malcolm tried to interject a list of Richmond Park’s various attractive features, Asher stepped away to check the girth on the bay mare Hannah would be riding.
“Did you invite Malcolm to London knowing he’d appoint himself the Season’s master of ceremonies?” Ian asked, patting the mare’s glossy quarters.
Asher speared his brother with a look over the mare’s fundament. “I didn’t invite him at all. I thought you were the one who collected him in the general remove from the North.”
