Page 99 of The MacGregor's Lady
The feeling engendered in Hannah’s breast at this confidence—for it was a confidence—was a vast, unconditional protectiveness that chased away her own woes and wobbliness. “You loved her. You still love her.”
More silence, while Hannah tucked herself as close as she could without sitting in his lap.
“I loved her as a lonely young man far from home loves a woman given to smiles and laughter. I loved her simply, without reservation, and that was unwise.”
“It was not un—”
He pressed two fingers to her lips. “For a physician to watch his family sicken and die is impossible, Hannah. This feeling you have, this great regard for another you admit to me not once but twice, when you are helpless to protect your loved ones, it builds and builds, not knowing what to do, until it becomes a purgatory with no exit.”
His family? Not just his wife? No wonder he’d wandered for years in the wilderness. She pressed her cheek to his shoulder and tried not to cry.
“Hannah?” He’d dropped his voice to a whisper. “I am not in that purgatory any longer. Sometimes there’s nothingtodo but love as best we can.”
The griefs in Hannah’s heart piled high, like so much snow driven by a harsh, relentless wind into suffocating drifts.
Though the gifts piled higher: because Hannah had come to Scotland and joined her heart to Asher’s, there would be an exit from every purgatory; there was a hand to hold, if only in memory.
The train roared northward on the track between the wide, rough sea and the high, cold mountains, and Hannah told herself the memories would be enough.
***
Asher scowled at the letter before him, a single sheet of crabbed, nigh indecipherable scrawl delivered by messenger right here to the room that served as the Balfour billiards room and armory.
“What does Fenimore have to say?” Across the card table, Ian peered down the barrel of an antique pistol, gun parts scattered before him on a folded Royal Stewart plaid. “Wishing you felicitations on your upcoming nuptials?”
“Hardly.” Royal Stewart deserved better treatment than Ian was giving it. “He castigates me for having ruined a good man by allowing him to become distracted by the charms of the weaker sex.”
Ian paused in the middle of working a soft, dirty cloth down the gun barrel. His fingers were dirty too. “Which good man?”
Ian would get the letter dirty as well, so Asher didn’t pass it to him. “In his peregrinations about the realm on Fenimore’s business, Evan Draper made the acquaintance of one Enid Cooper, late of Boston. Draper treated the lady to a recitation of the ills and indignities suffered on his travels, and she was the soul of sympathy and solicitude—had a remedy for all of the man’s trials, including his loneliness.”
Ian glanced up. “Aunt Enid?ThatEnid Cooper? She’s little more than a fading sot herself.”
“A fading sot marginally revived by the attention of an old flame from her youth, though Draper appears to have routed the competition.”
Which would be downright funny if Asher himself were drunk.
“What else does Fenimore say?”
“He demands we set a date.” Nobody else had had the temerity.
“There isn’t going to be a wedding, is there?” Ian pulled the cloth through the tube of metal and began reassembling the parts.
Rather than face his brother’s questions, Asher folded the letter and set it on the journal that had accompanied it, rose and crossed to the rack of cue sticks on the opposite wall. “Care for a game?”
“Thank ye, no. The baby will going down for his nap soon, and I’ll be taking tea with my wife.”
Taking tea. Oh, of course. Behind the locked door of their bedroom, Ian and his lady would be taking tea, with hispinkyfingerextended just so. Asher envied his brother and sister-in-law their frequentcupsofteaalmost as much as he envied them the way each knew the other’s schedule and whereabouts without even thinking about it.
More, they both knew the child’s schedule, and to some extent, organized their lives around it.
Asher racked the balls, broke, and studied the possibilities. “Whether there’s a wedding or not hardly matters. Hannah has to leave. I have to stay.”
Ian screwed the barrel into its fitting. “You could go with her. I’ve held the reins here before. I can do it again.”
So offhand, and yet the offer was sincere. Asher sank two balls in a single shot, one into each corner pocket. “You have not asked Augusta her thoughts on the matter.”
“I have. We do not agree. She thinks Hannah should stay here. I think you should go to Boston.”
