Page 35 of Romancing the Scot
“You make it sound like you’re defending the Irish against what you call a ‘fraud,’ when in truth you have a prejudice against them.”
“Prejudice?” he said, aghast at her accusation. “Would you care to explain?”
Grace couldn’t believe she’d spoken the words. She knew she’d crossed the line by the way he glared at her. She was not happy about the prospect of backing away from this fight, but how much should she say? The consequences could be dire, to be sure, if he were to order her out of Baronsford.
“Don’t go missish on me now that you’ve dealt the blow. I’d like to know what you have to say.”
Her fingers were knotted in her lap. She forced herself to hold her tongue.
“You can’t remember your past, but you have no hesitation about relaying gossip and—”
“I don’t deal in gossip, m’lord,” she said sharply, unable to hold back. “Within the first two months of serving on the bench, you demonstrated your evident anti-Irish bias, prosecuting them while others involved in the same crime walked away without even facing charges.”
The floodgates had opened and the waters burst through, rushing headlong toward the falls. But she was half Irish and this battle was hers to fight. She listed a half-dozen cases. Some were for minor crimes. In one case, a Scot would go free. In another, an Irishman would go to jail for weeks until the case was heard.
“You don’t know the facts,” he argued. “Justice is not dispensed overnight.”
“You call spending weeks in jail before thepossibilityof a trial for the mere suspicion of a petty offence ‘overnight’?” she asked. “And who is going to feed their families during that time?”
Grace’s head throbbed, and her face burned with the force of her conviction.
“Have you ever asked who these Irish are? Do you pay any attention to the desperate condition of how they live? In case after case, they plead that they cannot find work, even when they are willing to work for a pittance. Perhaps the injustices they face stem from the fact that they’re Catholic. Do you honestly believe you treat every defendant who comes before you the same, regardless of where they come from?”
She knew she was being harsh, but she wasn’t going to give in now. She’d seen the evidence mixed in with all his good deeds.
The viscount stood like a statue, saying nothing.
“It’s no wonder,” she finished, “that the Irish have a proverb:The name of an Irishman is enough to hang him.”
“And this is what the record shows?” His tone was low but dangerous. He put the Macpherson book on the table beside him. “Well, you’ve said quite enough.”
Grace’s chest hurt, and she didn’t feel well. Sometime during her diatribe, she’d forgotten to breathe.
“Please tell my sister not to wait for me in the morning. I won’t be joining you.”
As he stalked out of the library, Grace slouched on the bench and buried her face in her hands.
Chapter 11
Do you honestly think you treat every defendant the same?
Hugh spent much of the night bleeding from Grace’s razor-sharp words.
His first reaction was one of denial. She didn’t know him. She was a stranger. She was no lawyer. She was a guest in his house. She owed him and the family her life. What would motivate her to attack him so stridently? Pacing back and forth in his suite, he stewed over her charges.
As his anger began to subside, he kept mulling Grace’s motivation. She’d been hesitant until he baited her, and there was nothing dishonest in the straightforwardness of her words. Considering the vulnerability of her position at Baronsford, he had to accept that her comments were objective, based on what she’d read.
As the clock on his mantle chimed midnight, the possibility that she was right was what stung the worst.
He questioned whether he did indeed have an unconscious failure to see certain things that affected the way he dispensed justice. Whether his compassion failed to encompass the influx of destitute foreigners who were searching desperately for a place to live and work and raise their families. Was he sensitive only to the plight of the oppressed people he’d been instructed about in his youth? It cut him deeply that his sense of fairness might fail to extend beyond the Africans in England and the colonies, and the Scots displaced by the land clearances.
Speaking with Grace, he’d boasted of his principles and had given credit to his parents. But they weren’t the only ones who shaped him. Ohenewaa, the African healer who lived with them, had provided another powerful foundation during his childhood. Purchased by Hugh’s mother at an auction in order to free her, Ohenewaa spent her final years subtly educating the next generation of Penningtons in the rights and wrongs of the world. And at Melbury Hall in Hertfordshire, he’d grown up among former sugar plantation slaves—Jonah, old Moses, Amina, and the others. Hugh had idolized Israel, only ten years older, and watched him as he struggled fiercely to find a place in society, regardless of having been raised by an earl.
When it came to the evils of the Scottish land clearances, Hugh had his sister Jo as a daily living reminder of the malevolent outcome of landowner’s greed. She had survived, but her own birth mother had not.
Staring out at the moon descending in the western sky, he contemplated the possibility that Grace was forcing him to consider.
He recalled how he’d put off Truscott in hiring the Irish vagrants. What reason had he offered? He didn’t know them. And in his courtroom, he thought of the deaf-mute woman who’d been awaiting trial for six months. He remembered now; she was born in Dublin. She was sitting in that jail while the justices wrangled over . . . what?
