White Regency 03 - White Knight (24 page)

Alastair nodded and waited while Catriona
and Robert bid goodnight to Grace and Christian before leading them from the
room. When they had gone, Grace turned to face her husband. “Christian,
I—”

“He seems an able man,”
Christian said in obvious regard to Alastair.

Grace nodded. “He has been more
helpful than I could have ever imagined. He is a wonderful friend.”

Christian looked at her queerly, as if he
didn’t quite take her meaning. “Has he been steward here long?”

“Since long before my arrival. He was
born and raised on Skynegal land.”

“That is good.” Christian
nodded. “He ought to do well in handling things, then, after you return to
London.”

Grace stared, utterly speechless, as if
Christian had just told her the sky was green and the moon was made of plum
pudding.
Return to London.
He truly thought she should leave Skynegal.
She had of course expected this from him, though not so soon after his arrival.
It was as if he stood blind to what had just taken place before them, to all
that surrounded them in the many faces of the crofters who had watched them
when they had returned from the brae.

An anger Grace had never given in to
suddenly surged through her. “How dare you? Does your arrogance know no
bounds? How dare you suddenly appear here and expect that I would put aside
everything to return to London, abandon these people for a life I had willingly
left behind? Why? Simply because you expect me to? I will not be returning to
London, Christian. I am needed here.”

Christian stared at her, stunned. Grace
strove to maintain her calm. She saw now that she had been mistaken in thinking
Christian had changed in the time she’d been away, for while he might regret
the bluntness of his words to her that night, he still did not hold any true
regard for her feelings. If he did, he would know how terrible the words he had
just spoken to her were.

“Grace, what you have done here is
commendable, but I am a marquess and I have responsibilities that demand my
presence in London. I shouldn’t even have left to come here now, but—”
“Then why are you here?” Christian stared at her. “I beg your
pardon?” “Why are you here, Christian? Why did you come all the way
to Scotland to find me if your presence is so needed in London?”

“That should be obvious, Grace. You
are my wife.” She couldn’t keep the scorn from her voice when she said in
response, “I am the wife you did not want.”

Christian stared at her a long moment.
“I cannot go back and change what happened that night.”

“Was it untrue? Are you telling me
now that you truly wanted to marry me?” “Grace, don’t do this.”
But she wasn’t about to let it go. Not now. Not when he was threatening to
overthrow everything she had come to care about the past months. “Has my
absence in your life suddenly endeared me to you, Christian? Or is it that my
leaving you as I did was merely too much of an embarrassment for you? Can you
honestly say that you love me, Christian?”

Pressed for the truth, Christian could
only fall silent. They faced one another through a long, tense moment.

“I didn’t think so,” Grace
whispered, staring at him hard, suddenly wishing she hadn’t gone as far as she
had. Her insides were knotted and her throat felt suddenly tight. It was a question
she hadn’t really wanted to know the answer to—again.

Grace turned to leave. She stopped at the
door when Christian finally spoke.

“Damn it, Grace! I don’t know that I
know what loving someone means, or if I can know what it means. I don’t even
know you. I need to spend time with you, to learn more about you. There are
things about me you do not know. Perhaps once you learn of the true person I
am, your feelings for me will change. All I do know is that I am here because I
came to realize that I had treated you unfairly in London. I would have come
sooner had I known where you were.”

Grace turned, staring at him in silence.

His voice softened. “Grace, I cannot
know what the future may hold for us. Neither of us can.”

She closed her eyes, folding her arms over
herself. She wanted so badly to believe him, to believe that someday he might
be able to love her as she did him. But could she do what he wanted of her?
Could she return to London at the risk of losing everything she had
accomplished over the past months here at Skynegal? To Grace, loving someone
meant lending support to their ambitions and dreams, yet Christian had been at
Skynegal a matter of minutes and already he had asked her to abandon
everything. He wanted her to leave the very people who depended upon her here
for the uncertainty of a future with him in a place she most certainly didn’t
want to be.

What if once they were back in England, he
cast her aside again as he had before? And what of their child? If she told
Christian now that she was carrying his babe she might never know if he had
changed for her or simply because of the responsibility he felt for the child.

It was too great a risk to set the rest of
her life balancing upon.

“I am sorry, Christian, but I cannot
leave Skynegal. I have begun something here that I cannot abandon. Something I
will not abandon.”

“Grace, from the looks of things and
from what your steward was saying, you are barely making do as it is. Look at
yourself. You are a marchioness, a part of one of the wealthiest families in
England, and yet you wear woolens like one of your tenants. You drink tea out
of crockery cups.”

“Does it taste any better, my lord,
when drunk from porcelain? Why should you be offended that I prefer the
perceived crudities of life here to the falseness of ‘polished’ society in
London? Life here is
real,
not some grand and noble masquerade. The
people may not wear imported silk, but they also do not wear the arrogance you
do with it. When I look in the mirror, Christian, I see a person, not the rank
I was born to. Yes, we have grown short of funds. Feeding dozens of people at a
time is costly, but it is only until I receive the monies I have requested of
Mr. Jenner from the account set aside for Skynegal. I have written to him
thrice now and I hope to hear from him at any time. I—”

Grace suddenly realized how it was
Christian had discovered her whereabouts. She let go a heavy breath as if she
had just had the wind knocked from her. “Mr. Jenner. It was he who told
you where I had gone.”

“Do not blame him, Grace. He needed
my signature approving the disbursement of the funds you’d requested. He knew
you needed the money. He had no choice in the matter.”

“But it is an account left to me in
trust.”

“And as your husband, the management
of the account falls under my direction. According to the way in which the
trust was written, I cannot use the monies for reasons other than the
improvement of the estate, but I can disallow their being disbursed if I do not
agree with the purpose of their use.”

Grace felt a frightening shiver slither
through her. Perhaps it was his use of the word “improvement,” that
term which signified so much more here in the Highlands than anywhere else. But
suddenly she felt as if all she had worked for over the past months was about
to take a drastic turn. “Are you saying you will not release the monies to
me?”

“I did not say that, Grace. I have
only just arrived. 1 will have a look about the estate, to know firsthand what
it is you hope to accomplish here. I will stay for a few days to assess the
situation. Only then will I make my decision.”

Christian turned from his quiet study of
the moon at the sound of someone approaching behind him. In the darkness he could
see Robert coming down the pathway to join him on the shore of the loch. He’d
been standing there for the past hour, maybe longer, pondering his relationship
with his wife, trying to bring reason to this most unreasonable situation. His
years of study at Eton could offer no remedy. “Has Catriona gone to bed
already?” Robert smiled as he often did at the mention of his wife’s name,
a thing he still did even after five years of marriage. “When last I left
her, she and Grace were sitting with James, engrossed in one of Deirdre’s
stories. I never thought I’d meet another who could spin a yarn as well as
Catriona’s da, Angus.”

A moment passed in silence. Two. Robert
said, “Things didn’t go well with Grace?” “Not
particularly.”

“Tell me, friend, if I’m intruding
where I shouldn’t be.”

Christian took up a flat stone and skipped
it carelessly across the surface of the water, watching as the ripples from it
fanned outward in the moonlight. “Perhaps it would do me good to hear a
differing perspective. God knows I’m at an impasse.”

“She won’t return with you to
London?”

“No.”

Robert sighed. “Aye, once Scotland’s
in the blood, it’s a part of you forever. There’s no leaving it behind.”

“Yet you managed to convince Catriona
to leave Rosmorigh to go with you to England.”

Robert shrugged. “I didn’t have to
convince her. Catriona loves me and she knows no matter where we might travel,
we will always come back to the Highlands. Devonbrook Hall is a ducal mansion,
more a museum than a dwelling, and no matter how I’ve altered it, it will
always hold memories of the fire. The other Devonbrook properties are merely
holdings, and the London house is more a convenience than anything else. But
Rosmorigh is home. It’s as much a part of Catriona as that fiery hair and her
Scots’ stubbornness. I’d live there with her even if it were as small and poky
as Angus’s cottage on the moor. But I love her, and love makes a person do
unusual things sometimes.”

Christian stared at his friend,
considering his words. It struck him in the next moment, the very answer to his
troubles—how he would convince Grace to return with him to England.

He was going to have to make her fall in
love with him.

And he had three days in which to do it.

Early the following morning, after a
breakfast of Deirdre’s oatcakes and cheese and Catriona’s own special blend of
blueberry and clover tea, Christian asked Grace if she would take him on a tour
of the castle and surrounding grounds. She had looked at him queerly, no doubt
taken aback by the request, but then, after a moment’s thought, she agreed.

Over the next three hours, she took him
through what surely must have been every inch of the venerable old keep, which
had stood on this site nearly six hundred years, long before the august
Westovers had ever risen to authority. As they threaded their way through each
solitary corridor and time-haunted chamber, Grace related to Christian in
detail the work they had accomplished in the past months. She showed him the
garret where they had repaired the roof and described how they had taken down
the ivy that had once liberally covered the outer barmkin. Skynegal Castle was
a formidable stronghold. The donjon, or central tower, which housed the
residence, rose some sixty feet to the battlements. It was constituted of six
storys
and a garret
housed under a center pitched roof. The private
chambers took up the top three floors, the great hall the middle two, and the
service rooms were at the bottom, all accessed by a narrow spiral staircase at
one corner. Several smaller side chambers had been niched in the
twelve-foot-thick walls for use as dressing rooms, storage closets, or
wardrobes. The two side towers or wings housed the kitchen and its accompanying
chambers, the pantry, bakehouse, kiln, brewhouse, and estate office.

Grace concluded their tour by taking
Christian up to the battlements on the north tower overlooking Loch Skynegal.
Ordinarily when she came here, she would stand sometimes for an hour or more
while the legendary birds of Skynegal soared through the sky around her. The
wind blew in harsh off the loch, pulling at her shawl, and if the day were
clear, she might see all the way to the Hebrides. She would toss bits of
oatcake to the birds and sometimes she would prop her sketching papers on the
battlements and draw the crofters’ cottages that lay nestled in the distance
along the loch shore. But always, whenever she would come here, she would find
herself filled with a serenity unlike any she had ever known, a balanced peace
that seemed wholly connected to this unique place. There could be no doubt in
Grace’s mind that Skynegal had been blessed by a beautiful goddess, as legend
told.

But today even that peace could not ease
the disquietude of Grace’s thoughts.

In the short space of twenty-four hours
she had discovered she was with child and had seen her abandoned husband
suddenly appear. Now she had to face the very real threat of the dissolution of
all she had worked for. All through the night before, she had tried to think of
a way in which she might convince Christian to grant her the funds she needed
to continue her work at Skynegal. She had passed hours in her bedchamber,
poring through texts by candlelight, searching for something— anything—that
might aide her in her mission until the dawn had begun to break over the
Sgiathach Hills, bringing in the start of a new day.

But as she stood with him now on the
tower, watching him as he stared out over the loch, his hair ruffling in
the breeze, her thoughts
were no longer consumed with the future of the estate and the Highlanders. Her
thoughts were of Christian.

Many times during the morning Grace had
wanted to tell him that she carried his child, but had stopped herself each
time from speaking the words aloud. Weighing heavily on her mind was the
knowledge that Christian had been forced by his grandfather to accept her,
something she had come to accept over the past months. She realized now how
foolish she had been to have expected that Christian should fall in love with
her, a woman he had never known and certainly had never wanted. Even now, Grace
knew his only reason for having come to Scotland was a sense of obligation. If
she told him of the child, he might stay, yes, but would he only end up
resenting her for it? Or worse, would he withhold the monies in an effort to
force her to return to England so that she would give birth to their child
there? It wasn’t the sort of life Grace wanted—not for herself, not for
Christian, and certainly not for the babe.

By the time Grace left the tower and
returned with Christian to the estate office it was midday. He had asked if he
might have a look at the estate account books so that he could have a full
reviewing of the expenditures. Grace fidgeted with her teacup as she watched
Christian studying the ledgers across the desk from her. His eyes skimmed each
column but he said nothing, his expression absolutely unreadable. What if he
decided the estate wasn’t in need of further restoration? Surely it was
habitable now, but there was still so much more she wanted to do. If only he
could have seen Skynegal as it had been at her arrival so that he might better
appreciate the progress they had made since.

During that morning, through each chamber
and along every stairwell she had led him to, Christian had listened with
genuine interest as Grace had pointed out all of the renovations that had
already been completed. Would he see the importance of her work here? Would he
lend his support to it?

“As you can see,” she said,
unable to stand the silence any longer, “we were able to avoid a great
deal of expense by hiring the workers locally and then teaching the
others.”

Christian nodded. “It was a provident
choice. They have done excellent work.”

“And we have really only begun the
castle’s restoration. The repairs to the roof were finished just last week and
the curtain wall is very nearly rebuilt. Once that is completed, I had hoped to
begin work on the kitchen.” She removed a handful of sketches she had made
for an addition to the eastern facade from the desk drawer. “You drew
these?”

Grace nodded. “I’ve always had a
fondness for sketching buildings.” She scarcely noticed his amazed
expression as she went on. “The kitchen is now too small an area and a
potential fire hazard. If we were to enclose the courtyard and relocate the
kitchen here, should a fire occur, it would be prevented from reaching the
donjon by the passages here”—she pointed to the drawing— “and
there.”

As Grace nattered on about roof tiles and
window glazing, Christian could hear the passion she felt for the work she had done
at Skynegal in her words. It was impossible not to. Her enthusiasm was
intoxicating. It was in her eyes, bright and alive, and in her expression. And
her passion for the plight of the Highland people was equally evident.

Grace had spent a good deal of the morning
telling Christian about the clearances taking place on the neighboring estates,
describing the evictions and the hopelessness of a people who suddenly found
themselves without resources. She introduced him to many of them, young and old
alike, and told him what each of them had personally suffered. While their
stories did certainly horrify him, Christian, having been born a noble
landowner, understood the motive for profit from the land as well as an estate
owner’s right to do what he wished with his own property. Still, having seen
firsthand the impoverished Highlanders’ state, he could not morally approve of
what had taken place.

The unfortunate fact remained that no
matter how she might want to, Grace could not singlehandedly assume the responsibility
of feeding and housing every displaced Highlander in Wester Ross. There would
come a time when the account set aside for Skynegal’s support would run out. He
wondered that she had even thought of it.

“Grace, I think it is commendable
that you have found a way to employ the displaced Highlanders with the
renovations to the castle. But you must know the work will not go on forever.
Have you given any thought to what you will do when there is no more
restoration to be done here?”

If he had expected that she wouldn’t have
a prospectus in mind, he was to be surprised.

“Actually, I have thought about it
and I have even come up with an idea that will serve to benefit everyone
concerned.” She reached into the top desk drawer and withdrew what proved
to be a map of Scotland with notations and figures drawn upon it.

“Roads.”

“Roads?”

“Roads,” she repeated with a
determined nod. “I have been doing some reading. Some fifty years ago,
there was an English general named Wade who was assigned to help keep peace in
the Highlands when the Jacobite threat was imminent. His soldiers had a
difficult time moving through the countryside so he established a network of
military roads that would give easier access into the more remote parts of the
country. General Wade only built his roads as far north as Inverness and he
used the soldiers under his command for the labor. I have read many of the
publications that have been printed by the landowners who are carrying out the
evictions in favor of the ‘Improvements’ here in the Highlands. Despite the
fact that they greatly understate their measures, their main motive, they say,
is to modernize what they believe are a primitive people whose only ability
lies in rudimentary farming. There are so many other gifts the people here have
to offer, but there are many obstacles before them—language is certainly one of
them. But one of the biggest obstacles I can see is the inaccessibility of the
Highlands. Transport of any distance must be made by water. But if we were to
follow General Wade’s example—”

Christian stared at her. “You are
telling me you want to outfit the entire Scottish Highlands with a road
system?”

Grace smiled. “Not singlehandedly, of
course. I was thinking instead of making a request to the Crown for a grant of
monies.”

Suddenly an image presented itself to
Christian, of Grace standing before England’s own indolent and arrogant King
George IV, dressed in her Scottish woolens, trying to convince the newly
crowned king that he should cease spending Crown money on his ridiculous palace
at Brighton and instead give it over to the aide of the Scottish peasantry.

Good God, Christian realized—she would do
it, too. Was this the same frightened young woman who had viewed a London
ballroom as if it were a lion’s den? Or had Grace never actually been that
person? Had it only seemed so because it was the role he had
expected
her
to play? He hadn’t given her credit for the ability to pour a proper cup of
tea, yet here he stood, in a castle she had almost singlehandedly refurbished,
before scores of people who worshipped her, listening as she exuberantly laid
out plans for spending Crown money.

Somewhere in the past months, in a way
that could not be attributed to any one feature like a different way of wearing
her hair or a new gown, Grace had blossomed. It was in the way she moved about
the estate and spoke with the people with confidence, contentment, and ease—and
even more, with a happiness that had freed her to smile as he had not seen her
do before. He found himself wondering what he might do to make her smile at him
in that same way.