Bridegroom Wore Plaid (11 page)

Gil stepped into the breach, feeling a stab of pity for Con. “She’s a widow, Mary Fran.”

“So you saw them too?”

“I did not.” No, Gil had been too busy fending off an attack from a different and unexpected quarter.

“Connor?” Ian’s voice was very soft. “Has the widow put you in difficulties by requesting hospitality you’re uncomfortable showing her?”

The relief on Con’s face was pathetic, but insight struck Gil at the question. Leave it to Ian to sort through all the innuendo and misapprehension to the truth.

“I’m not in difficulties,” Con said. “Not yet. She just… She caught me off guard. They aren’t like the ladies we’ve had up here before. At least, Mrs. Redmond isn’t.”

“You’ll tell us if you need reinforcements,” Ian said after a considering pause. “We need to stick together if we’re to weather this summer successfully, because you’re right: This bunch is different. It isn’t enough to let them catch a glimpse of Mrs. Peason, so they think they’ve seen the Queen. They’re going to be family, God willing, and they’ll solve a lot of problems for a lot of MacGregors. We’d best watch each other’s backs.”

Gil could not have agreed more.

***

Hester slipped her arm through Augusta’s as the ladies dispersed after their last cup of tea for the evening. “I need to talk to you, Cousin.”

Augusta nodded, for Hester was nothing if not tenacious, and avoiding the girl to go mope over a departed cat—or a few harmless kisses—was hardly doing the job Augusta had been brought along to do.

“Let’s fetch shawls and walk in the garden,” Augusta suggested. “The evening light lasts forever here, and the flowers are lovely.”

“Gil says that’s because the days are so long. The flowers explode during the few months of pleasant weather because they have such a long winter to lie dormant.”

Dormant.
The word landed in Augusta’s ear with particular resonance. Tending her garden down in Oxfordshire, she herself had gone dormant in some way she couldn’t quite articulate. She puzzled on this until Hester tugged her arm free.

“Aren’t we going to get shawls, Cousin?”

“We can manage without. The evening is quite mild.” The thought of the dratted tan-and-black shawl was more than Augusta could bear, especially when she beheld the beauty of the gardens in the fading light.

“Genie is going daft.” Hester at least waited until they’d cleared the terrace to announce this.

“Genie is in a delicate situation,” Augusta replied. “For some reason, she has a horror of marriage, and yet the earl would make a very suitable husband.” Wonderfully suitable, and for some reason this rankled. Augusta set this realization aside to consider in private.

“The earl’s title would make Genie a countess. That’s what’s suitable.”

As they strolled along, side by side, Augusta detected no rancor in Hester’s tone. “Are we out here to discuss your sister, Hester, or something else entirely?”

“Two things. Julia attacked Connor in the woods today.”

Augusta managed to keep her expression blank. “Attacked?”

“Pushed him right up against a tree, plastered herself to him from knees to neck—except he’s so much taller than she is, so it was more like breasts to belly—and started right in kissing him. They were not chaste kisses.” Hester’s recitation was remarkably factual, not a hint of glee or consternation about it. “Then she took his hand and… well. When he wasn’t having any of that, she put
her
hand in a location a lady isn’t supposed to even know how to mention, but I’ve heard the lads call it their—”

Augusta put a hand over Hester’s mouth. “Hush, child.”

Hester turned her head with Augusta’s hand still over her mouth. When Augusta dropped her hand, Hester’s expression remained serious. “My widowed chaperone is wandering in the woods, accosting gentlemen she’s known less than a week, and you call me a child?”

“Valid point.” Augusta linked their arms and resumed their progress.

“You aren’t outraged, Gussie?”

“Are you?”

Hester’s expression became perplexed. “I’m surprised, mostly. Aunt is such a nice woman. I never thought…”

“You never thought nice women dealt with the need for closeness and affection?”

Well, neither did I.
But then a certain kind-hearted Scotsman had found her crying over her cat.

“I don’t think Aunt was looking for simple affection.”

“Do you judge her, Hester?”

Augusta waited, because Hester was family, and for some reason the girl’s assessment of the situation mattered. Augusta thought there’d be no answer when Hester dropped Augusta’s arm and strode forward to appropriate a bench near a border of low, pinkish-purple heather.

“I had a Season,” Hester said, arranging her skirts.

“And you were a great success.” Augusta took the place beside her cousin. “I think your success rattled Genie.”

“She’s a favorite. I was a deb. She should not have been rattled.” Hester spent another few minutes arranging her skirts just so. “I like kissing.”

Ah. Of course. “So do I, with the right gentleman.”

Hester’s head came up. The surprise in her eyes would have been comical, except it hurt a little to see it.

“So
did
I,” Augusta corrected herself. “Stealing a few kisses among the roses and shadows is one of the privileges of being out.”

Also one of the privileges of being an invisible chaperone.

Hester’s brows knit, and Augusta could see the wheels in her cousin’s mind turning.

“You’re still pretty, you know, Gussie. You could be wrestling men up against trees if you miss the kissing all that much.”

Assuredly
not
. She’d spent much of the day reminding herself that a whiff of that kind of behavior, and Uncle would send her home in disgrace. He’d been very blunt on that point. Very blunt.

Augusta brought her attention back to the matter at hand.

“You’re disappointed in your elders, Hester. That’s to be expected, but you must forgive us our flaws if you’re ever to accept the same peccadilloes in yourself.”

“So it’s all right to steal a kiss?”

What to say? This was ground Julia ought to be covering, a challenge a widow was far better equipped to handle.

“You don’t steal the kisses. They are stolen from you, but you must use great caution.”

“I know.” Hester hunched forward, elbows on her spread knees in a pose no lady ever assumed in company. “If anybody sees, if the gentleman can’t keep his mouth shut, if word should ever get out, I’m ruined.”

“The gentlemen generally keep such things to themselves, because the behavior reflects badly upon them, at least in Polite Society. I have my suspicions about what’s said among the men when the port is served.”

Hester gave a philosophical little shrug. “We gossip over tea; they gossip over port, brandy, or whisky.”

“There is danger in kisses, though, Hester.”

Hester turned her head to frown at Augusta over her shoulder. “Danger?”

Oh, for pity’s sake… “Men become impassioned, and their manners desert them.”

They took to begging and promising and begging harder, and a lady could lose her virtue in the time it took to brew a pot of tea. A furtive, slightly uncomfortable and very awkward end to years of proper behavior and careful upbringing, and a lady needn’t part with a stitch of her clothing to see it done.

But Augusta couldn’t put it like that to Hester.

“Maybe Aunt became impassioned.” Hester was frowning in thought. “Her manners were certainly nowhere in evidence.”

“Nor her dignity, I daresay.” But what would it be like, to be so carried away with passion that manners and dignity mattered naught? Connor was a very handsome man, almost as handsome as the earl.

Hester harrumphed out a sigh. “It’s silly, to be so hungry for kisses you take to accosting men in the woods.”

“Yes. I’m glad you can see that.” And what Augusta never wanted her cousin to see was that such behavior was the result of loneliness overcoming good sense, breeding, manners, and even sanity. Loneliness coupled with a sort of desperate courage and irresistible opportunity.

“This brings me to my second concern,” Hester said, sitting up.

“Have we resolved Julia’s situation to your satisfaction?”

“You’ll say something to her? I wouldn’t want her to get in trouble.”

“I’ll say something to her, but my guess is Connor is in the best position to say what needs to be said, and perhaps he already has.”

Hester’s face creased into a grin. “Suppose you’re right, and he’s plenty big enough to take care of himself. What I really need to discuss with you is this notion Genie has taken into her head to get herself ruined.”

“
Ruined?
” Augusta barely got the word out, so disconcerting was the very idea. “She can’t be ruined. Uncle will be wroth with me and Julia both if that should happen.”

“I overheard her discussing this with Gilgallon when he came by her sitting room to see about her ankle. She wants him to ruin her so she can’t marry respectably. She was begging him, in fact. I don’t think he was very taken with the notion.”

***

The baron had spent his morning in the library, some damned book about fowling pieces open before him as he’d waited for a shrieking chambermaid to rouse the alarm.

He’d been certain the English spinster would be found dead in her bedroom, or at the very least, quite, quite ill. Either outcome would do, because it would be little trouble to press a pillow over the face of a badly debilitated woman and finish the job in the dead of night.

The rest of the morning had passed, and no alarm had been raised.

When Augusta had sent word she’d take a tray in her room rather than join the family for luncheon, the baron had been encouraged. She was a damnably stubborn woman; likely even poison would have trouble overcoming such a constitution. The thought of laying flowers at her grave cheered him through the afternoon, flowers to celebrate a family fortune finally made secure.

Then she had appeared at dinner, pale and retiring as usual, her only comment that her cat appeared to have run off to go courting in the stables.

Well. So be it. Calibrating a dose of poison was tricky, a calculated risk. At least she’d be leaving her French doors unlocked as long as she fretted over her cat’s whereabouts. A man of parts who could think up one sound plan could easily think up two, or even three.

The baron excused himself from the dinner table and sat smoking cheroots on a bench in the garden. When he spied a certain plump scullery maid scurrying out into the gloaming with the slop pail for the hogs, he rose from his bench, pasted a smile on his face, adjusted himself in his trousers, and set a course to intercept his prey.

***

Augusta rolled over for the twentieth time in as many minutes and sat up.

She wasn’t going to fall asleep, and she wasn’t going to bother the kitchen at this hour to make her some warm milk—which, had she requested it, and had the kitchen provided it, she would have been sharing with her cat, had he still lived.

She sighed with the futility of that thought and grabbed her wrapper from the foot of the bed. The moon had risen and was spilling in through her French doors, which remained open despite the cat’s demise.

The air here was so fresh, so bracingly sweet and cool, Augusta let herself keep the doors cracked as a simple indulgence. Acting on impulse, she tossed the afghan—green-and-white plaid, of course—from her fainting couch over her shoulders and made her way to the terrace.

The gardens were beautiful by moonlight, peaceful and silvery like a faery world.

“Good evening, Miss Augusta.” The large shadow with the low, pleasant voice detached itself from a bench along the wall.

“My lord.”

“Ian,” he said, coming closer. “As we are quite alone. I suppose you could not sleep?”

“I could not, which is silly. My usual ability to rest at any opportunity seems to have gone missing.” She was also missing her slippers, which was beyond silly. He sauntered up to her, his features arranged into a frown as he studied her by the moonlight.

“You miss your cat. Sit with me and tell me about him.” He clasped her wrist in a warm grip and led her back to his bench. This relieved Augusta of the need to demur and fuss and retreat to the solitude of her room, when she really had no interest in such a course.

None at all, and neither did that appall her
at
all
when well it should have.

“He was your guardian cat, was he not?” The earl waited until Augusta took a seat, then came down beside her.

“He was a fat, lazy house cat, but he was mine.”

“He kept your feet warm.”

Augusta’s gaze traveled down to her bare toes. She looked over and saw in the earl’s expression that he’d also taken in her barefoot state—again. Well, let him be shocked, though he didn’t strike her as a man much given to the vapors.