Enlightened (14 page)

“Let’s have a cup of tea while we wait,” she said, adding after a long pause, “It’s so very good to see you, David.”

“It’s good to see you too,” he said honestly. All these months, he’d worried about her, haunted by the memory of how she’d changed following her marriage. And here she was—quite restored to her old self, wonderfully resilient. The only thing that weighed on him now was the knowledge of what he had to tell her. He took a deep breath.

“Elizabeth. I’m afraid I—”

“Wait—” she interrupted hastily. “Let me get the tea on, and then you can tell me anything you like.” She smiled, her voice almost too bright, and turned away to lift a kettle over the fire and fetch a teapot and small wooden box down from the mantel.

“This is my luxury,” she confided, opening the box and carefully measuring out a small spoon of leaves. “Euan bought me half a pound of this as a little present because he knows I adore tea, and I’ve been eking it out for weeks. Tea’s so expensive!” She was so cheerful, yet so…brittle. He looked at her properly then and saw that she was afraid. She had guessed his purpose.

“I’m honoured that you’re prepared to share your treasure with me.” He smiled.

It was a lighthearted comment, but it made her pause, and her voice was serious when she said, “I hope you know that there is nothing I would not share with you. How can I begin to thank you for what you did? You could have been”—her voice broke a little, and she swallowed hard—“you could have been killed. When I heard what had happened to you, I felt utterly wretched.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. In truth, he hadn’t anticipated Elizabeth’s escape would have such violent consequences, and he felt a fraud to be showered with gratitude. It wasn’t as though he’d known how steep the price would be when he’d offered to help her.

“There is no need to feel wretched,” he said. “I am all recovered. And now, coming here, seeing you happy and whole… Well, I am very glad to have seen that for myself.”

She watched him for several long moments, and he could see she was wrestling with whatever she had to say next. When at last she spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper.

“Is that why you’re here? To see how I am?”

The grief in her soft, brown gaze was terrible, but worse was the glimmer of hope.

To David’s surprise, sudden tears welled in his eyes. He’d never been a man for public displays of emotion, but there was so much between them, and he’d never had to bear news like this before.

“Elizabeth—”

She sank into the chair opposite him and reached across the table for his hand. Her small fingers gripped his with surprising strength.

“You are here about my father,” she said. “Is he dead?”

David made himself speak, made himself say the impossible words. “When I left him a week ago, he was hanging on, but barely. You should expect the news any day now.”

Elizabeth’s eyes grew glassy with tears that brimmed, trembling with the promise of their imminent fall as she absorbed David’s words.

“That’s not why I’m here, though,” David went on. “I wasn’t sent to give you that news. I was sent here to make arrangements in relation to your trust. Your uncle wrote to your father after Kinnell appeared at his office—your father was worried.”

“Was he?” The tears fell then, casting down her pale cheeks. “Oh, David, I’ve brought him nothing but grief in his final days! Grief and shame. A runaway daughter deserting her husband.”

“Don’t think that!” David protested. “He was comforted to know you were away, safe from Kinnell. And I was able to promise him I would look out for you—and to tell him that Euan would protect you too. He knows you have friends who will do anything to keep you safe, and he cares nothing for your supposed shame.”

“But I will never him see again,” she cried. “And the last time I did see him, I said almost nothing to him. Alasdair was with me, and I was afraid to speak. His last memory of me is of a silent, frightened girl.”

David squeezed her hand to make her look at him and shook his head. “He has a lifetime of memories of you, not just that one. And in these last months, he’s had all your letters to show him you have recovered and grown strong and happy again. When you ran away from Kinnell, you took his greatest sorrow from his shoulders. There is nothing you could have done to make him happier.”

“Do you think so?” she choked through her tears.

He raised her small hand to his cheek in an uncharacteristic show of affection. Her grief pierced his usual stiffness, made a mockery of his customary reserve.

“I know it,” he said. “I know it.”

Chapter Eleven

As painful as it was to give Elizabeth the news about her father, David was glad he’d been the one to do it. Glad that he’d been able to sweep her guilty regrets aside and give her the comfort that only someone who knew her father could. It had helped David too, the private sharing of grief between them subtly easing his own sorrow.

By the time Euan returned to the house at six, Elizabeth was calm again, though David thought that Euan looked strained. He entered the tiny kitchen, pulling up short in surprise when he saw David.

“Davy!”

Euan’s incipient smile died on his lips as his gaze turned to Elizabeth and then down to something he held in his hand—a letter. He proffered it to Elizabeth.

“It’s from your sister,” he said gravely. “There was another for me”—he broke off, gaze roaming to David again—“but perhaps the news has preceded me?”

David said nothing. He didn’t need to. Elizabeth had already broken the seal on the letter and was scanning the lines. Her expression remained calm, but he guessed what the letter said from the faint rounding of her shoulders and the lowering of her head.

“He’s gone,” she said. “My father died on Tuesday morning.”

“Oh, Lizzie—”

Euan went to her, wrapping his arms around her and kissing the top of her head, murmuring endearments and reassurances. If David had been in any doubt about what they were to one another, he could not have remained so after seeing this. He glanced away from them, touched by Euan’s devotion, but also—envious. The envy was a savage, unworthy howl in his breast, and he muzzled it quickly, ruthlessly, appalled at himself.

At length they broke apart, and as Elizabeth wiped her damp cheeks, Euan took the chair beside David at the kitchen table.

“Forgive me, Davy. I’ve barely greeted you.” He smiled a little sadly. “But it’s good to see you again, and looking so well. We were so worried about you, weren’t we, Lizzie?”

Elizabeth said, “I was wretched with worry when I heard you’d been hurt.”

“She felt responsible for your injuries,” Euan added. “And there was nothing I could say to convince her otherwise.”

“You couldn’t possibly have known what would happen,” David said, fixing his gaze on Elizabeth. “No better than I myself did. The truth is, it was down to rotten luck more than anything—not heroics on my part.”

“Don’t say that!” Elizabeth protested. “I
know
what you did. Euan saw you go after Alasdair. You stopped him getting to me, and in return, he pushed you under that horse.” She swallowed. “You were hurt because of me.”

“Well, now I’m fine,” David said. He meant to sound firm and certain. Instead he sounded surly.

Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment, her expression troubled. Then she said in a small voice, “But you have a cane now.”

The observation hit him like a rock. He had become a man who walked with a cane. David Lauriston, who used to walk twenty miles in a day over the Pentland Hills without giving it a thought. Reduced to this.

He tried to hide how much her words affected him, pasting a smile on his face.

“The cane’s temporary,” he said. “I’m growing better every day. I’ll be returning to Edinburgh soon. To my practice—” He broke off, as thoughts of Murdo—of leaving him and Laverock behind—surfaced again, making the smile on his face wither.

Elizabeth said nothing, but she watched him, her gaze assessing.

After a brief silence, she said, “You’ve changed, David.”

That surprised him. “Whatever do you mean?”

She shook her head, not in negation but wonderingly. “You don’t seem all that pleased to be going back to work. And you’ve always been entirely absorbed by your work.”

Had he been?
Entirely
absorbed?

“Of course I’m pleased,” he retorted. “It’ll be good to get back to it. All I need is a few days on my feet in court, and I’ll be right as rain.” He attempted a grin, but while Euan smiled back, Elizabeth still looked troubled, and he knew he hadn’t convinced her.

Dinner was a pleasant, informal affair. They sat round a little kitchen table, the three of them talking easily as they ate. Elizabeth served up a tasty, if somewhat plain, stew of lamb and vegetables. It was a stretch to serve the three of them with it, but there was plenty of good bread and ale, and, afterward, the apple pie.

David was amused to see that Euan literally couldn’t keep his eyes off Elizabeth. His gaze kept straying to her, even when David was talking, his handsome features softening with affection when he looked upon her. When she made a joke, their eyes met, shining at their shared humour, and whenever she went to rise to do something, to clear their plates or fetch some salt, he would leap up first, insisting on fetching and carrying the smallest items for her.

When he rose from his chair yet again, this time to clear away the remains of apple pie, Elizabeth finally said, in a voice that was one part amused, one part irritated, “For goodness sake, I’m not going to break. I’m just going to have a baby!”

The next instant, she clapped her hands over her mouth, eyes gone wide.

There was a long beat of silence.

“So,” David said at last, tentatively breaking into the oppressive hush, “you’re expecting a child?”

Elizabeth didn’t say anything. She’d flushed a dull red and was staring at her hands, so it was left to Euan to answer him.

“Yes, we are,” he said, and there was a glint of defiance in his blue gaze that just dared David to disapprove, “and we couldn’t be happier about it. I might not be able to marry Lizzie before the law, but she’s the wife of my heart, and our child will be loved as no child has before.”

Elizabeth didn’t say anything, but when she glanced at Euan, her brown eyes shone with trust, and for a heartbeat David felt another touch of that wild, howling envy.

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” he said. “No child could wish for better parents.”

He wanted to be happy for them, but his overwhelming feeling was one of dismay. The child would be presumed to be Kinnell’s under the law and would be at risk if Kinnell ever tracked them down, adding another complication to their already complicated lives.

Finally, Elizabeth spoke. “I was so worried about what my father would think about it,” she said sadly. “And now all I can think is that he’ll never know.”

Euan went to her, crouching beside her chair, touching her with gentle hands. Watching them, David considered how much disapproval their love—a runaway wife and her lover—would attract from the world. Not as much disapproval as he and Murdo would suffer were they ever found out, but more than ample. Realising that ignited something in David. Not envy this time, nor despair, but anger. Righteous anger, at a world that wouldn’t stop prying and interfering, demanding that its unjust rules be followed.

He realised that Elizabeth needed to hear the rest of what Chalmers had said to him. And so did Euan.

“Your father wouldn’t have minded,” he said.

Elizabeth looked up. “David, I know you’re trying to help, but—”

He interrupted her. “In fact, he
didn’t
mind. He told me he suspected about you and Euan, and I can assure you, he wasn’t shocked by the idea, or shamed by it.”

He told them everything then—about Chalmers’s suspicions that Elizabeth was growing to love Euan, and about his hopes for Elizabeth’s happiness. About Mary Cunningham, the woman Chalmers had loved, and about Chalmers’s own personal regrets.

He told them that Chalmers had said that love should not be denied.

It was when he spoke those words that Elizabeth began to sob. Quietly at first, but soon she was crying hard, helpless to stop herself. She turned into Euan’s arms to hide her face while the grief that swamped her dragged tearing gasps from her chest.

“God, I’m so sorry,” David exclaimed, appalled. “I shouldn’t have spoken—”

She shook her head against Euan’s chest in denial but couldn’t seem to form words.

“Come on,” Euan murmured into her hair. “Let’s get you into bed. You’re exhausted.” He helped her up, one protective arm round her shoulders, and looked at David over her head. “Do you mind waiting here on your own for a little while?”

“Of course not.”

“Have some ale. I’ll be back.”

Euan led Elizabeth out of the room and into the bedchamber next door. The house was so tiny David could still hear her ragged weeping, the sound of her sorrow interspersed with the soothing rumble of Euan’s voice as he comforted her.

David sat at the little kitchen table, nursing his ale, half listening to the indistinct song of Elizabeth’s grief through the wall. The worst passed, fading first to hiccoughing sobs, then to silence. Still David waited, tracing the scars on the ancient table with his fingertips and trying his best not to think of his own troubles—of Murdo and the woman he was promised to. Of the months of silence Murdo had maintained, no hint of the truth passing his lips. And of the world that would part David from Murdo anyway, when David had to return to his own life.