Page 38 of The Last Debutante
When Daria turned back, he was pulling the door shut. “There is your keeper, Miss Babcock. Good day.”
She whirled around, almost colliding with a red-faced Duffson.
Twelve
IT WAS THEpianoforte that swayed Jamie to invite Daria to dine.
Of course he’d thought of that moment in the hothouse. He’d thought of it as he’d lain in bed; thought of her lips, lush and moist, her bewitchingly sunny smile and glittering eyes.
But it was the pianoforte that decided him.
When morning came round, his mind was filled with the usual business and headaches of managing the holdings of Dundavie. His headaches were made worse by the fact that Hamish had been lost again and found several hours after he’d gone missing, wandering about the woods and talking about his friend, an imaginary English earl.
As if that weren’t bad enough, a letter had come from Malcolm Brodie, Isabella’s father. He wrote that in spite of everything that had occurred between their families, wiser heads had prevailed, and they believed now that Isabella had cried off too quickly. Malcolm wrote that it was Isabella’s wish that he write to propose a reconciliation.
“Then why did she no’ write it?” Jamie asked, tossing it onto his desk.
“We should use the opportunity to negotiate a better dowry, aye?” Duff suggested.
Jamie rubbed his forehead. Duff was right—they had the upper hand now; they could seek better terms. “I’ll think on it.”
Duff cocked a brow. “What is it, lad? Pride?”
Jamie slanted him a look, but he did not answer. He didn’t really know what made him reluctant.
It was as he was debating what to do about Isabella that he’d heard the music. He’d not heard the pianoforte played since his sister, Laurna, had died giving birth to her first child only two years past. Laurna had been the musician in the family. Trained in Paris, she had played beautifully, and the notes that came from her pianoforte would echo up and down the ancient flues of Dundavie like a melody from the beyond.
Laurna’s passing was hard enough on the clan, and on Jamie in particular, as she and Geordie had been his closest confidants. But the injury to his soul was made worse when she took the music with her. Mr. Bristol, who lived down glen, could be pressed to play the fiddle on occasion, but no one knew how to play the pianoforte, and the clan had resorted to singing in a horrible mismatch of keys and tempos.
There was such a dearth of entertainment, of art, in fact, that Robbie and Jamie had debated hiring a clan musician until one of their own could be properly trained.
They all mourned the music.
So when Jamie heard music creeping in through the vents as he worked one morning, for a few mad moments he thought he was hearing Laurna’s ghost. But then the music stopped and started once more, and he knew it was real.
And he knew it was her, the English rose.
He’d walked down the hallway toward the music room, standing just outside to hear her play. Though she was not as talented as Laurna had been, she played well nonetheless, and frankly, it sounded as sweet as anything he’d ever heard.
That was it, then—the thing about her that might appease his family.
Jamie told them that night that he intended to invite her to dine with them.
“With us!” Aileen, Robbie’s wife, said, her brown eyes wide with shock.
“With us,” Jamie confirmed.
Geordie had picked up his slate and scrawled across it,Donna keep with inimie,thrusting it at Jamie.
“She is not our enemy. She is collateral for a debt,” Jamie calmly reminded him.
That viewpoint was not held by anyone but him and did not garner any support. Rather, it only served to make everyone more cross. Save Hamish, who seemed quite happy with his meal. “Quite like goose,” he said, even though they were dining on salmon.
But in true Campbell fashion, the rest of them flailed their arms and spoke over each other as they voiced their opinions that Miss Babcock was not suitable to sit at their table, that her grandmother had treated Hamish so ill that she ought to be drawn and quartered in the bailey—
“What do you mean?” Hamish demanded. “No one’s treatedmeill. I’m a Campbell, and besides, I’ve no’ left Dundavie in an age!” Forgetting, of course, that he’d been found only a day or two ago wandering about lost in the woods.
The debate continued as port was served: was she or was she not a friend of the Brodie clan, that sorry lot of dung-eating, swill-drinking, grave-robbing cretins who lived on the other side of the hills?
