Page 18 of To Wed an Heiress
Her mother looked surprised, then pensive. “I don’t think she is,” she answered.
“She seems unhappy.”
She thought the same thing now.
Ailsa Macrory Burns was tall for a woman and rather formidable despite being so slender. Her beautiful hair was snowy white and swept up into a coronet at the top of her head. Her blue eyes were probably her best feature, large and cool, capable of freezing the object of her irritation to the spot. Her chin was pointed, her entire face too thin, no doubt a result of the conditions she’d had to endure before coming to Scotland. Her nose, aquiline and regal, however, regrettably reminded Mercy of a beak.
Overall, the impression Mercy had was that Ailsa was a force of nature, someone with whom you dealt with care.
She went to greet her grandmother, kissing her cheek as she had always done. Ailsa’s cheek was papery and tasted of powder. Her perfume smelled of lavender and something else that reminded Mercy strangely of grass.
Pulling back, she smiled and said, “You look well, Seanmhair.”
“You look abominable,” Ailsa said, frowning at her. “What are you doing in Scotland, Hortense?”
Mercy tried not to cringe.
Her grandmother was the only person who called her that. Her full name was Hortense Abigail Paula Sarah Gramercy Rutherford. She bore the name of her father’s mother, that of her two deceased sisters and the feminized version of her deceased brother’s name, as well as her father’s middle name. Her parents had acquiesced to calling her Mercy when she was old enough to announce that she hated the name Hortense.
“Mother wanted you to have this,” she said, putting the valise beside her grandmother’s chair.
Ailsa ignored the bag. Instead, she studied Mercy as if disliking everything about her. At any other time, she would never have dared to appear before her grandmother wearing a soiled dress, but what did it matter now since she was wearing a turban and she looked so abysmal?
“What have you done, Hortense?”
“She was in an accident, Mother.”
Ailsa glanced at her youngest daughter with a frown. “Was I asking you, Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth only shook her head. Mercy was grateful that she hadn’t had to travel from America with her grandmother. She could only imagine what that journey had been like for her aunt.
“Well?”
“There was a carriage accident,” Mercy said.
Her grandmother didn’t ask if she was hurt or the reason why she was wearing a bandage. Nor had she asked one question about Mercy’s mother, as if her eldest daughter was no longer any of her concern.
Had the war burned away any trace of maternal affection?
Mercy bent and opened the valise. Elizabeth gasped at the sight of all the money, but her grandmother didn’t say a word.
“What is this, Mercy?” her aunt asked.
“We’d heard how difficult it was in the South. Mother wanted you to have this, but you’d already left for Scotland.”
Elizabeth looked like she was blinking back tears. Her grandmother, on the other hand, appeared to have been carved from marble. Her face was frozen in a rictus of expression. She might look the same the moment after she died. Only her eyes bore any sign of life and they were fixed on Mercy.
“I don’t want anything from James Rutherford,” she said, the words forced through thinned lips.
“The money isn’t from my father. It’s from my mother. Your daughter.”
“It’s one and the same,” Ailsa said. “Do you think I would take charity from the man responsible for the deaths of my friends and the ruination of our farm?”
She stared at her grandmother, not one word coming to mind. Her father had only a small interest in an armaments company. Other than that, most of his businesses were focused around shipping. Did her grandmother think that he was responsible for the blockades of the Southern states? Or that he had done something directly to impact the outcome of the war?
“Take your blood money. I don’t want it. And you can tell your mother that I am not yet pitiful enough to take her charity.”
“It’s an act of love,” Mercy said. “Not charity.”
