Page 31 of To Wed an Heiress
Mrs. West stood and left the room, leaving her alone with Irene.
“He’s a good man,” she said, looking at Mercy’s pocket. “Once you get to know him you’ll figure that out well enough. It’s getting to know him that’s the difficult part.”
“I can assure you that I have no intention of getting to know him.”
Irene sighed. “He’s offended you, then. Now that’s a pity. I’m thinking that you could go back to America with tales of the handsome Scottish earl you met.”
“Earl?”
Irene nodded. “He’s the Earl of Morton. I forget if it’s the eleventh or the twelfth. It’s one of those. A lot of history behind that title.”
“He certainly doesn’t act like an earl,” Mercy said, having met her share of titled Englishmen. New York was occasionally visited by aristocratic young men eager to be feted and adored by a title-loving American population.
They pranced, these English dandies, affected a certain manner of speech, and were filled with knowledge of their own uniqueness.
Lennox Caitheart had been as dissimilar as a bird was from a fish.
She was torn between wanting to know his story and being irritated at the man. He’d insulted her in his three-sentence letter. How dare he call her vain?
“He was very concerned about your wound, miss.”
“I don’t know why,” she said.
“He studied as a physician in Edinburgh.”
That was another surprise. First an earl and now a doctor?
“Why doesn’t he practice?”
“He didn’t finish. Robert died and he came home.”
She pulled out a chair and sat, giving in to her curiosity.
“Why does he hate my family so much?”
“I don’t think he actually hates them,” Irene said. “Maybe he’s jealous. Or a touch resentful. It’s an old story, one you hear often enough. Mary Macrory and Robert knew each other as children. She went off and married a man by the name of Thomas Shaw. They had a daughter and when he died Mary and Flora came back to Macrory House. That’s the way of the Macrorys. When there’s trouble, they come home just like your grandmother and your aunt.”
She didn’t say anything, mulling over Irene’s words.
“When she returned, Robert visited that very day to express his condolences. Soon enough they fell in love.”
Mercy remained silent. She was not going to beg for the rest of the story, however much intrigued she was.
Thankfully, Irene continued without being coaxed.
“Douglas was all for Mary remaining a widow, I think. Flora might have felt the same, but I’m not sure. Mary had other ideas, however, and the two of them left one spring morning without a word to anyone. They never came back.”
“What happened to them?”
“The carriage overturned. A common enough tale. A sad one in this case. Robert died immediately, but Mary lived a few days. Long enough for Douglas and Flora to reach her.”
“I’ll never forget how they looked when they returned,” Mrs. West said, entering the room carrying a dark brown bottle. “It was as if life had been sucked right out of them.”
“The two of them weren’t just eloping,” Irene said. “They were escaping.”
“Escaping?” Mercy asked.
Irene nodded. “What other people wanted them to be. Robert had always been known as a man who was responsible for raising his younger brother, for caring for the castle. He was responsible to a fault and yet in this one thing, this one act, he wasn’t.”
