Page 11 of To Bed the Bride
Eleanor shook her head. “No,” she said. “The duke employs an interesting shepherd. An exceedingly rude man.”
“Old Ned?” The housekeeper’s eyes widened.
“Old? I wouldn’t call the man old, no.”
“Old Ned has been around since I’ve been here, Miss Eleanor. He’s getting on in years but you’ll always see him on the glen with his dogs.”
Maybe Old Ned had a son who had been acting in his stead today. Someone who needed to be educated in manners. Although she didn’t suppose a shepherd interacted with people all that much. From what she’d seen of the man she’d encountered, it would be best for him to stay with sheep.
Still, the duke probably needed to know about the man’s rudeness.
The Duke of Montrose’s country house—or, as she’d heard it called, the ancestral seat—was not that far from Hearthmere. The duke was rarely in residence, however, preferring to live in Edinburgh. She’d never met the duke. Nor had he ever visited Hearthmere. Or, if he had, it was when she was a child. Perhaps she should ask Mr. Contino if her father had ever sold any of their horses to the duke.
Hamilton, who had several banker friends, once stated that the duke’s family had a great deal of interest in the British East India Company with a resulting fortune that grew in size each year.
According to one of the maids who had a cousin who worked there, the duke’s home was twice the size of Hearthmere. Yet there wasn’t a large staff in residence. Only a handful of people maintained the whole of the property in the duke’s absence.
She might have been able to cut down on the staff at Hearthmere if her father hadn’t made promises to people who’d worked here for decades. In several situations, more than one generation had served the Craig family. How did you dismiss those people? You couldn’t.
She left Mrs. Willett then, wondering if the woman would hurry to her office to write a missive to Eleanor’s aunt.
Your niece went riding alone, without the company of a stable boy. If that were not shocking enough, she insisted on removing the saddle from her mare and grooming the animal herself. Not content with that behavior, she entered the house with windblown hair and cheeks reddened from the sun. It is all too obvious, Mrs. Richards, that your niece gives little thought to her appearance.
The housekeeper didn’t need to send a letter to Deborah. Her aunt already knew each and every one of Eleanor’s flaws. Occasionally she enumerated them, just in case Eleanor had forgotten. Eleanor wasn’t nearly as graceful as Daphne, who was always immaculate despite the fact that she’d borne two children. Even her two toddlers were always neat and tidy, unlike the grubby urchin Eleanor had probably been. No doubt her children, when they came, would smell bad, have regrettable diaper accidents, and spit up their food when it was least expected.
Instead of returning to her room since she’d already been seen by the housekeeper and several maids, she began her walk through Hearthmere, a ritual she performed every time she came home. Four years now. Four years of coming back to Scotland, of wishing she never had to leave again, of planning ways she could return. Four years hadn’t dampened the wish to live in her native country. Nor had all these years truly eased the loss of her father.
She began at the Clan Hall, the heart of the house. It was as it had always been, cavernous and echoing any footsteps on the stone floor. The arches overhead seemed almost cathedral-like, and in a sense the room was a place of worship. Not to God, but to the legacy of the Craigs. Here they were remembered. Not only her grandfather but his grandfather and scores of men before that. None of them were insignificant even though some names had been lost in the fog of history. They were all Craigs and as such would always be valued and honored.
She stood and walked to the window overlooking the river and pressed her fingers to a pane of wavy glass. Someone had taken the time to gouge their initials into the wood of the sill. When she asked her father why it had not been repaired after all these years, he only smiled.
“I was told that Mary, Queen of Scots, visited here when she was little more than a child.”
“And those are her initials?” The writing was so ornate that she couldn’t decipher it.
He nodded, his smile never dimming. “That’s the tale. Whether or not you believe it is your choice. But no one has ever repaired the damage, just in case it might be true.”
There were hundreds of places like that around Hearthmere, where long-dead people had made their mark of some sort or another, where history came alive and her own heritage was too powerful to ever ignore.
Today, however, she was experiencing a sense of sadness that seemed to hover like a cloud over her.
She made her way to the second floor, to a room at the end of the corridor. Pulling out a key from her pocket, she unlocked the door. She and a maid always dusted in here during her annual visit, but otherwise no one was allowed in this room. Her father had lovingly placed all those items of her mother’s here. Her dresses hung in the armoire. The vanity was laden with the silver-backed brushes and mirror that had her initials inscribed on them. Bottles of perfume, some of them imported from France, sat in front of the mirror.
This room might be considered a shrine, but it had never been her mother’s room and was only a repository for those things she’d liked or valued during her life. Eleanor didn’t think her father had come here, but it was a place she often visited, as if becoming familiar with her mother’s belongings would help her learn about the woman she’d never known.
Closing the door behind her, she went to the trunk at the end of the bed. Kneeling, she opened it and removed the tray containing her mother’s stockings, corset covers, and shifts, putting it aside.
A moment later she pulled out a blue fabric-wrapped parcel. After replacing the tray, she closed the lid of the trunk. Carefully she unwrapped the blue fabric, revealing her mother’s wedding dress. To her surprise, not a hint of yellow marred the silk fabric. It was still as brilliantly white as it must have been on the day her parents had married.
This was the dress she would wear to her own wedding.
Her father had once told her that it was better not to spend a lot of time looking back. Yet it was important not to look forward so much that you forgot to live today. He was always so firmly fixed in the day-to-day of his life, in breeding horses and raising her. She was lucky that she had a treasure trove of memories to recall.
She should take his advice. However, her father had never been faced with the prospect of marriage. Nor of knowing that once married she’d probably never be able to live at Hearthmere again. Michael had his own estate and, unfortunately, no love of Scotland. More than once she’d had to endure his lectures on how politically backward her country was.
Her father had been a true Scot and had loved Scotland and Hearthmere. He’d loved the land, too, and every time she rode out, she missed those rides with him. He’d showed her the tree where he’d marked his initials as a child, surprised that the mark was high above their heads now. He would point to a far off and hazy Ben Hagen, saying that they should go there one day and climb to the very top of the mountain.
She had known that she would eventually marry, but she’d always imagined a life in Scotland for herself. She and her husband would come back to Hearthmere often or even live here. The house would be a lodestone for her, a stabilizing influence.
