Page 9 of Death at a Highland Wedding (Rip Through Time #4)

NINE

We take great care with our route. We stick to an obvious footpath, and when the moon ducks behind cloud cover, we wait until it returns so we can watch for traps. A lantern would have been wise, but anyone spotting lantern light would have been suspicious. I guess it’s better to die in a mantrap than get caught sneaking around with an actual man?

I can joke, but it’s safe enough. We’ve seen the traps, and we aren’t going to accidentally step in one unless we wander into the long grass, which we do not. We follow the footpath until we’re on a small rise near a lake. From here, we have a perfect view of the estate grounds stretching in every direction, rolling hills and stands of trees, with the admittedly impressive house in the backdrop.

Gray opens the basket and pulls out a small bottle of whisky. Seeing it, he hesitates.

“I had this packed earlier,” he says. “That was before dinner and before your whisky sampling. Perhaps I ought to have packed something else.”

“Like port?”

He smiles. “Except port.”

“Whisky is fine. I don’t think we tried that one.” I examine the label. “Oh, wait. We did, and that was my favorite. Excellent choice.”

Gray pours us each a glass and then empties the rest of the basket.

“You went on a pilfering spree, ” I say as he pulls out a veritable midnight buffet of breads and cheeses and meat. “Okay, I forgive you for the lack of coos.”

“Cows.”

“Coos. That’s what I said.” I take a bite of bread. “It’s the accent.”

“We have the same accent, Mallory.”

“Bite your tongue. I have the accent of a Scot without your hoity-toity education.” I take another bite and swallow. “Can I just tell you how weird it was to wake up and not only have another voice but an accent I can barely understand?”

He purses his lips. “I had not thought of that. Yours is very different then?”

“Very. Wanna hear me do it?”

“Of course.”

I clear my throat, drop my voice, and concentrate on hearing a Canadian voice. “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”

“That is… interesting.”

“Flat, you mean. Compared to yours. It doesn’t even sound like the North Americans I’ve met in this time period. The evolution of language.”

“Does mine sound like Scottish people in your time?”

I wrinkle my nose. “Mostly? Catriona’s brogue is thicker. Yours sounds about seventy-five percent like a modern city-bred Scottish accent. I could usually understand those, mostly because of my nan. The country ones are tougher. Catriona’s sounds like what I’d think of as country. Same as Alice or Simon or Jack. More regional.”

“More pure Scot. Less influenced by the English.”

“Possibly. I remember watching old movies from the forties and fifties, and the Americans all sounded vaguely British. Turns out that was something actors affected in that period to sound more cultured.”

“They sounded English, you mean. Not British.”

“Right. Sorry. Someday, I will stop doing that. It’s like lumping Canadians in with Americans. Never appreciated.” I lift my whisky. “Here’s to living in countries annoyingly overshadowed by their more famous neighbors.”

He clinks my glass and then pauses. “However, in my case, we are under English rule.”

“Well, technically, my country stopped being a colony only a few years ago, and we won’t gain our full governing independence for another hundred years. Even then, we’re still part of the Commonwealth, which means we recognize an English monarch, at least symbolically.” I sigh. “It’s taking a very long time to snip those apron strings.”

He hefts his class. “To the demise of British colonialism. Which will end…” He looks at me.

“Uh, someday?”

He sighs, deeply enough to make me laugh.

I take a chunk of roast ham and lean back to stare up at the sky before I surrender and flop onto my back. “So many stars.”

“Which is one thing we have that you do not, yes? Well, you have stars. You simply cannot see them.”

“Not in the city.”

He stretches onto one elbow. The movement is slow enough to make me smile. Not that he minds getting his clothes grass-stained—after all, he isn’t the one to clean them. But it’s like using muscles creaky from disuse, as if he isn’t quite sure how to stretch out on the ground anymore, much less flop down on his back, like I had.

Once he’s on his elbow, he shifts before finally easing onto his back.

“They truly are glorious,” he says.

“Billions and billions of stars. All light-years away.”

“And a light-year is how far?”

I twist to look over at him. “Detective. Not astrophysicist.”

He smiles, and we resume our stargazing.

After a few minutes he says, his voice soft, “Are you still happy here, Mallory?”

I don’t answer too quickly. That would ring false. Instead, I take a moment to find the sincerity he needs. “I am.”

“And you know that if you were not…”

I tilt my head his way. “You don’t need to keep checking, Duncan. I’m a big girl who wouldn’t hesitate to try going back if this wasn’t what I wanted. But I haven’t questioned it for a moment.”

I resist the urge to add in a joke, maybe that I have questioned it when I had to peel back a corpse’s skin and hold it for an hour. Even joking would make him fret.

“I’m here,” I say. “I’m staying here.”

He nods and looks up at the sky. More minutes of comfortable silence pass. Then he says, “There is something I wanted to speak to you about.”

I glance over, but he’s still looking up. “Okay.”

“Since you are staying, I wanted to discuss… That is, I wanted to ask…”

He trails off, and I’m about to nudge when he clears his throat and blurts, “My mother will be home this summer.”

That didn’t seem like what he was about to say. It’s as if he’d had something else on his mind and switched midstream.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s just not sure how I’ll react to this news. The answer is “delighted.”

I haven’t met Frances Gray. She lives in Europe. Currently Italy… I think. She moves around, and mostly, her children go to her, but she does come for a summer visit. Last year, she hadn’t—she’d been volunteering in a community suffering an outbreak of influenza.

“I figured she’d be back,” I say, “considering Mrs. Wallace has only told me a million times that I need to be on my best behavior when she arrives.” I stop. “Is that the problem? Are you concerned about me?”

“Of course not.”

I push onto my elbows. “If you are, you can say so. I’ll stay with Annis while your mother is here.”

His lips twitch though the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “I would never torture you so.”

“I wouldn’t mind. I know I struggle to act like a proper Victorian at the town house. I’m home, so I relax. Simon and Alice and Jack accept the ‘Catriona head injury’ excuse, but your mom might be a lot more suspicious. Like Mrs. Wallace.”

“I am not concerned about that.”

“I’m serious, Duncan. If you are at all worried about my behavior, I get it. Zero offense taken. When it comes to acting like a proper Victorian lady, I’m a work in progress.” I pause. “Or is the issue me being your assistant?”

“Not at all. Isla and I have both spoken of you on our visits, and our mother is only pleased that I have a suitable aide. She knows…” He clears his throat. “She knows me well enough to know I would never promote you for untoward reasons.”

“Good.” I gaze up into the stars and then say, “I’ve been trying to come up with solutions for that. To keep people from making the wrong presumptions.”

I tell him about my fake-boyfriend story, and he laughs softly.

“You… put a great deal of thought into that one,” he says.

“But it won’t work. I know.”

A moment of silence, before he says, tentatively, “Does it bother you more than you have let on? That people make that assumption?”

“It pisses me off on your behalf. That’s what worries me. I don’t have a reputation to protect. You do.”

“But anyone who knows me understands I would not take advantage of you. And anyone who comes to know you realizes you are a worthy assistant. Even if strangers draw the wrong conclusions, they do no more than snicker and smirk, which insults you far more than me. That is what concerns me, and I will admit I have been seeking a solution as well.”

Silence as we stargaze for a while. Then he says, “If strangers presume you are more than my employee, you fear that damages my reputation because… why exactly? Because Catriona is a decade my junior? Or not of my social class?”

“Both.”

“While I would never dally with someone who was actually so young, it would be no cause for scandal. At twenty, Catriona would be more than old enough to form a relationship.”

“I know.”

“And you are not twenty. Do you feel her age? As if you are so much younger than me?”

I shake my head. “To me, we’re the same age. Well, you’re nearly a year older, but that’s nothing.”

“As for social class, we do suspect Catriona came from a middle-class background. Even if she did not, a man of my class wooing a woman of a lower class is only cause for mild scandal. It is not an earl wooing a serving girl. You are a fully independent employee.”

“I know.”

“So… it would not be…” He clears his throat. “That is to say, if it is presumed I am wooing you, that is not high scandal.”

It would be presumed he’s bedding me, not wooing, but I don’t clarify that. Unless we were caught naked, it could be a chaste wooing. He hired a young woman he fancies in hopes of catching her eye and getting to know her better, with an eye toward marriage. As he’s said, the difference in our age and social class wouldn’t make for a scandalous marriage.

“I worry too much,” I say.

“You do, and almost exclusively on behalf of others. If this bothers you and you wish a solution, I will continue to think of one. But please do not be concerned on my behalf.” He looks over at me. “I would do nothing to hurt you, Mallory. In any way.”

“I know.”

Our eyes lock. He seems to hesitate, as if considering something. Then he says, “I do not wish to lose you.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Duncan. Like I said, I’m here to stay.”

“I mean… That is to say…”

He glances aside and then stops, eyes narrowing. I turn to see what he does, and a figure moves in the distance.

I instinctively roll over and flatten to the ground, which would be fine if I were wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I can only imagine how I look, flipping over in my skirts, because Gray’s eyes widen in alarm and he starts bolting up, as if he might need to save me from a seizure. I frantically motion for him to get down.

“Someone’s out there,” I say.

I literally just thought that no one can prove anything unless we’re found in a compromising position. Lying together on the grass in the middle of the night? Even if we’re fully dressed, that’s Victorian for “compromising position.”

Why the hell did we decide to picnic on a hilltop?

I lift my head. The figure is down by the road, making her way quickly toward the house. It’s a woman. I can tell that by the bonnet and shawl. Otherwise…? With the shawl, it could be any of the women in the house with the exception maybe of Alice, who is still too slender to be mistaken for a grown woman.

“Can you tell who it is?” I whisper.

“The shawl is…” He squints. “Brown? Blue? I cannot tell. The bonnet looks like Isla’s, but I will admit to paying little attention to the other women’s headwear.”

“It does look like Isla’s. Any chance she’s slipping out for a romantic assignation with Hugh?” I waggle my brows.

“One could hope,” he says. “While I doubt that would be the nature of their foray—sadly—they could be doing as we are. Slipping off for a night walk.” He cranes his neck farther. “Blast it, I should be able to tell whether or not that is my own sister, if only by height.”

“I was just thinking the same. She’s nearly half a head taller than any other woman here, but I don’t see anything to judge by.”

The figure is a few hundred feet away, hurrying along the moonlit road, with nothing nearby to allow us to determine her height.

She disappears around a bend, and I push up onto my elbows. “You wanted me to meet you at the sundial, which is only twenty feet from the door. Would Hugh let Isla meet him so far from the house?”

“That is an excellent point. No, not at night and certainly not with those traps about.”

“No one should be out with those traps about,” I mutter. “But first Archie is and now someone else.” I pause. “Could whoever that is be meeting Archie?”

“Then it would not be Isla. I cannot imagine any reason for Violet to meet him at night, but I suppose they might, if they needed to discuss some family matter in private. That is, as you would say, a stretch.”

“Mmm, maybe not? We overheard that fight about the whisky business. Violet assured us everything’s fine but…” I look at him. “How shady is Archie?”

“Interpreting your word choices in context, I presume ‘shady’ means someone who is dishonest in business in a fraudulent way. I would not be surprised if Archie was exaggerating his success somewhat. As one must often do in business.”

“Pumping it up for investors. If Violet knows, Violet and Archie could be discussing that. It could also be Fiona, but from what he said to Sinclair about her, there’s little chance Archie’s luring her out for stolen moments together, even if they are marrying in two days.”

“Agreed. The most likely suspect is Edith.”

“For stolen moments? Or business?”

“The latter.” He hesitates and then leans in. “Although, Archie and Edith did have an attachment years ago. Briefly.”

“Romantic or intimate?”

“Definitely romantic. Though it might seem hard to believe, Archie is a gentleman in such matters. He seemed to consider her as a potential bride, but then Hugh broke it off with Violet, and Archie and Edith’s attachment also ended.”

“Because one of them changed their mind? Or because Archie was told not to make any marriage plans, with Fiona in the wings?”

“I cannot say. And thinking more on it, I suppose I should not be so quick to presume Edith would be meeting him for business. That is simply more likely. She could have seen him go out and wish to confront him about her husband’s investment. But they do have a history, and while I cannot imagine anything illicit, there might be a personal reason for their meeting.”

“Okay, so it could be Violet or Fiona, but it’s more likely Edith Frye. And whoever it is, it’s none of our business. However…” I look at the picnic spread around us. “As much as I hate to say it, we should probably head inside so we aren’t spotted.”

“Agree, with equal reluctance.” His lips tweak in the barest of smiles. “Perhaps we might try again tomorrow night?”

“Definitely.” I pop a last morsel of rich cheese into my mouth. “It was very nice. I have even forgiven you for the lack of coos.”

“I am pleased to hear it.” He tucks the whisky bottle and empty glasses into his basket. “Now let us slip back to the house, where you can hopefully get some proper rest.”