To Wed an Heiress Page 14

  “You never talk about being an earl,” she said, stopping in front of a large framed painting of the Caitheart clan badge.

  “It was always Robert’s title. Not mine.”

  “You must have loved him very much,” she said. “I envy you.”

  “I thought you said you had a brother.”

  She nodded. Jimmy was a subject that was rarely mentioned, even at home. Her parents didn’t discuss him in front of her. It was as if Jimmy existed on the third floor but nowhere else, not even in their conversation.

  “Jimmy isn’t like most people,” she said, violating a long-held unwritten rule. No one spoke about Jimmy outside the family. “He will never be older than a child. He doesn’t really recognize people other than my mother and father.”

  “He doesn’t know you’re his sister?”

  She shook her head. “I used to visit him every day, but every day I had to introduce myself all over again. The nurse finally asked me not to come so often, because it upset him.”

  “That must be exceedingly difficult for your parents,” he said.

  Her mother visited Jimmy every morning and every afternoon, always returning from the third floor with a look of resolution.

  Her father treated Jimmy as he did everything, like a task that must be performed. Every night he went up to the third floor by way of the elevator he’d had installed. Every night he returned the same way, pushing Jimmy’s chair before him. The father and the son spent an hour in the large study before her father retraced his steps, talking to Jimmy about his day or plans he’d begun for another merger before returning his son to his modified living quarters.

  Mercy went out of her way to avoid the two of them at those times, only because it hurt too much to hear her father’s conversation, knowing that her brother wouldn’t be able to respond or even understand. Her father wouldn’t have welcomed her pity. Jimmy’s condition—the result of a difficult birth—had never gotten better. Mentally, he would never be more than a child. The only change over the years was that her brother grew larger, the chair was replaced with a bigger one, and the nurse now had a male attendant to help her wash and move Jimmy.

  “Yes, I think it is.”

  “It’s difficult on you, too,” he said, surprising her. “I’m sorry.”

  “And I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “I’m guessing that you loved your brother a great deal.”

  He nodded. “Robert raised me after our parents died. He was the one who insisted that I go to school in Edinburgh.”

  “What would he think about your adventures now? Would he be angry that you didn’t finish your schooling?” Before he could answer, she asked him the one question that had truly intrigued her. “Why did you go to school to become a doctor when you’ve invented all those things?”

  “I needed a profession,” he said. “Tinkering was not a suitable occupation.”

  “I think you do more than tinker, Lennox.”

  He glanced at her.

  “Your airships,” she said. “They’re quite involved and intricate.”

  He nodded, then led the way down the corridor to the kitchen.

  Irene wasn’t there, but the pan of tablet was on the table under the window. Lennox ignored it, going to the cupboard for his bag.

  “Will we need whiskey again?” she asked.

  “To drink or for medicinal purposes?”

  “I think I should avoid drinking it from now on,” she admitted. “It put me to sleep.”

  “I don’t think we need it.”

  To her surprise, removing the stitches took only a moment.

  When he was finished she said, “I thought it would hurt.”

  “Did it?”

  “No. It was just a pinch.”

  Lennox combed his fingers through her hair, an intimate gesture she should have rebuffed.

  She should’ve pulled away, too, when he placed his hands on either side of her face and tilted her head back.

  “There you go, Miss Mercy. All healed and as good as new.”

  “Thank you, Your Lordship.”

  “If I agree not to call you Miss Mercy, will you simply call me Lennox?”

  She nodded.

  His grin startled her. “Would you like to see what I’m working on now?”

  “In the courtyard?”

  He nodded.

  Would he remove his shirt again? That was a question she wouldn’t ask, but she hoped he did.

  Why was it permissible to look at a statue of a Greek or Roman, to admire the form, the sculptor’s talent, and not feel admiration for a living body?

  Not that her interest in Lennox’s form was purely for artistic reasons. That was not a lie she would tell herself.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Lennox put up the bag and together they walked back through the castle and out to the courtyard. The deep blue skies promised a fair day with no rain. Yet even if it had stormed for hours, Mercy wouldn’t have cared.

  The curious thing about being in Lennox’s company was that she felt lighthearted around him. It was as if a smile began deep in the core of her and happiness radiated outward. It was such an unusual feeling and one she’d never experienced.

  “Connor has gone to Inverness to pick up the new sail,” he said. “I’m missing an assistant. Would you like to help?”

  “Yes, but I’ve no experience in airships.”

  “I plan to use you for painting,” he said.

  It didn’t matter whatever he wanted her to do. As long as she was here she would do what she could to help him. That turned out to be applying a noxious yellowish substance to various pieces of wood and then placing them in the middle of the courtyard to dry.

  “What does it do?” she asked, holding the jar up to the sunlight.

  “It seals the wood. It doesn’t make it entirely waterproof, but it protects it enough that if I land in the loch again I can salvage the craft.”

  “Must it smell so atrocious?” she asked, holding the jar away from her. The odor was one of rotting onions and fish.

  “It’s almost perfume next to the liquid I use to prepare the sails.”

  “What are these for?” she asked, picking up one of the narrow lengths of wood.

  “They’re struts to support the wings.”

  Once she’d been given her task, he returned to the other side of the courtyard.

  She was probably not as fast as he would have been at the same task, but she managed to finish one stack of struts, taking care that she painted the wood just as he’d demonstrated.

  From time to time she glanced in his direction. It looked as if he was building the framework of another airship. At the moment it appeared almost like the skeleton of some giant mythical beast. Without its sails, it seemed to be flimsy, almost fragile. How could he entrust his life to a few pieces of wood and cloth?

  Lennox might have escaped unscathed the last two times, but he’d been lucky. Next time he might not be so fortunate.

  He was standing on a crate, reaching overhead to string something that looked like copper wire from the edge of the wings down to the boat-like structure where he sat and controlled the aircraft.

  She was certain that if she hadn’t been there, he would’ve removed his shirt again, taking advantage of the warm summer sun.

  “Why?”

  He glanced over at her.

  “Why do you want to fly?”

  “Because it’s possible. Because men have flown in balloons for decades. Because a man flew in Cayley’s glider twenty years ago. Because the next great thing won’t be a glider at all, but something powered by steam. All that’s left is to figure out the formula.”

  She held up the jar. “Like this?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Like lift, weight, thrust, and drag. What makes a successful glider. I think velocity will have to be part of the formula as well, but I haven’t yet figured out a way to compute that. It’s only a matter of time, Mercy. Every day, we’re making advances
somewhere across the world. Why not here? Why not in this one spot in Scotland?”

  “So you want to be the first?”

  “I don’t care if I’m first,” he said, surprising her. “I just want to contribute. I want to be part of it.”

  “I should think that all of you would get together, whoever you are across the world, and form some sort of club or association.”

  “I do correspond with a few men. We exchange ideas and theories.”

  They lived in two different worlds, not just New York and Scotland. He was a man fighting to protect his legacy while following his interests. She was a woman expected to conform to a certain role. Of the two of them, he had the more exciting life and it was one he had crafted himself.

  She couldn’t even conceive of a circumstance in which she was given a chance to follow her interests. If she even had an interest in anything beyond herself.

  The thought brought her up short, made her turn and apply herself to the task that she’d been given once more.

  Was she that insular? Yes, she had been. Her entire life, from the first moment she’d drawn breath, had been lived inside a luxurious bubble. Nothing was as important as she was. Life revolved around her.

  Lennox was willing to put himself in danger to prove something. She had nothing that meant enough to her to fight for—except for her freedom.

  She’d read newspaper accounts of women who’d been heroines during the war. They’d been nurses or operated as couriers or spies.

  Even Ailsa had kept her farm going in the middle of a war with Elizabeth helping. They’d only come back to Scotland after they’d been burned out.

  The only thing Mercy had done was leave America. Her freedom had been important enough to brave censure and the endless lectures she would receive in the future from her disappointed parents, but it hardly seemed as significant as the actions of those other women.

  Each of them had believed in something outside themselves that was more important than their own safety. Even Lennox’s single-minded pursuit of flight wasn’t for himself as much as to prove that it could be done.

  Her life had never expanded beyond the big gray house in New York. If nothing else, this time in Scotland had taught her that and one thing more: she wouldn’t be able to live in such a narrow world again.

  “Why don’t you get along with the Macrorys?” she asked, desperate to change the tenor of her thoughts. “You both lost someone you love. Wasn’t that enough to bridge any gulf you might’ve felt?”

  “I didn’t know your family,” he said. “I rarely had anything to do with them when I was a boy and then I went to Edinburgh to study and live. I didn’t come back to Duddingston very often. Robert always came to Edinburgh.”

  She turned and looked at him, wanting to know more and hoping that he’d continue.

  “Robert made arrangements with a variety of people,” he said. “Most of them refused to honor any contracts once he was gone. I saw your great-uncle’s hand in that. Our cattle were grazing on Macrory land. I had to sell the herd because I had no way of feeding them. There was a right-of-way your great-uncle forbid me to use. Robert had developed a new way to dry seaweed. That stopped. Even the fishing contracts he made with the villagers weren’t continued.”

  “And you think Douglas was behind all those things? Why would he do something like that?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. No, that’s not true. I suspect I know, but I’ve never gotten corroboration from him. I think he blamed Robert for Mary’s death. It’s always neat and tidy if you can blame someone for acts of nature or accidents. So he was determined to obtain his own form of justice. If he could ruin me, all the better.”

  “Do you think him that petty?”

  “He loved his daughter. He couldn’t see that I loved my brother. For some reason, or because I was a Caitheart, I had to be punished, although I wasn’t responsible for the accident. No one was.”

  He remained silent for a moment and then spoke again. “There are times, Mercy, when things happen. There isn’t anyone to blame. You can’t wrap everything up in a nice little bundle and put a bow on it and say this is why that happened. Life doesn’t work that way. Douglas doesn’t understand that. He’s a scales kind of man. Everything has to be balanced in his world.”

  She hadn’t known her great-uncle for long, but from their conversations at dinner, she got the impression that he and her grandmother were alike. They each had a penchant for blaming others for their ills. In Ailsa’s case, it might have been appropriate to blame the war and the Union soldiers—especially those who’d set fire to her home—for her current situation. But it seemed unfair to hold Lennox accountable for the tragedy that had befallen both families.

  Now it seemed as if both sides were deeply entrenched in their respective positions. She wasn’t going to solve anything in the time she would be remaining in Scotland. That thought joined the others, succeeding in ruining the happiness she felt by being here with Lennox.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Lennox hadn’t expected her to want to help, but once again Mercy surprised him.

  When she asked a question, he felt compelled to give her the truth. It was genuine curiosity he saw in her eyes. Or a wish to understand him.

  It was a heady experience having a beautiful woman look at him in such a way.

  He should’ve banished her the moment he tended to her wound. Instead, he’d lifted up her face, studying her. He’d wanted, in those moments in the kitchen, to kiss her. A forbidden yet exciting compulsion, one he hadn’t acted on but that still lingered in his mind.

  For the last hour, he hadn’t paid enough attention to what he’d been doing. Instead, he’d been watching her, how she was intent upon brushing the solution on each side of the struts, then carefully moving them to the table in the middle of the courtyard.

  He should have given her an apron, but she didn’t seem concerned about her dress. She was an heiress, a fact that he needed to remember. She probably had never been given such a mundane task to perform. Yet she hadn’t balked. Nor had she spoken for the past quarter hour, intent on what she was doing.

  “Why did you come to Scotland?” he asked, letting his curiosity escape.

  She didn’t look at him. Instead, she finished painting the strut she was working on, put the paintbrush back in the jar, and carried the strut to the table.

  Only then did she come and stand next to where he was working on the wing assembly.

  “I escaped,” she said. “I ran away from home. I never thought to do such a thing, but my life was all planned out for me. No one ever asked me what I wanted.”

  “What do you want?”

  She looked startled, and then began to smile. He’d never been affected by a smile before, but something about Mercy’s expression made him want to smile in turn.

  “I’m not quite sure,” she said. “Isn’t that terrible? I’ve spent all that time being certain that I didn’t want what I had. But what do I want? I don’t know.”

  She glanced away and then focused on the ground as if the courtyard held some kind of answer.

  “I don’t have an airship,” she said. “I don’t want to nurse anyone. Or carry dispatches. Or shoot anyone.”

  He didn’t know what she was talking about, but rather than interrupt, he kept silent.

  “I wanted my freedom, but why?”

  “Why freedom?”

  “Why bother?”

  “You’re asking a Scot that? We fought for our freedom for centuries.”

  She pointed one finger at him. “You see, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Mercy, I have to confess I’m totally confused with this conversation. I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t,” she said.

  She didn’t speak for a moment and he wondered if she would continue.

  “It just occurred to me that I have nothing to believe in,” she finally said. “I don’t have a cause. I don’t have so
me abiding interest. There is nothing that fascinates me.” She pointed to the frame of his airship behind them. “That’s your cause. That’s your abiding interest.”

  “Is it important that you have one?”

  She nodded slowly. “I think so. Everyone I know has one. My father’s is his business empire. Douglas’s might be the feud with you, if you’re right about him. My grandmother even has one. Once it was her home in North Carolina. Now it’s hatred. She grooms it and holds it close as if it’s a pet. Even my mother has one: me.”

  “Perhaps you’ll find one,” he said. When she didn’t speak, he continued. “What do you not want?”

  “To be a puppet.”

  He hadn’t expected that answer. “How so?”

  “To be told what to do and how to do it every hour of every day. To have my schedule made for me. To dictate where I’ll go, with whom I’ll meet, and what I’ll say.”

  “Is that how it was with you?”

  “To some degree, yes. But plans were being made for me that would make it even worse. I decided I didn’t want that.”

  “So you came to Scotland.”

  She nodded.

  “But not to stay.”

  “No.”

  “So what will change once you go home?”

  “Me,” she said. Another answer he hadn’t expected. “If anyone asks why I’ve changed, I might mention a certain earl in a certain castle.”

  Once again, she surprised him.

  “Why would I be credited with such a metamorphosis?”

  “It started with you,” she said. “And now you’ve made me think. Although I’m not pleased with my thoughts, I should probably thank you.”

  “For giving you uncomfortable thoughts?”

  She smiled once more and this time he returned the expression, feeling buoyant in a way that startled him. He had that same feeling in his stomach when he took off from Ben Uaine, as if his insides were ascending as he dropped.