“Yes, of course I do,” she said before Mared could begin cataloguing the Douglas laird’s many faults. “I’m being silly, that’s all. Payton Douglas is a blackguard and a traitor and something else quite odious that I cannot now recall. Wasn’t it lovely the way he fawned over Duncan?”
“Everyone fawns over Duncan, Anna. Apparently even ogres. If ye know he is the enemy, why, then, did ye pretend as if the prince regent himself had come to call?”
“Because we have heard the news,” Ellie said with a bright smile. “And we shan’t tip our hand to him.”
“What news?”
“This news,” Ellie said eagerly. “When Liam traveled to Glasgow in search of work, by chance he encountered Sir Malcolm, and Sir Malcolm told him that Hugh MacAlister’s sister, Mrs. Reed, has come from Aberdeen to visit her ailing mother. She’s supposedly near unto death.”
“So what news does Aileen bring?” Mared asked anxiously.
“We don’t know as of yet,” Ellie said. “Liam and Grif will set out on the morrow for the MacAlister estate to have a bit of a chat. Grif said that Hugh was rather close to his sister Aileen, and if anyone in the family might know of his whereabouts, it would be her. Not to mention his poor mother’s ill health, which would bring even the worst of scoundrels home.”
Mared caught a breath in her throat. Was it possible? Her nightmare would disappear if Hugh showed himself anywhere in Scotland with the beastie. Yet she was afraid to hope—her spirits had been dashed to pieces by two false sightings of that bloody rotten scoundrel, Hugh. And each time she heard his name, she could not help but think of the little flirtations he’d whispered in her ear before he and Grif had left for England. “I’ll come back to ye, Mared, for I canna see the sun but in yer eyes,” he’d said. And “A Scottish rose ye are. I will carry yer image forever in me heart, and it shall be me guiding light until I’ve returned.”
That, he’d said to her the night before his departure. On bended knee no less, as he’d attempted to coax a kiss from her. Mared had laughed at him, but she’d enjoyed his attention nonetheless, as well as the chaste little kiss she’d given him that very night. The bastard! He hadn’t an honorable bone in his body! “No…I daresay Hugh will be in America by now,” she said morosely, sitting beside Anna. “He’ll no’ come back to Scotland for fear of hanging, no’ even for his dying mother.”
“Perhaps. But where do dogs go when they’ve no place else to roam and they are hungry? My guess would be home, or as close to a home port as one might find in a storm,” Ellie opined.
“And what has any of that to do with Douglas? Why accept his invitation? The Lockharts have never sought invitations to Eilean Ros nor been particularly well received there.”
“But that is the beauty of it,” Ellie said quickly, exchanging a look with Anna. “We shall all be in attendance Friday evening when Liam and Grif return to give him the good news that he is to receive his payment in full, with interest. And not you. And we shall celebrate!” she said with a squeak of delight, and both of them looked at Mared as if they’d already discovered Hugh’s whereabouts and the beastie, too.
Mared smiled, but she could not feel quite so confident. “What if they donna find Hugh?”
Anna and Ellie exchanged another sly look. “Well then,” Ellie said, as she studied the sleeve of her gown, “it would only be natural, I suppose, that we would all attend a rather…well, a rather important event to get better acquainted with our…perhaps future…family…ah, member.”
Mared snorted. “He’ll no’ be a member of this family, Ellie! I’ll never consent to marry him!”
“But really, Mared, he’s quite—” Anna started, but Mared sprang to her feet and strode to the door.
“He’s quite any number of things, Anna, but I’ll no’ lower myself to marry a Douglas!” she said sternly and quit the room before they could extol the knave anymore.
Five
M ared’s instincts, as it turned out, were rather keen—just as she’d suspected, Ellie and Anna’s optimism was effectively doused when Grif and Liam returned from the MacAlister estate three days later, covered head to foot in the grime from the road, hungry, and empty-handed.
Not only was Hugh’s sister, Aileen, quite ignorant of his whereabouts, she was, at least according to Grif, genuinely surprised and distressed to learn of Hugh’s theft of the beastie. Liam was less charitable—he suspected a vile conspiracy in everything the MacAlisters did, and cited Mrs. MacAlister’s recovery from her deathbed as proof.