Rodina and Una looked at one another. Una blurted, “Is it true, Miss Lockhart? Were ye to marry the laird?”
That was most certainly not what Mared had thought they might ask, and it caught her off guard. “No,” she said, blushing furiously, damn it. “The Lockharts and Douglases are mortal enemies—that is why I’ve been enslaved here as his housekeeper.”
“Enslaved?” Una echoed incredulously, and looked at Rodina.
“Mortal enemies?” Rodina asked Mared, looking quite confused.
“Enemies,” Mared insisted. “And quite firmly enslaved. So then! What are we to do?” she asked brightly in a frantic attempt to change the subject.
The two lassies gaped at her. “Ye donna know?” Una asked.
“I’ve no’ the slightest idea,” Mared cheerfully admitted.
More confused than ever, the two girls haltingly told Mared they were to clean the dowager’s study after finishing the linens. When Mared confessed to being a wee bit surprised, as there was not now or had there ever been a dowager at Eilean Ros that she was aware of, the girls nodded.
“Aye,” Una said, unabashedly rolling her eyes. “’Tis in the north wing that is seldom used. Miss Douglas required the cleaning of that wing every week.”
Did she indeed? Mared knew from her experience at Talla Dileas that when one didn’t have the required number of servants to maintain a very large house, one shut off as many rooms as possible. If Miss Douglas wanted them open, she could bloody well come back from Edinburgh and clean them.
She smiled genuinely for the first time that day, and asked, “Did Mrs. Craig keep furniture coverings about? I’m no’ of a mind to be dusting and cleaning a room that no one will see for a year, aye?”
Rodina and Una blinked at her, then at one another, and then turned twin smiles to Mared. “Aye!” they agreed in unison.
They spent the afternoon inspecting many of the rooms of Eilean Ros, during which time Mared could not help but be awed by the wealth of Douglas. Every room boasted expensive artwork and valuable knickknacks made of china, porcelain, or gold; fine Oriental rugs and French furniture; and frankly, Mared had never seen so many beeswax candles in her life. There was not a single paraffin candle in the lot of them, and there was a room below that held nothing but beeswax candles.
The magnitude of wealth in this house took her breath away. It was, in a sense, unthinkable. When she’d been a young lass roaming the hills around Talla Dileas, she used to imagine she was someone else entirely—a lass with no curse, obviously. But rich, too. Born of the aristocracy. Worldly and well traveled and beautiful and clothed in silks from Paris. She would have imagined herself in a house just like this, too, surrounded by fawning men.
Instead, she was watching Rodina and Una dust and cover the furniture. Their industrious nature was why she eventually rose from the armchair where she was resting and sat herself at a writing desk to pen a letter to the Dull and Stodgy laird.
She had determined, with Rodina and Una’s help, that at least three-quarters of the rooms in the house were so seldom used that it made little sense to keep them open. She’d studiously made a list of those to be closed off—at Una’s insistence, for Una in particular seemed to think the laird’s permission was required.
Mared was not going to ask, precisely. But she did feel it was her duty to inform. And so determined was she in her letter that she was surprised when Una begged her leave to attend supper.
“Supper?” Mared said, looking at a Louis IV mantel clock. “He’s no’ yet rung for tea.”
“He doesna take tea unless he has guests, miss,” Rodina said. “It’s only the laird, and he prefers an early supper. Early to bed, early to rise, he says.”
“Seems perfectly tedious,” Mared opined. But Una explained that she set the servants’ dining table, and that they all dined together at six.
“As early as that?” Mared exclaimed. “Little wonder there is no tea served in this house. What would be the point of it?”
“Aye, miss,” Una said.
Mared shrugged and turned back to her letter. “I suppose, then, I shall join ye promptly at six.” And indeed, a half hour later, Mared made her way to the servants’ dining room, stopping in the main foyer to lay the note for His Highness on a silver tray where she gathered Beckwith collected the post, and then onward, to the room where several of the other servants were gathered.