Miss Lockhart,
I am compelled to admonish you for the performance, or lack thereof, with regard to the laundering. I am particularly distressed about the purple neckcloths that currently grace my dog and the livestock. I shall not inquire as to whose neckcloths they are, for I fear that I shall take great umbrage with the answer. In addition, I rather inadvertently discovered a nightshirt, belonging to me, shoved carelessly under the bed in my chambers. You must have a care with the laundering at Eilean Ros, Miss Lockhart, or I shall be forced to add more days to your employ. Enclosed please find a list of chores that you should complete.
Douglas
Payton heard nothing from Beckwith about his letter. But he did receive a reply the following day.
To the Highly Offendable and Endlessly Aggrieved Laird Douglas:
How kind of you to take time from the importance of being laird and pay such excruciatingly careful attention to my duties. It is sad that you did not find the new collars agreeable, but I assure you, the cows and the dog liked them very much. Nevertheless, I shall remove them at once. And I fully regret that you found the nightshirt as you did, for had I known that you would be on your hands and knees, I certainly would have swept the carpet.
Your Indentured Slave,
ML
Miss Lockhart:
Please do endeavor to sweep the carpets. I have included a list of additional chores.
Douglas
Mared crumpled that response and fed it to the fire as she did all his letters. She hadn’t actually seen the tyrant for several days…but he never failed to send a list of tasks and admonishments.
She did what was required of her. She’d made a halfhearted attempt to repair the small burns in the intricately embroidered fire screens. And she had cleaned part of the wainscot in the dining room and would have completed it all had she not determined she would be much happier if she indulged herself in a walkabout.
On the day Rodina and Una took the drapes down in the sitting room to shake them clean, Mared was caught up in one of Payton’s travel books and had really just lost track of the time. And the afternoon the two lassies spent dusting the millions of tiny little bric-a-brac that cluttered the main salon, Mared had felt unwell and been compelled to lie on the divan, regaling Rodina and Una with tales of the dead Douglases that lined the walls. She was very careful to tell them of the mad Douglas, whose ghost purportedly still roamed the house.
Each time she received a note from his highness, she wondered why he did not deliver his curt little speeches of duty and responsibility in person. And the next time she saw him she only caught a glimpse of him.
She was late to supper one night, having napped too long in the small sitting room of the north wing, and was hurrying down the corridor when she passed the open door of the dining room and saw Payton within, having his supper. Completely and utterly alone.
He sat at the head of a table that could easily seat twenty. It was covered in a damask tablecloth, and candles flamed from silver candelabras all around him. To one side were the discarded silver domes of the meal’s courses before him. He ate in silence, the only sound the occasional scrape of his fork against china.
Jamie, next to the sideboard, glared at Mared—he’d not forgiven her the episode of the paddle—but he did not move or otherwise interrupt the lonely meal of his laird.
Slowly, Mared walked on, but the image of his broad back, of him sitting so regally and alone at a massive dining table, stayed with her. It was a dismal picture. She’d never really considered that Payton had no one, and it occurred to her, for the first time, what it must be like for him living alone at Eilean Ros, day in and day out, rambling about such a large house all by himself.
At Talla Dileas, the plaster fell around their ears, but there were Lockharts all around, and they enjoyed one another’s company.
It seemed awfully sad to be so alone, she thought, but it served him right. No one could bear to live with such an overbearing, demanding, and disagreeable man.
But that night, when she closed her eyes, she couldn’t erase that striking image of him dining alone. And she did not smile, she did not gloat.
She continued to seek him out, but to no avail. Every morning, Mared went to Payton’s chamber first, a little earlier than the previous morning—but he was never within. His bed always looked as if forty people had slept in it—the linens were pulled from the corners of the mattress, the beautiful silk coverlet shoved off and onto the floor. Pillows were strewn on the floor around the bed, as if they’d been restlessly kicked and pushed aside.