Five
“Well, if you are sure you were not compromised…?” Aunt Enid sighed gustily, her tweezered eyebrows raised in hope. Hannah kept silent, though this was not the first portentous pause in the conversation. “Then we must consider your misadventure merely that. Lord Balfour holds an earldom, though, my dear, and in case I didn’t mention it, earls fall only below marquesses and dukes in the order of precedence.”
“You did mention that, Aunt.”
Hannah tried to focus on her embroidery—her borrowed novels were still in the coach—but making a tidy series of satin stitches was difficult when her mind kept wandering to the bone-deep warmth she’d enjoyed cuddled up with Lord Balfour. The whiskey had something to do with it, but whiskey alone didn’t explain the sense of safety, the comfort she’d felt in Balfour’s arms.
“What do you suppose Lord Balfour is about?” Enid asked, eyeing her own hoop of fabric.
“I expect he’s seeing to the repair of the coach wheel.”
“One would think the household of an earl would at least boast safe conveyances.”
“The moors boast rocks,” Hannah said, stabbing her needle up through the middle of a French knot.
Enid put down her hoop and studied Hannah by the meager light of the fire burning in the raised hearth of their little parlor.
“If you had been compromised… I’m not saying you were, but if you had been, you’d be a countess and wealthy. Your step-papa told me in no uncertain terms we were to be escorted about London by an eligible fellow with a substantial fortune. Some old cousin of a cousin owed him a favor, Hannah. My brother does not squander the favors he’s owed.”
He squandered the happiness of all in his ambit instead.
“I’m wealthy now, Aunt, and a titled husband will take over my fortune every bit as readily as a plain mister.”
Though for all her wealth, Hannah had felt a greater sense of well-being out on the moors with Balfour than she’d ever felt in Boston’s finest neighborhood. Did the man have to be so clever at avoiding social ruin?
Not that Hannah would have married him, of course.
Enid put aside her hoop, her expression as animated as if a new patent remedy were under discussion. “My dear, you forget your pin money. The pin money will be spelled out in the settlements, all completely legal, and your pin money will be yours to spend as you wish.”
They’d had this discussion on board ship at least a dozen times.
“I believe I’ll step out for a bit of air.”
Before Enid could flutter in protest or assign Hannah a half-dozen errands to tend to first, Hannah was out of the parlor and on her way upstairs to their rooms. Thank a merciful God, the inn was as Lord Balfour had suggested, commodious and clean. Hannah shared a small suite with Enid; Balfour’s room was across the hall.
The day had become brilliantly sunny, and the eaves were again dripping. By night, all would freeze, which meant moving around in the milder air held even greater appeal.
The village of Steeth was an old market town, complete with a common, a church, and the usual variety of shops. Hannah walked a shoveled path encircling the common, and as she came back toward the inn, saw their traveling coach in the yard on the same side as a smithy’s shop.
Men loitered about, two holding horses, while boys scampered around underfoot. A wainwright inspected the coach wheels, peering into the undercarriage and trading insults with the blacksmith.
Except it wasn’t the smith. The man emerging from the gloom of the smithy, standing there without his shirt, naked to the waist and bulging with muscles was none other than Lord Balfour.
God in heaven, no wonder he’d been able to keep the chill off her. Hannah scooted around to watch as Balfour braced the coach, then hoisted it so the wainwright—no delicate flower himself—could wrestle the wheel back onto the axle. The two men continued taunting each other, with Balfour’s tone—and his physique—suggesting he could hold up a wagon all day if need be.
And all the while, his chest, arms, and back bunched and rippled with his every breath.
She’d seen men without their shirts, even seen fit young men laboring without their shirts, but this… Steam rose off Balfour’s shoulders, as if he were some magnificent Vulcan come to the shires for his own entertainment. He hadn’t yet shaved, and his countenance was darker than ever. The skin of his arms, belly, and chest had the same sun-bronzed hue as his face, and when he smiled at her, his teeth fairly gleamed…
She’d been found out.
Caught gawking like a schoolgirl. Hannah turned without acknowledging Lord Balfour or his smile. The Englishmen she’d met in her father’s parlor would have expired of mortification if she’d seen them without their shirts as others looked on.
Nor would she have wanted to see them.
How long she churned around the little common she could not have said, but at some point, she became aware that she was sharing the path.
“Just think,” Balfour said. “All that vulgar muscle could have become your sentence for life had I not prevailed on the goodwife in the dale and her spouse.”
He wouldn’t be a sentence; he’d be a citadel. “And I haven’t thanked you yet.” She did thank heavens, though, that he was once again properly clad, right down to his many-caped coat.
“You’re thanking me for coming across a convenient way to avoid a marriage between us?”
“I do thank you for that,” she said, “but compared to preserving my life when the elements were threatening a dire fate, preserving me from scandal comes a distant second.”
“So you would not have married me had we been found out on the moor cuddled up in our bide-a-wee?”
Hannah couldn’t read his expression. She would not have married him—earls needed to stick close to their earldoms, even a Boston heiress grasped that much—but, wonder of wonders, she would have been tempted.
Hannah liked Balfour, she respected him, and—most curious of all—she trusted him. “I think it more the case we would not have married each other.”
“Despite the display you came upon in the smithy’s yard, I am a gentleman, Miss Cooper. I would have had no choice.”
“I know.” And that had bothered her most as the sleigh had taken them back to town.
“What do you think you know?”
“You didn’t enact that little charade in the dale to protect my good name or to preserve my marital options this spring. You did it to preserve your own.”
She dropped his arm—when had she taken his arm?—and tried to make a dignified retreat, but he kept up with her easily.
“This bothers you?” His tone was jaunty, and yet the topic mattered to him, or he wouldn’t have raised it. “It bothers you somebody might want the same freedoms you seek to appropriate for yourself?”
They were in view of the smithy again, with its complement of men passing the time of day with one another. Hannah had never thought of a smithy as a dark, mysterious place before, never had the urge to linger where she could watch one from the shadows.
If Hannah claimed the right to remain unfettered by marriage, she had to accord Balfour the same latitude. She also accorded him a bit of honesty. “I am not used to being rejected.”
The words had come straight from her brain to her mouth, the insight striking her even as she spoke. She was used to being marginalized, not quite rejected, but tethered to the fringes of acceptability by a stout rope of inherited fortune—or had she simply decided she preferred to dwell there?
Balfour—he’d given her permission to call him Asher—picked up her hand and tucked it around his forearm. A forearm she could now visualize thick with muscle, dusted with the same dark hair as he had in such abundance on his head. That hair was downy soft. She’d felt it against her cheek the night before as he’d drawn her body close to his.
“Ah,” said his lordship, but it was a teasing “ah,” not an insulting one.
“Ah, what?”
“I wasn’t rejecting you, Miss Cooper, I was protecting your dreams. Don’t pull away, if you please. The last thing we need is for you to do yourself another injury and delay us yet more on our way to London.”
In his words, in his jocular discussion of reasons not to marry each other, Balfour did Hannah’s heart an injury—a small injury. She kept silent, took a firm hold of his arm, and walked more quickly in the direction of the inn.
***
Miss Cooper flinched at his reference to her clumsiness, and Asher had to stifle an apology. He hadn’t meant to be scathing, but the woman was as uncomfortable being beholden to another as… Asher was himself.
“How long will we tarry here in Steeth?” she asked.
“Anxious to take London by storm?”
“Anxious, yes.”
She was looking about her with the same honest curiosity she’d shown upon landing in Edinburgh, though Asher suspected she’d allowed another small truth to slip past her full, unsmiling lips.
“Are you truly fretting over what most young ladies consider the dream of a lifetime?” He subtly checked their pace, which the lady had increased to something between headlong and unseemly. Another fall on the ice would not do, but neither was he in a hurry to return her to her aunt’s dubious company.
“A London Season with all the trimmings is the dream of a lifetime? Consider, Lord Balfour, much of the Season transpires in ballrooms, and I do not dance.”
He’d asked her to call him Asher, but now, when they’d narrowly escaped a forced betrothal, she exhibited a fine command of proper address. “There are always musicales.”
“I do not perform reliably or sing worth the name.”
His brother Gil was the family charmer, while Con was a font of common sense. Ian, however, was the family lawyer, and from him, Asher had learned to hear the difference between “I do not perform reliably” and “I cannot perform reliably.”
Miss Cooper, Miss Cooper. For a lady who limped, she was adept at kicking snow over open flames. “What about Venetian breakfasts?”
“Where the primary fare is gossip, in which I do not indulge.”
“I believe we’ve had this discussion, but we must add swanning to the list, and I forget what else.” He was being nasty, and it was unlike him. “My apologies, Miss Cooper. I am not enjoying the delay any more than you are.”
“You enjoyed repairing the wagon.”
He saw no spite in her expression. Perhaps a little female curiosity, such as he’d seen when she caught him sweating off his stint at the forge, or maybe longing, because physical brawn was denied to genteel ladies.
“I enjoy being able to fix what’s amiss.” This was something about the practice of medicine—when it went well—that he missed. “I like being able to address my situation myself, though I know this is a lamentable tendency in a man headed for an earldom rife with servants and toadies.”
“I don’t hear you lamenting.”
“Like you, I have a list of behaviors in which I do not indulge. Shall we return you to the inn?”
She glanced again toward the smithy. The place was nothing special, a typical village blacksmith’s shop, where by the nature of the work, men congregated and passed the time of day while horses were shod or tools were repaired. The forge kept the interior blisteringly hot even on bitter days.
She’d seen him with his shirt off. It hit him low in the gut that she’d seen not just his ungentlemanly muscles, but also his un-English complexion. His un-Scottish complexion, in fact. She was an intelligent woman; she’d realize he wasn’t suffering from excessive sun on his entire body in March.
“The inn is comfortable, as you promised us,” she said, “but you haven’t answered my question, Lord Balfour. How long will we tarry? My aunt’s company in close quarters is not easy to bear, though she means well and tries hard.”
“Playing If-Only and Isn’t-It-a-Shame until you’ve lost your reason?” Aunt Enid and Uncle Fen would have much in common.
“She tries to be helpful, my lord.”
Would he be so charitable toward his uncle? “We’ll leave at first light, and the journey from here is easier, because we’re close to the coast where the water moderates the worst of the weather. We’ll hop the train in Berwick and be in Town in no time.”
She put her hand back on his arm, but lightly, just for show, which along with Miss Cooper’s my-lording, depressed Asher’s mood yet further.
***
“You might as well see the sights while we’re waiting for our wardrobes to be made ready.” Enid paused while winding soft ivory yarn into a ball. “That cat’s stare is the most unnerving thing. I don’t believe I’ve seen an animal with two different colored eyes like that.”
“Several of them live in Lord Balfour’s stables,” Hannah said as the white cat near the hearth took a bath. The animal boasted one blue eye and one green eye, and both were beautiful, though the whole was disconcerting. “Several in the mews, I mean. Balfour says there’s a mama cat who has one or so per litter.”
Not Asher, for Hannah was determined to avoid familiarities with the man—further familiarities, rather.
“Well, why isn’t this one in the mews, then? And how can you have an objection to seeing the Tower, the Menagerie, the churches, and cathedrals? This is your heritage too, you know. Your family isn’t all Colonial savages and backwoodsmen.”
“I’m aware of my heritage.” Which included a backwoodsman or two, but the only savage Hannah knew was her step-papa. “Why don’t you accompany Lord Balfour, and I’ll remain here?”
The London town house sported a small library, which boasted more medical treatises and novels than the northern collection had. Hannah looked forward to becoming well acquainted with its offerings, and to neglecting her embroidery shamelessly.
“For you to remain home will not do, Hannah. The Season starts in only a few weeks, and you won’t have time for sightseeing. Besides, your restlessness is irksome. You will go, and I will stay home, for I feel a megrim coming on and must away to my bed.”
Aunt was becoming a sot. Even now, a tisane that was more brandy than tea sat at her elbow. “This is your second megrim this week.”
“It’s the weight of expectation regarding your Season, and all the shopping yet to do.” Aunt put the back of her hand to her forehead, as if feeling for a fever, and Hannah knew she’d just been trounced.
Though Aunt had a point. Being confined in Balfour’s London town house for the past three days was taking a toll. Even if it meant putting up with his company, Hannah would feel better for getting out of the house and away from her aunt.
“Miss Enid isn’t coming with us?” Balfour asked when Hannah met him at the foot of the stairs.
“A megrim stalks her.”
He picked up the cat that had followed Hannah from the parlor, and the beast began purring and rubbing its cheek against Balfour’s chest. “Have you considered taking all of her patent remedies and nostrums in hand? Somebody should. It’s easy to misjudge when you’re using so many at once, and half of them are more poison than medication.”
This was a physician trying to masquerade as the polite host, for which Hannah had to respect him.
“She is to be taking me in hand,” Hannah said as Balfour gently scratched the cat under the chin, “though you have a point. My grandmother warned me on the same issue before we set sail.”
“The grandmother to whom you’ve written so regularly?”
Had he no older relatives in whom to confide his troubles, to whom he might turn for consolation and counsel? Hannah stifled an urge to pluck the cat from his arms, the beast was making such a racket.
“She’s my only paternal relation. What sights are we to see today, that I might write her of those as well?”
He put the cat down, carefully, not the casual tossing aside a saucy cat might merit from time to time.
“We’ll start with whatever you please, Hannah Cooper, and I’ll be in your debt, because you’ve given me an excuse to get out of this house.”
He settled her cloak around her shoulders and began to talk of the various churches and monuments they might visit. The weather was moderating—Balfour said that was in part because they had come almost due south from Scotland—and a weak sun was trying to melt the last of the city’s snow.
He handed Hannah up into a phaeton, the height giving her a fine view of their surroundings, the brisk air chilling her cheeks between stops. A tiger rode up behind and held the horses while Balfour escorted Hannah from one amazingly ancient house of worship to another.
He spoke of the coronations held, the kings buried, the foul and wondrous deeds done at each location, until Hannah could almost believe his duties were not an imposition, but rather, his opportunity to boast about England’s capital city. He fell silent when they saw the lions in the menagerie, inspiring Hannah to suggest they repair to a tea shop rather than visit the rest of the caged animals.
“One feels sorry,” she said when Balfour had placed their order. “One feels sorry for the lions, that is. Were they less magnificent, they’d be free to chase the gazelles all the livelong day. But they are wonderful, and so we must cage them up and make them pathetic.”
He paused in the arrangement of their outerwear on a hook. “They’re merely beasts. Rather odoriferous beasts, in their current confines.”
“They are not merely beasts.”
He settled beside her, much as he’d done in the grog shop in Edinburgh, while Hannah tried to find words to reach him. They were not merely beasts, any more than he was just any old earl. “They are lions, made for swift and merciless pursuit of prey, hot, lazy afternoons sleeping off full bellies, and magnificent lives as lions where God intended lions to thrive. We make them something else entirely when we bring them here, pretending because they don’t die that we’ve provided adequately for them.”
The quality of his frown changed, his mink-brown brows rising in thought, putting Hannah in mind of otters and how joyously they played in the wild.
“Are you a lion, then, Miss Cooper, captured and brought to civilization from your natural surrounds, here to be caged and kept alive for the enjoyment of your captors?”
She studied him for a long moment then studied him further as their tray arrived. Was he a lion? He’d grown noticeably quieter since they’d arrived in the malodorous environs of London.
“You weren’t like this that night outside Steeth. You’ve misplaced your manners, Lord Balfour.”
He pushed the cream and sugar at her, letting her fix her cup first then tending to his own. “My manners aren’t what’s gone missing,” he said, stirring his tea.
Hannah sipped in silence, knowing it was a good, strong cup of tea, served piping hot, with rich cream and generously sugared. And yet it tasted off. Balfour’s ill humor was that powerful.
His silence spread like gloom over the table, and Hannah spoke to combat it more than to be polite.
“You’re right in some ways. I am a Colonial by your standards, and that means I’m closer to the lions. We have them in America, mountain lions with no great ruff, but enormous teeth and claws. When I visited my cousins north of Harrisburg, I heard them. Lions don’t roar in the New World, they scream.”
He tapped his spoon against his teacup. The porcelain looked tiny in his hand, the teacup absurdly decorated in blue pastel birds and delicate yellow flowers. She plowed on because he said nothing, but stared at his tea.
“I see the pelts baled up on the wharves. I see the men who spend winters hunting the furs. As a young man, my father was one of those men, and he talked to me of his trapping. He routinely braved conditions like those we faced in Steeth. He went months without hearing another human voice, Lord Balfour. He heard the wolves howling, the lions screaming, the woodpeckers searching for their dinners. He heard the snow melting and the ice cracking as the lakes and ponds thawed. You wouldn’t expect such a man, so full of life and courage, to enjoy being caged up and gawked at like those poor lions, would you?”
The look he gave her was so piercing, it was as if he didn’t see her physical form, but some other manifestation of her. Her words maybe, or her soul.
“Your tea will get cold, Miss Cooper.” He set his cup down, having finished the contents in a single swallow.
“You think I’m daft,” she said, dutifully taking a taste. “I shall certainly go daft if I have to prance around from now until July, pretending I haven’t a thought in my head. What’s in this tea? I like it.”
“Lavender. I enjoy it for a change from time to time, but we can try a different flavor of tea at each shop.”
Where had Asher MacGregor gone? For surely, only the platitudinous Lord Balfour had sat down to tea. “So there’s to be more tramping about, cooing at lions?”
“You didn’t see anything today that you’ll write to your grandmother about?”
Hannah accorded him points for not coming back with a biting rejoinder. “Oh, I’ll write to her. I’ll tell her you can barely see the sun for all the coal smoke here, and the air stinks of it incessantly, which probably accounts for Aunt’s many megrims. I will tell her they’ve had grand churches here for nigh seven hundred years, and yet the Christian charity is so lacking, people probably froze to death on those church steps this very winter. I’ll tell her the wealth of the British empire has long since been acknowledged as coming from her colonies, and yet those colonies still—even decades after the American example—have no representation in the most civilized government in the world.”
“Is that all?”
A lift of his eyebrow and a particular heat in his gaze suggested her verbal rebellion had distracted him from his melancholy, so she forged ahead.
“Your Prince Consort has made a life’s work of bettering the condition of working men, and yet they despise him for his efforts. Your queen leads her empire but has increasingly little to do with the government thereof. This is an improvement, however, over a king who was mad and a regent who built palaces while his former soldiers starved in the streets. The Americas are better off without you English.”
“You are a very opinionated lady,” he said, rising. “One might say you’re even rude—though I do not—but you are wrong: I am not English. My title is Scottish, and my patrilineage is exclusively Scottish.”
This seemed to matter to him, though Hannah was more concerned with the topic under discussion. “I see with my own eyes what’s before me.” She rose as well, and turned her back to him so he might settle her cloak on her shoulders. “I cannot afford to doubt my own eyes, Lord Balfour. I should go mad if I did.”
She wasn’t sure, but she thought he might have given her shoulders a smooth pat—a caress?—as she fastened the frogs at her throat. When she turned sharply to look at him, his expression was as severe as ever.
How she missed the man she’d eaten roast hare with outside Steeth, the man she’d cuddled with.
He tossed some coins on the table and held out his arm. “Come, we’ll lose the light, and the streets get icy when darkness falls.”
Something about their exchange had stifled his running commentary on the wonders of London, and Hannah missed his voice. Missed having at least that much of him attending her.
“I’m not like a lion,” she said as they approached his phaeton. “I won’t bite everybody who tries to extend me kindness.”
“Won’t you?”
Was that humor in his eyes? “You’re the one who was so accommodating when a freezing night loomed, and has become such a pestilential lord now.”
And then, when he should have handed her up—always a tricky undertaking, and one Balfour monitored closely—he surprised the daylights out of her.
“I’m sorry for that, for being such a pestilential lord. Perhaps you were a more accommodating guest out on the moor, or more… something.” An apology and a backhanded sort of admission, while he kept Hannah’s hand grasped in his own.
“I was half-tipsy. I can hardly be expected to observe all the finer points of etiquette with a man who escorts me to the bushes.” With the only man to ever escort her to the bushes.
“You weren’t going to go alone, and you won’t go alone into the ballrooms, Boston.”
And with those few words, Hannah again felt the sort of warmth she’d experienced on the wintry moor, a sense of safety and well-being, of resting in good hands.
“Neither will I let you face those ballrooms alone, Asher MacGregor. You’d get to pacing and flicking your tail, and then whatever would I do for an escort?”
Hannah clambered up into the carriage as the horse stomped a big back hoof in the mucky slush. Nimble as a cat, Balfour dodged back in time to preserve his boots from the worst of what might have befallen them.