In truth, Lydia suspected that her friend had wanted to protect her. Georgiana had not wanted Lydia to journey alone, and she’d known precisely how to convince Lydia that she was not motivated by pity or doubt.
The staff at Strathrannoch Castle, however, turned out to number rather fewer than Lydia might have guessed, even with her knowledge of Strathrannoch’s dubious finances. After conversing with Mr. Palmer and Mr. Trefor, Georgiana had found only Willie, the groom; Fern, the lone chambermaid; and Rupert, Fern’s seven-year-old son. Evidently, the Earl of Strathrannochhad been the only one in the vicinity willing to hire seventeen-year-old Fern, who had turned up in the village with a two-month-old baby and no husband to speak of.
Georgiana’s reports were consistent: Davis Baird was a charming fellow, easy on the eyes and possessed of a great talent for winning adoration and affection. Rupert seemed the only one who had not been taken in by Davis’s most recent performance—Rupert’s hero worship, it seemed, extended only to the earl and not to his brother. The boy seemed generally convinced that Strathrannoch had slain giants, wrestled crocodiles, and placed the moon in its orbit about the earth.
Given the presence of zebras on the estate, Lydia supposed the crocodile tale might have some basis in fact.
While Georgiana deployed her information-gathering talents amongst the staff, Lydia found herself in close proximity—again—with Strathrannoch himself.
He wanted to examine all of Davis’s letters, a desire which flustered her. In fact, everything about the man flustered her, in a physical fashion altogether different from her normal anxiety around strangers.
In truth, after her first few days at the castle, Strathrannoch no longer seemed like a stranger. Somehow—between the zebras and the degu and the exasperated fond looks he sent toward young Rupert when the boy turned up in his office with a flying squirrel ensconced in his hair—Lydia no longer felt the painful reserve that marked her interactions with people she did not know. She’d become comfortable in his presence, at least comfortable enough to speak to him openly and without too much distress.
No, her physical reaction to the man was decidedly not anxiety.
When he entered the downstairs drawing room in the late afternoons to meet with her, he generally seemed to have come fromsome work with his tenants. He always looked rather fierce, and once he shouted for Mr. Palmer’s assistance—something about seeds and tomatoes and mad old Scots with no sense of agricultural timing. He wore his shirt open about the neck—always, except at dinner—and his sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms taut with muscle and gleaming with curly golden hairs. His beard had thickened since her arrival, but it did not disguise the sulky shape of his mouth.
Lydia found it all immensely distracting, particularly when he pulled a chair up to the desk beside her and asked to examine whatever it was that she was reading.
He was interested in everything. He wanted to know about her pamphlets, her politics, her exchanges with his brother. She perused his office one evening before dinner while he sorted through her correspondence and discovered that he was extensively well-read and possessed of notes and papers upon nearly every subject she could think of. Evidently much of the Strathrannoch library had been sold in an effort to raise funds, but he had made his own careful notes on hundreds of scientific texts. He informed her—the tops of his ears slightly red—that he was a member of a circulating library in Edinburgh, which he visited monthly to keep up with advancements in agricultural technology.
“Did you go to university there?” she asked curiously, resuming her place at the desk by his side. “One of my brothers graduated a few years ago from the Royal College of Physicians. Your scientific curiosity reminds me of his—I think you would get on.”
But when she looked at him, he was frowning again, his fingers tense on the quill that he held over one of Davis’s letters. “No,” he said shortly. “Neither of us went to university, though Davis was schooled at Eton.”
She blinked. “Was he? Why, he never spoke of it, not once, in all his letters.”
“Aye, well, he couldn’t have done, could he? Or else you might have known it wasn’t me writing the letters.”
“What do you mean?”
“He went.” Arthur hitched one shoulder in a shrug. “I didn’t. So he could not mention it.”
She did not know what to make of that. It was not unheard-of— the heir being kept at home to learn the estate and its husbandry, the younger son sent off to school.
But it was not so very common, either. And from what little she had gleaned of the previous earl these last days, she did not imagine he had been a particularly good teacher.
“Davis spoke only of Scotland,” she told Arthur. “I would not have guessed he had lived in England. Here—he mentions Argyll and Buccleuch. In this one, Glencoe—”
Arthur looked up sharply. “Glencoe?”
“Yes, I think that was it. He said you had a house there—he remembered it most fondly.”
She could see the tension rise between Arthur’s shoulder blades, could feel it in waves from his large form. Her body was always attuned to such things, ready to predict catastrophe from the stiffness in someone else’s tone or the harsh line of their mouth.
But she did not think Arthur was upset with her. He looked back down at the letters, his curling lashes falling over his eyes. “Aye, we had a summer house in Glencoe. Our father sold it when Davis went to school. I would not have thought he remembered.”
But Davis had remembered. The stories had been drawn in such vivid colors, his scene-setting sharp and precise. She’d laughed aloud at his anecdotes of tumbling into the water whilefishing for trout with his bare hands, of stealing apples from a tree he’d later learned belonged to his own father.
It occurred to her now, as she watched Arthur compel his fist to uncurl, that Davis had never, in any of his letters, mentioned having a brother.
Had it been a fear of accidentally revealing himself? A wariness about referencing himself in the third person?
Or was it something altogether darker? A desire to pretend that he was the Earl of Strathrannoch—and that the brother who currently held the role had never existed?
Lydia did not know what to think. And she wondered—a strange ache rising in her throat—if Arthur had noticed. If it had hurt him to read the letters.
But he shook his head, rejecting the very notion of the house in Glencoe. “Argyll, Buccleuch: Those two are not a surprise. Those are the homes of his great friends these last years—the aristocrats who favor him.”
