Yes, Arthur had mentioned this—that Davis had not been a critic of the Scottish aristocrats whom they’d discussed but rather a friend to them. It was almost impossible for her to accept.
She withdrew a writing-covered sheet from the stack of correspondence, one she’d read so many times that the ink had worn down where the page was folded. “I find it difficult to believe that Davis supports Argyll and Buccleuch and Sutherland. It must be an act. Did you not read this letter?”
She found the lines she wanted quickly enough. “‘Sutherland is beginning to wear a depopulated and ruinous aspect. The duchess sends a posse of men to eject the Highlanders from their dwellings—homes in which they have gone through all the stages of their lives, homes endeared to them by a thousand ties and circumstances—’”
“Homes which are then burned before their very eyes. Aye. I recall the words.”
She raised her eyes from the letter to find Arthur’s face. “You can read this and truly believe that he supports what Sutherland and the others are doing in the Highlands?”
She had admired this letter—its plainspoken sympathy, the care it evinced for the Highlanders whose homes had been ruthlessly destroyed.
“Aye,” Arthur said. “Because Davis did not write those words. I did.”
Her lips parted, and the moment stretched as she sought speech. “I beg your pardon?”
She could see, even beneath the beard, that his jaw was tight. His hand opened and closed on the desk. “I wrote down the stories the crofters told us. The ones who came here from the Highlands. We tried to find a place for them on our lands or, failing that, the means to move them to the Americas. I wrote their stories and then I sent them to the newspapers, and some of them were printed. That’s where Davis got the words, I suppose. From my own damned pen.”
She blinked several times in quick succession and reminded herself to close her mouth.Arthurhad written these words? Had been the author of the sentiment she had so admired?
She scarcely knew what to feel. A bizarre twist of betrayal—though why this revelation should disturb her almost more than everything else Davis had done, she did not know. She felt unsettled, almost unmoored.
She had not truly known Davis. Of course she had not; she perceived that perfectly well by now. He had wanted something from her—information, political gossip that she was privy to. His letters had been filled with lies.
But perhaps in some small way, she had known the man he’d pretended to be. She had known the Earl of Strathrannoch.
Her fingers on the desk were inches from Arthur’s, she realized. It would be easy to slide her hand over to his. To soothe the unhappy tension there. To ease her palm along the muscular line of his forearm and—
She coughed, then cleared her throat, then finally transferred her fingers to her lap. “I thought you did not care for politics. When I first arrived with the letters, you said that you could not have written them because you were not interested in political causes.”
“The Clearances, the crofters—’tis not politics, lass. ’Tis people’s lives.”
She shook her head in automatic negation of his words. “All politics are about people’s lives. Our experiences are what drive our politics—our experiences and our sympathy for the lives of others.”
“Is that so?”
“Of course. I told you about my pamphlet on debt reform, did I not?”
“Aye.”
“My maid, Nora, came to work in our home at fifteen because her father was sent to the Marshalsea.” She pressed her lips together in remembered outrage. “The whole family was forced to either live with him in debtor’s prison or else work off his debt—hisdebt, not their own.” She made herself unclench her fingers, which had locked together in her lap. “It’swrong. And what’s more wrong is that our own father came from debt—my grandfather, the Marquess of Vye, was deeply mired in generations of it—and yet his treatment was entirely different because he was amember of peerage. The whole system ought to be burned down and built anew.”
Strathrannoch had a peculiar expression on his face as he looked down at her. “Aye,” he said slowly, “perhaps you’re right. I have always…” He hesitated, as if searching for the words. “It has always seemed to me best to do what I can for my own land—my own people.”
Yes. She had seen that in him from the first.
Her sex, her unmarried state, her natural reticence—all of it had led her to come at politics in the shadows, always working just out of sight. But this man—blunt and softhearted by turns, somehow rough and gentle at the same time—tackled the problems of his world differently, with his sleeves rolled up and his hands set to a plow.
She admired that. She admired him.
“I’m sorry,” she said impulsively. “I’m sorry Davis took your rifle telescope. I’m sorry I don’t know where he might be.”
There was a short, cautious pause as he took her in, his face close to hers. She could feel the weight of his gaze, the peculiar gravitational pull of his body beside her own.
“Yet,” he said finally. “We don’t know where he is yet. I’ll find him.”
She glanced back down at the letters they’d been examining, and her mind, which had been a trifle hazed by the combination of his eyes and voice and general proximity, suddenly sharpened. She slipped one of the letters free, and then another, lining them up on the desk.
“We should plot these sites on a map,” she said. “Both of us, together. Some of them I’ll know how to find—the estates, the villages he mentions—but others I’ll need you for.The cleverestlittle dry-goods store, he says here, orthe burn where I fished as a boy. You would know those places—I would not. If we mark them all out, perhaps they’ll give us some indication of his whereabouts when he wrote the letters or a sense of the location of his allies.”
