Another breath of uneasiness ran through him. They’d never manage more than a walk there, either. Just in his limited view through the trees an endless sea of carriages and horses and parasols and hats spread before them. Somewhere behind him he caught Owen’s muffled curse, and he silently agreed. Not only would it be nearly impossible to make an escape, but they’d likely never see any trouble coming until it was far too late.
He cocked his head. Much as he hated to admit it, any attackers would have precisely the same difficulty. And a hundred witnesses on top of it. The Campbells might risk it anyway, but luckily they were more likely to call him out to his face than stab at his kin behind his back. Clan Gerdens concerned him more, but mainly because he had nothing more than suspicions and third-hand rumors about what they might have been up to.
“It’s fairly well ordered once you join the throng,” Charlotte commented on the tail end of his thoughts. He seemed to have drawn even with her sometime during the ride to the park, though he couldn’t consciously remember doing so.
“Dunnae any of ye have anything better to do?”
Well, that seemed unfair, Charlotte thought, though she had to admit that Hyde Park was quite crowded for this early in the day. Unusually so. Generally, visiting didn’t begin in earnest until after luncheon. “There’s no Parliament today,” she said, remembering her father packing up his fishing gear this morning. “And I believe there are to be races on the Thames this afternoon.”
They bypassed Rotten Row, as the morning was quite warm and none of the ladies—or she, at least—wanted to bother with the canter. Charlotte did point the riding trail out to Glengask, as he looked like a man who required exercise. In fact, as she sent another sideways glance at the marquis, she decided he was quite fit. He must have spent a great deal of his time in the Highlands out of doors.
As they joined the line of riders and carriages along the path, she realized she wasn’t the only one noticing Lord Glengask, either. From the fluttering eyelashes and batting fans, half the female populace was either flirting, or fighting off a horde of midges.
Ranulf kept up the slow pace, ostensibly more interested in seeking out likely shrubbery-shrouded hiding places than in all the pretty eyes cast in his direction. Was this single-minded enemy-hunting of his why he remained unmarried? By her calculations he was somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, he had wealth, land, and a great deal of power—and yet there was no Lady Glengask. Not that she cared about that, of course; she was merely curious.
Jane and Winnie had somehow managed to put a barouche and a phaeton between them. Ranulf gave a subtle wave of his fingers, and his two outriders pressed ahead to join them. The dogs evidently knew their duty as well, because they kept pace on either side of his big bay as if they’d all done it a hundred times before. An elderly woman, Lady Gavenly, she thought, passed by in a barouche, a small yapping dog struggling in her arms. The bigger deerhound, Fergus, swiveled his head around to look at the little thing, then returned to his walk. Evidently small yapping dogs were below notice in the Highlands. Either that, or the hounds had already eaten their daily meal, and weren’t hungry.
“Speaking theoretically,” she said, wondering if she was about to begin another disagreement, “aren’t you, as the chief of your clan, the one who should be the most protected?” What she wanted to ask was whether all of this was truly necessary. Especially in the middle of Mayfair, in the middle of the morning, in the middle of the Season.
“I know aboot trouble,” he returned in a thoughtful tone. “Rowena, for the most part, doesnae. At home it didnae so much matter, because she always had clan around her. Here, I’m beginning to wish I’d encouraged her to take it all a wee bit more seriously.”
“How do you know about trouble? I’m not questioning that you do; just about what’s happened to make you so cautious.”
He glanced sideways at her. “That’s very carefully worded, lass. Am I so fierce?”
Charlotte couldn’t help her smile, though it was a fairly apt description. “I’m attempting to be diplomatic.”
“Ah.” To her surprise, he chuckled. “The clansmen called my father Seann Monadh—Old Mountain. That man was tough as winter and strong as a draft horse.” Obvious affection in his voice, he smiled a little, then briefly lowered his head. “They say he drooned.”
It took her a moment to decipher what he’d said, partly because it was so unexpected. “He drowned?” she repeated, to be certain. “I’m so sorry.”
“Aye. Drowned,” he said, this time exaggerating the vowel sounds. “Though I imagine having his hands bound and his head held under the water makes it closer to murder.”
Good heavens.
Charlotte put a hand over her chest, though she wasn’t certain why. His words, the ill-hidden pain and anger in them, had already dug into her heart. “I take it not everyone agreed with your assessment?” she asked after a moment.
Blue eyes met hers. “Nae, they didnae. I was fifteen when it happened, but I think that’s old enough to ken what rope burns around a man’s wrists look like whether or not they were bound when we found him, and to realize what torn sleeves and scratched arms mean.” He took a slow breath. “None o’ that signifies, I suppose, except to answer ye when ye ask why I’m so cautious.”
She couldn’t even imagine what he must have felt, to
know
something even more foul had been done on top of what was already a tragedy. Just the image in her mind of someone binding and drowning her own mild, jovial father made her fight back tears. “I have no words,” she whispered.
Ranulf shrugged. “’Twas sixteen years ago.”
“Do you know who did it?”
This time his grim smile chilled her to her bones. “That’s a tale for another time—when ye and I are better acquainted.”
“You mean, when you’ve decided you can trust me.”
The expression on his face eased a little. “Ye’ve a way of cutting to the heart of a matter, lass.”
That made her smile, though she wasn’t entirely certain it was a compliment. “I’ve found there are fewer misunderstandings that way.”
Ahead of her, Janie turned in the saddle. “Char, the Lester twins are over there,” she said, half mouthing the words behind her hand. “Please don’t come over.”
With a sigh, Charlotte nodded and reined in her gray mare, Sixpence. Ranulf drew up beside her. “What was that all aboot?”
“Jane’s in love with either Phillip or Gregory Lester, and she has some silly notion that I find them … ridiculous.”
“‘Either’?” he repeated, lifting an eyebrow. “I take that to mean she doesnae know which one?”
“They’re entirely interchangeable.”
He continued to look at her, bafflement in his expression. “Then why doesnae yer father tell Jane to keep her distance from them? Or tell them to keep themselves well away from her?”
As he likely wouldn’t appreciate it, Charlotte stifled her laugh. “That would only convince her that she was Juliet and one or other of the Lesters was Romeo. Being a star-crossed lover doomed to pain and longing seems terribly romantic to a young lady, you know.”
“Hm. Doom and pain does explain some of the looks I’ve been getting from various lasses, anyway,” he returned with another glance around them. “I suppose there is something … intriguing about wanting someone ye cannae—and shouldnae—have.”
His gaze when it returned to her sent something unsettled and shivering through her. Were his words a message meant for her? Or was he merely speaking hypothetically and attempting to ruffle her feathers? He did seem quite proficient at that, after all. “Anyway,” she resumed, “the more time Janie spends conversing with the Lesters, the more likely she is to realize all on her own that they’re both complete nodcocks.”
With that she turned Sixpence toward the bridge leading across the Serpentine and to the less crowded half of the park. It took more willpower than she expected not to turn and see if the marquis followed her. A moment later, though, he and his monstrous bay clattered across the bridge and joined up with her again. And of course it did not give her a moment of satisfaction that he’d chosen to continue his ride with her rather than shadow his sister. It was only that he’d clearly decided that two large Scotsmen were sufficient protection for Winnie—at least for the moment.
“A false river in a false wilderness,” he commented, eyeing the Serpentine as though looking for a plug and a drain.
“The Serpentine is an actual river,” she returned, trying not to sound indignant at the insult to her favorite London park. “And Hyde Park was originally wilderness. They’ve both merely been … enhanced, so the citizens might make the most use of them.”
“‘Enhanced,’” he repeated. “Glengask overlooks the river Dee. Rapids, waterfalls, sheer cliffs—a thing that’s an Eden to yer eyes but’ll snatch yer life in a heartbeat if ye dunnae respect her. Nae ‘enhancement’ necessary. In fact, a man would be daft to attempt such a thing.”
A river, the Bray, ran by the edge of her family’s estate in north Devon. Like the majority of rivers in southern England it was for the most part placid and slow, as if it had given up the fight to be wild long ago. That didn’t make the Bray better or worse than the Dee; a river was simply what it was, after all.
Knowing her companion as she was beginning to, he likely expected her to argue his point, anyway. Well, she didn’t always like to do the expected. “That sounds breathtaking,” she said, following now as he guided his horse over for a closer look at the shore and the overhanging willows, their long, sad branches dipping into the slow-moving water. “Is Glengask forested, or pastureland?”
“Both. We’re high up in the mountains, so the trees grow mostly in the gorges and valleys where there’s more shelter from the weather. And our idea of pasture and yers are two different things, but we make do.”
“And you graze sheep, I presume?” From what she knew of other families with seats in the Highlands, they
all
grazed Cheviot sheep.
“Nae.” His voice was sharper than he expected. “We raise cattle at Glengask. A few Highlands sheep fer our own use, but a MacLawry will nae burn our own people out t’make more grazing land fer those bloody Cheviot beasts. Never.”
“The Highland Clearances,” she said, not certain she’d spoken aloud until he nodded.
That explained his caution over his sister’s safety, and a great deal more. The reason his clan was the largest still in the Highlands, and perhaps even the reason he suspected his father had been murdered. The MacLawrys were evidently resisting the clearances, despite the lure of income from the Cheviot sheep and the “urging” of the Crown to thin out the peasants and comply. There was nothing England feared more, she knew, than an organized band of free Highlanders.
As she considered all that he stopped in the shade of a cluster of willows and dismounted. “The clearances do tend to color every bit of business north of Hadrian’s Wall,” he said, walking up to her and lifting his arms.
“How have you resisted?” Looking down at his upturned face, the question abruptly seemed to apply as much to her as it did to him. Willing her fingers not to shake, because she was far from being some schoolgirl miss, she gripped his shoulders.
Warm hands slid around her waist and then she was in the air again, as if she weighed no more than a feather. Her insides felt just as fluttery—which was utterly ridiculous. Perhaps she wasn’t immune to his physical charms, but just from their handful of conversations she knew their temperaments couldn’t be more different. Their philosophies were as far apart as the two ends of the Earth.
Her feet touched the ground, but he didn’t release his hold on her. Instead he tugged her closer, so she had to put her hands on his hard, broad chest to keep her balance. “Shouldnae,” he murmured, the blue of his gaze sinking into her like warm summer. And then he leaned in and kissed her.
Charlotte closed her eyes. She didn’t know how a man could taste of the Highlands—or even what the Highlands would taste like—but Ranulf MacLawry did. Windswept cliffs, fierce storms, the welcome warmth of a hearth fire on a chill day. That was what the Marquis of Glengask tasted like. Utterly intoxicating.
“Charlotte! You didn’t put Lord Glengask into the river, did you?”
The sound of Jane’s voice made her start. Gasping, she uncurled her fingers from Ranulf’s lapels and shoved. For a heartbeat he held where he was, one arm around her hips and the other cupping the nape of her neck. Then he let her go and stepped back almost awkwardly.
Perhaps he felt as startled as she did. Resisting the urge to look him in the eye and see precisely what he might be thinking and feeling, Charlotte wiped a hand across her mouth and scurried out from beneath the willow branches. “No one’s fallen in,” she said a bit too loudly, nearly tripping over one of the hounds in her haste to retreat. “Though if Lord Glengask continues insisting that the Serpentine isn’t a real river I shall be sorely tempted to push him in and see if he gets wet.”
Winnie looked startled. “Ye’d do that? To Ran?”
“That might convince him, don’t you think? It was only a jest though, my dear,” Charlotte returned, forcing a smile when what she really wanted to do was put her hand to her lips and see if they were as warm and swollen as they felt.
The marquis’s sister leaned down in the saddle, craning her neck to see into the bower. “Ran? Charlotte didnae kick ye in the man bits, did she?”
Charlotte’s face heated. “I did no such thing!”
Janie was giggling behind one hand. “Ladies don’t talk about man bits, Winnie.”
“Truly? My brothers hardly talk aboot anything else, it seems.”
Leaves rustled behind Charlotte. “True enough,” Ranulf said dryly. “I hate t’admit it, Rowena, but perhaps ye could stand to learn some London refinement.”
And with that, the other two utterly forgot about what she and Ranulf might have been up to beneath the willows. Whatever his faults, and they seemed numerous, the man was masterful at turning a conversation—and about not answering questions posed to him.
Winnie squealed, flailing her arms until one of Glengask’s men helped her to the ground. As soon as she had her feet beneath her she strode up to her brother, her skirts bunched in her hands. “Does that mean ye’re giving me longer than a fortnight here?”