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Remembering, James turned his head; he couldn’t think of the odors without remembering the feel of flax dust caking his nostrils and throat. “Rotten. It smelled rotten.”
“Oh. I’d have thought being a flowering plant, a pleasantness might waft in the air.”
He huffed out a small laugh without humor. “If you want to know more, I’ll tell you, but it won’t preserve your sensibilities.”
She sat up on an elbow to look at him, curious. “Tell me, please.”
“Before flax fibers can be spun, they have to be separated from the stalk. It’s a foul process of near-rotting the flax. It was dried before it was delivered to the mill, but the moldy smell remained.”
“I see.”
Stroking her soft hairline at her temple, now uncovered after her bonnet was discarded, he admitted, “The warehouse fire brought it all back for a time. I came upon a store of flax, soaked so it wouldn’t burn.”
Her brows drew together. “You said you and your mother worked at the mill. What of your father?”
“A fisherman before I was born. Set off for the Arctic on a whaling ship when I was a few weeks old. He needed to earn more for his new family. But the ship was wrecked, and he and most of the crew were lost.”
“Oh, James. Your poor father! Your poor mother! Poor you!”
He nearly made a casual statement about not remembering and being too young, but Clara’s hands clutched his shirt, and she laid her head down again. Her tears wet the fabric, and he felt his own throat close.
“I hated the smell of the whale-oil lamps,” he found himself admitting aloud.
“What?”
“I was a boy when Dundee’s lamps changed to gas. I was happy. I hated the whale oil. Hated seeing the whale ships come into port. I hate corsets.” He ran his hand down her unbound ribcage. “I don’t want you restrained, least of all by whalebone. I remember the bone being unloaded in port.”
“Another reason to detest corsets,” she sobbed into his chest.
“Shhh,” he soothed.
“To think that I was feeling sorry for myself over the trouble I was in with my governess! All from running through the grass too much as a girl! You were struggling to breathe in a mill, no father, and eventually no mother—orphaned so much younger than I. I’m sorry, James.”
Me too,he thought, but couldn’t speak. He was suddenly racked with guilt.
Not once had he thought of his own parents since learning that Clara was with child. His memories of his mother were already so amorphous. He mourned what he did remember, but also had to grieve all the details he’d forgotten from early childhood.
Until this moment, he’d resented his father for leaving on that ship and ending in an icy grave. Holding Clara now—and the life her body cradled—he understood for the first time in his life.
With his parents’ dire circumstances in Dundee, it took no imagination whatsoever for James to understand why it had been necessary for his father to board a ship bound for uncharted whaling grounds, toward icebergs, frostbite, and worse.
For Clara and their child, he’d do the same bloody thing.
Strange that it took lying in the grass at Anterleigh to reveal this, he thought, his throat and eyes burning. After a few minutes, he stroked Clara’s hair, and she finally stopped crying.
“We don’t want our child working in a mill, and I’m not sending you off on a whaling ship. But is there anything from your childhood youdowish our child to know? For me, it’s the smell of grass. Is there a tradition we can pass from you?”
He frowned, thinking.
“Slàinte mhath,” she said suddenly.
He froze. She remembered what he taught her in the orangery. “Aye. I’ll impart a proper toast to our child.” He chuckled.
“What else? Something lovely, something Scottish?”
“Lovelier than the sound of raising a glass, I think not.” But he thought back anyway, searching his memories for anything he could remember.There has to be something.Something I looked forward to.
“Hogmanay,” he said suddenly.
