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* * *
It was early evening when the same maid helped her dress and led her downstairs. Her dress was pale lilac blue, a colour suitable for a widow but still youthful, and she knew it enhanced rather than dulled her grey eyes. She could not compete with Lady Tessa on any scale that counted, but she would at least not appear a complete dowd.
‘Jo! We waited for you.’ Jamie rushed up the steps towards her and her throat tightened with pleasure and pain as she saw Benneit at the bottom of the steps. She had been prepared to enter alone and remain alone and this consideration warmed her as much as the banked heat in his gaze as he watched her descend. But he didn’t speak and she couldn’t.
In the hall they were greeted by a bluff hello from Lord Aberwyld and a more subdued greeting from Lady Aberwyld. There was no mistaking the animosity in her gaze before she turned from Jo to smile at Benneit and Jamie, and Jo was relieved when their attention was caught by a cheer rising from a group of children playing in a corner of the large hall they entered. A young girl, perhaps eight, beckoned to Jamie.
‘Jamie! Come!’
Jamie’s body angled closer to Jo even as his hand slicked his hair again. Jo caught Benneit’s frown and though she was not certain it was in response to Jamie’s shyness or to his move towards her, she bent a little towards him.
‘What is her name?’ she whispered.
‘Beth. Like our Beth,’ he whispered back. ‘There are many Beths.’
‘What are they playing?’
‘Spillikins. I am good at Spillikins. Ewan and Angus play with me.’
‘Say your hellos to Lord and Lady Aberwyld before you go with Miss Beth, Jamie,’ Benneit said and Jamie came forward, but at the last steps as he approached the great bearded figure seated on an armchair around which the room appeared to rotate, he clasped Jo’s skirts. Even when she sat he remained by her side, his hand fiddling with the embroidery on her skirt. Benneit stared straight ahead and Jo was caught between the need to hug Jamie to her and guilt that he was clinging to her so obviously.
‘So, boy,’ McCrieff intoned, his voice a vibration throughout the room. ‘Gave your papa a scare the night of the ball, didn’t you?’
Jamie turned scarlet, his fingers tightening on Jo’s dress as the Earl burst into rumbling laughter. Lady Aberwyld leaned forward and smiled.
‘I’m glad you are well, Lord Glenarris. Beth, take him to the children.’
‘That’s right, go and play,’ the Earl interjected. ‘This is a children’s house, as you can see, Mrs Langdale. He needn’t hang about your skirts. ’Twill do him good. Right, Tessa?’
Tessa McCrieff was seated by her mother’s side and she smiled over at Jo with the same cheerful sweetness as at the ball.
‘He had a grand time when he was here last. It takes a few moments though, Father. Don’t press.’
‘Press? I never press, girl! Where’s my whisky?’
Jamie cast a look of entreaty at Benneit, but when Beth approached he went with her, eyes downcast, and Lord Aberwyld watched them with satisfaction.
‘Too shy, that boy. Needs toughening. He’ll get that here.’
‘Beth will take good care of him, Your Grace,’ Tessa said softly.
‘Aye, she’s Duncan’s eldest and already a natural mother, that one. Like our Tessa here.’
‘Papa!’
McCrieff laughed and began talking of the clearances, though by the look on Benneit’s face the man’s views on that topic were hardly more welcome to him than his views on his son. But with some deft manoeuvring he shifted McCrieff to a discussion of the progress made in Kilmarchie regarding the distillery and Lord Aberwyld’s sons joined in.
* * *
The next day Jo hardly saw Benneit or Jamie. He was out with the men and she remained with the women, discussing family matters and the changes in fashion now the war was over. They might be hundreds of miles from Uxmore, but other than the Highland accent and the heavy stone walls, they might as well have been in Oxfordshire. It was utterly familiar to Jo and already foreign after the ease that had become part of her life at Lochmore.
The worst was how much she liked Lady Tessa. Jo had secretly been hoping that her pleasant behaviour at the ball was a ruse like Lady Aberwyld’s veneer of politeness, but Tessa was genuinely nice. She would, as her father advertised, make a fine mother. A fine wife. Jo wished she could be happy for Benneit that he would wed someone as generous and warm as Tessa, but she wasn’t noble enough. She liked Tessa, but she hated her from the bottom of her aching, weeping heart.
