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“So,” Edilean said to Malcolm, “Angus was at some fort with another woman.”
“No, lass,” Malcolm said, frustrated. “He was not with her. As far as we could find, he’s not been with a woman since he left you.”
“I don’t believe that. I think he’s had hundreds, thousands of women. I think—”
“He left you because he had to!” Malcolm said loudly. “Canna you see that the man is daft about you and always has been? Why do you think we laughed so hard that first time he saw you? We all knew he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. And when he threw you in the horse trough! Ah, now, that was proof that—”
“That he hated me,” Edilean said gloomily.
“It showed he was fightin’ what he felt for you,” Malcolm said as he reached out and took her hands in his, and lowered his voice. “In a way, Angus had been the laird since his father died. It was my father who cheated the McTerns out of what was theirs, but the lairdship goes down through the oldest sons. Our clan is an old one, and they looked to the eldest son of the eldest son even though he was just a boy.”
“I understand,” she said. “Like the divinity of kings.”
“I guess so. But even as a boy, Angus tried to make up to all of us for what his grandfather did. Angus had no life of his own until he saw you, none at all.”
Standing up, Edilean looked down at Malcolm, her face cold. “I’m sick unto death of hearing about how wonderful Angus McTern is. Sick of it! Do you hear me? If he’s so in love with me, where is he? Why isn’t he here? Why aren’t I planning my wedding as Harriet and Prudence are? Why isn’t some man sneaking kisses with me when he thinks no one is looking? Why—?” She couldn’t say any more but turned and ran up the stairs to her room.
“I don’t know,” Malcolm whispered as he sat alone in the room. Surely Angus couldn’t have run off again, he thought. Surely the lad couldn’t have abandoned Edilean. It wasn’t possible.
It was when Shamus gave her a look of pity that Edilean changed her mind about Angus and began to defend him. Every time she entered a room, the engaged couples would break apart and look guilty.
“That’s it!” Edilean said at dinner one night as she stood up and threw her napkin down. “Maybe none of you believe in him, but I do! I don’t know what Angus is doing, but I know that when he’s finished, he’ll come for me.”
The others’ faces didn’t change. Harriet tried to look as though she believed Edilean, but the others looked at her with sympathy.
“I’m sure he will,” Tam said, but there was no enthusiasm in his voice.
After that night, Edilean decided to quit waiting and to go about her business. The first thing she took care of was Tam and Tabitha. Knowing that Tam had a kind heart, she asked if he’d please help her with a task that she couldn’t handle by herself. What she needed was for him to journey all the way down to Williamsburg to get Mrs. Abigail Prentiss to sign the final papers that transferred her farm to the Bound Girl company. Edilean held her breath as she handed the papers to Tam because she was staking everything on her belief that he couldn’t read. She gave him a sheaf of documents that dealt with a farm she’d bought three years before. “Oh! And take this,” she said, handing him a bolt of yellow silk. “Abby said she’d make it into a dress for me. She’s an excellent dressmaker.” Edilean didn’t know if Abby could sew or not. “You won’t come back without the dress, will you? Even if you have to wait for her to finish it?”
Tam looked about for a reason to get out of the long trip. “Maybe your coachman, Cuddy, would be better at this.”
“Than you?” Edilean asked, batting her lashes. “How can you say that? I couldn’t trust him with these papers, now could I? But if you think that you can’t do it...”
“No,” Tam said with a sigh, “I’ll do it. But maybe she could send the dress later.”
“Perhaps,” Edilean said, “but she’s a recent widow and she might like someone to talk to. If you’re going to be the laird of the clan, then perhaps you should get some practice in comforting widows.”
Tam straightened his shoulders a bit and took the leather portfolio she handed him. “It might be good for me to see more of this new country.”
“I think that’s a splendid idea,” Edilean said.
The next day after Tam left, she told Tabitha, who laughed and shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get Harriet to take me back to Scotland with her and I’ll get a man there.”
“Isn’t there a law saying you can never return to England?”
Tabitha shrugged. “I guess I’ll have her send me a man then. By the way, how often have you seen your man in the last five years?”
In the past, Tabitha’s innuendos had made Edilean angry, but not now. “It takes a man time to recover from a night with me,” she said, and turned and left. Tabitha’s laughter echoed behind her.
By the fourth week of Angus’s absence, the others seemed to have accepted that he was never returning. Even Malcolm had lost his faith that Angus was going to come back to them.
One day Edilean overheard him talking to Harriet and saying that he was disappointed in Angus, that he’d misjudged the boy. It was all Edilean could do to keep from giving him a piece of her mind, but she didn’t. They’d see, she thought. If Angus was alive, he was going to come back to her.
It was at the end of the sixth week, while Edilean was at the market inspecting the produce stands that had made her company so prosperous, that a closed carriage stopped near her. It was an ordinary carriage, black, worn along the footings, obviously hired, but when she moved, it moved. When she stopped, it stopped. The fifth time it halted, she knew Angus was inside the carriage.
“Excuse me,” she said to three women who worked for her and were overseeing the big produce cart. “Would you tell Harriet that I might not be home for dinner but not to worry about me?”
“Of course,” the young woman said. She’d been transported for stealing a silver bowl from the earl who owned the house where she’d worked since she was nine. That the man had been raping her since she was thirteen meant nothing to the court.
