She looked surprised at the question, but answered nonetheless.
“A number of years. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” he said.
He just wanted to keep her there talking. Any subject was acceptable, including the weather. But it was such a bucolic English night that he didn’t think it would interest her for long.
“Have you ever known a Spaniard?” he asked.
Another lift of an eyebrow.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” he said.
She slowly descended the steps, still clutching that odd book with one arm. It looked heavy enough that she could use it as a weapon.
As she passed him, Mrs. Williams uttered a word that only someone well versed in colloquial Spanish would know. In fact, he was so startled by her whisper that he wondered if he’d misheard her.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, the smile playing around her mouth telling him he hadn’t been mistaken after all.
He began to look at his stay at Chavensworth in a whole new light.
The movement of the train had lulled Sarah to sleep. Douglas reached into the cupboard and retrieved a blanket, then placed it across her lap before tenderly tucking it around her shoulders.
The train hadn’t halted at a siding after all but continued on through the night. The moon shone through the window. A Scottish moon. For the first time in twenty years, he was home. In the time he’d been gone, he’d seen the world, experienced adventure, been in danger as well as financial peril.
He’d come to value friendship, honesty, honor, and courage. He’d also come to feel some degree of shame for those things he’d done, as a boy, to survive.
Coming home was easier than he’d thought it to be. Perhaps that was due to Sarah’s presence beside him. Sarah, intense, duty-driven Sarah, who smiled so rarely that he’d come to look for it. Something about her smile seemed to lighten his heart.
Sarah made a sound in her sleep, and one hand brushed against her cheek. He bent and smoothed her hair free of her face.
Chavensworth was entailed, and the Duke of Herridge had not mentioned any other estates. Consequently, Douglas had believed the fortune he’d amassed to be substantially larger than anything she would inherit. But if she were to inherit Kilmarin, it meant his wife would probably become the wealthiest woman in Scotland.
Ever since he was a little boy, he’d heard of Kilmarin. The castle seemed to embody all that was great and wondrous about Scotland, its history, and the ferocity of its people. There were places at Kilmarin, he’d heard, that were seven hundred years old.
Not only was Sarah the Duke of Herridge’s daughter, but she was a Tulloch of Kilmarin.
Was Providence throwing boulders in his path on purpose?
He settled into the chair beside her, willing himself to sleep as well. He missed holding her while she slept, which was ridiculous. He’d slept standing up in a mud hut once, during a monsoon that had nearly floated him away. He could damn well sleep on a reasonably comfortable chair in a private rail car.
His memories, and their attendant guilt and shame, could wait until they reached Perth.
Chapter 17
They arrived in the city midmorning of the next day. As they pulled slowly into the station, Douglas realized that this journey was one of the longest he’d ever taken. Not of distance, but of time.
Douglas Eston, world traveler, explorer, inventor, and man of wealth was visiting the past.
Perth sat at the head of an estuary of the River Tay. To the southwest were the Ochil Hills, and the Sidiaw Hills lay to the northeast. Across the river, to the east was Monereiffe Hill and nearer, Kinnoull Hill, each nearly a thousand feet high. He’d climbed both as a child, pretending to rule over all his domain.
Perth was not only the site of his history, but that of Scotland itself. Once known as St. Johnstown, the city lay between two broad meadows, and had been, sometime ago, the capital of Scotland. In its past, it had also been a Royal Burgh, and in the hands of the English more than once. There, in the Church of St. John, where services had been attended by Charles I as well as Charles II, John Knox had delivered a sermon against idolatry.
As they waited for the carriage to be removed from the flatcar, he noted the people congregating in thestation. When he was a boy, he would have tried to steal from them, or conjure up enough tears to summon their pity. Yet even then, rouser that he was, he’d dreamed of becoming the man he was now. Oh, he’d no idea of the manners and the clothes, the carriages, horses, houses, and the like. All he’d thought of was the money. He’d wanted to have enough money that he could buy anything he wanted to eat, at any time. If he was hungry in the middle of the night, he wanted to be able to order up a meal.
He had come too close to starving too many times.
