Harry averted her eyes.
“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she muttered.
Alasdair waited.
She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. She seemed to make a decision and looked away again.
“She was seduced by a man two months ago. He is married, my stepmother says. And then the fornication was made public, and Arabella left London. She has written that she is safe, but she has been clever and we don’t know where she is, exactly.”
Emotions warred within Alasdair. Fury at this immoral monster who had seduced Arabella. Selfish disappointment that Arabella had given herself to another. But primarily, a very strong and almost suffocating anxiety about the safety of Arabella.
Anxiety. He, who had the reputation as the calmest of men. The most steady-handed of surgeons when he was in the navy and amputated five limbs in the matter of an hour, on a rolling ship under cannon fire from the French, with himself and his saw covered in blood, his boots slipping on the deck, not able to find purchase in the gore.
But now he was flooded with trepidation.
Harry peered at his face again.
“I think you better sit down, and I’ll get you a whisky.”
He obeyed her. Harry poured him a finger from one of her husband’s decanters and brought it to him. He drank it.
She said nothing more but sat opposite him, slumped in a chair, with her fingers steepled, studying him.
“Where was her letter from?” Alasdair choked out.
“Glasgow. And that was where she left the duke’s coach and told it to go back to London.”
“Glasgow?”
“Yes.”
“Does she have any acquaintance in Glasgow?”
“No. But she is not there now,” Harry said with the same surety she had when she discussed the natural numbers. “It is a misdirection. As I said, she is clever. She has gone on to some other place. She did promise to write again. But I think she doesn’t want to be found.”
“Is there to be a child?”
“My stepmother doesn’t think so.”
Alasdair eventually came out of the library with Harry and made an excuse to Thomas and went home to have Christmas night in his very lonely house and his very lonely bed.
The pain was deep. Not just the pain of loss but also the pain of responsibility.
He asked himself the very hard question. If he had had more courage, if he had felt himself more worthy, might he have been able to engage Arabella’s affections and prevent this unhappiness for her? He did not know. He only knew that he had not. He had been weak and shy, and she had been damaged by evil.
Better that he had risked his heart and approached her. But he had waited. And what he thought might be his one chance of joy had now slipped through his fingers.
He deserved his pain. She did not deserve hers. How natural it would be for a spirited and affectionate young woman like her to abandon propriety in search of love. Oh, poor Arabella.
He had not liked to ask Harry for further news of Arabella. However, Harry let him know that she wrote to and received letters from her every month. But Harry did not say where the letters came from or their content. And he did not feel he had the right to ask.
He wondered if Arabella had taken a ship from Glasgow to America. Or more likely, a ship from Glasgow to Liverpool and then on to America or Canada. He did not know why, but he imagined the dauntless Arabella in the New World.
Nine
Four very hard days and nights in the mail coach to Edinburgh and the home of Dr. Murray. The home where Alasdair had first been allowed to eat all he wanted. Where he had been encouraged to string more than two or three words together. And where he had sat up late at night, poring over his books, at one point learning the calculus that had so endeared him to Harry in her first months at Sommerleigh.
“Dr. Murray,” he said to the old man whose breath was laboring, who could not speak. He dropped his doctor’s bag and pushed past the nurse and pulled the man upright by his arms so he was sitting perfectly straight.
