He must think of something to say to her.
He sat up.
Perhaps he should make some notes.
Thirteen
Wearing Alasdair’s brown scarf around her neck, Arabella folded clothes and put them in her trunk. It was too bad that she didn’t have any really pretty dresses anymore. Just practical things. But Alasdair almost certainly did not care about dresses. And she would be in her coat in the carriage anyway, she told herself, just as Maggie arrived back to the cottage and put her head in the door of Arabella’s bedchamber.
“Miss Lovelock, what are ye doing?”
“Maggie.” She stopped and could feel her face growing hot with the excitement of telling someone. “Maggie, what do you think? We are to leave Dunburn tomorrow to travel to England. To see my sister. You will come with me, won’t you?”
“Come with ye? I’ve not been to England.”
“We won’t stay long. A month or two. My sister’s confinement approaches, and she asked for me.”
“I dinnae ken ye had a sister, Miss Lovelock.”
“Yes, two. You will come, won’t you?”
“’Tis warmer there?”
“In February? A little, perhaps. The winds are not so fierce at Sommerleigh as they are here, I am sure.”
“How will we go?”
“By a hired carriage. We will go with the man who brought me the letter from my sister. Dr. Andrews.” She touched the scarf at her neck and felt her face become a trifle hotter.
“The lovely man who is staying at the public house? Mr. Cormack’s second cousin? The one whom Mr. Cormack threatened to beat?”
Arabella could not find her breath. “What?” She started for the door of the bedchamber.
Maggie stopped her. “Dinnae be troubled, Miss Lovelock. They left the public house before there was a fight and when they came back after half an hour, Mr. Cormack had sobered and they both seemed unhurt and ate a pie together.”
Arabella stared. “You seem to know all about it.”
Maggie shrugged as she turned to leave the room. “Ye know villages, Miss Lovelock. There are nae secrets here.”
Except shehadkept her secrets here, Arabella thought. With great success. And she had become a different person, entirely.
Oh, what did Alasdair think of her now?
She buried her nose in his scarf. It smelled of him. She would not give the scarf back. Not for anything.
The next morning, the carriage stood outside Arabella’s cottage and the coachman Paterson and Alasdair wrestled her and Maggie’s trunks onto the top of the carriage. Ewen MacEwen, he of the freckled face, approached, looking almost fat and stuffed into his coat, like a bird who has fluffed the feathers of its breast.
“I hear ye are going south,” he said to Arabella, who was standing outside the carriage watching her trunk being lifted to the top.
“Yes, I will be away for a month or two.” She reached into her reticule. “I will still pay you to go to Inverness and get my letters, if you like, Ewen, and a book.”
“Nae,” he said. “But I would like to go to England.”
“We are leaving within the hour.”
“I am ready.”
“But your stepmother, your sisters?”
