Perhaps she just liked this shade of green.
Alasdair sat backward in the carriage, facing Arabella and Maggie. He did not have to make much conversation with Arabella the first day as they headed south on the road toward Inverness. Mrs. Maggie Gunn was full of questions for him. Where were his people from? Really? She did not remember any Andrews in Bailebrae. And surely he and she were of an age? Oh, his mother’s sister and her husband? The uncle was a Mowat? Yes, maybe she did remember some farmer by that name up by Bailebrae. But it had been long ago.
And his schooling and training? Edinburgh? And why had he not come back to the Highlands?
“We are in as much need of a good doctor as the people of England, sir,” Maggie said.
Arabella interjected here. “Maggie, you must leave Dr. Andrews alone. If he had never left Scotland, he would not have saved my sister’s life.”
Alasdair could feel the heat on his face. “I dinnae save her life. Her husband and Sommerleigh and she herself did that. But as to why I dinnae return ... Bailebrae was just a place of deprivation. For me. Perhaps I was not brave enough, and for that, I am sorry.”
“Brave enough!” Arabella leaned forward. “You were in the navy, were you not?”
“Aye.”
“On a ship that came under fire from the French many times?”
“Aye.” He wondered at her knowing his history.
Arabella sat back and looked at Maggie. “I should think that brave enough for anyone. There is no reason for the doctor to apologize.”
“Perhaps traveling to a place ye have never been before, where ye have nae friends, and making a life for yerself,” Alasdair said, “perhaps that is brave, too.”
Arabella looked down at her gloved hands in her lap.
“Well, she has friends now,” Maggie huffed.
“Aye,” Alasdair said.
Arabella looked up and fixed her eyes on Alasdair’s. “I count Dr. Andrews as among my friends. I hope I am not wrong in that, Doctor?”
He choked. “Aye, I mean, nae, Miss Lovelock. Ye are not wrong.”
Near the end of the day, the two women slept, Maggie slumping onto the much-smaller Arabella’s shoulder, her arm linked into Arabella’s. Arabella’s head was down, her chin on her chest, her face hidden by her woolen bonnet. Alasdair could see that the stout Mrs. Gunn’s head and arm were helping keep Arabella in place as the carriage bumped along the roads rutted by winter mud.
He mused that if he were sitting next to Arabella and, for some reason he was allowed to do what he wished, he would put his arms around her entirely and lock her in his clasp so she could not lurch off the seat. He would keep her from flying off.
He shifted in his own seat. Foolishness. He would never have license to do what he wished. Not with her.
He attempted to read a letter in a medical periodical about a bladder stone surgery. He leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, head down, trying to make sense of the words.
The air in the carriage suddenly seemed charged with something.
He looked up.
Arabella’s eyes were open and she was looking at him.
He looked back.
A smile curved her lips.
Suddenly, the world seemed a very good place to Alasdair. She was as wonderful and lovely as ever. He was brave. She was unmarried. She was with him. Happiness was within reach.
Then some worry in her face, the smile was gone, and she closed her eyes.
The world again became a place of uncertainty, of death and disease. Of endings. It became the world that Alasdair had always lived in.
Arabella was jounced awake by a rut in the road. She opened her eyes and saw Alasdair reading, leaning forward, his hat off, the top of his head just a few feet from her. Those waves of shiny auburn hair. She wanted to put her hands in that hair, lace her fingers into it, and pull his head up and look at his eyes, his mouth, his dimples, his face. That face she had seen so briefly and imagined for so long.
