“Is your house in the Highlands like this?” Bertie asked Sinclair, while they both kept an eye on Andrew.
Sinclair raised his brows, a hint of a smile touching his mouth. “A pile of rubble?”
A square part of the old castle stuck into the sky, a few holes near the top regular enough to have been windows or arrow slits. The base was surrounded by a wall that had fallen into nothing but heaps of stones, some stones still large, others ground down by time, weather, and people who took the broken rocks to repair or build their own houses.
“You know what I mean. Silly.”
“It’s not like Kilmorgan, no, so don’t grow too used to living in luxury. No lavish mansion with two-hundred bedrooms—or whatever number it is. I’m not a duke, only a gentleman descended from landed gentry.” He dropped his ironic tone. “It’s beautiful, though. The house is graceful, and the hills and loch behind it are like a painted backdrop. I’m always astonished that such beauty exists in the world.”
Bertie liked when he became like this, lowering his sardonic facade, and looking around with true enjoyment.
She winked at him. “Is there a monster in your loch?”
Sinclair frowned as though giving true thought to the possibility. “Might be. I sometimes see suspicious bubbles in the middle, even on calm days. Macaulay says it’s pike, but who knows? Andrew has watched for hours for tentacles or a head to pop up, but nothing ever has. He’s quiet the entire time he watches, which I think is more astonishing than a monster ever could be.”
Bertie had to laugh. “Andrew’s a good lad. He only needs a way to direct his restlessness. Like in running.”
Andrew was running now, on the flatter ground, chasing unknown monsters that lurked among the ruins. Cat ignored him and the view, her head down over her notebook. She looked fetching in her dark blue coat and hat, mittens hanging from her wrists, while her cold-pink hands moved across the page.
“She really does want to go to Miss Pringle’s Academy,” Bertie said. “She speaks of it often.”
“I know.” Sinclair sounded resigned. “Andrew has asked me when he can go off to school and join a running team. Not so he can study and learn anything, you understand.”
“Of course not.” Bertie eyed the two of them, children she’d become so fond of in such a brief time. “When you do send them off, I’ll be out of a job.” The words came out more forlornly than she’d meant them to.
“No, you won’t,” Sinclair said quickly.
“I don’t think any of the fancy governess agencies will put me on their books, no matter how many references you write.” Bertie glanced up at him, but Sinclair was watching Andrew, his face a careful blank. “I’ve started my own collection, you know. Of rules for a proper governess.”
Sinclair still watched Andrew, though she saw his chest rise more quickly. “Oh? And what are they?”
Bertie held up her hand, ticking the rules off on her fingers. “Well, book learning for a start. If a governess is going to teach her charges, she should know what she’s teaching them.”
“I’ll grant you that. What else?”
“She must have the patience of a saint but love the children no matter what. They shouldn’t have to behave to earn her fondness.”
“Rather like being a father,” Sinclair said, slanting her a look. “Anything more?”
“She should find ways to keep them interested in learning, not just beat them with facts. Like making history a string of great stories, not dates to memorize.”
“Hmm, I wish you could have given your rules to some of my tutors when I was a lad.”
Bertie grinned and touched another finger. “She should take plenty of exercise with the children and not be upset if they want to run and play. A governess being fit is a help.”
The glint of humor had returned to Sinclair’s eyes. “You sound like a reformer.”
“Do I? It’s only common sense. I think your other governesses ran away because they didn’t like children. They wanted Cat and Andrew to sit like statues while they talked at them, and got angry if they couldn’t repeat the boring details. Heaven forbid either of the kids should have an opinion.”
“The world expects children to be seen and not heard, you know.”
“Then the world ain’t—isn’t paying attention.”
Sinclair didn’t answer, but the space had lessened between them. Sinclair’s gloved hand touched hers, the backs of their fingers brushing.
Bertie wanted this moment to last—she and Sinclair on the hilltop, almost holding hands, Andrew happily exploring, Cat quiet and content. No dark world, no difference in their stations in life, in their pasts. Effervescent happiness welled up inside her—she could float away on it.
The moment broke when the sound of a hunter’s gun cracked the air far away. Hart’s ghillie and Macaulay had taken some of the remaining English visitors on a stalk on the other side of the valley. The cold, clear air brought the sounds from miles away.
Andrew stood up on one of the rocks, firing an imaginary rifle. “Take that, Butcher Cumberland. See what you get when you rile a Highlander.”
Sinclair left Bertie to climb to Andrew. “Don’t fall while you’re trying to fight the Battle of Culloden again. And keep in mind we lost, more’s the pity.”
“Wouldn’t have if I’d been there,” Andrew vowed. He made more shooting noises.
Cat rose from her seat, tucking away her notebook. “We should help father lure him down, or we’ll never get our tea,” Cat said, resigned. She took Bertie’s hand. “Can we go higher? I want to see.”
Bertie kept a firm hold of Cat’s hand as they climbed up to Andrew and Sinclair. The castle had been built on a rocky outcropping, giving the defenders a good view over the valley. They’d have seen attackers from miles away, and any opposing army would have been hard-pressed to reach it without harm.
The castle had fallen, so Daniel had told Bertie, not to attackers, but to bored English soldiers after the war with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and to time.
The black rocks were slippery. Andrew stood on a half-ruined wall, Sinclair holding the back of his jacket as Andrew shot at imaginary Englishmen.
Cat, next to Bertie, trod on a slab of loose stone, and lost her balance. Her foot went off the stone, her leg in its knit stocking and fashionable boot catching on a jagged rock below.
Bertie clung to her, and Cat scrambled for solid ground. She was almost up again when her other foot slipped on the snow, and Cat began to plunge downward.
With a cry, she grabbed desperately for Bertie. Bertie, heart pounding, seized Cat with both hands and pulled her to safety, but Cat lost hold of her doll.
The doll’s pink china face beamed its perpetual smile as it slipped over the black rocks, and fell, end over end, tumbling down, down, down, toward the jutting stones, gorse, and half-melted snow many feet below.
Chapter 24
A high-pitched keening sounded over the valley. Bertie jerked around, wondering what sort of creature could make such a noise, but the next instant, she realized it was Cat.
The little girl ripped herself from Bertie’s grasp and flung herself down on the stones, reaching desperately for the doll that continued to roll her merry way down the nearly vertical hill. The doll was battered from rock to rock, pieces of porcelain flying from her face to litter the hillside.
The doll’s wild tumble came to a halt on a rock jutting over the cliff, where she lay like a dead thing, her arms and legs dangling over empty space.
Cat’s desperate keening wound into words. “Mama! Mama! Mama!”
Sinclair leapt back down toward them, carrying Andrew. “Cat. Sweetheart.”
Cat reached toward the doll, her empty hands opening and closing. “Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! . . .” Her words choked her, the girl barely able to draw breath. “Mama . . .”
“Bl
eeding ’ell.” Bertie stripped off her hat and her coat, jammed her leather gloves more firmly over her fingers, and started scrambling down the tumble of boulders toward the limp body of the doll.
“Bertie!” Sinclair’s deep voice bellowed over the continuing cries of his daughter. “Get the hell back here! Bertie! . . .”
Bertie climbed down the rocks, hands and feet finding niches to steady her along. She knew she was mad to do it—one slip, and she was over the cliff, down the pretty hill to the rocks below. The view that had seemed so beautiful from the top would kill her.
“Mama! Mama . . .” Cat’s continued cries penetrated the silence, punctuated by another crack from the guns across the valley.
“I have to be daft,” Bertie muttered to herself as she sought the next solid rock with the toe of her boot. “I belong on city streets, I do, trying to make ends meet and keep meself out of trouble. What the blazes am I doing climbing down a mountain in Scotland to rescue a doll?”
Bertie knew, however, that she wouldn’t climb back up without it. If Cat had been any other little girl, an ordinary child Bertie didn’t know well, she’d have told Cat to sod the bloody thing and have her rich father buy her another.
But Bertie had come to know Cat in the last weeks, and she understood exactly what the doll was to her. Bertie’s mother’s locket swung against her skin inside her bodice—she knew good and well she’d be climbing down these rocks if she’d dropped it.
Not everyone had Bertie’s climbing skills either, honed from a childhood of getting herself up the sides of buildings and through tiny windows to let her father in a discreet side door. Her dad would never take very much during these jobs, just one or two things that might not be missed right away. By the time people realized they’d been robbed, they couldn’t be sure when it had been done or who’d been nearby at the time.
Bertie was a bit past those childhood days, however, and no longer as agile. It had taken everything she’d had to climb up the scaffolding after Cat and Andrew the first day she’d met them. This going was harder, and the rocks seemed determined to cut her hands, the damp to make her slip.
Almost there. At the top of the hill, Cat continued to cry frantically; Sinclair was cursing, his hands full with keeping Andrew from climbing after Bertie.
The doll hung face downward, its pretty silk dress caught on a rock, which was why it had ceased its tumbling. Bertie had to inch her way toward it, holding hard to stones that cut her gloves. She knew she’d never climb out onto the jutting rock—she’d have to hang on here, and reach . . .
She heard Sinclair say, “Bertie,” in a tone of terror, anger, and certainty that he was seeing the last of her.
Bertie gripped her handholds tightly and prodded with her boot until she had very firm rock under her foot. Then she leaned out, bracing with her hand- and footholds, and hooked her fingers around the back of the doll’s dress.
She plucked the doll from the ledge, much as Sinclair pulled Andrew back by his coat even now, the doll’s little gown filthy with mud. Bertie levered herself upright, and thrust the doll inside her coat.
Now to make her ascent. Bertie felt for handholds going up, testing each one before trusting her weight to it. Climbing up was always easier for her than down, mostly because she didn’t have to look at the empty space beneath her feet. She went slowly, though, knowing that any misstep could mean her death.
Halfway up, she found chunks of the doll’s broken face strewn about the gorse. The poor thing’s smile was split in two, but both eyes remained in one piece, gazing at Bertie in cheerful encouragement. Bertie gathered up the bits, dropped them into her pocket, and continued.
She was almost to the top when a pair of strong hands gripped her under the arms and hauled her to solid ground. Bertie landed against Sinclair’s large body, and his arms went around her, holding her tight, tight. He crushed her to him with arms as hard as steel, lips in her hair. “Bertie. Damn and blast you . . .”
Behind them, Cat continued to cry, her wailing breaking into hoarse breaths. Bertie pushed away from Sinclair, but he didn’t let go of her hand as they made their way back to Cat.
Andrew was kneeling next to his sister, stroking her hair, his small face troubled. “Don’t cry, Cat. Bertie’s here. She saved your dolly. See?”
Sinclair gently lifted Cat and drew her into his arms. “Shh. Sweetheart.”
“It’s all right—I nabbed her,” Bertie said breathlessly. “She’s a bit worse for wear, but I think we can make her better. Nothing a little glue and needle and thread won’t fix. And maybe a good scrubbing.”
Cat peeked out at the smashed doll, her eyes red and flowing. “Ma . . . ma.” The word came in gasps, Cat sounding more like a tiny child than an eleven-year-old girl.
Bertie smoothed Cat’s hair, which was tangled now with thorny twigs and dead leaves. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
Cat pushed herself away from her father to reach for Bertie. Bertie opened her arms and gathered Cat in. Over her head, she met Sinclair’s gaze, his gray eyes red-rimmed.
“Is she going to be all right?” Andrew asked in a small voice.
Sinclair took his hand. “I think so, lad. Don’t you worry, now.”
He squeezed Andrew’s hand, but the look he shared again with Bertie was uncertain, and she had to nod back in the same uncertainty.
Sinclair took Bertie and his children not to the shared nursery at the top of the house, but to the suite of rooms he’d been given in Lord Cameron’s wing. Sinclair didn’t want to have to explain the incident to the contingent of nannies or even to Ainsley and his well-meaning sisters-in-law. Not until Cat was better.
Cat was covered in grime, her face streaked with tears and mucus. Bertie didn’t look much better—her gloves in shreds, her gray wool gown torn, her face covered in dirt and little cuts. For once, Andrew was the cleanest of the lot.
Sinclair and Andrew waited rather forlornly in the little sitting room while Bertie ordered up a bath for Cat in the bedroom and bathed the girl herself. When she opened the door later to admit Sinclair, Bertie was damp and flushed, her face scrubbed clean, her bodice unbuttoned at her throat. Bertie told him in a quiet voice she’d take Andrew on up to the nursery, and left Sinclair alone with his daughter.
Cat lay in Sinclair’s bed, tucked up in her nightie that a maid had fetched from the nursery. The doll, stripped of the gown it had worn for seven or so years now, was propped next to the washbasin like a war casualty. Bertie had carefully set the pieces of its broken porcelain head beside the tattered body.
Sinclair smoothed the blankets over Cat. “Are you all right now, love?”
Cat nodded. The mad light had gone from her eyes, and she looked sad, ashamed, and a little discomfited. “I’m sorry, Papa.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Sinclair said. “I know she’s special to you. Bertie’s right—we’ll fix her up again.”
“She’s just a doll,” Cat said, her voice listless.
He sat down next to the bed and stroked Cat’s hair. She looked so like Daisy, with her dark hair and Irish blue eyes and dark lashes—as the saying went, eyes put in with a smutty finger. Cat had shared her mother’s liveliness until that terrible day Daisy went away.
Sinclair took her hand, his heart beating too hard. He wished he could reach that liveliness, bring it to the surface, but he didn’t know how. It killed him that he didn’t know how.
He could have lost her today, and Bertie—when he’d seen Bertie go over the cliff his entire world had stopped. He might be even now sitting here, wondering that he was still alive without Bertie.
Sinclair cleared his throat and squeezed Cat’s hand. “I know she’s not just a doll, sweet. Your mother gave her to you, and I know you treasure it.”
“Mama’s gone.”
The dull words struck Sinclair’s heart. “I know. And I miss her every
day. It’s all right to miss her, love.”
Fresh tears flowed from Caitriona’s eyes, but they were quiet tears, not the crazed sobs of her hysterics. “I don’t want Bertie to go. Even if I go to Miss Pringle’s Academy, I want Bertie to stay.”
“I want her to stay too,” Sinclair said, all his heart in the words.
Cat wiped away her tears. “She will,” she said with conviction, and Sinclair hoped with everything he had that his daughter was right. He’d make sure of it.
Bertie returned to her own room after she set up Andrew with a bath in the nursery. Andrew didn’t want a bath, but he gave in without as vehement an argument as usual. Bertie left him in the care of the nannies and went to her room to plop into a soft chair and let out a sigh.
Not two minutes later, Sinclair slammed his way into her bedchamber without so much as knocking, and Bertie leapt to her feet again. “What’s wrong? Is Cat all right?”
Sinclair stared at her as though he didn’t understand the question, then he nodded distractedly. “Yes, she’s asleep. Aoife is with her.”
“Good.” Bertie pressed her hand to her heart. “You had me worried, there.”
“I had you worried?” Sinclair banged the door shut and strode to her, his fury evident. “Devil take you, Bertie, what the hell were you thinking, climbing down that cliff and risking your bloody neck? For a doll?”
Bertie gaped up at him. Sinclair’s face was blotchy red, his eyes glittering with rage. He wasn’t the stern, arrogant barrister, or the empty, unhappy man; this was someone new. Sinclair towered over Bertie, his large hands balled to fists, a furious Scottish warrior barely holding himself in check.
“Her mum gave her that doll,” Bertie said faintly. “Of course I had to fetch it back.” She put her hand inside her collar and drew out her locket. “My mum gave me this. You don’t think I wouldn’t have been over those rocks in a trice if I’d dropped it?”