Chapter 1
I am, undoubtedly, an idiot. Also an arse.
—from the 1818 papers of Arthur Baird, Fifth Earl of Strathrannoch, unsent draft
“Based upon our respective financial situations, our mutually agreeable political interests, and the general compatibility of our persons,” Lydia Hope-Wallace said, “it seems to both our advantages that we unite in holy matrimony.”
Her voice shook only a trifle, which was a notable improvement.
Her friend Georgiana Cleeve gazed at her from across the post-chaise, expression impassive. Bacon, Georgiana’s dog, gave Lydia a sympathetic moan from his position on Georgiana’s lap.
Lydia winced. “Too wordy?” She fiddled with her sheaf of papers, trying not to look at her notes. Again. “I was afraid of that. Perhaps there is some way I can compress the language of the third clause—”
“I am not certain the language is the problem.”
“Perhaps not.” Lydia chewed on her lower lip and stared blearily down at the papers in her lap, draft after penciled draft of marriage proposals in her own hand.
Marriage proposals. To a man she had never met.
It turned out it was rather difficult to get such a thing right.
She pulled out the pencil she’d stuffed into her coiffure and scratched out a hasty revision. “How about this: Based upon the mutual benefits conferred by a legal union—”
“Mutual benefits? Lydia, you are the third-richest unmarried heiress in London. The benefits are all Strathrannoch’s.”
“Second-richest, I think.” Lydia frowned and drew a line through compatibility of our persons, which suddenly struck her as a bit indecent. “Hannah Harvey got engaged last week to that fellow in tin from Birmingham.”
She drew a line through mutual benefits as well, for the sake of caution.
Georgiana cleared her throat, and Lydia redirected her gaze to her friend’s finely drawn, deceptively innocent face.
“Perhaps,” Georgiana said—as though she had not said it half a dozen times in the last week—“we might consider a social call on Lord Strathrannoch first. You might discuss your ‘mutual interests.’”
Lydia clenched her teeth. Her heart beat harder in her chest, as it did every time Georgiana proposed an alteration in their plan. “No.”
“I can ask for a tour of his castle. You can take tea in his parlor. And then we can return to Dunkeld for the evening.”
They had left the posting inn in Dunkeld that morning to set off for Strathrannoch Castle. It had taken quite a bit of coin to persuade the postilion to take them away from Perth and Dundee, rather than toward those centers of civilization—a fact that had given Lydia a moment of pause—but the farther afield they traveled, the more the view out the hazed glass soothed something inside her. Softened the spiked edges of panic in her chest.
They’d spent nearly an hour winding along the river before they’d passed into a forest of thick-branched oaks and clustered fir trees. When they’d emerged, it had been to a wide soft vista of green—all hills and sun-spangled water and no other humans as far as the eye could see.
Lydia had loved every moment she’d spent peering out the coach window. It was only when she looked down into her lap, at the rumpled papers and scratched-out notations in her own neat hand, that panic resettled itself somewhere above her breastbone.
“You needn’t propose to the man immediately upon meeting him,” Georgiana went on. Also not for the first time. “Perhaps you might consider making him earn the privilege of your hand. Men perform better when they are required to rise to the occasion.”
“No,” Lydia said again.
Her blood had begun pounding in her ears. Her stomach churned.
She could not recall a time—even in the furthest reaches of her memory—when she had been comfortable with basic social congress.
In her own home, within the comfortable knot of her friends and family, she was perfectly capable of human interaction. Outside that circle, however, she tended to fade silently into the background—or, alternatively, become so flustered and dizzy that she fainted in the middle of a drawing room and had to be carried out by a footman.
She knew herself. There was no possible way that she could sit down with the Earl of Strathrannoch and make polite conversation for several days before revealing the truth of why she had come to his castle. She had to get it over with as quickly as possible before she made an utter cake of herself.
“We’ve come this far,” Lydia said. She looked down at the papers in her lap—some in her own hand and some in Strathrannoch’s, dozens of his clever, charming letters—and tried to force the tremble out of her voice. “I’m not going to give up now.”
She could not. She had hidden her whereabouts from her mother and brothers, revealed the truth of her plot only to her closest friends, and set out for Scotland armed with nothing but a trunk and a fresh pencil.
This is your chance, she had thought to herself. This is your chance to change your life.
Three years ago, Lydia had begun writing radical political tracts, distributed anonymously by the scandalous circulating library Belvoir’s. Lydia’s first pamphlet had called for universal suffrage for both men and women. Her second had argued for the complete abolition of the aristocracy in England.
It had been that second pamphlet that had prompted the Earl of Strathrannoch’s response, delivered care of the library.
Dear H, he had written. I admire your fighting spirit and wonder when you mean to write on the question of Scotland.
(Lydia had, of necessity, employed a simple pseudonym for her pamphlets. H for Hope-Wallace. H for heart and hardihood. H for Holy hell, what have I done? and Hope I don’t end up in prison!)
Dear Strathrannoch, she had written back. What Scotland question do you have in mind? I assure you, I have numerous opinions, most of which you probably will not appreciate. Your lordship.
Two weeks later, she’d had his reply: Dear H, I suppose you mean because the Strathrannochs have for five generations allied themselves with your monarchy instead of our own people? Aye, I can see why you’d think I’d oppose your incendiary ideas. You’d be wrong, however. Tell me what you think about the Scots fighting for your English king against Napoleon and don’t hold back. I’d like for my eyebrows to burn off when I read your next letter.
She’d written back. And in the months and years that had followed, she and the Earl of Strathrannoch had developed a peculiar friendship.
He did not know her true identity. He did not know she was an absurdly rich spinster. He had no idea that she was so terrified of interacting with other humans that, despite her fortune, she’d been a disaster during her seven unbearable Seasons.
But he knew her, in a way. He knew the heart of her—at least, the political part—and the shape of her ideas. And he agreed with them all, even the most outrageous.
When Strathrannoch had confessed in his last letter that his ancestral home in the Scottish Lowlands could scarcely support itself financially, that he was struggling to keep the place running, an idea had crystallized in her mind.
She could marry him.
Strathrannoch needed money, and Lydia had coin in abundance.
And Lydia needed—
Her chest felt tight. She rubbed her fingers at the ache there and stared down at the papers in her lap.
In the years since her ignominious debut, she had folded in on herself. She’d hidden behind the protective wall of her older brothers and let herself become smaller and smaller. More and more invisible.
Her anonymous pamphlets had felt almost miraculous at first. Suddenly, she had a voice—a way to make herself heard even when she could not manage to speak aloud.
But the rich, honeyed taste of independence that her writing had given her only made her crave more of the same. Her pamphlets were secret, hidden; she had no real autonomy. Almost no one in her life knew of her work—to everyone else, she was only silent, mousy, helpless Lydia Hope-Wallace.
Except to Strathrannoch. He did not know her for an awkward wallflower. He saw only her radical spirit, the bright ferocity of her writing.
And if she had her way, he would never know the way the beau monde perceived her. If she marched into his house and proposed a marriage of convenience—if he said yes—
She could be the woman from the pamphlets, strong and independent. She could be proud of who she was.
“This is my chance,” she murmured to the letters. “I will not waste it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She blinked and met Georgiana’s gaze. “I am not going home in disgrace. I can do this. It’s going to work out.”
“Your abilities are not my primary concern,” Georgiana said. Her lovely face had gone slightly peevish. “I don’t doubt that you can persuade this stranger to marry you. I wonder whether you are certain that you want to.”
Lydia set her teeth. “I’m certain.”
The coach shuddered and slowed down. Bacon made an excited circle in Georgiana’s lap, leaving a trail of white hairs.
Georgiana pressed her lips together firmly, and Lydia knew her friend would not speak of her hesitations again. She might doubt Lydia’s plan, but if anyone could understand a desperate desire for independence, it was Georgiana.
“Time to pluck up, then,” Georgiana said, “because we seem to have arrived.”
* * *
Lydia had known what to expect from the castle itself. She’d found a picture of it in advance, in an illustrated guide to the great estates of Scotland. She’d blinked at the page in shock, wondering if it was romanticized, so closely did it match the drawings of a fantasy castle one might find in a children’s storybook.
But no. The impression of a fairy-tale castle was, if anything, stronger in person. Though she could see from the outside the signs of disrepair that Strathrannoch had told her about in his letters, she was still boggled by the place, white and turreted, crenellations notched against the sharp blue of the early-autumn sky.
She had expected the fairy-tale castle. She had anticipated the missing glass on the upper-floor windows and the tumbledown ruin of the gate lodge, overgrown with mosses.
She had not anticipated the zebra.
The black-and-white equine moved placidly past them as they approached the castle’s front door, wending its way down the drive and toward the postilion.
The postboy swore in a Scots so thick and broad that Lydia could not quite make it out. “What in hell—”
“Not to worry!” Georgiana called out. “’Tis only a zebra!” She turned to Lydia and the expression of blithe unconcern fell off her face. “Why is there a zebra?” she hissed.
“I—I don’t—”
“Your earl did not mention a penchant for acquiring African mammals?”
Lydia felt a familiar panic swell in her chest, the kind that always rose when she was forced into unpredictable social situations. “I—no, he didn’t mention any—any animals—”
Georgiana appeared to notice the blood draining slowly from Lydia’s face and heaved a sigh. She gave Lydia a gentle shove toward the front door. “Never mind. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.” Under her breath, she muttered, “For a zebra.”
The front door to the castle was tall and arched, positioned between two dainty towers. Lydia lifted her eyes higher, straining to see the crest of the ramparts above her.
Her heart fluttered. Her throat tightened.
Strathrannoch, she reminded herself. This is Strathrannoch’s home.
She knew him. He knew her. He was not a stranger. She did not need to be afraid.
She tried to make her unruly body believe it. She bit down hard on her lower lip and knocked on the door.
It was flung open almost instantaneously, and Lydia promptly dropped her reticule in shock. Papers exploded outward at her feet, but she did not look down.
She stared instead at the man who had opened the door.
He was an enormous fellow, tall—considerably taller even than Jasper, the tallest of her brothers—and probably twice as broad about the shoulder as Jasper as well. His hair was a goldish sort of brown, curly and rumpled, and his face was obscured by a haphazard growth of whiskers. He wore some kind of boiled-leather smock over his clothing, and Lydia wondered, half hysterically, where they had found a pot big enough to boil the leather for a man of these titanic proportions.
He was scowling.
Lydia swallowed. Was this the … butler? She racked her brain and found to her horror that she could not recall Strathrannoch mentioning, in any of his letters, the name of his butler.
Georgiana gave her another, slightly more discreet shove. Bacon whimpered.
“Good afternoon,” Lydia said. Oh hell and damnation, her voice was trembling so hard, he mightn’t be able to make out her words. She felt her face flame but forced herself to keep talking despite her embarrassment. “I am here to see the—the Earl of Strathrannoch.”
This is your chance, she repeated in her head. This is your only chance.
The words felt suddenly less inspiring and rather more ominous.
“Aye,” the man said, “you’re looking at him.”
It was a measure of her rapidly increasing terror that she looked from side to side in desperate hope of some other hidden fellow before returning her gaze to the bearded giant.
“Oh,” she whispered. “You are—you are—”
“Aye,” he said again, “I’m Strathrannoch.”
She stared up at the man’s stern face, the hazel eyes boring into her from beneath the fierce line of his dark-gold brows.
This was Strathrannoch. This was Strathrannoch? This glower belonged to the man who had teased her about her politics and confessed his most private vulnerabilities over the last three years?
“Oh,” she said again. “I see your eyebrows are none the worse for wear.”
The aforementioned brows shot toward his hairline, and beside her, Georgiana made a stifled sound of despair.
Oh hell, oh damn, she was mucking this up. She tried again. “That is, I—I—I should like to make your acquaintance. Um. In the flesh.”
She instantly regretted the word flesh, which seemed distressingly … fleshly.
This is Strathrannoch, she told herself. He knows you. You know him. He just doesn’t know it yet.
“I am H,” she managed to say.
That wasn’t quite how she’d imagined it coming out. Truly, when she’d imagined this part of the scenario, they had simply recognized each other and then fallen into the habit of conversation built by three years’ correspondence.
Her imagination, Lydia was coming to realize, was thoroughly fuddled.
“H,” Strathrannoch repeated.
Did his eyes sharpen upon her—in recognition, perhaps? She could not tell.
“H,” she said again. “From the letters.”
His gaze flickered down to the papers strewn about her feet, and then up, up her body and back to her face. “And what are you doing here?”
She sucked in a lungful of air and tried with all her not inconsiderable brainpower to recollect what she had written in her notes for this precise moment.
Mutually … persons … union …
The words swam. In fact, the whole world seemed to be swimming slightly before her eyes, with Strathrannoch framed in the doorway and her head tilted up to look at his face.
Copyright © 2024 by Alexandra Vasti
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