The Seduction of Elliot McBride

Chapter 22

How do you wrap me around your finger, Juliana McBride? Her eyes sparkled with resolve and stubbornness, her lips quivering from her stout declaration.

I love you with every breath I draw.

Elliot caressed her cheek then leaned down and kissed the soft lips he’d been longing to taste all day.

“Then I’ll just have to find him first,” he said, his lips a breath from hers. “Don’t send half the village after me this time.”

Her stubbornness dissolved to worry, and that worry touched his heart. “Be careful.”

“Always, love.” He kissed her again, then released her with reluctance to retrieve his rifle.

Juliana believed him. Elliot’s heart sang it as he left the room—finding the entire household, including the dog, gathered in the passage outside the dining room. They collectively tried to pretend they were doing something else when he emerged, but Elliot strode past them, unseeing.

She believed him. The rest of the world thought Elliot irretrievably mad, but Juliana had decided to trust his word.

She’d just given him the most beautiful gift he’d ever received.

The day of the midsummer fête dawned promisingly enough. The weather was calm, the sky arched blue overhead, and only a few white clouds drifted over the highest hills.

Juliana gave the fine weather the merest glance, relieved the rain had stopped. Rains had swept over the house two nights running, as had high winds and wild lightning. Hamish had been convinced he’d seen a ghost again and refused to leave the kitchen, despite all Juliana’s efforts.

And Elliot had hunted Mr. Stacy. Elliot had gone out walking the hills, even in the bad weather, but he’d never found trace of his prey. Either Mr. Stacy had gone to ground, or he’d left the area entirely.

Juliana knew—and she knew Elliot did too—that Mr. Stacy wouldn’t simply leave. He’d come for a reason, and while that reason was not yet clear, if Mr. Stacy were anything like Elliot, he’d stick to his purpose.

The fact that the house began filling up with guests also might have triggered Stacy’s absence. First to arrive was Sinclair McBride and his two children, Andrew and Caitriona. Six-year-old Andrew took at once to Priti and her goat, while Caitriona, a dignified eight, preferred to sit in the drawing room and look at Juliana’s ladies’ magazines.

They were lonely children, Juliana sensed, though she soon learned why Sinclair called them ungovernable terrors. The day they arrived, Andrew managed to lure the goat upstairs and hide it in the tiny room Komal occupied. The shrieks and scolding went on for hours, the goat, bleating wildly, happy to escape. During all this Caitriona sat calmly in the drawing room, holding her large golden-haired doll, and quietly turned the pages of the magazine, uninterested in the entire affair—uninterested in everything.

Next to come were Ainsley and Cameron and their baby, Gavina. They were quickly followed by more Mackenzies—Lord Ian and his wife Beth, with their children, accompanied by Daniel Mackenzie, Ainsley’s grown-up stepson.

A gentleman called Mr. Fellows arrived quietly and alone the day after that, to Juliana’s surprise. She’d invited him, but he’d replied by return post that he might not be able to make the journey from London.

“I am so pleased you could come after all, Mr. Fellows,” Juliana said, coming into the front hall to meet him. “Your caseload has lessened?”

“No,” he said in the dry tone Juliana was to learn he used habitually. “Not really.”

Lloyd Fellows, a detective inspector for Scotland Yard, was a half brother to the Mackenzies, and shared their looks—dark hair with a touch of red, hazel eyes with glints of gold. His stance, his quiet gestures, and the way he bent his head to listen to her, put her strongly in mind of Lord Cameron.

Mr. Fellows was quite a good detective, Juliana had heard, though she’d met him only once before, at Hart Mackenzie’s wedding, and that only for a brief greeting.

“Well, I am pleased you took time from your duties for our first event as Mr. and Mrs. McBride,” she said.

“I’m afraid I didn’t come for pleasure, Mrs. McBride. I came in answer to your husband’s telegram.”

“Telegram?”

Mr. Fellows obviously had no intention of explaining what the telegram said. He looked about at the freshly cleaned stones of the hall and the varnished and repaired wood. “I heard the McGregor house was a run-down wreck. I’m pleased to see accounts were wrong.”

“We’ve done quite a bit of work since moving in, that is certain. Now, if you are looking for my husband, I believe you’ll find him at the river with Lord Ian. Fishing. A pastime they both enjoy, apparently.”

“Thank you.” Mr. Fellows gave her a little bow. “I will take myself there.”

He withdrew without further word. Very polite, yes, Juliana thought, but with a hardness about him that told her he had to make himself remember to be polite.

Fellows went, and Juliana returned to her other guests and the ongoing preparations.

Elliot found Lord Ian Mackenzie to be one of the most refreshing men he’d ever met.

Of the Mackenzie family, Elliot had only ever talked at length with Cameron, his sister’s husband, but he’d found Cameron too different from himself to form an instant friendship with him. He and Cameron could talk about horses, but Cameron raced expensive champions, while Elliot had confined his horse owning to useful farm animals. They both had traveled the world, but Cameron had always lived in luxury in the best hotels, while Elliot had eked out an existence either on army pay or on his own, living in hovels that he shared with reptiles and large insects.

Ian Mackenzie, on the other hand, was easy to be with. For one thing, the man didn’t feel the need to talk.

Ian also knew what fishing was all about. A man stood on the bank and cast his line, then waited in silence. He might lend a hand to his fellow fisherman then quietly return to his own line when the task was done.

Everyone else Elliot met wanted him to make small talk. Even McPherson and McGregor, though both were good-natured, expected Elliot to contribute to conversations and looked at him with puzzled patience when he did not.

Ian, on the other hand, just fished. And shut his mouth.

The two men hadn’t said a word to each other since Elliot had found Ian examining the fishing rods in the back hall of McGregor Castle that morning. Elliot had said, “Do you fish?” and Ian had nodded, brushing his fingers over a particularly good pole. “Come on then,” Elliot had said.

The two men had chosen poles and nets and gone down to the river, where they’d stood in silence ever since. Elliot pushed aside thoughts of Stacy and the horde of people about to descend on his home. Nothing existed but the quiet plop of hooks into water, the faint hum of flies, the ripple of a fish going for the bait.

Elliot had caught two fish, Ian three, when a figure in a dark suit, a garb more common to the dingy streets of London than the open Highlands, walked down the path to the flat bank of the river.

“Mr. McBride.” The man held out a hand. Elliot wiped the fishy dampness of his hand on his kilt and shook it. The man nodded to Ian, who acknowledged him only with a glance before going back to his fishing. “I’m Inspector Fellows.”

“I gathered as much,” Elliot said.

“I’ve looked into the matters you asked me to,” Fellows said. “I can tell you here, or we can…” He motioned toward Castle McGregor, the top spires of which were just visible through the trees.

“Here, if you don’t mind,” Elliot said. “If we return to the house we might be recruited to round up things for the jumble sale.”

Fellows acknowledged this with a half smile. “Ian can keep his own counsel,” he said with another look at Ian, who was far more interested in the river than their discussion.

“Archibald Stacy,” Fellows said. “Joined your regiment in 1874 and went to India. Was a subaltern.”

“Two years younger than me,” Elliot said. “I was a lieutenant by then. He was a good shooter already, so they had me help train him to be a sharpshooter. He learned quickly.”

“Left the regiment four years later, decided to try his hand at civilian life in India. But you know this too.”

“I had no trouble helping an old friend.”

Fellows’s expression didn’t change. He was a man doing his job, an expert at turning up solid information. But Elliot sensed a curiosity in the hazel eyes that would lead the man to make more connections than someone simply taking down facts.

“Mr. Stacy was reported dead in Lahore, after an earthquake that unhappily took quite a few lives,” Fellows went on. “Right before you returned to Scotland.”

“He was gone from home before that,” Elliot said. “I got back to my plantation after my escape in October of that year, and Stacy was already gone. So my manservant informs me. I don’t have much memory of the time.”

“Interesting that Stacy traveled to Lahore,” Fellows said. “Your plantations were closer to Pathankot, nearer the native state of Chamba, to the east, is that right? I consulted a map,” Fellows added in his dry tone as Elliot felt mild surprise. To many Englishmen, India was all one place, the same no matter where one traveled. They didn’t know about the vast differences in climate, weather, vegetation, animals, and people. Englishmen were still shocked at the change when they traveled from someplace like Bengal to the northern Punjab.

“If you are asking me why he went to Lahore,” Elliot said, “I have no idea. He had business interests in Rawalpindi, but none in Lahore as far as I know. As I said, I wasn’t very coherent when I returned, and I’d of course been gone for nearly a year.”

Fellows acknowledged this with a nod. He didn’t exclaim in sympathy at Elliot’s laconic statement of his time in captivity, which Elliot appreciated.

“An investigation was carried out when Stacy went missing after the earthquake, of course,” Fellows said. “By the local British authorities. He’d been seen there quite obviously before the earthquake, but not afterward. Bodies were recovered from a collapsed building, but too battered to be identified, and witnesses put Stacy in that area that day. A death certificate was issued, and the case closed.”

“How thorough was the investigation?”

Fellows shrugged. “From the report I read, and answers to cables, I’d say not very thorough. But I can’t blame them—things must have been in chaos. But Stacy never came forward to announce he’d survived.”

“A man can make certain he’s presumed dead,” Ian said, casting his line back into the water. “If he wants everyone to think he is.”

Fellows looked at Ian in surprise. “You have experience of this?”

Ian pulled in his line and cast it out again, the quiet swish the only sound as they waited. Elliot thought Ian wouldn’t answer, but then he said, “A man at the asylum had himself declared insane to get away from an uncle who was trying to kill him. The uncle wanted his inheritance.”

“The uncle got it then,” Fellows said. “If this man was declared mad, the money would be passed to the uncle as soon as he was committed.”

“He didn’t care. He wanted to stay alive.”

“Hell of a way to do it,” Fellows said. “Mr. Stacy could have done a similar thing—taken advantage of the confusion after the earthquake and lain low. If he knew the area and the people and how to blend in, no one might notice him slip away. A report would be filed declaring him officially missing or dead. End of the matter.”

“Though I don’t know why Stacy would want to be thought dead,” Elliot said. He stood his fishing pole on its end and worked out a small tangle of line. “Or why he’d come here to watch me.”

“That I don’t know. Would you like to hear more?”

Fellows sounded patient, but Elliot knew that putting together what information he had gathered had taken the man much time and trouble.

“I would. I thank you for this.”

“It is my job. And your sister can be…very persuasive…when she wants a thing done. A man calling himself Mr. Stacy and fitting his description took rooms in a boarding house in London a few months ago. He never gave the landlady any trouble, she says, and then one day he went out and didn’t return, leaving his things behind. But he’d paid up a few more months in advance, so the landlady didn’t worry.”

“Did anyone see him leaving London? Traveling to Scotland?”

“Of course not. Only in fiction does the detective find the helpful porter who remembers every person who gets on and off every train between here and London.”

“In other words, he’s gone to ground,” Elliot said.

“Waiting for your wife’s fête to end before he hunts you again?” Fellows asked. “Kind of the man.”

“I’m sure he intends to strike at the fête. Strangers roaming the grounds, everyone welcome, perfect opportunity.”

“I suppose your wife cannot be convinced to cancel it.”

Elliot let himself smile. “My wife is very determined.”

From the water, Ian laughed. It was a warm laugh, though he didn’t look up from his line. “My Beth is like that.” The fondness in his voice could not be clearer.

Elliot and Fellows watched Ian until he turned away, his kilt moving in the breeze, to find another fishing spot a little way down the bank.

“He’s a different man,” Fellows said in a low voice. “Since he married.”

Elliot could say the same about himself. In the scany fortnight he’d had a wife, the tightness in his body had begun to unwind. The nightmares still came, but he woke from them to Juliana’s soothing hand, her voice, her kiss…

Fellows snapped fingers in front of Elliot’s face. “You still with me, McBride?”

Elliot drew a breath, and forced himself not to slam the man’s hand out of the way like an irritated tiger. “Thinking of wives.”

“Hmm.” Fellows’s brows lifted and he looked away, as though he were thinking of someone too. “Do you want to know about this Dalrymple?”

“Yes. What did you find out?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I found no evidence that a George Dalrymple, married to an Emily Dalrymple, exists.”

“Then who the devil is he?”

“Who knows? If he tried to blackmail you then he’s a crook or a confidence trickster, and such people often take false names.”

“Dalrymple somehow got himself a copy of the death certificate declaring Stacy dead, but Stacy shot him before he could give it to me.” Elliot wondered whether Stacy had not wanted Elliot to see the paper or whether Stacy had just been annoyed at Dalrymple. He’d aimed for Dalrymple’s hand, nothing more. “The Dalrymples have been keeping themselves to themselves since the event, I’ve noticed.”

“I’ll have a look at him, though,” Fellows said. “I might recognize him. I have a good memory.”

Ian laughed again from down the bank, this one short, and possibly ironic.

“Anything else?” Elliot asked.

“That is all I’ve discovered so far.”

“That’s a hell of a lot.” Elliot started winding up his line. “I thank you.”

Fellows watched him in surprise. “You are returning to the house? What about the jumble sale?”

“I’ve only been married a short while,” Elliot said. “But I’ve learned the importance of keeping the lady happy.”

Fellows nodded, brows rising, and Ian’s laughter floated back at them once again.

Fellows fell into step with Elliot as he shouldered his pole and sought the path to the house, but Ian remained, fishing in silence, paying no attention to the others’ departure.

The grounds were full of people when Elliot and the inspector returned. Hamish, out of hiding now that the storms were over, was busy walking about and glaring at everyone. Elliot had emphasized to Hamish that if he saw anyone at the fête he didn’t recognize, he was to run and find Elliot.

“No one out of the ordinary,” Hamish said as Elliot approached him. “No one I’ve never seen before.”

“Good lad. Keep watching.”

“Aye, sir. Mrs. McBride is looking for ye though. She’s a bit upset.”

Elliot handed Hamish his fishing pole and followed the lad’s pointing finger to Juliana. She did look harried, tendrils of her hair sliding from her coiffure, her skirts whirling as she turned this way and that to direct, point, explain, argue.

Elliot watched her a moment, enjoying the sight of her flushed cheeks and excited eyes. Hamish might say she was worried, but Elliot saw a woman doing what she loved best.

“There you are, Elliot.” Juliana swung to him as he approached. “I need you to man the jumble sale table. Mrs. Rossmoran is feeling ill.”

“Is she all right?” Elliot asked, concerned, then twitched his brows together. “You asked Mrs. Rossmoran to run the jumble sale table?”

Juliana’s look said that Elliot was a hopeless simpleton. “No, I was to look after it. But Fiona now must stay home and take care of her grandmother. Ill, my foot. Mrs. Rossmoran doesn’t like fêtes and didn’t want to be left on her own while Fiona came. Anyway, Fiona was to be the fortune-teller, and now I will have to do it, but I need someone to watch the table. Don’t worry. The jumble sale is very simple. Stand behind the table, put the money in the tin, and don’t let anyone walk off with the things.” Juliana started for the house, and threw over her shoulder, “And do try to sell things. The money is for the church roof. You are charming. Charm them.” And she was gone.