The Scot by Lyn Stone

Author:Lyn Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

James left Drevers early, before Susanna awakened. How could he have gotten angry with her over nothing? They had so much that needed solving between them and he had delayed that in a fit of childish pique. Today he would do better, he promised himself.

For now, he wandered through the hall at Galioch, marveling at the changes Susanna had wrought with but a few furnishings and a bit of paint. It looked nothing like it had in years past.

His mother had been prone to overdo. The delicate and ornately carved pieces she had shipped from England had been out of character for a structure this primitive. Like some massive shire horse tricked out as a sequined circus pony. He wished to God she had charged sixpence admittance to everyone she enticed here to show it off. That might have paid for her fancies.

In her day, Galioch had been filled to overflowing with visitors they hardly knew, curious fellow nobles who mingled freely with the leeches, impoverished artists and poets she brought there. And Father had denied her nothing. He’d merely secluded himself and continued with his painting as if totally oblivious to the hotbed of pretension and faux culture teeming within Galioch’s walls.

For James, those guests and their goings-on had provided an education within itself that influenced his personal ambition, his attitudes toward class structure and even his sexual habits.

He had certainly grasped the evils of overindulgence before he reached manhood. Despite the fact that those lessons had proved expensive and almost always disheartening, they still served him well. If not for the concentration of negative examples his mother had assembled, he might be just like those people today.

James could not imagine those creatures existing here now. Susanna had created a calm and almost elegant sedateness. Her tastes ran to simplicity and seemed in perfect accordance with his, though he could never have envisioned or accomplished these changes as well as she had done.

She had trestle tables set up, three of them. Where she obtained them, he had no notion, but they were now covered in coarse white linen and graced with baskets of wildflowers. On the mantel above the newly scrubbed fireplace sat a row of pewter mugs, draped round with strands of ivy. Above the ancient fireplace were two crossed swords, relics she had probably scavenged from the lofts at Drevers, he guessed, since he had never seen the weapons before. To either side of that arrangement were painted coats of arms, one belonging to his family, the other to hers.

He smiled at what he was certain she had done unintentionally, and that was to call attention to the existing conflict between them. At swords crossed. Like warring clans.

Still shaking his head at her ingenuity, James mounted the curving stone stair to the bedrooms and entered his. The bed was still there, but with different hangings. She had left the comfortable chair, now obviously in an early stage of being recovered with the plaid fabric folded across the back of it.

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