Elspeth stared at this present as if it were a unicorn instead of a spider. To think that all these years—all these years she had worked so hard to be content with her lot—she might have seen something of the world beyond the confines of her small, muddy corner of Midlothian.

In the doorway, the dray mon hefted the trunk as if it were kindling. “Where d’ye want it put?”

“Not inside! We’ve no room—” Isla shut the door against both the trunk and the eyes of curious neighbors, who had begun to gather by the gate.

Elspeth felt her heart plummet straight from her chest to land with a splat on her muddy shoes. “Michty me.” What good was a present from a mysterious, scarlet aunt if she could not even open it to find out what lay inside?

“If ye don’ want it”—the dray mon shrugged—“I’ve direction to take it back. Paid for tha’ at t’other end, herself did.”

“Herself?”

“Leddy Augusta Ivers, as they was talking aboot.” The dray mon balanced the load on one broad shoulder. “She sayed as I wus to gie it ye, or bring it straight back tae herself.”

“Take me with you.” The words were out of her mouth before Elspeth could even gather the presence of mind to wish them back.

But she didn’t wish them back. She wanted to go. She had never wanted anything so much in her entire life.

“Please.” She spoke both more firmly and more politely this time, even though her heart was clattering in her ear like the off-balance spinning wheel in the corner of the parlor. “Would you please take me with you?”

“Tae Edinburgh?” The driver’s bushy eyebrows rose up, poised in consideration.

Elspeth held her breath, shocked by her own temerity in standing up for herself. Of daring to want something that had seemed so far out of reach for so long, the possibility of which hadn’t even existed until a moment ago. “Please, will you take me with you?” She caught her breath and, with it, her nerve. She had to convince him or forever lose her chance. “You do go straight back to Edinburgh, do you not?”

“Aye.”

“Could you not take me there as well?”

The driver stroked the grizzled ends of his ginger whiskers in contemplation. “I s’pose I could. For a price.”

And here was the fox in the henhouse—Elspeth had absolutely no ready money of her own. But she did have ready wits. “Lady Ivers already paid you to bring me the trunk, and bring it back, did she not? If you take me with it, as she asks in her letter”—Elspeth held the missive out as if it did verily contain such a request—“Lady Ivers will surely reward you handsomely for the service.” This was a rather delicate piece of fibbery, but Elspeth was prepared to risk the mortal sin of a potential lie for the potential reward—the chance to escape this stifling village.

To escape spinsterhood.

Mercifully, the dray mon warmed the idea. “Aye. She might at that. Well, come on ye then.”

Relief and excitement made a hot, breathless brew of her insides. “Will you bide here a short while, so I can gather my things?”

And do the harder thing—tell the Aunts what she had done.

The driver turned his squint to the sky, as if gauging the hours of daylight. “No more’n t’irty minutes,” he warned. “Or I’ll g’on without ye.”

“I’ll be back,” she swore. “So help me, I will.”

The Aunts were waiting at the door in forbearance of another of Elspeth’s unseemly displays of rash behavior, though they could have no idea just how rash she had truly been. Or how rash she was yet prepared to be.

“Elspeth,” Molly chided. “Come away inside. But mind your boots. You’re covered in mud.”

“I’m not coming in.” There was nothing for it but to give them the uncomfortable truth. “I’ve asked the dray mon to take me to Edinburgh. To Lady Ivers.”

The tight-lipped silence that greeted this proposal told Elspeth exactly what the Aunts thought of such an idea.

“You cannot want to go to her.” Aunt Molly’s shocked tone allowed it to be impossible.

“She can’t want you,” was Isla’s less kind answer.

Elspeth turned away the cutting remark as if it were an errant dirk—her aunt’s impotent jabs were fast becoming too dull a weapon to truly hurt her now. “But she does want me. She says so in her letter. And after all these years of so faithfully”—she chose a word her Aunts could not depreciate—“writing to me without response, I feel I must answer, and even atone, for my years of silence.” Years of silence that her aunts knew could be laid at their feet.

“That’s hardly necessary,” Aunt Molly began with an attempt at a grim sort of logic.

“Because she’s hardly decent!” Isla was too scandalized to admit logic. “She’s wicked.”

Elspeth disagreed as politely as possible. “She seems very decent, as well as civil and ladylike, in her letter,” she countered in a carefully mild tone.

“That is as may be”—Aunt Molly was clearly searching for excuses—“but, I’m not sure that it’s advisable…or proper…”

“Why?”

Aunt Molly’s pale face colored, as if she could hardly bring herself to answer. “The lady is of…dubious moral fiber—thrice-married and thrice conveniently widowed.”

“Those Otises. Bad blood, the lot of them,” was Isla’s more unguarded opinion.

As “the lot of them” included Elspeth and her own tainted share of the blood her late, unlamented father had bequeathed her, she felt the need to defend the family. “Lady Augusta can hardly be held to account for her husbands dying. Or is it that you think she’s had more than her fair share of them?”

The moment the hasty, unkind words were out of her mouth, Elspeth wished them back, biting her lips together as if she could swallow such ungrateful meanness of spirit whole and unspoken. Her Aunts had sacrificed to raise her, and had kept her out of love—a stifling version of love, but love nonetheless.

 But Molly, bless her, was equal to the truth. “Perhaps, Elspeth. Yes. You are right that not all of our circumstances are the product of choice. Sometimes one must take what life offers, and simply make the best of it.”

Elspeth felt as if her heart might break, so sharp was the pain in her chest. The Aunts had, indeed, made the best of it all—their genteel poverty due to absence of opportunities, lack of education, and reduced circumstances.

Heat scratched at the back of Elspeth’s eyes, but she could not give in to the choking pity. Not now, when it felt as if the whole of her life depended upon it. “Then perhaps you understand that I might wish for a change in my circumstances, at least for a short visit. Just this once.”

Because before she put on the lace cap of the spinster, and consigned herself forevermore to their forgotten corner of their Scotland, Elspeth Otis had a few things she meant to do.

If true love had not found her, she meant to go out into the wide world, and find it for herself.

Chapter 4

Hamish strode up the damp, stone staircase out of the Princes Street Gardens taking the steps two at a time. He had to keep moving—he always thought better on his feet, with the wind in his face and an idea between his teeth. It might take him all day to climb to the top of Calton Hill, or even Arthur’s Seat, but by the time he arrived at the top, he was sure to have thought of a solution to his rather dire dilemma.

“Hamish Cathcart?” A woman’s voice penetrated the fog wreathing his brain. “Where are you off to in such an all-fired rush?”

Hamish turned to find Lady Augusta Ivers at the bottom of the stair, and retraced his steps. “My dear Lady Ivers.” He bowed over the hand the elegantly clad widow offered. “Delighted, as always, to see you, my lady.”

Lady Augusta Ivers was a well-known fixture in Edinburgh’s society, as admired as she was universally liked. She could always be counted upon to have some fresh and interesting intelligence about Edinburgh and the world—her circle of friends and correspondents extended to the continent and beyond.

“Well enough,” she answered in her usual polished, self-possessed way. “But enough social palaver. You are just the man I was hoping to see. I have been meaning to speak to you about a proposition I think might suit both of us equally.”

Hamish was instantly leery—in his eight and twenty years he had entertained any number of “propositions” from widowed ladies. But he had never thought Lady Ivers the type—although younger than her late husband, she had been entirely devoted to Admiral Ivers. “How may I be of service to you, my lady?”

“A business proposition, Hamish, my lad. Not that I’m not flattered.” Lady Ivers flashed him a knowing, but kind smile. “Have you an office where we might speak privately?”

He did not. At present, Hamish conducted his business in a corner chair at Smyth’s Coffee House off the Grass Market, but such an establishment was hardly the place for a lady, even one as unflappable as Augusta Ivers.

“Never mind.” The lady was already waving him off, impatient to get to her point. “Walk with me, where we might not be overheard.” She took his arm, and led him back the way he had come, into the privacy of the garden. “It has recently come to my attention that the publishing house of Prufrock & Company is in some financial difficulty. This distresses me, as they were the publisher of my late brother’s entirely scandalous, but entirely popular novel.”

“Aye, my lady?” Hamish was familiar with the work. Indeed, any lad who had been to university in Scotland was familiar with the tale of Fanny Bahoochie—and there was a particularly apt name for the protagonist of A Memoir of a Game Girl. Sweet, game Fanny Bahoochie had been the stuff of schoolboy fantasy.

But how this might matter to him now, Hamish knew not.

Lady Ivers was keen to inform him. “I have been thinking of commissioning a new version of my late brother’s work to bring to publication. A considerably less scandalous version, retaining all of the charm, but a great deal less of the salacious content of the original.”