A Perilous Perspective (Lady Darby Mystery #10)(56)

I nodded.

“Well, I feared that, even if Alana convinced him to come up to scratch, marriage would not reform him. It rarely does, you know. But in Philip’s case, I was happy to be proven wrong.”

I tilted my head, wondering if she would have issued the same warning to me about Gage had she not been hundreds of miles away at the time of our brief engagement. Of course, in Gage’s instance, his rakish demeanor had been more of a role he employed in order to disarm others and gain information. Something that, in hindsight, Philip and Alana must have realized, or else they would not have allowed us to spend so much time alone together during those early weeks of our acquaintance.

Eager to shift the subject, I turned my thoughts to Poltalloch. “What was Mother’s relationship like with the other Campbells?”

“Amicable, I would say. She gave Edmund’s father and brother no reason for complaint. But I gather her feelings toward Miss Campbell and her sister were much warmer. She told me once that if she could have remained at Poltalloch with them, she would have been quite content.”

I must have appeared as bewildered as I felt, for Aunt Cait’s expression softened.

She reached out to gently touch my chin. “Oh, my dear, you’re more like your mother than you realize.” Her fingers smoothed back a strand of hair that had fallen against my temple, removing a hairpin and then refastening it to hold it in place. “Did you never wonder why your mother was content to live out most of her life in a sleepy little village in the Borders? She was quite happy there with your father. James was steady and honorable. Practical. Just what she craved.”

She sat back, clasping her hands in her lap. “But we were speaking of the Campbells and Poltalloch.”

We had strayed from the topic, yes, but part of me wanted to urge her to continue talking about my parents for as long as she could. Having her share just that little bit and then cut herself off made me feel yet again the keen sense of their loss. My memories of them had begun to fade, but Aunt Cait’s words had brought them back to life, if only for a moment. It was like a faint whisper in my ear, an image formed in smoke, but when I reached out to grasp it, there was nothing to latch on to.

“They visited Poltalloch often. Usually when Edmund had stirred up some sort of trouble and needed to vanish for a time. He did leave your mother there a time or two when he went off on one of his escapades, but of course, he wouldn’t allow her to remain there indefinitely.” Her voice dipped scornfully. “Then, she wouldn’t be by his side to appeal to his vanity and cater to his every whim when he tired of prowling.”

“Did Mother introduce you to Uncle Dunstan?” I asked.

“That seems a logical assumption, doesn’t it? But no. I met him in Edinburgh.” A secretive smile played across her lips. “Though, I did contrive to pay my sister a visit at Poltalloch some weeks later when I knew Dunstan would be in residence at Barbreck.”

My lips curled in amusement. It wasn’t as difficult as one would think, given the proper lady my aunt presented herself to be, to imagine her contriving such a plot. All I needed to do was think of her daughter Morven. She and my sister had given Aunt Cait the devil of a time when she chaperoned them for their debuts into society.

She laughed aloud. “Yes, I can see the exact comparison you’re drawing in your mind. I was, indeed, as headstrong as my daughter. But fortunately, I had my older sister attempting to restrain me and talk some sense into me. Otherwise, my already brief engagement to your uncle might have had cause to be scandalously short.” The glint in her eyes was waggish. “I knew precisely what tricks my daughter and your sister were up to because I had been up to them myself at their age.”

Her merriment faded, and she reached out again to touch my chin. “I wish you would have let me chaperone you for a season,” she confided almost wistfully, allowing me to see for the first time some of what she felt in knowing what I had endured in my first marriage. And now knowing what my mother had endured in her first marriage, I realized perhaps she was also carrying around a measure of guilt that she had not saved me from a similar fate. “Things might have turned out differently.”

“It was my decision,” I reminded her. I was the one who’d asked Father to arrange a marriage so that I wouldn’t be paraded before all of society on the marriage market and inevitably found lacking. My awkwardness had improved with maturity and the self-confidence that came from my marriage to Gage and success in solving inquiries. I no longer worried quite so much that I would say or do the wrong thing, nor cared as much what others thought of me when I did. But at seventeen and eighteen, I had felt everything acutely, even when I didn’t understand it. Society would have sharpened its claws on me and tore me to shreds.

“I know, dear. It’s useless to speculate.” She took hold of my hand. “The fact of the matter is, in spite of all you’ve been through, you’ve emerged stronger and wiser. You triumphed in the end. And had you not been through it all, who’s to say whether you would have ever captured Gage’s heart or given birth to darling Emma. Who, as you’ll recall, I predicted would be a girl,” she reminded me with a wag of her eyebrows.

I shook my head. “I’ve been waiting for you to remind me of that.” I still wasn’t convinced my aunt had the ability to know the sex of the baby an expectant mother was carrying simply by looking at her, but I had to admit she had astonishing luck. Though, to be fair, the odds were in her favor, given she had a fifty-percent chance of being correct.