Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore

Chapter 19

Earlier in the Day

She had stood by the window for an hour, watching the purple hues of the heather field change depending on the shifting afternoon clouds, and when the sun finally broke through, she examined the dresses Lucian had purchased for her more closely. Save the russet silk gown and one in emerald green, her trunk contained plain wool dresses in earthy colors. Which, admittedly, were perfect, since given the choice between waltzing into the village like a Marie Antoinette in fine silks or staying in the room, she would have elected to stay in the room, where she would have gone mad. If she couldn’t create, she had to move. She picked a plum-colored dress, laced up her boots, and with her sketchbook satchel and her parasol, she went downstairs to request Mhairi’s company. This put Mrs. Burns in an embarrassing position, for Mhairi was quite indispensably at work in the kitchen, until Hattie suggested one pound for the service, which was an offer Mrs. Burns thought unwise to refuse. Then, on a whim, she requested pen and paper and wrote a note in passable French, which informed the mistress of Mytilene of her arrival as soon as next month, and that she would make herself useful in the community in whichever way required. She knew the address by heart—a safety measure she had taken before setting out for France—and offered Mrs. Burns another pound for discreet delivery of the note to the post and telegraph office in Auchtermuchty.

“It’s peculiar,” she said to Mhairi, as she strode briskly along the path toward the village a while later, “I keep expecting the air to smell fresh in a valley and yet my nose tells me I’m in the middle of the city.”

“It’s the coal field, ma’am,” Mhairi supplied after a pause. “There’s an open seam and there’s always small fires.”

“Have you been to London, Miss Burns?”

Mhairi glanced at her sideways, clearly amused. “No, ma’am. I’ve been to Dundee.”

“Charming—and I suppose this is Heather Row.” Entering the village felt like walking into a Dutch Renaissance painting: all colors had a brown tinge to them and a somberness lay over the scene. The two rows of houses would have appeared abandoned had it not been for a group of children chasing a hoop down the road.

“I suppose everyone is at work.”

“They’ll return very soon,” Mhairi said, nodding at the furnaces steaming in the distance. “At five o’clock.”

“Would they mind if I sat and sketched the lodgings?” She pointed at the wooden bench in front of the first cottage in the row, from where she could conveniently sketch the cottage across.

“I don’t think they’d mind, no,” Mhairi said, “Hamish’s mother’s lives there, Rosie Fraser; I know her well.”

She looked on curiously as Hattie unpacked sketchbook and pencils.

“Sit with me,” Hattie said, and with an embarrassed giggle, the young woman settled next to her, and was soon watching intently as the house across the way began to appear on the page.

It took not long for the children to find them more interesting than their hoop, and for Hattie to find them more interesting than her sketch. Their little group brought field mice to mind with their round eyes and dull brown coats. One of the girls was chewing on a strand of blond hair. Hattie smiled at her. “Hello, angel.”

Encouraged thusly, the children encroached. Grubby little hands were touching the shiny blue silk of her folded parasol. She laughed when Mhairi tried batting away the boldest ones. “Let them,” she said.

The blond girl promptly climbed onto the bench between them and cuddled close to study the sketch. Then she said something incomprehensible in Scots.

Mhairi snorted.

“What did she say?” Hattie asked.

“Anne’s being daft, ma’am. She wants you to draw her.”

“Anne.” The girl’s eyes were wide and blue, and eerily serious. “Would you like me to draw you, Anne?”

A nod.

“You would have to hold still for a while,” Hattie said. “Can you do that?”

“A shilling that she’ll not last a minute,” Mhairi said.

“Why don’t you hold her on your lap?”

Bemused, Mhairi hoisted the girl onto her apron, and the pen flew over the paper again, easily capturing round, dirt-smudged cheeks, a pouty mouth …. The challenge was always the eyes, and in this case they held a very complex little soul …. When Hattie finally glanced up, she found several elderly women had joined the circle and were craning their necks.

“It looks like a photograph,” Mhairi said, amazed.

She shook out her hand. “It’s just a sketch.”

Anne seemed sufficiently smitten with her likeness; she gripped the sheet and held on tight.

“I suppose you shall have to take it home to your mama, hmm?”

The cozy atmosphere shifted as the miners were returning to the village, groups of men and throngs of children, and judging by their overt stares when they noticed Hattie, the curiosity was mutual. But when she comprehended what she saw, her stomach sank. “The children,” she murmured. “Were … they working, too?”

Mhairi followed her gaze to a couple of boys trotting past. “Yes, ma’am.”

They looked not much older than little Anne. Her next shock followed right at their heels—the women streaming in … were wearing trousers. They wore a sort of loincloth on top, the hems of which didn’t even reach their knees, and they were linking arms and chatting as if they weren’t practically in the nude. Outrageous. Intriguing. None of it half as startling as her husband moving into her field of vision. A hat covered his shaggy hair, but his purposful stride was unmistakable. Her belly clenched with a visceral emotion, and the elderly women who had been studying her sketch exchanged glances, grabbed the children, and dispersed.

“Um,” said Mhairi.

“Why don’t you return to the inn,” Hattie suggested. “It appears I have an escort.”

The girl had disappeared by the time Lucian reached the bench.

He was glowering down at her in a by now familiar manner. “Mrs. Blackstone.”

“Sir.”

“Will you accompany me to the inn?” Why did he even bother phrasing it like a question?

She collected her pencils. She had woken this morning with the strange notion that his presence in their bed had ensured her warmth and safety in those bizarre new surroundings. She was most powerfully deluded, for he looked moody and not at all pleased to see her.

He noticed her troubles to adjust to his pace as he steered her toward the dirt path, and he slowed at once, but he made no effort to make conversation.

“There were women coming from the mine in trousers,” she tried, because the silence felt awkward. “Is this commonplace?”

“Pit-brow lasses,” he said, keeping his eyes on the inn ahead. “They’re very common. They all but run the coal fields down in Wigan.”

“I must tell Lucie,” she murmured. “She leads our suffrage chapter back in Oxford,” she added. “I wonder if she knows—”

“I assure you they’re not motivated by politics.”

“What do you mean?”

He finally halted and looked at her. His expressing was grim. “They don’t wear trousers to make ladies clutch their pearls or change laws, but because it allows them to work,” he said. “They aren’t freaks for you to gape at and find exotic.”

She gasped. “Is that how you think I think?”

“And those children,” he said, “they’re not your playthings.”

He resumed walking, the matter settled. For him.

“But of course,” she said, keeping up with quick, angry steps. “You think I’m a snooty brat.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ve announced yourself as such by showing with a parasol.” He cast the pale blue contraption she was holding over her head a contemptuous glance.

His low regard stabbed her right in the heart, when his cruelty should no longer surprise her.

“My skin cares not where the sun happens to shine,” she said, shaking with distress. “Would you rather have me burn as proof of my good character?”

His face fell, as though he had heard impending tears in her voice. “No,” he said gruffly, “no, I—”

“Well, I think you would. You have no desire to mend a dratted thing between us.”

She hurried ahead, the path swimming before her eyes. She shouldn’t care; she shouldn’t, and comprehending that she did doubled her misery. At the inn, Mhairi was manning the reception desk and greeted her with notable wariness, which Hattie tried to assuage with a wide smile while storming past. Her blood was still rushing in her ears when she reached the dreadful little room. She dropped the parasol and ripped off gloves and hat. Mr. Blackstone better have the decency to go elsewhere—preferably straight back to his empty throne in the land of the dead.

The door flew open, and she was stunned to the spot by the smolder in Lucian’s eyes. He came to her; he didn’t halt until his knees pressed into her skirts. Her hands fluttered up, but he grabbed the thick fabric at her hips and pulled her flush against him, and her thoughts flew apart. His gaze searched her face so intently, as if he wished to see right into her soul.

“Much that I despise,” he said hoarsely, “and all that I desire, meets in you. And it frustrates me beyond reason.”

She felt the erratic thud of his heart beating through her chest in counterpoint to her own, and a different kind of agitation gripped her.

“That’s not my fault,” she whispered.

“It isn’t.”

Her fingers curled into the lapels of his coat. “It isn’t an apology, either.”

His thumb was against her mouth, lightly pressing on her bottom lip. The brazen caress flashed through her body like a shooting flame, and his eyes lit up at her soft mew.

“I don’t know how to do this right,” he murmured. He took off his hat and tossed it aside. “I don’t know what to make of you. I know I’d rather my skin burned than yours.”

He would kiss her now. Had he been angry, she would have resisted. But she sensed a need singing through him, deeper than desire, and it harmonized with a fiercely frustrated cry in her own soul. She raised her chin. His fingers slid into her hair, and their mouths met. A hot touching of tongues, and she headlong drowned in him—smooth lips, sugared tea, thick hair between her fingers. She indulged in mindless groping and heated closeness until she felt his urgency, hard and heavy against her belly, a reminder that kissing was not where he might wish to stop. As if sensing her surging apprehension, he eased his hold on her. Everything gentled and slowed. His hand slid from her hair and smoothed a warm path down her spine, then up again, wooing her to remain in his embrace. He cradled her cheek in his other hand, mindful of the sensitiveness of her skin, and brushed his thumb at the still damp corner of her eye. She leaned against him, trembling, unable to stop feeling him, and a last tension in him melted.

When he deepened the kiss again, it felt like an apology: deliberate and tender, seeking and somewhat humbled, an unfamiliar taste on his lips. It rendered every sensation acute: the carefully coaxing slide of his lips against hers, the intimacy of tongues teasing each other, the caress of his breath across her cheek. It made her swoon. She broke away with a gasp.

Lucian made no move to retrieve her, he was watching her, almost warily. Their breathing was shaky. The place between her legs ached. She shifted uncomfortably, and he tipped back his head on a dark laugh. “Supper is at seven o’clock,” he said. He left without his hat.

Dinner was a tremendously awkward affair. The sudden outburst of mutual lust joined them at the table like an ill-behaved inebriated uncle: avoiding addressing it felt wrong, but doing so also felt quite impossible. Lucian appeared fairly at ease, considering; he ate with appetite and he had loosened his cravat to a scandalous degree so that one could see the hollow at the base of his throat. Harriet kept sneaking glances at it, and eventually, he caught her doing so. His half smile made her feel hot in all sorts of ways, and she dropped her gaze back into her stew. Could one despise a man and still crave his kisses?

“You’re getting on well with the lass, then?” he asked.

He meant Mhairi, she assumed. “She is wonderful, thank you. I’m indebted to her by an additional two pounds.”

Lucian’s spoon stopped on the way to his mouth. “Whatever for?”

“Her accompanying me to Heather Row today.”

“That’s more than a maid’s monthly wage in London,” he said, comically outraged.

“Oh, I know,” she said, “I was trained in household management.”

Whatever his response was to that, he swallowed it with a big gulp of ale.

“Some of the children I saw coming from the pits today can’t have been older than eight or nine years of age,” she ventured.

“They’d be that, yes,” he replied.

“That’s rather young.”

He gave a shrug. “Old enough to work as a trapper. If not a hurrier, when they’re boys.”

“A trapper?”

“They open the trap doors for the coal tubs coming through. Or to ventilate the shafts. Children much younger than the ones you saw today used to do this.” He was rolling his right shoulder while he talked until he became conscious of it and stopped abruptly.

“Much younger?” She was thinking of Michael, sweet cherubic Michael bouncing on Flossie’s knee. Sending him to work in such frightening conditions in five years’ time? Impossible. “How could any parent inflict this upon a little one? Isn’t it terribly dark in the tunnels?”

Lucian’s features hardened. “Yes. It’s dark. So dark you can’t see the hand in front of your eyes sometimes. But every child in a working family is one more mouth to feed; it’s best if they learn early and earn their keep.”

She drew back. “At that age? You don’t mean that.”

“You seem to believe in the goodness of my heart despite much evidence to the contrary,” he remarked.

It seemed so. She had been temporarily swayed by the tenderness of his kisses and claims that he’d rather see his skin burned than hers.

She put down her spoon. “I’m certain that it is unlawful for young children and women to work underground.”

“Aye, there was a law passed in the early forties. The Mines and Collieries Act.”

“That’s it,” she said. “And doesn’t it prohibit women and children from working underground?”

He nodded. “No more women and girls in the tunnels. Boys must be aged ten and older. They mustn’t work more than ten hours a day. Officially.” His voice was caustic irony.

“I presume women and girls are still going underground,” she murmured.

“Here in Drummuir?” he said. “Yes.”

Her appetite left her altogether. “Will you put a stop to it?”

He gave a curt nod.

“I’m glad.”

“The women won’t be,” he said. “Often enough they’re the ones breaking the law on their own accord.”

“Why is that?”

“This notion that women are delicate creatures who should idle the hours away with letter writing in a parlor is a reality only in your circles, you know.”

“Our circles,” she said mildly.

He looked surprised for a beat, then picked up his ale again.

“I’m aware that most women work,” she said. “Bailey works with me every day, but she earns a wage she finds agreeable. Why not pay the miners a decent enough wage for work that is safe? I doubt the women here break the law because they crave being in a tunnel.”

“Aye, I could raise their wages until they are all very nice and comfortable on ten hours a day aboveground and raise the boys’ age to fourteen,” he said. “You know what would happen then?”

“You would have less profit?”

“In this case, I wouldn’t have a mine anymore—because other mine owners wouldn’t follow suit, so they’d be pricing Drummuir coal out of the market. And if they don’t have Drummuir, where will they go? Seen any factories nearby where they could make a coin?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Even if there were,” he said, “ask any pit-brow woman, and they’ll tell you they prefer the coal field over inhaling fluff all day in a hot cotton mill.”

She digested this while drinking wine, then she said, “Something is not right when the viability of a mine depends on the lowest pay possible for the workers.”

His dark smile went through her bones. “You have that right,” he said. “Something is very wrong with that.”

“I should have paid more attention to Lucie’s work with the women’s trade unions,” she said glumly.

“I’ll tell you what they say,” Lucian said. “They usually object to women worker protection coming out of Parliament, because it always aims to keep women from working. All right if they’re married and their husbands earn well, but what of the single women and widowed women? Wives of poor workingmen?”

“Or the ones who desire to be independent in any case?” she said pointedly.

“That, too,” he said. “And forbidding women to go underground was never brought on by concern for their health. The public and the church wanted it so for moral reasons. Can’t have women in the nude, they said. I say let the church compensate for the difference in earning, but they don’t.”

If he was trying to shock her, he had succeeded. “In the nude,” she repeated.

He took the bread from his plate and tore off a chunk with strong teeth. “It’s hot as hell underground and often wet,” he said when he had swallowed. “Stripping off makes it more bearable.”

Much as she was reeling from this news, it was remarkable that he knew such details. There was a lot of talk at the Greenfield dining table, but her father probably knew little of the conditions in the mines where he owned stakes, and even Flossie, for all her fervor, had never set foot in a tunnel. Hours of clever discussion and snarling at the ills of the world suddenly rang hollow.

It felt strange to pay Lucian a compliment, but she did try to be fair in all things, and so she said, “I find it commendable that you took care to learn such a great deal about the plights of the communities.”

He paused. Studied her more closely. Then he shook his head. “I thought you knew by now,” he said. “You’ve a very keen eye, after all.”

Her nerves shrilled with alarm. Quite like when he had been on the cusp of kissing her for the first time next to a pair of Han vases.

“I used to be one of them,” he said. “I’m Argyll mining stock.”