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by
Nichole Van
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July 23 - July 24, 2023
Prologue A country house party Staffordshire, England May 1819
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single lady in possession of no fortune must long to marry a duke’s son.
Miss Leah Penn-Leith feared she had inadvertently killed one instead. She stared down at the unmoving form of ...
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She could not abandon the dream of marrying a gentleman who viewed her as if she mattered.
She did not regret holding on to the hope of someday marrying a gentleman like that. No matter what her future held, Leah regretted nothing.
Fettermill, Scotland March 1839 Twenty Years Later
With every passing year, Leah felt herself pushed more and more to the fringes of her loved ones’ lives, moving from the caretaker of their happiness to a mere spectator of it.
“There is still time, child,” Elspeth breathed. “If ye have the chance tae marry a good man—or even a mostly decent one—take it. Find a way tae escape my lonely fate. Promise me, pet?” Leah wiped her tears and kissed her cousin’s cheek. “I promise,” she whispered. Cousin Elspeth had died two days later.
“in marriage, ye become part of someone else. In a way, ye lose yourself in them. With my Aileen, this feels . . . glorious. Our marriage is loving. We support and nourish one another. But if the love goes off . . .” His voice trailed away for a moment. “Well, I imagine ye can become so lost that ye struggle to keep any piece of yourself.”
“Happiness is what we make of our situation, not what the situation intrinsically is,” Leah sighed. “Malcolm, none of us are living the life we dreamed—”
After all, contentment was not measured by experiences lived, but by one’s attitude toward those experiences.
his former self wasn’t so much lost as shattered. Pulverized to dust. Obliterated.
She and Fox were both trapped in their own way. Fox, by the betrayals and shattering pain of his past. Leah, by her own selflessness, by a past that told her she was not valued unless she was useful. Both of them clung to their deceptions.
Joy and grief are two sides of the same coin. Ye cannae have one without the other. It’s foolishness in the extreme tae be so consumed by the possibility of loss that ye miss the joy of love entirely. Sorrow means the heart loved true.”
This was the worst part of loss, Leah thought. The endless ambush of emotion. The sense that the worst had passed and then bam! Something unexpected—a sound, a smell, an image—would bring grief crashing down again.
“Happiness and love are akin tae strawberries.” His voice turned hoarse, and he glanced at his dwindling whisky. “Ye have tae glut yourself when the occasion arises—create memories tae see ye through the dark seasons.”
“Death is an amputation.” He fixed her with haunted eyes. “A violent severing of a vital part of ye. It throbs like a phantom limb, pulsing with a pain that nothing can soothe.”
“Life is short, sister. Love hard and true . . . while ye still have time.”
I’ll always come for you, my heart.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Finding you is the easiest thing I’ll ever do. Because when I’m with you, I’m home.
Suffering injury and then facing my own demons, loss and grief . . . all these things carved me into a man who would finally be worthy of your brilliant, bright heart. I would live it all again as long as it brought me to you in the end.”
It was one of the side effects of having a child so late in life—they were both old enough to treasure and savor the beauty of caring for a new babe.
11th Earl of Dalhousie, Fox Maule-Ramsay, who like my own Fox, was named in honor of Mr. Charles Fox.
I’ve placed the fictional town of Fettermill right at the base of the Angus glens, at the boundary where the Scottish Lowlands meet the Highlands. Search for the town of Cortachy on Google Maps, and you will see my imagined approximate location of Fettermill. From Cortachy, it’s less than 15 miles to Corrie Fee (my inspiration for Corrie Finn).
Scotland today recognizes three distinct languages: Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and English.
If you want to read some Scots, Wikipedia actually has an entire dictionary written in Scots—sco.wikipedia.org.)
