A little copy of Cecelia, this one, sweet-natured and forever championing the lonely. Except she didn’t look like her at all. She was little for her age with eyes the color of a murky sea. He’d thought her hair a light brown the color of wet sand, but little gold strands glistened from unruly ringlets. Her features were strong and square for a lass, but striking. She might be handsome when she grew, and if not, she’d at least be imposing.
“Ye canna go with me,” he answered. “I need to bathe.”
Her little nose wrinkled in a feminine gesture of displeasure identical to the one his mother used to wear. “Is the bath behind the lock?”
He paused. “What?”
“Locks are not for bathing, they’re for—for locking, obviously.”
A chuff of mirth escaped him, and he almost gave in to the urge to tousle her fair little ringlets. “Not a lock, Phoebe, a loch.”
She shifted her eyes, blinking rapidly in confusion.
“What ye Brits call a lake, we Scots call a loch,” he clarified.
Her eyes widened. “Why?”
“Because that is our language.”
She made a sound of wonderment. “You have your own language?”
“Aye.”
“Will you teach it to me?”
“Nay.”
“Why?” She pouted.
“Because I’m stained with blood and offal and I need to go bathe.”
“That’s all right, you can teach me along the way, and I’ll play in the shallow pool by the rocks whilst you bathe in the deep end.”
He began to shake his head. “I doona think—”
“What do you call that rock?” She pointed to what was once a stepping-stone.
“Clach,” he answered absently. “But ye should stay here—”
“And this?” She pulled the dilapidated fence open, sweeping her hand most gallantly for him to pass.
“Tha thu nad pian ann an asail,” he muttered.
Her forehead wrinkled. “All that for a gate?”
“Nay, it means…” You are a pain in my ass, he didn’t say. “It means … go tell Jean-Yves ye’re going to the loch.”
She sprinted inside with an exuberance Ramsay, even as a vital man, couldn’t remember ever possessing.
He chuckled, waiting on the outside of the hip-high gate.
Ramsay often lost patience quickly with children, but oddly enough he found Phoebe’s precocious curiosity easier to bear. He could identify with her relentless need to understand things. To bend the world to her will. And her constant well-meaning nature was endlessly lovely.
When she emerged only three breaths later, she’d already shucked her pinafore and nabbed a towel of her own.
“I decided you can teach me how to swim, too,” she panted, grabbing his hand and tugging him toward the forest. “Do let’s hurry. How do you say tree in Scottish? Scots?”
“Gaelic,” he corrected, sauntering after her. “And it’s craobh. Also, English lasses canna swim in Scottish lochs, you’ll freeze yer wee noggin off.”
She pitted her entire strength against his arm, urging him to hurry. If he let her go, she’d fall flat on her little nose. “If you can do it, I can,” she declared.
“Is that so, now?”
“I’m not afraid of the cold.” She stopped tugging and changed tactics, turning to face him. “Please, Lord Ramsay. Please?” Her eyes must have taken up half of her face as she laced her fingers and pleaded as though she were at church praying for relief. “When will I ever again be allowed to swim in the wilds of Scotland?”
“With Cecelia as yer guardian, I imagine ye’ll have the chance to do all sorts of things,” he said, wondering if she realized how lucky she was.
A little anxiety peeked through her pluck. “I’ll have to go back to London when this is over. And Cecelia said I must be educated, that she’ll tutor me, or send me to school if I like.”
He nodded approvingly as he struck out again through the meadow at a much more meandering pace. Earth crunched beneath their boots, and a summer breeze ruffled their hair with the sweet smell of blossoms and loamy earth. The moment was a gentle one, a simple one, and Ramsay found himself enjoying the company of the tiny chatterbox. “Ye should go to school,” he urged. “Ye must learn to be a lady, I suppose.”
She screwed up her face, another uncannily familiar expression. “I think I’d rather be a doctor than a lady.”
“A doctor, ye say? Have ye been talking to Alexandra?” His sister-in-law was an archeologist first and a duchess second, at least in her own estimation.
“A lady doctor,” she announced. “One who takes care of women who are having babies.”
“Ye mean a midwife?”
“No,” she stated vehemently. “My mother, she died giving birth to me. A midwife didn’t know what to do, but a doctor might have done.”
“I see,” he murmured, incalculably glad for the umpteenth time to have been born a man.
Phoebe prattled ceaselessly as she walked, and Ramsay did his best to follow along. She spoke of Frances Bacon and Fanny de Beaufort. Who, apparently, didn’t accompany them on their outing as they preferred not to get wet.
The loch was little more than a grotto dammed by a rock wall that might have been a bridge in centuries past, collapsed by any number of marauding armies or clannish skirmishes or nothing more violent than the forages of time.
Ramsay settled Phoebe on the other edge of the wall where the river slowed to a trickle allowed by a break in the dam. He threatened to truss and blindfold her if she peeked over the wall as he bathed, only half joking.
He washed in record time, chuckling quietly as he listened to the girl sing with astonishing lack of intonation as she played. Donning his trousers, he climbed the rocks and peeked over to find her wrapping a ribbon around a bouquet of wildflowers.
“Are those for Miss Teague?” he asked, teetering over the dam and making his way down the rocks toward her.
“Yes.” She presented the bouquet to him with pride. “I think you should give them to her.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Do ye, now?”
She nodded ardently. “Aren’t dashing men supposed to give ladies flowers?”
Rubbing his chin, he eyed the bouquet with consternation. “Aye, but I’m not dashing.”
She brought the flowers back to her chest, studying him intently, measuring his amount of dashingness. “Well … not as dashing as some of the men who would visit Miss Henrietta and Genny,” she admitted with no small amount of sincerity. “But I think Miss Cecelia likes you in spite of that. Besides, you’re big and brave and have better hair then most men your age.”
“A distinguished commendation, indeed,” he said wryly.
“And you saved her just like d’Artagnan,” she said dreamily. “If she’s any sort of proper damsel, she’s supposed to love you after that, so…” She reoffered the bunch of flowers to him.
Ramsay hesitated to take them, because Cecelia Teague was no sort of proper damsel.
Phoebe pressed them upward, standing on her tiptoes. “I brought a purple ribbon, as that’s Cecelia’s favorite color.”