Indiscretion by Jillian Hunter Page A

won't work. Patrick was, and is, a scoundrel."
    "Not the Patrick I knew. And know," Nellwyn said staunchly. "He is the heart of kindness."
    "Now I know he has deceived you," Anne exclaimed.
    "He was a strong, spirited lad," Nellwyn said, stuffing her gloves into her reticule. "He found my dear Richard wandering at the roadside after his stroke and carried him all the way back to the house."
    "You should have checked your silver afterward," Anne said. "He probably wanted money for drink and gambling. Have you forgotten he stole the minister's carriage the day of Richard's funeral and crashed it into the crag?"
    "Grief does strange things to a person's mind."
    "Grief?" Anne said in astonishment. "Are we talking about the same person? Patrick was a veritable demon. He probably wasn't grieving at all—he was probably stone drunk." And Anne ought to know. She had made her own excuses for him at the time, too drawn to his physical presence to acknowledge his flaws.
    "Richard taught Patrick how to play chess," Nellwyn said, smiling fondly. "They spent every Sunday morning on the moor moving rocks about as chess pieces. My husband lived for those games. I vow it is what kept him alive that last year."
    Anne sighed in frustration. Of course she couldn't very well categorize Patrick's past sins without con fessing her own, and she had once been attracted enough to his hellfire ways to compromise herself; he certainly hadn't forced her. But oh, how she resented him for coming back into her life at a time when she should have been free to find peace.
    "You have become hard, Anne."
    "And you … you are a liberal, Auntie Nellwyn."
    Nellwyn sniffed. "But we shall both obey the Queen, won't we? And perhaps you will stop play ing the prude long enough to enjoy our little adventure."
    "It is not an adventure," Anne said hotly. "It is a private query. Oh, it is absurd, unfair. I have no wish to return to Scotland."
    "Make the best of it, Anne," she said unsympathetically. "One must do what is for the highest good."
     
     
    T he next day they struck out from Aberdeen's High Street; their coach clattered over cobbles toward Aboyne, passing Macbeth's cairn at Lumphanan where Nellwyn insisted they take a picnic. They climbed north past Glenshalg and rumbled over the heather-clad hills and uninhabited expanse of Corrennie Moor. In no particular hurry, they detoured through market towns, and spent an hour at a holy well where Nellwyn made a mysterious wish.
    On their fifth night together they stopped at a coaching inn to savor smoked haddock soup. The next morning when they awoke, mist covered the ground and wafted through the stone circles that overshadowed the road.
    The moment they passed through the mist, magic happened. Anne instantly felt the difference, as if she had stepped through a mirror into another world; she fought an impulse to tear off her tightly laced boots and stockings and run in the pools of rainwater on the moor until her sides ached and she had shed the last vestiges of civilization.
    Yet she knew she had to be extremely careful of her own behavior, or she would end up in trouble again.
    "I don't think Patrick should ride in the carriage with us for the rest of the way," she said, out of the blue. "It doesn't seem proper, a butler on equal footing with his mistress. He ought to sit up on the box."
    "Hell's bells," he said. "I'm not your butler yet."
    "No," she conceded, "but we might be seen together by someone traveling to the village."
    "It is misting," he said.
    "I'm sorry about that," she said unconvincingly. "Would you like to borrow my veil?"
    "I am not riding on the box like a piece of old luggage." He grinned. "And I don't look good in a veil."
    "Hellfire and damnation," Nellwyn said, waking up from her nap. "If the two of you don't stop fight ing, I'm sitting up on the box myself to get some quiet."
    They crossed a packhorse bridge and heard the distant croaking of ptarmigan on the moor. Anne counted blue hares on