Stirling, Scotland 1758
CALUM GARBETT WAS not allowed to know happiness. No matter how close he came to it, his wife and daughter would swoop in at the last moment to destroy any chance of it.
The scene playing out in the drawing room was the crowning blow. He could feel all his hard work slipping through his fingers. To think of all the money and time he’d spent bringing Carron Ironworks to life. It had been a Herculean feat to forge a relationship with Thomas Cadell, an Englishman with a successful ironworks of his own, who could teach the Scots the latest techniques. Techniques that would save time and money, that would enable Calum to employ more Scottish men.
He’d positioned himself to become one of the premier industries in Scotland. If that were not true, would the Duke of Montrose be sitting beside him now, willing to invest his own money and influence into the endeavor?
Yes, Calum had bargained his daughter’s hand in marriage as part of the deal, but then again, he’d done her a great service, as her prospects for marriage had not been dazzling. Frankly, his daughter leaned a little to the homely side of things, and when young, randy men of marrying age were presented with the prospect of a potential mate who made them wince when imagining the marriage bed, they tended to shy away altogether.
Well, he’d found someone for his daughter, Sorcha, and now, she would ruin everything with her mother standing firmly beside her, all because the young rooster she was set to marry was enamored with the far fairer, and much more elusive, Maura Darby. Calum’s ward.
Calum had taken Maura under his wing twelve years ago when her father, his oldest friend, had died. The lass was quite alone in this world, and Darby had appealed to Calum’s generosity and sense of decency. Calum had been happy to do it, particularly as the lass had come with a nice bit of money, and her presence would not affect him in any way.
But he’d severely underestimated how slighted his daughter, Sorcha, would feel about it. Or, perhaps more importantly, his wife. She was quite set against the lass from the moment she arrived.
The resentment only grew over the years. As the girls became women, no matter what Calum’s wife did to improve his daughter’s looks, poor Sorcha was destined to live her life with a bulbous nose and slightly crooked eyes, while Maura blossomed into a woman with appealing ink black hair and eyes the same blue as a winter sky. The more alluring Maura became, the more his wife tried to push her aside. As it happened, Sorcha had been the first to receive an offer of marriage—with the help of Mrs. Garbett, who had resorted to all but locking poor Maura away.
The lass had borne it well enough, with little complaint. She’d become accustomed, he supposed, to wearing hand-me-downs, having her things taken and given to Sorcha—a kitten when she was thirteen, a muff a few years later, a fichu that was given to her by a friend on her twentieth birthday. And those were the things Calum knew about.
But what had happened in the last fortnight under this roof had turned Sorcha into an entirely unreasonable wee shrew. This, Calum decided, was a bloody disaster.
As he understood it, a chambermaid witnessed a kiss between Maura and his daughter’s fiancé, Mr. Adam Cadell, and knowing this to be an unpardonable affront to her mistress, had