The Kadin - Bertrice Small [168]
“A good beginning, my lady, for I do not like what I have heard about the earl’s wife.”
“Marian, you haven’t even met the Lady Anne.”
“I have listened, madame. The Lady Anne doesn’t approve of this, or that, or the other. She feels that Christmas revels are wasteful. And Anne has converted the castle rose garden to a vegetable garden, and she sells them! Pah!”
Janet laughed again. “Perhaps you are right What I fear most is the strain of living under someone else’s rule. I am far too used to running my own home. I shall buy from my brother a piece of Glenkirk land, and I know just the place I want I want Glen Rae where I played as a child, the hills about it its loch, and the island in the loch. That island is just off the shore and would be ideal for a house. I shall begin as soon as we land. I can hire an architect in Edinburgh.”
“You had best make the trade with the earl legal before you return to Glenkirk, my lady. From what I’ve heard of her, the countess is a grasping woman, and when she sees her husband’s sister is no pauper, she is sure to try and get twice what you offer.”
“You have been with me so long, Marian, that you begin to think as I do. Those were my own thoughts.”
Marian smiled to herself. She knew that her mistress would be all right, for she had begun to make plans for the future. Now they could go about the business of getting settled and making a place for themselves in Scotland.
Janet had fallen asleep, her hair strewn about her face on the pillow. Lord thought Marian, she is but three years younger than I, yet she still looks like a girl. Her skin is smooth and unmarked while mine is beginning to wrinkle. My poor brown eyes are fading in color, but her green ones are as bright as ever. My mouse brown hair is shot with gray, but her lovely red-gold tresses have just lightened at bit I am plump with all the good food we ate in the Eski Serai, but my lady is still willow slender. If the men of Scotland are as I remember, she will be overwhelmed with marriage offers before the year is out—especially when word of her fortune is bruited about Already Captain Kerr has made a fool of himself over her each time he’s seen her.
With all these thoughts tumbling in her head, Marian fell asleep. She awoke to the sounds of men’s feet tramping about the deck outside their cabin, Janet was gone from her bunk, but Ruth still slept She went to her and shook her.
“Wake up, daughter! We are entering the harbor.”
Ruth stretched and yawned sleepily. She was a pretty, sweet-faced girl of twenty-three with her mother’s brown hair, and her late father’s bright blue eyes. An only child she had been born when Marian, in her early thirties, had long past given up hope of having children. She barely remembered her father, who had been Sultan Selim’s private secretary and had died of a fever while on campaign with his master.
She had grown up with the sultan’s three youngest children for playmates. She was barely nine when she had helped her mother and Lady Cyra smuggle the six-year-old Prince Karim out of Turkey to safety in Scotland. It was at that point she had become a woman, for had she once slipped and even hinted at this secret, many lives would have been lost—including her own.
On several occasions after she reached puberty, she had been offered the chance of marriage. She had refused. She hadn’t wanted to leave her mother or her mistress. Ruth had inherited her father’s intelligence and her mother’s strong streak of common sense. She was virtually a free woman while a handmaiden to the sultan valideh Cyra Hafise. As the wife of a Turk, she would be cloistered from the world. Now, however, she was a free woman in actual fact and should the opportunity present itself, she would marry without hesitation.
As her mother bustled about the cabin making sure that everything was packed, Ruth quickly dressed. After a lifetime of underdrawers that reached to her knees, long Turkish