Page 5 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

"I am entirely capable of staying silent," Grisselle muttered, her teeth clicking against the rim of her cup. "It is the rest of London that seems lacking in the skill."

"How odd," Penelope’s high, sweet voice cut through the drone of the elderly gentlemen by the window as she drifted across the carpet, Mr. Hartley lagging half a step behind her. She stopped, her painted fan tapping against her chin with a rhythmic, irritating tick. "How very odd that a girl who spent three seasons without so much as a curate looking her way should suddenly have a Highland Laird tucked in her pocket. Do produce him, dear. We are all waiting to see if he wears trousers or merely a blanket."

A quiet ripple of snickers went through the small knot of ladies by the pianoforte. Hartley let out his usual wet chuckle, his eyes sliding over Grisselle’s uncurled hair with a lazy, heavy satisfaction.

Grisselle didn't look down. She didn't let her fingers shake on the porcelain. "He has a great deal of work on his estates, Penelope. The north is not like Mayfair; men there are occupied with things more substantial than the width of a coat-tail."

"Oh, no doubt," Penelope smiled, her teeth small and white. "But a man who exists usually leaves a track, does he not? My father says there is no Herston listed in the Edinburgh rolls. Perhaps he lives in the deeper bogs?"

Behind Grisselle, her mother’s silk skirts let out a frantic, agitated rustle. Lady Hunter had been floating on a cloud of nervous triumph since Tuesday, her pocketbook already open with lists of mantua-makers, but now her hand came down on Grisselle’s shoulder, her fingernails biting through the thin muslin.

"He is... He is from an older line," her mother stammered, her voice going thin and reedy under Penelope's sharp look. "Very private. We are expecting his letters daily."

"My daughter will have the proper documents when the time comes," her father said from the hearth, though his voice lacked any real iron.

He was staring at the small fire, his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets. He looked up at Grisselle, his brow furrowed with a silent, heavy question she couldn't answer.

When will he write, Grisselle? Why is there no word?

Grisselle swallowed down the dry lump of copper-tasting fear in her throat. The walls of the room felt small, hot, and thick with perfume.

She had built a husband out of her grandfather's tales to stop a pack of wolves from tearing her name apart, and now the wood was splintering under her feet. The legend was twenty years drowned; his bones were kelp; he was safely dead. But London wanted a body, and she had nothing to give them but a red wax seal and a sheet of lied-on paper.

Just then, the double doors at the end of the hall hit the plaster walls with a dull, heavy boom that set the crystal pendants on the chandelier vibrating.

The footman didn't use his usual high, nasal drawl. He stood sideways, his silver tray clamped against his ribs as if he were trying to make himself thin enough to clear the opening. His face was the color of lard.

"Laird Alpin Herston," he said.

The room went dead, stone-still. The music from the next room seemed to thin out into nothing but a dry scrape of horsehair.

Grisselle’s breath stopped between her ribs. Her fingers went entirely numb, the teacup tilting in her hand until a dark trickle of Bohea spilled over the rim, staining her white glove brown. She didn't feel the heat.

That name is twenty years drowned. That name does not walk through doors.

A man filled the doorway.

He had to bend his head slightly to clear the gilded lintel. He was enormous, his shoulders so wide they blocked the light from the candles in the sconces behind him. His heavy wool plaid was pinned with a tarnished silver brooch, the fabric dark with dried mud and the grey crust of North Sea salt. He wore no silk, no lace, no powder. His dark hair fell in thick, wavy clumps over his collar, looking as though it hadn't seen a comb since the border, and a long, pale scar ran like a jagged lightning bolt from the edge of his jaw straight down into the wool of his shirt.

He didn't look at the footman. He didn't look at the gold leaf on the walls or the velvet sofas. His black eyes swept over the crowded room with a slow, heavy calculation.

He didn't ask for her. He didn't look at the ladies with their pale silks and bright jewels. His gaze moved straight through the center of the crowd, ignoring Penelope, ignoring Hartley, until it struck Grisselle where she stood paralyzed by the sideboard.

She was the only girl in the room with her hair falling out of its pins, her dress a season old, and an expression of such pure, naked guilt on her face that she might as well have been holding the ink-horn in her teeth.

When his eyes met hers, it felt like the heavy, freezing slap of the tide off the Herston cliffs. The room around them vanished into a grey blur.

He knows.

Without a word spoken, the hard, unblinking certainty in his black eyes told her that he had the folded paper with the broken red seal tucked under his leather belt.

He walked toward her.

The crowd parted before him without his having to touch a shoulder. The fine gentlemen in their satin coats shrank back against the wallpaper, their mouths open, their eyes fixed on his heavy, mud-caked riding boots as they thudded against Lady Danbury's expensive carpets.

A low, collective hiss of whispers broke out behind his back, rising like the sound of dry grass in a wind.

"...by God, look at the size of him..."