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  Anyway, all of McCairn was inside the house waiting for us.

  Mother, you have to understand this. For three days, Grace and her mother-in-law and Alys, Grace’s daughter, and I have been making hats in secret. Total secret. We’ve let no one know what we were doing. But, somehow, everyone in the village knew and they were all waiting for us when we returned to McCairn.

  You should have seen it! All the children were there, even the newborn daughter of Grace’s husband’s second cousin was sleeping in her mother’s arms. Everyone, even Horrible Hamish, the tyrannical pastor, was there, all waiting for us to return and tell them how it had gone with Grace’s hats in Edinburgh.

  So much for secrecy in McCairn! I’d like to think that the pastor didn’t know the full details of the way I skated between James’s legs on Sunday afternoon, but I bet he knows enough to draw pictures!

  Anyway, you know what a ham I am when I have an audience. You always said, Like father, like daughter, and I guess I am. I was very tired from the long day, actually, I was tired from several long days of skating and looking for treasure with James, but as soon as I saw those faces so very eager for a story, I lost my tiredness and started spinning the tale.

  And what a story it is!!

  Grace and I told no one what we were doing or the real reason we were going into Edinburgh because we were so afraid we’d fail. Now, knowing that everyone knew what we were up to, I see that they must have had a great laugh at all our elaborate attempts at secrecy.

  Since we’d told people we were going shopping for household essentials, we set off in our everyday clothes. But once we were within a mile of the city, we stopped and changed into my two best outfits. Grace is a bit thinner than I am, but the clothes fit well enough. And of course we were wearing hats trimmed so beautifully by Grace.

  We had lunch at The Golden Dove, just as you had arranged for us, and within thirty minutes of our entry, a woman came up to me and asked where I’d bought my hat. I said, “I can’t tell you. If I told, my milliner would be inundated with orders, then I’d never get my hats, would I?”

  When the woman walked away in a huff, I thought Grace was going to die. It took me a while to calm her down, but she was still so jittery that she ate little of the exquisite luncheon.

  But I knew what I was doing. That woman wasn’t going to give up, and if she did, then she didn’t deserve one of Grace’s hats.

  At the end of the luncheon, a waitress dropped a very messy batch of cakes onto my hat, and before I could say a word, she’d snatched it off my head. (Thankfully, I had thought to remove the pins earlier, which meant that I couldn’t so much as bend my neck during the entire meal.) The waitress took the hat away, insisting that she had to clean it for me. Ten minutes later, she returned the hat with a thousand apologies.

  Grace was more nervous than ever, but I told her to calm down and eat her eclair. Minutes later, we saw the waitress hand a piece of paper to the woman who’d asked me for the name of my hatmaker.

  I knew it was the name and address from the label inside my hat. We had made the label big enough that the most nearsighted woman could read it without her glasses.

  After we saw that exchange of information, Grace and I could hardly contain ourselves. We ran outside where we could release our laughter in a great explosion.

  After luncheon, we spent an hour wandering about the city (I had some things to purchase for James), then we took a leisurely stroll by the hat shop whose name you had given us. Since the silly proprietor didn’t come out to us, we had to go inside to “look around.” Since three women had already been there to ask about hats from the House of Grace, it took only thirty minutes to reach an agreement with the woman to produce hats for her shop and hers alone.

  During the entire negotiations, Grace didn’t say a word, just sat there and looked at me and wrung her hands. The shop proprietor said, “All artists are like that,” and I thought Grace was going to faint from the praise. An artist!

  So now Grace is established as an exclusive designer of women’s hats. I’m to do the accounting and establish the prices for the hats for as long as I’m here. After that . . . Well, we’ll find someone who can do my job later.

  So when we got home, the house was lit up and all the people of the village were waiting to hear what had happened. James said that any business in the village benefitted everyone, so Grace’s hats were everyone’s business.

  This is certainly different from New York where people can live next door to each other for twenty years and never know each other’s names!

  Anyway, we ate and drank—all at James’s expense—and I told them all about the day. And, yes, dear Mother, I did enjoy myself immensely. They were an attentive, appreciative audience, and I had a good story to tell.

  Oh! But it was all so wonderful to watch! I got to see Grace become a woman of major importance! Something that I hadn’t considered in all this was that Grace would get to choose her employees. I could have burst my buttons in pride when she stood up in front of the fire that James had lit to take the chill off the big stone dining room, and looked at all those eager eyes as she thought about whom she was going to choose.

  Oh, Mother, I was so very, very proud of her. She chose four women from the village who have no men to support them. At the time I didn’t know who the women were, but later James told me everything. And now Grace has changed the fortunes of four families in McCairn, and if her hats take off, as I think they will, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than four families’ fortunes were bettered.

  After we told all about the day—oh, but this is hard to believe!—it was Horrible Hamish who made us all laugh the hardest. He said that the real House of Grace was a sorry place to house a business.

  When he said this, everyone looked at James because he owns the house where Grace was living. He keeps it repaired, but, still, it is little more than a sheepherder’s shack.

  James said that there was room in his old house for a hat business, but when young Ramsey made a rude remark about James living with so many unmarried women, the village decided that James should pay for the renovation of what was once a warehouse for sheepskins. I’m told that it’s huge but now it’s derelict, so it’s going to take some time and money to fix up, but James is going to pay for everything.

  Of course James protested that he had no money or time to do anything like that, but he was booed down by all the village. It looks as though they may know enough about his finances to know what he can and cannot afford. As James has asked me to start doing his accounting for him, I’ll let you know what I find out about him. All I know for sure is that he couldn’t possibly be as poor as he says he is.

  We desperately need sewing machines and supplies for Grace’s business, so James said that, this year, he’d donate all the prize money he won from some big horse race he goes to every year to the House of Grace. At this the cheers were so loud that I feared the roof might collapse, so I think the prize money must be significant.

  James clapped Ramsey on the back and said he was going to make the boy run up and down the mountain every day to get him in shape as a jockey for the race. Then HH (Horrible Hamish) said that from the way I had driven the wagon home, I should be the jockey. He then further shocked me by saying that if there was a race for roller-skating, we could enter me and I’d win so much prize money that we could buy all the sewing machines in the world.

  I was so shocked by these statements and by the general joviality of the man that I couldn’t get my mouth closed. Grace whispered to me, “Lilias is his wife and he won’t remember any of this tomorrow.” It took me several minutes to figure out what she was talking about. Then I remembered that she’d told me that Lilias made a delicious liqueur out of seaweed. My goodness! But it seems that the woman gets her husband drunk every night!

  Mother, do you think you could find me some information on the bottling and selling of liqueur? I haven’t tasted Lilias’s product yet, but I’m sure there’s a market for i