Temptation Read online

  “You’re not married, are you?” James said quietly. “Never have been, have you?”

  “I, ah . . . You want any more chicken? Or would you like some pie? Ramsey picked blackberries all afternoon.”

  She stopped because James had leaned back in his chair and was smiling at her as though he knew something that she didn’t.

  “Would someone pleeeeeeeeassssssse tell me what’s going on in this house?” she asked. “Every person in it is acting strangely. Alys has been whispering with Ramsey, and Grace looks like she’s at a funeral. And you have been brooding so much that Heathcliff would envy you.”

  But James didn’t answer her. Instead, he said that he would like to have some pie. And for all the world he seemed to have solved some mystery, and he was very pleased with himself for having done so.

  Sixteen

  Mad, Temperance thought. Everyone on the almost-island had gone crazy.

  It was the evening of the day after that strange dinner with James and, if possible, the people on McCairn had all gone mad. Maybe they’d drunk something that had a poisonous herb in it, she thought.

  She was now at the top of the mountain, and she had practically run up the steep, narrow trail. A few weeks ago she’d been terrified by that trail, but not now. Now it seemed like the least fearful thing in the entire village.

  For the last day and a half she had been living with people who made no sense at all. It was as though they were in on some conspiracy that she knew nothing of.

  This morning Horrible Hamish’s wife had come running up to Temperance and whispered that Hamish had seen her naked in the pond.

  Taken off guard, Temperance had said, “He saw me? No, wait, I wasn’t naked in any pond. Do you mean the bathtub?”

  Lilias looked at Temperance as though she were daft. “Not you. Me,” she whispered. “That’s how Hamish and I met. I was taking a bath in the pond by the bottom of the rock fall, and he saw me. Of course I knew he was there and that’s why—” She broke off when she saw Sheenagh walk by, then Lilias put her finger to her lips in secrecy as she hurried away.

  Temperance was sure that Lilias had just shared some great secret with her, but why had she shared such an intimate secret? And then there was the thought of stripping off so Hamish would see her naked. At that Temperance gave a shudder of revulsion. Why in the world had the woman wanted that odious little bull of a man?

  Shrugging, Temperance had continued walking down the street that ran through the center of the village. At the end of it was the warehouse where Grace’s hatmaking shop was going to be established, and Temperance wanted to see how the work was going.

  But she was stopped by Moira, who was a cousin of Grace’s late husband. Moira whispered to Temperance that her husband had broken his arm and she had nursed him back to health. “We were left alone a lot, if you know what I mean.”

  All Temperance could do was give a weak smile, and after the woman went away, she continued walking. But two steps later, a woman she had never seen before told Temperance that she and her husband had been trapped together in a shed all night. “After that we had to get married,” the woman said with a great cackle of laughter before hurrying away.

  By the time Temperance got to the warehouse, she was sure that the people had gone insane. Grace was there with Alys, and Grace was telling the men that, yes, the windows had to be made larger. “You spend fourteen hours a day sewing without good light and see how your eyes stand up to it,” she was snapping at Rory, the man James had put in charge of the rebuilding.

  Temperance dropped the big bag that Eppie had filled with food for the workmen by the door. “Could someone please tell me what’s going on?” she said. “Is there a festival in the planning?”

  “Not unless someone else does the planning,” Grace answered quickly. “Why?”

  “Because every woman in this village is telling me how she met her husband. I must say that for so quiet a little place, there have been some risqué meetings. The women of McCairn—”

  She broke off because Alys looked at Grace, and the girl’s eyes were wide in horror.

  “I told them to tell us!” Alys said in a whine; then she turned and ran out the doorway so fast that she nearly knocked Temperance over.

  “What’s going on?” Temperance asked, eyes narrowed at Grace.

  “The children are planning a surprise for you,” Grace said quickly. “They’re writing a history of Clan McCairn for you to take back to New York with you.”

  “And the history tells who had to marry whom?” Temperance asked. “You wouldn’t believe what these women are telling me. Hamish’s wife . . .” She trailed off because she didn’t want to betray a confidence, but if it were a secret, why was Lilias telling it to be put into a book about the history of the clan?

  “I don’t think that what I’ve been hearing is quite suitable for a history,” Temperance said. “At least not if it’s to be published. Haven’t there been some battles near here or something bigger—in a historical sense? And, anyway, should the children be hearing what their parents got up to before they were married?”

  She looked at Grace and Rory, but they just stood there staring at her without saying a word.

  Finally Rory said in a voice louder than it needed to be, “I think you have enough light. It’s going to cost too much to heat the place in winter if you have these huge windows.”

  Grace turned her back on Temperance to face Rory and said just as loudly, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s my business, and I’ll have it as I want it.”

  Temperance stood there looking at the back of the two of them and knew that what she’d just been told was a lie. Not about how Mrs. Hamish had danced about in a pond naked in order to attract the ramrod-stiff Hamish, but about there being a book written on the history of Clan McCairn.

  But whatever the secret was, Temperance wasn’t part of it, and they weren’t going to let her in on it.

  Slowly, Temperance turned away and left the warehouse. For the first time in a long while, she felt like an outsider in the village. As she made her way back down the street, no one grabbed her arm and whispered intimate secrets about how she’d snared her husband. When she saw Lilias, the woman turned brilliant red before dashing inside McCairn’s one and only store. Temperance thought about following her and seeing if she could get some answers from her, but she knew that the village had closed itself and she was on the outside.

  In the end, Temperance decided to spend the day in her room writing about all that she’d observed since she’d arrived in McCairn. She told herself that it was good that the villagers had shut her out of their lives because she needed to remember why she was there in the first place. She wanted to discover new ways to help the people in New York, the people who really needed her.

  But Temperance found that she had difficulty writing because she kept remembering her time in McCairn. She thought of roller-skating with the children.

  And sliding through James’s legs.

  She thought of helping Grace with her hat business. And just yesterday when she’d quizzed Alys on numbers. “What’s 367 times 481?” she’d asked the girl. Temperance had no idea if the number 176,527 was right, but it sounded good. And the girl had looked into Temperance’s eyes and said that she wanted to be a doctor more than she wanted anything else in the whole wide world. Temperance agreed that it was good to have an education, but why would the girl think that she wanted to be a doctor?

  And Temperance remembered the night James had thrown Charming Charmaine out the window. And the afternoon the muscular woman had appeared outside the cave. And how they had laughed over each incident.

  And Temperance remembered delivering a sheep with James. And how she’d worn his shirt afterward. She thought about the times they’d shared lunch in his little cave. She wondered if he had ever taken other people to the cave. His wife, maybe? What had his wife been like? Other than unhappy, that is? As for that, why had she been so very unhapp