Temptation

“We did it!” Temperance said as she leaned back against the hard seat of the old wagon.

“You did,” Grace said softly as she held the reins of the horses. “I had nothing at all to do with it.”

Temperance ignored her words. “Remember the smug look on that awful woman’s face when she said good-bye to us? She thought she’d pulled something off, didn’t she? The House of Grace. By tomorrow all of Edinburgh will have heard of you.”

“Not me, you,” Grace said insistently. “I did nothing.”

“Only made the most beautiful hat I’ve ever seen, that’s all.”

“But what does that matter? Many people have talent. Brenda tells wonderful stories and Lilias makes liqueur from seaweed, but they aren’t selling their talents in Edinburgh. They aren’t making money from what they can do.”

“Oh, well, it just takes a bit of conniving.”

“No,” Grace said solemnly. “It takes a belief that you can do anything in the entire world, something that we don’t have here in McCairn.” Her voice lowered. “And something I don’t know how we’re going to do without once you leave.”

“Pish posh,” Temperance said, embarrassed by Grace’s praise. She just wanted to think of the triumph of the day and nothing else. “Right now we both need to think about how we’re going to hide your business from the people of McCairn. Somehow, I can’t see Hamish condoning a woman earning money, especially not the kind of money that I think you’re going to make. I’ve seen it in New York a hundred times. I’ll help a destitute woman with a do-nothing husband and kids to support find a way to earn a living; then, when she’s on her feet, the man’s ego will be crushed, so he’ll stop her from earning. Hundreds of times I’ve seen it.”

“Do you think James will want to stop me?” Grace asked as she held on to the reins. Even though it was dark, with only the moonlight to guide them, the horses certainly knew the way back to the stables.

“You know him better than I do,” Temperance said, then frowned at herself because she didn’t like the little pang that went through her when she said that. So she was attracted to the man. It wasn’t the end of the world, was it?

“Not really,” Grace said. “I know I’ve shared his bed, but I’ve never seen him talk to anyone the way he does to you.”

“Really?” Temperance said, then turned away so Grace couldn’t see the broadness of her smile. “He’s a nice man. I mean, there are things he shouldn’t do, like toss women out of windows and threaten to murder them, but, all in all, he takes care of a lot of people.”

Grace was looking at her with her head cocked to one side. “Murder?”

“Oh, it was nothing, just something he said. You had to be there to understand. Look, are you sure you want to try to conduct your business here in McCairn? I know my mother could find you a nice little shop in Edinburgh.”

“No, thank you!” Grace said firmly. “Do you forget that I grew up in that city? If I lived there and I were to die, there would be no one to take care of Alys. But here . . .”

“Yes,” Temperance said softly, “I know. She was born here, so she will always have a home here.” And that sentiment was something that Temperance was coming to truly like about McCairn: The people all seemed to be pulling for each other. No one was isolated or left out. Even Grace, who’d become the laird’s mistress, was as much a part of them as anyone else was. Yes, Temperance thought, smiling, she liked that attitude very much.

“My goodness, but it’s late,” Temperance said loudly, breaking her reverie. “Once I hit that bed, I’m not going to get up for a week.”

Just then they turned a bend in the road, and the old stone McCairn house came into view. On the first night Temperance had seen the place, there had been a single candle burning in one room. But tonight it looked as though the whole place was alight.

“Something’s wrong,” she said quietly, then louder, “something’s wrong.” With a jerk, she snatched the reins from Grace and yelled, “Hiyah,” to the two tired horses; then, when they wouldn’t move fast enough to suit her, she stood up, grabbed the long whip from its holder by the seat, and cracked the thin leather over the heads of the horses.

Beside her, caught unawares, Grace flew backward over the seat and slammed into the wagonbed. Her side hit something hard and she groaned. But she didn’t have time to think about pain because if she didn’t catch hold of something, she was going to go flying out the back onto the road. Her hat fell down over her face, so she had to feel for the side of the wagon. When she found it, Grace pushed her hat up and looked up to see Temperance silhouetted in the moonlight. She was standing in the front of the wagon, looking like something Grace had once seen on a circus poster, swinging the whip over the horses, the sound splitting the air.

When Grace saw how fast they were approaching the house, she was sure they were going to hit it. To prepare for the coming blow, she rolled herself into a ball and tried to wedge herself between the side of the wagon and the bags of whatever Temperance had bought and put into the wagon.

But just before impact, Temperance used her entire body to pull back on the reins. Grace was sure the front feet of the horses came off the ground. Then, before they had fully stopped, Temperance jumped down and ran into the house.

Shaking from fear and the ride-through-hell, Grace got down from the wagon and went into the house.

Dearest Mother,

It is late at night and I am dead with exhaustion, but I must tell you about what happened tonight. I apologize that I didn’t get to see you while Grace and I were in Edinburgh today, but we had so very much to do that there was no time.

First of all, Grace’s hats were a great success. We were seen and noticed, and she now has a contract to produce twenty-five hats as soon as she can make them. I told the owner of the shop that it will be extremely difficult to get enough of the old fabrics that Grace uses on the hats, so she raised the price she was offering by nearly half. Considering the acres of rotting curtains that James has in this old place, Grace will be able to make hats for the rest of the century.

When we returned to the house, every window was ablaze with light. If you knew how frugal all of McCairn was, you’d know how unusual this is. I was terrified that something horrible had happened, so, without thinking, I grabbed the reins of the horses and made them run. Remember how Daddy taught me to stand in the wagon and crack the whip? I remember that the one and only time I showed you what he’d taught me to do, we had to use smelling salts to revive you.

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,Ishould 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 it. If it can turn HH into a man who makes jokes, I may have found the Elixir of Life. Elixir of Humor, anyway.

So, that’s about it. I must go to bed, as there is a lot to do tomorrow. James is going to start me on his account books, and I want to look at James’s cards to see what I can find out about the treasure. I’ll tell you all about that in the next letter.

Oh, yes, could you send about a hundred pounds of sheep-dip? It seems that I picked up lime. James made some unpleasant remarks about how he could use the lime and said I was better with ladies’ hats than with sheep. I told him I was better at anything in the world than he was, and one thing led to another and now it looks like there’s a chance that I might actually be riding a horse in the coming race. If you saw the way James’s fancy racehorses dance around even when they have a rider on their back, you’d start praying for me.

Now I really, really must go to bed.

Love and kisses,

Your daughter,

Temperance