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so I did, after having taken tea in the front room with mother.

    ‘Ye mustnae get upset at anything yer father might divulge tae ye today, Caitlin,’ said mother, sipping heather and sage tea from a bone china cup. ‘He’s tried his best to keep everything stable for ye, despite particularly difficult circumstances.’

    ‘Aye, o’ course,’ I said, not really knowing to what my ma was referring.

    I felt unduly nervous as I took the familiar walk to father’s study, past the bookshelves and antique sculpted ornaments. My family had always had expensive tastes, although our collection of artworks had rather diminished in size over the past few years. I’d wondered why it was that father had been selling off the old portraits and sculptures, but had presumed that it had been due to changing tastes or fashions or suchlike.

    I struck father’s old oak door thrice as I had done ever since I could remember, and he called me in. ‘Come on in, Caitlin, I’ve been waiting for ye.’

    I was rather taken aback by my father’s appearance behind his desk. He had large, dark bags beneath his eyes, and his normally carefully oiled moustache was lacklustre and drooping; his eyes were bloodshot and there was a general pallid quality to his skin that I’d never seen before.

    ‘Caitlin,’ he said, sighing heavily, ‘I’ve let ye down, hen.’

    ‘Father,’ I said, ‘what’s the matter?’

    ‘I’ve tried to keep it from ye for all these years, tried in vain to make ye a happy wean, to give ye a happy childhood and a contented life, but now that you’re eighteen, you need to know. We are in debt. A suffocating, monstrous amount o’ debt. For years I’ve struggled to reconcile our paltry incomings with our huge outgoings to no avail. If I didnae do somethin’ aboot it, we’d be oot on our bahookies this time next year, without so much as a hoose to our name.’

    At this, I gasped.

    My father continued. ‘Now I need to tell ye somethin’ important, Caitlin. I’m afeart that ye willnae be going to enjoy the season in Auld Reekie next month. I’m afeart that yer fate will be quite different.’

    I felt the shock grip my body like a frozen vice, and I thought for a moment that I was going to swoon, faint right in front of my da. How had they kept this from me? How could he take this away from me like this, after having led me to believe for all these years that becoming a socialite in bonny auld Edinburgh was my destiny?

    ‘Father, I,’ I said, trying to hold back the tears which I felt pricking warmly at the corners of my eyes, ‘what will be become of me?’

    ‘I’ve committed tae something terrible,’ he said. ‘I’ve agreed, in principle, to yer marriage.’

    ‘My marriage ?’ I asked, beside myself with wretched rage.

    ‘Aye lassie, yer marriage,’ said my father. He drew himself up a little, shuffling in his seat, before adjusting his collar. I saw beads of sweat on his brow and then, finally, when he was ready, he uttered the words: ‘you’ll be merrit to the Laird of Elgin.’

    ‘Elgin?’ I cried. ‘But, but that’s miles away! That’s even further north than Inverness !’

    It took a second for this to truly sink in, and then when I finally knew what my fate was, I felt a surge of adrenaline beat round my body. My legs began to shake, and my breast heaved in my bodice as I struggled to breathe. Then, when the cold realization hit me, I felt consciousness slipping away. Everything went black.

Chapter 16

    In the following week, I learned a lot about my family, which had been kept secret from me over the years. All of our dirty wee secrets, my father’s gambling and my mother’s drinking, grandfather’s whoring debts and the scabrous clean-picked bones of countless other family scandals. And it fell to me to settle the family’s debts, of course. My maidenhood was the only thing of any worth around here, so of course it had been sold off to the highest bidder. The Laird of