Empire by Edward Cline Read Free Book Online Page B

shop the next morning.
    After their supper that evening, he waited until Madeline and Etáin had cleared the table of the last of their meal, then took a letter from inside his coat and dropped it on the table. “
That
came today, on the
Galvin
. Sutherland and Bain are ordering me back to Glasgow, and instructing me to settle all the accounts here.” He glanced at the shocked, attentive faces of his wife and daughter. “If I were not in arrears to the firm, I would resign and begin my own trade here, or in Norfolk. But I have been too generous in my terms with my customers, it would seem, and so I am in arrears, and we must comply.” He paused. “Etáin, you may stay, provided you marry.”
    Etáin shook her head. “I am not ready to, Father.”
    Ian McRae did not immediately reply. “Well, perhaps by spring you will be,” he said. “For by then, we must have sold everything in the inventory here and closed this place.” He looked at his daughter with a sad but firm resolution. “If you mean to stay, my dear, you must be bold.”

Chapter 4: The North
    I n Lausanne, Switzerland, near Geneva, young Edward Gibbon, on a restless quest for a history to write, contemplated a sojourn in Rome to study its past and its ruins. In Blackburn, Lancashire, James Hargreaves, a poor weaver, refrained from scolding his daughter Jenny for having, in the course of her play, overturned a spinning wheel, his chief mode of income, for the sight of it gave him the germ of an idea for a better way to work wool and cotton. And at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, upriver from London, Horace Walpole, member for Castle Rising and youngest son of the late Earl of Orford, was preparing to publish The Castle of Otranto, a new genre of novel later called “Gothic.” Respectively, these events comprised a major step in the evolution of the discipline of history, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the debut of what would in the next century become Romantic literature.
    Etáin McRae was as oblivious to these men and events as they were to her, yet her own ponderings were no less momentous.
    That night she tossed and turned in her bed like a woman gripped by fever, made sleepless by the turmoil of her thoughts. Until now, she had enjoyed the luxury of time. This had been abruptly robbed of her. Now she must make one of two decisions: to return to Scotland with her parents, or to choose between Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick.
    The first choice loomed ominously in her thoughts. She imagined a dozen dire, vividly likely events that could end her life, or at least the possibility of her ever seeing the men again: a savage storm at sea that could sink her ship; a fatal error in navigation that could dash the ship on the rocks on the coast of England, a common tragedy; a deadly shipboard sickness; on land, robbery and murder by highwaymen; an overturned coach; a variety of catastrophic mishaps…. The prospect of going to England thus became less and less a portent with each stark, capricious nightmare, and the choice receded in her mind until it was a mere distant, abstract foolishness it was pointless to dwell on further.
    She would not return.
    That left Jack and Hugh.
    She plumbed the depths of her soul, asked herself a hundred questions, and set up in her imagination a special ledger book such as she kept in her father’s shop, with columns for pluses and minuses for each man.
    But she found that all she could enter for both men were pluses.
    In the end, she decided on her measure; she chose her north. Exhausted by the task — realizing ultimately that her decision rested on what she regarded as justice for herself — she fell asleep just as light began to touch the top of the holly tree beyond her window.
    She allowed herself a few days to test her certitude. In her free moments, when neither her mother nor her father’s shop required her presence, she spent time on her harp. Once, her mother heard her playing a simple melody that was