A Scot to the Heart (Desperately Seeking Duke #2) - Caroline Linden Page 0,13
appointment. With barely a glance at Ilsa, the lawyer unfolded the letter.
“Good heavens,” he exclaimed almost immediately. Turning his back to her, he whispered furiously to his clerk, who snapped to attention like a pointer catching a scent. Frowning, Ilsa tilted her head and caught a few words: “waiting,” “properties,” and “Carlyle.”
Almost before she could comprehend what was happening, Mr. MacGill was on his feet, offering her his hand. The clerk scurried out of the office. “My dear Mrs. Ramsay, I do apologize but an emergency has arisen—I must cut this interview short. Shall we speak again in six months?”
She rose to keep him from looking down on her. “Why? What is this? Mr. MacGill, we had an appointment! I only ask a very little of your time now and then.”
“Indeed, and you have had it.” He reached for her hand.
Ilsa stubbornly refused to move. “Are you throwing me out?”
“No, no,” he soothed her, even as he extended his other hand toward the door. “But I must turn my attention—”
“Sell the shares,” she said, her voice rising. “Sell them, Mr. MacGill, and deposit the funds into my account. I insist!”
“Madam, I will do no such thing,” he snapped, dropping her hand. “What foolishness! You will thank me for it when we speak again in six months.”
Frustration boiled inside her. Wordlessly Ilsa turned and stormed from the room without acknowledging his hasty bow. She threw open the door herself, almost striking Mr. Leish, the sanctimonious clerk.
Behind him stood a man, tall and broad, dressed finely enough to be a lord. An English lord. So that’s whom Mr. MacGill considered far more important than she, Ilsa seethed as she strode past the lot of them.
Men. MacGill brushing her aside without a moment’s hesitation, that arrogant Carlyle fellow demanding his attention with the snap of his fingers, and Leish smirking at her dismissal. Anger carried her blindly to the street, and then all the way to the foot of the Canongate, where her father’s house stood.
He was still at the table. Fashionable people dined later, but Papa clung to his preference for an early meal. She suspected he spent the more fashionable dinner hour at a tavern, with cards in his hand. “You’re early, my girl!” he said jovially when she came in. “Come in, child! Have some cake.”
“How are you, Papa?” She kissed his cheek and waved off the offer of cake in favor of pacing the dining room. “I’ve just come from Mr. MacGill’s office. He has lost my custom.”
He blinked at her as he chewed a bite of cake. “Why, now?”
“He refused to do what I asked of him. Would you tolerate that from him?”
MacGill had been Papa’s solicitor for years. Ilsa had always thought that was because MacGill was the best, but in the last year she’d come to think that Mr. MacGill only had a reputation for being the best. MacGill’s fees were exorbitant enough to make one believe he was incomparable, but his service was another matter.
Papa pushed back his plate. “Calm yourself, child. No doubt he has your best interests at heart. What did you ask him to do, that he refused?”
“I told him to sell my shares in Mr. Cunninghame’s trading company.”
Her father’s face grew stormy. “Ach, Ilsa, why?” he said irritably. “I counseled Malcolm to make that investment, and now you’ll sell it?”
She hadn’t known that. “You know what Mr. Cunninghame trades in?”
“Sugar and tobacco.”
“And you know how that is produced.”
“I know he made a ten percent profit on his last two years’ voyages!”
“I don’t care to profit from slave-grown goods.”
“You’ll care when your income wanes,” he told her.
She rolled her eyes. “As if there’s money to be made only in sugar and tobacco! I fancy linen manufacture, perhaps. Something made here. Something Scottish.”
His mouth pursed, but then eased. He winked at her. “I know just the thing—cabinetry!”
Her father was Deacon of the Wrights, head of the largest group of carpentry tradesmen in town. Nobody made a finely turned table leg or an intricately carved wardrobe like Papa. His craftsmanship was unequalled, as was his larger-than-life personality. No wright in Edinburgh could have asked for a fiercer champion on the town council, which controlled most of what went on in Edinburgh, and beyond.
And no one had a better talent for disarming her temper. Ilsa laughed. “As if I’ve not profited enough from cabinetry! But perhaps that’s a thought. I’ll sponsor some boys to be educated and apprenticed as wrights.”