She raised a tawny brow. “The enemy here being colliery owners. Men like you.”
“Men like me, or what we represent.” He shrugged. “More important, you’ll never work as hard as when you work for your own clear gain and glory first. Human nature.”
“Unless you are a woman,” she said bitterly. “Then you are taught that spending your every breath on others is working for your own glory. A rather sly appropriation of surplus labor if you ask me.”
He nearly choked on his sandwich. “You receive two thousand a year. In addition to all essential expenses paid. That’s one hell of a wage.”
“And in return, you receive all of me, with no end to my workday,” she replied, “while the women in Drummuir are expected to do it all for no coin at all, a whole second shift. It seems that labor, once it crosses the door into a home, is magically transformed into a priceless act of love or female duty—meanwhile, women’s hands are raw from very real chores.”
He had nothing to counter that. “Your thoughts are wild, lass,” he said instead.
Again, her brow went up. “As wild as handing a colliery to its miners?”
He laughed out loud despite himself. Her expression remained cool. “All right,” he said, sobering. “I’ll do what I can. About the bill. For the Cause. For you.”
She dipped her chin. “Will you? Do what you can?”
“My word on it.”
“Through honest means?”
“And dirty ones.”
“Good.” There was a hard edge to her mouth.
He nudged his knee against her skirts. “Now my murky ways suit you, eh?”
Her gaze strayed to the driver’s back. “I’m afraid I have been quite thoroughly corrupted by my husband,” she then murmured softly.
“Your husband is a fortunate man,” he said in an equally low voice. “I reckon he’s keen on thoroughly corrupting you again tonight.”
She blushed, and heat washed over him when her lovely lips relaxed at last. Had they been alone, he would have pulled her onto his lap for some kissing. Instead, he contented himself with watching her finish her apple with delicate bites. She wrapped the gratings in her handkerchief. “For the ponies,” she clarified. “I’m wondering: Why would you communalize Drummuir if the other experiments failed?”
He had wondered the same. “I suppose sometimes, all one can do is try again,” he said. “To learn some more. Ah, now, what’s this look?”
The corners of her mouth twitched. “Nothing—it just sounds unlike you.”
“Unlike me—how?”
“A little vague,” she said. “Soft, almost.”
He didn’t like the sound of that, not at all.
They continued the journey in silence until they reached the Spittal of Glenmuick.
The sight of the sunny valley stretching before them left him feeling unexpectedly breathless. Distracted, he helped Harriet from the wagon. Lochnagar was part of the Cairngorms, the eastern mountain chain the Highlanders would call Am Monadh Ruadh—the red hills. Beneath clear skies, the majestic slopes honored their name and appeared in reddish-brown hues, and the usually gloomy moorlands were a muted patchwork of browns, green, and tufts of heather. A heavy feeling spread from a dark place in his chest, and he drew the peaty scent of the glen deep into his lungs to ease it. One couldn’t behold the austere splendor of the land without noticing how empty it was. He had never known it otherwise; when he was a boy the Highland communities had already been reduced to a tenth of their old numbers. But he had been raised on the stories and legends predating the Clearances, and that part of him could sense the ghosts lingering on this plain.
Harriet was walking ahead, her back stiff like a board, propelled by continued frustration over the failed amendment, he assumed. He nearly called after her: You can’t outrun it. Funny, how it was she who could toss big words like surplus labor appropriation at him because she had been educated better than most men in Britain and could read Marx. Marx would say that the same forces that had helped him, Lucian, become outrageously wealthy had also been behind the desolation of his homeland—in Marx’s essays, the Clearances were called the last great expropriation. An expropriation supported by plenty of Lowlanders, as it was. Now Lowlanders were working for Lucian and their entire livelihoods were lawfully in his power. Where, then, in all this should a man who came from nothing and now had everything position himself? Damn how conversations with Harriet tied his brain into knots.