The Fairbairn Girls Read Free Page B

deplorable table manners and his insistence that all the dogs should be free to roam around indoors during the day. When she’d first had a baby she’d been shocked and hurt at his cavalier manner towards her whilst he’d hovered nervously nearby over one of his bitches who was whelping at the same time. He’d summoned the vet although there was no need, yet had asked her crossly if she really needed Doctor Doughty to attend her as well as the midwife?
    Then, when Lizzie was born he said, ‘A girl is it? Huh!’ and walked out of the room, but when the puppies arrived he joyously announced the news to all and sundry and ordered that all the workers on the estate be given a pint of ale. Then he’d gone out shooting with the ghillie.
    Something died in Margaret Rothbury’s heart then and, as the years passed and their family grew in size, sometimes she wondered if it was her fault that she’d produced nine girls and only two boys? On the other hand, she figured it might be God punishing William for no longer caring for her, although at the beginning he’d sworn passionately that she was his love and his life.
    Breakfast over, the Fairbairn family scattered in different directions with great purpose and without saying a word to each other. Lord Rothbury was the first to stride from the room and go straight out where the ghillie was waiting for him with Megara, ready saddled, bridled and raring to go. For the next three hours they’d ride around the estate and talk about the coming shooting season when grouse, pheasant, widgeon, woodcock, plover and snipe would be brought down. Then there were leverets to be shot before they became fully grown hares, and then stalking would follow. Only one thing clouded William’s pleasant expectations for the coming months: a large number of guests were always invited to Lochlee Castle for a few days at the end of each week. The men were fine. They were his friends. It was the frivolous wives who drove him mad; sometimes he wished he could shoot them, too.
    Meanwhile, Margaret Rothbury had gone up to her private sitting room to give orders to the housekeeper, Mrs Spry, before sitting at her desk to see to her correspondence. She was an avid writer of letters and believed in keeping in touch with even the merest acquaintance.
    ‘You never know,’ she pointed out on one occasion, ‘when they might come in useful.’
    ‘They’re not a damned pair of boots!’ her husband had growled back.
    ‘Come along, children,’ called Susan the nursery maid, whose job it was to ‘give the girls a good run in the garden’ as Nanny ordered, as if they, too, had been a pack of dogs. Bundled up in tweed coats, woollen hats and scarves and little buttoned-up boots, Alice, Flora and Catriona trotted up and down the garden paths with sticks and hoops, seeing who could keep the hoops bowling along the longest.
    Alice, who was six, was highly practised and her hoop rolled along merrily, but four-year-old Flora was wild with her stick and her hoop kept crashing down on to the lavender borders. Only three-year-old Catriona ran up and down, gripping her hoop firmly in one of her tiny hands while waving her stick above her head and yelling, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’
    Susan watched them absently, her mind on the dashing new footman who’d arrived the previous week. She half hoped he was watching her now from one of the castle windows, and she raised her dainty chin so that he would see her pretty profile.
    In the west wing, Freddie and Henry sat at a long table with glum expressions as Hector Stuart, their tutor, lectured them about the vast extent of the British Empire on which the sun never set.
    By the window a globe of the world stood on a walnut stand. ‘Take a close look at it,’ he told them, rising to his feet. ‘I want each of you to write a list of the countries that make up our great Empire.’
    Freddie’s groan was audible and Henry’s gusty sigh made the sheet of paper in front of