“You have your family,” he said gruffly. It was more than he had. At that pitiable and useless reminder, he used the moment as an opportunity to dispel her. “And you should be getting back to them. I’m sure they are wondering where you’ve gone off.” It was a lie. Her noisy, nosy family, who were always staring out their windows at his damned household, were likely grateful for the reprieve.

Except . . . he’d watched her entire family leave. Surely, they’d not left the young lady—

“They’ve gone.” She spoke quietly, confirming his unspoken thought.

He frowned. Val really didn’t care about the lady or her circumstances, for the simple fact he didn’t care about anyone. “Gone where?” he asked, unable to account for why, then, that follow-up question for the lady should slip past his lips. But really, what family went off and left a lady alone with their servants?

“Scotland. For the holiday.”

“The holiday?”

“Christmastide.” She paused. “It is Christmastide, you know.”

“The English don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“I’m Scottish.”

“Of course you are,” he muttered.

The lady cupped a gloved hand to the shell of her ear. “What was that?”

He knew better than to further engage this one. “Noth—”

“You said, it’s because I’m Scottish. I’ll have you know there are plenty of English who celebrate the holiday.”

His stomach muscles seized. He did well know that.

“Many lords and ladies,” the gibbering creature went on over his tumult, refusing to let the talons of grief fully sink their claws into him as he’d become so accustomed.

As such, he stood in abject confusion, with more of her ramblings on about the Christmastide Season.

“And Jane Austen,” she was saying.

“You with this Jane Austen again,” he mumbled.

He may as well have called the honor of her family into question for the horrified look she cast his way.

“I have failed her completely,” she bemoaned. “And you. I’ve failed you.”

“This I have to hear, and by ‘have to hear,’ I mean I do not—”

Lady Myrtle threw her hands up in the air; in her exuberant gesticulation, she caught him in the arm with the log she held.

Val grunted, but so passionate in her defense of the unknown woman, Lady Myrtle didn’t so much as break stride and offer an apology.

“Knowing the secret I’ve let you in on about Miss Jane Austen, surely you see she is the most wonderful Englishwoman of all time.”

“Nay, she isn’t,” he said, his gaze locked beyond the lady’s shoulder on his empty household.

Some unfamiliar-to-him stranger was decidedly not. There’d been just one woman who would remain the only—

“She most certainly is. Long live Miss Austen.” Lady Myrtle raised her voice up to the sky.

His gut seized, as it invariably did with reminders of how precarious life was.