The Unknowing Heiress

Chapter 1

Chapter One

August, 1840

 

“Maggie, your mother has already scolded me countless times for bringing you home with scraped kneecaps. Can you please come down?” Max begged.

Maggie could hardly hear him for she was fifteen feet above the ground in an oak tree. Maggie loved climbing trees. She loved the feeling of being so far away from everything. She loved imagining that for a second she was flying, and wasn’t sitting on a bough ruining her expensive dresses.

The August sun was beating down on her, and sweat beads were trickling down her forehead. While others wore bonnets in the sun to protect their pale skin from going red, Maggie did not need to. Her olive skin only darkened.

Maggie pushed the thought from her mind and instead smiled down at her friend below her. He was shielding his eyes from the sun with one hand and clutching his sketches with the other.

They had gone for a walk about the Montrose grounds so that Max could draw in good light. Maggie had thought that he would sketch a landscape but when he’d started to draw her, she’d scampered up the tree. She was always his subject and there was only so long that she could sit still.

“Mama knows that I am the one who puts myself in the situations where knee scraping is a risk,” Maggie called down to him in a teasing voice. She decided to oblige Max and she began to climb down the trunk, jumping down the last few feet. Though as she jumped, her skirt caught on a broken branch and it caused her to fall.

Maggie gasped, closing her eyes and throwing out her hands, bracing herself for the hard impact of the ground. The only sounds she heard was the tearing of fabric and the sound of Max sucking in a breath as he caught her in his arms, albeit in a quite unladylike fashion. He’d fallen to the ground under her weight and had taken the impact himself.

He had one are around her waist and the other around her thigh, as if he’d thrown his arms out as a reflex. Were she in such a position with any other man, she would have felt utterly uncomfortable and very much violated, but she and Max had been inseparable since childhood. He was the only man she trusted aside from her father. She did not know if her ten year old brother, Edward, could be considered a man yet, but she loved him out of obligation and she looked forward to the time when he would grow up. He enjoyed irritating his elder and younger sisters.

Maggie breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you, Max,” she said gratefully as he helped her to stand. She fixed her torn gown as best she could but her underclothes were on display. At least her parents had only a torn gown to scold her over, a broken wrist would have warranted a stern lecture.

She noticed that Max had dropped his drawing tools on the grass floor in his hurry to catch her so she immediately knelt down to help him collect them.

Max had started to go pink from the sun. His own skin was very fair, as fair as his light brown hair, and summer had brought on a few faint freckles across his cheeks. He’d truly grown into his looks over the years, and he was now quite handsome, though thinking so made Maggie feel odd, as though she were finding a family member attractive. Maggie had been taller than him up until the age of fourteen, when he’d suddenly grown a foot and a half in a month, or so it felt. Maggie’s favourite thing about Max, aside from his kind nature, were his honest green eyes. They suited him and were very comforting, always watching out for her, like he’d done so a moment ago.

Maggie’s own pale green eyes did not suit her. They were startling and her dark skin made them terribly obvious. She feared her gaze made people uncomfortable, among her other features.