Status Updates From The Promise (Scottish Dream...

The slave trade, as seen through British eyes, rears its ugly head.

Rebecca had not killed the would-be rapist. She was the accepted illegitimate daughter of a lord and famous actress, but she knew none of this. The neighbor goes drunken crazy and lashes out at all around him. He thinks his wife is fleeing with the school teacher and comes armed to kill them both.

Rebecca was school friends with the neighbor who was married to a cruel drunkard slaveowner. Everyone is trying to uncover her past including Stanford's dumped mistress who hopes to connive her way to being his countess. She came, stayed with and had affair with the neighbor.

Stanford wanted nothing to do with James because he is the result of an affair between his new wife and his father while he was away with the military in Canada. The wife only fled at the last when the old Earl was going to give James away and claim he had died. All thought the wife fled when James was 2 months old because the old earl tried to pass him off as a son conceived before he left.

Rebecca met the original Countess as she fled to America with her newborn son who had a crippled hand. Rebecca promised to take care of James "Jamie" as her own and posed as a widow in Philadelphia to do just that. After 10 years, a lawyer came to take Jamie back to England. Stanford had promised his father on his deathbed that he would bring James back and make him the heir.