Kitabı oku: «The Highlander's Maiden»

Chapter One

Glencoe, Scotland

February 20, 1598

“Aunt Cassie.” Five-year-old Millicent MacGregor caught a handful of Cassandra Mac Arthur’s snood and yanked on it urgently. “Did Lady Quickfoot sink to the bottom of wee Black Douglas’s bog?”

“Millie!” Cassie exclaimed as her eyes were blinded by the sudden drop of her cloak’s deep hood over her face. Thick wool muffled the rest of her words. “I’m trying to tie this skate on your brother’s foot. You’ll hear the rest of the Lady Quickfoot story tonight.”

“But now is a verra good time to tell it.” Millie smiled winsomely.

“Annie Cass, lookie! Soldiers!” Ian swung his hand over Cassie’s head to point behind her.

“One thing at a time!” Cassie pleaded. She pushed the cloth behind her head, and gave more effort into fastening a wooden skate to a child’s wiggling brogue. “Sit still, Ian!”

“Tickles!” Ian chortled, squirming restlessly as Cassie’s fingers tied the laces firmly around his ankle.

“Lord, for another pair of hands,” Cassie proclaimed, pulling a knot secure.

“I dinna think I can wait till bedtime to find out if Black Douglas saves the last jewel of the Highlands.” Millie danced about, looking for the soldiers Ian had spotted.

“We’ve come here for a skating lesson.” Cassie firmly redirected the girl. “You’ll hear what happened to Lady Quickfoot, Black Douglas and the bard of Achanshiel at bedtime, not a moment sooner, lassie.” She sat back on her skates, muttering, “How does your mother keep clothes on your back, wiggle worm?”

“Whisht, Aunt Cassie,” Millie scolded. “Those men will think y’er daft. Y’er always talkin’ to yerself.”

“And what makes you think I care who hears my private conversations, eh?” Cassie winked at her dark-haired niece before she glanced over her shoulder. “Maybe I’m talking to my angel.”

“‘Twouldn’t be an angel,” Millie proclaimed. “‘Twould be a fairy.”

“No difference there.” Cassie shrugged “I hear fairies were angels in the beginning of time, till God sent them to stay in the Highlands because their queen was so vain.”

“Go on.” Millie shook her head. “What they need a queen for if they had God to look upon all the time?”

Cassie tweaked one of the girl’s braids. “Now that is a very good question, lassie. I don’t pretend to know the answer…save that fairies were the most beautiful angels God ever made…and I think it must have something to do with vanity. So God had no choice but to banish them from everyone’s sight. Vanity is an excessively awful sin to this very day, is it not?”

“Aye,” the child agreed solemnly.

They were high up in the north meadow, a wee stretch of the legs from Euan MacGregor’s farmstead. Within hailing distance, Euan claimed—if one had lungs as capacious as a blacksmith’s bellows—as Euan did. Cassie had heard him yell his clan’s battle cry once. He’d scared the daylights out of her.

This was a time of peace, a lull between the clan wars. Still, it paid to be alert at all times. Cassie continued to look for men in sight of the frozen pond. Here the air was frosty enough to keep ice solid until April. Lower on the mountain, everything melted in today’s mild sun.

Cassie spied the men on the mountain. Two scruffy travelers hiking through the mud-bound mire of MacDonald’s cow pasture. They led two packhorses weighted down with a great number of rucksacks, poles and bags. Cassie’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Tinkers, maybe.

A small alarm ran deep in her chest. They weren’t the Watch or king’s soldiers if their dun-colored plaids meant anything. No, they couldn’t be from the king, not coming from the south. No one knew Cassandra was at Glencoen Farm save her parents. Cassie shielded her eyes to lessen the glare of the wintry sun, studying the men more intently.

“Da says it’s fey to talk to yerself. You do it ‘cause y’er redheaded. Tha’s why he married Mama instead of ye,” Millie continued, proud of her scolding. So big she sounded and all of five. Cassie looked back at her niece and laughed over what she’d said.

“Och, and marrying yer mam wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that yer da wanted a woman to wed when he sweet-talked my poor sister Maggie into taking on this farm of his, eh? And me naught but a flat-bosomed lassie like you at the time.” Cassie tapped her niece’s nosy nose. “Fey, am I?”

She turned her chin in the direction of the two strangers, saying casually to the children, “Do you know them, then?”

Ian’s baby blue eyes rounded as he shook his head.

“They’re no’ MacGregors!” Millie’s identical eyes fixed upon the newcomers with calculating interest. She had the soul of a gossip and knew all her kinsmen and everyone who lived within thirty miles of Glencoe. “Could be MacDonalds. Da says they’re thick as flies ‘round shite hereabouts.”

“Millie! Mind your tongue!”

“Weel, Da says it.”

“And ladies don’t!” Cassie scolded.

“How come Da can say things that leddies shouldn’t?”

“Och, that’s because men say wicked things to keep all the wickedness inside them from festering like a rotten egg put on the boil. It can’t do anything but explode and ruin everything around it for a little while. Men can’t hold their passions quiet like we ladies do.”

“So we’re gooder?” Millie asked.

“Aye, we are better.” Cassie stressed the correction on the assumption that Millie’s grammar would improve with exposure to proper speech. “It’s nice to be a lady and refined like your dear Grandmother MacArthur. We must strive to be more like her every day. Besides, my child, men like doing hard and dirty work. Why, even the best of them can’t keep clean from the time they crawl out of the cradle until they fall into the grave.”

“Tha’s verra true.” Millie cast a wise look at Ian.

Not many strangers wandered into Glencoe in the wintertime. The pass to the north was beautiful but stark. You had to know what you were about to travel it in the winter. Neither of Maggie’s children had any innate fear of Highlanders walking the land their father worked. Soldiers, Englishmen or reivers were another matter. Cassie decided to wait and see.

“No’ stalkers neither.” Ian mimicked his sister’s acumen for quick judgment. “No bows or spears.”

“You’re right there, my lad,” Cassie murmured, though she saw the butt of a musket poking from between the saddlebags, and both men wore claymores and dirks, slung from broad leather belts fitted around their hips. That told her they were prepared for trouble if they came upon it.

“Can I run and ask who they are?” Millie said eagerly.

“I think we’ll wait and see if they have any business with us, first,” Cassie decided. “Speaking of which, we did come here to skate, did we not? Up you go, Wee Ian.”

She set the little one on his feet and guided him to the icy pond. His legs wobbled unsteadily on the rough skates, but he was game to give it a try.

Cassie kept a cautious eye on the strangers as they came up the steep incline from MacDonald’s meadow. They weren’t showing the slightest interest in the activities of the children or the cattle in the high field. Not reivers, then. But who were they? A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her they were the king’s surveyors, damn their eyes. What luck! That didn’t mean they knew who she was.

They seemed absorbed in the tall one’s pacing. The other stood back and counted his companion’s steps, letting out a cord, the end of which the other carried.

At the stony rise where MacGregor’s high field jutted up and away from MacDonald’s grazing pasture, they stopped and talked heatedly. The drum of their conversation carried on the north wind. At the peak of the hill, the lean one made a great commotion of pointing east, north, south and west, all of his motions becoming a sort of comic dance.

They were lost, then, Cassie concluded. Some mapmakers these two were, if they were Messrs. Hamilton and Gordon of the king’s surveyors’ ilk. She wondered which one was the Gordon, and how it could be that they’d traveled through Glen Orchy and were still alive. She wouldn’t waste a king’s penny betting on their odds of survival if they ventured into Lochaber without protection. Say, the certain protection of Cassandra’s Lady Quickfoot reputation. Then she smiled, because she would see to it that they never found the elusive Lady Quickfoot, the best guide in the Highlands.

The tall one put down his cord and stacked a few nearby rocks on the cord to hold it in place. Then he walked back down to the horses and took a brown folio from the packs. He settled the folio in his arms, using his back as a shield against the sharp wind. He shuffled parchment after parchment to the top, pulled a stub of a pencil out of his sporran, moistened the point with his tongue and began to scribble, it seemed to Cassie’s curious eyes.

The stout one took this pause to help himself to a healthy swig of the liquid his pocket flask contained. He offered a drink to his companion. That man shook the offer aside—too busy with his scribbling to break from it. When he finished and began putting the folio away, the stout one took hold of the string lying on the snow-dappled ground and began winding. It was a very, very long string with many knots in it and made a large and oddly bumped ball.

“How curious,” Cassie observed aloud.

“Faster!” Ian called her attention back to him.

Cassie caught the loose ends of her wind-ruffled hair together and tucked them back inside the hood of her cloak. She needn’t advertise her marital status to outright strangers. “Shall we teach this little ram how to really skate, Millie? Take his other hand.”

“I kin do it,” Ian yelled boldly, legs splitting and wobbling underneath him.

“No, Ian, you have to learn how first.” Millie sounded very much like her mother, Maggie.

A week of skating lessons on the pond behind the farmhouse had turned Millie into a very confident skater. She was bright and quick and it only took someone with a little time on their hands and energy to keep up with the girl to teach her anything. Unmarried aunts like Cassie suited that task perfectly. Sadly, the unusual winter warm spell had turned that convenient pond too slushy for Ian’s lessons.

Taking firm hold of opposite hands, Cassie and Millie wheeled the little one around the sheltered mountain pool. Euan had brought the sheep up to this field himself this morning and tested the ice’s thickness and strength before telling his children at dinner that they could continue skating lessons this afternoon.

Ian laughed and laughed, delighted by the wind that was so cold it stung his cheeks bright red and took his breath away in big puffs of frosty air.

“I do it m’self!” Ian grew impatient with their steadying hands.

Millie’s small face formed the perfect picture of long-suffering sisterhood. She sighed before letting go of her little brother’s hand. Cassie also thought it time to let him try skating on his own. When he fell on his bottom a couple of times, he’d accept their help more readily.

“You’re on your own, little man.” Cassie saw him turn around and head into the soft snowdrift on the north bank of the pond. Here, the ice was thickest. She had no fear that it would shatter under his little weight, no matter how hard he fell. If she remembered it right, this pool was deep and treacherous in other seasons because of its wicked currents.

He inched away, his little body struggling to keep his balance. His arms flopped in great awkward circles. His knees and ankles wobbled. His bottom went up and down and back and forth. Somehow—through all the gyrations, one little wooden skate inched forward after the other.

“Slide yer feet!” Millie shouted, skating in front of Ian on gleaming skates her father had made her last evening at his forge. Her old wooden skates now graced Ian’s nimble toes. She stopped and dropped to her knees, holding out her arms for the little boy to come to her. “Oh, Auntie Cassie, you should see Ian’s face, he’s trying so very hard! Why, it’s all screwed up like the last apple in the stillroom and red as the devil’s toes!”

“Is not!” Ian grunted and threw himself at his sister’s arms. He crowed in triumph, “I did it!”

“So you did, wee Ian-Dhu.” Cassie came to a graceful stop beside them, put her knee to the ice and hugged Ian affectionately. She was so pleased with his efforts she even rumpled his dark curls till he laughed with glee.

“Mumph,” grunted a male voice nearby, making that throaty sound every Highland woman recognized as a preamble to actual speech.

Expecting to find Old Angus scowling at her for spoiling the boy, Cassie looked up to find both travelers standing at the edge of the pond, grinning like a pair of loons.

“Pardon me, goodwife…” the taller one began. The second man cleared his throat as if he was correcting his companion without words.

“Och, Auntie Cassie’s not a goodwife,” Millie declared impulsively. “If y’er looking for a goodwife, you’ll be wanting to see my mother. She’s at the dairy, churning butter.”

“‘Tis my auntie Cassie,” Ian chimed in possessively, patting Cassie’s wind-stung face. “‘Tisn’t married.”

“Whisht, children,” Cassie said repressively as she came gracefully to her feet. “May I help you, gentlemen?”

“We hope you can.” The taller one spoke for both of them. “My friend and I were given directions to Glencoen Farm, though by our measurement, we seem to be north of it. We have a packet for Euan MacGregor who lives there, and a letter of introduction from his kinsman, Laird Malcolm MacGregor of Balquhidder. Do you know the precise location of that farm?”

The children giggled, but Cassie managed to shush another outburst with a stem glance. She wasn’t as good at that as her sister. Maggie could get these two imps to shush by just quirking one dark eyebrow. But then they probably couldn’t tell when Cassie’s pale eyebrows twitched or moved. Nobody could.

“Actually, sir, you’re standing on part of it as we speak. This is the north meadow of Glencoen Farm. You missed the turn coming through MacDonald’s cattle field.”

Cassie pointed to a narrow path beyond the snowd-appled rocks and foraging sheep. “You’ll find the right track there at the twisted pines and the sheepfold. The snow is melting, so be careful where you walk. Some of it is quite muddy. You can’t miss Glencoen Farm. It’s the only two-storied house in twenty miles. Just keep moving downhill.” She added a smile and a few extra words. “South by the southwest.”

Her addendum brought a sudden smile onto her questioner’s face. He thanked her and wished them a good day, then raised his hand to his brow in a polite salute on parting.

That gesture drew Cassie’s attention to a pair of very wonderful blue eyes and his hands. He wore mittens just like she and the children did. Simple fingerless tubes of knitted wool stitched at the great knuckles. His fingers were so dirty and chapped raw from winter’s cold that she could hardly tell where dark wool left off and skin began. That wasn’t unusual for any man trekking the hills in winter, but it certainly didn’t go with his gentle-seeming eyes.

Those eyes tilted deeply at the outer corners. While his skin was stung from exposure, the sparkle in those blue eyes and the length of his eyelashes betrayed his age. He was somewhere close to her own. She was days away from twenty. Those eyes declared he wasn’t older than twenty-five, if that.

As they strode away, her own eyes narrowed in revision of her earlier impressions. The two men were very nearly the same weight. The one she had thought stout was only larger boned and wore heavier clothing under his winding plaid. The other, the one she’d spoken to wore only a leather jerkin and woolen sark beneath his plaid. His slender frame was practically bare in comparison. Warm enough garments for most Highlanders. The leather surrounding his chest was as close as one could come to being waterproof—definitely a boon in Glen Orchy and Lochaber.

She noted another detail. His kilt was separate from his plaid and stitched. Precise knife pleats encircled his hips and fell in a neat swirl ‘round his knees. His plaid swung over his shoulder and was firmly clipped beneath a hunting brooch. Both ends were secured under his belt, keeping the cloth close across his chest and loose on his back. She recognized that habit, knowing intuitively that there walked a ready man whose garments wouldn’t betray him if he had to draw dirk or sword suddenly to be ready for battle. A murdering Gordon to be sure.

Other than both being garbed in serviceable Wallace hunting plaid, she could not tell from where they came or to which clan they gave allegiance, though she’d have had to be blind not to pay notice to his straight back and proud bearing—another giveaway of his clan affiliation. He moved with the proud strut of an invincible warrior, which the bloody Gordons were, curse their souls!

She could be wrong. The more slender man could simply be a soldier or officer in King James the Sixth’s garrison. God forbid he was a Gordon or Douglas scout, reconnoitering for rebels hidden in the pass. This was MacDonald territory and a Campbellton shire. Rebel earls and their war parties weren’t welcome here.

Both men hitched their plaids close over their backs as the brunt of the strong wind caught them and their overloaded pack animals descending the mountain.

Cassie saw that they had slogged through deep mud, probably in crossing the mire of MacDonald’s cow field. The hems of their muddy plaids slapped against the backs of their legs.

“You didn’t find out who they are!” Millie fussed when they went ‘round the bend and out of sight.

“Why should I want to know that?” Cassie responded, turning her attention back to Ian as he fell soundly on his bottom. Cassie winced at his impact, knowing that the fall had hurt. His bare shanks were exposed to the ice. He was so surprised he didn’t know whether to howl or pound his fists. Cassie waited to see what he would do.

“They could be im-por-tant!” Millie insisted as she pulled hard on Ian’s arm. “Whisht, Ian, get up. Let’s try again.”

Ian rose so unsteadily he clutched Millie’s waist, then leaned too far into her. His sturdy little body overbalanced Millie as well. Down they both went as quick as a blink, a small mass of tangled legs and banging skates.

“Ian, leggo! Y’er choking me!”

“Am not,” Ian insisted, mad now. He did a split getting up, both of his hands pushing heavily into Millie’s tummy. Cassie came to their rescue.

“Shall we skate together for a little while?” she suggested, righting the little one, firmly steadying his balance. Without argument, Ian gave her his hand. Millie dutifully took the other and they circled the pond without further mishap, restoring Ian’s confidence.

“The dark one had a signet ring, so he must be somebody im-por-tant!” Undeterred, Millie returned to her prior topic. She was like a dog that had dragged off a bone, determined to savor it down to the very marrow.

“One was dark?” Cassie repeated, adding under her breath, “Who could notice for the mud?”

“Och, y’er doin’ it again! Saying things ye don’t want me to hear but ye say them anyway. Mama says it’s because y’er always doing yer thinking out loud.”

“Your parents make a habit of discussing me in front of wee bairns, do they?” Cassie asked, teasing Millie naturally, the same way her older brother and sisters had teased her at Millie’s age. “Your da calls me fey and my own sister accuses me of being so witless I say every thought out loud like a five-year-old.”

Not one to be distracted, Millie continued. “‘Twas a gold ring on his little finger with a blue jewel in it. I saw it plain as day, winking at me from the edge of his ragged mitten.”

“Well, there. If your father gives them leave to have supper at his table, you’ll have time to knit the poor dark man a new pair of mittens,” Cassie said. “I didn’t see any ring, myself.”

“Tha’s ‘cause ye weren’ lookin’! You only looked at his face.”

Cassie shook her head, baffled by the girl’s powers of observation. The man had very nice blue eyes and came with an endorsement from Euan’s father. That was better than a king’s seal of approval in this part of the Highlands. Even so, if he was who she thought he was, he was a dead man. Like the rest of her MacArthur and Campbell kinsmen, Cassie had been brought up believing the only good Gordon was a dead Gordon.

Cassie loosened her hair from her hood. It spilled down the back of her cloak to be played with by the wind and tangled and blown about her face. The sun picked up its fiery colors and turned it into burnished gold. That was the only time she liked it, when she was in the sun.

One of these days she hoped to get the privilege of putting her red hair up in neat coils like her mother and all of her sisters. Until the day she was actually married, to put her hair up was the next worst thing to a sin. She had heard her brother James say that in England unmarried girls past a certain age were allowed that wonderful privilege…if they attended Queen Elizabeth at court. The day that happened in Scotland, Cassie would turn cartwheels up and down the nave of St. Giles Cathedral.

In her mind, she should have been granted that privilege when she and Alastair Campbell became engaged. But her mother had said no, and insisted the answer was still no, even when they’d buried what was left of poor Alastair in their chapel cemetery alongside his parents’ infants that hadn’t lived through childhood. Cassie still felt as if her heart had gone into the cold earth with him. It had been over a year since Alastair’s death. In that time a peace treaty had been signed and no further battles had disrupted the return to normal life.

In just a few days Cassandra MacArthur would be twenty. How could she hold up her head at the spring fetes if she was still wearing her hair down at twenty? Cassie sighed and gave up brooding over the impossible.

Ian was content to hold Millie’s hands and let her pull him along. So Cassie skated away, concentrating on making her figures with her blades in the pristine ice. Eights were easy, requiring little more than the careful management of her skirts. The circle within a circle was harder.

The children’s voices filled the high meadow with laughter, making Cassie realize she was happy at Glencoen Farm, happier than she was anywhere else in Scotland.

“Auntie Cassie,” Ian called to her. “I’m hungry.”

She’d come prepared for his inevitable hunger and produced two apples from her pocket. Millie left him standing on his skates and came to her, grabbing both apples greedily.

“Sit you down then.” Cassie instructed the girl firmly. “We don’t need to tax either of your skills with eating and skating, too.”

“I’d best take off Ian’s skates. Mama will want us home well before dark,” Millie added wisely.

Night came on quickly and early during winter. The sun was already sinking to the west. Millie skated as fast as she could back to Ian while biting into one of the apples. Then a devil got inside her and she circled the boy, holding his apple just out of his reach.

“Give it to me!” Ian demanded.

“Come and get it yerself,” Millie taunted. She skated far ahead of him, close to the rockbound edge where granite stones were frosted with a coat of dripping ice. She executed a sharp, quick stop on her iron skates. “Come get it, piglet!”

“Gimme!” Ian yelled.

Crack! went the ice at Millie’s feet. The sun caught the jagged line as it ripped across the length of the frozen pool.

“Millie, don’t move!” Cassie yelled, horrified as that jagged line zigzagged under Ian’s feet.

“Gimme it!” Ian screamed again, his hunger turned to temper.

Millie froze, clenching both apples, and looked to Cassie, who sped Millie’s way as fast as she could.

“Children—” Cassie’s heart thudded in her chest, but she kept her voice as calm as she could make it “—don’t move, please. I’m coming to you.”

“I want mine no-ow!” Ian stomped his foot.

The crack underneath him shattered like glass and roared with the voice of a cupboard full of pots and pans toppling onto a flagstone floor.

“Millie!” Cassie screamed a command. “Throw yourself on the rocks!”

“Owwww—iieee!” Ian screamed as he went down into the icy pool.

Millie scrambled onto the icy rocks, terrified by the sight of the ice closing over Ian’s head. “What do I do? Ian!”

“I’ll get Ian! Get help! Get your skates off and run, Millie. Run!” Cassie raced to the fracture.

The little girl moved quicker than Cassie could speak, catching hold of the buckles over her boots as an entire sheet of ice tilted crazily under Cassie, sending her skidding downward into a shockingly cold ice bath.

“Get your father!” Cassie screamed one last instruction before she, too, plunged under the ice.

Cassie’s arms and legs thrashed against the cloud of ice shards that accompanied her descent, in a failed effort to swim. Her cloak and heavy wool skirts rose as she sank. Then they tangled around her arms until she touched the rocky bottom. There the cold water was crystal clear save for a cloud of dark mud stirred up by Ian’s violent thrashing. Cassie bent her knees and pushed against the bottom to propel herself more quickly to Ian.

The little boy was trapped under a huge slab of unbroken ice. Even with the momentum of a firm thrust of her legs, getting to Ian quickly seemed to take Cassie an eternity in her heavy clothes. She grabbed the boy and pulled him to her, swiveling, looking for the hole in the ice, out of breath and as desperate for wind in her lungs as he was.