Jennifer Roberson (22 page)

“A thrifty man, Black Duncan.”

“—and didna steal but by guile when he could, murder when he could not. By Christ, Father, do you follow in his footsteps?”

“My question is: do
you
follow in them?”

Duncan’s mouth dropped open. “You believe I might drive out John?”

“Black Duncan did it with the brother his father favored.”

“John would defeat me! You ken it! He is better than I in everything—”

The earl cut him off. “Then best you remember it.”

Duncan’s color ebbed. “You are what they say of you!”

“Am I?”

Duncan quoted, “
‘No Government can trust him but where his private, interest is in view ..
. ’ ”

Breadalbane scoffed. “Coffeehouse stories. ’Tis a waste of time to read the broadsheets; you canna trust what is written.”

“Have you memorized it, then?”

“I have. I ken ’tis true, and perhaps the only truth I’ll ever have of you.” Duncan laughed. “Gey perceptive, to capture you so well . . . there was an etching, also—”

“Enough,” Breadalbane said. “Go out into the garden; you’ve your wife to meet.”

“Glenlyon’s daughter?” Duncan made a rude sound. “Then I’d better take whisky with me, or dice.”

Breadalbane recalled the defiance displayed before her father, and the blow withstood as if it were worth ten to ensure the earl would do what he could to get Glen Lyon back from Murray of Atholl. He had not, but not without effort expended; it was the Earl of Argyll who thwarted him.

Now he shook his head. “She isna her father, Duncan. Dinna forget that.”

 

When Cat went out to the earl’s walled garden at Kilchurn, she found the door ajar in invitation. But she did not go in at once because she could not; she could only stand there caught midway like a hare about to bolt, wanting to run away but not knowing which route might offer the best escape.

It was not fair, she knew; Duncan Campbell deserved better. She supposed his father did as well, though she was less inclined to offer the earl any kindness other than was required by good manners. She recalled too clearly how Breadalbane had refused to pay off her father’s debts, thereby forcing him to sell Glen Lyon, and how the earl had, despite promises, failed to overturn the sale to Murray of Atholl.

And now he suggests I marry his heir
. . . Cat supposed it might be Breadalbane’s way of setting things to rights after all; despite her father’s penury he remained Glenlyon, and of no small repute. She was a Campbell as Duncan was, and related by blood. They could both do worse.

She was not opposed to marriage. She wanted a husband, a household, and children. She knew marriage required things, and that she would have to compromise ideals as well as behaviors; that a man suffered less than a woman in such things as compromises, because he was required to make none. She was willing to do what was necessary to make a settled life. But she had expected one day to marry a Glen Lyon Campbell, a man she knew, or an acquaintance from a neighboring glen, and now that she stood on one side of a wall, fully aware her future husband, a stranger, perhaps waited on the other, she was less inclined to meet than to walk away from him.

Cat drew in a deep, noisy breath. “Duncan Campbell,” she murmured softly. “Christ—I dinna even need to change my name!”

But the rank would change, and with it her world. When his father died he would become an earl, and she a countess. The new earl would own a half dozen or more castles scattered all through Campbell country, as well as a town house in Edinburgh, and she doubted very much she would ever again see Glen Lyon.

Cat supposed many women would rejoice, but such knowledge brought her no peace. She cared no more for the rank than she did for the man, though she had never met him.

“Dinna be daft,” she muttered, and stepped through the open gate.

At first she believed herself alone, but that was quickly dispelled. A man also was present, digging in the soil from which grew a profusion of tangled vines intermixed with tattered roses. To her unpracticed eye the garden was unkempt, but oddly appealing for all its disarray; it seemed unnecessary to prune back all the wildness, but that was precisely what the man was doing.

Duncan? Duncan Campbell?
But she said nothing aloud. It would serve her better to see him without his knowledge, without the taut civility they would offer one another because they did not know what else there could be between them.

He knelt beside a wall, cutting vine and cane. He was not servant; his clothing made that plain, though his efforts soiled them. Cat watched the economy of his movements, the clean precision with which he selected stem or cane and cut, then pulled it from the shrubbery and set it aside. Heaps of trimmed, discarded growth lay about the walled garden, marking his progress.

She could not speak. She could not break the silence that, once broken, would never again be the same.

Someone had spent a great deal of time designing the castle garden. Years before cobbles had been put down in an elegant, curving walkway along the beds, but time and unchecked growth had overtaken the walkway. Now the grass-hatched stone path was treacherous as she made her way out into the cobbled center where a bench had been set; shrubbery snagged her skirts with nearly every step.

Cat stopped finally and wrestled with the annoyance, plucking insidious cane and thorny vine from the linen-and-woolen weave of her skirts. She had put on her best, a voluminous crimson-sleeved tunic of subtle green and black sett against a field of undyed creamy ivory, belted with green-dyed leather. The arisaid, less vivid, was fine and soft, pinned at her breast with a heavy double brooch. The inset stone was bulbous, ruddy amber taken from a Highland river.

As she worked free the thorns, Cat heard a murmured blurt of discovery and a rustling in the shrubbery. A moment later the man knelt at her side, lifting from her the burden of freeing her skirts. His hands were dirty beneath the nails, but he took great care not to soil her skirts. The fingers were supple and quick; in a moment she was free.

He smiled up at her. “ ’Tis in a frightful state, aye? I’ve no’ been here to tend it, so now ’twill take me days.” And then he was solemn all at once, weighing her expression; she feared he marked the nervous tension that beset her limbs. He rose, gesturing toward the bench. “Will you sit? I’ve bannocks set aside, and a wee flask of ale.”

Cat accepted the invitation; her knees trembled enough to make her grateful for the chance to sit down. As she smoothed her skirts into order he fetched a linen-wrapped parcel and dented pewter flask. He uncapped and cleaned the mouth of the flask, then offered it to her along with a bannock cradled in clean napkin.

Cat managed not to gulp. “You are the earl’s son, not a servant,” she said after returning the flask.

Unoffended, he grinned. “Not a servant, no, though with the state of these clothes—well, my father would clout me upside the ear and send me back inside to present a better face.”

She broke the warm bannock in two and offered him a steaming half. “Is the earl here?”

He accepted with thanks. “Inside. Has he no’ seen ye?”

Cat shook her head. “His gillie brought word I was to come out here to meet you.”

“Aye, well . . . there’s much on my father’s mind, what wi’ the meeting at Achallader. ”

“Achallader?” Cat’s stiffening fingers crumbled the bannock crust. “I thought Achallader was destroyed after Killiecrankie.” By MacDonalds, in fact, before they came to Glencoe.
Before Dair MacDonald gave me back my mother’s kettle.

“So it was, with thanks to MacIain and others of his ilk.” His tone did not disabuse her of the notion that the knowledge was bitterly felt. “But ’tis closer to the clans, and I dinna doubt he has his reasons. The earl always does.” He tucked bread into his mouth. “Catriona, aye?”

Something kept her from divulging the shortened form she preferred. He was an informal man, but there was no part of her that desired, at this moment, anything
but
formality; she did not at all like the hesitance making itself more apparent with each passing moment. He seemed kind enough, well cognizant of manners and her own natural reluctance. “And you are Duncan.”

“I? Och, no . . . I am John. Duncan is my brother. ’Tis he you’re to wed; I’ve a wife already.” He finished the bannock and shed crumbs deftly, then rose. “I imagine Duncan will be along; I’ll just gather up my tools and let you meet without me so near.”

Not Duncan
. . . Not Duncan at all, but the second son, whom it was said the earl favored.
I must begin all over again!

John Campbell collected his things and turned back, then arched dark eyebrows. “Ah, here is Duncan. ’Ware the rain; the clouds are on the march.” And with that dry obliqueness—there were no clouds in the sky—he was gone, slipping out the gate.

 

Dair discovered the truth was not easy to share after all, for all he and his brother were so close. Dair was not proud of himself. He had gone home to Glencoe from Glenlyon’s Campbell justice and said no word to Jean at all, waiting in his house; he had merely walked directly into his bedroom, knowing she would follow, and set about establishing the evidence of his survival in the most primitive of ways, as well as rectifying his lack of a child at once and without preliminaries, know ing she needed none; knowing she would understand and abet him, hungry as she was; knowing the fire that blazed between them would burn away the pain, burn away the anger, burn away the memory of a rope upon his neck, and the recollection of what had happened there on the hilltop gallows.

—Gallows Herd indeed; I proved the truth of that!
Except he had survived.

But the fire between them was unaccountably too quickly quenched, and the seed as quickly spent, his offering received, her absolution granted; yet he was empty of spirit as well as seed, and unable to fill it again in Jean Stewart’s bed.

She had been furious, seeing his neck; had raged at Glenlyon, threatening retribution. But he was empty of fear, empty of hate. And he had known, though she did not, that the fire had, in its blazing, burned itself out. There was no more fuel to consume. He had depleted it at last in the final conflagration, and he did not have the heart to search for kindling or flint.

He knew very well that one intent might be fulfilled; in a month or two Jean would tell him. But the knowledge offered no joy, no quiet triumph, no vindication, no redemption.

Dair supposed it did not matter how a child was conceived, merely that it was; but he was no longer on the gallows with a rope around his neck. He was no longer a man bought back from the devil by a woman’s anguished pleas and a drunkard’s private reasons, but a man who wanted far more than Jean could offer; far more than a child born merely of any woman who happened to fill his bed.

Jean had offered what she could because he had required it, because he had demanded it with no choice in it for her, thinking only of himself. He hated himself for that as much as Glenlyon for bringing him to it.

“What I want,” Dair explained with difficulty, “is what MacIain and our mother have. What you and Eiblin have. I see it. I ken it. I want it for myself. But—”

John waited.

It came out in a rush, but was as definitive in its intent as in its emotion. “Jean isna the woman to give it to me.”

John set his elbows against his knees and leaned forward, staring intently down at his son. A lock of thickly silvered hair lifted in the breeze, carried forward to brush against one still-dark eyebrow. “ ’Tisn’t the same wi’ every man and woman,” he said at last. “You are no’ me, and Jean isna Eiblin. It doesna mean there is no ground on which to build your house.”

“I am twenty-eight . . . I’ve built my house.” Dair stared fixedly into the distant vista: a haze of green, of gold, of purple; the rich backdrop of the sky. “But all the rooms are empty even with her in them.”

After a moment John sighed and shredded a scrap of pine bark in his hands. “Then it seems to me there are but two things for it. You owe her a decision.”

“I ken that, aye? I dinna want to hurt her.”

John tossed down the bark scraps and looked at his brother. “You are young, Alasdair, and you dinna ken women so much as you may think.”

“But—”

“Sleeping with them isna the same as living,” John declared.

“Dinna argue it, Alasdair—you will lose. Any man in the glen wi’ a wife in his house will tell you that.”

Dair sighed. “Then I willna.”

“Good. What I am telling you is—and ’tis true—that you canna help
but
hurt her. Unless you marry her.”

“But—”

“ ’Tis true a handfast is amicably broken if both sides decide so, but will Jean do it? Will Jean pack up her pots and pans and sewing and go home meekly to Castle Stalker, wi’ no harsh word for you?”

Dair knew better. “She will not.”

“She will not. Which means you must devise a way of telling her the truth. And it
will
hurt, laddie . . . ’twill hurt a great deal.”

Dair shut his eyes. “Oh Christ . . . Christ, John—I fought at Killiecrankie and was wounded, and nearly died a week ago from a Campbell rope. And do you ken, I think this will be worse?”

“Aye,” John agreed. “I do ken that. But when God made woman for man, he didna promise it would be easy . . . Sandy! Sandy, what did I say?—you’re no’ to go toward the river . . . oh, Christ—” John pressed the flask on his brother and got up, slapping his kilt free of debris. “Any more than He promised having
bairns
would be easy!”

 

Cat stayed where she was, bannock forgotten in its napkin set on the bench beside her. Her palms were suddenly damp; she spread them against her skirts and let the fabric dry them.