Jennifer Roberson (39 page)

A slight, wasted man, the years ungentle to him as well as the Highland climate. And yet the resolution in Hill’s steady eyes told Dair he was not a man who said what he did not mean.

“I will carry them,” Dair agreed, “but I canna say what he will do.”

John Hill’s unexpected smile was very faint. “Who else can predict MacIain save MacIain himself?”

Dair thought that was about as true and damning a statement as any man might make, Sassenach or no. He gifted Hill with an answering smile, then went with haste to his horse.
Best we leave Fort William before the king’s wife changes her mind.

And home, home to Glencoe. Home to red-haired Cat.

He and Robbie, followed by the others, departed at a gallop. Gaelic curses as well as dust fouled Fort William’s air.

 

Cat sat inside Dair’s house. A small house, a good house, built stout against the weather, withstanding Highland blizzards as well as Highland rain. Drystone walls, slate roof; a sound house, withal, if not as fine as Chesthill, but better by far than that: this was full of Dair MacDonald.

She feared at first it would be Jean she saw, Jean she sensed, perhaps even Jean she smelled when she went at last into the bedroom, the small cubby near the door. But there was naught of Jean after all, save a handful of dead flowers shedding powdered petals and dried leaves upon the sill.

The bed was not so wide as her father’s nor so fine in its linens, but wide enough for two. Enough for a man and his woman.

Cat sat down on the very edge, hearing the faint creak of leather beneath the thin pallet. She had left the front door open so the wind might come in.

But she had not expected Lady Glencoe to come in as well.

Cat stood up hastily as Margaret MacDonald entered. In her hands was a folded bundle, which she set with quiet authority into Cat’s arms. “Fresh linens,” she said. “My own.”

First there was shock, then embarrassment. And then a rushing wonder, that his mother could be so kind. Again and again and again.

“As you’ll be staying here now, we’ll have the others off.” Lady Glencoe set to with swift efficiency, stripping the bed of coverlet and old linens. “I’ll leave it to you to make it.”

It took no time at all. And then the woman was gone, saying no more about it. Cat, who knew little of women, nonetheless understood the gift. Understood the blessing that would remain unspoken between them.

She pressed the new linens against her face, inhaling the subtle scents: wool and wood and tobacco, whisky and pressed herbs. With care she began to unfold them.

Cat was nearly finished when she heard the shouting out of doors, the distant hails by MacDonalds. She left the bed, the room, and went to the doorway, shielding her face with lifted hand against the setting sun.

Alasdair Og, they called him. Alasdair the Younger. But Cat, overcome by relief, mouthed another name—and with it a prayer of thanksgiving. Then she went out into the sun and waited for him to see her.

He did not at first. There were the others to greet, those who came running up to welcome him home, to remark over the gossip that had him nearly to Edinburgh, to wait on the king’s pleasure. She saw him smile, saw him speak, saw him clasp hands and look around. And then there was MacIain, so tall amongst the others, and his mother, and his brother, and then Dair was off his garron, clutching shoulders and clasping arms.

Cat felt oddly detached. The whole world was centered on a single man, drawn unerringly to his presence. She felt it, wanted to answer it, but did not. Could not. This was not her place, unless he made it so. He owed his people more.

She saw his mother turn and push him gently. He looked. He smiled. He left behind the others to stride barefoot and bedraggled across his sun-gilded dooryard to the woman in his door.

She marked the sooty stubble blooming slowly into beard. It made his teeth all the whiter.

Cat said it aloud: “—and silver in his hair . . .”

“Och, aye,” he said ruefully. “D’ye mind it so much, lass?”

She did not, not at all; nor the grime, nor the stubble, nor the stink of a Sassenach cell.

He was whole, and home.

And the bed was
theirs
to lie in, no longer Jean Stewart’s.

 

Snow scoured the Highlands, whitening the mountains and frosting the edges of pools. The land glittered with brittle ice-rime, crunching and shattering beneath feet now clad in brogues, cut hide wrapped skin out was pulled up around feet, then laced with thongs at ankles and calves. Voluminous plaids served as blankets and cloaks for the men, hoarding body heat, while blue bonnets powdered white kept heads from bitter cold. The women wore kerches, or plaids pulled over their heads, muffling wind-tender faces.

In Dair’s house the pungent peat-fire burned, yet the warmth he sought and found came not of dried turf cut out of the braes but of the woman beneath the blankets, bare breasts pressed against his chest. His feet were tangled with hers, ankles laced like brogue thongs if with less flexibility; and her hair, free of encumbrances, was trapped beneath their shoulders. He was slack against her, but only because he had spent what was left of himself in the moments before.

There was little room to breathe; the covers pulled high against the cold shut out the air. Moments before they had thought little of such impediments as covers; but they cooled now, and Cat had yanked the covers up.

She was no longer a maiden, as he should know, but neither was she profligate in experience. Her desire to learn was flatteringly adamant, but there was yet embarrassment in her as she learned the needs of her own body as well as his, the complex intricacies of matching male to female in taste as well as fit. Yet she was withal a passionate woman in words as well as her needs, and was unstinting in offering all of what she could; as unstinting in confessing she wanted more even though she knew less. And so he took gently, forcing nothing; but took fiercely too, and gave, teaching her also there was nothing of etiquette in bed, no requirements of manners. Only pleasure, respect, affection, and the means to share it equally.

She was tall, and did not fit as Jean had with the crown of her head set snuggly beneath his chin. To do so required some bending of the body, and for now they were sealed: hip to hip, ankle to ankle, brow to brow. For each of them, so entangled, so enamored of touch, only a single arm was free.

Cat’s was draped across his jutting shoulder, lax in satiation. Her long fingers caught briefly and gently in the tumble of hair at his neck, combing absently. His arm moved; fingers drifted against her rib cage, then glided across flesh toward the curve of hip and thigh.

Her breath was warm against his cheek. “Will it always be so?”

“What, this?” His fingers tightened purposefully against the silk of her hip.

She laughed softly; her knees hugged his. “All of it,” she said, as laughter stilled into seriousness. “The days, the darkness . . . or will we use it up and have naught left?”

He knew then what she meant. Not only the joys of his bed, their bed, but in the days, the weeks; even the years of their lives. They had lived as one for three months only. It felt, incongruously, as if they had been together all of their lives; as if they had known one another for only this moment, and it so paramount as to eclipse all others.

Dair smiled, stroking flesh. It pleased him to feel the tautening of her body, the immediate response. “I am content as I have never been,” he said. “I lived in the house of my mother and father, and knew security; and in this house, alone, and knew pride in adulthood, in being a man”—he put his hand in her hair, cupping the cap of her skull—“but never have I felt as content as I do with you in my house. With you in my heart.”

Cat was silent a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was husky. “My father has a liking for spirits, you ken . . . and he was most pleased when a new keg came in from France, of the drink he calls brandywine. I have seen the need in his eyes, the need of his body. . . but he empties it, aye?—the keg of brandywine . . . and when it is empty, when he has drunk himself of it into a stupor, there is naught left for him but discontentment that there is no more. There is no more pleasure in what he has drunk, but in what he canna have again.”

Dair did not smile. “Are you comparing yourself to brandy, Cat?”

Tartly she said, “Spirits do better with age, aye? Women dinna.”

Now he did smile. “Then let me ask this of
you:
d’ye mean to leave me when I am white-headed, like MacIain?”

She expelled her breath as a brief, amused gust. “If so, I had best be saying my farewells in a fortnight, aye?”

He grinned. “A blow to the heart, that.”

Cat affected injured innocence. “Would you have me lie?”

“Well,” he observed judiciously, “you might be gentler about the truth.”

She grunted. “I dinna see that white hair has sucked the marrow from MacIain’s bones.”

“Or blunted the dirk that is his tongue?” His hand stroked again from ribs to hip, to thigh. “He has regard for you.”

She thought about it. “There is peace between us.”

“But I have been there too, aye?—I have heard the war of words between you.”

She shrugged the only shoulder she could. “I canna play chess, and I am poor at backgammon.”

“So you give him words, instead.”

Cat was silent a moment. Her body now was quiescent as she offered another truth. “I have never kent a man such as he is, Dair . . . there was a man in my mother’s bed, as I am in yours, but he did no more than that to breed sons and a daughter. I canna say what my mother was—she died when I was but a wee sprat—but he was never a father. MacIain . . .” She sighed, tucking her head into his shoulder. “ MacIain could be the father of us all, aye? Every man, woman, and child here in Glencoe.”

Dair thought then of what John Hill had said upon his release: ‘. . .
share this truth with MacIain, who is not only your father but the father of a clan. It is in his hands, now, the survival of Glencoe.
’

“Even me,” she said, following up her thought while he went elsewhere with his.

His father had yet to sign the Oath of Allegiance. In four weeks the indemnity offered, the deadline imposed, would expire.

“He is a gey strong man,” Cat said. “Stronger than any I ken.”

Another time Dair might have feigned offense; should she not say that of the man in her bed, rather than of his father? But his thoughts now ran toward John Hill, and the oath, and the promises made by a Dutchman who called himself King of England and Scotland.

‘
Will it always be so
?’ she had asked. Dair did not know. The world was larger than their bed, larger than Glencoe, larger even than the Highlands altogether. The world was Scotland, but also such men as Breadalbane, a Campbell; and the Master of Stair, a Lowlander; and an exiled king who as yet offered no answer to their request for information : would he release his Highland supporters from the oath sworn in his name at Dalcomera on the eve of Killiecrankie?
Or will James, living forever in France, turn his back on Scotland and the clans?

He wanted naught to do with such thoughts, not now, not here. And so to drive them away he loosed his ankle from hers, bent a leg, hooked a knee athwart her thigh, snugged it behind a buttock. A shifting of weight, the leverage of an elbow and he was free, free to roll atop her, to pull her beneath himself; free to cover her, to seek assuagement in the comforts of her body even as she, rousing as quickly, murmured incoherently and offered admittance, offered surcease from his unanticipated upsurge of apprehension, the desperate uncertainty of what lay before them.

It was cowardice, not courage. Escape, not confrontation. Avoidance of what was truth in the falsehood of the moment: in her, he could forget. In her, there was no fear.

Cat guided him, as he had taught her. Welcomed him without hesitance. Took of him what he offered and returned it fourfold. She locked her legs around him, taking him deeper, taking him farther, delivering of him his substance, his self, so that he, overtaken, threw back his head and bared the taut cords of his throat as well as the scar upon it . . . begging in silence for her to take him deeper yet, and farther, that he might lose himself in the only way he could; that he need not think of such things as oaths to one king and an indemnity of another; that he could instead think of only the moment, of the woman, of the covenant of the spirit as well as of the body, and the conviction that what they shared would never, unlike Glenlyon’s brandy keg, be emptied of its fire.

Cat laughed deeply as her nails dug into his hair and dragged his head to hers.
“Chruachan!”
she exulted.

He who was MacDonald did not know, in that moment, if he were victor or vanquished.

And did not care.

 

As John Hill set down the letter received so recently from the Secretary of Scotland, called the Master of Stair, parchment shook. His hands shook. The heart within his chest thumped irregularly, so violent in upheaval he feared it might cease to beat altogether.

Perhaps it would be well for him if it did. Perhaps it would offer release from this most onerous of duties, this most painful of all instructions.

He groped for reassurance, for something to mitigate.
Not an order—
Not yet. An advisory. Intelligence, acquainting him with the matter of the Highlands, the brutal, cruel, magnificently arrogant Highlands and her equally turbulent clans.

Not an order. A lesson, Stair declaimed in writing, that would be understood by all the rest of the intransigent lairds, taught by blood and fire in the language of the Highlands: extirpation. The cessation of a clan, one particular clan, so that all the others would hear, would know, would fear. And acquiesce.