Julia London 4 Book Bundle (97 page)

Yet there wasn’t one of them who didn’t feel his obvious longing stir something deep inside their own venerable souls. Not that a casual observer could tell from
looking at any of them, but once they had all been just as young as Wee Willie.

On a particularly clear and cloudless summer morning, however, no one was chuckling at poor Willie Keith—they were far too concerned with the urgency they sensed in Kerry McKinnon’s step as she marched down the rutted lane with the basket of letters clutched in her hand. The dozen inhabitants stood in their little yards with their chickens, dogs, and children at their feet, warily exchanging looks as she handed out the neat bundles of letters. It was unusual to see her so distracted—she had forgotten her always-cheerful greeting, her inquiry into their respective well-being.

She hardly spoke at all.

More than one wondered if the pretty, dark-haired lass wasn’t feeling a wee bit ill. Little wonder if she was—the lass worked like a dog to keep them all going, rising with the first gasp of the day and toiling well after its last sputter into the night. In spite of the work it took just to keep the crops growing, the livestock fed, the house and barn in repair, Kerry McKinnon also found time in every day to see after them, each and every one. She called on Red Donner to see after his gout, made sure the old hag Winifred had awakened to another sunrise (and blast it if she hadn’t), helped the young mother of three, Loribeth, with her chores. She was the glen’s lifeblood, and to see even the slightest crease of a frown on her fair brow made them all feel a little out of sorts.

But unbeknownst to the residents, Kerry McKinnon had started the day in perfectly fine health. In fact, she had been feeling so robust that she had tackled the very daunting task of cleaning the old barn, attacking it with gusto—until Willie brought her the weekly post. She smiled at the carrot-topped lad, asked after his sister who had been ailing. Even though she saw her mother’s handwriting on one folded vellum—which caused her to shudder involuntarily as it always did—it was the neat little signature of Mr. Jamie Regis, Esquire, on the back
of a very heavy vellum that caused her stomach to churn.

Kerry remembered the name of Regis all right, but worse, she remembered Fraser had done something through him that she had never fully understood and had suspected was quite ill-advised. A sense of impending doom had immediately tightened her throat. She snatched the letter from the little basket, hastily broke the seal, and unconsciously lifted a hand to her neck as she began to read, choking on the contents.

After the necessary and extremely wordy felicitations, the letter very simply said that the land she was standing on was forfeit and marked to be sold, that she was to be sued for Fraser’s debts, and
oh God … 
immediately evicted.

Evicted!

Her hand suddenly shaking, Kerry had quickly grabbed the left side of the letter to steady it and read it once more, certain she had misunderstood, positive there was a clause that she had missed.

Unfortunately, she had understood it all too well.

Somehow, she had managed to smile at Willie, to send him to the kitchen and the freshly baked biscuits there. Somehow, she had managed to put the post in her basket and start down the lane toward the cottages that dotted the glen. She had forced herself to smile and greet her neighbors as she handed out the mail, and now, she was miraculously managing to walk out of their midst, away from their curious gazes, turning at the end of the lane toward the loch, her head high.

Blind to the path in front of her, she walked, seeing nothing but Mr. Regis’s neat script citing irreparable debt and mismanagement, and the ridiculously short time of four weeks allotted her to pay her debt and avoid any legal consequence.

This was unbelievable! Fraser had sold a large portion of the family land, had owed money she had no inkling of before his death, and now she stood to
lose everything because of it, be tossed away like so much garbage, along with his cousins, Angus and May, and Thomas, too. Not to mention the others in Glenbaden, the last of Clan McKinnon, his own family! Dear God, where would they go? What would they
do
?

An invisible vise suddenly clutched her stomach; Kerry abruptly stopped and bent over, her pain real in the wake of understanding what the letter meant.

But after a moment, she forced herself up. She couldn’t let the others know of this disaster, not yet, not until she had thought of something. Anything! They would panic; Thomas would do something rash. No, she couldn’t let them know, not until she had tried everything to save them.

But Mr. Regis had given her only four weeks!

Despairing, Kerry continued walking, moving wood-enly toward the loch as her mind raced, desperately seeking solutions to this catastrophe. But there was nothing—she had no money, nothing of any value. There were no options, nothing save her mother …

Not that. Never that!
She stumbled to a stop again, brought a hand to her eyes as she squeezed them shut. Tears burned her eyes, but she pushed herself forward, told herself to keep moving, keep thinking, which she did almost unconsciously until she found herself on her knees beside her husband’s grave, staring at the little cross, the awful letters clutched in one hand.

“You lied to me, Fraser.”

She had
believed
him when he told her everything would be all right. Yes, well, it
was
all right for Fraser now, God rest his soul, as he had died last fall. But he had left her in a morass from which she had no idea how to extract herself.

Kerry glanced around at the little cemetery on the banks of a stream where the McKinnon ancestors were buried alongside her husband, trying to force down the anger she seemed to battle every day. She shouldn’t feel such anger—poor Fraser, he hadn’t been very old at all,
just four and thirty when he had finally gone to meet his maker. She winced and wiped her palm down the side of her neck.

There it was again, that little feeling of relief that he was gone.

Certainly she was glad he was no longer suffering, but that small, yet distinct feeling made her question if she hadn’t been more relieved for herself than for Fraser. All right then, truthfully—Fraser had been so sick for so long, that in Kerry’s heart, he had died years ago. He had taken ill only two years after they had married and had lingered in worsening degrees of ill health another seven years. They had ceased to live as husband and wife at the onset of his illness, and in the last two years of his life the pain had been so debilitating that he had required her constant care.

And so had the glen.

The McKinnon family had lived in this glen for more generations than Kerry knew. They had fished the little loch fed by the larger Loch Eigg, had cultivated a strip of land that would support a bit of barley in the good years. Fraser’s grandfather, an officer in the old clan system, was fortunate enough to have owned some acreage in his own right, which had eventually passed to Fraser. Along with the land they had leased from Baron Moncrieffe, they had lived quite comfortably. Until Fraser fell ill, that was, and then there seemed nothing that she or Fraser’s cousin, Thomas, or anyone else in Glenbaden could do to keep the cattle from dying or the barley from withering.

She had known things were bad, of course she did, but she had not known
how
bad.

Abruptly, she lifted her head and looked up at the white house with the green shutters she loved, sitting majestically on a small foothill, mountains dotted with cattle rising behind it, a stream below it running serenely into the loch. She loved this glen.

Oh God, she was in deep trouble—so deep, she was barely treading water.

Fraser, damn him!
It wasn’t until her husband had died that she began to discover the depth of her trouble. No sooner had she buried him when the first piece of correspondence came, a letter from the Bank of Scotland curtly informing her that taxes on the property were in arrears and that interest on the loan—a loan she was shocked to discover even existed—was past due, and the creditors quite anxious to be paid.

As if that astounding news wasn’t enough, a second piece of correspondence had arrived from her mother, insisting that she come to her in Glasgow at once.

Kerry could not say which letter had frightened her worse.

The letter from the Bank of Scotland had, in hindsight, been easy to ignore. None of it made any sense to her then, and besides, she had been too panicked by her mother’s letter.

After years of trying hard to love her mother, Kerry had finally reached a point where she acknowledged to herself that she could not. Her childhood memories were awful—Alva MacGregor had been a religious zealot who believed that every malady befalling a body was God’s punishment for disobeying His word—as
she
interpreted it, naturally. As far back as Kerry could recall, Alva had never said a kind word about anyone, and for some reason, saved her most vehement condemnations for her husband and daughter.

One of Kerry’s earliest memories was being locked in a closet as punishment for having accidentally broken a vase in her play. She was only five years old when her mother had pushed her into the dark closet, deaf to her fearful screams, shouting that Kerry should beg God to forgive her. But all Kerry could think of was the Devil—she was certain he was in the closet with her, because her mother had told her so, and that he ate naughty children.

In spite of the bright sunlight, Kerry shivered unexpectedly at the memory.

Fortunately, her father, Devin MacGregor, was not as devout as her mother and did not tolerate that sort of punishment. The result of his extreme displeasure upon finding Kerry huddled in the corner of that closet was to send her off to Edinburgh to a passable girl’s boarding school he could ill afford. There Kerry remained until she was a young woman, returning home only in the summers when she was forced to endure her mother’s harsh condemnations of anything and everything.

It was little wonder that she had begun to dream of escape, and when Fraser McKinnon had paid particular attention to her one summer evening at a harvest season gathering, she had shamelessly encouraged him. It hadn’t been hard to do—he was rather pleasant looking and was fortunate enough to own land nearby. When Fraser began to court her, Kerry could taste her freedom. She turned all the feminine charm she could muster on him, and they were married after a few short weeks. Not a moment too soon, either, as her father was found dead in his bed one morning just a month after they were wed.

That was when Alva seemed to lose what was left of her mind. She began attending the gatherings of an evangelical minister who was gaining quite a reputation around Perthshire. Alva grew very enamored of the Reverend Tavish, and much to Kerry’s horror, within a month she had sold the family’s land to a sheep farmer and turned the profits over to Tavish. That was astounding in and of itself, but Kerry was bowled over when Alva up and followed Reverend Tavish to Glasgow, where he had, apparently, established some sort of enclave. He and his followers lived and spent their days among the Glasgow poor, condemning them for their heathen ways and coaxing them into his fold. It wasn’t too long afterward that Kerry received word her mother had married Reverend Tavish and was expecting his child.

Her contact with her mother was sporadic after that, amounting to no more than a dozen letters exchanged in eight years.

But when news of Fraser’s death reached Alva, she suddenly began writing with a vengeance. Fraser had been gone only a month when Kerry received the first letter demanding she come to Glasgow. That letter was followed with alarming frequency by others, boldly ordering her to give up her morally decrepit ways and come make a good, obedient wife to a Believer.

Kerry would just as soon die.

She glanced down at the latest missive from her mother. Morbid curiosity filled her; she unfolded it, shaking her head wearily when the letter began immediately with a tirade about the Glory of God, the Sins of His Children, the failings of the Church of Scotland, and of course, the litany of Kerry’s particular faults. It ended with the usual demand that she come to Glasgow, but interestingly, Reverend Tavish himself had deigned to add a line, instructing her to honor her mother’s wishes, deny the temptations of the flesh, and come to Glasgow at once, her only hope for chastity. With a roll of her eyes, Kerry stuffed the letter into the pocket of her gray skirt.

She was chaste, all right, and God help her, she’d remain that way for the rest of her life before she would go to Glasgow.

Aye, Thomas’s plan was beginning to look better and better all the time.

Thomas McKinnon, bless him, was Fraser’s cantankerous cousin who had never stepped foot out of Glenbaden in all his life—although he threatened on a daily basis to do so. But Thomas loved this land. He
knew
the glen, knew what it would yield. It was his opinion that the land could not support cattle long term, as the grass was neither rich nor vast enough—but it was perfect for sheep. Sheep and barley, he told her, were the future; sheep and barley would turn the profit she needed to pay Fraser’s debts.

But … in order to make the transition from cattle to sheep, Thomas had urged her to borrow the money necessary to buy the sheep. If they could just turn a profit in this year’s cattle, he said, they could repay half of what they borrowed for the sheep, and hence, were halfway there. Thomas had thought of borrowing from the bank to purchase the first dozen sheep. But then the letter from the bank had come, and once he had recovered from his shock, he had quickly devised another plan—borrow from Baron Cameron Moncrieffe.

Borrowing from her neighbor was loathsome to Kerry, but Thomas’s suggestion had played in the back of her mind, in part because she had nowhere else to turn, and in part because Cameron Moncrieffe had been such a frequent visitor to her house in the last two years of Fraser’s life.

Moncrieffe, a wealthy man, lived in Glenbhainn just beyond Loch Eigg. Kerry had once heard he farmed a thousand head of sheep. She didn’t know if that was true or not, but the man lived in high enough style. She knew this because when Fraser could get around, he often called at Moncrieffe’s renovated castle and had once taken her to a summer ball there. And when Fraser’s health deteriorated, Moncrieffe called at Glenbaden. It had been a terribly thoughtful thing for him to do, and truly, Kerry had appreciated his concern for her husband.