Passion and Plaid - Her Highland Hero (Scottish Historical Romance) (12 page)

“Yes sir, what can I do for you?”

“This...fellow will be staying with us for a short
while.”

“Yes sir,” Rollo said. “Follow me, please.”

M
ornay’s Cleft

August 18, Afternoon

––––––––

“A
ch,” Gavin said, pacing back and forth in front
of Duggan’s bar and nursing his third whiskey of the day, “here we are past
noon, and there’s no sign of Kenna. Am I allowed to start worrying yet?”

“You can worry if you like,” said John, “but
you’ve got to remember that it was her what did the rescuin’ last time, no? She
knows what she’s doing. And even if she
is
in trouble, remember, this
isn’t some crackpot laird, or a sheriff with a mean tendency. Willard is a mayor,
and has been for over ten years. He’s not going to be murdering some girl or
locking her in a chamber or anything of the sort.”

“Aye, I know, it’s just-”

“Just nothin’ but you making problems for
yourself. I know you’re worried, I know you are. But you have to let things be,
Gav. We dinna leave there until past midnight and the party showed no sign of
diminishing. Gold crowns to haggis pies, they were all there until some
ridiculous hour, and then he offered her a room and is presently showing her
proper hospitality of a morning. He’s a nobleman Gavin, they take that business
seriously.”

“It’s the most important thing, Mister Gavin,”
Olga said as she tromped down the stairs. “Manners, I mean. Without manners
you’ve got nothing. And if you’re a noble, you’ve got very little else of
interest anyway, so they become all the more important.”

Duggan laughed loudly, but Olga didn’t seem to
understand what caused such boisterous excitement. “It’s true,” she said.
“Manners are very important for the nobility.”

“Aye, it’s just...ach, nevermind, woman. Sausage?”
Duggan stuck a fork through a juicy link, held it up and shook it a little. It
quivered and it was John’s turn to giggle while Lynne shot him a sidelong
glance.

“See here? It’s not only the rich who favor being
hospitable. Look at Duggan, our new friend. Every morning we come down and he’s
got a plate of food ready, and it’s always wonderfully delicious.”

Turning to John and speaking in a quiet whisper,
Elena said: “The way that wiggles on the for, it look like-”

Cocking his eyebrow, John laughed loud.

“Right,” cut in Rodrigo. “What is it we should be
doing while we wait for Kenna to return with whatever she’s learned? We know
there’s some kind of collusion between the mayor and those scurvy dogs from the
East India Company, but there’s little we can do with that until she brings us
some further items to ponder.”

“Items to ponder, says the graceful Spaniard. Did
you use your time off in Edinburgh to pursue a degree from the University?”
John cocked a wide grin and Rodrigo looked at him squarely with a set jaw
before breaking down.

“I am reading,” he said. “I’m trying these new
phrases I find in books. My favorite is Benjamin Franklin and his funny little
almanacs.”

“Ach, Dr. Franklin! The only way he could be more
wonderful is if he was Scottish!” John’s wit just kept rolling. Gavin finally
stopped pulling at the bottom of his kilt pin and seemed to lighten a bit.

“You know what I heard? Speakin’ of Franklin.”
Duggan paused as he spoke, both for dramatic effect, and to wet his throat. “I
heard there are a number of Americans what want to break away from the Crown.”

“You’re joking, how is that possible?” Gavin said,
sitting up straighter. “The lot of them are British. They canna just up and
leave King George.”

Slowly, Duggan nodded, but then pursed his lips
and ran the back of his hand over them. “It not a serious threat, I dinna
think. Not yet anyway. But there’s talk of it is all. How strange would it be
though? They live an ocean away from London. Ruled by a gaggle of mayors and
barristers and governors whose favorite activity is overtaxing and
under-spending on the things the people need. Ach, it’s been a hundred years
and a half since people started to filter over there. A full century since the
Civil War that ousted Charles in favor of a rebel.”

As he spoke, a kind of somber darkness descended
upon the men and women seated in Duggan’s inn. For the lot of them, life was
not so simple as it had been only weeks before. Rodrigo was a thug working for
a cruel bastard of a sheriff, Elena and Olga maids for Laird Macdonald. Lynne
doing whatever she could to keep eating, and Gavin and John were common
thieves, though thieves with big ideas.

But then the lot of them brought down a nobleman
who wanted to buy up Edinburgh. They sunk a sheriff who would just as soon kill
a Scot as protect him. And as Duggan spoke, as he talked of Americans and their
problems with the crown and everything else, the valiant souls sitting around
those tables in that sun-lit inn, with clouds of hazy smoke filling the air
with the smell of their countryside burning for the profits of yet another
self-interested Englishman, reality replace the morning’s earlier levity.

“We canna let this happen. This is our land,” Gavin
said. “Not his. These fires have to stop. These people have to stop being
tormented with taxes so high they canna pay. He knows what he does, you can be
sure of that. Raise the taxes so high no one can pay, then offer to buy all
their land when they’re broke.”

He looked around at all the faces staring back. A
few were nodding, but all were stern.

“This isna just about Kenna, though she’s a part
of it, no doubt. This is about injustice, cruelty, and righting wrongs.”

Duggan stopped wiping down his bar top and let the
rag hang limp in his hand as he listened. Elena stopped rubbing Rodrigo’s hand,
Olga put down her sausage, John spread his fingers out on the tables, and Lynne
put down the knife she was using to clean under her nails.

“When we – Kenna and I – when we left Edinburgh, I
thought we were done with all this sort of thing. I thought the thievery and
the danger were behind us and I thought we’d go off to Fort Mary and have
ourselves a whole brood of red-headed sprouts.”

“Aye and a fine lot they’d be too,” John said with
a smile.

“That they would. But it has to wait. When we got
here, and found out about the mayor and his taxes, Kenna insisted we stay and
see what we could. I dinna want to. I wanted to leave, get back on the road,
and pretend the problems of the world were behind us.”

“But you couldna do it,” Lynne said.

“Couldna do it. These people need my help. Our
help. I hate asking this of you, since I know none of you have any stake in
this. All that going on about Americans and the abuse they suffer, it just
sparked a fire in me.”

“Gavin,” John said, without a shred of jocularity
in his voice. “We’re your men. You’re our leader. I think I speak for
everyone.”

A round of nods and a couple of grunted agreements
met with what he said.

“I, uh...Gavin?” Duggan cut in. “If it isna a
problem, I’d like to be counted in as one of you. At least this time. I’ve not
seen such courage since I came back from the war going on twenty years past.”

“I couldna endanger you with what we do, Duggan.
There’s no telling how it might end.”

“It’ll end the same way it’s been going for a year
now, if no one does anything to stop it. Willard’s not a bad man he’s just lost
his way. He’s become darkened with hate and anger.”

“I worry,” Gavin said. “That if you get caught up
in what we’re doing, that something will happen later that hurts you.”

Duggan smiled grimly. “Nothing could hurt me worse
than what he’s already done. Do you see my daughters here?”

No one responded. Gavin sucked his lip.

“They left. Everyone leaves. This place, Mornay’s
Cleft, it used to be that this was the only place my daughters ever wanted to
live. They used to talk of it, of finding their husbands and coming back here
to spend their lives farming and raisin’ families like what their Ma and I did.
But now?” He shook his head. “Nay, no one’s to stay here if they’ve got any
reason to leave or any place to go. As soon as they found husbands, Linnie and
Molly, they left. Linnie moved as far away as she could. She and her man went
all the way to Inverness. Molly and Douglas, they bought a plot in Duncraig,
just down the road, and then not two years later – that would be last year,
mind – they lost it when the mayor invented another tax or six for new farmers.
He’s taken my daughters from me, and I want to make sure they can come back
like they always wanted.”

When he fell quiet, and went to twisting his beard
in his fist, Gavin stood up and clapped the man on the shoulder.

“Aye, then you’re one of us,” he said.

Duggan nodded solemnly.

A moment later, John broke the silence that
descended on the room by thumping his glass against the table. “Gav,” he said.
“There’s only one problem.”

“Aye?”

“Well, as you might’ve noticed, Kenna’s gone
missing, though I’m sure she’s safe, and we’ve not the first clue how to do
anything – or even what it is we’re wanting to do about the mayor. If we’re to
tie him to corruption and all of that business, we’ve to get some proof that he
and the Company are conspiring to enrich themselves at the cost of these two
towns.”

“That’s a fine point,” said Rodrigo in his
scholarly tone, “it’s against the oath of a mayor to damage his jurisdiction to
line his own pockets. It’s hard to prove that to be the case, but I think in
this instance, the damage done is fairly obvious, is it not? Clear cutting
forests and selling the timber, then burning the left over? Letting vast
swathes of field lay fallow while he plans to first build, and then run a
plantation staffed by the farmers who he’s been tasked with serving, but who he
has, in fact, pushed out of their land?”

“You’re sure you were a pirate before?” John asked
with his grin coming back to his face, “and not a barrister?”

A smile crept across Rodrigo’s lips and then he
chuckled before continuing, “but no, Gavin is right. This is a great wrong and
it must be-”

“Wait a tick,” Duggan said. “I’ve just had a
thought. Now, this mightn’t be a very good idea, but it’s an idea.”

“Well let’s hear it then,” Gavin said. “Anything
is better than what we’re doing at present.”

“Aye,” he said. “Well, do you remember me speaking
to you of a festival? The one scheduled two days hence?”

“Ach, I remember,” Gavin said. “The Duncraig and
Mornay’s Cleft one? Where the two villages get together between the two
harvests?”

“Aye, that’s the one. Do you remember what else I
told you about it? About the games?”

“Well, I recall you saying there were games, but
nothing past that. Is there something of import there?”

Duggan nodded, coming around the bar, seating
himself beside the others and rolling his sleeves up, as though he were about
to deliver a spirited lecture.

“Go on,” John said, “you’ve got us all excited.”

“There’s a tradition. For as long as I can
remember, and certainly as long as Willard’s been the mayor of our fair burg,
the winners of the different games are always invited to the mayor’s manor for
a dinner celebration on the night of the festival.”

Silence fell thick and heavy.

“Now, he’s no doubt figured out who you,” he
tilted his head to Gavin, “are by now. I’m sure the sheriff has run off and
told him all of your naughty secrets. But he doesn’t know the rest of you lot,
and he probably doesn’t remember exactly what you look like, Gavin.”

Light seemed to dawn all around the room.

“We’re going to win the contests,” Lynne said.
“And...”

“The dinner party always did seem a bit odd to me,
and a bit awkward. Especially when you consider that one of the contests is to
see who can quaff twenty mugs of drink afore anyone else.”

“What I wouldn’t give for Ben to be here right
now,” Gavin smiled. “We’ll make due though.”

“We can decide all that later. But for now, yes,
that was the idea what came to me. Win the contest, get into the mayor’s manor
and...”

Everyone leaned forward in their seats, waiting
for him to finish.

“Well to be honest that’s all I’ve come up with.”
He sat back to relieve the tension.

“It’s more than we had a moment ago,” Gavin said.
“What about Kenna though? I dinna want to leave her in danger. I would – nay I
will – do anything at all that ends with my love safe and these wrongs righted.
That’s all what matters to me in the world. My life without her...it’s not
worth living.”

Duggan nodded with downturned eyes that he raised
to Gavin’s a moment later when he took his hand, clasping it firmly. “I...dinna
think she’s in danger. The mayor is a strange man in many ways, and a cruel and
torn one in many others. I think more likely than him having hurt Kenna is that
he has her in his house and has decided she’s his guest.”

“You mean he’s kidnapped her?” John asked.
“Because that seems quite like the same thing as ‘in danger’ to me.”

“Aye, that’s one way of looking at it. But think
of it like this – if he ends up having kidnapped her, and hasn’t a clue who you
lot are, is there any better way to get her back than to win these contests and
march right in there and take her? All the while, hopefully building a case to
present to the crown or whoever else you think will listen about his
corruption?”

“Duggan?” John said.

“Aye?”

“You have a mind as devious as mine own. That’s no
mean feat.”

A soft laugh moved through the room.

“Right, but we need to figure out how we can
actually
win
these games. Aside from the drinking bit, there’s fencing.”
Rodrigo perked his head up. “Archery for accuracy.” John grinned and explained
that knives weren’t the only things with which he had aptitude. “A caber toss,
of course.” Gavin tapped two fingers on the table. “And a line dance.”

“Line dance?” John said with a high-pitched curl
in his voice. “How do you have a contest for line dancing?”