The Highland Countess (4 page)

“I cannot go alone,” said Morag desperately. “I know.
You
shall accompany me. What is your name?”

“Maggie—Maggie Sinclair,” said the maid, remembering her manners and bobbing a curtsy. “I cannae go. I’ve a lot of work.”

Morag bit her lip in vexation. “When will my husband return?”

“I cannae say. He aye goes to Dowie’s Tavern for a dram and then tae the Right and Wrong Club and maybe on tae the Spendthrift.”

“Then I shall go alone,” decided Morag.

“I widnae dae that,” said Maggie shaking her head. “Whit’ll my lord say?”

My lord would not be in a fit state to say anything by the time he finished patronizing his favorite watering holes, thought Morag grimly, so she did not answer, merely proceeding to dress. Maggie shrugged and left. It was not for her to criticize her betters.

When Morag eventually ventured timidly out into the High Street, she shrank back from the jostling throng. But the New Town with its quiet gardens and squares beckoned so she pushed forward down the hill in the direction of the North Bridge. She did not see the earl but he saw her. He had returned with some of his cronies to show them his beautiful, young wife, having already bragged a great deal about her charms.

But as he was about to hail her, his eye was caught by the sight of a servant girl bending over to lift a pail of water. Her ragged skirts were kilted up around a pair of well-turned, if dirty, ankles. A long rip in her skirt revealed tantalizing glimpses of pale leg.

The earl forgot about Morag, forgot about his friends. His hands twitched. “Deil tak’ me,” he muttered. “Will ye look at that!”

The girl turned around and caught the earl’s avid stare. Bending down, she slowly raised her skirt. On her calf were the brave and tattered remains of a scarlet garter. Although it was obviously only doing service as an ornament, the lady having no stockings on, it seduced the earl’s senses so much that he startled the street with a joyous “Halloo!” and bounded forward.

Morag hurried on, spurred by the sound of the wild cry behind her. She thought it sounded like a bull in pain.

Although several pawky gallants tried to block her path, she managed to avoid them and at last hurried over the North Bridge, her eyes fastened on the New Town beyond.

It was like stepping into another world. Edinburgh had already been established as the Athens of the North for some years and now boasted many English visitors who had come to see this peculiar city where society rated metaphysics higher than money.

Morag stared open-mouthed at the ladies in their thin dresses and wondered why they did not die of cold. She herself was wearing her blue wool dress with a pelisse buttoned over it and a shapeless bonnet. She turned to look after one young miss who was wearing so little that practically nothing was left to the imagination and, turning back, bumped full into a tall figure. She stammered her apologies and looked up into the greenest pair of eyes she had ever seen. They were not hazel with flecks of green nor were they that pale gooseberry color. They were as green as emeralds and as unwinking as the eyes of a cat. She ducked her head and muttered an apology and scurried off down Princes Street.

The sun shone down bravely and the air was warm until she came to one of the many crossings where an arctic wind whipped down all the way from the North Sea. A faint feeling of unease told her that she was being followed and she looked back. Sure enough, there he was—the man with the green eyes. The fleeting glimpse was enough to show her that he was tall and slim and very fashionably dressed. He wore a riding coat and buckskins, the little gold tassels on his glistening Hessian boots swung jauntily and the crisp white of his elaborate cravat, dazzling against the black of his jacket.

She turned round quickly as she caught the beginnings of a strange smile of… recognition?… on his face. She felt strangely breathless and somehow obscurely threatened. She saw the cool dark doorway of a bookseller’s shop and dived for cover, casting another quick look back.

Morag breathed a sigh of relief. He had been accosted by a party of friends. She found that the palms of her hands were damp and her knees trembling. What on earth was she afraid of?

She turned her attention to the bookshelves. So many, many books, hitherto forbidden. Miss Simpson was a great believer in the destructive influence of romantic literature. So although Morag was allowed to know the names of various famous writers, she had not been allowed to read their work.

She idly turned over the pages of a slim volume of poetry. It was secondhand and the pages had already been cut. “Poems,” said the title page, “by the Reverend John Donne.”

Feeling on safe and familiar ground, Morag began to read. Pandora’s box was opened wide. Her eyes were fastened on the pages, her senses and emotions reeling under the impact of some of the most beautiful love poems in the world.

She read on, her eyes misted with tears, feeling a strange lost yearning.

Her right to innocent love and passion had been forfeited by this arranged marriage to an old man. Her tremulous, adolescent half-formed feelings were being given a guide, an explanation, as she read her way steadily along the shelves, oblivious to the other customers and the dry, impatient cough of the bookseller.

Here was Shakespeare, there was Pope, all around her the witty, clever voices cried love. Andrew Marvell cynically berated his coy mistress. Was this how her husband felt?

As the sun outside climbed higher in the sky over the grim castle, Morag read on, dazzled, moved, elated and despairing as she lost her emotional virginity in an orgy of reading.

The cough behind her was now sharp enough to make her swing around, blushing furiously.

The bookseller was a small, chubby man in a pepper-and-salt frock coat and knee breeches. He had begun to assume that the young lady in the good but unfashionable clothes was under the misapprehension that she was in a circulating library and hoped to at least sell one book to her.

“Can I help you, madam?”

“Oh, yes. I mean, I would like to buy some books,” said Morag, wildly scooping up armfuls. The bookseller’s fat, white face creased up into a smile like that of a pleased baby. Then his face fell as his strange customer put the books down again and started scrabbling frantically in her diamond-shaped reticule.

“I have forgot to bring money,” wailed Morag. She could not go home bookless; she could not!

The bookseller caught the gleam of gold on Morag’s finger through the lace of her mittens. “Perhaps madam’s husband…?” he began.

“Yes, indeed,” said Morag. “I shall find him and then I shall return. He is the Earl of Murr—perhaps you know our address. It is in the High Street and it should not take me very long to walk there and back…”

“That will not be necessary,” said the bookseller with an avuncular smile. Oh, the magic of a title! “My lady may choose what she pleases and my boy, Jimmy, will carry them for you.”

A half hour later, Morag set out for the High Street with Jimmy, the bookseller’s boy, trotting behind her, bowed down under a sack of books—poetry, plays and, most priceless, several sets of novels which the bookseller had assured her were read by all the ladies of the
ton.

For the next few days Morag did not leave the sanctuary of her room. She barely noticed her husband’s absence, she barely noticed his return at the end of two days when he was helped up the stairs, having drunk himself into an inflammatory fever.

By systematically dosing himself with a mixture of brandy and mercury, the earl once again felt returned to the land of the living and remembered that his drinking friends had latterly begun to doubt the existence of this pretty wife he had bragged about so much.

He accordingly decided to promenade his wife down the High Street between the hours of one and two, which he vaguely remembered as the fashionable time to be seen. He brushed aside Morag’s faltering apologies for the amount of books she had bought—although his lordship read little else other than the game laws and the
Guide to the Turf—
with the remark that the whole of Edinburgh was book daft.

Morag dressed in her finest clothes at his bidding and, her eyes still clouded with dreams, she allowed her husband to lead her into the jostling crowd on the High Street. The earl and his bride made their stately progress, only jumping nimbly away from the tenements as a wild cry of “Gardez loo” from above presaged the emptying of the contents of a chamberpot into the street.

The earl espied two of his elderly cronies and hustled Morag forward. The men were called, it seemed, Erchie and Cosmo. They reeked of old spirits and their clothes were none too clean but they treated Morag with great admiration and courtesy, Erchie, who hailed from Glasgow, pronouncing her to be “a veritabubble ferry,” which Morag translated into “veritable fairy” after some difficulty.

The courtesies being dealt with, the earl and his friends fell to comparing the virtues of various taverns. Soon the three were hard at it, gossiping, and each one plying that instrument which is euphemistically known as a back scratcher—an ivory hand at the end of a long stick—which is really for scratching at the livestock in your head without disturbing the hairdresser’s art. Morag was left to survey the busy scene.

The day was steel-gray and cold. Edinburgh was giving a fine example of why it had earned its nickname, “Auld Reekie,” as the fumes and smoke rising from the myriads of chimneys blotted out most of the little light from the lowering sky and turned midday into midnight. The crowd jostled and pushed, exchanging greetings, nobles and their ladies rubbing shoulders with the lowest of the citizens. Newhaven women with strident voices and striped aprons sold “caller herrin,’” a knife grinder called his trade, his shrill voice rising above the other cries of pies and coal, soot and sand. Anyone who had anything to sell tried to sell it. An old man who seemed nothing more than a bundle of rags held together with string placed a dirty cloth on the ground and carefully placed on the cloth a pair of worn and cracked boots and proceeded to add his voice to the cacophony.

And then Morag experienced that strange feeling of unease. She turned her head slowly and across the jostling, moving throng, she met the gaze of a familiar pair of green eyes. Blue and green eyes met and held. Morag could not look away. For now she had poetry, wicked seductive poetry, to clarify her thoughts, and a quotation leapt unbidden into her head.

She blushed suddenly and painfully and dragged her eyes away.

“There she is again,” murmured Lord Toby Freemantle.

“Where? Who?” demanded his friend, the Honorable Alistair Tillary.

“Toby means the redhead,” drawled the third of the party, Harvey Wrexford. “Don’t meddle with the local natives, Toby. You’ll only come to harm.”

The three Englishmen were visiting Edinburgh.

Neither their fathers nor grandfathers would have been seen dead in the place, but Scotland was once again fashionable, and Edinburgh hailed as an intellectual paradise.

Lord Toby, of the green eyes, was twenty-five years old and had already earned himself a reputation as a rake. Part of it was well deserved but most was a fiction spread around by disappointed mothers of marriageable daughters. Lord Toby was an extremely wealthy young man. He was a model of athletic grace and exquisite tailoring. Life had been very easy for him and therefore had left him with a perpetual nagging feeling of boredom.

His two friends were equally fashionably dressed but neither was blessed with Lord Toby’s romantic face and figure. Alistair Tillary was round and fat with a chubby, jovial face held prisoner by the enormously high starched points of his shirt. Harvey Wrexford was thin to the point of emaciation and had a long, mild face. He looked like an undernourished sheep.

“I must find out who she is,” went on Lord Toby, his eyes fastening on a shining curl which had escaped from Morag’s bonnet. “Did you ever see such hair?”

“It’s red,” yawned Alistair. “Very unfashionable.”

“But such a red,” said Toby. “It’s almost purple, and, oh, those eyes! Who are these old men with her? One of them must be her father.”

“All the more reason to leave her alone,” said Harvey.

“Nonsense! She escaped me before. Look, there is a servant giving that one next to her a snuffbox. I shall catch him when he leaves and find out her name.”

Lord Toby watched until the servant drew back a little into the crowd. Morag was staring at her boots. He approached the servant and dropped a couple of coins into the man’s hand.

“You must refresh my memory,” he said in a low voice. “What is the name of your master?”

The servant was Highland and had no love of the English but he had accepted the money and his rigid code of honor told him he would need to give this accursed Sassenach the information he wanted. “Earl of Murr,” he mumbled in a surly voice and melted away into the crowd.

Lord Toby stared at the back of Morag’s head and felt his heart begin to beat quickly. He was not in love, of course. He was too hardheaded a young man to think that anyone fell in love at first sight—that is, if anyone actually ever fell in love at all. He gave a deprecatory cough and said, “Lord Murr?”