The Passionate One

Prologue

In 1523 the
McClairen chieftain, Dougal of Donne, stood on northern Scotland’s high headlands, looked out at a rocky island rising from the churning sea, and
ordered a fortress built there. He had carefully picked this particular ground,
it being an isolated, pine-strewn island connected to the headland by a single
ramp of flinty rock more oft submerged than dry. No man would step foot on that
isle without being seen and no army would cross that narrow land bridge if
Dougal deemed differently.

Dougal designed the
castle in the shape of a U, the short central façade facing squarely north
against the sea while its two wings swept back, forming an open courtyard on
the south. Below the courtyard he had a terraced garden cut into the rock
where, protected from north gales by the castle’s bulk, orchards and kitchen
gardens could flourish, making the fortress proof against any siege.

For four years the
proud castle gradually took form under Dougal’s careful, albeit impatient, eye.
Yet, for all its foreboding strength, Dougal did not stint on supplying his
castle with creature comforts, blanketing the chill walls with thick
tapestries, and carpeting the flag-stoned rooms with Oriental rugs.

When it was done,
Dougal set off to bring back the inspiration for his work, Gordon McIntere’s
black-haired daughter.

He’d seen Lizabet
only once before, on her thirteenth birthday. Dougal knew that McIntere had
planned to align his child with a richer clan than the McClairens. It mattered
not to Dougal; he swore to have her whatever the price. He persuaded the old
McIntere chief of the fervor of his suit with gifts and coins—and the sight of
Dougal’s seventy well-armed highlanders. Happily the wench had not yet married,
though Dougal swore to his deathbed it wouldn’t have mattered if she had. And
so they wed and he carried her back to his island.

Legend says that on
their arrival Dougal stopped some distance from the isle rising from a sea of
mist, and pointed at the great castle, and vowed that once in those walls
Lizabet would remain innocent of any man’s touch save his own. The lassie’s
cheeks grew red on hearing her new husband’s ardent oath, thus christening the
great, gray fortress with the unlikely name of Maiden’s Blush.

Maiden’s Blush she
had remained throughout all Dougal’s long life and that of his sons. Throughout
the bloody sixteenth century not once did she fall to enemy hands—not even when
Scotland’s Queen Mary was beheaded.

The castle remained
a loyal Stuart keep through the Hanovers’ rule and civil war, and into the
seventeenth century. When James II was exiled to France and the German George
took the throne, her thick stone walls listened to a gathering of Highland chiefs swearing allegiance to the “king across the water.”

Maiden’s Blush
herself kept George from seeking redress against the McClairens. The castle was
impregnable. Any army attempting to take it by force was doomed to failure. It
could only prove an embarrassment when it stood against the might of George’s
army—and held. Thus the crown never ventured and Maiden’s Blush never fell, nor
was she ever threatened.

Until, that is, one
rare summer in the third decade of the eighteenth century when heather grew so
thickly it hid the island’s sharp old bones beneath a mantle of lavender
flowers, and a gentle trade wind charmed a riot of brambled roses into bloom.
That year Maiden’s Blush housed a score of McClairens from diverse branches of
that clan, all living under the care of Ian McClairen, Marquis of Donne.

Ian had come
unexpectedly into his rank of chief. His three older brothers had died as a
result of their part in the uprising of 1719. Colin, his younger brother, had
gone to make his fortune in the East Indies, leaving Ian laird.

Ian never married.
Instead, over the years, he gathered his clan in the castle. All of them were
black-haired and fervent, with the McClairen knack for loyalty and the
McClairen curse of bullheadedness. The youngest and prettiest of these was
Ian’s distant cousin, Janet, whom Ian doted on as the child he’d never had. He
would have given her anything in his power to give, anything she’d wanted.

She wanted an
Englishman named Ronald Merrick.

Merrick was the
eldest son of the Earl of Carr, the half-mad scion of an ancient Sussex family. He’d befriended one of the McClairen men in Edinburgh and come up to
McClairen’s Isle on the young man’s invitation.

Ian had heard the
rumors about his cousin’s new English friend, that Merrick was profligate and
ruinously extravagant, that he’d been in Edinburgh fleeing a huge pack of London creditors. But Ian, having more heart than insight, paid little heed to the tales.
All young men, Ian reasoned, were wont to such excess if they lacked purpose,
and everything Merrick said gave Ian reason to believe that the Englishman had
found his purpose, the same one Ian owned, returning James III to the English
throne.

Ian little
suspected that Merrick had long been in the throes of quite a different driving
passion, one far more compelling than any political loyalties.

Gorgeous, charming,
and urbane, well-read and inbred, Ronald Merrick was a penultimate example of
amorality. Yet Merrick was by no means the black sheep of his family. He was
representative of that breed, being no better or worse, simply blessed—or
cursed—with a spectacular combination of good looks and an agility of mind that
allowed him to better serve his master—his own desire.

Merrick
’s desire was simple: He wanted society to bend its collective knee
before him.

His self-absorption
was unparalleled, his sense of duty nonexistent. He served what best served his
purposes and those purposes were whatever best served himself.

Of course his
companions knew naught of this. To them he was simply a charming guest who had
the devil’s own luck with cards and a right handsome way with women.

But Fate has a fine
sense of the absurd, she does. For though Merrick
wooed
the
McClairens, thinking to cheat from them and their friends what Highland riches he could, he
won
Janet. Before he quite understood what had
happened, he found himself wed to a rich, highland heiress. She was bonny and
generous of heart and body and she adored Merrick. And if Merrick considered
the world a penal colony and himself a prisoner barred from the center of his
universe, that being London, at least he’d found himself a comfortable cell
with a comely cell-mate.

The years passed
and Merrick got two sons on his beauteous highland bride, so pleased with her
that he almost forgot his purpose, his desire. Almost.

But one day as he
rode into the courtyard, he thought how he would have liked to replace the
central stone well with a marble fountain... if Maiden’s Blush were his. A
seemingly harmless, idle thought, but a seed of evil planted in a fertile bed
swiftly bears poisonous fruit.

Thenceforth, each
time Merrick entered the courtyard he would see some other item that he would
replace or embellish or alter if it were only his to do so. Quickly other
irritations chafed his never easy peace. Soon he could not dine without being
acutely aware that the food he ate had been prepared to please another’s
palate, or that the dogs lounging in the hall were suffered there because
another man willed it, or that the flowers spilling from the silver urns had
been placed because of another’s preference.

Envy grew in him
like a canker, insidious and deep. It became so entwined in his every thought,
so directed his every decision, that soon his hunger defined him. Not even his
bonny bride could ease it.

He grew to hate the
McClairens and all things Scottish, seeing them as manacles keeping him from
his true desire. His eyes began to turn ever southward toward London, like
those of a deserted lover pining for a former mistress. The newly rekindled
desire burned in his imagination until it became an all-consuming
conflagration. He needed to return to society. To London.

He kept the canker
well hidden. Only Janet knew of it—and that only because she’d seen the cold
distance in his eyes when he looked on their sons.

About this time, Colin
McClairen, Ian’s long absent brother, sent his wife and children to McClairen’s
Isle while he remained abroad. Ian offered them rooms at the castle but Colin’s
bride chose instead to live on the mainland.

Then, two years
later in 1745, Bonny Prince Charlie landed in the north of Scotland. The McClairens rallied to him and were instrumental in his triumphant march to Edinburgh. They would have been instrumental in his even more triumphant march to London—but someone had betrayed their plans.

Prince Charlie was
routed at Culloden and fled to France. Ian and his comrades were captured,
taken to Newcastle, tried, and executed. Even Colin’s sons were imprisoned
while the Duke of Cumberland, who’d led the king’s troops, swept through the Highlands like a burning scythe in a monstrous demonstration of merciless reprisal.

At first, Janet did
not suspect Merrick of her clan’s betrayal. But when he accepted Maiden’s Blush
from King George she grew uneasy. She fought to believe him when he told her
that he’d accepted the castle because, as an Englishman, he could better hold
it until, Colin, the new laird, returned.

Treachery had
achieved what no amount of force could; for the first time in two centuries no
male McClairen lived on McClairen’s Isle. The new laird had not returned, and
with no voice raised in their defense, his sons rotted in London’s Tower.

Merrick
commenced renovations on the castle.

Janet knew then,
though she did not ask. She’d dared not. It was too late for Ian and his men,
Colin’s sons, but it was not too late for
her
children.

Or so she’d told
herself.

For a time she grew
more ill with her suspicions. Now, as twilight rolled across the North Sea, she turned from where she sat at the far end of the terraced gardens and gazed
at the castle.

A wit had renamed
it Wanton’s Blush because of the embarrassment of ornamentation with which the
old fortress had so lately been bedizened. It was an apt enough appellation.
For centuries she’d worn the battered armor of a guardian; now she resembled
nothing so much as a self-conscious and elderly bride. Decked out in fresh
plaster, her dark bones covered in the tuck-pointed brick, her mossy roof
replaced by gleaming slate, she’d been remade.

Even her ancient
setting had been reappointed. The gorse and wind-stunted pine that had tangled
like squabbling retainers at her feet had been replaced by curtseying ranks of
tame gardens. Only the old kitchen gardens where Janet and her children rested
remained intact. The stone walls still held the manacled limbs of ancient espaliered
pear and apple trees, while thin onion stalks glowed fluorescent in the
half-light, and marjoram and mint scented the air.

“Is it ours?” her
eldest son, Ash, asked.

Lady Carr brushed
the silky black curls from his forehead, a tender expression on her face. He
was a beautiful boy and just coming into manhood, slender and elegantly
fashioned.

“No,” she answered.
“We’re just minding her a spell until Colin McClairen is free to claim her.”

“Father says
Wanton’s Blush is his,” Ash insisted in a troubled voice.

She must be careful
of how she dealt with this. Of her three children, Ash was the most passionate
one. He felt things too strongly; he saw things too clearly. No wonder his
father avoided him. Ash had always been able to see beneath his father’s thin
veneer of charm to the emptiness within.

“She belongs to the
McClairen, laird of the clan.”

“Then where is he?”
Raine appeared suddenly beside her, taking a combative stance.

Two years younger
than his brother, Raine was already nearly as tall, answering Ash’s fine-boned
beauty with his own rough, elemental grace. He was her reckless one, impulsive
and impetuous, capable of generosity as well as ruthlessness.