That was when she noticed the horse—whom Ewan had always characterized as having a soft mouth—was bridled with a double curb bit. “There’s your trouble,” she muttered under her breath as Robbie finally got His Grace well away, for as much as she wanted to give Cameron a sharp piece of her mind on the care of his valuable animal, she wanted to delay his departure even less. Clearly, Malcolm Cameron was as uncomfortable in Ewan’s saddle as he was unprepared to fill Ewan’s shoes.
But Greer had much better put her mind to filling her own saddle. “Robbie, would you fit the pack baskets to Dunnie while I saddle Nicnevin.”
“Aye, mileddy.”
Greer did not even bother to change into the beautiful riding habit she had had fitted in the latest Continental style in Dresden—time was of the essence and her sturdy wool plaids would stand her in good stead, even if the weather changed, or her trip pushed into evening. And her gentle, wounded friend in the glen would not like her any better if she were fashionable.
She was waiting outside the kitchens for Dunnie’s saddle baskets to be packed with the foods Mrs. Mallach mercifully provided without further comment when her Papa found her.
“What’s all this?”
The compulsion to lie, to say it was nothing more than a charity basket, lay hot on her tongue. But while an omission was one thing, a blatant lie was entirely another, and Greer had too much respect for her father—and for herself—to point herself down that tangled road.
“It’s for the young man from the road—you remember, the injured lad from Crieff that the moorkeeper Dewar was seeing to?”
“Aye. Did Dewar not reunite him with his family?”
“Nay. It’s very strange. He’s abandoned the lad”—so much easier to speak of her friend to her father as if the injured man were just a lad—“to that old stone bothy just up the glen from the upland loch.”
Her father knew the remote spot. “Alone?”
“Aye. So I’m taking him food.” Greer hesitated for only a moment before she confessed all. “And there’s something about him, Papa—something fine that puts me in mind of Ewan.”
“Greer.” Her father’s tone was discouraging.
“Really, Papa. There is something noble and fine in him, despite his rough speech and appearance. Something that speaks of a strength of character, despite the ordeal he has suffered—or perhaps because of it.” Something that spoke to her and drew her eye like a majestic stag in a glen.
“My darling girl.” Papa’s tone was more than discouraging—it was adamant. “I know how attached you were to Ewan Cameron—I was as well. He was a singular individual, a wonderful young man, and your marriage to him would have given me great delight. But it is not to be. You must put away this flight of fancy. You must.”
“Papa, I’m not being fanciful, truly.”
“Greer, as glad as I am to see you out and about and taking a proper interest in Dalshee once more, you really ought to put your mind to what matters—to you and your future. You must turn your attention to other prospects, other suitors.” He touched her chin in a gesture of parental fondness. “I’m not getting any younger, my dearest, and neither are you. His Grace, Malcolm Cameron, renewed those sentiments he expressed a fortnight ago.”
“Papa.” Her voice held its own desperate warning—it was too soon.
“Why not?” he asked.
She couldn’t exactly say what it was about Malcolm that put her off, but she was like a cat with her fur rubbed the wrong way, all tail-swishing annoyance. Mama always said she was too quick to judge, too hard on everyone, including herself. She held everyone to the same impossible standard to which she held herself—to be like Ewan.
And of course it was a flaw in her character, this tendency to dismiss, this rush to judgment—but that did not help the prickly sensation of unease creeping up her spine like a stealthy fox.
“Promise me you will consider, if not him, then someone else.”
Greer knew she would not be given leave to go until she agreed. She did so on a sigh. “I promise.” And she always kept her promises.
Papa kissed her forehead. “I know it is hard, my dearest. I can see that. But what cannot be avoided must be faced with equanimity. You are young and will recover. You must. Your future, and the future of Dalshee must rely upon that.”
“Aye, Papa.” Greer knew he was right, but she did not want to think of the future—she only wanted to think about now. It was easier that way.
But was it wrong to want to hold back the inevitable tide of grief Ewan’s funeral was sure to occasion? Was it uncharitable to use her injured friend as an escape from her cares? She knew she could not put the future off forever, but only for a little while.
Surely that could not hurt.
And yet she could not stop thinking about the things that Malcolm Cameron had said—the accusations he had made against Ewan. Had Ewan been as illiberal with his funds, or as ill-chosen in his friends, as his cousin alleged? It was possible—he had always been more generous to others than himself. He had certainly always been generous to her. Or so she wanted to think.
Was it her grief—the crushing disappointment of having all her hopes for the future overturned—that made her want to cast Ewan as a paragon of virtue? Although she had never thought he was perfect. He had flaws enough—as did she—that he had never tried to conceal from her. Or so she thought.
The doubts were maddening. No wonder she wanted the concrete action of charging up the moor as if she were riding to the rescue—it was something she was sure was right.
Greer found her new friend dozing in the late afternoon sun on the bench where she had left him a few hours before, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his shaggy head tipped back, resting against the stone wall of the bothy. His eyes were closed, but his still-bruised face was turned up to the warmth of the early autumn sun.
He ought to have been the very picture of rest and recovery. He ought to have looked calm and serene in the easy arms of sleep. But there was something tense, something watchful about him, even in repose.
“Hallo?” She called to wake him. “I’ve brought you food, just as I promised.”
He woke with a start, jolting to uncomfortable, probably painful, consciousness, while the silent dog came quickly forward to greet her with gyrations of delight. “Good lad, wee Gent.” Greer dismounted, and let the sweet wee beastie jump into her arms. It felt good to hold the demonstrative little dog again, and to see that she had done the right thing in trusting this man with Ewan’s beloved pet. “Has he been keeping you good company?”
“Aye.” He pushed to his feet as his face lit with recognition and pleasure. “You came back.”
“Aye. Just as I said I would. I always keep my word.” It was the granite bedrock upon which she had been taught to build her character, as solid and true as the Highland hills.
“Thank you, —” He paused, searching, his hands clenching momentarily into tense fists. “Sorry. I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Not at all. I’m Greer,” she told him. “And not to worry if you still can’t place yours,” she said with a cheerful briskness she did not exactly feel. “We’ll think of something else to call you.”
He closed his eyes, and clenched his fists again, as if he were trying to physically grasp something. “I can’t place it. It’s lost.” He shook his head. “Some words are fixed in my brain—Crieff, Dalshee, Dewar, Gent, and now Greer”—he said the last with patent pleasure—“and others have simply wandered away.”
The terrible blow to his head must have disordered his brain a very great degree. How devastating must it be not to know—to have one’s very identity stripped away.
“Well.” She forced a confident smile to her face. “Hopefully the condition is only temporary. So we must help you recover. I’ve brought all sorts of good things for you—fruit and fresh bread, and a ham from Dalshee’s larder.” She let Gent down and set to unloading the densely packed, linen-wrapped parcels Mrs.
Malloch had diligently prepared. “We’ll have you back to fighting weight in no time.”
“Fighting weight?” His brow furrowed in wariness, and he looked down at his still-clenched fists in dawning horror. “Do I fight?”
“Oh, I have no idea.” Though he certainly did have the look of a losing prizefighter—all bruised hands and face and broken nose. And he was an uncommonly tall, with a fighter’s long reach.
Gracious but they seemed to grow them big in these glens—Ewan had often remarked upon his towering height. This lad looked to be something well over six feet. The similarities were so marked, that she grew surer they could not be mere coincidence. “I meant you will recover your weight and strength. The food will help that.”
“Oh, aye. I ken.” He frowned again, and closed his eyes, as if thinking pained him. “Fighting weight,” he repeated before he opened his eyes. “Fourteen stone.”
“Oh?” Fourteen stone was the weight of a well-muscled, fit man. “Were you fourteen stone once? Before your accident?” She didn’t know what else to call it, though he had said the circumstance of his injury was no accident.
“Aye. I think so.” He winced up one eye, as if he were not quite sure of his answer. Then he scrubbed his hand into his shaggy, uneven hair, as if he could physically chafe the memory out of his head. “It’s lost in my cracked brain.”
“Oh, no.” A chill of apprehension spread across her skin like an ill wind. Perhaps he really was a prizefighter—they were said to go mad from the blows. But he seemed too gentle, too thoughtful, even with his present deficiencies, for such a brutal sport. Too much like Ewan, who made haste slowly. “Do you remember how it happened? How your head got cracked?”
“Nay.” Even with that simple word, she could hear the frustration, and even loneliness, in his voice. “I only remember…” He spread his hands in a gesture that took in the bothy and the hills and the whole of the glen. “…Crieff.”
“Yes. You’re a local lad,” she supplied, using Dewar’s words.
As if such scant information would encourage him.
He didn’t seem encouraged—he seemed resigned. He shrugged as if that information made no difference. “Aye. A crack-brained local lad.”
“Well, then.” Greer turned her mind to practical solutions—if she could not recover his memory, she could at least help him recover his strength. “Then when you are feeling stronger—when you’ve gotten the whole of that ham tucked away—we shall have to venture down to the village, to see if anyone there can remember you.”
“The village?”
“The village of Crieff,” she clarified. “It lies about ten or eleven miles south.” She pointed across the loch. “In that direction.”
“South,” he repeated, as if he were firming that word, or idea, or concept in his head. And then he turned. “East.” He pointed, and then changed his stance. “North.” He faced each new direction. “And west.”
“Yes—the cardinal directions.” How astonishing to watch him recover information that she took for granted—an understanding that was all but bred into her bones. “Is it coming back?”
He stood still for a moment, as if that might help his memory, and then he shrugged. “Compass rose. What is that?”
“That is what we call the formal depiction of those four cardinal directions. Sometimes it looks more like a four-pointed star, or the rays of a sun.”
“Aye, I ken. The picture came to mind,” he explained. “Then the words. Sometimes they’re together. Sometimes not.”
It was the longest speech she had yet heard him make. “Then that is progress. With time, and encouragement, more will come back,” she said with more confidence than she felt. “It is just a matter of time.”
“Aye.” He nodded, though he didn’t sound convinced. “T’was what Dewar said.”
“Then it is sure to be true.” Though if Dewar knew this lad—and surely he could identify him by now—why did he not simply tell him who he was? Why did he bring him all the way up to this remote bothy to heal on his own?
It made no sense.
Unless… Unless Dewar had good reason to keep him away from the rest of Crieff, and the rest of society. Unless Dewar also knew why the fellow had been beaten to within an inch of his life.
Mama’s warning that good men were seldom set upon for no reason, while bad men were invariably set upon for very good ones, echoed in Greer’s ear.
As much as she wanted his injured young man to be Ewan, the bald truth was he could indeed be anyone, from a prizefighter to even a murderer. Even if he did seem as gentle as a lamb, he was a stranger, set apart from his people quite on purpose, it would seem. And she was alone with this disheveled, “crack-brained” stranger a good eight miles of windswept, empty moorland from home.
She ought to have been more cautious. She ought to have been less fanciful, drat it. “I can’t stay, I’m afeared. Just wanted to make sure you had food.” She busied herself unloading the rest of the carefully packed goods—the apples, and jars of berries, and stout loaves of bread, along with the ham and a roasted chicken. “I should eat the chicken first, were I you—the ham will keep longer as it’s been cured and spiced. And there’s a crock of butter, and some jam, for your bread, along with some hard cheese.”
She lined the foodstuffs up on the stone bench—it would be foolish to put herself in the close confines of the bothy with him. “Will Dewar be back to see you soon, do you think?”
“Hope so. Though he’s not so nice as you.”
She smiled despite her best intentions not to be charmed by him, or fooled into misjudging him as a harmless, gentle giant—even below “fighting weight,” he was easily twice her size. “Good.” But she was going to Crieff on the morrow. She would speak to the moorkeeper then and decide if anything more ought to be done. “Then I’ll bid you good day. And good luck.”
She swung herself into the saddle, intending to leave straightaway, without any fuss, but he had followed her to the mare, and even took up Dunnie’s lead to hand to her, so she didn’t have to bend out of her saddle to do so. “Thank you.”
“I thank you.” He stepped back and laid his hand across his heart in an entirely genuine gesture of thanks. “For the food. And Gent. For being so kind. I am most grateful.” And then he bowed as elegantly as a French courtier.
Manners maketh the man, her mama had always said. But for once in her life, Greer didn’t know what to make of the man before her.
But she could always trust her heart. “I’ll come back,” she vowed. “It might be some days. But I’ll come again, I promise.” And because she had spoken too solemnly, she smiled, and tried for humor. “So I can see if you’re well enough to give me back my dog.”
He smiled then, a smile that curved up one side of his mouth with rueful charm. “Now, I don’t know if I want to get that well.”
Lord Ewan Cameron
Palazzo Lanfredini
Florence, Italy
1 February, 1787
Dearest Ewan,
I would value any gift that you should give me ~ and how you spoil me ~ first books and now this! Sunrise! The painting is in itself exquisite, but, oh, that it made you think of me is beyond thoughtful. Mama is concerned for the impropriety of the nude bathers depicted in the clear, green water of the river, but I think they are beautiful in their wild, natural beauty, and find the picture quite, quite lovely. I adore it both for itself, and for you, yourself, and ~ dare I say it? ~ for your thinking of me when you looked at those frolicking bathers.
I am becoming quite beholden to you for a vast deal of my education—in less frolicking matters, your mention of Descartes sent me to my father’s shelves, and a long, determined read of the Discourse on Method. My French is of course not so good as yours must now be, but I found by the end of my reading that I rather favor your treatise ~ that man, or woman for that matter, should not be the sole possessor, nor the complete master over nature. Indeed, I believe it to be quite impossible. No mat
ter what man’s improvements or changes, no matter the quantity of the stone or paving, nature will find a way ~ along the garden wall, where the gardener has carefully trained the apple trees into precise espaliers, seeds will find a way to take root, even somewhere so inhospitable to their growth as the steep vertical wall. And any walk through an old abandoned castle or monastery will show us that nature ~ wind, rain, earth and growth ~ will eventually subsume the building stones, and that a river shall find its course no matter the dams that force it into deep pools.
But enough of philosophy. Today I will look at my new painting by Monsieur Claude and be so very, very happy. I will hope fervently that this letter finds you the same. I remain,
Your Greer
Chapter 12
No sooner had the lass, “Greer”—he said her name again out loud, to savor the tart, lemony taste of it in his mouth—disappeared over the crest of the ridge, than another voice hailed him.
“I see ye’ve had a visitor.”
“Aye.” He turned away from the last sight of her to greet Dewar, who appeared as if out of thin air. “I have.” Even he could hear the defensive defiance in his voice. “The lass gave me the dog. And brought food.”
He set himself to endure Dewar’s lecture, but it didn’t come.
“She did, did she?” Dewar whistled so the dog would come forward, wagging his feathery tail. “Damned if she didn’t.”
“Gent, he is. To keep me company, the lass said.” Though he hadn’t felt alone until she came, with her smiles and her dog and her loveliness. “I like him.”
“Weel, aye. But she’s no lass, lad—she’s a leddy,” the old fellow said as if the difference were important. “Leddy Greer of Dalshee.” Dewar looked at him quizzically for a long moment, as if testing the limits of his memory.
“Aye, Greer. I remember her.”
“Do ye? Do ye remember her frae the road—she’s the one as found ye? Or do ye remember anythin’ of ’er frae afore?”
MAD, BAD & DANGEROUS TO MARRY (The Highland Brides Book 4) Page 10