The tobacco plug Fergus spat dinged the dirt. “Campbelton’s Highland lasses are accustomed to foot servants and ladies’ maids. Ye know – high-stepping horses drawing fine carriages and a slew of overhead candles dripping hot wax at fashionable balls. The lass ye selected would have to be glaikit to agree to settle on a wild creature fer a mate.”
He was already surveying the crowd gathered on the parade grounds. “You settled for Coowee.”
“She’s hung on like a tick,” he said grumpily. “Besides, no blue-blooded father worth his salt would give over his daughter’s dowry to the likes of yewrself.”
He was not listening. His vision, keen from constantly switching between a killdeer’s tiny tracks in the mud before him and a bald eagle perched on an outcropping of the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, searched now for a hike of ruffled skirt or toss of a beribboned and lacy white cap.
The afternoon’s festivities, a holdover from a feudal era, were a pageantry of military processions and games of brute strength and skill, demonstrated by clansmen brandishing their claymores. The games were invariably accompanied by revelry and heavy drinking – and especially dancing.
Despite the royal ban in England on tartan kilts, the Highlander men of the North Carolina colony flaunted their kilts during the Sword Dance as saucily as would a maid her petticoat. His mouth twitched. That feminine-like clothing would not serve well here, what with the snakes, briars, nettles, and poison ivy. Even when in breechcloth, he was not foolish enough to venture into the woods without his wrappers.
All was not gaiety that afternoon. Five weeks prior, back in February, these Highlanders, loyalists to King George, had clashed with a combined force of North Carolina Continental and militia at the bridge over Widow Moore’s Creek and had suffered a resounding defeat. More than 850 survivors had been taken prisoner. The Royalists’ first armed conflict with the rebels on American soil signaled a mighty discontent stirring throughout all the colonies.
Feared even more at the present were the intensifying conflicts with Indian nations, chiefly the Cherokees – and chiefly the reason Jacob found himself traveling in the river port area. Since he had to be at Fort Charlotte on April 15th, that left him only four days at Campbelton to court a potential bride.
His eyes swept a semicircle, past sweating foot racers churning up the dirt along one side of the parade ground. On the other side a kilted pipe band in spats, jacket, and sporran massed for a last practice competition. Their bleating and thudding was a painful screech to his ears, accustomed to more subdued chattering of forest critters. Farther along, a horse procession with standard bearers carried flags representing their Highlander towns.
His reconnoitering gaze reigned in abruptly at a large stage erected amidst a clump of great oaks and decorated with evergreens, floral wreaths, and garlands.
On the platform, near the royal standard, two women stood. One, a middle-aged woman in tartan and feathered bonnet, was addressing the fashionably dressed gathering. She spoke in that strange tongue native to the Gaelic aggregation and to the Royal Highland 84th Regiment of Foot. As she paused, enthusiastic applauding erupted.
“Who is she?” he asked of Fergus, while his own fascinated stare remained riveted to the stage.
Squint-eyed, Fergus had a wide tongue that rolled his every word. “She be the famous Flora MacDonald. The wee lass helped Bonnie Prince Charles escape Scotland. She and her family took refuge here a couple of years back. Her menfolk were captured at the battle at Moore’s Creek.”
“No, not her. The tall one.”
“Och, that be the Lady Catriona Kincairn. But don’t be getting any ideas about her, lad. Her mother was the chieftess of the Afton clan before emigrating here. The Kincairns be the most prominent family in the area after Flora Macdonald’s, and ye could not have chosen a lass less likely to accept yer courtship.”
“Wait for me.”
Long rifle in hand, Jacob strode across the trod-down grass, his focus never taken from the winsome Catriona Kincairn. Extravagantly tall, she had soft curves that enticed and, beneath a straw beribboned hat, hair flame-red enough to heat the most bereft heart. He knew he was bent on undertaking a seemingly impossible mission. But that had never stopped him. Not in the time spent with his mother’s Wolf Clan nor that with his father’s military peers.
Flora had finished exhorting the Loyalists to a skirl of bagpipes. A blast of bugles brought the younger woman forward. As she began to speak in that strange Gaelic tongue, he reached the edge of the red-haired-and-ruddy crowd. Taller than most, he could easily espy his quarry over their heads.
Beneath a beflowered wide-brim hat, her wide-set, lively gray eyes roamed with affection among the faces of the listening Highland Gaels. Her modulated voice, warm and lyrical, spoke in appealing tones. Then she switched from Gaelic to the King’s English.
Throughout all of this, a slow tremor started in him, like a small earthquake. He was thunderstruck. He could not believe what he was experiencing. But he could not deny the feeling either. Simply, he was overwhelmed by the wonder of it – a joy too great to hope for.
Yes, this was the one he knew he would take to wife. Something in the way she held herself, in her calm and poise, bespoke a strength. A strength she would need if she were to stand by his side in the primeval forests beyond civilized society – upriver, past where Hollering Squaw Creek mated with the wide Cape Fear and where he had claimed his father’s six-hundred acres and lumber mill.
Now all he had to do was make the impossible happen and claim the maiden, as well. That she could ever come to love him was irrelevant.
“I speak in behalf of me mam today,” she was telling the crowd. Her plaid, secured at her shoulder by a silver brooch, was slung back, as if rebelling against constraint. Amazingly, the maiden’s eyes altered shades. Earlier the lively gray of quicksilver, now the gray nothingness of dead peat moss. “Me mam attends me da, who is having a bad day. He was gravely wounded at the Battle of Widow Moore’s Creek.”
Sorrow muted her voice to an almost intimate whisper, and the listeners inclined their heads or leaned forward, as if fearful of missing a single word that lilted from her lips. “Aye, and three of me brethren were taken prisoners there, as well.”
She paused, then her tone echoed the funeral dirges of old. “We Highlanders ken the painful aftermath of unsuccessful revolutions . . . our lives and property forfeited at both the battles of Fifteen and Forty-five. Perforce, after the Battle of Culloden we were obliged to sign the Oath of Allegiance to George III. We canna go against our word. Still, if we canna be of service to the American cause, me mam pleads let us not be of injury to it.”
Her impassioned gaze alighted on first one face, then another, and her voice assumed the staccato notes of a fiddle, catching the listeners by surprise. “Although we have suffered defeats before and suffered a bloody defeat at Widow Moore’s Creek only weeks ago, we Scots, the backbone of North Carolina loyalism, will never surrender our right to freedom.”
From among the throng, a cheer went up and steel blades with iron basket hilts and shagreen grips swished the air. “King George and broadswords!”
He circumvented the crowd and met her as she descended the plank steps with untutored grace, her forest-green skirts carefully raised, revealing a glimpse of green mules and sheer white stockings. As inordinately tall as he was, the top of her fiery tresses nevertheless cleared his shoulder. “You will surrender.”
Her head jerked upward. Brilliant eyes met his with a puzzled stare. “What?”
“You are not like them. Not the kind to ride the fence. Your mother may believe temperance is wise. But you do not. Temperance is not your nature. Yet, you will surrender.”
Her head tilted, so that she could peer up at him from the brim of her engagingly angled hat. Her thickly lashed lids narrowed. “Who are ye?”
“Jacob Dare. Of the Dare Plantation in Kinsfolk Landing.”
Her dismissive gaze absorbed his long, lank raven lo
cks, unpowdered and unclubbed. Then her eyes drifted lower, to his thigh-length, coarse muslin shirt, tightly belted. Next, they inventoried his pipe tomahawk, knife sheathed in deerskin holster, and Doune pistol, all secured at his waist. Lastly her gaze leisurely inventoried his skintight, travel-stained buckskin breeches and worn wrappers secured by deer sinew, both below the knees and at the ankles, above his moccasins.
Obviously, his attire did not elevate him in her opinion, because the maddening twitch of her lips told him she did not find him or his statement of any worth. Her steady eyes met his once more with a calculated indifference. “I dunna know ye.”
His amusement palled. For an awful fleeting moment, he was once more at Fort Dobbs. He was once more Colonel Martin Dare’s skinny and half-naked, half-breed bastard. Then, he shifted his long rifle and his stance and gave her an easy smile. “Tis no matter. Marry me, you will.”
At that, she shook her head of glorious red hair and chuckled. A soft trill that came from deep inside and was as lovely, he thought, as the cardinal’s in spring. Then, purposefully her trivializing stare once again appraised his wiry, sparingly built physique. “Ye have as much chance of winning me for a wife as ye would at winning the toss of the caber.”
“Then I challenge you for the right to court you should I win the caber toss.”
She grinned out right, and dimples appeared miraculously beneath her full cheekbones. “Ye are no match for our brawny Scots lads. A mon such as ye with nothing but hank and bone to him might as well petition the wee people for a pot of gold.”
“Do you accept or not?”
With a toss of her strong chin, she said, “So done.”
He pivoted away, but she called out after him, “Mind ye now, should ye come a courtin’, I would laugh ye out – “
He continued on, crossing back to Fergus, waiting patiently beneath the sycamore shade. “What do you know about caber tossing?”
The Scotsman’s hooded lids managed to widen. “Yewr jestin’, tell me true?”
~ * ~
Almost two hours later, he and Fergus made their way to a meadow adjacent to the Bluff Presbyterian Church, where a dozen or so men were already lined up at one end. On either side, a crowd had gathered to cheer, jeer, and place bets.
At once, Jacob’s gaze arrowed straight to the statuesque young woman. Where she stood seemed washed by sunlight. She had removed her hat, and the sunlight burnished her hair with the colors of metals forged by heat. Copper, gold, bronze, cinnabar – and even the rust that could dominate those other metals.
She was talking to a man of equal height, despite her high curved heels. His fair-colored natural hair was clubbed. Her smile, the tilt of her head, her body inclined slightly toward his broad one, all these told Jacob she was favorably disposed to the handsomely attired gentleman.
Removing his mustard-colored linen coat, the man passed it along with his tricorn to her. Like most upper-class Tidewater planters, his suits had obviously been ordered custom-made to his measurements in London. Suits such as he wore had to have been specified cut from expensive fabrics, embellished with imported buttons, and made without lining to stave off inordinate perspiration caused by the colony’s humidity.
He said something that brought a transforming smile to her face. With that, he blew her a playful kiss and then set off in the direction of the caber-tossing arena. The way he sauntered, never glancing down, told Jacob this solidly built man was supremely confident that the ground, and the world, would always rise up to meet him.
“Get yon Barrett Fairfax to fetch ye yewr cable,” Fergus grumbled. “Mayhap, he will throw his back out.”
“What do you know of him?”
“Dunna underestimate this competitor, lad. Whether for the tossing of the caber or wooing of yon bonny lass. The Sassenach sold his Lieutenant Colonel’s commission to become a tobacco factor. Educated at Oxford, he was.”
And that, that one advantage, therein set Barrett Fairfax far above mere mortals who comprised most of the colonists – but not, in Jacob’s studied estimation, above himself.
“Now, listen to me, lad, ye may be lang and skinny as a string bean, but the mighty width of yewr shoulders will be an asset. Tis the running that twenty or so feet, the momentum afore ye toss the caber, that will matter more than strength.”
Jacob’s eye was on Fairfax who was approaching. The man possessed the stiff carriage, as straight as a saber, reflective of a born soldier. Jacob passed Fergus his twelve-pound flintlock rifle, which normally he kept with him at all times and could fire and reload on the run, which no British soldier could do – not even Fairfax.
Totally ignoring Fergus, the energetic Fairfax nodded at Jacob and allowed a smile, however briefly. “I understand you scout for Caswell’s colonial militia?”
Jacob said nothing, only waited, and returned Fairfax’s condescending stare with his own blank one.
Nonplussed, Fairfax was forced to fill the silence. “That makes us vying not only to determine the best man at the caber toss today, but also vying to determine which side shall dominate here – Crown or Colonial.”
Then Lady Catriona had refrained from sharing with Fairfax that she now had an additional suitor vying for her hand. Interesting. “I have no loyalty to governments.”
Fairfax’s muscled frame stiffened. “There is such a thing as duty and honor to our country above all else.”
He met Fairfax’s perturbed glare with an expressionless look that might, or might not, have been challenging. “There is such a thing as a man’s right to decide for himself. Beholden to none.”
“That consideration is subordinate to the interests of the Crown.” The man, who was maybe thirty, emitted a grunt of disgust and shouldered past him.
For all Fergus’s advice about the best form to use in the caber toss, the mere cupping upright in one palm at elbow height the seventeen feet of tapered tree trunk, weighing more than 175 pounds, was a feat in itself.
Jacob watched one after another competitor hurl the caber end-over-end so that it fell, if lucky, with the larger end hitting the ground first and then the tapered end falling perpendicular to the tosser at the twelve o’clock mark.
After each toss, applauding ensued. When Fairfax took his turn, it seemed the spectators’ breath suddenly ceased, as if they had attended the week-long games solely to be a part of this ten-second demonstration of mythological performance. Fairfax took his running steps. His shoes, of the best London-made cordovan, anchored in the turf. With a mighty surge of his last step, he hefted and tossed the caber.
After those ten seconds, Fairfax clearly bested all previous competitors. Cheers erupted. Fairfax waved at the crowd and executed a brief bow in the Lady Catriona Kincairn’s direction.
Knowing that the winning toss had been witnessed, spectators were already drifting away, toward the Maide Leisg – the Lazy Stick competition. Jacob would not glance at Lady Catriona, to see if she had stayed or was departing on Fairfax’s arm.
His turn was next. He had studied Fairfax’s effort, noting even the man’s approach to the perilous toss-line. Its divots dug up by the boots and brogans of all the previous competitors could easily trip up the unwary.
And yet . . . could he not make those divots work for him rather than against him?
Sweat plastered his muslin shirt to his back It took all his strength and coordination just to keep the caber upright as he hoisted the nearly two-hundred pounds in his palm. With the weight balanced against his shoulder, his moccasins churned out the twenty yards’ approach.
Planting his feet solidly in the divots for purchase, he flipped the caber up and out – and watched with lung action suspended as the caber spun like a mere throw of his tomahawk through the air. After what seemed interminable time, the caber landed. It tipped over exactly at the twelve o’clock mark and more than an ell’s length past that of Fairfax’s.
Silence stunned the afternoon. Next, exuberant whoops rang out. Only then did Jacob allow his gaz
e to seek the striking young woman. Her dismayed glance clashed with his. Abruptly, she pivoted toward an equally dismayed Barrett Fairfax and accepted the arm he was slow to proffer.
If Jacob thought the caber toss required all the physical skills he possessed, wooing the young woman next would require all the social skills he did not possess.
The story continues…The Calling of the Clan
About Parris Afton Bonds
Parris Afton Bonds is the mother of five sons and the author of more than thirty-five published novels. She is the co-founder of and first vice president of Romance Writers of America. Declared by ABC’s Nightline as one of three best-selling authors of romantic fiction, the award winning Parris Afton Bonds has been featured in major newspapers and magazines as well as published in more than a dozen languages. She donates her time to teaching creative writing to both grade school children and female inmates. The Parris Award was established in her name by the Southwest Writers Workshop to honor a published writer who has given outstandingly of time and talent to other writers. Prestigious recipients of the Parris Award include Tony Hillerman and the Pulitzer nominee Norman Zollinger.
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Captured Hearts and Stolen Kisses Page 45