White Rose Rebel

by Janet Paisley

  ‘Would you like to eat with us tonight?’

  She had not looked up. When there was no answer, she did. He was half-turned towards her, looking at her, dark hair flopping over his forehead, his peat-brown eyes a deeper darkness than the pool under the waterfall at Invercauld, looking right at her. Her stomach twisted. She dropped her eyes quickly.

  ‘No matter, if you don’t care to.’

  The letters in front of her blurred, didn’t make sense.

  ‘No, I’d like to,’ he said. ‘Tapadh leat. Thank you.’ He went on up the stairs. She stared at the incomprehensible writing, hearing every footfall. Then Elizabeth rushed over and planked herself down opposite, delighted.

  ‘Well, where did that come from? How clever of you!’

  ‘Clever?’ A sense of shock had overcome her. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking of. I’ll never be able to sit through supper.’

  ‘You will, you will. I’ll be there. You know me, I can talk for Scotland. I’ll let Jessie know, then we’ll go up and I’ll help you get ready.’ Elizabeth hurried to the kitchens, grinning. It was four weeks since Aeneas had been foisted on them.

  Upstairs in the main bedroom, Anne sat at the dressing table while Elizabeth painted her face and décolletage for her with creamy-soft white, then rubbed carmine into her cheekbones and lips. She had moved back into the room when MacGillivray left, staking her claim over Aeneas as master of the house. Behind them, her marriage bed seemed to take up more space than before, its covers slightly crumpled.

  ‘I don’t see why we’re making all this fuss,’ Anne complained. Her innards were churning. Elizabeth dressed her hair, making little curls fall by her ears on to her cheeks.

  ‘Pistols and broadswords don’t capture hearts and minds,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You want to win him over.’

  ‘I don’t want his heart, and if he had a mind, he would be at my side.’

  ‘He wants you still, to lie with you.’

  ‘Does he?’ That was pleasing. It meant she had some power over him.

  ‘Watches you all the time, coming in, going up the stairs. He’s a fish with his mouth open, waiting to be hooked. You’re too busy ignoring him to notice.’

  ‘He doesn’t imagine I want him?’ The knot in her gut tightened. Why did she feel so threatened?

  Elizabeth grinned and laid down the curling tongs.

  ‘No man ever knows what a woman wants. Not till he finds himself in her bed or out on her doorstep. Even then, he’ll believe what suits him. Now, what dress?’ She began rifling through the wardrobe. ‘Not white, we don’t want to be confrontational. Blue, what do you think?’ She held up the gown.

  ‘I’ll wear white,’ Anne said. The Jacobite colour would strengthen her nerve. The rose water on the dressing table was perfumed with the white rose of June. She rubbed some on her hands, patting it round her throat.

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Elizabeth pursed her lips. ‘Make him remember your wedding day,’ she grinned, ‘and night.’

  ‘That’s not why!’ Anne protested.

  ‘It’ll do one thing for you, another for him.’ Elizabeth made her selection and held the dress for Anne to step into.

  As her sister fastened her into it, Anne looked down at her bosom. Her breasts were exposed, almost naked.

  ‘I can’t wear this,’ she said. ‘I might as well be undressed!’

  ‘Stop thinking like a soldier,’ Elizabeth said, stepping round to look. ‘You want him to see the error of his ways.’

  ‘You’ve laced me too tight. My nipples are barely covered.’

  ‘A little titillation, that’s all,’ Elizabeth grinned, then she slapped Anne’s hand away. ‘Sguir dheth! Don’t pull it up. If you must think like a warrior, imagine this is a campaign to cause him regret.’

  ‘You mean he has no remorse?’ Anne frowned.

  ‘Of course he does,’ Elizabeth hastened to reassure her. ‘But he’s a man, so he doesn’t know it yet.’

  ‘Then he’d better soon discover it!’ Anne flounced out of the bedroom, her sweeping white skirts trailing as she swept down the stairs. Elizabeth hurried behind.

  Aeneas was already in the dining room, studying an opened bottle of wine as if he considered it of great interest. He looked up when they came in.

  ‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘you’re incredible.’ His eyes raked Anne from head to foot. Then that familiar, half-mocking smile twitched his lip. ‘Incredible,’ he repeated. ‘I’m honoured.’

  ‘And I’m hungry,’ Anne said, going straight to her seat and sitting down. He needn’t think she could be flattered and, whatever he might say, he had made an effort to be presentable himself. His long black hair still shone damp against his shirt. He wore a lace jabot at his throat and, though no weapons were allowed him, his belt buckle and the brooch which pinned his plaid were both silver.

  Elizabeth, minding everybody of their manners, waited till Aeneas drew her chair before she sat. Anne saw the nagging glance her sister cast at her but ignored it. Other things were not so easily put out of mind. When Aeneas walked round behind her to pour wine into her glass, his plaid brushed her shoulder and she could feel the warmth of his body next her as he leant forward. There was a brief hesitation before he tilted the bottle. Was it her perfume he’d noticed, or her closeness?

  She kept her head down, knowing he, too, would remember there was a time when she would have looked up and he would have bent down to kiss her, his mouth on hers, his tongue teasing her own, a time when they might have made love there and then instead of eating. He was her prisoner, she reminded herself, but when he sat down opposite, smiled across the table and raised his glass for a toast, she wondered who imprisoned whom.

  ‘The rebels,’ he said. If he was mocking, he would find no satisfaction in her response.

  ‘Victory,’ she replied, returning the smile. ‘Slàinte.’

  Jessie had outshone herself with the food. The main meal, dinner, was taken at midday, when visitors and workers often joined them. Supper was a light meal, but not this night. Oysters – whatever was Jessie thinking? Will must have been sent specially, Anne supposed. A haunch of venison, greylag goose, cottar cheese and half a dozen sweet preserves with oatcake and sugared shortbread. The conversation was strange, too many subjects to avoid: the war, the clan, Anne’s running of the estate. Their whole lives were bound up in enmity. They took refuge in the weather but avoided what would happen when it improved. They talked about the health of the stock but ignored its reduction to feed troops. They discussed Jessie and Will’s expected baby but not why the young couple were at odds. Elizabeth filled the gaps, prattling on about food, fashion and her mother’s recently discovered liking for snuff.

  Though Aeneas could have little interest in her topics, he appeared fascinated, asking questions, making good-natured jokes and ensuring their wine glasses were kept brimming. Any time Anne looked in his direction, he seemed to be watching her and she looked away, affecting disinterest, but with her face flushed. Towards the end of the meal, when he stood next her yet again, filling her glass, she had an overwhelming urge to turn her head towards him and bury her face in his midriff, just to feel the taut-ness of his abdomen against her cheek, to push aside his plaid and shirt and press her mouth against his skin, to know again the warmth and scent of him.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Elizabeth put her hand over her glass as he came round to replenish it. ‘I’ve had quite enough.’ She stood. ‘If you’ll both excuse me, I’m off to bed.’ With a swish of her skirts, she was gone. A click and the door shut tight behind her.

  Now there was just Aeneas. Anne felt a rush of terror. She could barely look him in the eye, though she could feel his close attention on her. The best thing, the only thing, to do was to get out of here before something irrevocable happened and weakened her position.

  ‘The oysters were a welcome surprise,’ he said.

  ‘The naval blockade of the coast doesn’t affect the warmth of our hospitality,’ she replied,
grasping politeness as a lifeline, staring at the ruby wine in her glass and the reflected candlelight trapped within it. She sensed him lean forward over the table and looked up into his dark, shining eyes.

  ‘I thought you might feed them to me with your fingers,’ he said slowly, his gaze hypnotic, ‘then from your mouth, with your tongue guiding them into mine, the salt of them crazing our lips for each other’s sex.’

  ‘Aeneas!’ Had he really said what she heard?

  He threw his chair back and stood, coming round beside her.

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t notice your sister’s blatant manipulation?’ He pushed his fingers into the top of her dress, between her breasts, caught the cloth and pulled her to her feet so her own chair fell backwards as she rose. ‘Wife, if this is all the husband you want, you can have him. Here, now. I don’t need the wine of our wedding, the scent of roses, or the food of our first love-making to want you.’ His arms were round her, his body pushed her back against the table edge. ‘My hunger for you, after all these months, is beyond appetite.’

  His mouth came down on hers, hard, as desperate as he said. She fought against the kiss, the brutality of it, but as his impulse yielded to urgent desire, hers did likewise. This was the husband she knew and remembered, the mouth she wanted on hers, the body she ached for pressed against hers, the man she’d missed. They kissed each other’s faces, throats, mouths again, moved their hands over each other, touching, caressing, renewing the geography of their marriage, desperate to confirm it, murmuring each other’s names and those half-spoken meaningless words of desire. When he gripped her buttocks and raised her on to the table, she pulled the front of her skirts up, blindly eager for the consummation of this force between them, that he would give himself to her, lose himself into her in that sensate heat of passion and become hers again.

  It did not come. He didn’t push his kilt aside. Instead he held her tight, close so she could barely breathe, his cheek pressed hot against her own, his body hard and tense, so tense he trembled with his own need.

  ‘Aeneas?’

  There was only the sound of great deep breaths in her ear, his chest moving against hers with each of them.

  ‘Aeneas, what’s wrong?’ She kissed his ear lobe. ‘I want you so.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, his voice rough, his breath moving her hair. He leant back, still holding her, his hips still pressed between her thighs. ‘But I don’t care to satisfy my need –’ his eyes were black as moonless night ‘– with another man’s leftovers.’

  It took a short second for what he said to fully register. With both hands on his shoulders, she thrust him back, away from her and swung her arm to smack a stinging slap across his face. The force of it jerked his head to the side. Her palm tingled, fiery.

  ‘Jessie!’ she screamed, jumping down off the table to her feet. ‘Will, Donald!’

  Donald Fraser, on house guard that evening, was first in, pistol in one hand, sword in the other. Jessie and Will were close behind.

  ‘I saw no one,’ Fraser said, alarmed. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I want Captain McIntosh locked up!’ Anne demanded. ‘This minute!’

  ‘Dè, the chief ?’

  ‘The prisoner,’ Anne snapped. She couldn’t look at Aeneas, sensed he was smiling that infuriating half-smile. If she saw it, the humiliation would force her to shoot him. ‘Put him in the cellar,’ she ordered, ‘in the wine cellar, where he might drink himself to death!’

  TWENTY-NINE

  When Elizabeth bounded down the stairs next morning, Anne was already in the hall, dressed to go out, sword and dirk buckled at her sides.

  ‘What’s all this,’ she grinned. ‘Are you fighting him off?’

  Anne wasn’t amused.

  ‘I’m going to Inverness. I’ve given Jessie and the guard instructions. Yours are that there will be no more walks.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I must’ve missed something.’ She glanced around. ‘Where’s Aeneas?’ Then she laughed. ‘Still asleep? Worn out, is he?’

  ‘Very comical,’ Anne said. ‘He was toying with us, Elizabeth, with both of us. He’s locked in the cellar, and in the cellar is where he’ll stay.’ She reached for her cloak.

  ‘No, wait,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’ll come with you.’ She dashed back upstairs to change into outdoor travelling clothes.

  While Anne waited, she had Will unsaddle Pibroch and prepare a carriage and horse instead. There was some fresh snow, wet and slushy. The carriage would be cosier for her sister in such chilly weather. Outwardly controlled and in charge, Anne seethed inside. A woman might refuse her husband, if he was brutish, drunk, unclean or annoying or because she simply didn’t want him, but this was unheard of. Men honoured their wives. That was all there was to it. He couldn’t change things to suit his peevishness.

  By the time Elizabeth came down and joined her in the coach, Anne had worked herself back into the fury which had kept her awake half the night. She pushed the bag of fresh cockades for the troops behind the seats and set off at a cracking pace. After five minutes of skelping through slush, bouncing over ruts and stones, Elizabeth unclenched her jaw.

  ‘Anne,’ she said, her teeth rattling as she spoke, ‘could we maybe not drive so fast and you could tell me what happened?’

  Mortified, Anne eased off slapping the rein and pulled back on it. She had been driving the horse too fast, dangerously so, and risking her sister as well as herself on the bends.

  ‘But he can’t do that!’ Elizabeth exclaimed when she heard Anne’s explanation. They both wracked their brains, but neither could think of a single occasion when it was said a man had refused his wife on purpose, from choice. Failure was as common as uisge beatha was popular, the one leading to the other as sure as night followed day, but that was an inescapable result of drink and ageing. A frustrated wife would normally take a lover if her husband’s over-imbibing left him unfit to please her.

  ‘That’s it!’ Elizabeth squealed, frightening the horse so it shied and nearly had the coach over anyway before Anne calmed it down.

  ‘That’s what?’ Anne asked once they were safely steady on the road again.

  ‘He said you’d made a mockery of his manhood.’

  ‘Aeneas is far from impotent,’ Anne snorted. ‘I think I can tell by now what’s going on under a man’s plaid.’

  ‘No, but he’s angry that he’d seem to be. Other folk will believe he can’t keep his wife content.’

  ‘So he punishes me?’

  ‘You took a lover.’

  ‘I’m entitled to have my needs met and Aeneas wasn’t there.’ Anne’s hackles rose. ‘He abandoned me, remember!’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Elizabeth tried to calm her. ‘But that’s not how he sees it.’

  ‘There’s another way to see it?’

  ‘Anne, just keep a tight rein for a minute. He thinks you left him, that you didn’t give him a hearing. You just rode off to war and didn’t come back.’

  Anne frowned. There was some truth in that. She’d meant to return, several times. It hadn’t worked out that way for reasons that made sense at the time, reasons he couldn’t know.

  ‘You see?’ Elizabeth pushed the point home. ‘He couldn’t be a husband to you if you weren’t there.’

  Male pride was tricky terrain. She’d taken his leadership of the clan. MacGillivray had taken him prisoner. Between them, they’d neutered his manhood. He’d lost chieftainship, his primacy as warrior, and, without any truth in it, his reputation in bed. Aeneas would hate being thought incapable.

  ‘No wonder he was cruel,’ she realized. ‘Spite is all he has left.’

  There was a considerable buzz of excitement in and around Inverness. March had gone out like the proverbial lamb and, despite the changeable damp chill, everyone knew the next battle, perhaps even the last battle, would come some time in April. There was a gaping hole where the hated Fort George had been. Finishing what the townspeople started, the Jacobites had blown it up.
They found MacGillivray directing men to billets around the square. Elizabeth jumped out of the carriage and ran to him.

  ‘MacGillivray!’ she called, gaining his attention and his open arms when he saw who it was. ‘We’ve missed you.’ And into his ear. ‘I missed you, at any rate.’ She had her arms round his neck, kissing his cheek, his mouth, but then he saw Anne, hanging back, waiting, and there was no point to any more hugs or kisses. The two of them stood looking at each other as Elizabeth unwound her arms from around MacGillivray and stepped back.

  ‘Would you take that note to the Dowager?’ Anne asked her sister.

  ‘But I want to stay here.’

  ‘And I want to have a private conversation with my commanderin-chief.’

  ‘Military?’ Elizabeth persisted.

  ‘Just take the carriage and go,’ Anne said.

  When Elizabeth flounced off, Anne appraised MacGillivray. He had stood to attention and wouldn’t look at her now.

  ‘You can’t just walk away from me, Alexander.’

  ‘I’ll serve you till I die, you know that, but I owe Aeneas.’

  ‘You can’t owe him me. I own myself.’

  ‘My life, I owe him my life.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You took him prisoner.’

  Now he looked down into her eyes, wanting to make her understand.

  ‘He could have killed me, if he’d wanted to.’

  She looked at his arm. He’d winced that day, the day he brought Aeneas to her, from a wound.

  ‘He blooded you?’

  ‘It’s healed now. He tried to make me kill him first.’

  ‘Did he ask for your life?’

  ‘He asked nothing. I offered. He wouldn’t take it.’

  Anne’s temper exploded. ‘So he humiliates us both!’