Spellbound & Seduced

by Marguerite Kaye

  ‘Witchy, Witchy, Witchy, come out and play.’

  Dragging herself out of her bed that right now she would have given all she possessed to be able to hide in until she died, struggling into her clothes, feeling like the old crone most people imagined a witch to be, Jura opened the cottage door.

  ‘Me ma said can you come and look at the bairn, for she’s not feeding proper.’

  ‘And mine says can you bring some of that stuff for measles for our Jamie.’

  ‘And Mister MacSween the factor is down with the gout again.’

  ‘And please, before you come with us can we play the snowball game?’

  ‘And can I play with Brianag?’ lisped the smallest girl, tugging on Jura’s sleeve.

  Five glowing faces looked up at her expectantly. They could not see the fog of grey hopelessness that enveloped her, nor the tight, painful bands that were squeezing her heart. Their beaming smiles, that would normally have made her day, now made Jura acutely conscious she’d never have a bairn of her own smile at her in such a way. Frantically, she tried to swallow the huge lump in her throat, tried to smile back, for it would not do to let them see Witchy was upset.

  ‘Wait here and I’ll get my magic wand,’ she said, earning herself an ecstatic cheer. The snowball game was one of the silly tricks she did only for the bairns, a simple spell to turn snow into multicoloured showers of light.

  Returning with the brightly painted stick which the little clutch of ragged bairns believed to be magical, she managed to put on a brave face, leading them in a dance round the cottage, encouraging them to chant gibberish while she said the real spell under her breath and Brianag watched from the safety of the window ledge.

  Gales of delighted laughter filled the air as the children threw snowballs that exploded into glittering rainbows in mid flight. The children could not have been happier. Watching, her face pasted into a rigid pastiche of a smile, Jura could not have been more devastated.

  Later, as she made her way through the village, besieged by people in need of her care, Jura told herself that she was coping, that she would continue to cope, that the pain would recede and the pleasure she had once taken from helping these needy people would return. It astounded her that she could walk among them, carrying on with her work, listening to their gossip and their cares, and that they could be quite unaware that she was drowning in sorrow. It would pass, she told herself. It would pass as she added a cheese, some oatcakes, a black pudding to her basket. She would not take payment in coin, but she knew the pride of these Highlanders well enough not to turn down their offerings.

  It would be Christmas Day soon. There was much talk in the village of the new laird, of whether he would hold the annual ceilidh. Returning to her cottage at dusk, Jura’s footsteps slowed, for she dreaded its emptiness now. It was no longer her sanctuary, but the place where Lawrence had once been. No one in the village had asked her how she would celebrate their special day. No one asked her to share it. Not a single soul enquired whether she would attend the ceilidh.

  Loneliness swamped her. ‘It’s my own fault,’ she told Brianag as she poured the cat a saucer of cream. ‘They think I am happy with my own company, because I’ve never said I’m not.’ She poured hot water over raspberry and camomile leaves for tea. ‘And I am,’ she said forlornly. ‘I will be. Once I have become accustomed to him not being here.’ A single tear plopped into her cup. ‘I miss him.’ The silver cat twined around her ankles. ‘I miss him quite a lot,’ Jura whispered. ‘It hurts, Brianag. What should I do? He can’t love me, because he’s never loved anyone, he said so. Though he did say that I am different, Brianag, and I know it is wrong, but for a moment, when he said that, I felt so—happy!’ The cat set about cleaning its face. ‘I know,’ Jura said, wringing her hands, ‘he can’t love me, any more than I can love him, because my spells never fail me, so whatever it is I’m feeling isn’t love, and anyway the point is that I almost don’t mind for myself, but I don’t want him to be unhappy. I can’t bear him to be unhappy. Only, if he stays here even for a few days, weeks, our paths are bound to cross. So he has to forget all about me, only how can he—oh!’

  Jura leapt from the settle so quickly that she almost tripped over Brianag, who gave her a haughty look. ‘A piece of the subject, a piece of the subject,’ Jura said feverishly. She had his hairbrush, she remembered. It was quickly retrieved. In the still room, her eyes glittered gold. Her hair sat about her face like a cloud, as if there were lightning in the air, as it always did when her powers were at their most potent. She tugged at a stone in the wall above the little pot-bellied stove, and from the cavity behind pulled out a small book with a faded blue cover. It took her some moments to find the correct page. Carefully, meticulously, she read the words written in her great-grandmother’s spidery writing.

  As she began to chant, the air in the still room thickened. She blew out the candle and held the hairbrush in both her hands, pressed against her heart—the heart that she felt would break as she said the words. The heart that would surely be torn from her if she did not. Clearly, slowly, painstakingly, she said the words.

  A week passed before he saw her again. A week in which he told himself he didn’t miss her, he didn’t want her, he was better off without her, and utterly failed to persuade himself of any of it. He missed her desperately. He felt as if he had lost a part of himself. The vague feeling he remembered from being lost in the woods that day he met her, of seeking something different from his life, took a quite definite shape. It was Jura who was missing. There was a shape, her shape, inside him, which only she could fill.

  But she had made it quite clear she could never do so. During the day, Lawrence went about his new business in a trance, grateful only for the small mercy that since none knew him, none could be aware of the dramatic change in him. At night, he walked. The castle grounds. The battlements. Up and down the Great Hall. He walked into the early hours of the morning, desperate to wear himself out, retiring to bed empty, drained, lying sleepless, for it was in bed, with the cold space at his side he had always cherished, that he felt most lost.

  It was his factor who first mentioned Jura, and Lawrence discovered that despite the snow, his presence had been well-known in the village long before his arrival at the castle. ‘Is it true,’ Lachlan MacSween asked lasciviously, ‘that she dances naked at the full moon? She can make a potion which will have a man as potent as a prize bull, ye ken. They say…’

  ‘They say a lot more than their prayers.’ Lawrence had exclaimed, and his factor, though he drew him a knowing look, said no more. In the village it was different. The people spoke of Jura with a mixture of awe and admiration, a touching gratitude from those whose pains she had eased, or whose bairns she had helped into the world. The children called her Witchy, but it was they who spoke of her most warmly, as a source of fun and games and gingerbread. Picturing her playing in the snow with these ragged little urchins, Lawrence felt an odd pain in his heart. A wee one, with amber eyes and amber hair, the image of her mother, danced into his head before he could catch her. When he returned to the castle, he looked hard at his sketches and plans, and realised what was missing was a nursery.

  But when he saw her today, tending to the smiddy’s blistered hands, she’d looked at him so strangely. When he took her aside, told her that his feelings had only matured in her absence, she’d shrunk from him. Hurt, horribly hurt, he had stormed off.

  The huge timepiece above the stone fireplace of the castle’s Great Hall chimed the hour. Four o’clock in the morning. Christmas Eve. Tomorrow was the day of the ceilidh that his factor insisted he must hold if he were to make good with his tenants. He had never felt less like attending a party. Lawrence threw himself down in the ornately carved chair of black oak at the head of the table. His detailed drawings for the renovations to the castle were spread out before him, but they gave him no pleasure.

  He dropped his head into his hands and groaned. There was no doubt in his mind now. He’d been
over it and over it and over it for hours every long, sleepless night. There were two things he’d discovered since coming to the Highlands that you just couldn’t explain. Magic was one. Love was the other. He was in love with Jura. He didn’t know how he knew it, he couldn’t say why he was so sure, but he knew. He just knew, with a certainty as unshakeable as the foundations of his newly acquired castle. He loved her.

  ‘Which leaves me precisely where?’ he asked himself as the clock struck the quarter with a painful grating noise. ‘She says she can’t love me. She says she doesn’t want to see me again. She says she’s bewitched by her own spell. She won’t undo the spell.’ He counted each point off on his fingers. ‘Not to forget the curse,’ he muttered.

  But when they had been together all that time at the cottage, he couldn’t believe she had felt nothing for him. And today, mixed in with the shock of seeing him, and that expression he didn’t want to think about, surely there had been pain there too? Lawrence pushed his chair back and began to stride about the room. ‘Am I fooling myself? Just because I feel something, doesn’t mean it has to be returned. It can happen, my own father was proof of that.’

  He went over it all again from the beginning, counting back his points on his fingers. ‘Not to forget the curse,’ he said again, folding back his pinkie. ‘Not to forget the damned curse.’ The curse that Jura believed could not be broken. He would die if he loved her, so she would not let him love her. Which meant he’d been looking at it the wrong way round! What if she loved him? What if that was what frightened her?

  Lawrence punched the air. Without stopping to think, he ran out of the castle, leaving the huge oak door wide to the elements, into the night, across the slush and mud of the fields, over the rickety bridge and the rushing river to Jura’s cottage.

  Chapter Six

  It would snow again soon. The sky was ominous. As Brianag disappeared into the night, Jura latched the window. It had snowed every Christmas Eve she could remember. Lonely as she had been these last years since her mother died, she had never felt quite so alone as she did now, knowing that Lawrence was at the castle making preparations for the ceilidh, talking to his factor, laughing with the villagers and that ancient steward of his, and all without her.

  The shock of seeing him today had been severe, though nothing like the shock of realising that her spell had not worked. Which led her, finally, to admit that the spell she had relied on to protect her had not worked either. She could no longer deny her feelings. She loved him, and the knowledge thrilled her and terrified her. She was in love. All her life, she had relied on magic to keep her safe. She had thought her powers supreme. She had not thought that there could be another, stronger power.

  So lost was she, seesawing between the wild excitement of loving and the terror of it, that she neither heard nor sensed Lawrence’s footsteps. Thinking that the knock on the door presaged a demand for her services as midwife, for one of the women she’d seen today was well over her time, Jura grabbed her shawl. ‘Oh!’ For the second time in her life, the man of her dreams stood on the doorstep.

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘No! What do you want?’

  ‘Why aren’t you asleep? You look tired.’

  ‘So do you.’ In fact, he looked quite wild, with his hair curling every way, his waistcoat hanging open, and a day’s stubble on his cheek. He wore neither greatcoat nor coat. He had no neckcloth and no hat or gloves either. She had never seen him look so dishevelled nor so attractive. Nor so nervous. Jura pulled the door wide. ‘You’d better come in before you freeze.’

  ‘Yes.’ Exhilaration had carried him like Mercury, the winged messenger, from the Great Hall to Jura’s cottage, oblivious of the dark and the sleet and the howling gale that made the trees moan like soldiers dying on a battlefield. Abruptly conscious of his unshaven and partially clothed state, Lawrence realized, even more worryingly, that he hadn’t a clue what he was going to say, and that telling his beloved that she looked tired hadn’t been the best of opening gambits. ‘I haven’t been to bed.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘I haven’t been able to sleep. Not really. Not since you and I—and then today when I saw you, and you looked at me as if I was some sort of devil…’

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t that. It was just that I thought—I thought you might have—you should have forgotten me.’

  ‘Forgotten! I’ve been able to do nothing but think about you since I left. I can’t think about anything but you. Every time I speak to someone I wonder if you’ve tended to them, or helped with the birth of their bairns. All these plans for the ceilidh, all these strange customs and traditions I must learn, the tangle that is the law here, every time I wrestle with it all, I wonder what you would advise me. I hadn’t realized how much we laughed together until it stopped. I hadn’t realized how soundly I slept with you by my side until you weren’t there. How could I have forgotten you? I love you, Jura.’

  ‘Lawrence don’t. I can’t bear it. Please don’t.’

  ‘I have to. I can’t not speak. I love you. I don’t know why I do, or how I can be so sure, but I do, I am. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind at all that it’s you, and will always be you that I need, want, love. You are the one I will always be faithful to because I would find it impossible not to be faithful to you. I don’t even know what it is that I love about you, except that you’re you and that’s enough. I love you. And I know you love me, Jura, it’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t,’ Jura cried in anguish. ‘I don’t understand it. One failure I could perhaps—though I have never failed before—but two! It’s not possible.’

  ‘Two?’

  ‘When you left, I cast another spell because I was afraid that I was falling in love with you. You were to forget me. It was there in great-grandmother’s book, a spell to slay love, and her magic has never, ever failed me.’

  Lawrence laughed. The soft, husky laugh that made her shiver. He pulled her into his arms. ‘So your powers have failed you?’

  Jura nodded miserably.

  ‘Twice? Which means the first spell failed too? You love me?’

  ‘Yes. I do, Lawrence, I can’t help it, but I do, and I am so, so, terribly sorry, but I will go away from here, you’ll forget about me, and then you’ll be safe.’

  ‘Jura, darling Jura, don’t cry. You’re not going anywhere, and nor am I.’

  ‘But you’ll die.’

  ‘Part of me will be dead without you. Death could not be more painful than a life without you. Jura, you said a true and perfect love will break the cycle. I love you truly and perfectly. I believe you love me in the same way.’

  ‘I do. I really, truly do, but…’

  ‘Twice now, love has proven more powerful than your magic. I’m willing to take a chance on it succeeding a third time, and if it doesn’t, I’d rather have a year with you than a lifetime without.’

  ‘You love me,’ Jura said, gazing up at him in awe. ‘You really do love me. Oh Lawrence, I love you so much.’

  Their lips came together, their mouths clinging to each other as if they would kiss forever. They kissed, kneeling beside the fire, peeling away the layers of clothing which separated them, kissing each newly exposed piece of skin as if for the first time.

  They sat face to face, breast to chest, their legs entwined, in front of the fire, stroking, kissing, she stroking the solid length of him pressed into her belly, the damp heat of her sex moulded to the root of him. Their kisses became more purposeful, hungry, tongue thrust against tongue, lips devouring lips, fingers feverishly skimming, stroking, clutching.

  Lawrence laid Jura down, kissing her nipples, her breasts, her belly, along the crease at the top of her thigh, into the slick heat of her sex. She cried out as his tongue flicked over the swollen core of her, tensed when he kissed her there, licked her there, suckled and kissed her again. She was icy cold, save where she was burning hot. She bucked as he licked her. He cradled her bottom and kisse
d her again and she came. Different from before it was, her release was more like an unravelling than a spiral, a communion rather than a letting go. He was with her. She was with him. She cried out his name, over and over and over as he kissed his way back, up the crease of her other thigh, her belly, her breasts, then her mouth, and this time their kiss was a merging.

  Lawrence entered her slowly. She wrapped her legs around him, easing him into her, up and up. When she thought he could go no higher he tilted her and rocked into her, little pulses like the aftermath of her climax, which made the aftermath another beginning. Pulsing, rocking, pulsing, his shaft filling her, her muscles stretching for him to fill her further. Then out, slowly he withdrew before thrusting back in again. Jura shuddered. He moved more urgently now, thrusting harder and higher, intensifying her shudders into spasms, into a whirlwind of feeling, until his final thrust touched a point high inside her and she cried out as he pulsed, poured himself into her, calling out her name in an agony of ecstasy and they found in that moment that two truly can become one.

  The Yule log, more like half a tree, burned bright in the hearth of the Great Hall. Garlands of holly and fir were strung along the high stone mantel, woven around the carved lintels above the doors. Upon the huge oak table with its five trestles set at right angles to it lay the remains of a magnificent repast. Venison and ox, beef and mutton, the villagers of Dunswaird had feasted until their bellies threatened to burst out of their Sunday-best clothes.

  Pewter beer jugs were replaced by the welcome clink of whisky bottles. For the bairns and the righteous—of which there was a small coterie—there was lemonade, made from sour yellow fruits sent all the way from London. For each of the bairns too, there was a sixpence. And for all there was clootie dumpling.