by Mary Daheim
“My Lord,” Niall began, now spreading out his hands as if in supplication, “forgive me, but the lady-lass is so fair ….”
Fraser made a slashing motion with the riding crop. “Enough. You’ll never mention this incident. Never.” He swung the crop once more, this time within an inch of Niall’s face. “Understand?”
Niall nodded slowly, then turned away from both Fraser and Sorcha. Her legs seemed to wobble as she walked the ten paces to join her father. Tears hovered in her eyes, and she noticed vaguely that she’d done up the buttons all wrong, so that one side of her collar poked up unevenly against her chin.
Fraser didn’t speak until they were inside the blue-gray stone walls of the manor house. Time had not slowed his long stride nor diminished his panther-like grace, though his black hair was streaked with gray and the hawklike features had sharpened. Indeed, to Sorcha, her father had never looked as severe as he did in this moment of her stark terror.
Wordlessly, she followed him up the winding staircase with its hand-carved bunches of grapes and entwined ivy. They went directly to the family dining room, which adjoined her parents’ sleeping quarters. Dallas was already at the table, but the others had not yet arrived.
“Sweet Jesu, Iain,” exclaimed Dallas, looking from her stormy-eyed husband to the tears that now rolled freely down her daughter’s face, “what’s amiss?”
Fraser started to speak, suddenly realized he was still carrying Corsair’s bridle and the riding crop, and tossed them onto a footstool. “I have discovered why Sorcha prefers Inverness to Edinburgh,” he said with forced calm. “Master Niall seems to have captured her fancy.”
“Niall!” Dallas turned visibly pale and seemed to shrink into the chair. But she took a deep breath, pressed her hands against the table’s beveled edge, and stared at Sorcha. “Has the knave seduced you?”
“Oh, no!” Sorcha’s denial was a virtual wail of indignation. “I’d only kissed him once until today!”
Her parents both seemed to relax. Fraser went to a side cupboard and poured himself a generous tumbler of whiskey. He sat down at the head of the table and motioned for Sorcha to sit, too. “Then you are not infatuated with the braw laddie?” His tone had lightened into the indolent cadence Sorcha knew so well.
Her initial reaction was negative. Yet Sorcha had learned that she could respond to a man’s touch. Even with the heat of Fraser’s anger still upon her, surely what she felt for Niall must be more than impersonal animal lust.
But to say so out loud would bring down the wrath of both parents. Suddenly it didn’t matter. Johnny Grant had jilted her. Only Niall mattered—and he was worth fighting for. “I care for him, yes. And he cares for me.” She sat up straight, brushing the tears away with her hand, looking first at her father, then at her mother. They both wore expressions of stony reproach.
Dallas was the first to explode into words. “Fie, Iain, tell her! We can’t permit this. And she must know why!”
“Christ.” Fraser set the whiskey tumbler down on the table and shook his head. “Christ,” he repeated, this time more softly, the heavy dark brows coming close together. “All right,” he said, settling one booted leg across the other and facing his distraught, mystified daughter. “You must put Niall from your mind. What may be worse is that you must never tell him why. Some things are better left that way.” He paused to take a swallow of whiskey, while Dallas pleated her napkin in her lap. Sorcha heard herself sniffle but vowed to stop crying, no matter what her father said. Was there madness in Niall’s family? Had he been handfasted to someone else? Was he not the normal, virile young man he appeared to be, but given to unnatural affections such as King James was said to pursue? She held her breath as her father resumed speaking:
“The only way you can ever love Niall is as a brother. You see, Sorcha, Niall is my son.”
Chapter 2
Only after the enforced separation did Sorcha realize how much time she had spent in Niall’s company over the years and how precious those hours had been. Indeed, it had almost seemed as if they had been brother and sister all along; the intimacy they had shared had been little less than that between herself and her acknowledged brothers, Magnus and Rob.
Yet a much different feeling for Niall had emerged during their ardent encounter in the stable. Sorcha had sensed the power of love—and of being loved. And then the raw, fledgling emotion she had experienced with such delight had been snuffed out.
There were moments when Sorcha considered that her disappointment over Niall hurt more than the humiliation dealt her by Johnny Grant. But pride intervened; being discarded by Johnny still rankled.
After her father’s anger had cooled, Sorcha had sought him out in his study. It was early evening, with the sun setting over the gaunt hills to the west, casting a burnished crimson glow through the mullioned windows.
“I am surprised, sir, that Johnny Grant’s dishonor of our family hasn’t provoked you to wrath,” Sorcha began. “Are we so wedged between Grants and Gordons that our own clan lacks importance or power?”
Iain Fraser looked up from his inventory of the annual harvest. He surveyed his daughter with cool hazel eyes. “I’d hold no man to a bond he’d chafe at keeping. Would you prefer that I haul Johnny here in chains and force him to wed with you?”
Sorcha noted that while her father’s face was serious, there was a touch of humor in his question. While she didn’t wish him to turn his anger on her, she half hoped he might be incited to take revenge on Johnny Grant. “He’s done me a great injury,” she complained, surprised to discover that her voice was unsteady.
Fraser leaned across the paper-strewn desk. “To your feelings or your pride?”
Sorcha rubbed at her nose with her fist. “My p-pride,” she mumbled.
“Did you truly care for him?” Fraser reclined in his chair, long legs outstretched under the desk.
As if in answer, in her mind’s eye Sorcha saw Niall, not Johnny. “We got on well enough,” she replied, sniffling against her fist. “Or so I thought.”
Fraser nodded, his lean mouth turned up at the corners. “Lassie,” he said, now smiling affectionately, “don’t fash yourself over hapless Johnny Grant. Neither your mother nor I would wish for you to marry a man you didn’t love.”
Sorcha frowned, unable to meet her father’s wry gaze, though she sensed the rightness of what he said. Yet she was confused, not because of Johnny Grant, who had stirred no more than amiable companionship, but on Niall’s account, and the mutual ardor between them.
Noting the confusion etched on her face, Fraser came around the desk to put a firm hand on her shoulder. “Let me clarify a point,” he said in the indolent way so familiar to Sorcha. “Passion wears false faces. Be very careful, lassie. Always.”
For the briefest instant, Sorcha let her head rest against her father’s chest. She wasn’t sure that she might not pine for Niall, nor was she convinced that Johnny Grant didn’t deserve retribution. But the one thing she knew for certain was that while parents were often dense, they were almost always a comfort.
Sorcha did not talk to her father about Niall—or Johnny—again, but she had spent part of an afternoon with her mother discussing her half brother’s background. Niall had been conceived during a period of estrangement in the early years of her parents’ marriage. While Dallas lived at court, Iain had spent some time at his former home nearby at Beauly, where Sorcha’s late aunt had maintained the household.
“As you know, ’tis not unusual for a gentleman to dally with a serving girl,” Dallas had explained in an even voice. “Your father was no different than most, and he’d just returned from a long sea voyage.” She’d paused and looked out through the window toward the darkened cluster of buildings that was Inverness. Her mother’s face was in shadow, and Sorcha thought that memory was holding back her tongue. But Dallas continued speaking as she picked up a small porcelain jar and began smoothing a honey-colored cream on her neck and bosom: “Catriona was a pretty wench,
and your father fell prey to temptation. He didn’t know about Niall’s birth until we moved here from Edinburgh the year before you were born.”
Sorcha remained silent for a few moments. It was disconcerting to hear her mother discuss her father’s infidelity, impossible to see Iain Fraser as anything but her father and the husband of her mother.
“He told you, then?” Sorcha finally asked.
“I guessed. When Niall was very young, he greatly resembled your father. In any event, your sire wanted to see that the lad was brought up properly. When I inquired as to Niall’s parentage, he told me the truth.” Dallas replaced the lacquered lid of the jar and smiled fondly at Sorcha. “It’s so ironic that you should have been attracted to him. And he to you.”
It was not Niall, but Catriona whom Sorcha considered later as she walked her favorite mare, Thisbe, across the ripe, heath-covered moor toward the River Ness. A stout, fair-haired woman with cheeks that seemed perpetually warmed by the manor house ovens, Catriona supervised her domain with a kind but firm hand. She had three younger children, all apparently fathered by the man who had been her husband until his death the previous spring. Cummings, his name had been, distant kin to the Frasers’ majordomo of many years. And so the other three children were called, but Niall had retained the Fraser surname. Strange that Sorcha had never thought to ask why. But then half the inhabitants around Inverness were named Fraser.
Thisbe had stopped to munch at a tussock of grass that sprang up between clumps of claret-colored heather. At least, Sorcha consoled herself as Thisbe began meandering down the gentle slope to the river, there had been no more said about Edinburgh. A drop of rain on her cheek made her look up at the sky; dark clouds had moved down from the north without warning.
Guiding Thisbe among the pine trees, Sorcha paused to gaze at the wooded isles that stood like primeval ships in the broad, brown Ness. It was a view she had loved since childhood, with the rippling waters, the heavy scent of pine, the backdrop of blue hills marching like a giant staircase to the distant mountaintops, where the snow never quite disappeared, even under the hottest summer sun.
A sudden movement nearby made Thisbe tense. Sorcha turned in the saddle to see a six-point stag standing aloof in motionless splendor. She knew the stag well. Two years earlier, her father and Magnus had determined to see which of them would bag the magnificent animal. But he had evaded them both, in a taunting, cunning match of human and animal wit. In deference to his victory, the Fraser menfolk had vowed never to kill the stag they had come to call the Master of Ness. Strangely enough, the animal had seemed to sense their concession and had boldly appeared before them at least a half dozen times the previous autumn. Sorcha lifted her head to touch her cap in salute as Thisbe’s ears twitched in apparent awe.
“Stay still,” Sorcha whispered, patting her mare’s neck. “He’ll go. It’s his way of telling us he’s guarding the Ness.”
The stag turned slightly, antlers tipped back like a primitive diadem. Sorcha was still smiling with admiration when the arrow soared through the pine trees and found its mark.
It seemed as if at least a full minute passed before the stag’s long legs buckled and he crashed onto the peaty ground. Horrified, Sorcha screamed and Thisbe reared up. Instinct alone saved her from being thrown as she clung to the mare’s neck and uttered a sharp command.
Sorcha leapt from the saddle, running to the stag, which was already in the last stage of its death throes. It was useless to remove the arrow; it had gone straight to the heart. Sorcha was too angry to cry, too outraged to be surprised by the tall, imposing figure that emerged from the pine trees carrying a huge bow in one hand and a dirk in the other.
“You killed him!” she cried. “You killed the Master of Ness!”
The man looked more bemused than concerned. “Strange, it looks like a stag to me.” He bent down to make sure the animal was dead, then sheathed his dirk. “Was he your pet?” The dark eyes were the color of the river itself, unrevealing and every bit as deep, set in a long face that struck Sorcha as wolflike.
His skin was dark, too, and the wavy hair was brown as a bog. The short-cropped beard and mustache made him seem older than he probably was. Not yet thirty, Sorcha gauged, and realized she was staring.
“Aye, he was, in his way. A family pet.” She gripped one of the antlers and glared defiantly at the man. “Why did you do that? There are so many other deer nearby.”
The man stood up and sighed. He was very tall and broad shouldered under the long black cape that covered him from neck to ankle. The beard, the cape, the guarded features, momentarily deflected Sorcha’s attention from the slain stag. There was something clandestine about the man, as if his all-enveloping attire shielded him from much more than the weather. But his words were frank enough, if tinged with irony: “I didn’t know I had to request an introduction to a stag before I shot him. Most do not have names. Or families.”
“Well, this one did. We all were particularly fond of him.” Sorcha brushed at her damp cheeks, lest he mistake raindrops for tears. She suddenly felt very young and vaguely foolish. “Do you have a name?”
The smile he gave her was surprisingly candid. “I do. It’s Napier. Gavin Napier. And you?”
“I’m Sorcha Fraser of Gosford’s End.” She paused, waiting for the usual acknowledgment of her family’s prestige. But Napier said nothing; he just continued to gaze at her from those deep, dark brown eyes. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, wondering if Gavin Napier lived close by. But most of their clan came from much farther south, near Loch Lomond.
Before any coherent words could take form, Napier whistled. Within seconds, a handsome gray stallion trotted through the trees to stand by his master. “At least my horse is obedient,” Napier said with a trace of impatience. “Now where are the others?”
“You are with a hunting party?” Sorcha inquired as the rain began to pelt down in stinging drops.
“Of sorts.” He turned away, and she noticed that his profile was strongly etched, from the high forehead to the long nose, which had apparently been broken more than once, to the wide mouth with its slightly elongated lower lip. It was not a handsome face, Sorcha decided; it was too rough-hewn, too uneven. And definitely wolflike. But for some reason, she could not take her eyes from him.
“Damn.” He uttered the word with resignation. “They must have gone farther upriver, to the loch.” He unsheathed his dirk again and looked at Sorcha. “I don’t suppose you’d care to watch me gut your friend?”
“Oh!” Sorcha clapped her hands to her cheeks. “No! No, not this one!” The mere idea shocked her. Yet she wanted Gavin Napier to know that she had not only watched but gutted many a stag in her time. It seemed vitally important that he should not mistake her for a fatuous, squeamish child.
“Then turn the other way or head on home.” He had knelt down once more and was rolling the stag over onto its back. Napier moved with practiced assurance, reminding Sorcha of the poachers her father often winked at when he caught them on Fraser property. Napier obviously was no local poacher, but there was the aura of the hunter about him.
The rain was beginning to pierce the thick fabric of her woolen skirt. Sorcha was suddenly tempted to take Thisbe and flee to the manor house. But sheer willpower and a determination to prove herself forced a different decision.
“Oh, God’s teeth, if you need help, I’ll assist you. The poor creature can’t be any more dead than he is already.”
Napier glanced over his shoulder, a glimmer of surprise in his dark eyes. “Well. There’s a good lass. You hold the forelegs and I’ll do the cutting.”
Steeling herself to watch Napier’s every movement, Sorcha pried the legs as far apart as she could. The dirk plunged, and a torrent of blood spurted out over the animal’s tawny belly. Sorcha choked and was afraid she was going to be ill. To distract herself, she tried to think of Niall and how she’d responded to his kisses and the touch of his hands on her breasts. Somehow, those
images were almost as jarring as the carnage taking place just under her nose.
Napier worked swiftly. Not more than five minutes had elapsed before the heart, organs, and entrails lay on the peaty, rain-soaked ground. The downpour was washing the blood away, allowing it to merge back into the earth, as nature claimed nature.
Napier stood up and caught Sorcha off guard with a wide, appealing grin. “Well done, lass. I have a rope; I’ll tie him to my horse.”
She was about to ask where he was taking the stag when three riders appeared downriver. As Napier called out to them, Sorcha could see that they were all dressed alike. As they drew closer, she realized why: They were monks, wearing their white robes under riding capes, with hoods covering their tonsures to protect them from the rain. She recognized one of them, an elderly brother named Joseph from Beauly Priory.
“The Lord be with you,” Brother Joseph said in greeting. Sorcha curtsied and replied in kind. “Ah, we’ll feast well this night,” he exclaimed, his faded blue eyes fixed on the stag.
“Aye,” said Napier, unwinding the rope from his horse’s saddle. “Though I feared Mistress Fraser here might do me a mischief when she discovered I’d slain her pet.”
“Pet?” Brother Joseph’s mouth was droll. “Ah, I believe I’ve heard of that one. The Master of Ness, is it not?”
Sorcha nodded. “It is. Was. But I would not begrudge it to you and the other holy monks. Consider it a reparation for sin.”
“Sin?” Brother Joseph’s scanty white eyebrows lifted. “You would have had to break most of the commandments to need such a handsome penance, my child. But we thank you all the same.” He turned in the saddle with some difficulty. “Do you know Brothers Michale and Dugald?”
She did not and went through an introduction to the two younger monks while Napier secured the stag and mounted his gray stallion. The rain was already letting up, driven southward by a brisk wind that moaned through the pine trees and ruffled the river’s steady passage.