by Mary Daheim
“You will explain, Father,” she averred with a voice that shook, yet had somehow lost its youthful timbre.
Napier tilted his dark head to one side and regarded Rosmairi with a rueful expression. “The Earl of Huntly’s intentions were not what they seemed. George sought to dishonor you, mistress.”
“Liar!” Rosmairi flew at him, but Sorcha grabbed her sister by one arm and yanked her back. “Leave me be!” she screamed, trying to wrench herself free from Sorcha’s determined grasp.
“Be quiet,” Sorcha rasped in a low voice. “Do you want to rouse all of Gosford’s End?”
Rosmairi’s gray eyes widened; then, like a card house, she virtually collapsed against her sister. “I hate you,” she snuffled, wiping her face with the back of one gloved hand, “you and that priest!”
“Father Napier must have his reasons,” Sorcha insisted, and put a comforting arm around Rosmairi. In truth, Sorcha was as muddled as Rosmairi. Seeking support, she glanced at Napier. “Are you trying to tell us that George Gordon wished to ravish Ros rather than to marry her?”
Napier was hanging his saddle and bridle in a vacant place on the stable wall. “Aye,” he replied shortly. “Fornication was his only aim.”
For some reason, his utterance unnerved Sorcha. She’d heard other priests talk against sins of the flesh, warn of wanton desires, rail against illicit passion. None of them had ever really moved her, let alone caused any upset. Yet she found Gavin Napier’s simple statement disturbing.
“We must tell my parents,” she declared, forcing her mind from animal lust and priestly condemnation.
“No!” cried Rosmairi, pulling free of Sorcha’s arm. “Spare me that!”
The heartfelt plea tugged at Sorcha, but it was Napier who responded. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.” To Sorcha’s surprise, he suddenly looked tired, even haggard. “Lord Fraser must hear of this, though I am as loath to tell him as you are, mistress.”
Rosmairi went rigid as a carved image. “You shame me, Father! What kind of priest are you?” Putting frantic hands to her pale face, she stared in desperation at Napier, then turned and fled the stable. Sorcha made as if to follow, but Napier put a hand on her arm.
“Stay, mistress. She’ll merely go to her chamber and sob noiselessly into the night. ’Twill do her no harm and mayhap some good.” He started to withdraw his hand, but bent down to study Sorcha more closely. “And you?” he asked, with unexpected anxiety. “Your sister’s tribulations must distress you mightily.”
Their gazes had locked, and Sorcha found herself strangely tongue-tied. Behind them in the stalls, the horses were settling down for a foreshortened night. “Well, of course,” she managed at last, noting absently that the little lantern she had lighted upon their arrival cast a feeble amber glow among the piles of straw and bales of hay. A black cat with a white vest prowled hopefully, searching for a midnight mouse. “Poor Ros,” Sorcha murmured, self-consciously aware of Napier’s hand still on her arm. “Our Lady Mother said George wasn’t to be trusted. Why didn’t we listen?”
Napier’s mouth twisted bitterly. “I wish I had been given such a warning. My mission seems doomed. George Gordon’s iniquities mock my efforts to bring unity among the Catholic clans of Scotland.” Slowly, he let go of Sorcha’s arm. “Gordon’s callow, ambitious. He has no conscience.”
“He has no heart, either,” Sorcha asserted, once more feeling pity for Rosmairi. She gave her arm a little shake, as if she could still feel Napier’s hold on her, then noted that his brown eyes had grown shadowy. A trick of the lantern light, she thought, but cast another glance in his direction and was struck by the haunted expression on his lean, wolflike face. “George has betrayed us all,” she said gloomily, and put a hand to her weary head.
Napier’s mouth twisted sardonically. He took a step forward, so that Sorcha’s riding skirts and his long cloak brushed against each other. For one tense moment, she thought he was going to touch her again. Instead, he gathered the folds of his cloak more closely around him and flung them over one broad shoulder. “Perhaps,” he finally replied, the irony still visible on his face, “but I betrayed him as well.”
Then Napier swerved on his heel and left the stable, the flickering lantern light making his shadow ominously large.
In the fall, ever since Sorcha could remember, the Fraser offspring spent one Sabbath gathering up the leaves from the front of Gosford’s End and piling them high for a bonfire after dark. When they were younger, the four children had tussled and tumbled and toppled among the piles, eventually requiring several servants to restore order. These past years, they had gone through the ritual with less ebullience and more efficiency.
This time, it was different. As the north wind kept the rain clouds at bay, Sorcha, Ros, Magnus, and Rob whooped and shrieked as they worked, occasionally pummeling one another or throwing huge handfuls of crisp leaves onto an unaware sibling. It was as if the years had rolled back, and knowing that this could be their last autumn together, all four Frasers were desperately clinging to childhood.
“Stop it, Magnus!” Rosmairi called out as her elder brother brandished a rake. “You’ll give Rob a tonsure before he ever leaves home!”
“Maybe I’ll pound sense into him so he won’t leave,” Magnus replied, making a mock thrust at Rob’s head. “I tell you, Rob, there’s land enough here to make us both a living.” Rob threw a stick for the aged collie, Buchanan, to fetch. The dog looked up, reconsidered, and went back to sleep on a tussock of grass. “You plant the seeds of food, Magnus; I’ll plant the seeds of faith. Though, soon you’ll plant other seeds with Jeannie Simpson.”
“I rather like Jeannie,” Rosmairi remarked in a deceptively bland voice. “She has lovely manners. Or does she never interrupt because she has nothing to say?”
Sorcha cast a sidelong glance at her sister. Of all the Frasers, Rosmairi had always possessed the greatest sense of charity, even more so than Rob. But her thwarted elopement had sharpened her tongue and blunted her usual happy, gentle nature. To Ross’s dismay, Gavin Napier had carried the humiliating tale to her parents. Lord and Lady Fraser had been outraged by George Gordon’s shameless behavior, though Rosmairi refused to concede that her lover had connived at her seduction. Doggedly, she clung to the belief that George really loved her and that Gavin Napier, for some cruel, unfathomable reason, had prevented the wedding. Sorcha didn’t agree with her sister, and said so, but when Rosmairi had asked archly why she’d put credence in a stranger priest rather than their longtime ally, Sorcha had no answer, except that the young earl was ruthlessly ambitious and used to getting his own way. And that somehow, inexplicably, Sorcha trusted Gavin Napier.
While this explanation made no dent in Rosmairi’s staunch defense of George, at least the sisters had not broken with each other over the matter. Still, there was an uncustomary distance between Rosmairi and the rest of her family these days. Nor, thought Sorcha, were remarks such as the one Rosmairi had just made about Jeannie Simpson helping to narrow the gap.
Indeed, Magnus was giving Rosmairi a baleful look, but it was Rob who replied: “Like most wives, Jeannie will discover her tongue once she’s wed. I’ll wager your ears will wilt within a year, brother.”
Rob ducked as Magnus reached out to cuff him. “Jeannie is as bonnie as bluebells and docile as Buchanan,” Magnus bellowed, and tripped over a root. He righted himself before falling down, but Sorcha moved swiftly, dumping a basket of leaves over his head.
“If any man compared me to a collie, I’d saw off his ears,” she asserted, dancing out of reach.
Snatching leaves from his hair, Magnus grimaced, while Rob grew thoughtful. “We are more thorough than we used to be,” he remarked, indicating the tidy grounds.
“We had less to talk about,” Rosmairi put in, setting aside her rake. “We had fewer … troubles,” she added on a wistful note.
Sorcha set her face against the brisk wind as she gazed from Rob’s slim, fair presence to the pink-and-red
-gold visage of Rosmairi to Magnus’s tall, dark, sturdy form. She would miss the others, but at least Rob would be with her on the journey south.
As the wind grew even stronger, Sorcha shielded her face with her Fraser plaid. “Damn,” she said in a muffled voice. “Mayhap we’d better torch these leaves before they’re scattered halfway to Inverness. Moreover, it’s going to rain.”
She felt her sister and brothers stare at her for just a moment. They knew she was right, but the annual burning would mean an end to their day together, perhaps to their lives together. Sorcha smiled back feebly. A few seconds later, Magnus had lighted some twigs. The leaves caught and before long the flames shot heavenward, an orange-and-yellow signal to herald oncoming winter. Biting her lip, Sorcha watched the fire burn, aware that her youth had drifted away like the leaves themselves. Yet the tree still stood, tall and sturdy against the twilight.
So did another figure, some distance away by the side of the house. Sorcha caught the movement and felt tears sting her eyes. It was Niall, alone in the shadows, watching the Fraser heirs pass through the rites of autumn.
PART TWO
1586-87
Chapter 5
The first two days they headed southward were uneventful, with kind, mild weather favoring the little party as it wound its way along the Findhorn. Sorcha knew this wild, remote country well; she had hunted here at least twice each year with her family. It was also MacKintosh and Clan Chattan ground, the ancestral home of her mother’s maternal kinsmen.
There were ten people in the group: Rob and his manservant, Torquil MacKemmie, a stout, flippant youth with an eminently practical nature; Arthur MacSymond, related to Iain Fraser by marriage and renowned throughout the Highlands for his instincts as a guide; Father Napier, and two monks, Brother Ninian and Brother Myles; Sorcha was accompanied by her maid, Ailis Frizell, an intelligent, doleful girl with extremely poor eyesight.
Dallas’s self-control had crumbled at the time of departure, as she clung to both Sorcha and Rob outside the gates of Gosford’s End. Rosmairi wept, too, and even Magnus’s eyes were brimming. Only Iain Fraser retained a mask of nonchalance, though his farewell embraces were overlong and overtight. As the group trotted their mounts away from the Fraser home, Rob wiped a manful tear while Sorcha used a sleeve to dry her damp cheeks.
I will be back, she vowed silently, not daring to turn around for a final look at her beloved home. But the brave words could not stave off the gloom she felt the first day of the journey. However, the next morning Sorcha awoke in somewhat lighter spirits. As there was no turning back, she might as well try to consider the trip as an adventure. Rob and Torquil were already laughing a great deal with Father Napier. Since Sorcha preferred keeping her distance from the disturbing priest, she would try to find some source of mutual amusement with Ailis Frizell. Judging from the sour look on Ailis’s face, Sorcha decided she’d set an all but impossible task for herself.
But by the third day, the sight of the Grampian Mountains lifted even Ailis’s spirits. It was a clear, crisp autumn morning, with the rugged peaks of Ben-y-Gloe, Beinn Dearg and Ben Macdhui rising proudly above the moorlands. When the travelers espied the Cairn Gorms, they could see the first heavy snows nestling in the cleft between the peaks. Crows called out from nearby trees as nimble horned sheep sought safety from the intruders next to low stone walls.
“Do you remember,” Rob called out to Sorcha, reining in his mount so she could catch up with him, “how we came through here one summer and feasted on raspberries?”
Sorcha did. It had been on the last of the three trips she had made to Edinburgh with her parents. Magnus and Rob had chased some shaggy cows while Dallas and the girls filled their riding skirts with berries. It had been a raucous, happy trip despite Magnus’s wandering off in Perth, and Rosmairi’s suffering from a stomach upset near Kinross.
Now, more than five years later, they would spend the night in the shadow of Ben Lawers, at a rude inn on the edge of Loch Tay. It was there that Father Napier and the monks exchanged their clerical attire for secular garb.
“We’re out of the Highlands,” Father Napier said to the group at supper in the small common room of the inn. “It’s not prudent to flaunt our faith.”
Sorcha felt a pang of sadness at the thought of leaving her native country behind. Another two or three days would bring them to Edinburgh. But even as Sorcha tried to picture the route in her mind, Father Napier informed the party that they would make a short side trip to Doune.
“Doune?” queried Rob, with his customary habit of accompanying a question with the wrinkling of his rather foreshortened nose. “Is that not the dwelling of the Earl of Moray?”
Napier nodded, summoning a lame-gaited serving wench with brilliant flame-colored hair. He indicated the trenchers, requesting more roasted lamb. “If you find it strange that I would deliberately visit the home of a Protestant lord, rest easy, young sir.” Napier sat back as the redheaded wench served him. “Moray is a very different man than was his late and unlamented father-in-law. He is fair-minded, cheerful, and quite the braw gallant.”
Sorcha regarded Napier’s remark with interest. For all the enmity which had existed between her father and the previous Earl of Moray, Iain Fraser had never criticized the title’s present bearer. In fact, Fraser had spoken well of young Moray’s courage and integrity.
“Will you tell him who—and what—you are?” asked Sorcha, refusing more lamb but pulling another chunk of barley bread from the loaf that sat on a thick board in the middle of the table.
“Nay, though he’d bear me no grudge for it. One thing to keep in mind,” he admonished his listeners, “is that while Mary Stuart lives, no one with any foresight will openly persecute a Catholic priest unless they have ample grounds.”
“But we are persecuted,” Sorcha countered, her mouth full of barley bread. “Even now, you go about in disguise.”
Napier smiled dryly, his peat-brown eyes on Sorcha’s face. “Most Protestants aren’t like Moray. After all, it’s still possible that Queen Mary could be reinstated as cosovereign with her son. Or that James could be swayed by influential Catholics to embrace the Church of Rome.”
Rob put his chin in his hands as a sanguine glow touched his face. “Think of it, a Scotland brought back to the true faith! How I should want to be part of that holy crusade!”
“Och,” exclaimed Torquil, with his customary irreverence, “will we see ye hovering over King Jamie with a rosary?” Rob flushed but managed a feeble laugh. “I’ve no such grand ambitions, Torquil, my brash laddie. But don’t think a day goes by that I don’t fail to pray for His Grace’s conversion.”
Feeling vaguely guilty because there were days when she didn’t remember to pray at all, Sorcha brushed the crumbs from her suede jacket and excused herself. “Ailis,” she murmured, leaning over the other girl’s shoulder, “will you walk with me for a while? It’s too early to retire, and our room smells of peat and dust.”
With a marked lack of enthusiasm, Ailis agreed. Like her mistress, she had not been anxious to leave Gosford’s End. Dallas, however, had persisted, telling Sorcha she would be better served by the stolid Ailis than some feather-witted wench who’d get herself seduced upon setting foot in the High Street. As for Ailis, Dallas asserted it was part of the serving girl’s education, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Outside the little inn, Sorcha and Ailis walked along the edge of Loch Tay as the pale autumn light faded beyond the Grampians to the west. “The land has changed a great deal since we left home,” Sorcha said, wondering what the rest of her family was eating for supper that evening at Gosford’s End. “See how civilized it becomes as we move south.”
“I won’t object,” Ailis replied, squinting into the dark loch. A sharp breeze tugged at their riding skirts and made little tuftlike waves on the water. “The road today was so steep, and rough as well.”
“It was tricky footing for the horses,” Sorcha conceded, “but Arthur MacSymond
is an excellent guide.”
Even as Sorcha spoke, Ailis stumbled over a rock and uttered a shrill little cry. She had turned an ankle, and while Sorcha didn’t think it was a serious injury, it seemed wise for Ailis to go back to the inn. “I’ll go with you,” Sorcha declared, but Ailis insisted she could manage by herself. Not really ready to return just yet, Sorcha agreed.
From somewhere close by, she heard a throstle pip noisily in the chilly night air. The breeze had died as suddenly as it had come up, and the loch was quiet. Unacquainted with the terrain, she was careful not to lose sight of the little inn’s sole lighted window. After about a half hour, she turned back, making her leisurely way toward the beckoning amber glow and the smell of the peat fire.
She had gone about halfway when she saw a tall figure walking with long, sure strides in her direction. Though he now wore conventional garb, she knew immediately that it was Father Napier. Annoyance crept over Sorcha. Did he think she was lost? If so, why hadn’t he sent Rob to fetch her? Sorcha slowed her step deliberately, perversely wanting to make him walk as far as possible.
“This isn’t the garden at Gosford’s End, you know,” he called out when he got within thirty feet of her. “Wild beasts still prowl at night in these parts. Are you armed?”
Sorcha ignored the irony in Gavin Napier’s voice. “There are more such animals where I come from.” She couldn’t control the goading glare she gave him as he stopped just a few feet away from her. “I’ve grown to distrust not beasts with four legs but those with two.”
Napier seemed to ponder her remark as he stroked his short, thick beard. He wore a leather jacket over a light-colored shirt, his boots rose well up on his thighs, and the wide belt around his waist held a silver-handled dirk. The layman’s attire seemed to suit him much better than his priestly garments.