“Well,” said Duncan, coming up beside her. “ ’Tis of some comfort to me to see him lose his temper. No matter the provocation, he always turned it aside.”
She cast him a sidelong glance. “Which made you provoke all the more.”
Duncan smiled slyly. “Which you do gey well yourself, aye?—with me.”
“And you deserving of it.” Content with the exchange, they grinned inanely at one another; united against his father, they were in perfect accord.
But the momentary pleasure faded. With a final exchange of insults—Breadalbane’s hissed, MacIain’s roared—the giant turned on his heel and strode down the hill into the gathered crowd, plaid swinging, shouting for his MacDonalds to ready themselves at once to leave the foul stink of Campbell lands and lairds.
Neither Cat nor Duncan smiled now. They watched the MacDonald, head and shoulders above others, as he made his way brusquely toward the fire she and Dair had shared, albeit briefly, while discoveries were made of such things as attraction against and in spite of all that was proper in their separate worlds.
“No treaty,” Duncan said on a note of satisfaction. “He’ll no’ have Glencoe after all, agreeing to be bought.”
“Bought?” Cat echoed incredulously. “Did he think he could?”
He slanted her a look of scathing disdain. “What d’ye think he came for? To buy off all the clans so they turn their backs on Jamie, and Willie can have his war.”
She eyed MacIain’s retreat uneasily; would the son echo the father’s fury? “I’ve heard they’ve built that fort at Inverlochy . . . and put guns there, and soldiers. And boats on the loch.”
Duncan’s mouth twisted. “He’ll tell them all ’tis naught. He’ll tell them all ’tis only MacIain, a pawkie cattle-lifter, and jolly them back into seeing things his way.”
“Not MacIain.” She was certain.
“No,” Duncan agreed without argument. “Nor likely Glengarry, I’ve heard. They’ll no’ put their names on any treaty. But the others will. Or they’d be leaving, too.” He looked beyond her, beyond his father. Something bloomed in his eyes, setting color to his face. “Aye,” he whispered. “Aye—in the confusion, who would ken?”
Cat frowned. “What?”
He was tense as a hunting hound, nearly trembling with it. “Now,” he said. “ ’Tis the best time, aye? While the MacDonalds gather their garrons. . .”
“Duncan—”
But he was away at once, running gracelessly across the rocky ground on some errand of his own.
A massive foot well planted kicked Dair into wakefulness. “Up!” a voice roared. “Ye shame me, aye?—asleep like a drukken man here in Campbell lands!”
Dair roused at once, if catching his breath at the shock of it, and answered the tone and the thunder as well as the foot.
“Up!” MacIain repeated, moustaches bristling as he loomed like a demon from out of folktales, eyes glittering beneath the white shelf of brows.
Behind him lurked his gillies, faces blanked by a diplomacy Dair might have appreciated had he the time to think. The giant scowled fiercely at all the MacDonalds gathering now, some waking blearily, gathering puddles of plaid, while others, alarmed, put their hands to weaponry.
“I’ll no’ have my MacDonalds drink another dram of his whisky, nor set tooth to his cattle, aye?—we are quit of this place! Faugh! No more of Campbell courtesy; best ye look to yon castle to ken what they’re owed!”
Dair caught his breath, stung by shame at such dishevelment and unreadiness before MacIain. They were all of them gathered now, all the Glencoe-men. Bonnets were pulled on hastily over tousled locks spiky from sleep, weapons sorted out about various persons, garrons brought up in answer to the laird’s gillies, who saw efficiently to the ordering of his tail and of his things.
Beside Dair, John resettled and pinned his plaid. “Breadalbane,” he said simply, in eloquent explanation.
“The pawkie bastard!” MacIain spat. “No more of him, d’ye hear? I’ll none o’ his lies, none o’ his promises, none o’ his Sassenach ways.” He jerked his massive head. “We’re home to Glencoe, and none of this liar’s oath. . . . I dinna trust the man, and I dinna trust his treaty.” Fierce blue eyes fixed avidly on his youngest son. A hand cuffed smartly. “Alasdair Og! You spoke to the bastard and said none o’ it to me!”
No, he had not. He had thought only of Cat and later of Robbie, not of MacIain at all.
The abused ear stung as he staggered under the blow, catching his balance gracelessly against rocky soil and the impediments of straggling plaid, but he made no protest, not to the one man who had a right to beat him bloody if he chose.
“Get on your garron,” MacIain said. “We’re home to Glencoe.”
There was Cat—was Cat—“Wait—” In desperation, but the giant had turned away; was bellowing at his gillies.
John caught his arm. “Alasdair—no. Not now, aye? He’s had words wi’ the earl this morning, and no good come of them. Let him bide a wee. . . and if you didna say aught to him of speech with the earl, ’tis no wonder he is angry.”
Dair had bitten his tongue. He tasted blood in his mouth. Anger, kindled by humiliation, flared abruptly. “Christ, but I’m no’ a fool nor a bairn to be treated this way—”
“Why not?” John asked as he scooped up bonnet and bottle. “Even a drukken man kens ’tis better to go to his laird with such news as speech with Breadalbane.” Then his expression softened. “Think, man. She’s a Campbell. . . and the earl’s kin, aye?—you’d do better to let MacIain settle before you think on her again.”
“I canna ride off with no word to her!”
John’s glance went beyond Dair. “You’d better,” he answered succinctly, slapping the boiled-leather bottle against his brother’s chest. “Or risk worse than a cuff of the man.”
Awake in the dawn, and alone, Jean Stewart stared into the pallor of the day and cursed herself for her folly. Her eyes burned for staring so hard, so fixedly at distance, but she neither shut nor blinked them. She would hide behind nothing, not even the fragile shielding of her own flesh.
She was a woman who knew men, because they were, to her, the only thing in the world worth knowing. Most women she disdained, save those she was required to deal with, such as Lady Glencoe and John’s wife, Eiblin. Women did not offer the same diversions as men, the same culmination to the dance, save a momentary competition that ended the moment she gave a man leave to pay his favors to her in place of anyone else. And they did pay favors, at once and fully consumed with it, forgetting immediately the other women, their lasses, whose spite and anger and bitterness Jean did not credit as anything more than impotence: they were not as she, were they, in beauty or in bed.
She did not wholly blame them. She would be jealous, also, if a woman stole her man.
But now? No woman; Jean was certain. There were signs in a man of distraction, of interest snooving elsewhere, and Dair showed none of them. What he showed was indifference, and a different man withal, someone growing apart from her. Someone very like the man he had been that day he came with Robbie to Castle Stalker, offering nothing of himself save a name, a smile, and casual courtesy, no spark in his eyes for her beyond a momentary acknowledgment that he saw the beauty, yet was not blinded by it. Thus it had been her task, her doing, to lure from him the same manner of attraction and need other men felt when they saw her.
She had won him, eventually. And kept him far longer than intended. Six years, if counted altogether, six years with one man.
To Jean, there was only one thing worth such fidelity. From him she had it in full measure, and returned it willingly; or as often began it. But there had been no oath. No declaration before witnesses. No proper handfasting, making them wed in the sight of others until there was a minister who could marry them in God’s eyes.
He has not once offered, nor asked. And now he had packed his own kit. Had withstood her blandishments, the lure of her body; even the insistence of her hand, that
knew how to work a man. Had turned his back on her and walked out into darkness, wanting nothing of her, clearly, save to be away.
She burned with shame, with anger. Who was he to treat her so? How dared he suggest in any fashion that she did not, could not, rouse him?
Jean stilled abruptly. She had said it to him plainly, too plainly, perhaps: twenty-five, she said, admitting her age. Was she too old for him?
Have I lost my beauty? Had she, in complacence, in neglect, damped the fire between them?
Dair owned no mirror; she had used his eyes, and those of other men, to know her appeal. But those eyes were gone, and the others of men who rode to Achallader with MacIain, and the glass she used otherwise was home at Castle Stalker.
“Lady Glencoe,” she murmured. “The mirror MacIain gave her, brought back from France.”
A small mirror, a lady’s mirror, meant to hang from a cord around a woman’s waist. It would do.
Jean Stewart got out of Dair’s bed and began to dress herself. By the time the sun was up she would look into the mirror and know again if she had won, or if she had lost.
Cat stared after Duncan, then looked beyond to the hoof-churned dust clouding the air, the detritus of departure.
MacIain was leaving. And taking with him all of his men, including his youngest son.
‘Come with me,’ he had said. ‘Come home with me to Glencoe.’ He had meant it. She was certain. She knew little of men save her brothers, her drunkard father and ambitious Breadalbane, but Dair MacDonald had never offered her anything save honesty and kindness.
Their enmity was banished. They had buried it between them by the fire the night before, in the skirl of ceol mor snooving into hearts and souls to root out the bone-bred hostility of Campbell and MacDonald—
And Robbie Stewart in the moonlight, speaking to her of his sister waiting for Dair in Glencoe.
Cat caught her breath, recollection shattered as abruptly and irreparably as her mother’s mirror. That Dair had replaced.
But Robbie Stewart was there yet, laughing at her in the darkness with bare feet planted and wide shoulders thrown back, the thick column of his throat rising inviolable from summer-soiled linen.
His sister in Glencoe. And Dair inviting her.
Stewart had made it plain: ‘A man might look, and a man might ask, and a man might take what is offered. . . but it doesna mean he will put the woman in his home out of his bed while he woos another into his plaid while he is out on the heather. ’
What did Dair mean to do? Set them at odds, her and Jean, and bed the winner? Grief rose up, and bitterness. It hurt so badly she choked. “Pawkie bastard,” she said. “God-cursed, pawkie bastard.” But even in her bitterness, even in her shame, Cat could not be certain which man she meant. It applied to all of them, equally: Breadalbane. Robert Stewart. And to Dair MacDonald.
Around John and Dair the tacksmen gathered, forming MacIain’s tail. It was for his sons to do as well, with no protest uttered. The laird himself, incongruous on his small garron, was setting out already. It was expected everyone else of Glencoe would follow immediately. Their only loyalty lay with their laird.
Certainly not with a Campbell, be she woman or no.
It was bitterly painful. “John—”
“Dinna do it, Alasdair.”
“I can catch up.”
“No.” John grasped his arm again and jerked him back roughly. “Christ, man, I ken what you’re feeling—but would you shame him before them all? Before Breadalbane?”
“I canna just go—”
“If she has any sense at all, she’ll ken what has happened.”
She had sense, aye. And wit. And the tongue to use it. But she was a Campbell, and deserving of explanation lest she believe him lying to her.
A gillie brought up two garrons. John took the reins and thrust one set into Dair’s hands. “Dinna be a fool,” he snapped, and swung up onto his mount with a flare of kilt and plaid. “You are Maclain’s son.”
It was honor or indictment, depending on one’s view. Bitterly Dair arranged his reins and hurled himself onto the garron’s back, not caring of the disarray in plaid and kilt, nor the testiness of his head. The bottle was empty; he tossed it toward a gillie. “I’ll go to Chesthill,” he declared. “Into Glenlyon’s lands, if ’tis what it takes.”
John’s mouth jerked flat. “He hanged you once,” he said. “Will you give him a second chance?”
Before Dair could answer, the heir to all of Glencoe set his garron after their father. But John knew nothing of temptation, nothing of the conflict, the desperate, newborn yearning. His Eiblin was home in Glencoe. Cat Campbell was here, with the earl.
Dair slammed bare heels into the garron’s ribs so hard the animal started in surprise. “Christ,” he muttered viciously, “he’ll have me castrated, aye?—so as not to soil his seed with the taint of Campbell blood!”
Maclain, his son knew, could spill Campbell blood. But he would not welcome it as a woman, and Breadalbane’s niece, in MacDonald lands.
Cat stood at the remains of the MacDonald fire. Burned-out now, burned to ash in the daylight, as impotent as her anger. But she did not doubt buried beneath was a glimmer of ember that could be coaxed to kindle again into flame, even as her anger might flare again into grief.
‘Come home with me to Glencoe.’
They were gone, the MacDonalds, vacating Achallader and the promise of peace. Breadalbane had his treaty, though lacking two signatures.
Cat looked up. Just gone, the MacDonalds, so recently departed they left dust in their wake, settling now to the ground, drifting on the draft of air caused by hasty horses.
She could see naught of them save the glint of their weaponry, the colors of their tartan bleeding together into distance. And heard the piping of ceol mor fit to raise the spirits of men setting out to war.
A single horse, abruptly, burst free of the encampment, scattering clansmen who, in their startlement, damned the rider to hell. And then Cat saw it was not a single rider, but two on one horse; and the one riding pillion clutched the man in the saddle while her lank yellow hair tumbled down around her shoulders.
Marjorie Campbell of Lawers. And Duncan in the saddle, riding hastily after MacDonalds.
Or not after them, as an enemy. Nor to join them as a friend. But to appear as two tardy MacDonalds riding hard to catch up to the others.
How better a way to elope with a woman underneath the imperious nose of the man most definitively opposed?
“Oh, Duncan,” Cat murmured, watching the flag of Marjorie’s hair. And then she began to grin. “Aye, ”she said, laughing, “Poke a stick in his eye for us both!”
But the laughter died away as Duncan abruptly hesitated, reining in frenziedly as a mounted MacDonald wheeled and broke free of the others. The confrontation was immediate—and as immediately dismissed. The lone MacDonald, no woman riding pillion, came at full gallop toward the ash-clotted fire. Beyond him Duncan went on with Marjorie clinging still.
She knew the eyes, the face; loved the bonnie grin, with white teeth a’gleaming.
He scalped himself of his bonnet and tossed it to her even as he reined the gape-mouthed garron to a haphazard halt. “No proper Scot goes out without his bonnet,” he declared. “I’ll be back for it, aye?”
And left her standing there in the dust of his delivery, clutching the hostage bonnet as he spun the garron around and galloped back again toward his father.
Home, to Glencoe.
On the thirtieth day of June in the year 1691, according to the copy John Hill read repeatedly, all save two of the lairds meeting with Breadalbane signed the Treaty of Achallader. It was but a temporary measure, the governor knew, and would not result in the lasting peace King William desired. What it did, in fact, was give credit to Breadalbane for bringing about the very thing Hill had argued for—but also time in which such men as the Master of Stair, who was with the king in Flanders, to prepare for rebellion.
The balan
ce was delicate, too delicate for Scotland. In ignorance, a foreign-born king sought to use such men against those he perceived as enemy; in full knowledge, men such as Stair, as Breadalbane sought to pervert the strength, the wild and stubborn courage that defined Scotland’s heart.
Hill knew he had failed. It was a matter of time before he was removed; he suspected his appointment would last only so long as Stair and Breadalbane paid lip service to peace.
Unless they expect me to carry out their depredations.
It was not a new thought. He was a disposable man with no connections of any substance, no familial grace. He could die in the Highlands and no one would know—or he could kill in the Highlands, and have his name cursed forever.
He looked again at the copy of the treaty sent the day before. Simple words of complex promise, and signatures that bound souls. But only so long as such men as Coll MacDonald of Keppoch and Robert Stewart of Appin, intemperate and arrogant both, agreed to be bound by empty promises and equally empty purses.
MacIain had sworn nothing, nor had Glengarry. And Ewan Cameron of Lochiel, thinking twice and thrice, had withdrawn his support.
They would honor no conditions. To them, there was no treaty. It gave them the freedom to do as they would, and would in fact create the reason for William to levy such punishment as he desired.
As he was told to desire, by Stair and Breadalbane.
The blow, when it came, split his lip, cracked a tooth, and set Dair’s head to ringing even as he staggered. Sunlight filled his vision, too much sunlight all at once, and then the second blow landed with enough selective force to knock him off his feet. He measured his length on the ground, aware vaguely of a rock grinding into his spine, but more aware of the silence surrounding him save for his father’s breathing.
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