Jennifer Roberson
Page 39
“Even me,” she said, following up her thought while he went elsewhere with his.
His father had yet to sign the Oath of Allegiance. In four weeks the indemnity offered, the deadline imposed, would expire.
“He is a gey strong man,” Cat said. “Stronger than any I ken.”
Another time Dair might have feigned offense; should she not say that of the man in her bed, rather than of his father? But his thoughts now ran toward John Hill, and the oath, and the promises made by a Dutchman who called himself King of England and Scotland.
‘Will it always be so?’ she had asked. Dair did not know. The world was larger than their bed, larger than Glencoe, larger even than the Highlands altogether. The world was Scotland, but also such men as Breadalbane, a Campbell; and the Master of Stair, a Lowlander; and an exiled king who as yet offered no answer to their request for information : would he release his Highland supporters from the oath sworn in his name at Dalcomera on the eve of Killiecrankie? Or will James, living forever in France, turn his back on Scotland and the clans?
He wanted naught to do with such thoughts, not now, not here. And so to drive them away he loosed his ankle from hers, bent a leg, hooked a knee athwart her thigh, snugged it behind a buttock. A shifting of weight, the leverage of an elbow and he was free, free to roll atop her, to pull her beneath himself; free to cover her, to seek assuagement in the comforts of her body even as she, rousing as quickly, murmured incoherently and offered admittance, offered surcease from his unanticipated upsurge of apprehension, the desperate uncertainty of what lay before them.
It was cowardice, not courage. Escape, not confrontation. Avoidance of what was truth in the falsehood of the moment: in her, he could forget. In her, there was no fear.
Cat guided him, as he had taught her. Welcomed him without hesitance. Took of him what he offered and returned it fourfold. She locked her legs around him, taking him deeper, taking him farther, delivering of him his substance, his self, so that he, overtaken, threw back his head and bared the taut cords of his throat as well as the scar upon it . . . begging in silence for her to take him deeper yet, and farther, that he might lose himself in the only way he could; that he need not think of such things as oaths to one king and an indemnity of another; that he could instead think of only the moment, of the woman, of the covenant of the spirit as well as of the body, and the conviction that what they shared would never, unlike Glenlyon’s brandy keg, be emptied of its fire.
Cat laughed deeply as her nails dug into his hair and dragged his head to hers. “Chruachan!” she exulted.
He who was MacDonald did not know, in that moment, if he were victor or vanquished.
And did not care.
As John Hill set down the letter received so recently from the Secretary of Scotland, called the Master of Stair, parchment shook. His hands shook. The heart within his chest thumped irregularly, so violent in upheaval he feared it might cease to beat altogether.
Perhaps it would be well for him if it did. Perhaps it would offer release from this most onerous of duties, this most painful of all instructions.
He groped for reassurance, for something to mitigate. Not an order—Not yet. An advisory. Intelligence, acquainting him with the matter of the Highlands, the brutal, cruel, magnificently arrogant Highlands and her equally turbulent clans.
Not an order. A lesson, Stair declaimed in writing, that would be understood by all the rest of the intransigent lairds, taught by blood and fire in the language of the Highlands: extirpation. The cessation of a clan, one particular clan, so that all the others would hear, would know, would fear. And acquiesce.
William would have Scotland. William would have his Highlanders. And William would send them to fight the French king, on whose beneficence Scotland’s Stuart-born monarch survived in exile.
—let it not be so—
But it was, it was.
—let it be that I misread it—
But he had not, had not.
—let be a dreadful mistake—
That it was, and would be.
And in desperate dialogue with himself: “There is yet time. . . .”
—there is—
“He may yet come forward. . . .”
—but probably not—
“If Buchan and Menzies return from James with his release of them, all the lairds will sign. . . .”
—even MacIain—
Perhaps even MacIain.
But equally—painful acknowledgment—perhaps not MacIain.
In his peat-heated, pungent room, Governor John Hill clasped his wind-chafed hands upon his crude writing table, crumpling the parchment. “Christ Jesus, I ask you—” He bent his head and pressed his brow into his bony thumbs. “—dearest Lord, I pray You in the name of your holy Son—” His eyes ached with sudden tears trapped behind tightly shut lids. “—let this not come to be!”
Cat laughed aloud, no longer cold but warm. He lay beside her, collapsed in all things, even of speech, grinning inanely into his pillow as she tried and failed to rouse him.
“Is he weary?” she inquired. “Has he struck his banner?”
He twitched as she investigated, drawing a quick breath. “Christ, Cat—”
“Has his claymore been blunted?”
Dair’s laughter was strangled. “Will you have it off me, then?”
“I prefer it—sheathed.”
“Aye, well, as do I—Christ”—Dair gargled as she squeezed—“but you might give me a chance to hone it again—”
“ ’Tis for me to do, aye?”
“—deliver me . . .” he gasped.
“Och, aye?” She tugged gently. “Where am I to deliver you—? . . . or is it that you wish to be delivered from me?”
His reply, couched in half words and sibilants, was incoherent.
Cat laughed. It bubbled up from deep in her throat, bursting free to skirl like a war-pipe at the dawning. She was a steaming sulfur pool a’bubble with elation, so full of effervescence she thought she might fly to pieces. In an instant’s flash of insight and quickening curiosity she sat up, then moved atop him. She straddled his thighs. With hair spilling all around, coiling against his flesh, she arched her spine and stretched jubilant arms into the air. “Chruachan!”
With markedly less exuberance, Dair offered dutiful rebuttal. “Fraoch Eilean. ”
She swooped down abruptly, setting forearms and elbows on either side of his head. Masses of hair fell around them like a brilliant copper-clad plaid. “What we have,” she began, “what we share . . .”
He blinked, unfocused in close proximity. She hung over him like a falcon, swift of wing and beak, stooping on its prey. “What we share—?” he echoed.
“ ‘Ne obliviscaris’. ’Tis the motto of the Campbells.”
“ ‘Forget not’?” Dair smiled. “Och, I dinna think so. Not ever.” He paused. “Not with you in my house—and with such a powerful inducement as that!”
She grasped again. “This?”
“Oh . . .” he hissed, “. . . aye . . .”
Cat laughed again, certain of her course. “ ‘Ne obliviscaris. ’Aye?”
But he could not answer, and in his taut, rigid silence she knew she had won a freedom far greater than ever imagined.
Four
In Breadalbane’s Kilchurn bedchamber, where he laired against the winter, parchment crackled beneath the earl’s hand. He nodded once. What he read pleased him. Immeasurably. So much he felt exultation hastening a heart he believed beyond such emotion. All of the pieces, the plans, put together at last.
Achallader’s razing avenged. And the brutal raid across Glenorchy as well as Glen Lyon. And all of the insults, all of the enmity; the interminable feud dating back a thousand years.
To MacDonalds of the Isles, usurpers of Scotland itself, and the very first Campbells.
So many years. So many offenses. And now the Master of Stair promised compensation. He declared it in his letter.
All of them to die.
The bitch licked his hand. The long curved tail thumped. Deep against her turgid belly, suckling vigorously, five squirming puppies thrived.
But in Glencoe what puppies were yet unborn might remain so—and MacDonald children as well.
Stair promised it. Stair had written it down in so many words. All of them to die.
“Aye,” he said softly, stroking the wiry hair, “by the first of January you’ll be free of these burdensome mouths, even as I soon thereafter shall be free of MacIain.”
God would surely understand that it must be done if the Highlands were to survive harnessed to the wheel that was England, rather than fall beneath it. Glencoe was, after all, only a small holding, and her MacDonalds less significant in the vital workings of Highland politics than others of the surname.
All was in motion now. Nothing could be stopped. Stair promised it.
The Campbell earl smiled. They shall be forgotten, MacIain and his MacDonalds, and the glen by the River Coe . . . and when this thing is finished no one shall recall them, or what was done to them.
Dair stood at the foot of the great rock at the east end of the glen and looked at Cat atop it. She was barefoot, trews- and shirt-clad, swathed haphazardly in a man’s plaid. Her hair, unbound and uncovered by kerch or borrowed bonnet, blew unfurled in the wind. Behind her, crowning the Pap and Devil’s Staircase, clouds misted the morning.
“What are you doing?” he asked, perplexed, having just come up from his house—their house, and overempty—to search for her.
Cat, poised against the wind, smiled in extravagant contentment. “Looking.”
“Och, well—I can see that, aye?” He glanced back over his shoulder curiously to inspect her view, though his vantage was not so paramount. He saw nothing he had not seen before. “What is it you’re looking at?”
“Not at, aye?—over. The glen.” She stood, arms folded beneath the plaid, at the western edge with muddy toes curled over the knurled lip of craggy granite. “Glencoe.”
It baffled him. “Glencoe?”
She withdrew an arm from beneath the plaid and gestured geography. “Just over there is MacIain’s winter house—there, Carnoch, through the trees . . . and John’s and Eiblin’s over there”—she swept the arm across the track that wound its way through the center of the glen—“and ours down a wee, behind that rib of mountain . . . and all the others scattered here and there like dice amidst the rocks and trees, or chicks too far from the hen—” Her arm dropped. “And beyond all that is Ballachulish and the ferry, and beyond that Loch Linnhe, and beyond that the Isles. But for the trees one might almost see them”—Cat grinned—“and Sommerled himself.”
He had taught her that by the peat-fire, with whisky in horn cups and tall tales as well as true in his mouth: of bold Sommerled come down from northern lands and his brave sons, who made the Isles theirs; and of Donald himself, progenitor of them all who now lived in the glen of the River Coe, of such proud peaks and frozen waterfalls, of stony curtain-walls nearly impassable.
Dair grinned back, much admiring a view that had nothing to do with houses or trees or islands. “You could be a ship’s figurehead, standing up there like that.”
“Och, I would rather be a sailor than a piece of wood . . . to sail the oceans broad and see what there is to see, to travel to the far Indies for the spice and to China for the silk . . .” She glanced down at him, bright of eye and yearning, one strand of hair blown slantwise across fiercely beautiful features, the face of a warrior-queen. “You’ve been to France, aye? I’ve been nowhere.”
“You’ve travelled farther than you ken, Cat.” He made his way around the back of the rock. “Verra much farther, aye?”
Her tone was dubious. “Have I?”
He climbed the crude steps hewn by no man’s hands but God’s, and joined her atop the time-wracked stone. Wind unpleated his kilt, billowed in his plaid. Like her he was barefoot; with the snow melted, it was good to feel the earth beneath one’s feet.
“You have.” Dair stood next to her now, one hand meeting hers to grasp, to twine the fingers into his own. “Would you have said ten years ago that you might stand here one day with me?”
So close, she was warm, and warded him from wind. “Ten years ago MacDonalds were lifting Glen Lyon cattle,” she explained with marked irony. “So no, I dinna think I would have said anything of the sort.”
He laughed. “Trust you to remind me of that!”
“Aye, well, ’tis true. And I swore then to hate you.”
“Hate me!”
“For lifting the cattle.”
“I wasna there, Cat!”
She looked at him sharply. “You were. They said so.”
“Who said so?”
“My brothers!”
He affected elaborate comprehension. “Oh, aye, well—they wouldna be lying, would they? And were they there, to ken whether I was?”
“No, but—” Cat stopped. She was silent a moment, mouth twisted awry. He felt her body stiffen. “Bloody bastards,” she muttered, between tight-shut teeth. “Bloody, cursed liars!”
“Aye, well, brothers are, forbye. Sometimes.”
“They wanted me to hate you! They kent how I felt—” She broke it off abruptly, face aflame.
This was worth investigating. “Aye?” he prodded. “And what was it they kent you felt?” No answer. “Cat?”
Mutinous, she was silent.
Dair laughed and slung an arm around her neck, pulling her closer still. “You’ll no’ be hiding something from me, aye?”
Cat worked her mouth, considering something. Then sighed and laughed ruefully, glancing sidelong at him and away. “That day you came, with MacIain. To see my father. About MacGregors, aye?”
“I recall.”
“You were kind to me.”
He smiled. “It isna my practice to be rude to a wee lass.”
Cat flashed him a scorching sidelong glance. “Wee lass . . . I was never a wee lass! And not so much a lass at all, to hear my brothers tell it.” She heaved a noisy sigh of aged aggravation, then dismissed them from her world. “You spoke to me as if you understood what it was to be overlooked, as MacIain overlooked me.”
He was preposterously comfortable with his arm crooked around her shoulders, hand dangling slackly. “Because I kent it myself. I told you, aye?—I was a runtling, myself, and only a second son. ’Twas John would be MacIain one day in our father’s place.”
Cat’s abrupt smile was brilliant. “I remember you said until your hair began to silver, you feared you were a changeling.” She put up a hand and touched it, threading affectionate fingers through it. “No one would question it now.”
He laughed. “My mother never did. A woman kens her own, she said. But dinna turn the subject. How was it you felt, that your brothers lied to you?”
She left off untangling his hair and let the arm slip to his waist beneath his plaid, settling there with finality. “I told you. You were kind to me. And you were a bluidy MacDonald from bluidy Glencoe, and I couldna help but wonder if you were a monster.” She laughed softly. “You were gey remarkable, aye?—a monster, a MacDonald, but kind to a plain-faced lass.”
“Ah,” he said, as joyous laughter bubbled up from deep inside; he had never felt this with Jean, and marvelled at it. “A great romantic hero, aye?—like in Roman de la Rose or Chanson de Roland. ”
Cat’s mouth twisted wryly, and then she smiled. “But I was only an overfanciful lass—I learned the truth of you.”
“But I wasna on that raid,” he protested.
“Not that one, perhaps . . . but others, aye?” She flashed him an arch glance. “There was a misty morning in a Glen Lyon shieling—and you wi’ Robbie Stewart.”
He sought bitterness in her tone and found none. It was teasing, no more, warmly intimate, as if she had let go all the bitterness of the past, the dirks drawn between them, between Glen Lyon and Glencoe.
Overwhelmed, he caught her up in a sudden, inelegant embrace. “Christ, Cat—” He buried his face in her hair, holding her tightly, so tightly. The wind beat about them, snooving through the trees to tangle tartan plaids. “Dinna ever leave me . . . ”
Her grip was as strong, and the breath warm against his scarred neck. “ ’Tis my home,” she said simply. And then, as if comprehending what he could not say, the fear he would not admit, offered him what he most wanted of her. “This is my home. Glencoe.”
Governor Hill stared at the young Cameron come to carry him a message. He clutched the arms of his chair so tightly his knuckles ached. “James has released the clans from the oath sworn at Dalcomera ! ”
Lochiel’s son would be a handsome man. His face was expressive. “He has that, aye.”
Relief was overwhelming. Though still seated, Hill collapsed in upon himself, hearing the chair creak beneath him. “Praise God for His wisdom,” he murmured breathily, then pulled himself to his feet. Elation lent renewed strength. “Will you have usquabae?”
The young Cameron declined. “We have but six days before the amnesty expires,” he said. “My father says we had best go to Campbell of Ardkinglas to set our names to the parchment.”
Indeed, time is running out. . . . But Hill believed it no longer mattered, nor Stair’s hatred of the Highlanders; that such commitment by Ewan Cameron of Lochiel on the heels of James’s release of them would go far to convince other clans this was the right decision.
Except perhaps for one old laird. “Glencoe,” he blurted.
Lochiel’s son hitched a plaid-swathed shoulder. “We’ve heard naught of MacIain.”
Elation burned to ash. It was imperative that MacIain sign. If he comes forward within the week, there need not be a beginning of Stair’s brutal plan, but if he does not—