Despite his intentions to see his home be solely of his own company before midnight, Niall was still arranging fresh drinks and the arrival of yet more food long into the early morning hours. Lords appeared unwilling to leave his grounds, and their ladies continued to chatter despite the late hour. This meant that Niall was forced to remain in place, caretaker to the guests within his household. But each passing hour tested his infamous stoicism and thinned his patience, for there was never any conversation or relationship that was not utilized for personal gain at events such as these.
The lords of Grant and McIntosh had each approached him, offering praise of his home and reminding him of their three daughters apiece. According to them, no finer women in Scotland were to be found than their own offspring; skilled in music, singing, and fine language. MacPherson, a man who resembled more a bear than a human, who Niall had never thought to be able to see past his next meal, even spoke of his own niece as one of the most beauteous in the Scottish Midlands. Right in the middle of a discussion about hunting.
When lairds and rich merchants of the area were not attempting to push their female kin towards the unmarried laird of Brodie, they were discussing machinations of war, a subject that Niall had grown weary enough of to have extracted his own militia from most ongoing clan wars. It had taken him years of discussions and trade agreements to ensure that his connections with other provinces would not be damaged should he withdraw his men from their ranks, but his reward had now been several years of peace, and his people were still recovering from that last clan war against Sutherland. He would not lend more blood and sinew to a fight that was not of his own making.
Rescued from Alex Ross’s entreaties for stronger militia support from their neighbors across the bay, Niall was thankful when a hand found his shoulder and a fresh goblet of wine was presented before him. Ross was interrupted in his beseechment when Niall’s uncle spoke with buoyant joyfulness.
“Such a spirited ceilidh, my lord!” he insisted, the large and only slightly gnarled hand falling upon Niall in a hearty manner of congratulations. Ross’s lips drew thin with annoyance at the disturbance. Taking the opportunity presented, Niall bid him a quick apology and then resolutely turned his back on the man.
Ross was a laird who enjoyed war more than he did peace, and he wasn’t interested in anything the monger had to say. Instead, he took Duncan’s interruption in stride and was quick to paste a smile on his face that was only half false.
“Enjoying yourself, Uncle?” he said to the man, glancing at the half-filled cup in Duncan’s hand and the way that his preferred mead had set his cheeks aglow.
Niall preferred whiskey when he was truly celebrating, but knew that any event in which Malcolm and his witch of a mother Fiona were in attendance was one that he needed to keep a clear head for. As such, watered-down wine was his insufferable beverage of choice. Which didn’t exactly encourage his mood.
“Oh, most certainly, my lord, most certainly.”
Duncan was a man of fine feeling and positive attitude. Niall wasn’t sure the old man had ever disliked a festive occasion in his life. Instead, he was too much of an avid lover of life to pass up the opportunity to make merry—and too wise not to find the mirth in watching lesser fools drink themselves into stupors.
Nodding to Lord Ross as the man shifted away, a resentful glint in his eye, Niall focused on his uncle. The man was old enough to be his blood kin but was only a Brodie by marriage and not at all by name. He had married Niall’s aunt some years ago and been widowed almost as quickly, for fate had been cruel the day that his wife and child were taken from him in a single sweep of the hand. Now, decades later, Duncan had still retained his faith and spunk for life, embracing Niall as an adoptive son, nephew, and brother.
“In fact, this whole evening has been so engaging that it has had me considering the choice to have one myself!” Duncan chortled.
To any who might be a stranger to the man, Lord Mackenzie was joking. But Niall was no such stranger and could recognize the cunning that lay behind the old man’s gaze.
“You want to hold a ceilidh?” he asked the man. Duncan had always been one for celebratory occasions but rarely was he the sort to stand at the head of such things. He was no seeker of power or authority.
“No, my boy, I wish to hold a child,” Duncan proceeded to explain, apparently blind to Niall’s look of surprised shock. Duncan had never mentioned a desire to remarry. Not since his first wife was lost in childbirth. “Last winter was a harsh one for me, my lord. It had me fearing for my mortality and what I might leave behind me should I be lost in the chill.”
Niall opened his mouth to protest. His uncle was still young by many accounts, healthy and strong. But Duncan overrode him as easily as if he were once more a boy with a simple wave of his hand.
“Yes, the winter did not take me, but it still could this time around. I fear a world in which the Mackenzie name will be lost. I have thought of taking another wife and having a son to leave behind me when I am done in this world.” He looked at his nephew. Unlike in the years of Niall’s youth, Duncan’s gaze was forced upwards to meet his nephew’s eye. “Do you not harbor such fears and desires, my lord?”
“No.”
Niall gave no further consideration to the topic, his mind naturally shying away from it. Approaching his third decade in just a few years, it was logical that Niall should be considering marital prospects. As laird, he needed a son if the Brodie title was to continue down the direct descent of firstborn children. Malcolm had made that very clear in his little speech. And yet, Niall never had desired to take a wife or even actively seek one.
Instead of pestering him over his aversion to human connection and familial love, Duncan patted his nephew on the shoulder once more.
“Well, it will just have to be my little ones that you chase around your grounds then, boy,” he told him with a laugh before drinking from his cup once more. “If I have a bushel, I may even let you adopt one. T’would keep your cousin’s mitts off of the seat of lairdship.” Duncan’s gaze narrowed towards where Malcolm was entertaining several families from Cummings land with his tales of bravery in the last clan war. “That boy be trying so hard for your birthright, he’ll be sitting in your lap before long.”
Niall’s teeth clenched, his jaw widening into a hard slab of resentment. He reached to rub at his chin in thought, short bristles of a new beard rasping against his palm. Malcolm was a threat to his lairdship, but no more so than an idle sword was to a soldier. His gaze moved from his cousin to his aunt, the shrew that wielded her son as a weapon.
Fiona, like Duncan, had married into the Brodie name. The wife of Grahame’s second son, she had been eschewed by the eldest heir for a woman of low birth. Niall’s mother had been simple, sweet, and kind. All things that Fiona, with her fine breeding and English arrogance, had detested. The fact that Gilroy had chosen such a woman over her own hand had been a burning resentment in Fiona for years. With Niall’s mother lost so young, the target of her ire had been taken from her before vengeance could be executed.
Scorned pride was a wound that festered like no other.
Accepting the second son as a consolation of sorts, Fiona had done all she could to encourage the rumors that Niall’s birth had been too early after his parents’ marriage to be considered appropriate. Despite there being no evidence to suggest that he had not simply been premature in his advent, Fiona had crafted and manifested half-proofs where it had been needed, and regularly stoked the flames of rumor. So far, her slanders had tarnished only Niall’s reputation, not his claim as Brodie heir. Now, with her own child married and with a son of his own, Niall knew that her efforts would be redoubled.
He watched the woman in question, gowned in the finest French cloth, her white-blonde hair pulled into a vicious braided knot atop her head, and her fingers decorated with rings of large cuts and various colors. Her features were pointed, her blue eyes shrewd, and she assessed everything about her as if it hel
d a scent that she found distasteful.
As he observed her, never doubting her wiles to be thrice that of her son’s, Fiona’s icy stare met with Niall’s across the room. She held his gaze with a stubborn pride that only her state as a widow could afford her. She was beholden to no one in the Brodie name now, and operated as her own station of power. She lowered her gaze before no man, least of all, Niall. And, as she held his stare with so uncompromising a look of her own, her lips curled into a slow and satisfied smile.
Now that Fiona’s bloodline held the strongest lineage in the family, Niall could be sure that her nails would be sharpened and her claws extended. That little smile might as well have been a battle cry.
2
Caught in a Current
“Catch it, Caoimhe! Catch it!”
The cries were sweet and peeling in the morning breeze. Little Effie squealed as the tide rushed in, cool and biting at their ankles. She turned and ran three steps towards the shoreline, her skirts in one hand, and her unbound hair matted about her face. Wisps the color of the brightest sunset created a glowing halo around the little girl’s head.
Caoimhe knew that her own could look no smoother, locks already pulling from her braid and flying wild in the wind. Yet she claimed no such beauty to her own palette. Where her niece’s long and curling tresses were like fire in the cool morning dew, her own were dark as bramble and unruly like bracken.
Laughing as the tide rolled in, Caoimhe paid no mind to the chill creeping up her bare legs. Her skirts swirled around her, their ends caught in the roll of the waters and the bright white of the froth and sway. She held her dress so that only the last few inches might be held prisoner in the current, and wriggled her toes in the sands beneath her feet. She felt the bite of a stone at her heel.
“Caoimhe, it’s floating away! Get it, get it!”
“It’s not floating away! I’ll have it, Effie!” Caoimhe called back, bending low and reaching her fingers into the dark waters of the loch. She could barely see the pretty blue ribbon, so sodden it had become a part of the body it floated upon. The tips of her fingers brushed a strip of damp satin and Caoimhe shifted to reach further. Her toes dug into the bedded sands to steady her weight, and one side of her skirts fell into the water.
With a brave stretch and grab, Effie’s ribbon was wrapped around Caoimhe’s fingers. She felt the strip against her palm and curled her gentle touch around the lost trifle. In efforts of speed, she had already seen it slip from her grasp with too forceful a claim once before. Instead, delicacy was the key, and with a little luck and chance, the hair ribbon was secure in her hand once more.
In triumph, Caoimhe smiled and straightened, lifting the ribbon above her head. The trailing ends dripped salty drops upon her face before wrapping to meld around her wrist. Effie beamed and cheered, her hands clapping together with joy.
Neither of them noticed the large surge of tide that came to crash around their legs. Both squealed with cold and raced back to the sandy coastline. They kicked up the frozen waters of the shallows as they went, hands over their faces to protect themselves against the spray.
Shivering, Caoimhe felt a tingling numbness in her toes as they made it to dry land, and wiggled them against the coarse sands of the shoreline. Effie hurried over to claim her ribbon, and with the piece once more secure around her hair, the pair of them rushed for their shoes and stockings.
While it was innocent for Effie to run bare-legged upon the beach, Caoimhe was now past her seventeenth summer. Her mother was always warning her that she could not continue as an infant; that she must now behave as a lady should. It behooved Caoimhe to fall to the rough and bristling grasslands and pull her stockings back into place before her father returned from his dealings or a passerby might spot her childish indecency.
Secured once more in her feminine sensibilities, her hose in place and her soft slippers of kid upon her feet, Caoimhe drew up her knees and wrapped her arms beneath her thighs. Her skirts were dark to the knees, chilly against her skin and turning the light breeze to a chafing wind, but she did not mind. She closed her eyes and breathed in the salt of the sea and the smell of the land.
She had spent all her life within the borders of the Brodie highlands and saw no desire to adventure beyond them. Her sisters had been the adventurous spirits in the family and left Caoimhe to her own imaginings of contentment.
She looked out across the bay, the mountainous shape of the lands beyond, felt the wind and water, the earth beneath her feet, and smelled the faintest trace of burning wood from a nearby pyre. As far as she was concerned, it was here that God’s creations came together. It was here that was paradise on Earth.
“Caoimhe, come play with me!”
With a smile and a holler of abandon, Caoimhe was back on her feet and chasing her niece across the dunes of the coast. She reached out and tickled, grabbed the girl beneath the arms, and spun her in arcs through the air. She was the little girl’s savior and her knight and her frightening monster. All manner of exciting creation, as they played and danced across the sands.
The docks closest to the Webb family’s home were little more than a deeper area of the bay, declared as a trading port by the slatted bridge that held true to one side. It could support no more than three rowboats at a time and was forced to permit its ships to spread and spiral out across the coast. From this central port, there were only the necessities to be had; only the daily intake that kept the three nearby villages sure of food and trade.
Caoimhe’s father, Kenneth, was a man of great craft and reputation. The name of Webb was known amongst the merchant classes, encompassing trust and valor in trade. When purchasing from a Webb, you knew a deal was fair and well made.
But one could not trade on reputation alone.
As Caoimhe took Effie’s hand and led her over the uneven slats of the docking bay, she heard the accepting tone of her father and the clink of too-few coins falling into his outstretched palm. Spotting the approach of his daughter, the man curled his fingers around the sum, too quick for it to be counted, and secured it within the leather pouch at his hip. Once upon a time, the leather of that bag had hung full and heavy; now it barely shifted against her father’s hip as he walked.
No such worries were painted on the face of Kenneth Webb, however, as he turned to greet his grandchild and daughter.
With open arms, he pulled Effie up into his embrace, smiling at Caoimhe over the little girl’s vibrant hair. The merchant with whom he had been speaking bid his farewell, bowing his head in respect of Caoimhe’s gender as he passed. She offered him a pretty smile and the dip of her knees in return.
“Are we to go home now?” Effie asked, her eyes bright and round.
It had taken only three weeks for the littlest of the Webb family to see the small and sturdy home of the Webbs as her own. No more did she cry for the house of her late father’s family.
“I certainly hope so!” her grandfather assured her. His smile was broad and his eyes bright with an effortless energy. With a step only heavy from his size, he strode from the docks. The sound of his leather boots on the wooden slats was familiar and comforting to Caoimhe’s ears. She had been to ports all along the province’s boundary with her father, witnessing his business and smiling at his skill. The reassuring thud of his steps was the sound of her childhood.
Reaching out to take her father’s arm, Caoimhe and her family walked as a little unit up and along the sloping beach, around the long, broad grass of the dunes and towards the little road that would lead them back home.
The well-traveled lane was on no map that Caoimhe knew of, and was no wider than a single horse’s girth. Her slight frame pulled in to the side of her father’s bulk so that she might remain at his side, despite the narrow passage. Her wet skirts slapped against his legs in the wind.
“You two have been in the water again,” Kenneth chastised with little disapproval in his tone. Instead, a wide smile was stretched across his face. He patted the bottom of
his granddaughter and shot a suspicious glance at Caoimhe.
“No one saw my daughter behaving as a child, I shall hope.”
“Father, you worry more for things you should not and less upon concerns that warrant your attention,” she told him, her nose in the air.
Caoimhe was no outspoken strumpet or wicked shrew. Her voice was low, soft, and possessed a unique ability to hold both strength and unassuming demurity in a single breath. She was no tittering lady of polite society nor the coarse-mouthed wife to the fisherman’s boy. Her own opinions, though infrequently spoken, were no less powerful for their rarity.
“My business was concluded well enough, daughter of mine. You have no need to trouble yourself.”
“Did you gain enough for radishes?”
Caoimhe’s latest attempts at remedies for her mother’s pains had served well when using the root vegetable, but old woman Bertha two miles down the road refused to part with her radishes for less than a pretty penny.
Her father was saved from answering her interrogation when the little family approached a crossroads where the slim walkway met a wider road.
Almost immediately, they were rushed from their place by an approaching carriage. The hooves of the heavy beasts that drew the vehicle along hit the uneven ground hard, and crushed roadside thistles and weeds beneath their tread.
Caoimhe stepped back, turning in towards her father so that her skirts were not at risk of catching on the wheels of so fine a carriage. She spotted a clan shield emblazoned upon the door of the cart but knew not to whom it belonged.
No sooner had the first of the travelers passed them by but a second followed in its wake. Six carriages in total were led along the road, some drawn by a single steed and others with as many as four. Caoimhe watched as their drivers brought them all to a fork in the road a half-mile down the valley before being spurred in opposing directions. Each had their own destination in mind and yet they had all come from the same direction.
Haunted By A Highland Curse: A Steamy Scottish Medieval Historical Romance Page 2