He hadn’t said a word since luncheon, and Kate told herself she ought to be happy for his complete indifference. Rather than worrying about what was now too late to remedy, she should be fanning the spark of satisfaction she’d felt upon leaving the White Rose.
Despite all odds, she was going to make it to Castle Parnell. She was going to petition the marquis for aid. The chance of her and her sisters returning to some semblance of their former lives, the chance that had so long eluded them, was finally within reach. Not only would she and Helena and Charlotte survive, but they might actually win freedom from this fear-laden state called poverty. The idea of sitting in a warm, comfortable room sipping well-sugared coffee without having to wonder how they would pay for it brought a smile to her lips.
“You have the look of a cream-sotted tabby, Mrs. Blackburn.”
MacNeill’s deep burr startled Kate from her reverie. She hadn’t thought he’d been paying a speck of attention to her. The realization that he had not only remarked on her expression but had been evidently watching her alarmed her. What thoughts and considerations moved behind MacNeill’s enigmatic visage?
“I was thinking of coffee,” she said, with forced brightness.
“You must be right fond of coffee then,” he said.
As Kate wasn’t certain how to take that, she ignored it. Maybe he couldn’t help intimidating people. He just looked threatening, the physical embodiment of menace. And she had learned that the best way to eliminate a menace was to make its agent your ally.
MacNeill, her ally? She swallowed, though objectively she knew the idea had merit.
Besides, there was good material for her book to be plumbed here. How often did one get to interview a ruffian? Possibly someone with bona fide connections to the dark underbelly of society? He might prove a veritable font of information on how one might circumnavigate the dangers of the lower economic orders. The opportunity was too good to pass up.
“Ahem.”
His gaze remained locked on the road ahead.
“So.” She clapped her hands together in the manner of one embarking on a pleasurable conversational voyage. “What have you been doing for the last three years?”
His head turned slowly in her direction. “I beg your pardon?”
“How have you been occupying your time?” Done anything criminal? “Where have you been living?” In a rookery?
He hesitated, as though trying to gauge the dangers of answering, and oddly, that comforted her. How could she pose any danger to such as him? “In India.”
“Ah, yes. Where the gelding came from.”
“Aye.”
“Were you a spy there, too?”
His gaze snapped, startled, to hers. “No!”
“You needn’t look so off-put. When you came to York, you quite clearly intimated that you had been spying in France when you were caught and imprisoned.”
“Not caught,” he corrected flatly. “Turned in.”
A long moment of silence followed.
“Did you spend the entire three years in India?” Kate finally asked. Her father had told them stories about the deprivations and hardships soldiers faced in India: heat and dust and sickness. “It must have been terribly hard. How did you endure it?”
Her sympathy was lost on MacNeill. He looked, in fact, amused. “My choices were somewhat limited, Mrs. Blackburn. A Rifleman goes where he’s sent.”
So he was a soldier in the new Rifleman’s regiment. Chosen Men, she believed the soldiers who served in that unit were called. Surely he was not an officer. How could he be? A Scottish orphan without name or money would not have the wherewithal to buy a commission.
But if he was only a simple soldier, what was he doing here? A soldier enlisted for life unless wounded. He didn’t look injured. He looked in the prime of health.
“What about the others? Did they enlist, too?”
“Others?” His brief glance was quizzical.
“The two young men who came to York with you. Mr. Ross and Mr. Munro. Are they soldiers too?”
The flint returned to his green eyes. “No.”
“Where are they?”
“Last I heard Munro is in London, teaching boys to prick each other for sport. Dand …I do not know where Mr. Ross is. I’ll find out, though.” Darkness invested his voice.
“And when you find him?”
“We’ll have a conversation,” he said. “Talk over old times.”
The words themselves were innocuous, but the way he said them made Kate shiver. So much for her momentary ease. Too much about MacNeill made Kate afraid. She hated being afraid. She reacted badly to it. She reacted badly now.
“Do you do that on purpose?” she blurted out.
He frowned without looking at her, his eyes on the road. “Do what?”
“Intimidate people? Because if you do, I think it exceptionally bad form.”
His brows flew up. “Bad form?”
“Yes. Very bad form. I should think it beneath you to intimidate helpless widows into a state of abject terror.”
“Abject terror?”
“Yes! It can hardly be worth your effort. I am far too easy a mark to waste such a talent on, but if it makes you feel somehow superior, then fine, I admit, I am entirely in awe of you.”
“In awe?”
“Would you kindly stop repeating me?” she asked, her tone edging toward shrillness. “It’s most disconcerting!”
“Disconcert—” His expression relaxed, and one corner of his mouth curved up into a grin that scored a dimple deep into his lean cheek. “Forgive me. It’s just that I’ve never had a lady confess to holding me in awe. It’s beyond flattering.”
She gasped just as the carriage jolted over a rut in the road, pitching her against MacNeill. His arm shot out, his hand clamping down on her hip, big and broad and entirely male, sealing her tightly to his side. Even through the layers of petticoat, gown and cloak, she could feel his heat. “Careful, Mrs. Blackburn. A man can handle only so much… ‘awe.’ ”
“Oh!” She jerked back, scooting as far from him as possible. The blackguard!
He laughed. “Ach, lass. Beg pardon. I’m a mannerless brute who never could resist tweaking a few tail feathers—especially when they are being swished right beneath my nose,” he said with unexpected charm.
It wasn’t the words that disarmed her. It was his smile. For the first time, she saw a hint of boyishness in his countenance and realized that he was, for all his hardness and his history, still a very young man. He seemed so capable and so… used.
She must remember not to let a person’s manner cloud her perceptions.
Abruptly, she reached beneath the plank seat and from her reticule withdrew a stub of a pencil and sheet of foolscap she kept folded within. Hastily, she jotted down her insights. He watched her without commenting until she finished and tucked the paper back.
“Difficult to write a letter in a carriage,” he said in a neutral voice. “I suppose you must miss the company of your mother and sisters.” He hesitated, as though making conversation was unnatural and uncomfortable for him.
“My mother died of a fever a few months after you saw us in York.”
His brows flashed together. “I didn’t know. I am sorry.”
Kate nodded, caught off guard by the surge of loss that swept through her, and with it, the familiar sense of panic. There were only her and her sisters now. Her mother had fought her illness valiantly, but in the end it had proved too strong. Her last words to Kate had been “I am sorry.”
Weren’t they all? Had her father, too, been sorry as he faced his executioner? Had Michael died regretting he’d volunteered for his assignment? She slammed the door shut on the hurtful thought.
“And your sisters?”
She considered telling him a lie that would leave her with some dignity, but then remembered all too vividly her confessions of the preceding night. From their first meeting, MacNeill had known the baldest truths about her. What matter
if he knew the extent to which her family’s fortunes had fallen?
“Helena has become the companion to an elderly neighbor.” She did not elaborate by telling him what a despicable old cat that neighbor was or the manner in which she bullied Helena. Kate herself wouldn’t have been able to stand one hour of the old harridan’s tyranny, but Helena, cool and poised as an ice sculpture, endured all with utter aplomb and a calm, if sardonic, smile.
“You had a younger sister, too,” MacNeill prompted.
“Yes. Charlotte.” Kate smiled, thinking about the beautiful, if willful, baby of the family. At least Charlotte had landed on her feet. “She is at school. Come spring she has been invited to spend the season with her good friend Margaret Welton, the Baron and Baroness Welton’s only daughter.”
“You are impressed.”
“I am relieved,” Kate said stiffly, reacting more to the disdain in his tone than his words. “She might make a decent match yet.”
“She might make a decent match, yet here you are, sitting in an open carriage with a most indecent companion. It hardly seems fair, does it?” His voice grew musing. “How you must resent this.”
She did not reply, flustered by him: his size; the leathery masculine scent of him; the breadth of his shoulders; the rough stubble on his chin and cheeks; the easy competence of his hands on the reins. She was entirely too aware of him.
A group of sheep lifted their heads from the steep flanks of a mountainside and watched their passage. She seized on the distraction they offered. “I was beginning to think there was nothing alive out here.”
“Those are cheviots,” MacNeill said. “Four-legged Highlanders, some call them.”
“Why?” Kate asked, startled.
He shrugged. “They’re the lairds’ newest tenants. Their only tenants. The people have been moved out to make way for them.”
“All of the people?” Kate asked disbelievingly.
“Most. You ken the White Rose?” The Scottish burr had thickened in his voice. “Time was it was the center of a wee town. Until Lord Ross moved it.”
“Moved an entire village? Where?”
MacNeill’s eyes stayed fast on the road ahead. “The shore. Some to collect kelp, others to try their hand at fishing. But the Ross men are no fishermen. So they left. Sailed west. To Canada, often as not.”
“But… why would anyone do such a thing?”
“Well, lass”—his voice dripped irony—“see those great fat sheep staring down at you? Acre for acre they make far less troublesome tenants than a few old men running cattle. They produce more profit, too. And that’s the whole and sum of it,” he said. “It’s happening all over the Highlands. Soon there’ll be no Scots in Scotland.”
“It isn’t right to take everything away from a people.”
“Not everything,” MacNeill said, with a twisted smile. “You can take a man’s land and his horse, ye can outlaw his plaid and his pipes, but you can’t steal away the nature of a man, and it’s the nature of the Scot to be proud and to be loyal.
“That’s why the Highland regiments fight so hard for your king, Mrs. Blackburn. We took an oath, and we’ll stay faithful to that oath past death.” His gaze became dark and shuttered. “And damned be those who aren’t.”
He fell silent after that and would say no more.
FIVE
OVERNIGHTING IN LOWER PLACES THAN INNS, TAVERNS, AND HOSTELRIES
DUSK CAME, AND THE TEMPERATURE PLUNGED. Kate had no clothes appropriate for traveling in an open carriage, and her boots had been created in another life for a fashionable young wife to saunter along grassy garden paths, not over frost-rimed rock. She shut her eyes and willed herself into a light sleep, escaping the icy grip of dusk as best she could.
“Here we are.”
She came awake at once, lifting her head and peering about from under the hood. “Where? I don’t see anything,” she said, looking about for the lights that marked a village.
He pulled the horse to a halt and sprang lightly to the ground. In the gloaming, his features were obscured. He came round the side and without hesitation picked her up before she could react, set her down, and turned back to the carriage.
As her eyesight adjusted, she saw that they were standing among a cluster of crude stone shanties, their tiny windows gaping into black interiors and their doors ajar. The buildings had been abandoned.
“What is this place?” she asked.
MacNeill, busy unharnessing his gelding, shrugged. “Never had a name that I heard.” He motioned toward the nearest building. “That’ll do as good as any. Go in there.”
“In there?” She had expected to be overnighting at an inn or a stable, or at the very least, at some farm where they could purchase the use of a bed. It had never occurred to her that she would be alone at night in the middle of nowhere with Kit MacNeill. “Isn’t there a tavern or something nearby where we could stay?”
“Not for miles.”
“That’s all right. I don’t mind if it takes a bit longer. It’s a lovely night…”
His hands stilled on the harness and he turned his head, looking at her over his shoulder. She smiled tentatively.
“There’s no moon, and when I say miles, I mean miles, not a matter of another hour or two. The road is rough and going to get rougher before we crawl up onto the moors and I’ll not risk Doran’s footing to assuage your delicate sensibilities.” His tone brooked no argument. “So, Mrs. Blackburn, I suggest you pick your accommodation.”
“I see. Well, if it’s a matter of safeguarding your horse’s health, of course, we must stay,” she said with forced brightness and headed into the nearest hovel.
And it was a hovel.
The door was half off the hinges and tilted tipsily on the frame. A tattered rag curtain covered a tiny opening, and the dirt floor within was sloped toward a low flat stone hearth beneath a rude chimney. Other than a bit of broken crockery, it was empty.
What was she supposed to do? There was no furniture. She hovered indecisively near the door, miserable, cold, and frightened.
“Step aside.” She jumped at the sound of his voice so close behind her, but he affected not to notice, edging past with an armful of kindling. He dumped the wood on the hearth and reached into his jacket, pulling out a tinder box which he used to light a fire. He stood up. “I’ll get your trunk.”
“Thank you.”
He disappeared, returning within a few minutes with her luggage and the basket from the White Rose. He sat down on the edge of the hearth and fed the fire a few sticks of wood before rummaging into the basket and taking out the jug of ale.
Dear God, please do not let him get drunk. I don’t know what I’ll do if he gets drunk. She edged closer to the door, preparing to bolt. But to where?
He uncorked the jug with his teeth and spat the top onto the hearth, tipping the crock back against his forearm and lifting the opening to his lips. Then he tipped his head back and poured the beer down his throat for, what seemed to Kate, a great long while. Finally he lowered the jug, wiped his mouth against his sleeve, and held it out to her. “Here. It’ll warm you better than water, not as much as brandy.”
She didn’t want the raw ale, but the alternative, to leave it all for him, seemed unwise. Hesitantly, she accepted the jug. His eyes glittered in the dancing fire-light. “Do you have a drinking utensil of any type?”
He regarded her flatly. “Aye. It’s called a mouth. I suggest you use it.”
“I see.”
He broke off a chunk of bread, watching her as she tried to emulate his movements, but the jug was heavy, and though she tried, as he had, to brace its weight against the back of her forearm, it slipped as she hefted it, spilling ale down her bodice. “Damn!”
His brow flew up at her language. She didn’t care. She was now wet and sticky as well as cold. The road that had seemed endless to her today promised to be eternal tomorrow, she hadn’t a proper bed to sleep in, and she was alone with a tall, rough-looking High
lander who, for all she knew, had committed untold atrocities against any number of women. And worse, she was here of her own volition. She was frankly afraid, and Kate Blackburn, ever since she’d been a child, met her fear with anger. Now was no exception.
“Damn, I say! How the am I to drink out of this… thing?” she demanded. “Why the devil don’t you own a cup, or is that somehow contrary to your Highlander’s code of self-abnegation? Not everything has to be a trial, you know. A few utensils wouldn’t unman you! Or un-Scot you, should you be unable to differentiate between the two!”
He unfolded with quick, lethal grace and in a single stride stood before her, looking down into her upturned face. His eyes sparked with hot-cold lights. His smile was not pleasant. Still, somehow she kept her chin up, her gaze challenging his.
“Well now, lass. I can only assure you of my manliness, unless you’d prefer a demonstration?” he purred. She flushed. His gaze slid to her mouth. It took all her restraint not to bite her lips to keep them from trembling. “As to a drinking utensil… You can drink from my mouth, if you’d like. Because that’s the only other vessel here. And I promise I won’t find it a trial.”
She gasped. Her gaze plummeted from his and scorching heat swept up her throat and covered her face.
“No?” he asked. Abruptly the lambent sensual quality disappeared from his expression. “Then get some sleep, Mrs. Blackburn,” he said flatly. “Tomorrow we have some real driving to do, and I don’t trust the weather to hold.” He turned back toward the hearth, pausing to look at her over his shoulder. “And do not bait a man unless you’re willing to pay the price of the sport.”
Yes. She would remember that. To her grave.
With trembling fingers, she unlatched the trunk, looking for something to don that would provide added warmth. There was nothing. The dresses she’d had remade from her mother’s once fashionable gowns were made of silk and muslin, as sheer and delicate as moth wings. She took a deep breath. She supposed he meant for her to sleep on the ground.
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