Kissing the Countess

by Susan King

  "Plans?" He blinked.

  "Will you stay or will you leave the glen?" Morag asked. "They say you do not want to be here. Which is it?"

  "I, ah, have some decisions to make."

  "Then make them. Inherited nearly a year ago, and only now he comes back with his plans," Morag muttered.

  He was not surprised that the old woman had her doubts about him. He had expected that from the tenants in the glen. He turned to Catriona.

  "Well, you and Mrs. MacLeod have your own plans," he said. "I'll leave you to go about your business."

  "Very well," Catriona answered.

  For an awkward moment, he and Catriona looked at each other, and he knew she felt unsure, as he did, about how to say farewell. He bent and gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek.

  Catriona turned with Morag and walked toward a bridge not far from where they stood. Evan noticed its single stone arch construction, built over a gorge that contained, in its hollow, a wide, fast stream. He glanced past that toward the hills.

  High about them soared forested slopes and bleaker, rocky inclines dotted with tenacious grazing sheep and goats. Higher still, the Torridon peaks were ringed with clouds. Everywhere were the sounds and scents of wind, water, turf, and pine. The landscape here had overwhelming power, mysterious strength, and a raw and rugged beauty. Much of this—nearly all his eye could see from this spot—belonged to him.

  Glancing toward the bridge again, he noticed that Catriona and Morag had begun to cross its long arch. As he walked along himself, the angle of his view changed, and he saw that the bridge was ruined in the center of the span.

  The keystone was missing, and a gash, empty air, separated the two curving sides of the bridge.

  Yet the women walked up the slight stone incline, talking, not even looking at the danger. Another step, and another, and they would plummet to their deaths.

  Evan started running. "Catriona!" Pounding onto the bridge, he grabbed her, grabbed the older woman, too, and pulled them both away from the brink, dragging them off the bridge onto the safety of solid earth.

  "Ach," Morag said to Catriona. "Did you not tell the man about the bridge?"

  Chapter 14

  "Tell the man what," Evan said, heart still slamming, "about the bridge?" Letting go of Morag, he kept a grip on Catriona's upper arm, as if he kept her from falling, though they stood on solid ground.

  He knew exactly why he held her so tightly. He just did not want to think about it. The shock of seeing her at the edge of the gap had left him shaking.

  "The bridge is safe for walking. We just do not send carts or horses over it," Catriona said.

  "Safe?" Evan blinked. "Are you mad?"

  "We cross it without trouble."

  "As sturdy as the mountains, that bridge," Morag said.

  "Why hasn't it been repaired?" Evan demanded.

  "It has, many times," Catriona answered. "But it always collapses again in the center."

  He studied the bridge with a narrowed glance. "The arch is too low," he observed immediately. "And the construction must be faulty." Looking down at the water, which ran fast and deep between a high bank on one side and a soaring mountain slope on the other, he lifted his glance again. "That slope has deep runnel tracks from melting snows.... Does the stream flood during spring rains?"

  "Sometimes," Catriona said. "If the water comes as high as the bridge, more stones break off. Should the arch be higher?"

  "No, but that low curvature is unstable across such a wide span. That's one reason it comes down so easily."

  "It is the fairies who take it down," Morag said.

  He looked at her. "The what?"

  "This is Drochaid nan Sitheach, the Bridge of the Fairies," Morag answered. "It leads to Beinn Sitheach, the Fairy Mountain. And the daoine sith do not want many humans to cross over. They take down the bridge when it pleases them to do so, and the humans put it right back up. When I was a wee lass, I remember my father and other men setting the stones into place, and the stones fell even as the men worked. They said then it was the fairies' mischief. That was long before your father evicted my father and others from their own homes, when they were old men and no longer of any use to the lord and the land," she added, with an accusatory glance.

  "I'm sorry that happened, Mrs. MacLeod," he said. "I am. But tell me more about this bridge."

  "The fairies wreck it, and we put it back up. But it has not come down for a long time. It is a sturdy wee footbridge."

  "There's a hole in the middle!" he said.

  "Just a wee bad step. You have to know how to cross."

  "A wee bad step." He frowned. "And how, exactly, do you cross it?"

  "You speak a fairy charm first."

  "A charm?" He blinked incredulously at both women. Catriona nodded as if there was nothing odd in the old woman's statement.

  Morag nodded. "We say a charm when we go over, and the same when we come back. It keeps the traveler safe."

  Evan felt bewildered. "A fairy charm."

  "Tell him, Catriona Mhor, so he too can cross the bridge."

  "By all means, tell me." Evan looked at Catriona.

  "Hold your fingers just so," she said, shaping her thumb and forefinger in a closed circle. Reciting some Gaelic phrases, she translated them for him.

  Like the birds of the air I fly,

  Like the leaves on the wind I fly

  Head to foot, crown to sole,

  Angels protect me from the fairies of the knoll.

  "And that keeps you safe on this old bridge," Evan drawled.

  "That, and long legs to leap the gap," Morag said.

  Shaking his head, Evan looked toward the bridge, where crumbled keystones hung over a drop of nearly twenty feet. "This is insanity," he said. "I'm closing this bridge."

  "But it is the straightest route to the lower slopes of Beinn Shee," Catriona argued. "Morag and I use it often when we walk about the hills, and there are crofters and herdsmen who live with their families on the mountain slopes. If they have animals or carts with them, they go along the drover's track to the lower bridge, which crosses the same stream several miles farther down in the glen." She pointed southeast, away from Kildonan toward Glenachan.

  "It will not be so inconvenient to close it temporarily."

  "The walk to the lower bridge takes much longer. Some crofter children go to the village school at Kilmallie this way, through Kildonan lands."

  "Children! Absolutely, the thing cannot be used."

  "You do not want bairns walking on your lands?" Morag asked.

  Evan sent her a sour look. "I do not want them to fall off the bridge. It will be closed until it is fixed or replaced."

  "But our charm keeps us safe," Morag pointed out.

  "Tragedy happens too easily." He knew that too damn well, he thought, as he walked up the bridge to test the stones. Some bounced disturbingly underfoot. He turned. "In the interests of my tenants, I am closing this bridge for repair."

  "The Earl of Kildonan and Glen Shee never cared much for tenants before," Catriona said. "Why start now?"

  He shot her a dark look and walked away to pick up a large rock, big as a hatbox, which he then deposited in front of the bridge as an impediment.

  "Stand aside, ladies," he said, and they did, while he lifted and tossed several large rocks of similar size until he had built a crude barrier. Wiping his gloved hands of dust, he looked at Catriona and Morag, who stood staring at him.

  "That should do for now. I'll send someone up here with a rope and a sign to keep off the bridge."

  "In Gaelic or English?" Catriona snapped. "Many of your tenants will not be able to read it. You would do better to post a guard to keep them away."

  "Shall I wait under the bridge myself like a troll?" he said irritably. "This thing is dangerous, and it is disturbing to know that it's been used all these years like this. Why was my father never informed of its condition?"

  "He would not have cared," Catriona said.

&n
bsp; "He never came this way," Morag said. "The hunting was not good enough here to please him, I suppose. He never bothered us here, even though it is not far from the castle."

  Evan sighed. "If you are determined to go walking today, you'll have to use the lower bridge. I'll drive you there. We can go back to Kildonan and fetch a pony cart or the gig."

  "I live three miles from this spot, and I will not walk all the way back up here from the lower bridge," Morag said stubbornly. She looked at Catriona.

  As if in silent agreement, the two women lifted their skirt hems and stepped neatly over the rock barrier.

  Evan strode after them, but as he reached the apex behind them, he felt a subtle tremor. His additional weight, when the women stood near the weakest point of the arch, was unwise.

  "Catriona," he said, "come back. You, too, Mrs. MacLeod. Carefully." He held out his hand, beckoned.

  "Your new husband is a worrier," Morag told Catriona.

  Without a backward glance, they said the charm in singsong voices and then cleared the breach lightly and rapidly, helping each other with outstretched hands. Standing on the other side of the span of rock and the hole in the bridge, Catriona turned.

  "There, see," she said. "Good day, husband. I will return by suppertime." She turned and took Morag's arm, and the two women walked down the opposite half of the bridge.

  Evan stood staring after them as they struck out on a steep upward ascent on the forested hillside. Far above, the mountain and more distant peaks soared into a cloudless blue sky.

  He stared downward to where the water rushed fast and deep over boulders far below. In coming to Kildonan, he had never expected that he would have to confront a collapsed bridge. Though the structure was small, its very existence reminded him too sharply of a magnificent thing of iron and steel, its red-painted girders gleaming in the sunlight as it crashed downward into a harbor in Fife.

  Difficult as those memories were, he could not turn away from the comparatively minor challenge of a simple stone bridge in need of repair. The sight of Catriona on the ruined structure had made his heart plummet with fear—but he would face this, and make certain that nothing happened to her, or to anyone else.

  He walked toward the center and tested his weight here and there, holding on to the parapet. He felt a dangerous shimmy underfoot, where the ragged edge jutted like teeth into open air. The keystone and crowning stones were missing. Glancing down, he saw a pile of rubble, impossibly old and worn by water, lying in the midst of the deep, fast stream.

  He moved back, frowning. If anyone stepped fast and hard along that edge, sooner or later the stones would give way.

  And when that happened, all the fairy charms in the world would not prevent the old bridge from coming down.

  * * *

  A little stone house with a thick thatched roof sat at the top of a steep slope. Looming over it was a massive wall of dark rock with patches of green moss and rusty-colored bracken. A few wild goats clung to its heights, Catriona saw, as she and Morag walked closer.

  Tendrils of smoke rose from a hole in the center of the roof, and two goats nibbled on a block of turf beside the closed door. She saw no other signs of life about the place.

  "Is Mother Flora at home?" Catriona asked Morag.

  "She's always here, except when she walks the hills for her exercise. She refuses to come away from her home otherwise. But I warn you, she usually sends me away when I come up here—after she takes whatever food or gifts I have brought."

  "I hope she will agree to sing her songs for me. I brought paper and pencil in case she does, so that I can take notes."

  "I would not be too quick to take out your paper," Morag said. "She knows we're coming—I came up here the other day with my daughter-in-law and got her promise that she would see you. Look, her door is not open. She's going to make us knock and beg to come in, the old witch."

  As they walked, Catriona looked around. This remote slope was part of the foothills of Beinn Sitheach, although the angle prevented her from seeing its uppermost peak. The wind cut brisk and cold, and Catriona drew a deep breath of the air, a nearly intoxicating essence that combined pines, grass, water, and the strength, somehow, of the mountain.

  She could feel the magic in these hills—if there really were such creatures as fairies, surely they existed here, on the powerful and mysterious mountain slopes named for their kind.

  The climb was a straight path worn in the grass, but so steep that Catriona felt the burn of effort in her legs—and she was used to walking inclines. She reached out to take Morag's arm to assist the older woman, only to be waved away.

  When they reached the kailyard of the cottage, both goats blinked at the visitors. A cat slipped around the corner and climbed from the turf block to the thatched roof, tail curling.

  Morag knocked on the worn wooden door. No answer came. "I know you're in there, Flora MacLeod!" she called.

  Finally the door creaked open, and a tiny old woman peered out at them. She was bent and fragile, her face a delicate mesh of lines, her eyes a bright aqua blue, young eyes in an ancient face. Her hair was snowy and thin under a pleated mutch, and her brown dress was nearly a rag, its hem shredding about her feet, which were covered in patched leather shoes. She clutched a faded plaid around her shoulders.

  "Ach, it's you, Morag MacLeod. What do you want?"

  "I've brought you fresh vegetables," Morag said, lifting the basket she carried. "And a visitor. Let us in out of the wind, Mother Flora. We've had a hard climb up here to see you."

  "It's a fine day and the climb will do you good, Morag MacLeod. You're fat as a pig." Flora looked up at Catriona. "How tall are you, girl?"

  Catriona blinked. "A little less than six feet, I think."

  "Huh. Higher than that, I'd say." She studied her. "Red hair, too. My husband was a tall red-haired man. Would he be your grandfather?"

  "I—I don't think so," Catriona said.

  "He was a lusty man with many by-blows before I met him. After that he only wanted to be lusty with me." Flora grinned, showing a scattering of teeth.

  "Mother," Morag said, but Catriona saw her smile. Morag and Flora had blunt, wicked honesty in common.

  "What's your name, tall girl?" Flora asked.

  "Catriona MacConn. My father is the reverend of Glenachan. You knew my mother, Sarah."

  "Ach, so I did! She was not so tall as you, but with the same red hair." Flora smiled. "Mine was blond, once."

  "Are you going to let us in or not?" Morag asked.

  "I like turnips," Flora said, peering at the vegetables in the basket Morag gave her. "What else do you have for me?"

  "Do you need some socks?" Catriona asked impulsively. Reaching into the large basket she held, which contained the knitted things she and Morag had collected from a few croft wives elsewhere in the area, she drew out a pair of knee stockings in a bright pattern of red, black, and white.

  Snatching them with arthritic fingers, Flora looked up. "What are you waiting for? Come in. Watch your head, tall girl."

  Ducking her head under the lintel to step inside, Catriona expected to find little more than a hovel. Instead, the interior was dimmed by smoke and scant light but cozy, with a few good pieces of furniture and a bed neatly made with a thick blanket and a flat pillow. The floor, though, was littered with peelings of food that crunched underfoot, and the house smelled suspiciously like a byre.

  "She lives like a goat," Morag muttered.

  "Sit down," Flora instructed, and Catriona and Morag took seats on a bench beside the fire, while Flora sat on a wooden chair with a threadbare cushion behind her back.

  "Have you got anything else in that basket?" Flora asked, reaching over curiously to poke her fingers inside. She pulled out a scarf. "I need one of these."

  Morag snatched it back. "Teach the girl your fairy songs first, and we will give this to you."

  Scowling at Morag, Flora then turned to Catriona. "Why do you want to learn my fairy songs?"
/>   "I've been collecting the old Gaelic songs for years and writing down the verses and melodies." Catriona reached into the basket again and pulled out some folded pages. "I have learned over a hundred and thirty so far. They are listed here—"

  Flora waved her hand. "I do not need to see that. Bah. Why do you want to turn the old songs into scratchings on a page?"

  "She is saving them so people generations from now can sing them," Morag said. "People who do not know the old Gaelic songs."

  "If they do not know the old songs, then why would they want to sing them?" Flora asked. "Are you married, girl?"

  Catriona blinked at the sudden question and glanced at Morag, who frowned. "I am," she said carefully.

  "And what husband lets his pretty young wife collect songs like butterflies when he should be putting babies in her belly? You'll have many healthy babies, with those fine hips and such a good bosom," Flora observed. Catriona blushed, speechless.

  "She was married only yesterday," Morag said. "Give her time to see what will happen."

  Flora grinned. "Is your groom a MacLeod? There are not many handsome young men left in Glen Shee. I hope it is not that sour doctor from Kilmallie who Morag brought here once or twice. I do not like him. He does not know nearly as much as I do. So, who is it?"

  "Mackenzie of Kildonan," Catriona said. Silence filled the little room.

  Then Flora narrowed her eyes. "You're the Countess of Kildonan now?"

  Catriona nodded. "I am."

  "I will not share my songs with the wife of Kildonan," Flora announced. She pointed toward the door. "Get out!"

  "But, Mother—" Morag began.

  "Hush, Morag." Catriona picked up the basket and stood, summoning her dignity, though tears stung her eyes. She had feared this would happen, had known from the moment she became Countess of Kildonan that her new status could drive a wedge between her and the people and culture she loved. "I am sorry—"

  "Just go!" Flora stabbed her finger toward the door. "Leave me to my memories and my grieving, and do not take my old songs from me, too. They are the only solace I have now. Go!"