‘You think your bloodline is weak because of your father’s actions? If we’re doomed to be our parents, then I’m fated to die very soon. Or become like my father, which I feel is only slightly preferable to early death.’
‘My mother had many children,’ he said. ‘All of them are dead.’
‘All of them?’ she asked, her voice hushed. ‘You lost all of your brothers and sisters?’
He dismissed the tenderness in her voice. ‘I don’t remember most of them.’
Only James had lived long enough to be given a name. Only he had lived long enough for Lachlan to remember his cries, his ruddy little face. His small, angry fists that he’d waved in the air as he wailed. Fever had taken him. And quickly.
‘That’s tragic, Lachlan. I’m very sorry.’
‘The world is a harsh place. Life and happiness are guaranteed to no one. I survived. There must be a purpose to that.’
‘And you don’t think that that purpose is to have more children?’
‘My purpose is to get the land back to the clan. To make sure that balance is restored.’
‘So you’ve taken me from…from marriage to a duke, a household full of people and a life where I would have children to…to taking me up to a foreign land where I will have no one.’
No one but him.
But she didn’t say that.
‘Babies die, lass,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘If I remember anything from my youth, it’s that.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said softly, ‘why you would do this to me?’
‘It’s nothing to do with you.’
He felt her shrink against him. ‘Of course it’s not. Nothing is. I’m a pawn, aren’t I? I don’t get toast or my jewellery box. And none of it matters, because you are getting your revenge. And you’re going to restore the Highlands the way that you see fit. You don’t much care if I could marry the man that I loved. You don’t much care if I wish you would…say something to me after you use my body. You don’t care if I want to hold a baby in my arms some day. That is…a wife and mother is something I should be. It’s…the way of things.’
‘I don’t have pity in my heart, Penny,’ he said, feeling a strange tenderness there all the same. ‘It’s a wasted speech on me, bonnie girl.’
‘What good is being beautiful? My father thought that beauty was my triumph. That it was what had got me into marriage with the Duke. But my beauty doesn’t mean anything, because you would have married me even if I looked like a toadstool. All you wanted was his suffering.’
‘Yes, but had you been ugly my marrying you would’ve been a favour. Instead, it was an insult. That his beautiful daughter would be wasted on a barbarian.’
‘So glad I could help with that,’ she said, each word bitten off at its end.
‘How is it you have such a tongue in your head? Such a sheltered girl, yet you don’t seem to fear me.’
‘Why should I? What else can you possibly take from me?’
The words scraped against something he hadn’t known existed inside him.
‘You will have a castle.’
‘A castle?’
‘Yes. The clan has a proper castle and it is no medieval fortress. My father used his money to make it quite modern. I think you’ll appreciate it. All the comforts of home behind fortified stone walls.’
‘Without a friend. Without children. I can go from one mausoleum to the other. A monument to sins that were not mine. I am truly a fortunate lass.’
He urged his horse forward, at a faster pace. ‘There are always children running about the castle. I’m sure you’ll find a bairn if it’s what you desire.’
She said nothing to that and absurdly he found he wanted to go back to naming body parts and ecstasy for her education. For anything would be better than this. Knowing he had disappointed her and caring even the slightest bit.
What was it about this creature that called forth feelings in him? He knew drive. He knew how to chart a course and sail his ship to that destiny. He knew how to plan and wait and execute. He did not feel.
But she shifted things in his chest, like the rising and falling of a tide rearranged even the heaviest of boulders, and he could not see the reason for it.
‘I swear to you this,’ he said. ‘Your life will not be a misery.’
Then he knew, for he was thinking of his mother. His mother, who had been so badly disgraced by his father, who had lost all of her children but one. And though he knew his father deserved the largest share of the blame, he could not shake the guilt. It had followed him through life, following him on to the battlefield. All the women he’d failed to save. He might have married Penny for revenge, but he would never treat her cruelly. ‘You will not fade away to misery. My mother took her own life, Penny. That was where her misery took her. That was where my father took her. I have seen things on a battlefield that would tear you right in two. I have seen what it does to men, the madness that overtakes them. Rather than protecting the vulnerable they…use their strength against them. They forget they are men and become like animals. I have seen men lose all hope and decide death is preferable to the life around them. The despair that takes you to get to that point is a tremendous pit. The pit my mother fell prey to. You may not understand my reasons, but you can take me at my word. That will not be your fate. But trust that my decisions are for the best.’
He had partly expected a quick rejoinder, but she said nothing. Not for a while.
‘I’m sorry about your mother. I’m sorry if what my father did made it worse. Made it harder.’
‘It did,’ he said.
‘Of course it did. If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been so bent on revenge, would you?’
‘And what can you take from a man who has nothing?’
‘His daughter,’ she said, softly. ‘And his chance to have a relation to a duke by marriage.’
‘So you see that I had no choice.’
‘You always have a choice,’ she said. ‘It’s just that you might not like the results of some of those choices. And so you chose the one that suits you best. I could’ve run away from our marriage. I had a choice. Society would have made it very difficult for me to find a way to survive. The Duke’s sister offered me help, but I couldn’t in good conscience risk Beatrice’s reputation. Or even the Duke of Kendal’s. A duke he might be, but he is still beholden to society and they love nothing more than to watch a man of quality fall. He prizes his integrity and reputation. How could I be the one to damage all that he’s built?’
‘And so you fell on your sword for the sake of their reputation, then complained to me about my revenge?’
‘And you have twisted my words and used them against me.’ She sounded grudgingly impressed.
‘I have experience in war. I’m trained to fight.’
‘And I am trained to do needlepoint. So I am outmatched.’
‘Somehow, I doubt it.’
For there was something about the woman that got beneath his skin and he could not figure out the where or why.
The road went on, wide and smooth, the fields on either side of them rolling and green, sharp rocks rising from the grass out in the distance, creating a shoddy patchwork that extended to the horizon line.
‘What did you dream your life would look like?’
‘Must you talk?’
‘It’s the reason that I’m riding on the horse with you,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the quiet. It’s heavy. I was tired of being alone.’
‘I was not.’
‘Was that your dream, then?’ she asked. ‘To be alone? In which case, choosing a wife as a pawn in your revenge game was poor planning.’
‘Many men do not often see their wives.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘Your dreams,’ he said. ‘Tell me of your dreams, Lady Penelope. If you want
to know mine, surely you should tell me yours first.’
‘When? My dreams recently consisted of a duke and his beautiful country home.’
‘Somehow, I can’t imagine you wished to marry him for his rank and title.’
He didn’t know why he was so certain of that. Any person would be tempted by a title so lofty. Why should she be any different? Yet he sensed that she was. He sensed that it was not his title that had appealed to her at all.
‘I’m tired of being alone,’ she said. ‘That’s why I used to wander the estate the way that I did. Looking for small animals. I used to dream of being like the birds. I used to dream of flying away.’
He was not looking to fulfil this woman’s dreams. He was not the husband she’d chosen. But her sadness bothered him and it made him want to offer her something.
‘Well. The horse doesn’t have wings, but it is carrying you away to Scotland.’
She took a sharp breath, her shoulders pitching upward. ‘I suppose that’s true. But I had been to Bybee House. I’ve spent so much time there. And I know the Duke’s mother. His sister. She was one of my dearest friends, before her brother was told that I betrayed him. And his ward. Such lovely girls, and… They were the first real friends that I’ve ever had. I want to not hurt. To not have to…feel fear or grief.’
Her words, her face, mingled with images from the past. With a woman he couldn’t save, whose last moment he knew had been spent in fear and despair.
‘Aye, lass, wouldn’t we all.’
‘You can’t tell me you feel fear.’
‘I fought in a war for ten years and, no matter how grimly I told myself death was to be accepted, greeted like a friend, I fought to preserve myself as well as those around me. Death was commonplace, but one thing you learn is how strong the will to survive is.’ A strange sensation tightened his chest. ‘The very worst thing of all is to see that will stolen from another person. You must have some sense of the future. For me…it was restoring the clan.’
‘And revenge,’ she said, her tone filled with mock cheer.
‘Aye.’
‘I thought I knew what my life would be, then the Duke proposed. Suddenly I could dream of a whole new future. You took that from me.’
‘Dreams, perhaps. But there is always adventure. Adventure often lies just far enough in front of us that we cannot see the destination,’ he said. ‘You cannot know to dream of what’s on the other side of that.’
‘Is that what you’ve had these last years? An adventure?’
He nodded slowly. ‘Adventure is also not always good. I came to England to make my fortune and I did. But it was a circuitous route that took me over battlefields and brings me to a home where none of my clan may remember or accept me as chief. But make my fortune I did.’
‘Was making your fortune your dream?’
‘I was born with fortune. I did not need to dream of it.’
‘Then what was your dream?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I had everything until I had nothing. And then there was no purpose to dreams.’
‘Only revenge?’
‘A dream is nothing more than a wish. Revenge takes planning.’
‘Well, then I suppose you planned well.’
‘That I did.’
Yet, as he sat atop his horse with his wife clutched tightly against him and the carriage rolling behind them, he had the sense that his plan might not be going quite as he had expected.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter and neither did the feelings that she roused in his soul. What mattered was getting back to Scotland, not concerning himself with her feelings of loneliness or her thoughts of her own shattered dreams. Or giving names to the mysteries in her universe.
She was not a bland, English miss and he should have given her more credit than that. But her failure to be boring hardly meant that he needed to recalibrate the way that he saw his life moving forward.
He was the husband, after all.
His wife was his property.
He protected what was his, kept it safe. He was not his father and he would not treat ill that which was his to protect. But she was his none the less.
He was returning home to the Highlands with much more property than he had when he left and that was a triumph.
It was all that mattered. He would concern himself with nothing else.
‘That’s an oak,’ Penny said, though it lacked the spirit of her earlier proclamations.
* * *
For the rest of the day he contented himself with listening to her name the obvious, while the press of her arse kept him hard with wanting.
When they arrived at the next inn, he had his way with her as he had done every night before and, when he was finished, he did not concern himself with her loneliness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The further north they’d gone, the more the landscape had changed. The greens became ethereal and she could easily imagine fairies hiding out behind the rocks, which grew to enormous proportions, jagged and sheer faced.
She wouldn’t have known when they passed into Scotland, except that Lachlan told her.
She hadn’t tried to talk to him again, not like that one day on the horse. She had kept things light.
She hadn’t used the new vocabulary he’d given her either, but she had locked it away inside herself, for later use, because knowledge was power, after all, and she could use whatever she could lay hands on.
He had not changed his actions towards her at night. Still she found ecstasy in his arms, only to crash back down to earth when it was all finished.
Maybe that was just the way of things.
Maybe there was no answer. Maybe the intimacy between a husband and a wife created only questions, at least in the wife.
She felt startlingly vulnerable and didn’t like it. She had spent her life working at ways to not be weak, to not be a potential victim to those around her. Her father was so volatile. Though he had not used his fists on her, his words had often cut deep grooves inside her soul. The games he played with isolation had tested her fortitude. If she had not found ways to layer protection over herself, if she had not found ways to please herself, ways to insulate herself, she would have been destroyed by now.
Lachlan had asked her how she had such a tongue in her head. She could only attribute it to her ability to protect herself, so why then did she find it so difficult to control that tongue around Lachlan and also to shield herself against the feelings that he created inside her?
It was distressing.
Today, they would arrive on the land of Clan MacKenzie. He had warned her that their reception might not be warm. He had sent his men ahead and, had the reception been deadly, he had assured her that he would have received word from a survivor. Unless there were none.
He’d given her a grim smile after that and she had not been able to discern if he were teasing.
She was not entirely sure if Scottish warriors engaged in teasing.
She found her husband extremely difficult to divine.
But then, she didn’t find her own feelings any more clear.
Today, though, she kept her focus on what was ahead. She was seeing her new home. Her new home.
The words radiated inside her and she did not know what they meant. Not truly. For how could she make sense of calling this strange place home?
It was beautifully alien.
She could feel Lachlan’s tension increase the closer they got to his home. The green went deeper as they went, the mountains higher, craggier. Penny felt like exactly what he’d told her she was.
An outsider.
They weren’t the same. And this was not where she was from.
She understood now what he had meant. Understood now that this wasn’t just a place a bit further to the north, but a stark, unforgiving landscape. L
ooking at Lachlan’s face over her shoulder as they rode reminded her that he was from here. But he had lived in England for a great many years. If she found him uncompromising and forbidding…how much more so were the people who had been here all this time?
* * *
Some hours on, the path curved and she could see it. A great, great castle that stood against the sharp blue of the sky, the deep green fields rolling down below. It was high on a hill, overlooking a lake. There were houses dotting the landscape, rolling down to flatter green.
‘Here it is, lass,’ he said. ‘These are the lands of Clan MacKenzie.’
‘What are you doing?’
He stopped the horse and dismounted, taking her down to the ground with him. ‘Get in the carriage,’ he said.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘In case we are met with a volley of arrows.’
Fear gripped her. ‘You don’t think that will happen?’
His expression was grave. ‘I don’t know what will happen.’
She could see that it cost him to make such an admission, for her husband was a man who wanted to anticipate everything.
And if not even Lachlan Bain knew what might befall them here, then…
She was filled with disquiet and for the first time obeyed him without argument.
As they drew closer, she could see that there was a line of men in tartan standing in front of the castle. They had swords and all other manner of weapons strapped to their bodies and held in their hands. They looked grim and forbidding, and not at all welcoming.
But no shots were fired.
That was a small comfort, at least.
‘I’m Lachlan Bain,’ he said. ‘Son of Angus Bain. I’ve returned as promised. I have come to restore the land and make repayment for that which my father stole. I am here to take my rightful place as chief.’
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