“Your hunting companion?”
“Yes,” she said, avoiding the scrutiny of that lone eye as she reassessed her position. Every instinct cried danger, told her to cut her losses and retreat. She had already said too much. Daisy’s warnings echoed in her head, but as long as the threat was to Kate alone, it was tolerable. He had given an oath, she told herself, if the game got too deep, they could always pull up stakes and go. It was still the best of bad choices. “Since you will still allow it, we shall stay. Now, milord, if you will forgive me, my partner and I will flush some more game before the storm hits.”
Clearly he was not invited. “Aye, Fred will be needing my help unloading.” Reluctantly, he turned back, pausing at the promontory that overlooked the loch. There she was, directly below him, still as a marble sculpture as the hound moved into the brush. As the birds rose into the air, she drew, sighted and shot so swiftly that the arrow was in the air before he could blink. He had been fairly good with a bow once, but even before his eye was lost, he could never have laid claim to such skill. Now give him a pistol or a rifle . . . doubt assailed him. He had not fired a shot since just before the loss of his eye and those recollections were numbing. He was no longer the man who could be three sheets to the wind and shoot the cork from a wine-bottle.
There was a bark from below as Cur plunged forward to retrieve another bird, the woman moving behind him with the feline grace of a stalking predator. Duncan closed his eyes and envisioned whirling Kate around a ballroom, imagined her seeing him as he had been, dressed in regimentals, his face whole and handsome. If she had seen him then, when he had been able to make a female smolder with a mere look . . . but he was no longer an incendiary man and he could not blame her for avoiding the sight of him, looking anywhere but directly at him. After all, he could barely stand his own reflection.
Yet for a moment, for an all too brief snatch of time, he could swear that she had forgotten his disfigurement. She had looked at him directly, even smiled at him and, he reminded himself, she had decided to stay of her own free will. Perhaps she was not as terrorized as he supposed.
Or, his inner voice gibed, she fears what is out there more than she dreads you, MacLean.
Once more, he knew full well that he was fooling himself. With a stifled sigh, he started slowly for the castle. His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of raised voices. Duncan groaned as the yard came into view.
“Put that biscuit back, or I swear, I’ll pop you one, I will,” Kate’s woman declared waving a cast iron skillet threateningly. “You’ll eat with the rest of us!”
“Can’t.” Fred got the single word out of his full mouth then swallowed, but his cheeky grin disappeared as the angry female advanced. “Ain’t never ‘it a mort,” he declared as he backed away. “But I’ll defend myself, I will. Now let me be about my business, woman.” The little man gave a resounding sneeze, punctuated by a rattling cough.
“Bad enough, you stealin’ the food out of our mouths. You’ll be the death of us too!” she declared. “Just listen to you, sounds like it’s gone to the lungs already, it has. Don’t think I’ll be nursin’ the likes of you, you thievin’ jackanapes.”
“Rather be dead,” Fred called, shaking his fist. “All this fussin’ about a wee bitty biscuit and a few wet clothes.”
“Must be somethin’ about bein’ born within the sound of the bells rings all the sense out of them Cockney heads. Next time you go takin’ a bath, you might try undressin’ first. Shakin’ like a leaf you are, ‘tis a wonder your hand was steady enough to snatch that food from under my nose,” she said, lowering her skillet and voice. “I got some hot soup in the kitchen. Now take them wet clothes off, little man.”
“Like to see that, wouldn’t you?” Fred asked with a leering smirk. “Don’t see many fine figures of men ‘ere do you?”
“And I ain’t likely to see none now,” the woman retorted. “I’ve seen scrawny roosters that’d do better than you for the dressin’! Though I must say, you have somethin’ of the look of a drippin’, plucked chicken.”
Fred’s rubbery lips fell into an indignant scowl, his fists clenched at his sides. Amusing though it was, Duncan decided to put an end to the Punch and Judy show. “I will unload the supplies, Fred,” he said. “It looks as if you’ve already finished with most of it.”
“Ain’t done nothin’ yet, except kept me noggin from bein’ bashed,” Fred said with a frown as he gestured toward the paltry array of sacks. “That’s all there is, barley, bit of oat flour, some sugarloaf, salt. Couldn’t even get you a razor to take place of the one what you lost and with mine broke this mornin’. We’ll both be lookin’ like Father Christmas afore the week is out.”
“What else happened, Fred?” Duncan asked, reading more in his servant’s expression. “Obviously there is something that you are not telling me.”
“Nothin’,” Fred mumbled. “Ain’t much to spare in the village. I ‘ad to show them the color of my coin first, Sir, before I saw so much as a grain of barley.”
Duncan skewered him with a look. “What else happened?”
“The sot brain probably told them that he was from the castle,” Daisy informed his lordship. “If he gave them the glad news that you still bide on this side of Hell, milord, ‘twas a wonder that they didn’t hang him on the spot.”
“You ‘ush your bleedin’ mouth, woman,” Fred warned, shooting her a threatening look. “And don’t dare call me sot again. I don’t touch the drink.”
Daisy cast him looks that were, by turn, impressed and skeptical, before turning to address Kate, who was leading a small donkey into the courtyard. “They might as well know of it,” Daisy argued. “Better to be aware where you stand with the folk here, I say. Tell them.”
“I believe Daisy is right, milord,” Kate agreed, untying a brace of game. “I fear you will not find much of a welcome down in the village.”
“I expect no joy at the sudden resurrection of the house of MacLean,” Duncan said, his tones clipped. “But I will not suffer my servant to be abused.”
“I weren’t ‘urt none,” Fred hastened to reassure him. “No man what I know of ever got killed by a lick of spittle in the face. I’d ‘ave learned them a bit of respect, I would ‘ave.” He shook his fist. “But I ain’t a man to be usin’ fists on no Methuselahs.”
Duncan frowned, knowing how much it must have cost the prideful little Cockney to swallow such treatment, even from old men.
“You mustn’t blame them, milord. ‘Tis a poor place,” Kate explained. “A worse hole, I would warrant, than some I have seen on the riverside streets of Lisbon.”
“Surely you exaggerate,” Duncan said, recalling the filthy warrens and tavernas that abounded near the Tagus. Some of them had made the Seven Dials seem like Mayfair by comparison. “The village was fairly prosperous when I was a boy. I know that my father was in the habit of taking what he would without a thought to paying back the tradesman, but they seemed to do well enough nonetheless. Even if they knew Fred to be from the castle, he had gold in hand.”
“Gold will not buy what is not to be had,” Kate said, responding to the puzzlement on his countenance. Perhaps she had misjudged him; it appeared that he was genuinely unaware of the state of his people. “There is but one shop remaining in the village and that barely stocked with a few staples. You will find little to spare here and naught beyond the most rudimentary necessities.”
“What caused the change?” Duncan asked.
“You are aware of the Clearances?” Kate asked cautiously.
“No need to beat around it,” Duncan said, his jaw tightening as he realized what she was getting to. “When I was a stripling, my father was well on his way to fencing and claiming any bit of bog that he could for sheep-grazing and woe to the crofter who stood in his way.”
“Then you know that there was an exodus then, not just from here, but from much of the Highlands. Many of the young men left,” Kate explained. “When your father passed and you were
presumed dead, the flocks were sold. That left almost no means of making a livelihood. Entire families headed for the cities, and from what I understand, a good many of Eilean Kirk’s boys are in Canada now. I sometimes read the letters that they pay someone to write to those they left behind. ‘Tis mostly old people who eke out a meager existence as your tenants, milord, grandfathers and grandmothers, those too timid or too weak to seek a new life or those who fear that their leaving would be the sentence of death on those they love. Perhaps they think that you intend to dun them for the rent that they cannot pay.”
Outrage blended with sadness in her voice. Did she dare to blame him then? It was not his fault, he told himself, but his father’s. Duncan had not set foot here since he was a boy. “You seem to know a great deal about my crofters, Madame,” Duncan said.
Kate shifted uncomfortably. “They thought me your widow.”
“They must have accounted you as something of a heroine,” Duncan murmured. “Few and far between are the MacLean women who managed to survive their spouses.”
“I was a great disappointment, actually,” Kate said. “They believed that I had returned to rebuild, to fulfill some kind of prophecy and make Eilean Kirk prosper once more, but they soon realized that I was as poor in the pocket as they themselves were. Still, I have done the best that I can to help. I owed them that much, considering how I have deceived them.”
“Charlie’s bloody curse again, but then you would know nothing of that,” Duncan added sarcastically, heaving a sack onto his shoulder. “Were you playing at noblesse oblige since you were, after all, The Lady MacLean?”
“‘Tis no game that I play here, milord,” Kate said in frustration. “They are good people who deserve far better than what they have had. I do what I can as a human being. The blind toleration of suffering diminishes us all. No matter what name or title we may hold, we are all obliged to help where we can.”
“No wonder you did not take well in London,” Duncan remarked, setting the sack down beside him. “Such dangerously republican sentiments would likely stew you in scandal broth were you foolish enough to voice them publicly.” His annoyance changed to surprise at the sight of her face, suffused pink with consternation. “By Hades! You were outspoken, weren’t you?” He chortled. “Did you defend the Luddites, too?”
“Do you justify the penalty then? To hang a man for breaking a weaving machine so that his family will not starve?” Kate barely choked the words out. How did he manage to find all the scabs of her wounds and pry at them? “We have only to look to France to see what can happen when people are driven to desperation.
‘The starved mechanic breaks his rusting loom
And desperate mans him ‘gainst the coming doom,’” she quoted.
“Though I hate to admit it, I find myself agreeing with the words of that reprobate Byron, it was no less than the truth.”
“Ah, but he has the advantage of being a charming scoundrel,” Duncan said. “George can get women to agree to almost anything from what I recall.”
“A characteristic which you share,” Kate retorted.
“I did, once.” Duncan stared at her, daring her to look him full in the face. He had to know; it was important to him to see the disgust that she was masking so successfully, to accept that he was loathsome to her. Surely that would stop these absurd flights of fancy. He had spent half the night imagining her in his arms. Such dreams were a distraction that he could ill-afford. “I find now that I cannot get women to agree to much of anything, especially you, Kate.”
She knew neither the stakes, nor the rules, but a hand had just been dealt to her, and somehow she was aware that the next play was the critical one. Kate searched the rough shadowed lines of that bearded jaw, followed the straight unsmiling shape of his mouth, the wounding scar that reached far beyond the surface of his skin, that single gray eye that was bleak as a storm-beset crag of stone. His expression yielded no clue.
That frank search was agony, looking at him, through him, the shallow man that he had been, and the hollow man that he had become. The examination of those jade eyes seared at the remnants of his soul and asked questions that he dared not answer, not even in silence. But she did not look away. She did not look aside, even when she spoke at long last.
“I have always been a most disagreeable woman, milord,” she said, her lips curving gently. “Or so I have been told, so you need not fear that all is lost.”
That soft smile was like a healing balm and Duncan wondered what manner of man her husband had been, what fool could have such a woman and seemingly value her so lightly. If only he had found her before . . . no, there was no lying to himself beneath that crystal gaze. He would have used her if he could and discarded her eventually, just as he had so many others. The Mad MacLean would never have thought to search beneath that pretty surface, to see the courage and decency at the core of her. Then again, a woman like Kate would have stayed well clear of him. She might not abhor the sight of him, but she had precious little respect for the manner of man that he had been.
“Well, leastwise we don’t ‘ave to go chasin’ you up to the ‘ellsgate now,” Fred said as he picked up the sack at Duncan’s side.
Kate’s look of bewilderment prompted Duncan to explain. “We feared that you might attempt the mountain pass. Fred and I were going to go after you.”
“We was,” Fred punctuated his agreement with a sneeze. “Sewercide, it would be, with the rain like to be comin’ by the bucket.”
“So it is called ‘the Hellgate,’ an apt name for it,” Kate said, watching as Duncan took a blanket from the saddle and draped it around the shoulders of the shivering man. The simple gesture told her far more about Duncan MacLean than he could ever have imagined. It was something that her father might have done, one of those many small acts of kindness to subordinates that his brother officers had often derided. Yet, Papa’s men would have followed him through the true gates of hell.
Indeed, in the end, they had. For if ever the devil had gained dominion on earth, it was at the battle of Rolica. It was hard to believe that the stupidity of one man had led the 29th to disaster. But Papa and his men had obeyed a fool’s orders and followed Lake up that narrow gully to their doom. According to Marcus, not a one of Papa’s men had faltered or fled. From the look of near worship upon Fred’s face, Duncan’s servant would likely do no less if called upon. “Has the rain already fallen in the village?” Kate asked. “You are soaked to the skin. How odd, since the storm seems to be turning. I suspect that we might not get so much as a drop here.”
To her surprise, the little man turned as bright as a lobster on the boil.
“There are just some things that are beyond prediction,” Duncan said hurriedly. “Eilean Kirk is known for its unusual atmosphere.”
“Aye,” Fred agreed, giving Duncan a measured look. “And the fishin’ too. Never know what you can haul out of the lake.”
“I caught a fish that must have weighed at least four stone,” Kate agreed.
Duncan gave a strangled gargle that sounded to Kate like a smothered guffaw, but that was nigh to impossible, Duncan MacLean seemed incapable of laughter. Obviously, he did not believe her. “Well, I did,” Kate said defensively.
“I’m sure you did, milady,” Fred said, his brow wrinkling as he smiled. “Mighty big fish in them waters. Ah . . . Ah . . choo!”
“No more fish stories, Sergeant Cockney and bull,” Duncan said, taking the burden from the small man’s hands and giving him a gentle nudge. “Dry off and get something warm in you; consider that an order.”
The Cockney cast him a dubious look, nodding his head significantly at the woman who stood in the kitchen door.
“Do as your master says,” Daisy said, setting her skillet on the window sill. “So long as you don’t go touchin’ nothin’ I won’t bite you, little man.”
Fred cocked an eloquent eyebrow. “Wonder what you got to touch to get bit?” he asked in an undertone for Duncan’s ears alone.
“Let me give you a hand, milord,” Kate said, undoing one of the knots that held one of the larger sacks in place.
Duncan’s look plainly spoke his doubt.
“My strength would surprise you,” Kate said, her expression amused as she easily hefted the burden from the saddle.
“You are a woman of many surprises, Kate,” Duncan said, putting his own load down to take the sack from her hands. “If it is your aim to make me feel inferior, I must vow that you are succeeding. You have already proven you are my peer as a rider and my better with a bow. I have no doubt that you could school Gentleman Jackson in the science of boxing, paint pictures to rival Lawrence’s portraits, fly a balloon higher than Sadler and explain natural history to Faraday. However, I will do the hauling, madame, if you do not mind. Leave me that small illusion of superiority at the least.”
“I am hopeless with a paintbrush,” Kate confessed with a smile.
“I am most comforted to hear it,” Duncan said in mock relief as he lifted both sacks, trying not to grunt at the effort. “Now if you truly wish to be of assistance to me, you might go and exercise Selkie. In fact, consider his care to be one of your daily duties. He and Fred never got on very well together and I doubt that I will have the time for such mundane chores.”
Her grin spread from ear to ear. “You cannot mean it, milord!”
“What? Do you go womanish on me at the thought of stable dung?” Duncan hid his amusement behind the burden. “If you feel that the stallion might be too much for you-”
“Oh, no, milord,” Kate interjected. “I would account it a privilege.”
“Saying that you actually enjoy mucking stables would be doing it too brown, Kate.” Duncan could not resist the opportunity to use the pun. To his consternation, she caught it.
“Very brown indeed,” Kate agreed.
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