Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  “Tell whomsoever you wish,” she snapped. “Mind your own business.”

  “I am,” he retorted. “I’m minding the business of the MacPherson family. ‘The scourge of rebel peasants!’” he added, mimicking Royce’s tone.

  “You did kill that man.”

  “An’ ’e ’ad it comin’,” her brother growled, lapsing into the idiom he always used when angry or upset. “An’ you be watchin’ yourself, or ye’ll be the ruin o’ Father’s plans.”

  That meant Sean Bloodwell, obviously. She said nothing. Last week, or even yesterday, the prospect of marriage to Sean would have been wonderful and exciting. But tonight everything had changed. Everything was altered. She tried hard to smile, and sat down next to Sean.

  “I trust you enjoyed the dance,” he said, with an amused smile.

  She was about to reply, when Royce Campbell crossed the ballroom and climbed the great stairs to the upper rooms of the castle. It was all Selena could do to keep her eyes from him.

  She was never again alone with Royce during that holiday week. Brian made himself her guardian, with her father’s tacit approval, and she spent the remaining social affairs of Christmas and the New Year in the company of Sean Bloodwell. He was tender and amusing and endearing all the while. Selena even began to feel as if the moments of madness on the balcony had been unreal, but then she would catch a glimpse of Royce Campbell dancing, or riding on a black stallion outside the castle walls, and her heart would ache to be with him again.

  Finally, it appeared that he had conceived a plan to bring them together. The MacPhersons were finishing breakfast in their chambers when a servant entered, bearing a sealed envelope on a silver tray. Brian took it and tore it open straightaway. “Campbell,” he grinned, looking at Selena. Then, reading, “No, it’s for you, Father.”

  He handed the note to her father, who read it, frowning.

  “I wonder why he wants to see me.”

  “Refuse to see him, Father,” Brian advised.

  “Now, son, that’s neither politic nor wise. He’s no enemy, even if I don’t care for his kind.”

  What if he’s asking for me? Selena thought, and even believed it for the shred of a second.

  Royce Campbell was admitted then. He greeted her courteously, but distantly, and she and Brian were dismissed while Campbell talked to Lord MacPherson. Desperate to see him, Selena waited until Brian grew bored and wandered off, then stationed herself in an alcove down the corridor, which Royce would have to pass when he made his exit. Finally, it happened, and as he walked toward her hiding place, she stepped into his path. He was preoccupied, and when he saw her it seemed to take a moment for him to recognize her. Her heart went cold, dropped toward an icy abyss. Then he smiled, and saved her life.

  “Selena!”

  She grabbed the sleeve of his velvet riding cloak, and pulled him into the alcove.

  “Selena, what…?”

  “Brian’s gone. Shhhhh! He’s been watching us all week.”

  “What?”

  She had him in the alcove now, behind a scarlet drapery with golden pheasants embroidered thereon. It was very dark, except where a little light penetrated the gold, and the draperies muffled any sounds.

  “We can talk now,” she whispered, clinging to him, waiting for the pressure of his embrace. It didn’t come.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, looking up at him.

  He was smiling tolerantly. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “But…but that night at the dance…”

  She watched him remember. “Ah, yes, the night of the dance.” He smiled and drew her to him. “Unfortunately, our plans went awry. Unfortunately for me. But fortunately for you.”

  He kissed her. On the forehead! As he might kiss a sister! What was wrong?

  “But I meant it. I wanted…I wanted you.”

  He held her at arm’s length. “How old are you, Selena?”

  She drew herself up to full height and pushed out her breasts.

  “Seventeen.”

  He shook his head. “Well, I daresay you look more than seventeen, but seventeen it is, and seventeen’s no good for the likes of me.”

  She bit her lip, and he could not help but see the hurt in her eyes. And the utter seriousness behind the hurt.

  “I love you,” she blurted.

  “Ah, Selena!” And this time he took her into his arms in a way that broke her heart even as it made her love him more. His strong body pressed against hers, and he was quite gentle, but in his voice was another tone, deeper and serious, which she had not heard before.

  “Come now, Selena,” he said. “You don’t know what you love. I’m sure there are plans for your future, for your life. You’ve a wise, kind father, and I expect when you’re eighteen or thereabouts you’ll have a wedding, perhaps to Bloodwell, and I know you’ll be happy.”

  “I’ll never be happy. I’ll never be happy without—”

  “Without me? No, don’t be a fool, Selena. You’ve too much fire and spirit to waste your days pining about happiness and such.”

  He was setting her aside! He was smiling and sympathetic and gorgeous, but he was setting her aside! She struggled to reason, to speak. Still, she knew a fiery woman was exciting to a man, and she knew she had excited him on the balcony. So what was wrong?

  “Selena, you don’t even know me,” he was saying. Oh, rubbish. What did that matter, anyway? She broke away from him, at last, and tried to control herself.

  “Are you attempting to tell me that I should be older, before you—”

  “No, that’s not it at all.”

  “Will you promise me something, then?” Her tone was cold, as if with finality. Royce responded to it with relief.

  “If I can.”

  “Will you see me here at the ball? Next year?”

  “If I’m in Scotland then. Of course, I’ll see you.”

  During the course of the year, Selena had replayed the scene, the conversation, a hundred times and more. Just as the night on the balcony had sealed in her very being a physical need for Royce Campbell, so did the painful moments in the alcove hold the promise of something more than mere happiness. Later, when she returned to the chamber, her father was deep in thought; he barely noticed her return. And he never spoke of his conversation with Sir Royce. To Selena, whatever they had discussed was inconsequential. It meant nothing. Obviously, Royce had not asked for her hand; nothing else could be of significance.

  Warnings

  So now the long year of waiting and planning and dreaming had ended, and she was going back to Edinburgh at last. I ought to be happy, she thought; this time, she herself would go to Royce Campbell’s chambers. But everything seemed awry. She was dreaming of how it would be, how, with their bodies locked together in love, everything would be clear and true for both of them, when the driver leaned back and shouted into the window of the coach.

  “Seems t’ be some sort o’ roadblock ahead, y’ lordship.”

  Abruptly, Selena broke away from her romantic reverie. These were rough regions through which they passed, and many things could happen. Brian shot upright out of his nap, knocking off his hat in the process to reveal the curly, red thatch of hair that accentuated the volatility of his temperament. His hand went for the dagger at his belt. Lord MacPherson restrained him.

  “Easy, lad. Let’s first see what the business is.”

  Quickly, he rolled up the isinglass curtain that gave them some protection from the weather. The wind had shifted since dawn, and now it came at them from the Highlands, icy blasts that promised snow. Selena shivered and buried herself more deeply in the furs and blankets, while her father looked out.

  “Highwaymen?” Brian asked happily. He was always looking for a fight, particularly one in which the odds were against him.

  “I don’t think so,” her father explained. “I see a glimpse of purple.”

  He and Brian exchanged a glance, which Selena could not read. She knew, of course,
that purple was the color of the cloaks of His Majesty George III’s gendarmerie, but whatever would they be doing way out here on the road to Lauder? Perhaps there were highwaymen about.

  “They be wavin’ fer me t’ stop, y’ lordship,” the driver called.

  “Do as they say.”

  In a moment, the carriage ground to a halt. The horses pawed and snorted in the icy air, their hooves stamping the frozen road. One of the King’s men left his small group of companions and their horses at the side of the road, approached the MacPherson coach, accompanied by a cheerless gust of wind and a flurry of snow. Selena saw the bars of an officer on his purple collar, the gold threat of rank on the purple, tricornered hat. The man reached out and pulled open the door of the coach, as if he meant to have hard business within.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” asked Lord MacPherson, his voice pleasant, but with just a touch of reserve to indicate his displeasure at being delayed.

  Normally this reserve, this natural assumption of superiority, would have been enough to bring forth at least a pro forma apology, even from an officer, because the coach doors carried the MacPherson crest as well as Lord Seamus’s parliamentary insignia. But not this time. The officer’s arrogance and officiousness were barely contained.

  “Security, your lordship. Orders of the Secret Offices. You don’t mind if we check your coach, I presume?”

  “By my mother’s blood—” Brian vowed, almost shouting.

  “Quiet,” his father snapped. “May I inquire as to the meaning of this, Lieutenant?”

  The officer motioned several of his men forward. He looked at Brian, and a challenging smile crossed his mouth. He wouldn’t have minded a bit of resistance; he had the men to back him up. Then he glanced toward Selena, huddled in the furs.

  “Please unwrap yourself, my lady,” he ordered, his tone intimate and insinuating.

  “What?”

  “The furs, madame. I must search.”

  She looked at her father, who nodded coldly. “Go ahead, it must be a very special case.”

  The officer smirked, and Selena did as she was told and removed the travel wraps. The officer poked at them idly with his fist, even as he tried to meet her eyes, to provoke a glance in return.

  “Where are you bound?” he demanded.

  “You British bastard,” Brian flared, “’tis none o’ yer bloody business. Do ye na ken who ’tis ye’re—”

  Lord Seamus put a hand on his shoulder, and he subsided. “To Edinburgh,” he replied evenly, “to the Christmas gala, as we do every year.”

  The coach swayed as two of the soldiers climbed on top to inspect the luggage there, and Selena thought anxiously of her gowns, upon which she was depending for no little effect when she met Royce Campbell again. Gowns fashioned by half a dozen seamstresses from Coldstream village. Gowns of silk and satin and velvet, of muslin and taffeta, with shawls and wraps of ermine and rich Highlands wool. Gowns with high necks, jeweled and glittering collars, that pulled her breasts up, and gowns with daringly low bodices—“eye traps,” one of the seamstresses had called them—of white and silver and gold, of red, of a blue so pale it shone unearthily in firelight, and against which her dark violet eyes, her tumbling blond hair, seemed like two dark diamonds in a bed of golden floss.

  “Nothing up here but some finery,” yelled one of the soldiers, clambering down with his mate.

  “I’m waiting for an explanation,” Lord Seamus demanded now, with a steel in his manner that brooked no trifling.

  The officer, pleased with the authority he had exercised over a nobleman, now saw fit to yield a bit. “Yes, your lordship,” he said. “His Grace, Lord North, will be attending the festivities this year, and we are on orders to ascertain that no one enters Edinburgh who might disrupt his visit.”

  Father’s face remained impassive, and this time even Brian revealed no emotion in word or manner. It was clear to Selena that they were no longer outraged, as she had expected, but instead cautious.

  “It’s those bloody devils, the Rob Roys,” the officer finished. “We cannot allow them to surface, not with the prime minister of England as a guest of state.”

  “Quite right,” Lord Seamus agreed. “I wish you had told us in the first place. One has the devil’s own time traversing these hills as it is, without more delays. Well, Lieutenant…”

  He reached out and pulled the coach door shut. In a moment, the horses started off again, and they swayed and rocked down the road to Lauder, leaving the roadblock behind.

  Brian looked back nervously, almost as if he were afraid they might be followed. What was going on, anyway?

  “Father, I think it’s some kind of a trick,” Brian said softly. He leaned forward in the carriage, his blue eyes hard with conviction, accepting the possibility of a danger Selena did not understand.

  “I know we’re invited to the Edinburgh affair every Christmas, but I don’t like the feel of things this year.”

  Lord Seamus nodded slowly, his face very serious. Selena thought he looked every inch the nobleman he was. Although not tall, he was solidly built, with a grave mien and a slow, deliberate manner of speaking. He had a sunny smile, but he seemed to keep it for those he loved most, Brian and Selena. And for their mother, before she died. These past few years, he had been more serious than usual, and Selena, who sought to cheer him but who succeeded only intermittently, put it down to mourning, excessive mourning, perhaps, but then his love for his wife had likewise been greater than that which normally exists between a long-married couple. When the pneumonia of that winter had carried her away, Father had been inconsolable. Now, however, she was beginning to understand that his gravity over the past months may have been caused by something far different. Quickly, her mind flashed back over the preceding weeks, seeking an answer. True, people still journeyed to Coldstream to seek his advice, but many of them seemed unduly hurried, almost furtive in their need to speak with him and depart. No longer were there the long after-dinner conversations over French cognac and bowls of fragrant tobacco from Virginia, in the colonies. No, the mood at Coldstream had slowly but relentlessly grown serious, even grim, and as that knowledge came to her, she read a confirmation in the lines on her father’s face.

  One incident, in particular, had upset him immensely. It was that day, about a fortnight past, when a wild young man, half drunk, no doubt, or worse, had come galloping up to Coldstream, waving his hat and yelling at the top of his lungs about Scotland, something about “long live Scotland.” She had been with the seamstresses in the sewing room high up in the castle, but when she got to the window to look out at the cause of the racket, Father had already reached the youth and calmed him down. Later, at dinner, when she had asked who it had been, he had just said “some vagabond, and none too sober, either.”

  Now her father was considering possibilities that were beyond Selena’s ken.

  “Brian, you may be right,” he said slowly. “But we have to look at it from every perspective, and make no rash mistakes. Particularly, we have to see the thing from Lord North’s perspective. It is no accident that he plans to attend the reception in Edinburgh. A prime minister of the King does nothing by accident, much less come to Scotland at this time, when the American colonists are kicking up enough of a fuss to keep him busy.”

  “How much do you think he really knows?”

  Knows? Selena thought. Knows about what?

  Lord Seamus shook his head in discouragement. “Well, we know for certain that, until recently, they might only have suspected the nature of the organization. They might even have thought of it as a kind of fraternity. But…” Here he lowered his voice and glanced around, almost as if fearful of being overheard, even in the family coach “…for the past two weeks no one has heard a word of MacTavish. We don’t know where he is.”

  “And Darius McGrover is said to have been in Edinburgh again, nosing around.”

  “McGrover!” Selena exclaimed, remembering the sinister man in black, at last year’s bal
l. “I know him. He looks like…”

  “He looks like the devil’s bastard, once removed,” Brian snarled.

  “If I’d had even a thought when we organized the party ten years ago,” Lord Seamus mused, “if I’d had even the shred of a thought that things would turn out this way, I might not have gone forward. But now the Rob Roys are in too deep.”

  Selena knew from her history tutor that Rob Roy was the name given Robert the Bruce, the Scottish King of long ago who had cast off the yoke of British rule. But now, with the Act of Union, this Rob Roy talk made no sense to her.

  “What is all this about Rob Roy?” she wanted to know.

  Brian and his father glanced doubtfully at each other. “It would be better if she didn’t know,” Brian said.

  Lord Seamus nodded tentatively. “Yes, but we’ve been careless. She already knows a little, which is dangerous. And if the time should ever come, God forbid, when she’s tortured by the likes of McGrover…”

  Torture? What dark night is this—?

  “…well, it’s best that she have something to confess…”

  “Confess?” cried Selena.

  “…because he’s merciless. I’ve heard that he’s tortured many an innocent person to death simply because he cannot believe that there is such a thing as innocence.”

  He let his voice trail off, looking out into the distance at the thatched roofs of the village of Lauder. And on his face was that familiar look of concern she had seen sometimes in her younger years. She was trying to remember when she’d seen it, and what it meant.

  He spoke again.

  “The Rob Roys, Selena,” he said, his voice not much more than a whisper, “are a political party that seeks to negate the Act of Union. To make Scotland entirely independent again. We didn’t originally intend it this way. It all began, more or less, as high-spirited talk. Scottish talk. We felt the Union wasn’t working out fairly for Scotland. It seemed to us—and it still seems—that we are getting the dregs, and the British the wine. You see, they have the navy, the army, the great corporations. So, except for private operators like Royce Campbell—and one cannot trust them anyway—the wealth that is coming back from lands across the sea is going to England, not Scotland. London is the center of everything, not Edinburgh or Glasgow. We have gotten a raw deal out of union, and they send against us men like McGrover and his uniformed hoodlums to ensure that we shall remain docile and powerless little provincials. Well, out of the original talk, the meetings, there grew circulations of letters, then a newspaper. Next, some speakers were arrested, and Alan MacTavish’s father was taken right off the floor of the Scottish House of Commons. That’s why he’s such a violent lad. Hanged the man, too, they did, after but a semblance of a trial. It was pathetic. But, in an odd way, there’s nothing that allows a political movement to thrive like a bit of persecution. Few tyrants have learned that simple but complex lesson, and reckoning by their enlightened manner of dealing with the Americans, George the Third and Lord North are not going to be among them.”