Yesterday's Promise

by Michele Paige Holmes

  “You are more poetic than Finlay.” Collin’s words seemed as beautiful as the land itself and expressed the depth of his feelings for the Highlands. I found myself longing to share that with him. I had enjoyed what I’d seen, been moved by the wonders and creations surrounding us, but Scotland had not yet penetrated my soul as it had Collin’s. That he had tried, these past few days, to share that with me touched me deeply.

  “I wanted you to have something to tell your sister.” Collin looked away as if embarrassed. “I know she has been visiting the continent with her husband and this cannot compare, but I wanted you to have something of a wedding trip as well.”

  “Oh, Collin.” I leaned forward and threw my arms about him, hugging him fiercely as my feelings— those that had penetrated my soul— overflowed. “That is the kindest thing. You are too good to me.” Here I thought he had been avoiding going home, and instead he had been doing this for me. A wedding trip. As if we are a real married couple. Perhaps we were, or would come to that stage eventually.

  I drew back a little and looked into his eyes. “This has been the best week of my life.”

  His brows lifted, and half of his lip rose in a doubtful smirk. “I thought you said your father was good to you.”

  “He was,” I insisted. “Very good. I had a most pleasant upbringing. But it wasn’t here. I wasn’t with you.” I slid one hand from his shoulder and patted his chest, so that my fingers were just above his heart. Right where they had been the last time we almost kissed.

  We were even closer now, with me on his lap, our faces just a breath away from one another.

  I looked into his eyes. Please, Collin. There was no river to push him in this time. I would not run away. I was brave enough now. I thought he was, too. My eyes fluttered closed in invitation.

  “Katie, I—”

  I dared to look at him and read the desire burning in his eyes. My heart soared. He does care for me.

  “Collin,” I whispered. Would he make me beg? I didn’t care if he did. His nearness didn’t seem enough anymore. It was his affection I craved, in word and deed.

  “Katie, I— I’m glad you’re here. That you’ve come home.” He leaned forward, pressing a quick kiss to my forehead. “But you’re sitting on the only bread I’ve had to eat in five days.”

  “Oh.” I jumped up, fighting a surge of disappointment and feeling guilty as I saw the smashed piece and scattered crumbs on his leg. “Here. Have mine.” I retrieved it from the ground where it had fallen when I’d made the sudden leap to his lap. “I’ve only taken a bite. It isn’t very good, actually. Crumbly and dry.”

  “It’s not fish or oatmeal,” Collin said lightheartedly, accepting my offering. I saw through his attempt to ease the tension between us.

  Once again I did not understand his reluctance to be close to me, to behave as a husband and wife ought. For the more I thought about it, the more certain I felt it must be all right for a married couple to kiss one another. I believed my father and step mother had— in those earlier, happier years. I knew Collin felt the same hunger as I. And he continued to prove he cared for me. Yet he would not trust me with his secret. Or with his heart, it seemed. I thought back to my sketchbook and how I had vowed to make him smile.

  Perhaps I ought to have made a different goal. It was much more than a smile that he needed. I glanced at Collin as I stood and shook the crumbs from my skirt. I promise to teach you of love.

  * * *

  We lingered too long— entirely my fault— on Bealach Druim Uachdair. It was everything I had imagined when I had painted it. One really could see forever, and Collin took his time pointing out things on both sides of the pass to me. On our way up he told me about the Battle of Killiecrankie, the sight of the first Jacobite rebellion in 1689.

  “Over seventy years now this has been going on.” I shook my head, utterly displeased to learn this and worried that it wasn’t truly over yet.

  “Scotland’s never had a peaceful past,” Collin said. “It isn’t in our nature.”

  “Or it has to do with our neighbors— to the south,” I suggested.

  “At times, yes,” Collin said. “But at others we have no one but ourselves to blame. We are our own worst enemies.”

  I thought on this as Ian’s stallion steadily picked his way up the moor. Did Collin speak of the conflict between the clans? Or was there something more, something even worse, happening here? Were men like Brann and Ian at the root of it?

  “The English have done a few good turns for us,” Collin said, giving credit to General Wade for the military road we traveled. “Even if he did build it to stop the Jacobites.”

  “Is that one of the reasons the English won? Because of these roads?”

  “No.” Collin was swift to answer. “They won because the Highlanders were divided. A divided people can never win.” We’d reached the final peak, and Collin stopped the horse. He dismounted, then held his hands out to me. I slid easily into his embrace and felt pleased when he kept my hand in his and walked us a distance from the road where we could truly look out over what seemed the edge of the world.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, wishing for a word that would do the landscape before me justice. “Someday I wish to sit up here and paint it.”

  “It couldn’t look any better than the painting you did already,” Collin said. “You’ve a real talent, Katie.”

  “Thank you.” My heart warmed with his compliment. “It, and the other painting I’d brought, were my favorites. I often imagined this was a real place. It was where I would escape to in my thoughts whenever I was troubled. I never imagined that I was painting my future.” I realized my abilities with charcoal and brush would help us little in our new life and land. My art did not seem a reliable or timely way to predict any dangers we might be facing.

  “Such a magical place needs a people who care for it,” I said. “Are the Highlanders that people? Are we any better than we were at the end of the war? Will the wounds ever heal and the clans band together?”

  “Is Ian’s hair the shade of Alistair’s?” Collin gave a grim bark of laughter. “Nothing much has changed in that regard. MacDonalds and Campbells are still enemies.”

  “Except us. We aren’t.” I squeezed his hand, loving that he was both a MacDonald and mine.

  “It was what your grandfather hoped.” Collin’s gaze grew tender. “Those many years ago when he joined our hands and made us speak solemn vows to one another.”

  “What did we promise?” I asked, unable to remember much of that night.

  “That we would care for one another and always put the other first, and that we would care for our people and do what we must to unite them and see that they continued on for generations to come.”

  “Rather a lot to ask of a fourteen-year-old and a four-year-old, don’t you think?”

  “Aye, but we’re not fourteen and four any longer. We’ve already done one hard thing. We can do another.”

  “And what was that?” I couldn’t see that we’d accomplished much toward our goal yet, other than to successfully avoid both of our families the past several days.

  “We married each other without bloodshed— almost,” Collin added.

  I supposed he spoke of Malcom. “Marrying you was not difficult— not as I’d expected it might be.” I thought back to the day of our wedding and the moment I had first laid eyes on Collin. My heart had known him at once, even if my mind did not then remember him.

  “It wasn’t,” Collin agreed. “But quite a feat nonetheless when, for many years, I wondered if I would ever see you again.” He turned my hand over and traced the thin scar running across my palm.

  “Do you know how I got that?” I asked, realizing he might know the answer to one of the mysteries of my life. “I asked Father a few times, but he never would tell me, so I supposed it must have happened when I was very young.”

  “You were five. He is the one who gave you that scar. Mine as well.” Collin turned his own hand o
ver, matching ours together so that the line on his continued where mine left off.

  I stared at them together and saw them no longer white and thin but blood red, deep, and painful.

  “I thought you lost your hand because of me. Because I wouldn’t let go.” Collin folded my fingers over the scar and raised my hand to his lips, holding it there. “Your father and a small group of English soldiers had been chasing us, tracking us for three nights. I’d done everything I knew of to keep you hidden and safe. I’d circled back around toward the Campbell keep, hoping that if I could get you inside the walls of the church I could plead sanctuary and your grandfather could do something to prevent them from taking you. We didn’t make it that far. Your father found us hiding in the graveyard.” Collin’s eyes met mine, pleading for forgiveness and understanding he didn’t need to ask for.

  “It wasn’t your—”

  “I refused to let you go,” he continued. “Even when one of the redcoats held a gun to my head. Even when your father grabbed you and was pulling you away. You were begging him to stop, begging me not to let go of you, and so I didn’t. Until your father threatened to cut off your hand. He said I could keep that and he would take the rest of you. I had no choice but to let you go then. I couldn’t let him cut off your hand, Katie.”

  “He didn’t. It’s all right, Collin.” I placed that hand on his cheek, wanting to comfort, to erase the painful memory from his mind.

  “I let go of you, but you still held on. He struck our joined hands then carried you away screaming and bleeding.”

  “I remember.” I sucked in a breath and closed my eyes, seeing my five-year-old self pressing a bloody hand to a carriage window, trying to get out.

  “I ran after you. I ran and ran,” Collin said. “But I was no match for a carriage, and the soldiers started shooting at me, and soon you were gone. I didn’t know if I would ever see you again.”

  Thunder echoed in the sky above, and we both looked up to see grey clouds hovering. A storm had moved in, stealing what hours of daylight we’d left.

  Wordlessly Collin grabbed my hand, and we both ran to Ian’s horse. The trip down the north side of the mountain was no less treacherous, and we were not yet halfway down when fat drops began falling from the sky. Collin steered us off the road onto a side path, then directly across the moor to an outcropping of rock. He led us to an overhang not deep enough to qualify as a cave, but substantial enough to shelter us from most of the rain.

  The steady drops turned to a downpour as Collin unfolded our shared blanket and wrapped it around us. We sat on the ground, huddled together for warmth as streams of water began cascading over the rock on either side and in front of us. Two waterfalls in one day.

  “Is this still the best week of your life?” Collin asked above the sounds of the storm.

  “Yes,” I insisted, though my mood was melancholy. I had unraveled the mystery of why Collin hated my father. It had nothing to do with Collin’s own loss and everything to do with me.

  Fourteen years I had been gone. Years in which Collin did not know if he would ever see me again. Years which had seen my grandfather’s death and ought to have released Collin from any promise he had made. Years when he might have chosen another as his bride. But he had not. Against logic and odds, he had hoped and waited and chosen me.

  I twisted the wedding band around my finger. “How long did it take you to make this?” I held my hand up, admiring the ring.

  “Your grandfather gave me a bit of silver about a month after you’d gone. He said I could spend it, or he suggested it might make a nice wedding band for you someday. I was grieving badly— I cannot explain it, you being such a little scrap of a thing and ornery and annoying much of the time.” Collin nudged my shoulder playfully. “But somehow you’d become my family, my purpose after losing first my home and clan, then Ian and Da. I’d been charged with your safekeeping and felt I had failed, and it nearly crushed me.”

  “You didn’t fail.” I rested my head against his shoulder. “I’m here, am I not? Safe all these years, probably because I was with my father instead of here. Besides, that was a terrible lot of responsibility for my grandfather to put on a boy. What was he thinking?”

  “It wasn’t just him,” Collin said. “I came to understand that the night he betrothed us. There was a higher power at work among us, One who intended us to unite for his purposes.”

  I sat up and turned to him. “Are you speaking of God? Do you really believe that?”

  “I know it, Katie.” Collin was as serious as I’d ever seen him. “You would, too, if you’d been a little older or could remember that night.”

  “Why us?” I asked. The way he spoke made us sound like we were akin to Joan of Arc or King Arthur.

  He shrugged. “That I don’t know. But you’ve been given a gift. And I’ve been given you, so we’d best figure out how to fulfill our parts of the bargain.”

  I liked the way he said I’d been given to him. As if he treasured me as one would a gift. I twisted the ring on my finger, once more admiring the delicate carving.

  “I was grieving, and making you a ring was something I could do,” Collin continued. “A little thing, to be sure, but it brought solace, because I thought if I made it, then someday you must wear it, and then I should be with you again.” Collin brushed his fingers over the silver band and smiled sadly, as if remembering. “It took months, every evening by the fire. I worked at it off and on over the years, putting it away when I returned to the MacDonalds. When your father’s letter arrived, I took the ring out once more and polished it.”

  “You are an artist, too. A craftsman.”

  “If only I could conjure a house right now.” The sheeting rain had encroached on our shelter, the rock wet right up to the tight circle we sat in.

  “That wouldn’t be any good,” I said. “No trees around, and you want to live in a forest.”

  Collin grinned. “Anywhere you are will do fine.”

  Anywhere you are. Anywhere. His words were freeing somehow, suggesting that if all did not go well with the Campbells or MacDonalds we might go elsewhere. We were not tied to any spot of land or people. Only to each other, though I could see that Collin felt a responsibility far beyond that. I’d felt it, too, since learning that Brann was the one who had taken my grandfather’s place.

  But for now, for these few minutes alone, with the water falling all around us, sealing us away from the rest of the world, we were safe and content with each other, and the future could wait.

  Liam Campbell’s laughter ceased abruptly. He stood and began removing his belt. My eyes tracked his movements and knew what was coming. The urge to flee or fight nearly overpowered me, but some deep-rooted sense of self-preservation held me in place. I was surrounded by the enemy. But I would only be beaten. Unless I resisted. Then I’d be shot instead.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  With utmost care I lifted Collin’s arm from its usual position, draped across my middle, assumed these many nights we had shared a blanket together with only the grass below as our bed and the stars overhead for a canopy. We had done nothing more than sleep on the handful of nights we’d shared alone, and while I appreciated Collin’s patience with me— with us as husband and wife— I was beginning to wonder if he ever would expect more. Or even wish for it.

  On our wedding night he had made it clear that nothing more was required to make our union legal. After Collin’s explanations regarding his aloof behavior those first few days, I wasn’t entirely certain whether his wedding-night statement stood or not. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to. Sleeping beside Collin, with his arm wrapped protectively around me, the steady assurance of his heartbeat as my lullaby, had proved both comforting and exhilarating— instead of awkward and discomfiting.

  But there had been times the past couple of nights when, instead of his mumbled, ‘Goodnight, Katie,’ I wished desperately that he would kiss me instead. But he had not even attempted such or brought up the subject since the
night I’d lost my nerve and shoved him in the river. Oh, that I had that moment back.

  Perhaps Collin’s reluctance was my penance for the deed. But how long was I to be punished? And what was wrong with me that I saw his considerate behavior as punishment? I categorized it with my apparent need for adventure, one I’d been largely enjoying the past few days— with one exception. We were very near to facing danger head on, and I had no notion of how we were to protect ourselves. Or, more precisely, I’d had no additional visions and had little confidence in my ability to predict anything of the future and thus help us navigate the dangers safely.

  By nightfall we would be on Campbell land. Tomorrow I would have to face Brann and who knew how many hostile others. Not only that, I would have to do something about them as well.

  Having extricated myself from beneath Collin’s arm, I eased out from beneath the blanket. If I intended to claim my right to my grandfather’s castle and oust its current occupant, it seemed the least I ought to be able to do was to begin such endeavors by catching my own breakfast, and Collin’s, too.

  I crawled away into the grey predawn light— one of the best times to catch a fish, Collin had explained on the numerous mornings he’d risen before me and had breakfast waiting by the time I awoke. Today it was my turn.

  Not bothering with my shoes, I crept down to the loch. I tied my dress up, braced myself for the cold, and stepped into the freezing water, pressing my lips together to contain any number of epithets I might have expressed about the shocking temperature.

  One hundred tries. Collin believed that was how long it had taken him to acquire the skill of spearing a fish. With grim determination I stared down at the still water pooling at my feet, wondering how close I’d come to that number already over the past week. Surely catching a fish here would be easier than catching one in a river, no matter how gentle the current. I didn’t have the luxury of weeks to learn— how to fish or anything else.