by Fiona Monroe
"Still feel it?" he said, with a faint smile.
"Well enough to remember the lesson, sir."
"Aye. No more running off and shutting yourself up alone with strange men in future for you, my girl. Especially not once you're Lady Buccleuch."
She couldn't help smiling back. It wasn't that she had really doubted him, but it made her very glad to hear him reaffirm his intention to marry her; a true libertine might have made that promise simply to have deceived her into yielding to him.
"I truly thought, when I could not immediately find you in the grounds, that you had absconded with the blackguard," he said, his tone darkening. "I thought I had been a fool after all, and that you had been hell bent on him all along. It made me desperate."
She stroked his shoulder. "I loved you from... well, I knew it from the night that Caroline nearly eloped with Lord Daventry, but I think my heart had been yours some time without my knowing it."
"I knew it the moment I learned you had promised yourself to another." His voice was low and breaking slightly, quite unlike its usual semi-mocking drawl. "Though you tempted me much sooner than that. I did not want to yield to that temptation... because of course it was impossible that you should be my wife. I did not want to despoil you. And that ought to have alerted me to the real trouble I was in, for I have never had that scruple before."
"And yet, here I am, sir. Thoroughly despoiled."
He grinned and kissed her breast. "Ach, a temporary situation." He grew serious again. "I gave myself a bad write-up as a potential husband back there, telling you I had never wanted to marry because I would make my wife miserable. You should know, it is not my intention to inflict misery on you. Although I have had no very good pattern of connubial conduct to follow."
She was silent. She wanted to ask about Mackenzie and the gentlewoman whose letter, dated only three months ago, she had found in his desk, but she did not want to poison her perfect contentment with a single drop of jealousy.
"My father," he said, after a pause, "made life a living hell for two wives in succession. I saw my mother's sufferings, although she would deny the worst of them now. As for your aunt — well, best to leave that in the past."
"I do not want to leave it in the past."
He raised his eyebrows at her. "Are you sure about that, Catriona?"
Catriona propped herself up on her elbows and looked at him directly. She made a sudden decision that she wanted to share everything with him, wise or unwise as it may be. "My mother always said that your father drove her to her death, and when I came first here, I had some silly notion that I might discover evidence of that."
"You surprise me," he said dryly. "Were you disappointed not to find the secret chamber where your aunt had been shut up alive all these years, fed by the faithful Cruikshank in the dead of night? Or the bloodied knife that inflicted the fatal wound? Or both?"
"My mother had a letter from my aunt saying that she feared something terrible was about to happen to her," Catriona went on, ignoring this. "A letter, mind you, she had to smuggle out at great risk to herself, as she was forbidden to correspond with my mother. Soon after I arrived here, I saw you looking at a letter in my mother's hand, which you put away in your bureau as soon as I entered. That was what I was really looking for, the night I trespassed in your study."
"And found instead a tender missive from the scheming Miss Charlotte Sinclair, and were rewarded by having your pretty backside thoroughly chastised with a wooden rule. I remember it well."
"Then Caroline — I know Caroline's judgement is not wholly to be trusted, but she told me that it was rumoured that your father had killed my aunt — not incidentally by cruelty or neglect, but deliberately, by his own hand. By poison, in fact. She told me that my aunt had been in good health, came down with a sudden fever, and was dead within a fortnight."
"Incidentally, Miss Sinclair is now Mrs. Cameron. She bagged an Edinburgh lawyer who was more credulous than me, I should think. She was no maid, for sure. So you need have no fear of her. As I told you, I do not bed other men's wives."
"If you know the truth of what happened to my aunt, will you tell me it?" she persisted.
He sighed heavily, and dropped back on the pillows. "All right. But I warn you, you may not like it."
"I do not expect to like it."
"Here's the thing. My father did indeed kill your aunt — in a manner of speaking. And sad to say, it was probably the best thing he ever did, for it set him on the road to some manner of repentance. You aunt, though she suffered no doubt greatly at my father's hands, was not the saintly victim your mother has no doubt painted her to be."
"She did not," said Catriona, though it was a lie.
"She had — eventually, no doubt, when my father's conduct had driven her to it — a lover. He was the Minister of Scourie Kirk, to add extra spice and pathos to this tale. This clerical reprobate and your sainted aunt had laid plans to elope together to the New World, where they are always in need of sermonisers with a shady past, apparently. The letter I was looking at that night was written by your aunt, not your mother. Their hands were very similar."
This was true, she realised. The one sample she had of her aunt's writing, the letter her mother had preserved, could indeed have been written by either sister.
"I can only think that your aunt had about as much sense as my sister, for instead of absconding in decent silence, she was asinine enough to explain herself at length and in writing in a letter intended for her eleven year old son. My older half-brother Roderick, Poseidon rest his soul. I suppose she felt she needed to justify herself to the boy and apologise for abandoning him. Women seem to be sentimental about their offspring like that. However, her maternal feelings were not so strong that she didn't pack her carpet bag and flee. Of course my father found the letter first and was able to pursue her to the meeting-place with her lover. It seems to be Lochlannan's most popular spot for clandestine appointments."
"The old mill!"
"The very place. Off stormed my father with a loaded shotgun, more or less as I did this evening. Even in my rage, I feared that history might be repeating itself. He found the guilty pair before they had a chance to set off, and he told me that it was fully his intention to blast the fellow to kingdom come. I cannot say I wholly blame him here. He would have done it, too, had your aunt not thrown herself in front of her lover."
Even though she had been anticipating something bad, Catriona felt a thrill of horror. "He shot her?"
"Only as it happened in the arm, glancingly. Shot is designed to kill small game without damaging them too much. A shotgun is not the best way to kill a person. You want an honest to God pistol for that. Well, your aunt went down with a minor arm wound, and my father says he was too busy tending to her to stop the minister taking flight, which he did, promptly. It seems his great love for Lady Buccleuch wasn't quite strong enough for him to risk his own neck or even make sure that she wasn't dying. He resigned his ministry and left Lochlannan the next day, as my father tells it."
"But my aunt. What happened?"
"It was very simple. She had shot embedded in the fleshy part of her arm. My father carried her back to the castle, put her to bed, and tended the wound himself. He had plenty of experience in that way, and she ought to have been none the worse after a couple of days. He told nobody what had happened and gave it out that Lady Buccleuch had been taken ill. Unfortunately, after three days, she did take ill. The wound putrefied and became inflamed, and once that poison enters the blood there is nothing to be done. She lingered for two weeks, sinking lower and lower, but the end was inevitable. Of course, it was given out that she died of a fever, which in fact, she did. Very few people knew the truth. So you see, my father did kill your aunt, though he did not intend to — and he tried as best he could to save her."
Catriona could say nothing. It was not at all the story she had imagined. She recalled the letter, and suddenly the words twisted round to reveal her aunt's true meaning; n
ot thoughts of suicide, not fear for her life, but an oblique hint that she was about to attempt a desperate flight.
"As I said, the one good thing to come out of it was that it made my father begin to think more seriously about how he lived. He married again, and again did not make his wife happy, but at least my mother never felt obliged to run off with the minister. He quarrelled with his elder son, who did feel obliged to run off to sea, but he tried now and then to be a father to me. And he grew positively penitent on his deathbed, deciding to return his first wife's fortune to her surviving family, and confiding all of this to me. Counselling me to lead a better life."
"And have you not?"
"No. I've whored and drunk and paid scant attention to the estate."
"You do not make promises you don't intend to keep, you took great pains to secure your sister's happiness, and you do care about the estate — you care about the people who live here. I saw that the day we went to that little village."
"Township."
"You haven't dislodged the crofters merely to make the land more profitable."
"Ah, but that could just be laziness," he said, with a grin. "Maybe once I am a married man, I will take a great enthusiasm for improving, and turn them all out onto the heather."
"I do not think so."
With a sudden burst of energy, he threw the covers aside and leaped to the floor. The room was in near darkness now, but through the window she could still see a lingering azure light in the sky. Very distantly, she could still hear the skirling of the pipes.
"The ceilidh will be properly underway by now," he said, reaching for the swathes of plaid discarded on the floor. "We should re-join the company, and I can shock both clans by presenting you as my bride."
Every last vestige of doubt melted away. If he was prepared to announce their engagement immediately and so very publically, they would be getting married in the morning as he had promised. And she knew enough of his impetuousness to believe that he would organise the wedding quite as quickly as that, if he were determined. She slid more gingerly out of bed, feeling sore and a little light-headed, but giddy with happiness.
Solemnly, he handed her the ruin of her fine ballgown.
"Oh — I cannot wear that."
"Wheest! Nobody will care, at this late hour."
"But it will look as though... We have been gone so long, and together! And the skirt..."
"It will look as though we scurried off together and spent the whole time making the beast with two backs, then inexpertly dressed ourselves afterwards. I'm in a worse fix. I can pull on a kilt but I have no hope of making anything much of this damn plaid blanket without my man. What of it? Do you care?"
Catriona found that she did not. And so, once they had approximately reassembled their outfits, and she had made a futile attempt to pin up her tumbling hair, they walked down together arm-in-arm to the Great Hall.
The End
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
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