Highland Crown

by May McGoldrick

  But the most important thing was, he wasn’t completely ruined.

  “This Lowlander you’ve brought into my house. Who is she?”

  He knew he’d need to explain sooner or later. The time had come. “That Lowlander is my wife.”

  “Does the woman have a name? Family?”

  He had no time to come up with a name other than the one she’d already chosen herself. “Isabella Murray. But she’s Mrs. Mackintosh to you.”

  The sun, which had hovered just beneath the horizon for only a couple of hours during the night, was now beginning to rise high enough to brighten the chamber. Still, from this distance, Cinaed couldn’t read the look in Searc’s eyes. He didn’t like lying to the man, but he had no idea how he’d explain having a wife one trip and none the next. He figured Isabella’s future and his were murky enough. The time for explaining might never come.

  “When did you marry her?”

  “In Aberdeen, not a fortnight ago.”

  “Why? She’s hardly a lass.”

  “Because I wanted her in my life. What of it?”

  “Is that all?”

  “I feel deep affection for her. I have no desire to be apart from her. She’s mine now, and I’m a much better man for it.”

  The words were spoken without forethought or pretext. Cinaed’s mind flashed to Isabella and the kiss they’d exchanged this morning. He was attracted to her physically, but there was so much more he wanted to know about her. Her life. What she enjoyed doing. What she dreamt of. What could he do to erase the permanent furrow in her brow? But beyond all that, what would become of her now was even more important to him than replacing the Highland Crown.

  “How long have you known her?”

  Cinaed understood Searc’s distrust of strangers. They both had too much at stake. He’d put into port in Aberdeen for only a few days. Short enough for romance, but hardly long enough for marriage.

  “I met her last summer when I docked in Aberdeen to have the hull scraped. I’ve made a point of calling on her the last two times I’ve stopped there since.”

  “What do you know about her family?”

  “Enough,” Cinaed barked. “We are not going to ferret out whether her third cousin’s husband might be distantly related to some exciseman who wouldn’t take a bribe from your partners in Aberdeen. She’s more trustworthy than you, apparently. She saved my life. She’ll not do anything to jeopardize your business dealings or bring danger into your house. Let it lie at that.”

  Searc’s eyebrows pumped up and down as he stomped about and wrestled with the answers, but after a minute, he stopped abruptly at the desk.

  “She’s a woman of quality?”

  “She’s a woman of quality,” Cinaed repeated.

  Searc nodded curtly. “I want her down with us tonight for dinner.”

  This had to have something to do with Searc’s terms. Cinaed knew it’d come out sooner or later. “Why? Who are you trying to impress?”

  Searc ignored the questions. “And clean up, both of you. I’ll have clothes sent up.”

  “Who are your guests?” he demanded.

  “The organizers from the local weavers, their wives, and some others.”

  The weavers were the heart of the radical reform movement in the south, and in England. They’d been organizing for better wages and working conditions for years. To the chagrin of the manufactory owners, they controlled the workforce. But they were also the people who’d put a price on Isabella’s head. Cinaed kept his face impassive.

  “I thought they kept themselves clear of your influence. ‘Unbribable’ was the word you used less than a year ago. What are they doing here?”

  Searc went to the window and looked out before answering. “They’re calling for a day of strikes in Inverness. The same as they’ve done in every bloody town and city south of here.”

  “What does this have to do with you?”

  “They want my protection.” Searc went back to his desk. “Nearly everywhere else, when they’ve shut down the work and gone out to protest, they’ve been attacked by the British and the local authorities. They know I have my own men. They know I entertain officers here from the port and from Fort George. They don’t want it going bad here the way it has in other places.”

  Cinaed didn’t want to know what Searc was getting in return for such intervention. He doubted he was doing it for any noble reason.

  “You don’t need me or Isabella for this dinner.”

  Searc’s dark visage became as fierce as Cinaed had ever seen it. The look had been fairly intimidating when he was a boy, but it had no effect on him now.

  Cinaed returned the look. “I’m still waiting to hear about this money you stole from me, but I’m not about to become your dancing bear to get it back. You’ll give me what’s mine.”

  Searc huffed and stormed back to his desk again. Yanking the folded paper from the ledger, he stalked back and tossed it to him. “That ledger accounts for every ha’penny, but you need to look at this first.”

  Cinaed opened the sheet of paper and stared at it for a moment. It was a flyer, advertising the sale of a ship, a cargo-carrying schooner of 280 tons. Apply to Captain P. Kenedy, Citadel Quay, New Harbour.

  “Two hundred eighty tons at £25 per ton. The seller wants £6800. I can get him down to £4000.”

  Cinaed waited, assuming the negotiated price was what he could afford.

  “Captain Kenedy will be dining here tonight with his wife.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Well, I do,” Searc scoffed. “The man’s a bloody bore, but he owns that ship and a dozen others. Wants to ‘slow down,’ he says. After me, Kenedy is the richest man in Inverness, and I’ve done him a few favors over the years.”

  Cinaed didn’t care to know any more details about how the man made his fortune.

  Searc snapped the paper out of his hand. “You and your wife will come down to dinner.”

  He didn’t know how he was going to convince Isabella to show her face at a dinner hosting the leadership of the local weavers. She’d probably suggest inviting Hudson and his men and let them fight it out for her head right here.

  So far as he could tell, the people she knew were in Edinburgh. Inverness was a long way from there. The chance of anyone recognizing her was almost naught. She was also being presented as his wife, an added layer of concealment. Still, the decision was hers to make.

  “While we’re making deals and calling in favors,” Cinaed stated, knowing he needed to get everything on the table before Searc decided they were somehow even after his deviousness. “I’ll be needing the assistance of your men next week for a private matter of my own.”

  Searc stuffed the flyer back into the ledger. “Getting shot twice in one day wasn’t enough for you?”

  “I tried to do it alone last time. This time I’ll have your help.”

  “What needs doing?”

  Cinaed was going after John Gordon, but there was no reason Searc had to know. “Perhaps, if you’re hesitant, we should take a look at that ledger you’ve been waving about like Moses and his tablets. I have a notion there’s not a deuced word or number written in that book.”

  As he pushed to his feet, Searc waved him off. “When do you need them?”

  “One day next week. I’ll let you know exactly which day.”

  CHAPTER 16

  So wondrous wild, the whole might seem

  the scenery of a fairy dream.

  —Sir Walter Scott, “Lady of the Lake,” Canto I, stanza 12

  The dress of yellow-gold brocade, with its short, puffed sleeves and its patterned satin shawl, was more elegant than any gown she would have thought to order or wear in Edinburgh.

  Isabella stood in front of the mirror as the early evening sunlight played over the subtle shades and contours of the material. She pulled up the top of the bosom gently, without success. It was far more revealing than she would have wanted, but it was truly a beautiful dress.

&
nbsp; Since their arrival, no one had thought for a moment that Jean might be a servant. So, to get ready for this evening’s dinner, a seamstress was brought in by the housekeeper to help fit and dress her. As it turned out, the garment fit her almost perfectly, and the few required tucks were dispensed with in no time.

  Isabella didn’t ask where the dress came from or to whom it belonged. She definitely had no interest in finding out more about Searc’s business dealings than she needed to.

  Cinaed had explained to her who would be at dinner. One of the guests was a man named Kenedy, who was attending with his wife, and a possibility existed that he’d sell Cinaed a ship at a good price. When he told her the leaders of the weavers would be there, as well, Isabella stifled her nervousness. She was being introduced as Mrs. Mackintosh, and she agreed it was highly unlikely anyone from Inverness would recognize her as the wife of Archibald Drummond.

  She knew all of her husband’s friends in Edinburgh, and many in Glasgow, as well—their names, their trades, their families, where they lived. These were the names that Lieutenant Hudson and his people wanted from her. It was information she would never reveal, despite the radical reformers’ distrust of her. But whether they were weavers or tinsmiths or carpenters or lawyers, all of those activists she knew were Lowlanders, and none of them would be here in Inverness.

  She would go along with Searc’s request—or was it a demand?—if it helped Cinaed get the ship he needed.

  Long before it was time to go downstairs, Isabella was dressed and had her hair gathered up in a fashion that was simple and comfortable. Earlier, Cinaed had given her some needed privacy—a gesture she found touching—by offering to bathe and dress in a guest bedchamber one flight below her in the tower.

  After he left, however, questions began to edge in. She glanced at the bed where he’d been fighting through the fever and wondered if he’d be sleeping elsewhere. Many married men and women slept separately, but would he draw undue attention to their relationship, especially when they were still supposedly newlyweds? Could the two of them be in the same room and not continue what they’d begun this morning?

  She was relieved when Jean arrived to rescue her from her thoughts. Coming over to the mirror, she circled wordlessly around Isabella, studying the dress carefully. It seemed today that the older woman’s back was a little more stooped. She was more unsteady on her feet than she had been, and her hand shook more severely. No surprise. Jean had been indispensable in caring for Cinaed during the fever. She had to be exhausted from the ordeal, especially since it only added weight to her constant worry about her nephew.

  Jean cast a critical eye over the dress and wearer as if she were some Parisian modiste.

  “Damn me, but yer a bonnie lass.” She flared the skirts out to get the full effect of the brocade, then pulled down on the bodice, revealing a little bit more of Isabella’s breasts. “When ye go to market with the halibut, mistress, ye don’t hide ’em in the sacking.”

  “I’m not taking anything to market, Jean.”

  The old woman shrugged and held up the shawl to inspect.

  “I just saw yer handsome husband. He’s a fine braw man, to be sure. Ye won’t be recognizing him.”

  Isabella pressed a hand to her fluttery stomach. She, too, thought him handsome, with his broad shoulders and his blue eyes and his hair like a lion’s mane. Recognizing him would never be a problem.

  “He’s not my husband,” she replied.

  “Hush now.” The old woman looked over her shoulder as if afraid the walls might have ears. “Have ye forgot what I told ye the first day we come here? Ye need to be spoke for to belong. And there’s no better person to belong to around here, that I can see, but yer handsome sea captain.”

  It wasn’t belonging that worried her. It was the future, and it terrified her. Death was dogging her steps, and she feared taking him down with her.

  She didn’t want to think about this idea of husband and wife and the charade he’d started as another way of protecting her.

  Isabella faced the mirror. Still, the woman looking back at her was a different person from the one who had, little more than two months ago, fled Edinburgh. A single-minded, dedicated physician had grown into some new creature, a person with the courage and the desire to play a part in a larger world.

  Her gaze involuntarily wandered to the bed reflected in the mirror. But she blinked it away.

  “Have the guests begun to arrive?” she asked.

  “Can’t say. I was down by the pier, milling about with the workers on the docks, hoping one of them Highlanders would come to me again.”

  “Did they?”

  “I saw a couple of lads that could’ve been the same ones, but when I tried to talk to them, they just moved off.” Jean shook out and refolded the blankets Isabella used at night to sleep on. “Coming in just now, I saw no guests, but that means nothing. This house doesn’t have one door. I swear it has ten. Leastwise, that’s how it seems.”

  Isabella hadn’t been out of this chamber since she’d arrived, but from what Cinaed told her, Jean might not be wrong.

  “I can’t tell ye how many times I’d be down by the kitchens and hear someone’s in a private meeting with that shark when I know his men have answered no door. So where did they come from?”

  “Cinaed says this house is a fortress, with all sorts of hidden passageways and secret doors.”

  Isabella walked to the window to see if she could see any arrivals from this vantage point.

  In the lane below, a tall man impeccably dressed in black coat and trousers passed under her window. A pure white cravat was just visible as he walked across the way. Wide shoulders filled the coat to perfection. He was dressed formally for dinner, but he wore no hat and his dark hair curled over his collar. She wondered if he might be one of the guests.

  Before he reached the far side of the lane, he turned and looked up at the window. He nodded, and Isabella’s heart took off like a flock of birds. She flattened her hand against the glass. It was as if Cinaed knew she was watching.

  “Didn’t I tell ye? All clean shaved too. The man’s a handsome dog, is he not?” Jean asked, standing beside her. “Who’d not want that one for a husband?”

  * * *

  Cinaed came out for two reasons—learning who these fellows were and what they wanted. The message they’d passed on through Jean wasn’t enough.

  He felt Isabella’s eyes on him, and when he looked up at the window, he caught a glimpse of her. Even though he’d stressed the safety of the house and the value of Searc’s protection, he still worried about her. He’d convinced Searc that she was his wife, but these men outside knew the truth.

  Two tall figures melted into the shadows of a ruined malt house that had been deserted since he was a boy. He passed them without a glance and continued up the lane to the corner. It was somewhat troubling that Searc, with a gang of ruffians at his disposal, didn’t mind their presence. Cinaed hadn’t mentioned it this morning. He wanted no attention brought to them until he had a chance to learn who they worked for and what they wanted.

  The road that ran in front of Searc’s house bustled with traffic. Carts and wagons loaded high with barrels and crates were making their way in the direction of the harbor or back toward the center of Inverness. A flock of sheep was being driven to town, and a ragged family, carrying all their worldly possessions, circled wearily around the animals. One of the children, a scruffy lad with a dirty face, pulled a small but resistant yellow dog along by a cord. They were trudging in the direction of the pier. Like so many other Highland families, they no doubt hoped to find a ship that would carry them across the sea. The desperation in their faces and the life they’d lost was caused by the clearances, and it angered Cinaed. He knew their homes had already been destroyed. They had nothing but a long bleak road before them. Pulling a gold sovereign from his pocket, he handed it to the lad as they passed. It was all he could do for them. For now.

  A tall man in a battere
d wide-brimmed hat, leaning against an abandoned cart and eating an apple, watched him. Across the road, two more fellows sat on a low wall. They could have been just passing the time. One was absently whittling a stick, but Cinaed knew their attention never strayed from him.

  As he approached, the Highlander by the cart straightened and tossed his apple away. He was dressed in a coat and pants of worn brown wool and a dark green waistcoat. His boots indicated he was no simple farmer, but rather a horseman. And the marked face and flattened nose showed evidence of more than a few rows.

  They were approximately the same height and build. He guessed the other man might be a few years older than him, but no more. The Highlander wore a long hunting knife at his belt, and without doubt had at least one sgian dubh tucked into his boots. The riders who came to their rescue on the coach road had been heavily armed with muskets and pistols. If these were indeed the same men, they weren’t foolish enough to carry outlawed weapons on the street.

  The Highlander touched the brim of his hat. His hand didn’t move an inch in the direction of the knife at his belt. He wore the comfortable demeanor of a person who’d been waiting for an old companion.

  “Who are you?” Cinaed had no time for pleasantries or pretense.

  “Blair Mackintosh.”

  The quick answer and the name took him by surprise, but there were Mackintosh families spread across the Highlands. “Where from?”

  “Dalmigavie, Cinaed.”

  The years were raindrops disappearing in the grass. He knew he had changed, and the same would be true for others who grew up at Dalmigavie. He didn’t recall anyone with the name Blair, but he didn’t remember many things from those days. Still, he could easily be kin to this man. The realization was bittersweet, and at the same time clarified a great deal. It made sense now that Searc would have no objection to members of his own clan loitering about the streets surrounding his house. But did this mean that whatever information they had, Searc also knew?