The Highlander's Virtuous Lady: A Historical Scottish Romance Novel

by Fiona Faris

  Epilogue

  In the bridal chamber, Gilbert took Margaret in his arms.

  “Well, Countess Errol; does that serve you well?”

  Margaret snuggled into his embrace.

  “It serves me well, my lord.” She purred. “Am I really to be Lady of Slains Castle?”

  “And of the manors of Scone, Strathardle, Longforgan, and Coupar.” Gilbert chuckled. “And you shall have a place at court.”

  “Heavens!” she exclaimed softly.

  “Heavens indeed, my angel!”

  He kissed her, and she returned his kiss ardently.

  “Our wedding night…” he murmured.

  She stiffened in his arms.

  “It has been a long time in coming to pass,” he observed.

  “Yes.” She breathed nervously. “Much has happened.”

  She was trembling. Gilbert felt her tremor against his broad chest. A sudden gust of wind outside rattled the casement. He drew her closer.

  “I can’t,” she moaned softly.

  “Sorry?”

  She pushed him away.

  “I just can’t.” She sobbed, making to turn away, distressed.

  He was confused. He tried to take her in his arms again, but she spun away from him.

  “Don’t. I am… I am not ready for this.”

  “But, my love,” he pleaded. “It is… It’s our wedding night.”

  Margaret sat down heavily on the bed. She looked utterly desolate, her shoulders bowed. She wrung her hands in her lap.

  “What is the matter?” Gilbert asked, his voice riven with anxiety for her. “What on earth did Moult do to you that has made you so… averse?”

  “I… I cannot say.” She suddenly reached out and snatched his hand to hers. “Can we just lie awhile, just… lie, that’s all, nothing else.”

  Gilbert sat down beside her on the edge of the bed and placed his arms around her. They lay down and shuffled up until their heads lay together on the bolster and she lay cradled in his arms. She stared at the pale-blue painted ceiling, thoughts and memories sailing like warships through her mind, then she suddenly began to weep.

  “It’s alright,” Gilbert whispered into her hair. “It’s alright.” He curled his arm up from beneath her shoulders and began to stroke her long silver-gold locks. “If you are not ready, I can wait.”

  “But you should not have to wait, Gilbert.” Margaret sobbed. “I am your wife; you have every right—”

  “Shush! I would not force myself upon you. I have waited eight long years; I can surely wait a little longer. At least we are together. At long last, we are together. That is all that matters.”

  They eventually fell asleep, still fully dressed, in one another’s arms.

  Gilbert awoke. It was still light outside. The wind had risen and driven a fitful spattering of summer rain against the glass of the window. Margaret was no longer beside him.

  He heard the clatter of hooves on the cobbles below the window. He leaped out of bed, unlatched the casement and pushed the window open, just in time to see Margaret disappear through the castle gates.

  “Margaret!” he shouted, but the mounting gale snatched the name from his mouth and scattered it to the skies.

  He turned and rushed from the bedchamber. He careened down the turret stair and stumbled out into the courtyard.

  “A horse!” he cried to a bemused-looking stable boy who stood round-eyed and open-mouthed near the stable doors. “Come on, lad; look lively.” Gilbert clapped his hands.

  The boy turned and disappeared into the stable gloom, re-emerging minutes later with a horse fully saddled and bridled. Gilbert swung into the saddle and set off in pursuit of his bride.

  Margaret took the path they had earlier taken to the lochan on the moor. Gilbert followed her at a safe distance. He did not want to intercept her but pursued her only to ensure that she remained safe and unmolested in such a wild place.

  Margaret rode for about two miles along the burn side, then struck up onto the exposed moor. The gale blew stormier there, the moorland being more open and less sheltered, and the flurries of rain more frequent and stinging. Margaret had rushed out bareheaded, grabbing only a deep blue riding cloak to cover her wedding dress, and both cloak and her long silver hair streamed out behind her in the wind. Both she and her mount bent their heads into the rising storm as it whipped across the windlestrae, tossing its thick tussocks like waves on tempestuous sea.

  Gilbert continued to trail her at a distance, his long dress-tunic, bearing the arms of his clan, flapping and snapping in the wind. As Margaret came to the lochan and dismounted by the knoll on which they had sat, he too dismounted a few hundred yards distant and led his horse into a deep fold in the land, an old peat bank that had long since been abandoned and the moor had reclaimed. He scrambled up the bank and lay on his stomach to watch her without being seen.

  Margaret gazed off into the distance, staggering occasionally against the buffeting of the wind, her long hair and cloak streaming out around her. Behind her, the surface of the lochan was crazed with ripples and pocked with the impact of large drops of rain. She raised her face to the sky and closed her eyes.

  “I’m a fucking whore,” she screamed. “Moult used me to pleasure himself, and I spilt his seed for him. His stain is on my flesh.”

  The wild wind whipped the words from her mouth and cast them to the skies, where they were torn to shreds and dispersed across the firmament, both their sounds and their meaning.

  Margaret felt her hurt begin to heal.

  Gilbert had heard the thin wail of her voice as she cried to the heavens, but not the words. He remembered what he had said to her that day he had shown her this place, his special place, where he had always come for peace and healing.

  “There are things too of which I would not speak, terrible things I witnessed and did in the war. But not to speak of them leaves them to fester in the memory and poison your life. Speaking them, I have found, is like a kind of blood-letting, a kind of release. I have found this in my conversations with my father. Perhaps you should confide your feelings too.”

  Margaret had confided her feelings to the moorland, knowing that it would keep her secret in the bosom of its vastness. It was a kind of confession that let from her veins the poison of all that had befallen her over the past eight years and released her from the festering of those events in her memory. She would always remember them, she was sure, but she had spoken them and received some kind of absolution for the sinfulness she felt.

  She climbed back up onto her horse and heeled it to a walk back down the moorland towards the shelter of the burn. Gilbert remounted his horse and walked it out to meet her on her way. Wordlessly, they stopped their horses side by side and tightly embraced.

  “It is over,” Margaret said. “I am ready.”

  Gilbert lifted her from her mount and sat her across his horse’s neck, wrapping his arms around her to hold her safe. As the gloaming fell, they made their way slowly back to Lochorwart, Margaret’s head lolling easily against Gilbert’s shoulder, her eyes gazing fondly up into his handsome face.

  It was dark by the time they reached the castle’s gates. Gilbert roused a stable lad and gave the horses into his charge, then they climbed the turret staircase back to the bridal chamber.

  They were both damp from the rain-squalls that had ambushed them off and on during Margaret’s flight onto the moor and their return.

  “Your wedding dress is ruined.” Gilbert nodded at her bedraggled and mud-besmirched white satin gown.

  Margaret smiled.

  “I was not intending on ever wearing it again.”

  “We should get out of these wet things,” Gilbert advised.

  “Be gentle with me.”

  Gilbert swept her into his arms.

  “Of course I will, my love.” He looked deep into her eyes. “Are you sure you are ready?”

  “Yes.” She smiled and nodded. “I am ready. But, mind,” she added, “I am still a
virgin.”

  He gazed at her uncomprehendingly.

  “Still a virgin…” he mumbled. “But I thought…”

  She laid a finger on his lips.

  “That was one part of my virtue that I did not lose.”

  He peeled the damp gown over her head and began to untie the ribbons at the neck of her chemise. Margaret unfastened the front of his shirt and pushed the wet fabric from his shoulders, revealing his broad hairless chest. He tugged the loosened chemise over her head and stepped back to admire her, as she stood in only her white linen braies with her hose suspended from the cloth straps stitched to their hems.

  He drew in a sharp breath. Her wet hair lay in a long tangle over her shoulders. He pushed it back to reveal her pert apple-like breasts with their rosehip nipples. He reached out and cupped the side of a breast in his fingertips and brushed the nipple with his thumb. Margaret shuddered and gave a small plaintive cry. She sat on the edge of the bed and drew him to her.

  He knelt between her long slender thighs and ran his palms along their smooth firm muscles. She reached up and did the same to his broad flat pectorals. He hooked his fingertips over the waistband of her braies and drew them down. She raised her hips to free them from the round globes of her bottom. He slid them down the length of her legs and let them drop onto the floor.

  Suddenly he noticed the fading stripes on the backs of her thighs. He ran his fingertips lightly along them and gave her a quizzical look.

  “He beat me with a switch,” she told him in a sleepy murmur. “But that doesn’t matter now.”

  The blonde hair over her sex was so pale that it was almost invisible. Running his hands up the insides of her thighs, he parted her outer labia with his thumbs to reveal the pink nub of her clitoris. He lowered his head reverently and kissed it.

  Margaret squirmed. Her head arched back to lay bare her long smooth throat, her mouth fell open in a silent scream, her eyes rolled them closed. He pushed his face more firmly into her groin and lapped at her with his tongue. She gave a low squeal, and her hand found its way onto the crown of his head. Her long slender legs folded over his shoulders and she pressed her sex into his face, angling herself to glean the most pleasing sensation from the working of his tongue and lips. A wave rose in her stomach, grew slowly through her breasts and throat, and crashed deep inside her head. She gasped and cried out, as her legs tightened around his shoulders, then slowly relaxed.

  She pushed herself back onto the bed, and Gilbert pushed off his braies and hose and joined her. He propped himself up on his elbow, and with his free hand, began to gently probe her sex with a finger. She was wet and warm. His finger stretched her maidenhead as he carefully worked it inside her. The large head of his cock waited patiently, rigid and erect between his legs.

  After a few minutes, he withdrew his finger and replaced it with two, stretching her maidenhead still further. He leaned down and fastened his lips around the hard nipple, nibbling her and flicking it with his tongue. Margaret pressed a palm into her forehead, just above the bridge of her nose, as if to counter the pressure of the pleasure that was building up inside her brain.

  Finally, Gilbert withdrew his fingers and rolled above her. He took his hand, wet with her juices, and lubricated the length of his cock. Then he carefully positioned its head to her vent, and slowly but firmly, slid it into her. She gasped, but there was no sharp tearing pain. Her muscles clamped around him, and she wrapped her forearms over the sides of his face and linked her fingers at the nape of his neck. He began to move gently, tenderly in and out, stretching her maidenhead almost, but not quite, to breaking point.

  Margaret began to move her hips against his, drawing the lips and walls of her vagina along the length of him, the exquisite agony inside her head contorting her features. She kissed him, her teeth bared in a wide-mouth silent scream, and when she drew back her head, a long thread of saliva hung between them. He began to move more rapidly. Her long slim legs wrapped around his hips and she hooked her ankles together. He slipped an arm under the small of her back and lifted her towards him. She plunged her fingers into his hair and clung on tightly.

  Now he was fucking her with long rhythmic strokes, his breath thick and heavy in his throat. Margaret’s head thrashed from side to side as she climbed inexorably towards her orgasm. He thrust harder and harder, deeper and deeper, his back and shoulders growing slick with sweat. Then she fell over the edge, into a slow swirling whirlpool of ecstasy, a moan sounding deep in her breast, as with a long stuttering gasp he poured himself into her.

  They remained in their tangle of limbs for some minutes more, afraid to move, their nerve-endings attuned to an unbearable pitch of sensitivity, while they panted deeply to catch their breaths.

  Eventually, he fell onto her breast and rolled to the side, his arm still pinned beneath the long sweeping curve of her back, his other forearm thrown across his eyes.

  Margaret’s eyes were closed, and her face was composed in a deep, almost beatific smile of satisfaction and completion.

  Her tribulations were over. She had survived and triumphed. Despite all the evils that had assailed her and tried her faith, she was still a virtuous lady.

  Extended Epilogue

  Eager to learn what happened in Margaret’s and Gilbert’s household?

  Then you may enjoy this extended epilogue. Simply tap here and you can read it for FREE, or use this link:

  https://www.fionafaris.com/l5ro.

  Afterword

  Thank you for reading The Highlander's Virtuous Lady. I really hope you enjoyed it! If you did, could you please be so kind to write a review HERE?

  It is very important for me to read you your words and thoughts about my book, in order to get better at writing.

  Please use the link below:

  https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review?asin=B07GMPCTY9

  About the Author

  I am Fiona and I am an author of authentic historical Scottish romance stories.

  I live in Dallas, Texas with my husband and our two sons. Before I started writing historical romance, I experimented with various occupations: computer programming, dog-training, scientificating… But my favorite job is the one I am now doing full time — writing romance.

  If you want to know when my next book will come out, please subscribe at my newsletter and you will always be the first to know about my newest Scottish novel.

  Thank you

  Glossary

  bields – a shelter; house

  braies – trousers

  cleuch – a steep valley or ravine

  corrie – a circular hollow in the side of a hill or mountain

  cratur – creature

  cuirass – a piece of armor consisting of the breastplate and backplate fastened together

  dirk – a dagger with a straight blade

  dirling – vibrating

  feart – afraid

  fere – companion

  feus – a tenure

  geegaws – trinkets

  garderobe – wardrobe

  gyte – deranged; mad

  happed – covered or wrapped

  ingle – fireplace

  jute – the glossy fiber of either of two Asian plants

  kirtle – garment

  kist – a chest used for storing clothes and linen

  lang – long

  outwith – outside; beyond

  parritch – porridge

  plothering – the sound of fat water drops hitting the ground quickly in great numbers

  psalter – biblical psalms (the Book of Psalms)

  reiver – pirate

  syne – ago

  thole/tholing – to suffer/experience (something pleasant)

  tickle-toby – penis

  trencher – a wooden platter for serving food

  tumbrel – a farm tipcart or a vehicle carrying condemned persons

  ugsome – frightful

  villein – a peasant (tenant farmer) who is legally tied to a
lord or manor