So In Love

by Karen Ranney

  He bent closer, a wave of nausea passing over him. He had not been around many infants in his life, but Douglas knew that what he was looking at was unnatural.

  The infant was little more than a skeleton. The flies that buzzed around her face no doubt weighed more. Tufts of black hair covered her tiny head, and when she blinked up at him her MacRae blue eyes silenced any doubt he might have had about her parentage.

  Mary came to his side and would have reached out and scooped up the child in her arms had he not stopped her.

  “No,” he said, nearly incapable of speech. Emotions flooded through him—joy that his mission had succeeded, horror that his daughter looked as if she would not live the night. Above all, he was filled with rage for Jeanne du Marchand, who had left Vallans with no thought for her child.

  “I’ll carry her,” he said and gently lifted the infant, ignoring everything but the look in her brilliant blue eyes. She fixed her gaze on him as if she knew he was saving her. Her head was too big for her body, and as he stared at her emaciated form in disbelief, one tiny hand reached out and almost touched him. He cradled her in his arms, bent his head and kissed the tiny fist.

  She couldn’t be more than a month old or maybe two and lighter than a breath; such a small and weightless burden that when she closed her eyes he thought she’d died. His heart pounded in a rapid, panicked beat until she moved again. Only then did he lift his gaze to the old couple.

  “Did you never feed her?” His voice sounded calm, almost rational, a remarkable feat considering that he wanted to kill both of them.

  “She’s a picky eater, sir,” the old woman said. She bent her knees in an awkward curtsy. “And the money the woman gave us ran out. We couldn’t hire a wet nurse.”

  Mary used her kerchief as a makeshift blanket, covering the baby in his arms.

  “Can we save her?” he asked, glancing at her.

  His sister-in-law’s look was too compassionate, her brown eyes revealing the truth.

  But then the baby blinked her eyes and looked up at him. There, in his daughter’s face, he saw the shadow of his parents and his brothers. She was a MacRae and he prayed that she had the strong will of all MacRaes.

  “Live,” he whispered to her. “Please, live.”

  She was his child, but he had never expected to feel the overwhelming sense of protectiveness that he did at this moment. Nor had he thought to love her instantly and completely.

  “We’ll save her,” Douglas said to his sister-in-law. “We will.”

  Instead of speaking, instead of giving him countless reasons why such a miracle would not happen, she only nodded, tears swimming in her eyes.

  “What is her name?” he demanded of the couple.

  The old man merely shook his head while his wife shrugged, the outline of her bony shoulders showing beneath her shawl.

  “We’ve never named her,” she said. “But you can, if you wish, sir,” she added, grinning at him, revealing the brown stubs of her teeth.

  He shook his head in disgust. Settling the infant in his arms more firmly, Douglas headed for the door.

  “You can’t be taking her, sir,” the old woman said, clearly alarmed. “What if someone finds out that she’s gone?”

  “I doubt anyone will come looking for her.”

  Anger for everything French nearly overpowered him. He hated the country, the people, even the language.Everything except for the child he cradled in his arms, so slight that she might have been a ghost of herself.

  A moment later he emerged from the dark hovel to the sunlight, Mary following. The old woman followed them to where his brother Hamish stood beside their horses.

  “Pay them,” Douglas said and waited until Mary mounted before handing up his daughter.

  Hamish withdrew a small leather bag from his waistcoat and tossed it to the woman. She opened it quickly and gasped at the amount of gold coins resting inside. There was enough money to keep her and her husband for the rest of their lives.

  “You don’t deserve it,” Douglas said, glancing over his shoulder. “But this amount will buy your silence. Tell anyone, if they bother to ask, that she died. I doubt anyone will want proof.”

  The old woman nodded eagerly.

  “Bless you, sir,” the old man called from his position by the door.

  Douglas didn’t turn at his words. Instead, he mounted and then held out his arms. Mary reached over and gave him his daughter.

  “It’s a miracle she’s alive,” Mary said, one hand smoothing his coated arm, the other resting lightly on the kerchief covering his daughter.

  Weeks had passed before they’d known if she would survive.

  Douglas had never considered that he might hate as deeply as he loved. Not until the moment he’d taken his daughter into his arms and looked down at that tiny, wizened face. He’d known then that he would forever hate Jeanne du Marchand for what she’d done.

  Where had that hatred gone?

  As if he’d summoned Margaret with his memories, he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. The blur became a green dress and flowing black curls as she raced across the glen, followed by two bigger boys.

  He felt the door to his heart creaking open once again.

  Watching impatiently as the sailors lowered the anchor, he waited until they approached the dock like a lumbering and cautious tortoise. Before the ropes were lowered and tied off, Douglas swung himself over the side and climbed the rope ladder down to the pier.

  Margaret had disappeared, but he knew where she would be, the same place she always was when he came to take her back to Edinburgh.

  He didn’t have the affinity for Gilmuir that Margaret had. She reminded him of his mother, and the tales she’d often told of the old fortress when he was a boy. Or perhaps she was more like Moira MacRae, his grandmother, who’d been a skilled horsewoman, married an English Earl but still returned every summer to her home in Scotland.

  Sometimes, when Margaret spoke of the fortress, her eyes lit up and her face glowed. To his daughter, there was no place in the world as grand as Gilmuir.

  Alisdair had spent years restoring the ancestral home of the MacRaes. Douglas often suspected that Gilmuir was more magnificent now than it had ever been.

  Every summer, the brothers, their wives, and their children united at Gilmuir. All of the MacRaes made a point of coming together for a month in order to strengthen familial ties. None of them wanted to forget the legacy that had brought them home to Scotland.

  James returned from his village of Ayleshire. Brendan and his brood traveled in two coaches from Inverness. Even Hamish and Mary scheduled their voyages in order to return to Scotland in time. Because Mary would never set foot on Scottish soil, they made a point of meeting aboard Hamish’s ship to greet her, a reunion Douglas never missed. He would always be grateful to Mary, certain that Margaret was alive today because of his sister-in-law’s knowledge and skill with healing.

  Although he saw his brothers often during the year and their wives occasionally, returning to Gilmuir was special. Douglas always felt a surge of memory—recollections of his parents, his great-uncle, and all the tales he’d been taught as a boy growing up in Nova Scotia. His MacRae heritage was here in the soil, the very air of Gilmuir.

  He left the dock and took the cobbled path. To the right it wound up to the top of the hill and to Gilmuir. Straight ahead lay the trail to the land bridge and the glen. Below him was the necklace of rocks, a chain of massive blackened stones emerging from the bottom of the loch. Beyond the rocks was a cove once kept secret but now used to test new hull designs for the MacRae shipyards. The sunlight glinted off the deep blue water, the reflection striking the cliff walls.

  Chips of silver embedded in the stone reminded him of Jeanne’s eyes.

  Once, he’d wanted to punish her, as if by inflicting pain he could right the wrongs she’d caused. As the years had passed, gratitude for Margaret’s survival and love for his daughter had softened his rage, only to have it retur
n at the sight of her.

  Before he left Edinburgh he and Jeanne had not yet admitted their past to one another, as if each knew what must follow if they did so. Jeanne would have to confess what she’d done, and he would have to destroy her.

  He should have held her at arm’s length. Instead, he’d bedded her not once but twice. She’d proven to be such an irresistible lure that he’d found himself fleeing from her, arriving at Gilmuir before he was expected.

  She was there in his mind, however, so strong that she might have stood beside him, her hand on his arm. In fact, when Alisdair suddenly stepped into the path to greet him, Douglas was surprised that his older brother didn’t remark upon her presence.

  “You look tired,” Alisdair said, clapping him on the back. “You’ve been working too hard, Douglas. Don’t we have enough money?”

  He smiled in response to Alisdair’s familiar quip.

  “Mary will have you drinking all sorts of possets and potions to keep up your strength.”

  “They’re here?” he asked, surprised.

  Alisdair nodded. “They’re as early as you.”

  The years had been kind to Alisdair. His hair had a little more silver at the temples, his face bore a few more lines, but other than that he didn’t look appreciably older. Iseabal, his wife, had the same good fortune. Her hair hadn’t changed color, and only a few lines appeared at the corners of her eyes, a testament to her habit of smiling often.

  Alisdair reminded Douglas of their father, capable of achieving a commanding presence without speaking a word. Perhaps it was because he was the oldest brother of five. Or maybe because he’d inherited their father’s title, and was an English Earl in addition to being master of Gilmuir.

  He assumed responsibility easily and was a born leader. His only mistake was in occasionally attempting to lead his brothers, all of whom were possessed of the same strong personality.

  “Margaret is about,” Alisdair said, scanning the glen for signs of his niece.

  “I know where she is,” Douglas said, looking ahead. Across the land bridge that connected the promontory of Gilmuir to the glen was a hill they called Iseabal’s Knoll. Over the years a path had been carved in the glen and through the forest and he took it now, bidding Alisdair farewell for a time.

  A small green scarf had been wrapped around a sapling, a clue that he was correct in assuming Margaret was there. His mother had often spoken of this hill, telling stories of how his great-uncle had dared the English by playing his pipes here.

  The hill had been the first place he’d brought Margaret on their very first trip to Gilmuir. She’d been two years old, still too thin but healthy. He’d held her up so that she could see everything in front of her. “It’s Gilmuir, Meggie. It belongs to you, and to every MacRae.”

  Although Alisdair had rebuilt the fortress, using a substantial portion of the legacy from his English inheritance to do so, he had insisted on altering the ownership of Gilmuir after the memorial service for their parents. The brothers had signed the papers in front of a solicitor, taking ownership of a share of the ancestral estate. Despite the fact that each of them had created homes in other parts of Scotland, they were now linked to Gilmuir legally.

  The forest was shadowed even though it was noon and the sun directly overhead. The cool air was redolent with the heavy, sharp scent of decaying leaves and musty earth. Moss growing on one side of a few sapling trunks attested to the fact that it had been a damp spring.

  He continued upward, the stillness of the forest a balm to his spirit. He found himself relaxing, the concerns he brought with him from Edinburgh being lost in the greater expanse of nature around him.

  He took a deep breath and felt some of the tension leave him. Being at Gilmuir relaxed him, or perhaps it was only that he was going to see Margaret soon. This year she’d begged to be able to spend some extra time with Mary and Hamish and he’d allowed her a three-week visit before the Gathering began. His life, carefully proscribed, had continued without her, but there was something missing in Edinburgh, some sense of happiness, of rightness.

  It was not strictly for Margaret that he worked so hard as much as it was his sense of himself. He had obligations, true, but his driving ambition urged him to continue thinking, advancing, and conquering one obstacle after another. Even when he had sailed with Hamish, acting as captain aboard his brother’s ship, he’d pushed himself to learn all that he could. Now Douglas owned a fleet of MacRae-built vessels.

  There were times, like now, with the journey to Gilmuir fresh in his mind, and the glint of the sea visible through the towering pines, that he still yearned to be at sea. When Margaret was three, however, he’d traded living aboard ship with a rolling deck, imminent threats of fierce storms, or becalmed seas for a more conventional existence in Edinburgh.

  He had created a happy life for himself and his daughter, at least until he’d seen Jeanne du Marchand again.

  Douglas stopped, looked around him as if to ascertain that only the squirrels and foxes and other feral creatures were witness to his confusion. There she was again, in the midst of his mind. Just when he thought himself free of her, she had popped in, diverting his thoughts, leading him from relaxation to irritation.

  Go away, Jeanne.

  He could almost see her in the filtered sunlight. She was standing there, an ethereal figure, a ghost of his imagination. She held out one hand as if to entreat him to follow her. Where? To perdition, no doubt.

  He closed his eyes and shook his head, the better to banish her. Margaret was waiting.

  Swiftly, he began walking again, cutting across the path to a less-well-known trail that led past a shadowed cave to his left. The cave, too, featured prominently in his parents’ tales.

  He found it difficult to remember that an English fort had stood beside Gilmuir on the promontory. But it had been picked clean, dismantled brick by brick after the English had left MacRae land. Traces of it weren’t even visible anymore, since Alisdair had constructed part of the new Gilmuir over the ruins.

  That’s what he should do with his life—build something on the ruins of it. Perhaps he should marry. Find a woman who suited both him and Margaret and create a new existence, one not dependent upon memory.

  Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a flicker of material. Or a ghost again?

  Go away, Jeanne. Take your sad eyes and hint of mystery and leave me alone.

  Pushing through the thick growth of trees, he emerged at the top of the hill. Here, he’d been told, a large pine had once stood. Over the years, the earth had been flattened by wind and rain and was now covered in a thick layer of pine needles.

  She wasn’t there, but he knew she was nearby. He heard a giggle and smiled. Margaret never walked when she could run, and never simply smiled when she could laugh. She was so filled with life that Douglas felt energized in her presence.

  “Papa!” Suddenly she was hurtling herself toward him. He opened his arms and grabbed her and was enveloped at the same time in a smothering embrace, her arms wrapped around his neck, her warm cheek pressed against his. She squeezed tightly as if to never let him go.

  A moment later she pulled back and glared at him accusingly. “You took so very long to get here.”

  “I took the right amount of time, Meggie,” he said. “In fact, I’m early.”

  She frowned at him, her entire face revealing her displeasure. Her mother’s beauty was in the shape of her nose and the curve of her chin. She had Jeanne’s hands, long-fingered and elegant even though her nails were filled with dirt at the moment.

  Margaret was, despite the resemblance to either of her parents, quintessentially herself.

  “Yes, but it just seemed so very long. You cannot measure how long something seems, Papa.”

  He set her down on the ground and she immediately placed her hand in his. She was taller than most girls her age, a fact that occasionally caused her some discomfort.

  “It’s because I was a picky eater as a ba
by,” he’d heard her say once to a group of teasing cousins. “They fed me and fed me and fed me. I couldn’t help but grow tall, could I?”

  “It seemed long for me, too,” he said now. “Have you enjoyed your summer?”

  She looked at him, eyes shining. “Oh, yes, Papa, it’s been the most wondrous time.”

  Suddenly she reminded him of the girl he’d known in Paris. Jeanne had such vivacity, so much enthusiasm for life. Where had that personality gone? What had life done to Jeanne that had subdued her so very much?

  He remembered the scars on her back, and her words about the convent.

  I did something that earned my father’s displeasure.

  Had the Comte discovered her actions? Had he, too, been sickened by what Jeanne had done?

  He wanted to hate her for being complex when she should have been uncomplicatedly evil. He wanted to hate her for piercing the armor of his self-restraint, and his façade of indifference. He wanted to hate her for weeping, for being scarred, for her aura of sorrow, for his unexpected and unwanted curiosity about those missing ten years. Above all, he wanted to hate her for the fact that she made him care.

  “It feels like we’re on the edge of the world,” Margaret said, staring out at the vista before them.

  Her hand tightened within his and he felt a surge of protectiveness for her. When he was little more than a child himself, he had held her within his arms, feeling revulsion for what her mother had done. Now that revulsion was directed at himself. He had made love tenderly and with great passion to a woman who had cared so little for her own child that she had sent her to her death.

  Now that child looked up at him worshipfully, confident that he could order her world and make everything right for her.

  He would die trying.

  “It does feel as if we’re on the edge of the world, doesn’t it?” he said. “Or at least the only world that matters.”

  “I wish we might be able to live here forever,” Margaret said, her voice holding a note of wistfulness.

  “Unfortunately, we cannot.”