The Scottish Witch

by Cathy Maxwell

  Ajax was a mighty steed. A warrior’s horse. He carried them at a fast clip through the woods toward Camber Hall.

  Colonel Chattan had one arm around her waist. His other hand held the reins. As they rode, the masculinity of him seemed to circle around her, teasing her. He now smelled of sandalwood and the musk of their lovemaking.

  They were close to Camber Hall when she felt his breath on her hair. He kissed her, once, twice, a third time, and then brought his lips down to gently kiss her temple. His hand came up to cup her breast. He kissed her neck.

  Portia knew she should stop him. She could feel his hardness against her. She had a need as well.

  He reined Ajax to a stop. He did not release his hold.

  Pressing his head against hers, he said, “I want to see you again.”

  Portia started to shake her head. “I can’t, Colonel—”

  He hushed her. “Harry,” he said, amusement in his voice. “My name is Harry, and after what we’ve been to each other, I believe we may be less formal.”

  “I can’t meet you, Colonel,” she answered.

  His hold tightened. “I’m not letting you free until I hear you say my name.”

  She glanced at him to see if he was serious.

  He was smiling but he didn’t loosen his hold. “Har-reee,” he said, drawing out the syllables. “Try it.”

  “I’m not that amenable, Colonel,” she responded, proud of herself for standing up to him.

  Her bravado earned a laugh from him. “I’ve known that.” He turned serious. “Meet me again tomorrow.”

  The suggestion alone was enough to send the blood racing through her veins. “I shouldn’t,” she said, common sense warring with this newly discovered desire for sexual pleasure. It was wrong to want him. Wrong to be so willing.

  “Meet me tomorrow,” he repeated, his voice in her ear. “We need to make love naked, at least once.”

  Portia didn’t dare speak. He was her weakness. He was a temptation, a devil.

  “I’ll be at the bothy around noon,” he said. “I shall wait for you.” He then let her down to the ground. Portia started walking toward the house, and then began running.

  Minnie was in the sitting room darning socks when Portia came in the door. Her sister smiled at her and asked how Crazy Lizzy had been.

  Portia stared at her, uncomprehending for a second, and then remembered her excuse for leaving the house. “She is the same as always.” Portia put the basket down on a side table and began removing her cloak.

  “You are such a good person,” Minnie said. “Oliver has commented at how happy he is that our family is a far cry from the sort of man Father was. He confided in me today that there had been gossip in the valley when we’d first arrived. I don’t know how they expected us to be. We wouldn’t have carried on the way Father did. We may be Black Jack Maclean’s children but we have the moral standards our father lacked.”

  Portia smiled, not trusting her voice to speak.

  Minnie put down her piecework. “I’m so happy, Portia. So very happy. I hope someday you meet someone who makes you as happy. And I don’t believe you are too old. I’ve never thought that.”

  “Thank you, dear.” Portia started for the stairs. “I’m going to my room.”

  “Oh, Portia, there is something I should tell you. Mother and General Montheath had their heads together all afternoon. He came calling and she received him without one grumble. He’s given her carte blanche to plan his soiree and she is reveling in it.”

  “Mother and General Montheath?”

  “I know it is amazing, but you know how she likes to spend money. The soiree has turned into a grand Christmas Day dinner. Mr. Tolliver is going to ask his parents to join us. Mother wants to invite the Duke of Montcrieffe and his daughter, Lady Emma. I’m not very excited for that, but Mother feels we must extend the invitation.”

  “How interesting,” Portia murmured. The last thing she wanted to do was spend her Christmas Day with Lady Emma. But she didn’t offer a protest. Instead, she escaped to her room, where she lay on her bed fully clothed as the room grew darker with the day’s end.

  What was she doing? She’d behaved today in a way contrary to her good breeding. She’d behaved as her father would have. She must not go to the bothy tomorrow. She had to resist temptation.

  Then again, she was Black Jack Maclean’s daughter. He’d certainly enjoyed sensual pleasures—and she did wonder what it would be like to lie naked with Harry.

  Harry. Colonel Chattan was a distant figure, a cold one. Harry was a man who whispered in her ear. A man whose touch ignited her senses.

  The next day, Portia met Harry in the bothy.

  He’d been right. Making love naked was truly remarkable.

  And so she met him the following day as well.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I need your help,” Harry said to Portia.

  They had just enjoyed a very strenuous and very happy bout of lovemaking. She was exhausted and lay with her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat.

  Portia’s excuse to leave the house for her trysts with Harry continued to be her need to help Crazy Lizzy, and she did not lie about the old woman. She did deliver the food.

  But only after spending an hour, sometimes more, in Harry’s arms. And he had been true to his word. They now took precautions to prevent a child.

  Of course, her sister and mother didn’t appear to care where Portia was. Minnie was caught up in planning her marriage to Mr. Tolliver. They would wed on January 2 of the new year. The banns had been posted twice now.

  Surprisingly, Lady Maclean no longer spent her days in bed. She was up and ready for General Montheath’s call. Any of her earlier complaints about him vanished as she almost gleefully spent his money. She still wouldn’t let any of his many dogs into the house, but Portia had caught sight of her mother’s hand reaching down to scratch Jasper’s ear a time or two.

  Therefore, Portia was able to do exactly as she pleased, with only a semblance of propriety. No one questioned her, not even Glennis was suspicious. So far their liaison was a secret, and Black Jack Maclean’s older daughter liked it that way because she was proving to be his child.

  They’d turned the bothy into their own paradise. Harry brought a stack of fur-lined blankets to keep them warm and they didn’t need much else. The weather might be cold or windy or wet, but there in his arms, the world was perfect.

  Her lover was a masterful teacher and Portia was an eager student. Nor did she weigh the rights and wrongs of what she was doing. She knew it would end someday, but for now, this was what she wanted.

  Indeed, there was only one small matter that concerned Portia—she hadn’t seen Owl since that day she’d first met Harry at the bothy. The cat seemed to have disappeared. Everyone told her cats did that from time to time, but that didn’t stop Portia from worrying and calling for Owl to come home.

  “What do you need help with?” she asked Harry, propping her head up on her hand resting on his chest.

  “The book.” He sat up, forcing her to move. She pulled the blanket up around her breasts. Heedless of his own nakedness, he rose from their makeshift bed and went over to where his saddlebags lay.

  She liked his body. He was hard muscle. She imagined that the Spartan warriors of old must have looked like him. Not even the scar on his leg deterred from his masculine beauty.

  “How did you receive that wound?” she asked.

  A frown marred his brow as he pulled the book from his bags. “A French sword. It came at me and I forgot to move.”

  “The cut must have been deep.” The scar was angry and occasionally she had noticed him favoring the leg. She remembered at the dance, when they’d been on the floor together, he hadn’t hopped and skipped the way the other men had. She’d assumed his reserve was because of pride. Some men didn’t l
ike to dance. But now she understood.

  “It was.” His voice was curt. He returned to her just as she shivered in the cool air. He pulled the blankets over them.

  “What battle were you in?” she asked, snuggling against him and running her hand along the scar.

  “Vitoria. I don’t like talking about it.” He opened the book.

  “Why not?”

  Harry gave her his full attention, his expression somber. “Because I proved myself to be a vainglorious fool and cost many good men their lives.”

  “It was war, Harry. War always costs lives.”

  His lips twisted into a sardonic smile. “How callously they speak who don’t witness the cost.”

  “I’m not trying to be callous,” Portia said, a bit hurt by the label. She sat up.

  For a second, he appeared ready to say something but shook his head and opened the book.

  Portia wasn’t ready to let it go. “You should say what you think instead of swallowing your words.”

  “No one cares what I think,” he answered, turning a page.

  “I do.”

  The word seemed to hover in the air. Harry looked to her. “You shouldn’t, Portia.”

  Her throat tightened. “But I do.”

  “I’m not worth it.” He slipped a hand around her neck and kissed her forehead as if ending the subject.

  There was great sadness in him, a sadness that she had seen that moonlit night when he had been on his knees. She placed her hand on his chest, right over his heart. His heart. She loved the steady rhythm of it. When they made love, and his weight was on her, she relished its pounding beat as much as she did his heat and strength.

  “Yes, you are,” she said.

  Again, he pressed a kiss against her brow. He did not believe her.

  He held up the book. “I’ve read this from cover to cover three times,” he said. “I can’t find any clue as to what can be done to break the curse. I find nothing ‘witchy.’ ”

  “What are you looking for?” she asked. He’d changed the topic. He did not want to discuss the matter further and she knew he remained unconvinced of her belief in him. She reached for her spectacles on the stool and placed them on her nose.

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he admitted, stabbing his fingers through his hair in frustration. “I suppose something such as ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog.’ ”

  Portia smiled, recognizing the reference to Macbeth. “Another Scot with a witch problem,” she murmured. She took the book from him and turned a few of the pages. “Why don’t we read this aloud to each other? Sometimes, I miss details when reading silently. Hearing the words spoken makes them clearer to me.”

  “Capital idea. You start, my lady.” He stretched out on their bed of furs.

  She glanced at him, at his spent maleness, knowing that before she went home, he would please her again. He saw where she was looking and laughed. “Read,” he ordered, slipping his hand beneath the covers and placing it possessively on her thigh, and so she obeyed.

  It wasn’t easy reading. Some of the recipes were in the old Gaelic and the ink of many of them had faded. He listened as she stumbled along, watching her intently.

  Portia didn’t read every recipe. She’d scan them for something of interest. There were hundreds of them. She’d barely had time to investigate the book at all before she’d given it to him.

  “Here is something,” she said. It was the last entry in a section. “Reunioning a soul with an animal,” she read. She looked to Harry. “What does that mean?”

  “In the East there is the thought of reincarnation where the soul returns to live again. The Hindus believe all life, including animal life, reincarnates. Read on.”

  “Choose the animal you wish to live on in. Very old power. From Gypsy.” Several of the recipes had given their source. “Make an elixir of mugwort oil and powdered spruce needles. Mix with frankincense resin. Chew while repeating, ‘Life come hither, Life is mine’ until passing.”

  Portia looked up in shock. “What does it mean by ‘until passing.’ ”

  Harry frowned. “Death, I suppose.”

  “How strange,” Portia said, and made a face as she shivered in distaste. “I don’t like this spell.”

  “It can’t work,” Harry assured her. “How many of us choose the hour of our death. How would one know when to start chewing the resin—” He broke off as if struck by a new thought. “Wait a moment, a suicide would know the hour of her death.”

  Portia looked down at the recipe and shook her head. “There is no way of knowing if this spell was used or not. I don’t like thinking about it.” She started to shut the book but Harry placed his hand on the page.

  “How did you find this book? Has it been in your family?” he asked.

  “No, I found it in the attic at Camber Hall.”

  “Was it in a trunk?”

  “Actually,” she said, a strange sense of foreboding rising within her, “Owl gave it to me.”

  “The cat?”

  Portia nodded and told him of going up the attic to put a bucket under where the roof leaked.

  “So the book was on top of something it could be knocked or pushed off of?” Harry asked.

  “I assume that was the case,” Portia answered. “I don’t really know. There are stacks of wooden boxes and crates and trunks up there. I was weaving my way around them when the book dropped down in front of me. I didn’t know why until I saw Owl peek around a corner. She could have jumped from the top of something and knocked the book off.”

  Harry sat up. “Where is the cat now?”

  “I don’t know,” Portia admitted. “The last time I saw her was the first time we met here. She was waiting for me. I haven’t seen her since.”

  He pushed the covers away and stood, pressing his brow with the fingers of one hand as if trying to answer a riddle. He looked to her. “I said to you once, I thought the cat was Fenella.”

  “And I thought the idea ridiculous. I still do.”

  “Fenella took her own life as well,” he said, ignoring her criticism. “She knew when she was going to die.”

  “Oh, not again. Why do you keep suggesting that Owl, a poor little cat with deformed ears, is a two-hundred-year-old witch? That’s impossible.”

  He knelt beside her. “Not if she is reincarnating herself.”

  “Over and over again?” Portia let her doubts show. “Cats can’t repeat chants.”

  “Portia, your cat came to me at General Montheath’s house. I was going to leave Glenfinnan. I’d exhausted every resource in the surrounding area without success. I decided I must go to Edinburgh. There is a man there who specializes in country tales and traditions. Someone suggested he might know of Fenella’s legend. I doubted it but I was on a cold trail. I didn’t know what else to do. And then your cat woke me. I was asleep, in a deep dream, and I didn’t know what it was waking me, and I threw her off the bed. She ran under the wardrobe to hide and I started thinking about how strange it was that a cat had managed to steal inside Monty’s house. The place is a dog haven. They bark at everything. Monty has no control over any of them. And yet, not one of those hounds made a sound to alert us there was a cat on the premises. So I looked under the wardrobe and the cat wasn’t there. I couldn’t find her anywhere in the room.”

  “Perhaps you dreamed her,” Portia suggested gently.

  “You can’t feel dreams. I heard the cat purr, felt the roughness of its tongue. Your cat was in the room and that is when I decided I needed to stay here.”

  Portia looked down at the words of the spell written in the book. Owl was an independent creature and she did have a habit of appearing without fanfare. “There must be a hidey-hole or some other opening for a cat to use to find her way into Montheath’s house. Cats are very clever that way.”

  Harry shook
his head. “I know to my bones, Portia, your cat is a part of this. I told you that once, and I feel it more certainly than before.” He took the book from her. “But if your cat is Fenella, then why give us the book? Her hatred was so strong, she would never offer any clues to lifting the curse.”

  She didn’t speak. What he was saying defied common sense.

  “We need to find your cat,” Harry said.

  “Owl comes home when she feels like,” Portia answered, a bit uncomfortable with the idea of him hunting her pet.

  “I must find the cat.” He came to his feet and started dressing.

  Portia watched him a moment, disappointed that her afternoon with him would end so abruptly. “Where will you go?” she asked.

  He looked at her, surprised. “With you, of course. The cat comes to you—”

  His voice broke off as he realized the import of what he’d said. “The cat comes to you,” he repeated softly. “You and I were meant to meet. That’s why the cat didn’t want me to leave Glenfinnan.”

  Now he sounded completely mad.

  “That’s nonsense,” she snapped, strangely annoyed. She reached for her clothes and began dressing.

  “Is it?” he asked, sitting on the stool and pulling on his boots. “Can you not imagine, just the smallest bit, that we were destined to meet?”

  Portia pulled her dress over her head and stood a moment, wanting to reject his theory . . . and wanting to accept it.

  Had they been destined to meet? It would seem that she was always in his path. He’d almost run over her that first day and then there was the connection of General Montheath and her mother. They could be coincidences, and she found she wanted to believe that they were.

  “I can’t accept that there are forces at work that we can’t touch or feel,” she confessed.

  “Do we not pray to God?” he challenged.

  “God is good. You are speaking of an evil.”

  “Or not. Rose wasn’t evil. What if Rose was the one who had reincarnated herself? What if your cat is her?”

  “What if you stopped speaking this insanity.” Portia reached back and pulled the laces of her dress, quickly tying them into a bow. She grabbed her stockings and shoes. Her feet were cold now and she was out of sorts because the afternoon spent making love to him that she had looked forward to with sweet anticipation was destroyed. “I need to take that basket to Lizzy,” she said, putting on her shoes.