One Man's Love

by Karen Ranney

  “What are you doing?” James asked as Ian sat and dangled his legs over the side.

  “He shouldn’t go down there alone,” Ian said, the lure of the unknown proving to be irresistible.

  His foot slipped before he found the first step. He reached out with both hands, feeling his way. The walls of the staircase were narrow and damp, the air heavy with moisture.

  Ian heard James behind him, knew the other boy followed. A moment later Ian heard the sound of the stone being moved across the opening.

  “Why didn’t you bring a lantern?” he asked only a few feet below the surface.

  “And what excuse would I have given for that?” Fergus asked derisively. “My ma wouldn’t have let me out of the house without an explanation, not to mention what the laird would have said, to see us with one.”

  “He would have known we meant to disobey him,” James said from behind Ian.

  It was darker than night, oddly disorienting, the only reference point being either boy’s voice.

  The stench became even more intense as they traveled farther. He hoped it was only lichen clinging to the walls. Something equally slimy coated the steps, making them slippery. Twice he almost lost his footing.

  The staircase finally widened. Gratefully, Ian stepped out of the darkness and into a domed cave, only to stop and stare at the space around him.

  The morning sun illuminated the paintings on the tan-colored walls and ceiling. What the artist lacked in talent he made up for in perseverance. Each successive rendering of a woman’s portrait was more skilled than before, until Ian stood transfixed at the beauty of the final painting. Here the woman was attired in a pale yellow dress adorned with trailing sleeves and a coronet of daisies in her hair. Her winsome smile and soft green eyes had been so perfectly executed that it seemed as if he could hear her breathe.

  “Who do you think it is?” Fergus whispered beside him.

  Ian only shook his head.

  “It’s Ionis’s lady,” James said, emerging from the staircase.

  Ian looked at him questioningly.

  “Ionis? The saint?” He glanced above him again. He’d heard the stories about Ionis from his grandfather and had thought them only MacRae lore. Now it seemed as if they were real after all.

  Slowly, Ian followed the two boys out of the cave, his boots crunching on the pebbles. Ahead of him was a cove he’d never before seen. The deep blue water was surrounded on three sides by cliffs. Where Loch Euliss should be was a series of massive stones emerging from the bottom of the loch like the blackened teeth of some great monster.

  Tipping his head back, Ian stared upward, expecting to see the priory above. Instead, there was only the steep wall of an overhanging cliff. He walked along the shoreline, his attention riveted on the last of the rocks in the chain. He circled the shoreline until his perspective was better. There was an opening between the chain of rocks large enough for a ship to pass.

  The cove, Ian realized suddenly, was the true secret, not the staircase. It was Gilmuir’s one vulnerability.

  “We should leave,” he said, his hand throbbing as if to remind him of his honor. Ian pushed past Fergus and entered the cave again. All he wanted to do now was leave this place, seal up the staircase, and pretend that he had never learned the secret.

  “Where are you going?” Fergus asked.

  He spun around, frowned at his friend. “The laird will not be happy,” Ian cautioned. “And being his grandson won’t matter if he learns I was here.” In fact, his birthright might well make the punishment more severe.

  He retraced his steps, ascending the staircase in half the time of the original journey.

  It was with a sense of doom that he emerged from beneath the stone, saw the boots, then let his gaze travel upward. There was a woman in the clan who had the Sight, and claimed to feel the burden of the future. At that moment, Ian MacRae, born Alec John Landers, felt the same.

  Most of the time there was a twinkle in his grandfather’s blue eyes, but now they appeared icy.

  “Come with me, Ian,” the laird said, his voice echoing in the priory. “It’s a man you’ll be this day, and I’m sorry for it.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, forcing himself to look up into his grandfather’s face and accept his punishment with bravery.

  Ian hoped that his courage would not fail him. But his grandfather did not stop in the clan hall, nor retreat to the laird’s chamber. Instead, he led the way through the archway and into Gilmuir’s courtyard.

  His grandmother stood in the courtyard, her apron over her face, weeping uncontrollably. “Moira, Moira,” she moaned, rocking back and forth on her heels.

  Ian felt a sense of dread so strong that it almost made him ill.

  His mother’s horse stood there, tied to the end of a wagon. His sides were lathered, his eyes rolling as he pulled away from the groom who attempted to calm him. Surrounding the wagon were several men, none of whom Ian recognized.

  But it wasn’t the strangers that caught his attention, nor his grandmother’s weeping. He stepped forward, forced to by a feeling he could not name. A sense that after this moment there would never be the childish innocence and delight he’d felt at Gilmuir.

  He walked closer to the wagon thinking that he truly wasn’t here but in the midst of a strange waking dream. He was exploring in the cove below with Fergus and James.

  The Drummonds had killed his mother, his beautiful laughing mother.

  He wanted to be sick. Or cry. Or throw himself into his grandmother’s waiting arms.

  “The women will prepare her,” someone said, laying a supportive hand on his shoulder. He glanced up to see his grandfather looking down at him, a look of pity in his eyes. Ian shook his head, determined to remain with her.

  They took his mother to her chamber, the weeping women trailing behind. Ian also followed, silent and determined. When they washed her body, he turned away, but he would not leave her, and he did not speak.

  “They raped her to death,” one woman whispered in horror while his grandmother wept, inconsolable. Ian closed his eyes, his fists clenched at his sides to contain all of the rage and grief he felt.

  He sat beside his mother’s bier all night, watching for the moment when her eyelids would open, and she would smile and rise up, laughing in that merry way of hers. Only a jest, my dearest, she would say, and her eyes would sparkle with amusement. He stared so long that his eyes burned, barely blinking in case he missed that first halting breath. But her lids remained shut and her face was still and white in the light of the thick white candles at her head and feet.

  His grandfather sat beside him, their chairs only a foot apart. But there was no talk during the lykewake, only a watchfulness maintained in order to guard the body and soul of the departed.

  At dawn his grandfather stood as several members of the clan entered the room, signaling an end to this ceremony and the beginning of another. His mother would be laid to rest beneath the hills of Gilmuir.

  He would never see her again.

  James and Fergus, attired in their dress kilts, came to stand at his side, but Ian wished, suddenly, that they would leave. He was perilously close to crying and he would not do so in front of the two brothers.

  Leitis emerged from the crowd, her hair tamed by a ribbon, her eyes brimming with tears. Her cheeks were flushed, her mouth red and swollen. He glanced at her and wondered why it felt as if a thousand years had passed since he’d been daring enough to kiss her.

  Leitis came closer to him, stood on tiptoe, and kissed his cheek. Hours ago he would have been overjoyed at her gesture. Now he felt nothing.

  She stepped back, and handed something to him. He cradled it in his palm. She’d wound a length of black wool tightly around a thistle and formed it into a circle.

  “It’s a remembrance,” she said softly. “So that you’ll not forget this day.”

  He glanced over at her, studying her as if he’d never seen her before this moment. How could she think th
at he would ever forget?

  He deliberately dropped her gift, ground it beneath his boot.

  “God wills,” his grandfather said, placing his arm around Ian’s shoulders. He looked up at the laird, his eyes dry and gritty. “We learn that as Scots, my boy. There’s no need to punish someone else for what fate has brought us.”

  He stepped away from all of them, distancing himself from the clan, feeling an instant and overwhelming aversion to anything Scots. He was Alec John Landers, not Ian MacRae, and he stood clinging desperately to that thought in order not to cry.

  “I am not a Scot,” he said stiffly. “I will never be one. I’m English and I hate all of you.”

  Chapter 1

  Scotland

  July 1746

  I ’m giving you a command, Colonel, one almost as vital as your mission. Stamp out this damnable insurrection. Execute every one of those miscreants if you must, but deliver the Highlands to me in peace.

  The Duke of Cumberland’s words echoed in Alec Landers’s mind as he neared Fort William. Behind him rode five handpicked men who’d accompanied him from Inverness. Their conversation mingled with the jangle of harness, the clop of horses’ hooves on the thick grass, and the moan of wind, forming a backdrop for his thoughts.

  On the crest of a hill not far from his new post, he stopped and raised his hand. His men halted, remaining in position. Not one of them questioned his delay or why he dismounted and walked a few feet to the edge of the road. It would never have occurred to them to do so.

  He stood staring down at the scene before him, memory furnishing the quiet moment with details.

  For six years, from the time he was five until his eleventh birthday, their coach had stopped in exactly the same place. His mother would lean out of the window beside him in order to view her childhood home. Gilmuir sat like a welcoming beacon, a wondrous world that might have been created solely to grant her every wish. She would begin to smile in a different way than she did in England, as if she, too, threw off all constraints.

  What would his mother think now, all these years later, to discover that Fate, or a vengeful God, had sent him back to her native country? A foolish question to ask because he’d never know the answer.

  For most of the year this land was covered by a stark, inhospitable grayness, a monochromatic hue that announced it was Scotland. But now heather and thistles and wildflowers bloomed riotously over the hillsides, casting shadows among the green grass and clover. Loch Euliss was deeply blue, surface waves stirred by the sudden fierce wind.

  A storm loomed, as if to greet him. The sunlight, diffused through the curtain of clouds, bathed the castle in an otherworldly light. It was a strange welcome to this place of memory.

  The promontory was a place ideally suited to repel invaders. But the builders of the castle had not been prescient about English cannon or the anger of the Empire as they extracted revenge against the recalcitrant and rebellious Scots. Gilmuir had evidently been bombarded into submission and now nothing more than a roofless shell.

  Will Gilmuir last forever, Grandfather?

  As long as the sea, Ian. As long as the sea.

  But it hadn’t. Instead, it had fallen and now lay broken and shattered, a skeletal companion to the newly constructed Fort William.

  Cumberland himself had chosen Alec among the cadre of officers in Flanders to accompany him back to Scotland to quell the rebellion. For his ability to stay alive in battle and for his greater capacity to remain silent and obedient, Alec had been given command of Fort William.

  He’d wanted to protest, to give the duke some rational refusal of the post, but it would not be wise to tell Cumberland of either his heritage or his reluctance. The first could get him hanged; the second would only result in the duke’s displeasure.

  A mist was blurring the horizon, tinting the mountains blue. The glen was heavily forested on the western side, but on the east was cropped as cleanly as if sheep grazed on the grass. Below him, in a secluded corner of the glen, was the village he knew almost as well as Gilmuir. A clachan, the Scots called it. He had been a visitor to many of those houses, almost a third son in the place Fergus and James called home.

  The stones of the cottages were tinged with green, moss having added its own hue over the years. Each was alike, a long rectangular structure intersected in the middle by a door and flanked by two tall windows. The thatching on the roofs had matted over the years until they appeared like crisp brown crusts on freshly baked bread loaves.

  Yet another place of memory, one he would do well to avoid.

  He mounted again, gave the signal, and began to ride toward Gilmuir, banishing all thoughts of the past. It was easier to concentrate upon his task, and the duty given him.

  The sky was darkening even as the wind increased, the gusts blowing bits of leaves and grasses past the open door of her cottage. Leitis glanced outside. A beam of light suddenly speared a menacing cloud, brushing its outline in gold as if announcing the presence of God in the oncoming storm. Sadness seemed to linger in the air as if the earth prepared to weep.

  Leitis closed her eyes, hearing the murmur of the threads beneath her fingers. The sounds became, in her longing mind, teasing conversation between her brothers. The wind, laden with the scent of rain, was not unlike the subdued laughter between her parents. The gentle kiss near her ear was not the air brushing a tendril of her hair, but a touch from Marcus as he bent close and whispered endearments.

  Above the sound of the oncoming storm she could almost hear the music of the pipes. The tune pierced her heart, reminding her of times of welcome. In her mind, her younger brother Fergus waved to her from a nearby hill. Beside him, her older brother James grinned, glad to be home once more. Marcus, the man she was to marry this spring, walked with them, as did her father. He made a jest and all four men laughed, their heads tipped back, the sound of their merriment lost in the sound of the wailing pipes.

  Spirits. All of them nothing more than spirits, summoned to her on this storm-filled summer day to wet her eyes once more.

  The loom was a comfort. She had learned this skill when she’d been barely tall enough to sit on the carved bench. All of the memories of her life were entwined with the acts of her fingers and the touch of the threads. She’d been weaving when news had come of the prince landing at Loch nan Uamh. She’d finished a plaid just in time to drape over her father’s shoulders as he led his sons off to bring Scotland’s rightful king to the throne. Here, too, she’d been occupied when word had come of Culloden and the loss of life there.

  The cottage had never seemed as large as it had this past year. The interior rock walls had been whitewashed years ago, the earthen floor tamped down by generations of feet until it was smooth as stone. The furniture was simple but built for wear—a large table of oaken boards surrounded by six chairs, a tall bureau that held her mother’s treasure, a fine porcelain ewer, and a basin adorned with a pattern of purple flowers. In the corner, beyond the two partitions built by her father, was her parents’ bed, and farther still her own. Her brothers had slept in the space above, reached by a ladder propped in the corner.

  She was the only occupant of the cottage now. Her father, Fergus, James, Marcus, all gone. Her mother had died almost in relief only weeks after her sons and her husband had been lost.

  The sound of the pipes grew, punctuating the far-off sound of the thunder. The MacRae Lament swelled, the music seeping into her bones and her very soul. She blinked open her eyes, suddenly realizing that the melody was too clear to be a memory. Too dangerous to be anything but foolish.

  Not Hamish again.

  She abruptly stood, pushing the bench beneath the loom. Walking to the open door of her cottage, she stopped for a moment, one hand upon the frame, the other tightened into a fist and resting in the folds of her skirt. The sound was not a dream, nor a fancy, but her uncle daring the English.

  Perhaps the soldiers had not heard, and the people of Gilmuir would be safe from the consequences of Ha
mish’s defiance. Even as she had the thought, she chided herself for the foolishness of it. The music of the pipes carried well over glen and hill.

  Reaching for the shawl hung on a peg by the door, she covered her head and walked quickly from the cottage, cutting in front of Malcolm’s puny garden and up the cleft created between two gentle mounds of earth. A well-worn footpath led to the hills above her, a journey she knew well.

  The wind pressed her dress against her body and blew her hair back. Nature was a lover in that moment, caressing her ankles and wrists and throat, bathing her in a kiss that tasted of moisture and sunlight in one.

  A flash of lightning taunted her, reminding her that it was not the wisest thing to be climbing a hill in a thunderstorm. Still, there was less to fear from nature when mankind was loose on the earth. A lesson she had learned this past year.

  She climbed up the rolling earth, past the gathering of flowers. The primrose with its yellow center and bright pink blossoms bobbed in the gusting breeze as if welcoming her. The thistles were proud things, tall and spiky, their large-headed blooms a bright yellow or purple. The harebell had a delicate stem and pale blue nodding blooms and was her favorite of all the flowers. It was hardy and thrived despite its fragile appearance.

  The glen was bordered on one side by dense forests, thick pines crowning a knoll that provided a commanding view of the countryside. It was there she sought out her uncle, knowing that it was a favorite spot of his. She followed the path upward, ducking beneath low-hanging limbs and pushing her way through the undergrowth.

  The hillock was bared of trees like a bald man’s pate. Once, a giant pine had stood here, sentinel for the forest. But it had been struck by lightning years before and had fallen to the ground so hard that the earth had shuddered.

  To her right was Gilmuir. Veiled in the morning mist, it looked whole again, and if she squinted, she could almost pretend that smoke emerged from its four chimneys and the courtyard was filled with people all going about their business. Lively ghosts crafted by her wishes.