The Laird Takes a Bride

by Lisa Berne

  “To be sure we do.”

  “Excellent. But one of the entrees for Wednesday—I do not think the laird cares for beef tongue roast, and nor do I overmuch, so perhaps you might reserve that for staff. A roasted sirloin instead for the high table?”

  “Aye, mistress, and we’ll enjoy the tongue, thank you.”

  “Good. And a salad of potatoes and peas, if the peas are fresh?”

  “Indeed they are.”

  “Then I think we’re done.” Fiona smiled. “Now, do you need more salve for your arm?”

  Cook rolled up her sleeve to display the inside of her forearm, where the skin was pink and healthy. “Nay, I thank you, mistress. Only see how well the burn has healed!”

  “It has, and I’m so pleased,” said Fiona warmly. “Thank you, Mrs. Allen, you may go. Cook, if you could have a nuncheon brought to my morning-room in an hour or so, I’ll take it in there, and—”

  She broke off as she realized that Sheila was tugging at her skirt. Goodness, how that child crept up on one! But she smiled down at her and said, “Yes, hinny?”

  “Lady, lady, have you a magic salve for my granny’s hands? They’re paining her greatly.”

  Fiona looked inquiringly at Cook, who nodded and said, “It’s the rheumatism which plagues poor Dame Margery, mistress.”

  “I’ll bring some salve for your granny,” Fiona promised, “and herbs for a tea. It will help, although it’s not magic, hinny.”

  “When, lady, when?”

  “I’ll come tomorrow, if you’ll tell me where you live.”

  “You must go past the village to the heather meadow. We live on the very edge of it, just where the forest begins. I think there are boogeymen within it, but Granny says I’m wrong.”

  “There’s no such thing as boogeymen, child!” interpolated Cook reprovingly, and Fiona only said:

  “Tell your granny I will come in the afternoon.”

  Sheila nodded, and picked up her biscuit which had fallen to the floor. With casual nonchalance she began to eat it, and Fiona smiled again and went off to the stillroom, where she began assembling the herbs she needed. As she worked her mind wandered, thinking for the hundredth time about the other night in which she and Alasdair had quarreled so fiercely.

  She’d been feeling very low, for there was no babe within her womb, no little one to dream of, look forward to. Why couldn’t he have said, What if tonight I held you? Simply held you?

  Why couldn’t she have said, Please will you hold me?

  Because they couldn’t. Obviously.

  But oh, she had wanted to be held, had wanted a little comfort. It might have been nice to be clasped in those strong arms, to feel her body brought close to his, to lay her head on that broad chest and listen, just listen, to his heartbeat. Who knew, maybe—what a wild, wild hope— maybe it would even have lulled her into sleep.

  That wasn’t how it had gone, however. Oh well. The truth was, you couldn’t have everything in life. You didn’t want to be like that foolish farmer in the cautionary tale by Aesop—greedily killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Wasn’t that the key to, well, if not happiness, at least not being miserable? Accepting things the way they were?

  That’s what people said, at any rate.

  And so here it was, another day.

  Time, as the saying goes, was marching on.

  Whether you liked it or not.

  Fiona reached for a fragrant sprig of lavender, and focused again on her work. Despite everything, she was looking forward to riding out to the heather meadow. Exceptionally lovely it was, surrounded by dense woodlands of pine, juniper, yew, and with the majestic Grampian mountains in the distance, rising up to meet the wide blue sky. Beautiful, calm, and peaceful.

  She could, she thought wryly, aware of a faint, but unmistakably lonely ache within the far reaches of her heart, certainly use the peace of mind.

  On the very next day, in the fullness of a glorious afternoon dappled with the light and shadow of drifting clouds, Alasdair, riding with his bailiff Shaw to visit some of the tenant farmers who lived on the remote northern border of the Penhallow lands, saw that one whole length of fence, a cattle enclosure, had been hacked away. Inquiries among the farmers elicited the information that it had just happened last night, and that half a dozen cattle had been stolen—a heavy toll.

  “I’ll send some men to help you rebuild, and to stand watch during the next several nights,” Alasdair told them. “And we’ll try to find your cattle.”

  “Think you it’s the Dalwhinnies again, laird?” asked Shaw, as they rode swiftly back toward the castle.

  “It’s hard to believe they’d be that bold, after what happened so recently. You heard that old Dalziel Sutherlainn died last month?” At Shaw’s nod, he went on, “A hard man to mourn—a twisty mind, an improvident leader, rash and selfish. His son Crannog is now the chieftain.”

  “Know you him, laird?”

  “Nay, we’ve not met, but I wonder how far the apple can fall from its tree. I want twenty men out there at least, and word sent out to all the farmers to be on their guard.”

  And at exactly the same time when Alasdair turned his horse back toward the castle, Fiona was giving Dame Margery a pot of salve and a cloth bag of herbs, and glancing around her cottage. It was small and simply furnished, but clean and comfortable. “Where is Sheila?” she asked. “I’ve brought some lemon biscuits as well.”

  “Thank you, mistress,” said the old lady smilingly, “most kind of you! Sheila went off to gather some kindling for our fire. Though I thought she’d have returned by now. She’ll be sorry to have missed you, for she wished to show you her slate, with her letters drawn upon it.”

  “I’ll walk out to meet her if I can,” answered Fiona, and said her farewells. Holding Gealag’s reins, she led him along a winding track into the shadowy woods that lay behind Margery’s cottage. Boogeymen lived here, little Sheila had said. Fiona remembered how, when she was small, her garrulous nurse had terrified herself and her sisters with bloodcurdling tales of trolls, wraiths, demons, and, worst of all, the Sack Man, a phantomlike figure said to descend upon wandering children, scoop them up in his foul sack, and carry them off in order to eat them. How incensed Father had been when he’d discovered this. He’d sent the nurse away, back to her family, and secretly Mother had confided to Fiona how grateful she was, for the stories had been petrifying her, too.

  Fiona smiled faintly.

  Then she heard men’s voices, low and rough, and paused, her smile yielding to an abrupt tense alertness. It was hearing Sheila’s voice that compelled her to pace cautiously forward, to the lip of a clearing, where she saw some ten or twelve men, plainly not of the Penhallow clan, for their clothing was ragged and unkempt. Their horses, tethered, were thin, but the half-dozen cattle were fat and robust; and in this dark clearing stood Sheila, gazing up at the men whose postures indicated both fierce hostility and more than a little fear.

  They were all armed, with muskets and daggers, and Fiona briefly but intensely regretted not bringing her pistols. Then again, why would she? She’d merely ridden out to visit one of their own. Besides, she’d have been badly outnumbered anyway. These men were cattle thieves, and she was deeply afraid that the belligerence they were displaying toward Sheila—looking more than usually otherworldly with her pale, wandering eyes, very blank just now, and her seemingly unlikely attitude of calm imperturbability—would erupt into swift violence.

  “You’re empty, empty,” said Sheila, matter-of-factly. “Hollow, hollow.”

  One of the men, bearded and balding, hissed: “Kill her, laird, and be done with it! We must be away!”

  The man just addressed slowly lifted his dagger, and took a step forward. “Aye, I’ll do it, just as you say!” He was very tall, cadaverously thin, and reekingly filthy, with a rough sort of mantle flung over his shoulders, made of shabby animal pelts loosely stitched together.

  “Stop!” Fiona came three, four, five paces into the clea
ring. She could feel her heart thumping hard in her breast, but made her voice loud and imperative. The men all swung around to face her, weapons raised, and the leader jabbed his dagger menacingly.

  “Who are you?” he cried out.

  “It’s our lady,” answered Sheila calmly. “Good day, lady, you came as you said you would.”

  “The Penhallow’s wife!” hissed the bald man. “Leave the little witch, laird, and let’s take her, and that horse of hers! A fine ransom the Penhallow will pay for her safe return!”

  “Aye, that’s for sure,” agreed the leader. “But—how do we do that?”

  “Bind her wrists,” the bald man replied, “and have her put on your horse. And you ride that horse of hers! Do it!” he barked at the other men, who moved quickly to obey.

  Fiona submitted to the indignity of having her hands tied together and being tossed up onto an old sway-backed mare, but when the leader approached Gealag, he found that short of killing the beautiful white horse he’d not mount him, for Gealag threw out his sharp front hooves with vicious intent.

  “I’ll lead him, the brute,” said the bald man, moving toward Gealag, “and whip him if he balks.”

  From atop the mare on which she perched astride, displaying far too much of her stockinged legs, Fiona said, with steel in her voice, “Harm him, and I’ll make you wish you were dead.”

  “Ha!” retorted the bald man, snatching at Gealag’s reins, “as if you could, trussed up like a chicken as you are.”

  “She’d shoot you in the heart, empty man,” remarked Sheila, then staggered as he stalked past her, cuffing her across her head, hissing, “Quiet, you witch!”

  The leader swung up behind Fiona, holding her about the waist with an unnerving tentativeness, and kicked his heels into the mare’s flanks. “Let’s go!” he cried, and the ragtag cavalcade began making its way deeper into the forest. Fiona, nearly gagging from the smell of the man behind her, turned her head to stare at Sheila, first to make sure she wasn’t harmed, and second to try—foolish though it seemed—to communicate an urgent thought.

  Go tell the laird, hinny!

  Sheila only stared back at her, a grubby finger stuck into her mouth, her face utterly blank, and Fiona felt her heart sink.

  Alasdair was very busy when he got back to the castle, organizing his men, sending out messages, looking over all the horses. The last thing on his mind was dinner, but as the hour arrived, he knew he and the men would be awake all the night and would benefit from having had a meal, so with them he quickly made his way to the Great Hall, only to find that his wife wasn’t there. How odd. Perhaps she was caught up in one task or another, or napping somewhere. He dispatched both a servant boy and her maidservant Edme to go find her.

  Naturally it had begun to rain, so not only was Fiona tired, hungry, sore from the lack of a saddle, and unhappy, she was soaked to the bone and shivering in the cold. She had whiled away the long hours of this weary journey by eavesdropping, and had learned that the skeletal, bad-smelling leader, behind her, was named Crannog Sutherlainn, and that he’d only recently become the clan’s chieftain. She learned that the balding, bearded man, Faing, was Crannog’s uncle. As she listened to them openly rejoicing about not only stealing several fine, fat cattle but also looking forward to receiving an enormous ransom from Alasdair Penhallow, she refrained from pointing out that her absence at Castle Tadgh would be noticed (sooner rather than later, if Sheila bestirred herself), someone would come after her, and because cattle couldn’t travel particularly fast, the plodding pace of their escape was, frankly, a bit of a problem. For them.

  The moon was high in the sky by the time, after a great deal of complaining among the men, their party stopped and made camp for the night in a small clearing filled with concealing underbrush. Fiona was relieved to be lifted down from the poor nag who’d been made to carry two people, and also to see that Gealag—although clearly nervous—was all right. She was pushed down into a wet patch of leaves to sit and given some malodorous venison jerky to eat, with her hands still bound together. Even in the darkness she could see the green patches of mold upon it, and so she turned to Crannog Sutherlainn who was beside her, and held out the jerky. “Here.”

  “You don’t want it?” His long, thin face was suspicious.

  “No. It’s nasty.”

  “It’s the best we’ve got,” he said defensively, accepting it, and as he immediately began gnawing upon it, Fiona looked around the group of men who surrounded her, all of them, she now observed, as thin as their horses and eating their single pieces of jerky with undisguised avidity. Nothing else was produced to eat. She was pondering this, when Faing spoke to her.

  “Wouldn’t mind having a bit of you,” he said with a smile that revealed several distinctly unappealing teeth, “before we let you go. You’re a rare beauty, lass. The Penhallow’s a lucky man.”

  Fiona took a moment to wonder if a compliment coming from such a one could in any way be viewed as flattering, especially since she knew for a fact he couldn’t possibly be drunk and so it wasn’t just alcohol talking.

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” she responded coolly. “Violating me would only make my husband quite a bit angrier than he’s already certain to be.” My husband. Was this the first time she’d said those two words out loud?

  “She’s right, Uncle,” interpolated Crannog Sutherlainn, sounding more than a little anxious. “Come to think of it, maybe we ought to be pushing along right now.”

  The men began loudly grumbling, and Faing replied, “No. We’re fatigued,” and Crannog promptly subsided, his eyes darting worriedly about. They came to rest on Fiona. “You’re cold?” he asked, softly, as if hoping the others wouldn’t hear him.

  “Yes.”

  He took off his shabby fur mantle, and laid it around her shoulders. Its smell was awful, and as it was already wet it provided little real warmth, but Fiona couldn’t help but be touched by Crannog’s gesture. She saw, as he bent near her, that he couldn’t be more than twenty years old.

  He’s only a boy! she thought. Aloud she said quietly, “Thank you.”

  He nodded, and without his mantle she could see just how painfully thin he was; his shoulders were knobby and his Adam’s apple huge in the scrawny column of his throat. Here was someone considerably thinner than herself, but she doubted very much that he was anywhere near as well fed.

  Empty, empty, hollow, hollow, little Sheila had said.

  The castle and the stables and the gardens had been thoroughly searched and his wife, apparently, was missing. Alasdair stood in the Great Hall, frowning. Annoying and perplexing Fiona might be, but she wasn’t flighty, or one to play pranks. He was wondering uneasily if there was a connection between the Sutherlainns and Fiona’s mysterious disappearance, when Cook approached him, and said, twisting her hands in her apron:

  “Laird, it’s come to me, ’twas yesterday that the mistress mentioned she was to ride out today to Dame Margery with some herbs.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth before Alasdair was gone from the Hall, off to the stables where he had a half-dozen men saddle their horses along with his own. Twenty minutes later, he stood just inside Dame Margery’s cottage, having woken her and little Sheila from their beds.

  The old lady was baffled, alarmed, and turned to Sheila, who, barefoot and in her nightgown, stood sleepily rubbing her eyes.

  “What know you of this?” she said urgently to her granddaughter. “You told me you saw the mistress in the woods, but nothing else.”

  “You saw the mistress, lass?” put in Alasdair quickly. “When?”

  “Oh, this afternoon, laird, I was looking for kindling for Granny.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The men took her away with them.”

  The little girl was calm, vague, so casual in her speech that Alasdair had to keep himself from what felt like literally exploding. He’d been exasperated many times prior in his life, but he now knew, with soul-shaking certai
nty, that this moment was the absolute topper.

  Sharply, from between clenched teeth, he said, “What men?” just as old Dame Margery exclaimed in horror:

  “You never said a word of this!”

  “Oh, Granny, when I saw those lemon biscuits I forgot all about it. Aren’t they so good? I wish we could have them every day.”

  Patience, he told himself sternly. You mustn’t frighten the child. “What men did you see, little Sheila?”

  She looked up at him (at least one eye did, the other seemed to be directed at a stoneware crock in which, he suspected, biscuits were stored). “I didn’t know them, laird, but one of them called me a witch, which is a terrible lie. They had some of our cattle, and they also stole our lady and her horse.”

  “Can you tell me which way they went, lass?”

  She nodded. “Oh yes, laird, they’re following the northwest trail, but they’re not going very fast, and if you ride hard you’ll find them in about an hour and a half. But be careful, because the rain has made the trail very slippery. Although the rain will stop soon.”

  Now the lass was all about sharing useful information. Hours had passed since Fiona had been taken—long, treacherous hours in which anything might happen. That they were going northwest confirmed his suspicion that it was the Sutherlainn clan they were dealing with, led by a man of whom Alasdair knew nothing: a lack of information which made him very, very uncomfortable.

  As he and his men began riding as rapidly as they dared along a trail which was, as Sheila predicted, dangerously slippery, Alasdair thought of Fiona, alone, vulnerable, unprotected, and he felt the cold hand of fear take hold of his heart. If the Sutherlainns so much as hurt one hair of her head, he told himself grimly, he would wreak such vengeance upon them that the entire clan would wish it had never seen the light of day.

  Chapter 9