by Marie Laval
‘Don’t be silly. You can’t walk barefoot.’
Ignoring his hand she slid down from the saddle, pushed past him and started towards the front porch, wincing as her feet touched the rough, frozen ground. He muttered something about stubborn women, scooped her up in his arms and ran up the porch steps.
Even though she went as stiff as a board, this time she didn’t utter a sound. She had done enough shouting already. Reluctantly she rested her hands on his shoulders for support as he walked up the front steps, kicked the front door open and strode into the hallway.
A single oil lamp threw grotesque shadows onto the walls and floor. Rose looked up at the staircase shrouded in darkness and shivered. She could feel that presence again – something or someone, reaching out from a very dark, very lonely place.
A tall shadowy figure moved at the top of the staircase, and slowly started going down the steps. With a whimper of alarm Rose linked her arms around Lord McGunn’s neck and pressed her body against his.
A faint smile appeared on his lips, and he walked to the bottom of the stairs.
‘Don’t be scared, it’s only Morag.’
‘Morag? Are you sure?’
Breathing out a sigh of relief but embarrassed he’d seen her so easily flustered, she unlaced her arms from around his neck and put her hands flat on his chest to push him away.
‘I will be all right now, please let me down.’
For once, he did as she asked and she stood on the cold stone flags as the housekeeper came down the stairs.
‘What are you doing still up?’ McGunn asked Morag in an uncharacteristically kind voice. ‘You should be in bed.’
‘I was waiting for news. I hope there was no trouble in the village tonight.’
Morag’s face was pale and drawn. Her grey hair stuck untidily from under her bonnet and her eyes had a sad, haunted look. She seemed to have aged ten years in the space of one evening.
‘There was no trouble. Well, not too much trouble – not with MacKay and the men anyhow,’ he corrected. ‘Lady McRae, however, had a close encounter with a pint of ale. Then we had a… small disagreement, she misplaced her shoes and I had to offer my assistance to carry her across the village square.’
Heat rushed to Rose’s cheeks. She opened her mouth to protest, but what could she say? No doubt the story of her outburst would be all over the village by morning. Perhaps she shouldn’t have screamed so much. As usual, her temper had got the better of her, like that time not so long ago when she’d hurled a chamber pot at a French Lieutenant from her window at Bou Saada and narrowly avoided being thrown into jail.
She could only hope to catch the mail post the following day and reach Cameron before the gossip did. If Bruce McGunn had one thing right about her husband, it was that he was very proud of his rank and title, and indeed very attached to manners and etiquette.
Morag glanced down at Rose’s bare feet.
‘Would you like me to get anything for you, my lady? A hot drink or something to eat? Some hot water for a bath, perhaps?’
Lord McGunn didn’t leave Rose the chance to answer. He put his hand on Morag’s shoulder, gave a light squeeze.
‘I’ll take care of Lady McRae. Now, go to bed and have a rest,’ he said kindly.
There was however no trace of kindness in his eyes or his voice when he turned to her.
‘Follow me to the drawing room now. We need to talk.’
His abrupt tone irked her.
‘Do you wish to apologise?’
‘Apologise, what the hell for?’
‘For making a fool of me in front of the whole village, of course.’
‘You did that all on your own, sweetheart,’ he replied with a mean smile. ‘All you had to do was obey me without causing a fuss.’
‘Obey you?’ She was about to say that the only man she’d ever obeyed was her father, but she paused. She wasn’t going to let him rile her, not anymore.
‘You may keep me a prisoner in your castle, Lord McGunn, but I don’t have to obey you, talk to you or even listen to you if I don’t want to. Now if you’ll excuse me, I am cold and filthy, and I want to wash that dreadful stink of beer off.’
As she started up the stairs his deep voice stopped her in her tracks.
‘I thought you wanted me to find out what happened to your friend – Malika.’
All her anger melted away at once. Never mind her dirty hair, the reek of beer on her clothes, her wounded pride and feet turning blue. Malika was dead. She’d never again talk about her dreams, laugh or dance with her in the garden at Bou Saada. She would never stroll up and down the winding streets of the Algiers Kasbah or sit in the shade of palm trees to stare at the turquoise blue sea sparkling under the midday sun.
Her shoulders sagged, and in silence she followed Bruce McGunn along long, draughty corridors to the drawing room. Here, too, a solitary oil lamp was lit, which together with the light of the dying fire, bathed the room in a weak golden glow that reflected onto the blade of the claymore on the wall.
‘Please take a seat.’ He gestured to an armchair facing the fireplace.
She sat down and folded her cold feet under her.
‘What can you tell me about Malika?’
He walked to a sideboard and poured two tumblers of whisky.
Rose took a deep breath. ‘Her name was Malika Jahal. Her parents died when she was little and she was brought up by an aunt who trained her to be a dancing girl from a very young age and had her perform in market squares and taverns. She must have been about ten when my mother saw her dance one day on the market square at Bou Saada and brought her home.’
It was hard to keep her voice steady, to blink the tears away.
‘We grew up as sisters. I taught her French and English. She taught me Arabic, the ways of her people…’
And how to dance like an Ouled Nail, she finished silently.
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘The night before my wedding. We had a disagreement and she stormed out.’
He swung round. ‘A disagreement? What about?’
She sighed. ‘She didn’t like me getting married.’
It had been a lot worse than a disagreement. It had been a full-blown row with Malika saying nasty, hurtful lies about Cameron. Lord McGunn however didn’t need to know that.
‘Why ever not?’
‘She didn’t care much for Cameron,’ she answered feebly.
‘A very sensible girl, if you want my opinion.’
She tilted her chin up. ‘Well, I don’t.’
He shrugged and handed her a glass. ‘Drink this, it’ll warm you up.’
She took a sniff of the drink and pulled a face. ‘No thank you. I don’t like whisky.’
‘Sweetheart, you can’t be married to a Scot and not drink whisky. But perhaps the taste is too strong for you.’
It sounded like a dare, and she’d never been able to resist a dare.
‘Too strong? Certainly not. Once you’ve tasted camel milk, you can drink anything!’
She drank a sip and grimaced as the fiery liquor burned her mouth and throat. If only he wasn’t watching her with those dark grey eyes of his and a mocking smile on the corner of his mouth, she could tip the glass into that chipped vase on the side table. But he was watching, so she forced another sip down.
‘I have no idea why Malika travelled to Scotland and how she came to be on that beach today. Somehow, I can’t help feeling it’s my fault.’
She let out a choked sound, and couldn’t stop a tear from sliding down her cheek. She drank a long gulp of whisky and this time welcomed the burning trail it left in her throat. It took her mind away from the painful tightness in her chest.
‘Don’t blame yourself. You aren’t responsible for the woman’s death.’
McGunn’s voice was flat and devoid of any feeling, his face impassive, and not for the first time she wondered if the man felt anything at all about the two young women found murdered on his land
.
‘She must have travelled on the Sea Lady with her friends, the dancers Cameron hired.’
‘What dancers?’
‘Cameron hired five dancers and four musicians for his birthday ball at Westmore Manor. There should have been six girls but one of them was mugged and her body was found in the harbour the night before the Sea Lady sailed. Sadly, it isn’t unusual. The girls are easy targets for thieves because they carry all their earnings on their person, in the shape of gold and silver coins and baubles they thread into necklaces and bracelets.’
He narrowed his eyes again. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about these dancers.’
More than he’d ever know. She came alive listening to their music. She danced like them. She danced with them. And at times, she even felt she was one of them.
‘One can’t live in Bou Saada and not know about the Ouled Nail,’ she said in a quiet voice before drinking up her whisky. ‘They’re very much part of the local culture.’
He turned to face the fire and they were both silent. She stared at his broad back, the solid mass of his shoulders under the black jacket, his long, muscular legs clad in black trousers and scuffed boots, his unfashionably long dark hair. Even when he didn’t move or talk, there was something overbearing and threatening about him.
She swallowed hard. Behind him the flames hissed and whispered in the fireplace, their amber light outlining his silhouette. The night was so quiet she could hear her own heartbeat and breathing.
Her head felt fuzzy suddenly, and her body too warm. She shook her cloak and bolero off, unfastened the top buttons of her shirt and leaned back in her chair.
‘I can’t understand why McRae hired Algerian dancers in the first place,’ Lord McGunn said at last, still staring at the fire.
‘He said he wanted something unusual for his birthday. A surprise.’
‘That would be two surprises, with the announcement of your marriage… Perhaps he needs his inheritance so badly he wants to speed up the old dragon’s demise.’
He turned round. This time surprise flickered on his face as his gaze slid over her, slow and intense. His eyes were so dark and hot her body tightened and tingled all over in response, in a strange, awkward way, almost as if it wasn’t just his eyes that roamed over her body but his hands as well.
She straightened in the chair and crossed her arms over her chest. She shouldn’t have drunk that whisky, it made her feel all hot and funny.
‘What old dragon?’
He smiled.
‘Lady Patricia, of course. Actually, some people say that comparing her to a dragon is unfair to dragons. Then again, others claim it would be more accurate to call her a female Black Donald.’
‘Black Donald?’ Rose lifted a hand to her throat. ‘Isn’t that what people around here called the devil?’
He nodded. ‘Aye, and believe me, the woman deserves her reputation. Anyway, I spoke to all my staff at the Lodge, and at the fisheries, as well as most people in and around the village. None of them saw Malika before tonight.’
He drank a sip of whisky, pictured once again the dead woman’s pale, bruised face, her huge dark eyes open onto the grey skies. Like Fenella’s, Malika’s body had emerged from the sea, as if she’d been held captive by the blue men of the Minch then released back into the world of humans.
And yet she must have travelled on the Sea Lady. The only thing for him to do was to ride to Westmore and find out what McRae, the dancers and the musicians knew about Malika.
He wouldn’t tell Rose, of course. She would only insist that he take her with him, and he needed her here at Wrath Lodge – safe, or captive, depending on how you looked at it – while he renegotiated the bank loans with McRae and investigated the puzzle over the two deaths.
Why did he have the feeling he’d seen Malika the night McNeil helped him fight a gang of attackers in Inverness? Unfortunately McNeil, the only man who could help sharpen his hazy memory, had left for Alltnacailich earlier on that day. Apparently Bruce himself had sent him there on estate business, even though he had no recollection of doing so. But then again, he did forget all kinds of things these days.
If he couldn’t tell Rose about his plan to ride to Westmore, at least he could tell her about the arrangements he’d made for Malika’s burial.
‘By the way, your friend’s funeral will take place early tomorrow morning in Balnakiel church. The MacKay girl will be buried there later in the day.’
Rose looked up.
‘Thank you.’
He nodded, suddenly unable to speak as his gaze travelled up and down her body, taking in the details of her flimsy exotic princess costume. Her shirt was so thin it hardly hid the soft swell of her breasts. She wore no corset, no stays, and he could make out the tight buds of her nipples straining against the fabric.
He tried, and failed, to ignore the vivid image that surged into his mind: of him opening the shirt and trailing his tongue down from her throat to those full, round breasts before taking her nipples into his mouth until she moaned and writhed in his arms.
As if she could read his mind, her smooth, creamy skin flushed a delicious shade of pink and she parted her lips. His eyes lingered over the sheer purple pantaloons that draped over her slender legs. What it would feel like to yank her against him right now, stroke the silky fabric covering her hips before pulling them down to uncover her bare skin?
He exhaled sharply, and made himself look away. What was wrong with him? He was behaving like a green boy. The woman was entirely at his mercy, she had just suffered the tragic loss of a friend, and all he could think to put his hands, his mouth, on her. And to top it all, she was McRae’s wife!
His voice was a little hoarse when he spoke next.
‘Actually, there is something else I’d like to know. How did you and McRae meet? I mean why did he travel to North Africa in the first place? I wasn’t aware that he had business interests there.’
‘It wasn’t business that brought us together, but fate,’ she answered.
‘Fate?’
‘Fate, and our fathers.’
She pointed to the broadsword hanging on the wall, which glowed faintly with reds and oranges.
‘You know of course that Niall McRae, Cameron’s father, was in the Gordon Highlanders, like yourself, I believe. Two days before Waterloo, in June 1815, my father’s Cuirassier Regiment and the Gordon Highlanders clashed at Quatre-Bras. Niall McRae was mortally wounded that day. It was my father who looked after him.’
McGunn looked surprised. ‘Really? Please carry on.’
‘He recorded their meeting in his military journal, which was later lost in the French War Ministry’s archives in Paris. It was only returned to my mother six months ago.’
‘It took the French army thirty years to return it?’
She nodded. ‘That’s right. As soon as she read the entries concerning Niall McRae, my mother wrote to the British Embassy in Algiers with a letter to be forwarded to Lady Patricia, in which she offered to make copies of the pages concerning her late husband.’
‘And?’
Rose pulled a face.
‘A couple of months later we received a rather… forceful letter from Lady Patricia demanding that the diary be sent to Westmore at once. Apparently she didn’t trust my mother to make a faithful copy and wanted to see the diary for herself.’
‘Needless to say, my mother didn’t care much for the tone or the content of the letter. She replied that if Lady McRae wanted to see the original document, she would have to travel to North Africa herself because she would under no circumstances part with my father’s diary. It was far too precious to risk losing it again.’
She must have seen the unspoken question in his eyes.
‘My father died seven years ago, killed in an ambush by the French army.’
‘Killed by his own side? I don’t understand.’
‘He’d gone to help villagers hiding in a mountainside cave who were wrongly accused of helping Abd el K
ader’s rebels. The French ambushed them and killed them all. They later claimed they didn’t know my father was there.’
There was raw grief and anger in her voice, her eyes shone with tears again.
‘So what happened with Lady Patricia and the journal?’ he asked, abruptly changing the topic of conversation.
‘She wrote back to say that Cameron would travel to Algiers and requested that my mother meet him there with the diary. My mother made all the travel arrangements but at the last minute she had to leave for Djanet for the birth of my brother’s baby, so I went in her place with Akhtar, our old servant, and Malika.’
‘You are telling me that McRae travelled all the way to Algiers just to read a few pages in an old diary…’ Bruce hissed a whistle between his teeth. ‘Whatever is in that journal?’
‘It’s an account of Niall McRae’s dying moments.’
‘I see. Where is the diary now? I suppose you gave it to McRae and he took it to his mother.’
She shook her head. ‘Oh no, I have it here, in my tapestry bag. I promised my mother I’d never part with it. So you see, in a way I have my father and Niall McRae to thank for meeting the man I love.’
The man she loved? A flare of anger burned through him. McRae was a depraved rake, a gambler, a cruel landlord. He didn’t deserve to be loved by any woman, let alone by one as naive and gullible as Rose.
As if echoing his feelings, the claymore glowed like a straight, incandescent flame on the wall, then became dull again. Funny how he’d never noticed until tonight how it reflected the flames in the fireplace…
‘Another question, if you don’t mind. Why didn’t you sail on the Sea Lady with McRae?’
Her face closed up at once.
‘I… I do not wish to speak about it,’ she said in a shaky voice.
He narrowed his eyes. There was definitely something very odd about the whole story of McRae sailing to Algiers to get his hands on an old war diary, and about him sailing away again without his new bride… Whatever it was, the young woman wouldn’t tell him anything more tonight.
‘Come on,’ he said as he set his empty glass on the mantelpiece. ‘I’ll take you to your room now, in case you lose your way and end up in someone else’s bed.’
