Rose In Scotland
Joan Overfield
Avon (1997)
* * *
Rating: ***
Tags: Historical Romance, Scotland Highlands, Highlanders, Scotland, Love Story, Romance
A DELICATE FLOWER
Lady Caroline Burroughs is desperate. Her unscrupulous guardian is squandering away her inheritance, and now wants to gain complete control over her dwindling wealth by forcing her to wed his aged crony. But Caroline has found a solution to her woes. Though it means surrendering her long-cherished dream of marring for love, she agrees to a preemptive temporary union with a devilishly handsome stranger--a brave and noble Scotsman who believes that love is an illusion.
A THORNY ROMANCE
Major Hugh MacColme has every reason to hate the British--since the Crown stole his ancestral castle and sent his father and brother into exile. And he never imagined he would end up marrying one of the enemy. But a year spent in the intimate company of an exquisite English rose seems a small price to pay for recovering his birthright. For tender-hearted Caroline, however, the difficult part will be coping with her unexpected desire for this proud and distant man--no use for is the warm and healing love he truly needs.
A ROSE
IN SCOTLAND
JOAN OVERFIELD
Dedication
To Chad Estep, a hero for all seasons who
walks the thin blue line for all of us.
This book is also dedicated with gratitude to the men and women of the Spokane Police Department’s Chaplaincy Program, and to police chaplains everywhere who offer hope and comfort when the unthinkable becomes a heartbreaking reality. Thank you for your kindness and your compassion.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Dear Reader
Other AVON ROMANCES
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Castle Loch Haven
Scotland, 1771
“Cladhaire! Fear bradhaidh!” Douglas MacColme, laird of Loch Haven, hurled the invectives at the young man standing before him. “It’s dead I’d rather see ye than wearing the colors of our enemy! Ye’re nae to speak of this again, do ye hear?”
Hugh MacColme bore his father’s rage in stoic silence, for he’d expected nothing less. At twenty, he’d grown to manhood listening to his father rail against the hated English, and had known how he would respond once he’d learned of his son’s plans. But Hugh had known also that he could not let it matter. Since the day he’d read the writ in Edinburgh, he’d accepted what his duty must be, and accepted as well what that duty would cost him. Still, his father’s words cut deep, and his silvery-green eyes flashed with pride as he faced Douglas across the expanse of the great keep.
“I’m nae a coward, Father,” he said quietly, only the clenching of his jaw betraying his inner turmoil. “Nor am I a traitor—nae to the clan, nor to yourself. It is because of you that I do this thing. Why can you nae be seeing that?”
“Because ’Tis a foul lie, that’s why!” Douglas surged to his feet, his face twisting with fury. “And if ’twas sense ye had in yer head instead of useless book-learning, ye’d be seeing the truth of that!”
“But a pardon, Douglas,” Geordie MacColme, Hugh’s uncle, intervened. “Let your mind rest on that for a wee bit, and think on what it could mean to the clan. Ye’ve seen what’s happening about us, how the English seize upon the smallest excuse to take what is ours. If Hugh swears this oath and enlists, it will mean clemency for us all.”
Douglas whirled to glare at his brother. “Clemency!” he roared, his voice echoing off the stone walls. “Where’s yer pride, mon? Yer honor? Is it a burraidh ye are, to be believing in the lies of the English? Did Culloden nae teach you anything?”
A bitter quarrel erupted between the two brothers, with the chieftains soon joining in to offer opinions and criticisms. Hugh watched it all with increasing bitterness. Did his father and the others truly think he wanted to leave? he wondered angrily. Were they so daft as not to know that leaving Scotland and those he loved would tear the heart from him? And did they think there was any other choice? As he listened his iron control slipped, and his temper ran free.
“Honor!” he sneered, breaking into his father’s tirade. “Pride! Will honor fill the stomachs of the babes when they wail from the hunger? Will pride keep out the snow and the cold when the winter comes and we dinna have roofs over our people’s heads? You know the answer to that as well as I: It will not.”
A stunned silence filled the hall as the men assembled there exchanged uneasy looks. “ ’Tis nae that we dinna see the truth of yer words,” James Callamby, one of his father’s oldest friends, said at last, his expression kind as he studied Hugh. “And we mark that ye do this for us. But to accept a MacColme wearing the uniform of the enemy …” He shook his grizzled head. “ ’Tis a hard thing ye ask of us, lad.”
“ ’Tis a disgrace is what it is,” his father interjected before Hugh could respond. “A blow to all who have died under the heel of the usurper! Your own mother amongst them,” he added, shooting Hugh a glowering look.
The mention of his mother, dead now these last three years, was a stinging lash upon Hugh’s soul. He had adored his sweet-tempered mother and grieved for her still, but he knew she would have understood what he was doing. Would have understood and supported him against his father, just as she had when he had begged to be sent to university in Edinburgh. She had stood against his father and the entire clan to see he got the education he craved, and he took comfort in the thought that she would have stood with him now.
“Hugh,” Geordie said, regarding him solemnly, “is it set you are to do this thing? Do you truly mean to become one of the English?”
“Nay, Uncle,” Hugh said, relieved he could reassure the others on this point. “I’ll never be English. I’ll don the uniform; I’ll pull my cap and go where I’m told, and do as I am bid; but I’ll always be a Highlander. I’ll always be a MacColme. Never doubt that.”
There was more heated discussion amongst the chieftains and then James Callamby gave him a worried look. “And if ’Tis yer own people yer new masters tell ye to kill, what then, Hugh MacColme? Will ye still do as ye are bid?”
This was something Hugh had already considered, accepting that he would die at the end of a rope before ever raising a weapon against his own. He pulled out his dirk and held it high above his head. “If such a time comes,” he said, turning slowly around so that all could see his face as he spoke, “if ever I turn against a man of my clan, a man of my blood, I offer my life in forfeit. I charge those here to plunge this dirk in my back if ever I betray Scotland.” He turned and hurled the knife into the table where his father sat, the handle quivering as the blade buried itself in the thick wood.
“I love you,” he said in the old language, his gaze meeting that of his father. “But I will do what I must to protect the clan. All I ask in return is that you do nothing that will endanger the pardon I have won.”
His father’s face worked oddly for several seconds, and for a moment Hugh feared to see him weep. “Ye will do this, then?” he asked, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Ye will take the king’s shilling and leave all who love ye?”
Hugh blinked back his own tears. “I will.”
His father dropped his head. “Then so be it,” he said wearily, raising his chin and gazing about the room. “My son is dead,” he intoned, ignoring the shocked gasps and cries of dismay. “From this day hence we’ll speak his name nae mair.”
Hugh stood in painful isolation, accepting his father’s judgment before turning away; his head held proudly as he walked away. People looked away as he moved past them, their eyes downcast as if he were a ghost they feared to see. He walked out into the antechamber, and he could tell by the expressions on the faces of the women that they already knew what had happened. More than one pretty lass dried her eyes with the edge of her apron, her private dreams dying as he walked past her. A young lad of some fifteen years stood apart from the others, his hands clenched into fists, and after a moment’s hesitation Hugh walked over to lay his hand on the lad’s bony shoulder.
“Go to him, Andrew,” he said gently, his eyes drinking in every detail of his brother’s face. “He’ll have need of you now. Mind you have a care for him, and Mairi, too. That one will want a great deal of watching,” he added, his heart twisting at the thought of his impish younger sister.
Andrew shrugged his hand off, his young eyes full of hurt and betrayal. “It’s true, then?” he asked, his voice caught between youth and manhood, cracking with emotion. “You’ve enlisted?”
“Andrew,” Hugh began painfully, “I beg you to understand. There is no other way …”
“Colin MacLorne says you are a coward,” Andrew interrupted, wiping his hand across his nose in an impatient gesture. “He says you fear standing against the English, and so you join them instead to murder your own people.”
Hugh’s desire to soothe vanished at the insulting words. “You are young yet, Andrew,” he told his brother sharply, “and Colin MacLorne is a pimple-faced garrach who would best be advised to hold his tongue instead of wagging it. I do what I must, and I expect no less from you. I place the family and the safety of the clan in your hands. Guard them until I return.”
“You’ll never return,” Andrew snapped as Hugh turned to leave. “You’ll never return because you’re a traitor, and a traitor will never be welcomed in Loch Haven!”
Although it cost him everything, Hugh did not respond. He simply kept walking, taking his plaid from the gnarled hands of his old nurse who was standing by the door.
“God have a watch o’er ye,” the old woman whispered, tears shimmering in her faded blue eyes as she gazed at him. “I’ll nae be seeing ye in this life again.”
“Farewell, Annie Kirkcaldy,” he said, bending from his great height to press a kiss to her wrinkled cheek. “I’ll think of you and your oatcakes when I am far away.”
“Hugh! Hugh!” A red-haired whirlwind with a torn dress and a dirty face dashed past the women to launch herself against him. “Dinna go, Hugh! Dinna go!”
“Mairi.” Hugh caught his sister in his arms and held her close. “Mo piuthar, I love you.”
“I hate Colin MacLorne,” she charged passionately. “I’m going to bite him the next time I see him!”
Hugh laughed at her fierce tone, his hand shaking as he passed it over the unruly curls that were several shades brighter than the reddish-brown waves streaming past his wide shoulders. “You do that, kempie, and mind you bite him hard,” he said, giving her smudged cheek a smacking kiss. He treasured the sweet, warm feel of her for a precious second, and then set her on her feet.
“Now off with you, love,” he told her, infusing a teasing note in his voice. “I have a hard night’s ride ahead of me, and must be away. Mind you do as Father and Andrew bid you.”
But instead of going off as she was bade, Mairi resolutely stood her ground, her gaze never leaving his face. “I know you’re nae a feardie like the others say,” she said, eyes as green as the trees in springtime sparkling with tears. “I know you only joined the English because they made you.”
Hugh could not speak for the lump in his throat. Were they alone he would have let his tears flow as they would, and not care a groat for it. But with the others there watching with their sharp eyes and even sharper tongues, he schooled himself to hide his pain.
“No tears now, little one,” he scolded gently, raising his hand to brush her damp cheeks. “It’s happy I want to remember you.”
A tentative smile wobbled on her trembling lips, but her eyes were solemn as they met his. “Will you be back, Hugh?”
Hugh thought of the dangers he would face as a soldier. The chances he would survive the next several years were all but nonexistent, but how could he tell that to a child? Then he saw an adult’s understanding shimmering in his sister’s eyes, and wondered how he could lie.
“If I live,” he said quietly, granting her the honesty she craved. “My word to you, Mairi. I will come back.” He reached out to give a tangled curl a playful tug. “I must come back, mustn’t I, so that I can dance at your wedding?”
As he knew it would, her small nose wrinkled in disgust. “I’ll nae be marrying some pest of a boy!” she declared with conviction. “They’re the very devils!”
He gazed down into her face and saw the promise of great beauty in the odd angles of her expressive face. “ ’Tis a beauty you will be,” he told her, his heart aching that he would not be there to see her grow into womanhood. “Father and I will have to post all the clansmen on the towers to keep watch, so that some love-struck prince from a far-off land doesn’t carry you away.”
“Let him try,” Mairi retorted, tossing back her curls with a sniff. “I’ll stick my knife in him as if he was a haggis!”
Some of the women nearby tittered with laughter, while others shook their heads and muttered how wild the cailin had grown. Hugh ignored them all, his concentration fixed on Mairi. She was the image of his mother, and with that thought in mind he reached into the pocket of his jacket, extracting the locket he had carried with him since the day his dying mother had pressed it into his hand. He flicked open the heavily etched silver case, gazing at the miniature it contained.
His mother had been seventeen when it was painted; it was the year she married his father. She had been young and full of life then, her emerald eyes sparkling with laughter. Eighteen years later she was dead; killed, he knew, by the harsh life and grief over the four small ones who had gone before her. He studied her beloved face for several seconds, and then snapped the locket closed for the final time.
He reached out and took Mairi’s small hand in his, placing the locket in her palm and folding her fingers around it. “Keep this safe for me, Mairi,” he said, his eyes meeting hers. “The day I come back, you may return it to me. But if I do not, I want you to promise me you will give it to your firstborn son that he might give it to his wife. Will you do this for me?”
Mairi’s thin fingers clutched the locket tightly. “I will, Hugh,” she vowed, pressing the locket to her heart. “But you will come back; I know you will. And I will be waiting for you.”
A single tear Hugh could not stop wended its way down his cheek. “Good-bye, Mairi,” he whispered brokenly. “Good-bye, mo cridhe.” And with that he turned and left, closing the great wooden doors of Castle Loch Haven behind him.
Chapter 1
Castle Loch Haven
Scotland, 1785
All for nothing. Hugh gazed up at the stone turrets of the castle, his eyes narrowing against the lash of ice and rain. The past fourteen years of his life—the pain of it, the hell of it—had all been for naught. His lips twisted in a bitter smile at the realization. ’Twould seem his father had had the final say after all, he decided, his hand clenching about his reins.
“And when was it you say that the soldiers came for my father and brother?” he asked, his voice devoid of emotion.
“Four years last May,” James Callamby provided, reaching up to rub his cheek thoughtfully. “I remarked on it because it happened but a week after my Elspeth married Rory Steward. I was to Dunstaffnage f
or the feasting, and a good thing it was, too,” he added, his blue eyes dancing with merriment, “else I wouldna be having this conversation with ye.”
Four years ago, Hugh mused, his expression hardening as he did some quick calculations. That would have been about the time he and his regiment were bogged down in the swamps near Cowpens in the Carolinas. At the same time that he was fighting for his life, killing American rebels for a flag he detested, his father and brother were being dragged off in chains by other soldiers of that same flag. The irony of that was almost laughable, but the feelings tearing at him were too painful for laughter.
“Tell me what happened,” he said, banishing the black thoughts from his mind with the experience of many years. “I would know all.”
There was a long silence as the older man gathered his thoughts. “ ’twas after the hanging of the rebels in Glasgow, and feeling was running high against the clans,” he began, his face taking on a distant expression. “The soldiers came from the border, marching from glen to glen, and those who wouldna sign a pledge of fealty to the king were taken to London for trial—your father, brother, and uncle amongst them. We know some were transported and others hung, but of the men of Loch Haven we have nae heard a thing.”
Transported. Hugh’s jaw clenched at the fearful word. If his father and Andrew had been shipped to some far-off colony, then they were as good as dead. No one returned from such hellish places, and he knew that in such a circumstance, hanging would have been the truer mercy. It was a horrifying thought, and he felt his stomach tighten in sickness.
“Mairi.” He forced the word between gritted teeth. “What of Mairi?” If his sister had been transported as well, he knew he would truly go mad.
“In Edinburgh with your Aunt Egidia,” James assured him quickly. “The old lady was fair ill at the time, and Mairi had gone there to care for her. She was well away from the castle when the soldiers came.”
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