‘Alec had no more choice than I did. The deed was done before he knew of it. I was not allowed to say goodbye. Those are the rules for those banished and I didn’t dare break them for fear of the retribution that would be wrought on the two of you.’
‘I know all about the Munro rules of banishment,’ Alasdhair said bitterly. ‘So there never was another man?’
Morna laughed scornfully. ‘No. There was only ever the one.’
‘Why didn’t you try to see me? Why didn’t you try to tell me the truth?’
‘That word again. I’ve told you, Alasdhair, there’s no such thing as the truth. I didn’t try to see you because I didn’t think I had the right, especially not after your father died and the blame was laid fair and square at my door. Guilt and shame are terrible things. Seeing you today is more than I’ve ever hoped for. It’s enough. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, I will die happy.’
‘There is nothing to forgive.’ But the words did not sound forgiving, and though he meant them, Alasdhair did not feel them. He wanted to, but he could not rid himself of the conviction that Morna was allowing him only to see a part of the picture. ‘None of this is your fault,’ he said, though it was himself he was attempting to reassure.
Morna shook her head. ‘It’s nice of you to say it, but it isn’t true. I always loved you though, Alasdhair. I’ve carried you in my heart these twenty years; there’s not a day’s gone by without me thinking of you.’
Now, surely, he had what he wanted, Ailsa thought, watching Alasdhair closely. Now he knew that he had always been loved, surely he could find it in his heart to make the first move? But Alasdhair remained in his chair, a frown drawing his brows firmly together. ‘When my father died, why did you not come back for me then? If you cared about me as you claim, surely you must have worried about what would become of me? I had no other kin on Errin Mhor.’
Morna shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘I knew the laird would take care of you.’
‘How could you have known that? I was the son of his factor, nothing more. You said yourself that Lady Munro had made it plain she was determined to see the back of you. Why would you assume she’d be willing to take me in under those circumstances?’
‘I knew the laird would do his duty by you.’
‘What duty?’ The feeling of impending doom he’d had earlier was closing in over him like the chilly black waters of the deepest loch. Morna was refusing to look at him now. ‘Mother? What duty was it that impelled Lord Munro to make me his ward, when the obvious thing to do was to send me to you? He knew where you were.’
‘Alasdhair, believe me, there are some things that it is best to leave buried.’
Alasdhair hesitated. Maybe she was right. But though part of him urged caution, the larger part of him, the part that had fought its way into the light with the aid of Ailsa’s love, was stronger. ‘What are you not telling me?’
Morna’s eyes darted from Alasdhair to Ailsa and back again to her son. ‘Maybe if you could ask the lass to wait outside,’ she said hesitantly.
Alasdhair shook his head and reached for Ailsa’s hand. ‘Whatever you’re about to say, she has the right to know. Ailsa and I are to be married.’
The effect of those words on his mother were astonishing. Morna rose out of her seat, her hands clutching at her breast. Her face turned from white to grey. ‘No! Oh, dear God in heaven, no.’ She clutched at the edge of the table to support herself. ‘You mustn’t marry the Munro’s daughter.’
Alasdhair pushed back his chair so violently that it fell to the floor. ‘Enough! Unless you wish our estrangement to be for ever, you will think very carefully before you say another word. I love Ailsa with all my heart. Whatever prejudices you have about her family—and Lord knows they have given you just cause—you will keep them to yourself.’
‘Alasdhair, please don’t,’ Ailsa interrupted, completely bewildered by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘It is perfectly understandable that—’
‘No.’ He pulled her to her feet and put his arm around her shoulder, anchoring her firmly to his side. ‘You are to be my wife. If my mother cannot treat you with the respect you are entitled to, then she does not deserve to be my mother.’
Morna’s knees gave way under her. She tottered back into her seat, waving away Ailsa’s attempts to come to her aide. ‘It’s not you, lass,’ she said, her voice made harsh by her laboured breathing. ‘I swear to you, Alasdhair, it’s not Miss Munro’s heritage that is the problem.’ She took a deep breath. ‘It’s your own.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your father.’
‘What about him?’
‘Alec isn’t your real father. He couldn’t sire bairns; it was one of the reasons he consented to the match, so he could have a child to call his own.’ Morna licked her dry lips and forced herself to meet her son’s accusing gaze. It broke her heart to see the shadow of pain lurking there.
‘So there was another man all along. You did run off with him, didn’t you? Is he my father?’
‘There is, there never was, another man.’
Alasdhair looked bewildered. ‘Then who on earth is my father?’
The answer, when it came, was so quiet as to be barely audible. ‘Lord Munro.’
‘What!’
‘Lord Munro is your father.’
Chapter Ten
‘No!’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry, but it’s true. That night of the ceilidh,’ Morna said, head bowed, ‘was not the first time the laird had his way with me. When I first came to the castle he—he—it was his way of making his mark, you see.’
‘No!’ Alasdhair’s roar was like a wounded lion. ‘No! It can’t be true.’
‘I’m sorry, but you wanted the truth.’
‘You’re saying that I am Lord Munro’s bastard? But that means …’ Out of the corner of his eye Alasdhair saw Ailsa’s face drain of colour, so quickly it was as if the blood had been let. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to gather her close to him and to run and run and run away from here.
She got to her feet and reached for him. ‘Alasdhair?’
Her voice was thread-thin. She looked bewildered. Lost. Her eyes like bruises, beseeching him.
It broke his heart to see her like this. ‘Ailsa.’ He pulled her to him, felt the achingly familiar shape of her nestling into him, bending to him, fitting so perfectly that it was meant for him. He turned to his mother again. ‘You lie,’ he said with conviction.
‘I’m sorry,’ Morna said wretchedly, seeing now in the way the girl cleaved to her son what she had not noticed earlier. It was too late. The ultimate sin had been committed, and it was her fault for keeping the truth secret. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again, for there was nothing else to say. ‘You cannot believe how much I wish I could change things, Alasdhair, but I cannot. Why else do you think the laird so readily took you in under his own roof?’
Ailsa was shaking uncontrollably against him now. ‘Alasdhair?’ She tried to catch his eye, but he looked away, and it was that, the sliding away of his peat-smoked eyes, eyes that had looked so truthfully and so lovingly into hers only a few short hours ago, that made her realise the full, horrible implication of Morna’s bombshell. Only a few hours ago the world had seemed to have been made for them. It was she who had insisted they come here. If she had not. If they had gone back to Errin Mhor instead of coming here to Inveraray. If she could just unravel the last few hours. If she could unpick them back to the flaw like a tweed still on the loom, if she could tie the threads anew in a different way so that the pattern they weaved would be different. If she could only …
Alasdhair, too, was beginning to shake, for it felt like the whole world was rocking under his feet. ‘Why did you not say? Why did no one tell me?
Why …?’
‘I thought it for the best,’ Morna said. ‘No one else knew, save Alec, not even Lady Munro. Why land you with the label of bastard when Alec was willing to keep you as his own? A
nd then when he died I was so ashamed, so guilty, knowing I had hastened his death—it seemed so—and I never thought, you see. I thought you were in America.’
Alasdhair put Ailsa from him. Bereft, she stood, swaying, her mind frozen on that one thought. If only they could turn back the world, just a few short hours. But she knew only too well that ‘if only’ never worked. It seemed to her as if she and Alasdhair were destined after all to live their lives in the land of ‘if only’. The full horror of the implications had not yet sunk in. She did not think of her crime or of their sin. She could only think of ‘if only’ and ‘if only’ and ‘if only’. And Alasdhair. ‘Alasdhair.’ She said his name, like a plea from a death bed. She turned to him. She reached for him. But he flinched and that was it. The end. Their ending. And she wished with all her heart in that moment of agonising revelation that it would be hers, too. Now and for ever.
‘I’m sorry,’ Morna said again, ‘It never crossed my mind that you and she—the laird’s daughter—it never crossed my mind that you would look at each other in that way. He would never have allowed it.’
‘He didn’t. “Ailsa’s the very last girl you should be thinking of that in that way.” That’s what he said to me six years ago. That’s what he meant.’
‘Six years ago?’
‘When Ailsa and I first … our feelings for each other are of—were of long standing.’ Alasdhair’s voice cracked. He felt as if he were dissolving. An ominous silence filled the cottage. Outside, the sun still shone. The birds still sang. The fishermen fished and the workmen continued to labour on the Duke of Argyll’s new castle. Outside, the world went about its business oblivious. Inside, blackness brewed.
Morna, run out even of apologies, buried her head in her apron and wept, silent acrid tears.
Alasdhair stood motionless, his eyes glazed, his mind struggling to reassemble the facts into a logical order that made sense. That did not slay and flay. That did not destroy utterly.
Ailsa’s heart beat faster and faster. Her breathing was ragged. Her mind darted first one way, then the other. She could not think of facts, but only of colours. The shining silver of the future she and Alasdhair had planned. The deep crimson of their lovemaking. The burning gold of her love for him. She tried to clutch them to her heart, to keep them safe from the marauding black that threatened to cloak them all in its vileness. The sins of the father. The sins of her father. Alasdhair’s father.
‘No!’ Desperately, she tried to reach him. Only a few inches of floor separated them, but it felt like a vast void. The floor was moving under her feet, shuddering and tilting like a brewing storm. If she could just reach him, it would be all right. If he would just look at her, if she could just see the love he had for her in his eyes, it would be all right. None of this was true. It couldn’t be. ‘No.’ She reached for him, but he stepped back. A roaring in her ears made her stagger. ‘Alasdhair, say it’s not true.’
The room tilted. Ailsa felt her knees give way, but just before she fell, Alasdhair caught her, holding her tight against his chest, his grip painful, a pain she welcomed, for at least she could feel it. ‘Alasdhair.’ She burrowed her head into his chest. She drank in the achingly familiar smell of him. Her mind reeled, a swirling mass of turgid colours. Then blessed unconsciousness claimed her as she fainted clean away in his arms.
Alasdhair deposited her carefully on the bed. Leaning over, he stroked her hair from her face and kissed her icy cheek. ‘Look after her,’ he said tersely to Morna, standing beside him like a spectre. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To hell,’ Alasdhair barked and strode out of the longhouse.
He walked. He did not know where he walked, nor did he care. Along the banks of Loch Fyne he went, to the edge of the trees and then into the forest, where the gloomy ambiance suited his state of mind. He stumbled over the roots of the Caledonian pines that spread like the gnarled fossilised joints of ancient crones over the sparse earth. He splashed, indifferent to both wet and cold, through the burbling streams, swollen with the run-off from the mountain snow. He tramped over clumps of ferns unfurling from silver spores, over the sharp green shoots of bluebells and the soft browning velvet leaves of dying primroses. He tripped when his toe caught in a rabbit’s burrow, causing a startled roe deer to leap with balletic grace from a clearing. The low-hanging branches of the trees caught in his hair as it flew out behind him. Gorse clutched at the pleats of his plaid. Alasdhair strode on and on, away and away, falling into a kind of trance somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, almost numb in a grey twilight world where his unwitting sin lurked like an evil kelpie in the deepest cavern of his mind.
Eventually, he stopped. Eventually, he came to the realisation that running away was futile. The fate that awaited them, a life for ever apart, must be confronted. He could not, nor would he, wrench Ailsa from his heart, but he must cut her completely from his life.
Garnering all his resolution, with a leaden heart that would, he knew for certain, grow heavier as each year passed, Alasdhair turned around. Slowly, like a man facing the gallows, he walked back the way he had come, instinctively taking the same paths he had not even noticed himself choosing, a man on a tumbrel of his own making, heading inexorably towards destruction.
Back in the cottage, the pale creature who had once been Ailsa fought her way back to consciousness. She looked like a wraith. She felt like a will-o’-the-wisp, the fabled marsh creature made of smoke whose destiny it was to cast fatal spells over men. She had no words with which to express how she felt, not even to herself. She wanted nothing so much as to bury herself deep in a dark place like a wounded deer, to endure the lonely vigil that would be her life from now on. If she could not have Alasdhair—and she could not, she could not, she could not—then she would have nothing and no one.
Though she could see that Morna, too, was suffering greatly, Ailsa had nothing to offer that would give her comfort. She pitied Morna in a way that she did not pity herself. Her pain was too great for pity, the crime she had so innocently committed too all-encompassing for her to think beyond its existence. The full horror of it would no doubt dawn on her, and with it, perhaps, repentance and shame. But for now, Ailsa’s only way of dealing with the truth was to reject it by simply refusing to take it in.
Every part of her was frozen, save her love for Alasdhair. That continued to burn, feverish and defiant, a straining of her heart. She knew it was wrong, but she could not bring herself to slay it.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Ailsa struggled to her feet, brushing aside Morna’s outstretched arm, shaking her head at the offer of sustenance, for her throat felt as if it were closed. Gathering her arisaidh around her, she opened the door of the cottage and took a deep breath of fresh air. She must find him. When she knew he was safe, then she would leave him. But first she must find him.
She was stepping down from the path to the beach when a hand stayed her. A familiar hand. An achingly familiar body. ‘Alasdhair.’
‘Ailsa.’
They stared at each other for long moments. The world had changed utterly, yet it seemed utterly unchanged.
‘I thought you were gone,’ she whispered, her voice thin and parched.
‘I will be. Soon.’ His own sounded tortured.
‘Alasdhair, I …’
‘Don’t!’
‘If I had known, I would not have …’
‘Ailsa,’ he said, gentler now, ‘it wouldn’t have changed the truth.’
‘Your mother was right,’ she replied bitterly, ‘there is no such thing as the truth.’
‘No, you are wrong. The truth is what you feel in your heart. I love you. You are a part of me. You were made for me, and without you I won’t ever be complete. That love is not wrong, Ailsa—I won’t ever believe it is. I love you, and though it is a profanation, and I can never tell the world of it, I will always love you. If that is a sin, then it is one I will continue to commit, in thought if not in deed. This parting whi
ch must be is not an ending. I have you tucked in my heart. Though it feels as if I am slain, knowing I must never again feel your lips on mine, your hand in mine, my love is strong enough to transcend even that.’
‘Oh, Alasdhair,’ Ailsa said brokenly, ‘I have you in my heart, too, I promise. Always.’
‘I know you do. I know you do, Ailsa, and it is enough,’ he said fiercely, fighting with all his might the urge to take her in his arms. ‘It is enough,’ he repeated, determined to make it so. ‘It will be.’
They were too wrapped up in their own tragedy to notice her presence until she was upon them, too caught up in contemplating the pain and agony that awaited them. The terrible journey they knew they must undertake, from blissful togetherness to desolate separation, lay ahead.
She had left her horse at the howf, and come on foot. She was dressed entirely in black, her golden hair, which the years had not faded, concealed under a widow’s cap.
It was Ailsa who saw her first, startled by the motionless figure whose attention was focused on her in a way that reminded Ailsa of the Errin Mhor village women when the fleet was overdue. They would stand on the end of the pier just like this, still as statues, frozen between joy and grief until each boat landed and each man was accounted for.
‘Mother,’ Ailsa said numbly. ‘I don’t understand, what on earth are you doing here?’
‘Ailsa.’ Faced with her daughter and disconcerted by the bereft expression that was written over her beloved countenance, the extent of her task overwhelmed Christina Munro. Frozen by fear of failure or, worse, outright rejection, she took a faltering step towards Ailsa, then stopped. Any normal mother would envelop her daughter in a hug, but Lady Munro knew, having had ample time to reflect on the journey here, that she was about as far from being a normal mother as it was possible to be. ‘Ailsa, I had hoped I might find you here. I need to talk to you, explain. It is very important.’
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