by Julia London
“Milord,” he said.
“Go to your bed now. The lady is sleeping.”
The lad picked up his cloak and stumbled clumsily down the hall.
Arran walked down the hall to his study. It was a small room, the original purpose lost. He liked that it adjoined his dressing room. He sat himself at a desk stacked with papers and books, shipping ledgers and the household accounts. He’d been hard at work of late, preparing for a voyage that would take him to France to trade wool for cloth and wine, which he would then ferry to Ireland to sell or trade for leather goods.
Fergus appeared at the door of his study, looking bleary-eyed, his thinning hair in complete disarray. “Will you break your fast, laird?”
“Aye,” he said. “I’ll have it here. Send Jock to me when he comes.”
Jock joined him a quarter of an hour later. Unlike Fergus, Jock looked as fresh as a spring daffodil. He arched a thick, dark brow above a smug smile. “And how does the morning find you, laird?” he asked with much jocularity. “I expected you to be abed this morning.”
Arran smiled. “And risk a knife at my neck?”
Jock laughed.
“What does the day bring?” Arran asked.
“We’ve men training for unarmed conflict this morn,” Jock said, settling into a chair across from him.
Arran perked up at that. He had learned to fight at his father’s knee and now taught young men from his clan. His soldiers were widely regarded as some of the fiercest men in all of Britain. “I could use a good brawl just now,” he said, rubbing his eyes. There was nothing quite like throwing a punch or two when he was feeling at sixes and sevens, and he was certainly feeling that way this morning. Disappointment, anger, hope and carnal bliss were all mixing dangerously in him.
Why did women have to be so bloody treacherous?
“Did you question the Englishmen?” he asked.
Jock nodded. “Aye, that I did. But they were no’ forthcoming.”
“And the maid?”
“A cake-headed lass, that one,” Jock said with a flick of his wrist. “What do you make of it all?”
“I donna know,” Arran admitted. He sighed, removed the vellum from his pocket and tossed it onto the desk. “I caught her in the night at my chest of drawers with this almost in hand,” he said.
“Ah. Having a look about, was she?”
“I can think of only two reasons she’s come back. Either her father has put her out of the house...or he’s sent her here for a reason. A pampered woman does no’ undertake such a long journey by her own doing.”
“But what reason?” Jock asked. He looked at the letter Arran had tossed onto the desk, but he made no move to take it. He knew what it said—MacLeary had written to warn them about rumblings from England. It was well-known that some of the more influential Jacobite clansmen—Scots who were aligned with the son of the deposed king, James Stuart—were increasingly unhappy with the union and oppressive taxation. Rumors abounded that there were those who were plotting a second time to put James Stuart on the throne. Then again, wild rumors were commonplace since the Acts of Union were signed three years ago. This time was different, however, as MacLeary had written that Arran’s name had been included as one of the unhappy chieftains. It was the first time he had been mentioned as a Jacobite.
Arran had been surprised by the contents of the letter when he’d first received it. He’d been very careful to walk a thin line between chieftains who wanted Scottish independence and the Scotsmen who saw opportunities in the union with England. Certainly he had taken advantage of the union by increasing his trade with France and Ireland. He’d built a wealth where most clans were suffering. He raised cattle and sheep he sent to Glasgow and Edinburgh markets. He traded wool for silks with France. He trained soldiers who found good wages with the English army. And the glen that surrounded Balhaire had soil rich enough that he could grow enough food to feed his own clan. He was one of the few chieftains who had managed to stem the rising tide of emigration and provide for his people.
He was not a Jacobite, and suddenly to be labeled as one had baffled him. Something was definitely amiss.
A kitchen wench appeared with a tray. She set it before Arran, dipped a curtsy and scurried out.
“I donna know what Norwood is about,” Arran said between healthy bites of his breakfast. “But it is no coincidence that my wife should miraculously appear and profess a change of heart so soon after I received that letter, aye?”
“Aye,” said Jock. “My guess is that he has sent her. But for what reason?”
Arran shook his head. “I’ve done my duty by her, have I no’? I’ve sent her money. I’ve said no’ a single ill word against her or him.”
Jock shrugged. “Perhaps it is a coincidence. Perhaps it is only that he believes a wife belongs with her husband and has turned her out.”
“No,” Arran said. “He’d have turned her out long ago were that the reason. It is something more. And to have my name mentioned with the Jacobites just before she has come...it stinks to heaven, it does.”
Jock nodded. “What do you intend to do, then?”
Arran dropped his fork and leaned back, looking toward the window. The sun was just coming up on the day, rising up over the hills, casting long purple shadows. As much as he’d enjoyed last night, he didn’t trust her. This homecoming was gravely wrong.
There was something else niggling at him, too. The sadness he’d seen in her eyes. Did she regret what she’d done three years ago? Or did she regret that she was about to slide the knife into his back? “By the by, how long has it been since you’ve had word from Dermid?” he asked, referring to the man he kept in England to keep eyes on his wife.
Jock thought about it. “A month. Perhaps longer.”
Arran frowned at that. “It’s no’ like the lad to have allowed something like this to have happened without sending word.”
“It’s no’ like him,” Jock agreed. “What do you intend to do?”
Arran dropped the last bit of bread and put his hand to his abdomen. He was suddenly filled with foreboding. “Send her back to England,” he said. “Find four of our best men to accompany her and the fops she rode in with. I’ll give her the news myself.”
Jock stood to go.
“Did you have a look through her things?” Arran asked as Jock walked across the room.
“Aye,” Jock said with a sigh. He looked back at Arran. “We had to subdue her maid, we did. The lass bloody well bit me,” he added, holding out his hand to show Arran. He gave a curious shake of his head. Poor Jock would always be confounded by women. “I found nothing but gowns and shoes and the like,” Jock continued. “Quite a lot of it, too—I’ve never understood why a woman needs so many bloody shoes. A lot of bother if you ask me.”
Jock quit the study, leaving Arran alone.
He looked to the small window. Why, Margot? Have you no’ harmed me enough?
The memory of her flight from him had dulled with time, certainly, but there were still moments that the pain still felt raw, an open wound exposed to bitter wind.
He hadn’t been surprised by her departure, not really. They had argued several days before, at an impasse once more about the course of their marriage. She couldn’t seem to find her bearings at Balhaire. She had expectations that did not fit their clan and, Arran could admit, his clan had expectations of Margot that she’d been too young and inexperienced to meet.
He’d thought long and hard about this over the years, and he realized now what he didn’t really understand then—Margot Armstrong had been pampered and served from the day she was born. She knew no other way. But at Balhaire, the clan was family—everyone contributed to the greater good. Arran had expected, had assumed, that she would adopt this way of life. Unfortunately, the very few attempts Margot made had been badly
done, from a place of superiority. And his clan... Diah, but they would give no quarter.
It had been a fractious four months of trial and error, and yet Arran had seen a side to Margot that he’d come to adore.
He heard the door of his study swing open and turned his head; Old Roy had followed his scent and ambled over to Arran to have his head scratched.
Arran smiled down at the dog, suddenly reminded of a cold winter morning he’d coaxed Margot out of her rooms and down to the kennels, where a litter of weaned pups were frolicking in a box of straw. They would be herding dogs, but that morning they were just black-and-white balls of soft cotton, tumbling over each other and onto the straw that had been lain down for them.
He would never forget the look of delight on Margot’s face. She’d fallen to her knees, laughing as a pair of them had climbed up onto her lap. Arran, too, went down on a knee beside her, and the two of them had remained in that small space with the pups, laughing together at their ungainly attempts to play and move. They had playfully named the five pups. She’d told him about a small dog she’d had as a child, one that she would dress in clothes the housekeeper made for her and take about the garden in a perambulator.
There were other moments like that—unguarded, easy, companionable moments when Arran had seen the promise of their union. Moments when he’d felt things for his beautiful wife he would not have thought were possible only weeks before. He’d seen another side of Margot, and he had loved her.
Margot clearly had not shared his optimistic vision. Why they’d argued so vehemently that day, he could no longer recall. He’d been gone for a few days, hunting red stags. He’d been tired and hungry, and what he recalled most vividly were the tears streaking her face, another round of tears he despised and was helpless to understand. “I want to go home,” she’d said flatly. “I don’t want to live here like this.”
“Aye, then, go. We’ll all be the better for it,” he’d snapped, and he’d stormed out of her room, furious with her, with himself.
But he hadn’t meant it.
Those were angry words, spoken in a moment of fury. He had let them disappear into thin air with so many other angry words. He’d been careless, thoughtless—because he had believed that as they had sworn to each other and to God that they would stride forward in conjugal fealty, somehow they would forge a path in spite of their many differences.
Jock told him she was leaving a day or two later, and Arran still didn’t believe it. He went about his tasks that morning, disbelieving. He told Jock to let her go if that was what she wanted, because he never believed she would.
Diah, what a fool.
He didn’t like to think of that day. It still pained him—aye, pain, the sort of pain he’d never in his life experienced. He’d come riding up from the cove with a few of his men and had seen the coach pulling away from Balhaire. He had reined to a halt, had glared at her as she’d passed and as the agony of this reality had settled into his marrow. The burn was deep—he was humiliated before his clan and at the same time made to understand what an ignorant man he was. And the burn was accompanied by the ache of watching someone leave him, someone whom he had, against all odds, come to care for very much.
A fool. There was no other word for him.
Arran would never forget that pain, as it burned in him yet. And he realized, as he scratched Old Roy behind the ears, that the time for reconciliation had come and gone. He’d not be made a fool of again.
CHAPTER SIX
MARGOT WAS AWAKENED by a dour-faced woman who announced a bath would be drawn for her, then shoved the draperies aside with such verve that Margot cried out when she was blinded by the sun. “Thank you,” she said, turning her face to the pillow. “Would you be so kind as to send my maid?”
The woman muttered something on the way out. Margot waited until she heard the door close before she pushed herself up to sit and brushed back the hair from her eyes. She was exhausted. And deliciously sore. And confused.
Last night had not been the homecoming she’d expected. Arran had confounded her. The passion he’d shown her—raw, formidable anger and desire—had moved her. She’d been dangerously inflamed by it, her body wanting the coarseness of it all.
But then there had been that slender moment, that tender caress. It had hardly happened at all—but she had felt it. She had seen it. And then he had made her turn her head.
What did it mean? Did he despise her? Was there a part of him that didn’t? Or had it been only a moment?
Arran seemed different to her now. Older. Wiser. Much more sure of himself than he’d been before. And whatever he’d meant by that touch, however truthful, it had awakened emotions Margot was not prepared to face. Such as regret. Buckets and buckets of regret for leaving him at all. For not having left sooner. Regret that she’d not known how to defy her father and never enter this marriage, regret that she’d allowed herself to be ruled by her emotions for the short months she’d spent here.
In the time she’d been gone from Balhaire, Margot had never forgotten what her husband aroused in her. But the actual physical sensations, so powerful in the course of the act, had dimmed with time. The animal attraction and unbridled pleasure he’d shown her in this bed last night had staggered her.
Before, with few words between them, she’d always felt cherished and beautiful. But the man who showed her that depth of passion was never the same man who rode out with his men the next morning. The man who whispered his devotion to her in this bed was not the same man who seemed inconvenienced by her beyond this room.
And yet, last night, she’d felt such longing. Sweet Jesus, such undiluted yearning filling her veins and heart. For what, exactly, Margot didn’t know. But she’d realized, after they’d come together a second time, that something was missing in her, something vital, and the hunger felt fresh.
Margot didn’t hate Arran, had never hated Arran—but she had hated her situation with such intensity that it had eaten away at her and perhaps had clouded her judgment at times. The transition to Scotland had been difficult, to be sure. Her rage had simmered, then turned wild over the circumstances of her marriage, forced by a father who’d demanded her loyalty at the tender age of seventeen, who had allowed her to be carted off without any real knowledge of the world at all, much less the ruggedness of the Highlands—or marriage, for that matter—and there had left her to fend for herself while her husband carried on with his clan.
It had been all too much for her. That last argument with Arran had been explosive and jarring, both of them shouting. She’d tried to express her unhappiness to Arran, how she felt as if she were a single boat on a vast ocean, floating along with no oars and no hope of rescue.
“God help us,” he’d said. “For you’re no’ the only ship adrift in this marriage, Margot.”
She never asked him what he meant by that.
Oh, but there were so many hurtful things said between them. And she’d had no one to go to, no friends in Scotland. It seemed like the harder she tried, the less anyone wanted to befriend her.
Perhaps it hardly mattered, because in the end, she lost patience with the situation entirely.
She left Scotland shortly after that final argument. It hadn’t been an escape, really, because as the coach was pulling through the massive gates of Balhaire, Arran and his men had come riding up from the sea. He had reined to a halt to the side of the road to let the coach pass. She would never forget the stony look he gave her as the coach slowly rolled by. He remained on his horse, his fists clenched as tightly as his jaw, watching her go.
He hadn’t tried to stop her. She’d imagined him happy to be relieved of her.
When the coach had passed, he spurred his horse through the gates and behind the castle walls, and his men had followed him, and that was the last she saw of him. She had collapsed onto the leather squabs of the co
ach, heartbroken. She’d been such a foolish girl then, wanting both worlds. She’d wanted desperately to go home, away from that crude castle and society. But she had also wanted him to fight for her.
Ah, what silly, romantic notions lived in the minds of girls who were not yet women.
In England, with time, Margot had managed to detach what feelings she had for Arran Mackenzie and go on about her life. Her father had been unhappy with her, but he’d assured her he understood. “Of course it is well-known that the Highlands are full of barbarians,” he’d said without hesitation. She’d thought it odd that he did not seem to see the irony in how he had been quite at ease marrying his daughter off to one. “You’ve done your duty, my girl.” Now that he had his agreements and lands in Scotland, made inviolable by her marriage to Mackenzie, he’d seemed satisfied.
He’d left Margot well enough alone, and she had turned her attention to...what? Nothing. There was no life to speak of as an estranged wife of some distant Scottish chieftain. She was a novelty—that was all. A married woman with no husband in sight who enjoyed vast liberties that other women did not. Margot had a robust social life, free to come and go as she pleased. She hosted soirees and flirted with gentlemen. She attended balls and suppers and flirted with more gentlemen. She was wanted by those men, pursued and courted by those men. However, that attention never seemed enough.
Their desire for her—and hers for them, no matter how shallow—only added to the unease in her. Margot could see years stretching out before her with a lot of flirting and not much else, because she was married. She had opportunity to be touched, of course—men pursued her for that very reason. But Margot had taken a vow before God to remain faithful. She couldn’t dishonor her word so completely and irrevocably. She was clinging to the last shreds of her dignity and her moral compass as it was. She began to feel quite numbed by her predicament, as if she was merely going through each day, waiting for something.
