A Kind of Magic (10 page)

“He could have sent Walter in his place,” Rosemary agreed.

“Especially after you took the time to make the setting feel so romantic.”

Wait a minute
, Maddie thought.
I sound as if I regret Rowan’s absence.
She didn’t of course, except for the matter of the unfinished business of consummating the marriage.

Business that was going to remain unfinished. She told herself that the only reason she regretted Rowan or any of the Murrays’ absence was because hunting cattle thieves was dangerous.

“No one’s going to get hurt are they?” she asked, and knew it was a stupid question. Highland history was full of the bloody deeds performed during such livestock raids.

“Not your Rowan,” Rosemary reassured her. “He’s a mighty warrior.”

“All our men are,” Flora said. “And the Harboths are cowards to a man.”

“Not so,” Micaela countered quickly. “Even the Harboths have one or two brave men.”

“I can think of one or two,” Rosemary agreed.

Micaela lifted her head proudly. Her eyes blazed with anger. “Even Rowan has said so. Besides, perhaps it was Sassenachs who stole the cattle,” she suggested.

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“You know well it was none other than the thieving Harboths,” Flora insisted.

It looked as if Micaela and the other woman were about to get into a shouting match. Maddie decided to try to divert their attention. “I don’t think that many Lowlanders—Sassenachs as you call them—come up this far north if they can help it.

Maybe it was raiders from the Orkneys,” she added for Micaela’s sake. The girl seemed to admire the enemy Harboth clan.

“Aye, that could be so,” Rosemary conceded.

“Are you from the Orkneys?” Flora asked.

Maddie was happy to change the subject. “No,” she told the women. “Though I have been as far north as Fair Isle.”

Farther actually, but she wasn’t going to try to explain working on a North Sea oil rig to these women. They’d find a metal island serviced by dragonfly-like helicopters as magical as they did the alleged fairies who lived in their hills.

“Perhaps you’re from the Sassenach land below the Great Glen, my lady?” Flora suggested.

“No, she’s from the fairy folk,” Micaela answered.

“I am not. I’m—” Maddie began.

But she was cut off by Rosemary. “Where are you from, my lady? We’ve all wondered where Rowan found you and who your people might be.”

These people believed in supernatural forces. And Rowan had showed no surprise at the notion that she’d been brought back through time. In fact, he seemed to have thought of it before she had. Maddie wasn’t ready to talk about something she found incomprehensible.

“My family came from the Highlands,” she told the curious women. “They moved to a faraway land over a century ago.” That was all she could reasonably tell them.

Maddie put down her knitting and stood up. “You know, Rosemary, I think I might get into this lady of the castle thing after all. I think it’s about time I took a tour of Cape Wrath.”

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The one thing Rowan wanted to do but couldn’t was kill Burke Harboth. It wasn’t just that the lad was a Harboth that made him so annoying. No, it was something about the way he looked—the ripe barley color of the hair that hung in a thick braid down his back, the eyes as blue as a deep cold loch, his wide full lips. Only the strength evident in his square jaw and the width of his shoulders saved him from being as beautiful as a maiden.

It wasn’t Burke’s looks that stayed Rowan’s hand or the flag of truce the younger man carried. It was the fact that the words he’d shouted as he rode toward Rowan’s band of warriors carried the ring of truth. There was another reason as well but Rowan carefully refused to think about it.

“So,” Rowan said, keeping his attention fully on the current problem, “if the Harboths didn’t take my cattle, who did?”

Behind him someone muttered, it was Angus, he thought, “He’s too pretty to trust.”

“But the tracks don’t lead toward Harboth land,” Aidan pointed out.

“He’s still a Harboth.”

“Aye,” Father Andrew agreed. “Cut him down and let’s be on our way.”

Rowan shot an angry glance at the priest. “Did you not speak to us about loving thy neighbor not a sennight ago?”

“Aye,” Andrew replied. “But I was na thinking of the Harboths at the time.”

“Nor should you have been,” Rowan conceded.

“The brotherhood of man is all very well in the abstract,” Burke Harboth spoke up,

“but damned inconvenient in the particulars.”

Burke Harboth had been sent away to Paris by his older brother to study at the university there. He hadn’t come back a priest as many a father and brother in the district had fervently hoped. He’d hardly said an intelligible word since he got back either. Somehow his newfound gift of speech made him even more attractive to the women or so Rowan had heard. It just made the menfolk, at least those riding with Rowan, grumble angrily.

“I’m here to help you,” Burke added.

Rowan silenced the complaints with a wave of his hand. He’d spent a hard, rain-soaked night sleeping on the ground, followed by the better part of a rain-soaked day in the saddle. He was tired of riding through drenched heather and churned up mud left by the passing livestock. Dogged though he was in the pursuit of what was rightfully his, he wearied of the weather and the chase. He wanted to go home to his warm bed, 58

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though his mind was more on the unfinished business he’d left there than on resting.

He had to admit that duty first or not, he’d far rather be riding his woman than a horse.

He glowered at the cocky lad before him. “Why would a Harboth offer to help us?”

“Why indeed?” Burke threw back his head and laughed, as if at some private joke.

Rowan refrained from asking for an explanation.

“He wants his cattle back and it’s easier for us to do his work for him,” Rowan said.

“It’s a trap, Rowan,” Walter advised. Angus, Andrew and Aidan nodded their agreement while the rest muttered and glowered at the fair-faced, seemingly relaxed Harboth lad.

“The three men we found dead yesterday were Harboths,” Rowan reminded them, adding, “Pity it wasn’t the Murrays who killed them.”

“I know you didn’t have anything to do with my clansmens’ death,” Burke told him. “I’ve been following close enough to know everything you’ve done since leaving Cape Wrath. I was following after our own stolen cattle when I came across the trail of your beasts. You came across that trail as well.”

“Someone’s stealing from both of us,” Rowan agreed.

“And letting us think we’re stealing from each other. Gives them time to get away while we go after our usual enemies.”

“Not a bad plan,” Rowan said. “I hate thinking the Norsemen from Orkney have grown so clever and so familiar with our ways.”

“They’ve been raiding our coast for years—”

“Your coast!” Angus interrupted. “The shore belongs to the Murrays as well you know, you thieving Harboth!”

Men shouted. Swords were drawn. Someone began to chant a war song. And the rain just kept coming down. Rowan held up a hand to halt the clamor and all the while, Burke Harboth looked on with eyes wide with amusement. His nonchalance alone was enough to make Rowan want to strike him.

Rowan wished the lad would go to the devil, but since the earth wasn’t likely to open beneath him any time soon and Rowan grudgingly agreed with him, there was nothing to do but say, “Lead on, Burke Harboth. Just know that you’ll be the first to die if this is a trap you’re leading us to.”

The men of the Murray clan protested but Rowan had his way and they set off through the wet heather with a Harboth riding in their midst.

* * * * *

“I’m sorry, I’m just not into all this New Age stuff.” Maddie took her hand out of Rosemary’s grasp and almost unconsciously wiped her palm on the rough wool of her plaid skirt.

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Rosemary gave her a puzzled look. “There’s nothing new in the old wisdom. The lines in your hand tell your life story.”

“No they don’t.”

Micaela leaned forward. “As above, so below,” she said.

“Huh?”

“As the universe, so too the soul.”

“What?”

“The lass means that the grand scheme of things can be discerned from studying what is around us,” Rosemary explained. “Our fates are written in the stars, in many signs and portents and in our palms. Magic is everywhere.”

“That’s what I was afraid she meant.” Maddie tried smiling at the earnest young woman. “Mickey, honey, the world doesn’t run on all that paranormal mumbo jumbo.

There are rules to the universe, sure, but they’re the rules of science. You know as Einstein said, ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe…’ Of course from what I’ve been reading on Chaos Theory lately it seems as if maybe God not only plays dice but they’re loaded.”
Or I wouldn’t have ended up several centuries from where I’m supposed to be
, she added to herself.

“There are logical rules to the way the world is set up. We humans just haven’t discovered them all yet.”

Rosemary beamed. “Precisely. That’s why we study magic.”

“No,” Maddie countered. “That’s why we study science.”

The women looked at her with a benign patience that was beginning to get on her nerves. She sighed. She didn’t know why she was bothering. This was the thirteenth century, for heaven’s sake! Of course, just because it was the past, it didn’t mean people had to remain ignorant and superstitious. The Scots she knew in her own time were a hardheaded practical lot, some of the finest scientists and engineers in the world. She was of Scottish descent herself and she didn’t have an unrealistic bone in her body.

Maddie looked up from where she sat between the women on a bench in the courtyard. As she glanced up, the sun came out from behind a patch of clouds. The heavy rain of the last few days was finally giving way to sunny weather. She wondered when the men would get home. She wondered if they’d run into trouble. Not that it mattered on a personal level of course, if Rowan Murray was safe and well. What mattered was that these were dangerous times, the more armed men a stronghold had, the safer it was for the noncombatants.

What also had to matter, she thought, must be the attitude of the people who dwelled inside the thick walls of Cape Wrath. She was afraid that these people might be more likely to rely on some ridiculous spell or chant or something than on more realistic resources. That could not be good for the survival of the population. Something really ought to be done about their attitudes.

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Before she could launch into a lecture on the folly of their erroneous beliefs, Rosemary said, “I can’t help it if you don’t like what the lines in your hand show to be true.”

Maddie fervently wished she hadn’t let Rosemary have a look at her palm. At first she hadn’t even realized that the woman had fortune telling in mind since Rosemary’s request came after Maddie complained that she was getting calluses from trying to learn how to spin wool.

She’d been surprised when Rosemary said, “You’ll have a long adventurous life.

Your love will have a rocky start but you’ll be giving our Rowan at least four strapping sons.”

She didn’t want to have an adventurous life. Nor did she have any intention of giving Rowan Murray sons. Besides, not only was the prediction unscientific, she had no intention of staying around long enough to give anyone four strapping anythings.

“I shall enjoy having four nephews,” Micaela said.

“I’m not having any—”

“Did you see any daughters, Rosemary?” Micaela forged on over Maddie’s protest.

“Two.”

“No!” Maddie was on her feet before she realized she’d shouted. When she whirled around to face them, she saw that the women were laughing at her.

“Lady Maddie doesn’t believe in our ignorant superstitions,” Rosemary said, eyes twinkling with merriment.

“No, of course not,” Micaela agreed.

“That must be why she just jumped as if someone had stuck her with a pin.”

Maddie began to laugh herself. “All right, you got me,” she acknowledged. She pointed at Rosemary. “I don’t believe in palm reading, but it’s unnerving to be told I’m going to have six babies.”

“That’s because you hunger to hold a child of your own,” Rosemary said.

“No way. I’m too old to start having babies.” Besides, she didn’t have a husband, not really. Never mind the longings that had plagued her before she ended up in the past, her arrangement with Rowan wasn’t going to do anything to fulfill them. All she had here was an agreement to live with a man for a year and a day. It wasn’t the same as having the love and commitment she knew was necessary for raising a child. Besides, she didn’t intend to let Rowan Murray close enough for the subject—or anything else—

to come up.

“I don’t have time start a family,” she reminded the staring women.

“Rowan will have some say in that,” Rosemary answered.

“And you only need one time to make a baby,” Micaela added, and blushed.

Which was another good reason not to go to bed with Rowan Murray. Maddie didn’t know anything about birth control, at least she hadn’t had any hands-on 61

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experience with the subject. Besides, she doubted if a Highland laird, probably used to having his way with every woman in the countryside, would graciously consent to slipping into a condom even if she had any on her.

I’m not going to think about that right now,
she decided, even though she couldn’t stop herself from conjuring up an image of how he looked completely unclothed.

“You’re blushing, Lady Maddie,” Micaela said.

“She does that quite a bit. No doubt thinking of our Rowan,” she added with a canny nod.

“I admit it,” Maddie answered. She crossed her arms under her breasts. She turned away. “But not for the reasons you think.”

Rosemary stood and put a hand on her shoulder. “Was he rough with you then?