book JdM6x1406931-20978754 (12 page)

“It’s all balance, lass,” Angus said. “These two beggars have very little of it, more’s the pity, but you have a very great deal.”

“Think of their poor children,” said Alan to Calum.

“Aye—the king will take them and put them in his menagerie, and all the Lowlanders will come and point at them, while the poor things have to walk atop a wee rope all day,” replied Calum.

Angus, without anger, toppled Calum to the ground by means of what seemed the slightest of pushes to the man’s shoulder. Alan doubled up laughing, and Angus flicked out a foot and had him down atop his brother.

The sight was so comical that Elisabeth felt she had never laughed so hard in her whole life. Angus, his hands on his knees, looking at the brothers, turned his head to watch her, helpless in her mirth, and then without warning—it was always without warning, she would have to remember that—he had toppled her, too, into his arms, and he was kissing the soul, it felt, from out her body.

Chapter Fourteen

Elisabeth improved more quickly than Angus could credit. He thought often while they were practicing first the simple moves and then, to his surprise, the more difficult ones that he taught her, of the idea that had passed through his mind in the barn at Urquhart, that she could improve if she had a man. After a lifetime of what felt like bad luck—a father who lived only to drink more whiskey, sheep lost to the MacDonalds summer after summer, and fleeces lost to them in the raid on Urquhart to top the lot—it seemed he had finally had this very most important stroke of luck just when he needed it most.

So when, after a month of nightly practice with the dirk, she asked him to teach her to swing the claymore, he did not resist, though he told her that she would grow frustrated very quickly because of the length of the thing—his was almost exactly as tall as Elisabeth herself—not to mention its weight. The footwork, though, was not very different from what she had learned already, and though he could not think when she might ever be called upon to fight with the sword, and though her arms did become quickly tired when using it, she made a very creditable sight after a fortnight’s work, because of the same native balance that seemed more and more to be a basic part of her character.

Her body was lean and hard beneath his, now, when he took her of a night, but it made the struggle all the better, and when she spent with her eagle’s cry, she looked into his eyes, and he could see that in the abandon with which she writhed against him there was a sort of balance in her need for him and his need for her.

The strap never seemed to stay on its hook for long. At first, he had resisted Elisabeth’s request that he strap her when she made mistakes in her footwork. “That’s no way to teach, lass,” he said. “You learn by doing, not by laying over a bed to have your bottom beat.” By the Rood, he wished his Da had known that.

“But,” she pleaded, “I need to know that you care to correct my faults, Angus.”

Indeed, he was nothing loath, when it came to it, to strap his bride’s lovely bottom and thighs until they were bright red and she begged him to take her backside with his yard, saying, “My feet were so slow tonight, My Lord. I must have a reminder that you expect more of me!”

He could, he supposed, see the value of such reminders, and fucking Elisabeth’s shapely, noble arse gave him more pleasure than he had ever thought he could feel. But as he considered the matter, the problem of her enjoying her chastisement too much did loom larger and larger.

He solved that difficulty one day to the relief of both of them. After a strapping for a missed parry, when Elisabeth expected to feel his yard first in her cunny and then in her backside, he brought out an object he had been hard at work on, made of stiffened leather, as broad as his yard, though not nearly so long, and presented it to Elisabeth’s mouth. The thing had a kind of bulb at the end so that it would stay inside her and a broader, but still little, handle at its end so that it wouldn’t vanish into her entirely.

“Get it ready, wife,” he said in his tone of authority.

“What?” she asked. “I—”

“Obey me, Elisabeth. Open your mouth and get this lovely little thing ready to remind you to parry next time.”

“But, wh—”

Angus delivered a hard spank to her already sore bottom, and she yelped.

“Do as I say, Elisabeth.”

She closed her mouth hard and made an angry face at him, so he spanked her again and kept spanking her, two on the right then two on the left, until, with a grimace, she opened her mouth and let him insert the little leather bung—as he had named it to himself—inside it.

The sight of Elisabeth suckling on it as he moved the thing in and out of her mouth was so diverting he almost suspended the exercise to replace the bung with his yard, but though he had been reluctant at first to give her this kind of discipline because of his memories of his father’s harshness with the strap, he had come to see the value of it. A missed parry was not something Elisabeth would survive should she ever have to fight. If it required that she be humiliated so that she did not underestimate the importance he placed upon such things, he was happy to do his best to find ways to accomplish that humiliation.

He withdrew the bung from her mouth. “Hold your arse open, now, wife,” he said. “You are going to wear this bung to teach you not to be so slow with your blade.”

“Oh, My Lord—Angus… please, no…”

“Do you want me to call in Calum and Alan to see?”

“Angus! You would never!”

“Perhaps not, but I am going to have to find a way to persuade you to obey me when I wish to punish you as I think you deserve. Open your bottom.”

Slowly, she put her hands back behind her and took the punished cheeks in them. She tugged as he watched, enchanted, and he saw the tight little dimple that he had to confess he had come to love above almost everything on earth. To it he presented the point of the bung, moist with Elisabeth’s own spittle, and pushed gently.

She responded with an inarticulate, humiliated whimper, which rose to a scream as he kept pushing until at last the bung was inside her. He removed her hands from her cheeks and watched with satisfaction as those prim, pink apples closed to show only the handle of the bung. Standing up, he rolled her arisaid and her shift together and tucked them into her belt.

“Go tend the hearth, wife,” he said gruffly, trying to keep the amusement out of his voice.

“Oh, no—Angus, no—not like this.”

“Do as I say, Elisabeth.”

Slowly and reluctantly, moving carefully, he could tell, to avoid as much as possible feeling the way the leather bung claimed her backside, she rose from the bed. The sight of her going to the hearth with her skirt raised high to reveal her punishment seemed to him the strongest possible confirmation that he had found a way of chastising her that would at least serve the purpose. The sight of her bending to tend the embers, so that he could see not only the bung in her bottom but her sweet little cunny as well, peeping between her thighs, however, made him wonder whether he could hold his resolve not to give her his yard until she had worn the bung for an hour.

* * *

The raids continued in their turn-and-turn-again style, as they always had, and like as not, always would. Angus and the lads, as they were known at Achmonie, gained a few more sheep than they lost, so that when shearing time came round again to find Elisabeth able to best Alan when they sparred with wooden dirks and to wield the claymore for a quarter-hour before her arms began to tire, there was more wool to card than there had been at Glanaidh in many a year.

They had sheared half their flock when Big Alan came running up the road one morning. “The laird’s back!” he said before Angus had even bid him a good day. “You had best hide that lass of yours, I’m thinking.”

“Talk sense, man!”

“Look at the loch, Angus.”

Ten strides took him to a vantage point where he had a fine view of Loch Ness. He saw, just off Urquhart in Enrick bight, ten big loch boats at a guess, low in the water.

Big Alan had followed him. “They’re up from Fort William, sure enough,” he said.

Now Elisabeth had run out of the house to join them. She saw the boats and turned to Angus with a questioning look in her blue eyes,

“It’s your father, dearling,” Angus said.

“So many boats!” Elisabeth replied. “He must…”

“He must be here to rebuild the castle,” Angus said grimly.

He had been terrified, he had to admit to himself, that she would greet the news with foolish joy, but the look on her face told him that these tidings did not please her. Perhaps in her heart she still wanted her castle to rise again, but he saw in her eyes that she did not want it to rise this way, with her father as its lord.

“We’ll be called thither before too long, Angus,” Big Alan said. “I do not see any hope of keeping the knowledge from him that you have wed his daughter.”

“Nor would I try,” Angus said. “Elisabeth came to me of her free will, and we are wed before God and man. I am a freehold crofter, as good a man as any laird.”

Elisabeth put her arm around his waist. He looked down at her to see that her eyes were full of tears. “That you are, Angus MacGregor,” she said. “And you are my laird as well.”

* * *

The summons came the next day, in the form of a troop of Lowland men-at-arms riding up the little road on horseback—a rare sight in the Highlands at any time and one unknown in the year since the MacDonalds had stolen all the horses from Urquhart on the day before Angus’ wedding day, which was how he could not but think of the day the castle was sacked.

“The MacGregors are called to meet with the Chief of Clan Grant on the morrow at his castle,” said their leader. Whatever William Grant knew about the fate of his daughter, this captain did not know it, it appeared.

When the men-at-arms had gone, Elisabeth emerged from the croft-house.

“We are summoned,” Angus said.

“I shall go with you,” she said.

“Aye, Elisabeth, I think you must.”

* * *

She looked, in her plain arisaid, even more beautiful to him than she had in her silk gown the day he first saw her, about to fall into the mire. That had been the last time either of them had seen Urquhart. She had hooded herself in the plaid entirely, but out from that darkness he could see her sky-blue eyes peering, and even though he could not see the red-gold tresses in their kertch, his mind painted them there, and his heart filled with anxious love for her, his Highland bride who had been intended for a Lowland princeling.

As they walked through the little town towards the curtain wall of the castle, signs of the rebuilding were everywhere. The disused warehouses were full of stores, now, and as they approached the moat, they saw that the gates and portcullis were just being made fast—their new iron gleaming darkly in the bright sun that played off the waters of the loch.

The meeting of the allied clans took place in the nether bailey, by the little chapel that was the only thing to which the MacDonalds had not laid waste. Elisabeth drew a great many puzzled looks as the only woman present, but hidden by the hood of her arisaid, she had not been recognized.

William Grant and Sir James Gordon, his steward, emerged from the great hall. Grant had grown even portlier in the intervening year, when perhaps he should have been kept lean by the effort of maintaining his claim to Urquhart, and his clothing was even more ostentatiously the rich stuff of Lowland lords. Angus hoped that Elisabeth could see how ridiculous he looked, even as he was pained for her to have to hear the grumbling of the other MacGregors around them, to see the dandy who led them by hereditary right.

“Welcome back to this great fortress, my clansmen,” Grant began. “I call you here to declare that Clan Grant has the full support of His Majesty King James and that His Majesty has tendered that support in men and in goods. Urquhart will be rebuilt, at speed.” There was a faint cheer, and Grant beamed. “Let me also declare,” he said, “that it is my intention to support my allies in their warlike actions. Though I cannot promise my own resources, bespoke as they are from His Majesty, I can say that tales of the daring of the Gordons and the MacGregors will always have an eager audience in this great hall behind me.”

Another faint cheer went up as Gordon whispered to Grant, briefly. Grant colored, visibly, and said to his steward angrily, “Yes, that is understood.” Gordon whispered again, and then Grant turned back to the Highlanders and said, “It is to be understood, of course, that by supporting you in war, I mean in a moral and an ethical sense.”

There was confused silence at that. Grant continued, “Well, then. I thank you for answering my call, and I look forward to the great banquet that will ornament the final completion of this glorious castle’s renewal!”

Chapter Fifteen

Elisabeth could hardly believe her father’s cravenness. She could not tell whether the Highlanders understood that he had just told them that he was too cowardly to help them in their clan warfare, but the message had not been lost on her, and she had blushed furiously for the disgrace he was bringing upon his own blood and hers.

She found she could not help herself but was striding forward towards him, until she stood only three paces away. Until the last moment, when she was lowering the hooded wool of her arisaid, he had no notion of who she might be and wore only an unpleasant sneer, as if at the temerity of a Highland woman coming into his keep.

“Good day, Father,” she said.

It was Sir James who spoke first. “Elisabeth! My Lady…”

“We thought you…” her father said.

“I imagine you thought me dead,” Elisabeth replied, “though from the regard you paid to my memory in your address a few moments since I wonder whether you rather had simply forgot I was ever born.”