book JdM6x1406931-20978754 (4 page)

“For what?”

“For saving you from the stocks, you pig’s arse.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, lad. Did you do something that any MacGregor would not have done for another?”

Calum twisted his mouth. “Does risking my neck with the MacDonalds running in like rats to the mill earn no gratitude, then, when my kinsman has lost us our fleeces simply because he could not keep a laugh inside his fool belly, earn no gratitude from Angus MacGregor?”

“I thank you, Calum MacGregor, for taking so long to free me that I had to save the laird’s daughter from being ravished by Ian MacDonald and his lads instead of being away in good time. I thank you that I had to break the nose of the MacDonald’s son with an axe-haft—a fact that, if you breathe it to a single living soul, will be my death. I thank you that honor demanded that I find her again, and I thank you that she angered me so much that I spanked her over a hay bale—”

“You—”

Angus held up a hand. “Wait, lad. I haven’t come to the best bit. That I spanked her over a hay bale, and then she told me she was coming to my house to stay until Castle Urquhart rises again, and when I said that the only fashion in which she might stay in my little croft-house was as my wife, she said that she would.”

“It wasn’t a jest, then?” asked Calum, whose gaping mouth returned to its open-jawed position after asking the question.

“It was not a jest, Calum MacGregor.”

“And will you?”

“I may. So you’ll pardon me, I hope, Calum MacGregor, if I withhold the full measure of my gratitude until we see the event of this day.”

“A nineteen-year-old lady to wife, as fair as she is noble, and you not grateful? What is this land coming to?”

“In truth, Calum, I am very grateful that you freed me from the pillory, but I do not know what is to become of Elisabeth Grant, whether as my wife or no. I will not have her here any other way, ‘tis sure, but I’ll not have her in my bed on terms a Highlander should not brook. I’ll not put the matter less delicately than that.”

“You mean you’ll have her as you like, when you like,” laughed Calum, “laird’s daughter or no. I’ll sleep on the braes tomorrow night, if it’s all the same to you.”

Angus felt his face grow dark with offended honor. “I would never harm her, Calum MacGregor. Do you know that, or shall there be a quarrel between us?”

Calum laughed. “I did not mean the lass, Angus. I meant only that I would not wish to hear you scream when she bites your fool yard off.”

Angus laughed from the bottom of his belly. He was glad, at least, to be alive and back at Glanaidh.

* * *

“When do we wed?” asked Elisabeth.

They were standing on the brow of the hill above the MacGregor croft, looking northwest, across Loch Glanaidh. The morning was warm, but not warm enough that Elisabeth did not need the plaid she had, apparently grateful, wound around her as they left the croft so that Angus could show her properly what she still seemed resolved would be her new home.

The view ran out before them across the little upland loch to green hills on the opposite side, over which the MacGregor sheep were grazing under the eye of Alan MacGregor, Calum’s brother, who had the third of the little croft-houses at Glanaidh. Angus could just make out Alan by the red of his plaid, picking his way across the slope, supported by his long crook. Angus’ heart swelled with pride. The croft was small, but it was his.

“You’re looking the wrong way, lass,” he said and took her gently by the shoulder to turn her around, towards the Croft. He could see, though, that she was not looking down the slope but over it, towards Loch Ness. He watched her take a deep breath, and he saw her set her face the same way she had when she had told him in the barn that she would not leave the Highlands. Angus’ heart seemed to fill now with a different, even more powerful emotion than his pride in his croft. This lass, all of a sudden, had brought her delicate beauty, so separate from the rugged comeliness of a Highland croft and yet somehow sorting so very well with it, into his settled life, and in the course of a few hours had overturned it all. Did she mean what she said?

“Look downward, milady,” he said, “at my home.”

She turned her gaze downward from the far view of the loch, across the braes and the little folds near the shores, and he saw her take in the three tiny houses and the barn.

“Milady, if we wed, that will be your home for the rest of your days. I have no hope of another, nor do I long for any.”

He looked closely at her comely face and watched her cheeks pinken a very little bit.
How strange,
he thought,
that I can know the mind of a noble girl I met only yesterday.
He had not the slightest doubt that she wanted to say that her castle would rise again. But her pride, it seemed, was not a simple thing. When she chose a path, perhaps the path was chosen and ill-betide that path if it should try to throw Elisabeth Grant off its back.

“If the castle should rise,” Angus continued, gently, “would I be welcome there?”

“Of course you would. You should be my lord husband.”

“A Highland crofter the Lord of Urquhart?” He laughed. “Your family is Norman, milady. They came with the conqueror.”

“We are Highlanders!” Elisabeth replied fiercely.

“Hush, lass,” Angus said. “Yes, you are Highlanders, but you are also of the blood of the nobility of England. And that is before we mention your mother’s folk.”

“Descended from Crinan and Malcolm,” Elisabeth said proudly. “Do you mock my royal lineage, MacGregor?”

“No, lass.” Angus chuckled. “Far from it. I mean that I am not worthy to hold your hand, let alone to spank you or to train you to please me the way I will train my wife.”

The pinkness in Elisabeth’s cheeks grew darker and spread itself across her whole face as her eyes turned back and upward over Loch Ness again. He was bewitched, he thought; the girl had bewitched him. He had never wanted anything as much as he wanted to feel her arms around him, wanted to feel her struggling beneath him as he took her and tamed her pride at last.

“If we wed, milady, you will belong to me. Your rank will be my rank, and your station will be this croft. I hold that a husband must have his way with his wife in his bed and in his house, and that if she refuses him his way, he must chastise her until she is ready to please him. You will card, and you will spin, and you will cook what I bring in to you. And when I call you to my bed, you will come, and I will have my way.”

Did she understand what he meant? How could he make himself plainer? He tried one last time.

“And if you do not give me my way, milady, I will chastise you, and my hand is not the worst thing I will apply to your bare backside.”

She drew breath at that. At least she was listening.

“I do not think you noticed, milady, that there is a strap hanging near the bed in my house. That strap kept the peace in my family when I was young, and it will keep the peace in my house as well, whoever my wife should be.”

Had she noticed, indeed? She seemed not to quail in fear, but he thought that perhaps her breathing became a little harsher.

She turned her face to meet his eyes with hers. The comeliness of her struck him again, like a sweet blow from an axe-handle fashioned all of ivory and lace.

“I must hope, then,” Elisabeth said, “that my learning in the ways of pleasing you, Angus MacGregor, comes on quickly. I will learn to card and to spin and to cook; I have watched those things done often enough. The other thing—a lady does not speak of it, but I have been told the wife’s part, and—I will stay in the Highlands.”

Should he make her speak now, this instant, of that thing of which they had told her a lady does not speak? No, he thought, there would be time enough this night and in the nights to come to bring her to say the wicked things that would rouse his yard whether she said them or he spanked her bottom red because she would not and then took her in the rear to teach her to obey him… He felt his manhood rising strong and hard beneath his plaid, and he was nearly overcome with the urge to throw her down upon the hillside and to tear the plaid off her lovely young body and show her what his way meant, here on his croft.

His own breathing, he suddenly realized, was becoming labored. Elisabeth seemed to see something in his eyes that intimated a danger to her whose nature she could not guess. She turned her face again and set her eyes upon the great loch.

“When do we wed?” she asked.

Chapter Five

Since the priests of Urquhart had fled down the loch—and they would not have been suitable in any case to the occasion, Elisabeth knew—they took the oxcart to the little chapel at Achmonie, where a monk from Iona said Mass daily.

It was not the way Elisabeth had imagined her wedding, to be sure, but she had never seemed to imagine her wedding as often or as intricately as her cousins in Edinburgh did. Elisabeth’s fancy had included a faceless bridegroom in a red silk tunic, the Highlanders of Clan Grant and its allied clans standing respectfully to watch her pass to dinner, and more important than the bridegroom or the Highlanders, Castle Urquhart. And Castle Urquhart not because of its nobility or even its ancient stone walls, but because of the glen and the loch.

“Surely we should go to Inverness,” she had said, thinking that she wanted to be married within sight of Loch Ness, at least.

“Achmonie is closer, girl,” Angus had said with a look that made Elisabeth suddenly fear for her bottom and think of the strap that she had fallen asleep looking at the previous night, wondering whether its purpose was indeed what she thought it might be.

When Angus had told her that the strap would indeed find use upon her backside were she to become his wife, she had felt again the terrifying, yet somehow also treacherously pleasant, new feeling she had first known in the barn the day before, when he had spanked her and then, even more, when he had said, “to serve me in my bed.” She could not name the feeling, nor could she describe what she seemed unable to help longing for when she heard him use his voice that way, to tell her that she was to belong to him and that he intended to train her to please him, as (she thought) a dog or a horse might be trained. She knew only that it made that secret, unspeakable place between her thighs warm, and that the warmth seemed to make that place suddenly wet, too, and in that warmth and wetness somehow also to call out to Angus to do something to her and with her. And she knew that she must not let him see that weakness; he must never know that he had her body under his command.

What had she learned, really, from her governess and her cousins? She had learned that a woman’s husband was made differently from the way she was made. She knew that the difference somehow made for a great deal of trouble in the marital bed, and that a wife, properly wed, must put up with that trouble in order to have all the fine things that marriage brought with it—servants and gowns and her own household to order as she pleased.

She might never have those fine things, but that did not mean that she should become weak in the face of this master she now took for herself in order that she might stay in the Highlands. Now she was not to be served, but to serve Angus MacGregor as her husband; not to have gowns, but a plaid and a linen shift; and her household was to be that tiny croft-house, full of peat-smoke. Still, to her distress, her body seemed to cry out for this Highlander she had first seen when he had laughed at her when she was lying in the dung in the market square, and her soul to cry out for his little croft, where the sheep wandered around the tiny loch that looked like it could reflect the entire sky if only the wind would cease to ruffle its surface for a moment.

Something prophetic seemed to be stirring in her soul as she thought about Glanaidh. A man who had such a croft should take the Lady of Urquhart to wife, should he not? And… she did not know why the thought entered her heart, but once it had, it seemed impossible to shake thence: that Highlander should surely be the castle’s true lord, should he not? Should she not wish Angus MacGregor the Lord of Urquhart, as impossible as that seemed?

There would be Highlanders, at least, to grace her marriage: Calum came for a witness.

As they traveled down from Glanaidh, she could see the smoke rising from Urquhart, and tears stung her eyes. When Angus put his arm around her shoulder, she tried at first to shake it away, but he did not allow her to have her grief alone and held her closer, saying, “You must forget that pride, lass. I will comfort you as I think you need comfort,” and she had silently let him gather her to his side. She rested her cheek on the wool of his plaid, where it covered his chest against the wind, and wept, thinking not just of the wedding she had always imagined at her castle and how it was lost forever, but also now of the indignity of having a husband whose arm she might not shake off as she chose.

Somehow the comfort found its way to her heart, though, and she stopped crying.

“Better now?” asked Angus.

“Yes,” she replied and pulled away from him again. He let her go this time. The pang of regret she felt at no longer having his arm about her told her that she must guard her feelings better. She would not show Angus MacGregor the weakness he had found in her—let him punish her and train her as he liked.

* * *

The portly little monk at the tiny chapel was just finishing Mass when Angus led Elisabeth into the back of the nave, with Calum behind them. They waited in silence until the
Ite, missa est
, while the priest sped through the Latin so quickly that even another monk would have had trouble understanding him. He spared them a glance as he brought the vessels back to the sacristy. Then, with everything put away, he came to meet them.

“Wedding, Angus MacGregor?” the monk asked with a broad smile, taking their measure with his eyes. Dressed in the
arisaid
, folded of the same kind of plaid that went round Angus’ broad shoulders and waist but in a very different fashion, Elisabeth looked like any Highland girl; the cleanliness that would have betokened a noblewoman had gone in the market square, and her Lowland coif atop the tower when the alarm had sounded. Back in Angus’ house she had been delighted when he had handed her an old piece of blue ribbon for a snood, saying, “‘Twas my sister’s, I think.” She wore it now and looked as an unmarried Highland maid should, down to the hood of the arisaid that veiled her red-gold locks.