Imposter Bride (26 page)

Still, she could not allow her disgust to show. She
must call upon every shred of fortitude she possessed to walk
Edward Metcalf through the next few moments.

Sophie dropped to the cushion beside him and bent to
his mouth. She pressed a chaste kiss upon his dry lips.

“You are like a wild beast,” she murmured.

“See what you do to me?” He smiled. “Just wait until
next time, when we have more privacy.”

“Next time?” she retorted. “Then you’ll have to
marry me before my grandmother changes her mind altogether.”

Edward’s eyes opened. “She’s changing her mind about
the wedding?”

Sophie nodded. “I believe she thinks I can do
better.”

“She does?” Outraged, he struggled to one elbow.
“How dare she!”

She ran her finger down the side of his face and
across his lower lip. “But if we elope, she won’t be able to do a
thing about it.”

“Very true.” He buttoned his breeches and sat all
the way up. “Although I have to say my family wouldn’t be happy
about an elopement.”

“We can still have a big wedding afterward. That’s
all they want. We can do that.”

Edward glanced at her, and she could see the
possibilities sifting through his thoughts. Suddenly he smiled. “We
can get married in Scotland and stay at our family holding on Lake
Lemond. It’s rustic, but impressive in a way.”

“It sounds perfect.”

“You know, I feel so much better now,” he
remarked.

“I’m glad.”

He leaned forward and kissed her. “Go back to
Carlisle and pack your things, my winsome pet, and we’ll leave
first thing in the morning.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I didn’t tell my grandmother I was coming here this
afternoon. I’m sure she wouldn’t have approved. And if I go back,
she might not allow me to leave the house again.”

Edward smoothed his hair, somewhat shocked. “Then
what do you propose. Leave today?”

“Yes.”

“My God!” He looked at her and grinned. “This is
just wonderful, Katherine. Truly. More than I could have asked
for.”

She smiled. She felt almost the same way. He was
playing into her hands more easily than she had ever imagined.

While Edward packed for the trip to Scotland, he
sent a servant to retrieve the small traveling trunk Sophie had
hidden in the shrubbery outside the Carlisle House. Then, heavily
armed against highwaymen, they set out for the north road to
Scotland with a single driver and a sturdy coach. In Scotland they
could legally marry without waiting to post bans or gaining the
consent of her grandmother, as Sophie was still under the age of
twenty-one.

Most of the snow had long since melted in London,
but in the Lake District, further to the north, they encountered
more and more snow, which turned the highway into a muddy mess of
ruts. The closer they got to the border, near the village of Gretna
Green in Scotland, the slower the carriage rolled, or so it seemed
to Sophie.

She stared glumly out the window at the breathtaking
landscape of high wooded hills and stone outcroppings. In another
season and in another state of mind, she might have found beauty in
the dark copses of pine, the small lakes nestled in the hills, and
the occasional glimpse of a country estate, but her heart felt as
bleak as the gray winter sky overhead. In a matter of hours she
would be a married woman, destined for a life of comfort but one
that would come at a heavy price.

Worse, she had lied outright to Lady Auliffe. What
would the older woman think of her when she discovered the letter
Sophie had left in an attempt to explain her trickery? Lady
Auliffe, so admiring of honesty, would never trust her again, and
would think of her with contempt. The thought shamed Sophie to her
bones.

As Ramsay left the Border hills of Scotland and
turned westward toward the sea, he rode into a wall of fog. It was
as if fate chose to conceal the homeland he had not seen for twenty
years by smothering the landscape in an eerie white mist. What he
had hoped might be familiar landmarks to lead him home instead
loomed as gray phantom shapes, only gaining form and color when he
got within a few feet of them. As he rode, he felt time and
distance growing distorted, sounds oddly muffled, and after a few
hours he found himself disoriented and lost.

“Damnation,” he muttered, pulling his mount to a
stop at a fork in the road. He didn’t recognize the countryside
well enough to know whether he should turn right or left, and no
signpost was in evidence. On his right stretched a stone
outcropping capped with snow, and on his left stood a bank of
half-rotted broom, shrouded in fog. He rose up in his stirrups to
alleviate the stitch of the old wound in his thigh, and looked
around, unable to see anything more than twenty paces away, and
nothing to aid him in getting his bearings.

“Which way, old boy?” Ramsay inquired of his mount.
The horse blew and shook its head, rattling the bridle with a damp
clank of metal.

“My sentiments exactly.” Ramsay settled back into
the saddle. He could smell the dankness of the sea on the air, and
knew the road he sought lay close to the water’s edge. Guided only
by smell, he gently urged his horse to the left, hoping he would
find an inn or posting house not much further up the highway, not
only to confirm his location but to afford him something to
eat.

After another hour of riding through the strange
white world, he heard the sound of someone weeping. He slowed his
horse to a prudent walk, and peered through the mist, hoping to
glimpse the source of the noise, which sounded like a woman or
young child. A minute later he came around a curve and spied a
woman in a tattered brown cloak huddled on a rock at the side of
the road, and a darker shape hanging ominously still above the
path.

Ramsay pulled back on the reins, his gaze riveted to
the shape dangling before him, and realized he had ridden straight
into a nightmare. The shape swinging above the road was the body of
a young man hung from the neck, naked from the waist down, his
genitals hacked away, and his feet pointing lifeless toward the
ground.

The scene cut through Ramsay like a knife, bringing
back every wretched memory of his childhood. Here was the savage
surprise his homeland had saved to show him in the fog—the very
image of his last days in Scotland, brought to life in glaring,
gruesome horror. He was not meant to take a contemplative trip to
Ayr, weighing the precarious machinations of his present life, his
thoughts tormented by a woman with chestnut-colored hair. No, he
was meant to see this butchery, this blood-soaked reminder of
everything that had turned him cold and hard inside.

For a long moment, Ramsay couldn’t move. All he
could see was his father’s body swinging from a tree, the branches
above black with crows. All he could feel was the utter
helplessness he knew as a child, when he’d been unable to keep the
crows from pecking out his father’s eyes, no matter how many rocks
he hurled, no matter how he screamed at the starving black birds to
go to bloody hell.

For the third time since meeting Sophie Vernet,
Ramsay felt a deep swell of grief roar up his chest and surge into
his throat. All these years he had managed to lock away the
memories and the pain, holding them back as he had held everything
and everyone back. But the press of Sophie’s cheek on his spine
that night in his study, the touch of her gentle hands on his
chest, and her tender knowing embrace had unleashed the tightly
wound bundle of despair he’d buried inside him. And now, Scotland
was doing the rest, blinding him with a blaze of pain that cut
across his heart.

Gradually, however, the woman’s sobs seeped into his
consciousness, and wrested him from his dark hesitation.

He looked down at her. She watched him, her chapped
red hands clutching her cloak to her chin, the hood outlining her
pale slender face, her eyes huge with alarm, not knowing whether he
had stopped for good or evil, not knowing if he were English or
Scottish. She was young, not much older than Sophie, but her eyes
were old, as old as Mollie MacRell’s and all the other Scots he’d
helped.

For the last few hundred years, his people had eaten
hardship and grief as their daily bread, and a sorrowful wisdom had
become part of their bones and hung in the eyes of even the
smallest bairns. With the loss at Culloden, they’d lost the clan
chiefs who had once protected the people of the glens. The safe
haven of extended family and kin were no more. The English had
killed the lairds who had stood against them and embraced the ones
who bowed their heads in submission. The traditions that had bound
his people together through glory and hardship had been severed by
British sabers and British laws that banned the Scots from even so
much as playing their pipes.

Now, all that remained of the old ways were clan
names carried by men who lived in fashionable houses in London, men
who had turned their backs on their heritage—some out of cowardice,
some knowing it was the only way to survive, but mostly out of
greed.

And now, with the price of wool outstripping that of
beef, a remote clan laird living in London, his Highland soul and
the claymore of his father packed away and forgotten, could make
more from grazing sheep than he could collect in rent from his
tenants. Only a “lucky” few crofters were retained to serve as
hired labor to tend the sheep on the estates. The rest were being
sold as slaves and sent to the Caribbean on “coffin ships” or
turned out to face an even more wretched poverty than they’d known
before, with no way to scratch a living from the earth, as the
forests and fields were cleared for pastureland. In the past few
years, Ramsay had watched his homeland become a nation of poachers,
trespassers, and thieves, while the English called them savages,
barbarians, and compared them to cattle.

Damn them all to bloody hell.

Anger never far from the surface washed over him,
urging him to action. He kneed his horse forward and slipped his
fingers into the top of his riding boot for the knife he always
carried while traveling. Rising in his stirrups, he reached up to
cut down the hanged man.

The woman jumped to her feet. “Sir!” she cried.
“What are ye doin’?”

“I’m cutting him down.”

“Ye can’t!”

“And who will stop me?”

“The soldiers, that’s who!”

“Let them come. I’ll not see a Scot hang like this!”
He strained to reach for the rope. Thankfully, the man hadn’t been
hanging for more than a day or two. Still, Ramsay had to hold his
breath as he sawed away at the thick cord of hemp.

The woman clutched his ankle. “I beg you, sir, dinna
do it! They’ll kill ye, too!”

“Let them try.” The English had killed the best part
of him long ago. He had no concern for the portion of him that
remained.

“They said they’d come back to make sure he’s still
here.”

“Then they shall have a surprise when they do.”

With a few more strokes, he cut the man loose,
tossed away the knife, and caught the slumping body as it fell. His
horse whinnied and pranced, frightened by the smell of death.
Ramsay managed to control him with his knees, and then slid from
the saddle and eased the man across the ditch in the road and up to
a patch of snowy grass.

The woman fell to her knees beside the body, weeping
pitifully.

Ramsay gently removed the noose from the neck of the
young man. “Your brother, lass?” he asked. “Or your husband?”

She swallowed. “My husband.”

“What was his crime?”

“Wearin’ the plaid at our wedding.”

“Good God!” Enraged, Ramsay threw the rope upon the
road.

“Jamie was proud, so proud.”

“Aye. And they made him pay for it.” Ramsay rose and
clenched his hands into fists, trying to control the dark rage that
engulfed him. A man had died for wearing a colorful scrap of cloth
forbidden by the English. And now his widow, no more than a girl,
wept at his side, probably never having known a single night in her
lover’s arms. The unbending cruelty of the English in the name of
their unjust English law was outrageous. Heinous.

“Do you live nearby?” he asked tersely.

“About a mile, sir.”

“I’ve a blanket. We can wrap him up and take him
home.”

“But, sir, what if the patrol comes?”

“How many are there?”

“Three of them. They’ve been harassing us for
months.”

“The same three?”

“Aye. May they rot in hell.”

“The fog will conceal us.”

She nodded, but kept throwing glances over her
shoulder as if she expected to hear the thunder of hoof beats at
any moment. Ramsay had forgotten what it was like to live each day
in fear of the law.

He strode back to his skittish horse, retrieved his
knife from the muddy ground, and led the animal to the side of the
road, where he untied the blanket fastened at the back of the
saddle. Then, as gently as he could, he rolled Jamie’s body in the
blanket, hoisted it to his shoulder, and draped it over the
saddle.

“Which way?” Ramsay asked. The woman pointed to the
right, toward a path that snaked between huge mounds of
heather.

“What happened?” he ventured, pained to see the
stark expression on her young face.

“They got wind of our nuptials. The damned patrol.”
She peered over her shoulder again. “‘Twas but a day ago—the
happiest day of my life, or at least it started out that way.”

“And the groom wore his plaid?”

“‘
Twas a private ceremony. We
thought no one outside our families knew about it.”

“But they found out?”

“They always find out.” She set her jaw. “They
pulled Jamie from the hall. We couldn’t even take the chance to
marry in a real kirk. They ripped off his plaid and tossed it in
the air, shooting it until it was nothin’ but a rag. And then they
shot my Jamie as he stood there half-naked. My Jamie,” she looked
away. “On our wedding day.”