Miranda (6 page)

“Have we...did we...”

He threw back his head and laughed. “My dear, if you had forgotten
that
, I'd say there's not much hope for us.” Seeing her unamused expression, he took both her hands in his. “Believe me, Miranda. To my eternal frustration, and through no choice of my own, we have never made love.”

“We were waiting, then.”

“Aye.”

“For marriage.”

He hesitated. “Aye.”

“Mary Wollstonecraft didn't believe in marriage on principle.”

“She may have a point.”

Miranda found herself laughing again, feeling giddy.

“You're an incredibly desirable creature, Miss Stonecypher,” Ian said.

She wondered if he had any idea how entrancing he was. “Tell me more,” she said. “I feel that if I could remember even one moment, if I could just look back and
know
, then everything would come right.”

“I dinna think it's that easy.”

“Indulge me,” she said. “Please.”

“The Orangery in Hyde Park,” he said.

“Should that be significant to me?”

“Oh, aye.” He paused. “Your first kiss.”

She felt her color deepen. “Surely a significant event if there ever was one.”

“And you dinna remember it.”

“No.” She stared at his mouth. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be.” He took her hand and led her toward the bow of the ship, where they stood in the cool evening shadows. Sails luffed in the wind, and the cry of a cormorant droned mournfully across the swells. “Actually, it's rather an advantage.”

She began to tingle inside. “An advantage?”

“Oh, aye. You can have your first kiss...all over again.”

With a discreet movement he took off his gloves, dropping them on the deck at their feet.

She felt faint, yet dizzily aware all at once. Nervously she licked her lips. “I'm afraid I don't know what to do.”

“What you're doing now is just fine. For the moment.”

“What am I doing?” she asked.

“Standing there. Looking bonnier than heather in bloom.”

He took a step closer. His hands drifted down the length of her arms, heating her skin. The pads of his thumbs found her racing pulse.

“Was it like this...before?” she asked.

“Nay, love. This is better.” His hands traveled up and over her shoulders. His fingers threaded their way into her hair, sifting through the curls.

“Now what?” she whispered.

Though he did not smile, amusement glinted in his eyes. “Just keep your head tilted up. Aye, like that.” He bent low, his face looming close, his breath, with the tang of his evening brandy, caressing her. He touched his lips tenderly to her eyes, first one and then the other, so that they were closed. Then he kissed her mouth, softly, tentatively.

“I can stop at any time,” he whispered, “if this makes you uncomfortable.”

She smiled dreamily. “
Uncomfortable
is not quite the word for what I feel.”

He kissed her again, tugging gently on her lower lip until her mouth opened and she surged toward him, hungry, wanting. The taste and smell of him filled her—sea and leather and maleness, seasoned with the brandy they had drunk after supper. The sensation of kissing him caused passion to leap up inside her until she was straining almost painfully for him.

His hands slipped from her hair and traveled down, tracing the inward curve of her waist and the outward flare of her hip. Then he touched her breasts, hands brushing, fingers skimming the tips. Warmth seared her in places he wasn't touching, places that begged for his caress.

Then, as gradually and inevitably as the kiss began, it receded. He lifted his mouth from hers, and his hands dropped to her waist.

She kept her eyes closed, holding the moment, hovering in uncertainty and wonder and delight.

“Miranda?” he asked.

She forced her eyes open. She reached up and touched his cheek. His tanned skin was rough with evening stubble. “I feel completely starstruck, Ian. Bowled over like a ninepin. Was it like that for me before?”

“You never said.” His voice sounded gruff and uneven.

“I was trying to remember what it was like to love you,” she said. “But I feel as if I'm learning for the first time.” That something so simple as a human touch could shake the foundations of her heart was a staggering notion. “Ah, Ian.” She spoke his name on a sigh. “You are so good to be patient with me.”

He took her hand, removed it from his cheek and kissed the back of it. To her surprise, his own hand trembled. “You make it easy, Miranda.” She thought she detected a note of bitterness in his voice when he added, “Too bloody easy.”

* * *

Guilt was a new and decidedly unpleasant sensation for Ian MacVane. Yet as he lay awake in his narrow, damp quarters each night of the voyage, he knew guilt in all its sharp and bitter shades.

He was manipulating the feelings of a naive young woman. Whatever else Miranda's crimes might be, she was innocent when it came to matters of the heart.

But not for long, if they stayed on their present course.

I was trying to remember what it was like to love you.
Her words snapped back at him like a lash. She was driving him insane with her unwavering trust in him.

Trust. Miranda
trusted
Ian MacVane. She was by far the first woman foolish enough to do that.

She wanted memories, and he was giving them to her. False, hollow tales he dredged from his paltry stores of sentiment.

If ever a man had a past that begged to be forgotten, it was Ian MacVane.

Instead here he was building a castle of lies in order to win Miranda's faith and perhaps, if he was very lucky, find the memories she kept locked away in her mind.

He kept wondering if he should have simply handed her over to Frances. Perhaps that would have been better all the way around.

The morning they'd taken ship, Frances had shown her customary lack of surprise at his flagrant disobedience. She'd even sent him a message in cipher:
Perfect, darling. I do so love it when you do something scathingly clever and cruel. Yes, sleep with the girl. It is the best way to—dare I be so tasteless?—get her to reveal herself to you.

At the bottom of her note, he had scribbled a reply in cipher and sent it back to her:
When I bed a woman, my dear, it's for my own reasons, not because anyone orders me to.

Even then he had known he would find a reason. The whole matter was sordid. He had a sudden notion to turn his back on the entire affair, but he knew he would not.

Time was not critical yet. The duke of Wellington was still in Paris, ambassador to the newly restored King Louis. But once Wellington returned to England, Napoleon's allies would put their plan into motion.

Ian had pledged to foil the insane plot. Bound by his own private sense of honor, he knew he would not rest until he succeeded in stopping the conspiracy.

Even if it meant filling Miranda's head and her heart with his lies. Even if it meant a cruel betrayal of her trust. Even if it meant taking her innocence and ruining her reputation.

He pounded his fist into his hard pillow. Surely it wouldn't come to that. Surely she would regain her memory and divulge the plan before things had gone too far.

When the smoky gray mist of a Scottish dawn tinged the sky, he gave up on sleep. He had lost sleep over only one woman before Miranda, and that was his mother.

For all that Mary MacVane knew or cared.

Shoving aside thoughts of a past he could not change, Ian got up and bathed with water from a basin, then dressed in the black trousers and white shirt Duffie had set out the night before. Soon they would make landfall.

Today Ian would begin a journey from which there was no return. For him, Scotland was a place of memories and madness. Here, his world had been torn to unrecognizable bits by a stranger with greed in his eyes. His soul had been damned by the woman who had given him life.

Once he had escaped Scotland, Ian MacVane had been reborn, a creature of darkness, his past scoured clean through sheer force of will.

Perhaps that was why Miranda held such fascination for him. She had achieved what he had been trying to do all his adult life. She had obliterated the past.

Her means of doing it, however, held little appeal for him. In his soldiering days, he had seen men wake up the day after battle with no notion of the horrors they had seen, of acts that had been committed upon them, of atrocities they themselves had carried out.

At first, the postbattle blankness had seemed a blessing. But the memories always returned in one form or another, weeks or months or years later. Nightmares. Fits of rage or terror. An inability to cope with everyday life. Was that to be Miranda's fate?

He donned a waistcoat of boiled wool and reached for his gloves. Before pulling them on, he braced his hands upon a sea chest at the end of his bunk and studied them. They were large and squarish, hands suited to the son of a hardworking crofter. Except that the crofter had been murdered in cold blood, his young son sent to toil in Glasgow at tasks so grueling that they were performed only by orphans or slaves.

Ian scowled down at the stub of the last finger on his left hand. The digit had been chopped away at the first knuckle, and the only concession he had gotten after the accident was half a day's holiday and an extra slice of bread at supper.

Och, how he wanted to forget. Instead he remembered every detail with crystal clarity, as if he were viewing his past through a perfect glass that showed him not only the sights, but the smells and sounds and textures, as well. The reek of soot and blood. His brother Gordon's bitter curses. Ian's own horrified screams. The dizzying view of the street far below the rooftop where he had been stranded. The sensation of abject fear that had roared through him as Gordie fell.

He made a fist, hiding his deformity. Then he forced himself to open his hand. Today, no glove. No shoving his hand into his waistcoat à la Bonaparte.

Ian MacVane would return to Scotland as he had left it: maimed and full of rage.

Six

On ev'ry hand it will allowed be,
He's just—nae better than he should be.

—Robert Burns

A
fter the landing, Ian stood on the rocky shore, oblivious to the movements around him, oblivious to the delighted shouts of young Robbie, oblivious even to Miranda, whose presence had consumed him since the moment he had laid eyes on her.

He simply stood, feeling the solid earth beneath his feet and trying to get his mind around the fact that after an exile of fifteen years, he was home. In Scotland.

How much had he changed, he wondered, from that wounded boy, skulking to freedom by hiding in a ship's hold?

He was staggered by how deeply he had missed his homeland. He drew the feeling in through his pores, and into his lungs with each breath, and the very essence of the land began to pulse through him. This was Scotland, his birthplace.

Here, he had suffered the torments of the damned—but also, in that early misty time of his youth, he had known his greatest joy. Had known the crystal sharp air of the craggy Highlands as he'd raced across the moors after a stray lamb. Had known the sweet, warm scent of a mother and the hearty affection of a father.

Ah, how long ago that had been. The boy who had gamboled through glens and boggy moors, who had fished for trout in the icy streams and chased squealing girls in the kirkyard on Sunday, was as good as dead.

Ian MacVane knew the name of his murderer. Adder, like the snake. Mr. Adder, the sly-eyed Englishman. He had swept like a storm into Crough na Muir, claiming that the crofters were trespassing on his property. And so they were, on land relinquished to him by the laird whom Adder had beggared at the gaming table.

Ian drew in another breath of Scotland. He felt as if he were falling, falling back into the hideous past, squarely into the night Adder and a troop of mercenaries had swooped down upon the croft of the MacVane...

He heard a sound that didn't belong to the night. Below the living quarters, the cows blew gently in their sleep. Then the sound came again. It was a soft whistle—not an owl or a nightingale, but a human sound. The dog reacted first, leaping down from the loft, yapping wildly.

He heard a sickening thump, and the dog fell silent. By then Ian's father was up, pitchfork in hand, but it was too late. Too late...

Miranda broke his fall. She did it with something as simple and as complicated as the brush of her hand on his sleeve, a tilt of her head, a querulous smile. “You were a thousand miles away, Ian,” she said. “And it was a sad place.”

He fought the urge to shake her off, to lash out like a wounded wolf, to recoil from her compassion. Instead he managed a wry half smile. “Reading my moods, are you?”

“Didn't I always?”

“Of course.” Christ, but this was absurd. Inventing a past for them, pretending they had a future.

No one's future was assured so long as fanatic Bonapartistes kept hatching their plots in England. Ian wondered how the British could be so blind. They and all their allies were convinced that Napoleon would rest content in his defeat in exile. But Ian understood the brilliance and determination of the emperor, the loyalty of his followers. Exile at Elba was surely but a temporary state for such a man. Bonaparte would be back. Already he was coiled like a snake, poised to strike.

Impatience stirred within Ian. He had best make quick work of the marriage—a handfasting would do—and hasten back to London.

“We've always been of one mind, lass,” he said, forcing gentleness into his voice as he lied to her. “And my guess is, you're of a mind for a good bath and a meal.”

“I am.”

Duffie and Robbie had gone on ahead with the baggage. Ian scanned the road that wound up and around the great rising hills. He had not stood on this spot since he was a lad. Yet he knew people would still remember him in the village.

A part of him still dwelt there.

He started toward the settlement, old and tumbled and comforting as a tattered blanket.

After walking along the dusty road for a quarter mile, Miranda stopped him. “Ian.”

“Aye, lass?”

“I don't remember my own past, save what you've told me. But I know nothing of your past, either.”

And he would never tell her, Ian thought. The one thing he would not do with his pain was share it.

He grinned at her and winked. “I was an exemplary lad in every way. Surely there is no question of that.” He took her hand and started walking again.

“Someday, Ian MacVane,” Miranda said, “I am going to get the truth out of you.”

Not in this life, he thought grimly. Not in this bloody life.

The pony cart that had brought their belongings from the ship had preceded them to the village. Clearly Duffie and Robbie had made a grand announcement, for townspeople were waiting expectantly just beyond the gate.

The drystone walls had crumbled low, though when the Scots had first built them to deter raiding Norsemen, the defensive structure had stood tall and sturdy. Now the barrier resembled a set of decaying teeth, weathered by the centuries and the incessant wind off the moors. Rock roses and ivy twined in and out of the stones. In the background stood the steeple of the village kirk. At the end of the lane was a stone cottage with yellow thatching on the roof and a trellis of twisted old roses framing the gate to the dooryard. Agnes's place.

Miranda stopped walking again.

“Are you all right?” Ian asked her.

“It's just that this is all so lovely. Like a painting or...or a dream.”

To Ian, the place looked like no more than it was—the village to which he had walked hand in hand with his father each Thursday to buy rye flour and to sell eggs. Little had changed; Crough na Muir was sturdy and drab. Yet unexpected bursts of flowers in the window boxes cheered the place, much like a smile on the face of a plain girl.

No one was smiling now. The knot of people waiting inside the town gate looked piercingly inquisitive. When last they had seen him, he'd had a rope around his neck and wrists and was being led off by English soldiers.

“As I live and breathe,” said a wiry man with a gap-toothed grin. He pointed to his chest. “Callum Grundy—I was a friend of your da, and you're the very image of him.” Callum scratched his head beneath a worn woolen cap. “Never thought a MacVane would tread this path again.”

“'Tis grand to be back, Callum. I know you all from Agnes's letters, every one of you.”

“Aye, you're the picture of your father, Lord grant him eternal peace,” Flora Hunt agreed. “You have his charming, smooth way, too, laddie.”

Ian tried not to see it, but the people were gaunt and unwashed, their clothes little better than rags. Under a proper laird, the crofters of the district might have flourished. But Adder had stolen good fortune from them all those years ago.

Rather than seeing to their welfare, he had merely engaged a factor to extract rents. Occasionally he sent bored English peers to the manor house, once the residence of the laird, but now a brooding hulk on the hill. According to Agnes, the visitors did nothing but drink and hunt grouse on the moors.

Just for a moment, an old dream flickered in the back of Ian's mind. Perhaps it was awakened by the nearness of Miranda. There was something about her, a special quality that awakened old hidden desires. He did not like it, did not trust it; he feared she would cause him to care about things better ignored.

Ian sometimes dreamed that
he
was the laird, wise and benevolent, devoted to the welfare of Crough na Muir. He was a part of their lives, watching them grow up and marry, mourning with them when they buried their dead, celebrating with them over the birth of a bairn. Rather than living amid strangers, he had a place to belong. A place that belonged to him.

The yearning for it rose like an ache in his chest, and he was stunned to feel it. He had not dared to want something like this in years.

A man with gray hair and beard shuffled forward. “Is that truly Ian MacVane and his betrothed, then?” he asked in Gaelic.

A number of the villagers still had only the Gaelic, and to Ian's ears it lilted like a lullaby. For Miranda's sake he spoke in English. “Aye, this is Miss Miranda Stonecypher.” He told himself he had no reason to smile, but he grinned like the village simpleton. “Soon to be my wife.”

Duffie had done his work quickly and well; none of the people looked surprised by the news. Tam Alexander, who operated the ferry across Lock Fingan, nodded sagely. “They always come back to marry, eh?”

“She's a bonnie thing, isn't she?” a woman observed.

Ian scanned the crowd, spying the small figure, the wizened face. “Agnes.”

She held open her arms. “Come here, laddie, and bring the lassie with you. Lord, but it's been an age.” She embraced them both with her sturdy arms. “I've waited years for this day,” she whispered, for their ears only. “How I've waited, Ian! Waited for you to find love, to find someone to live in your heart.”

He gave her a squeeze and stepped back. In all the eventful years of his life, he had done many unspeakable things, but this was quite possibly the worst. Duffie had done his work too well, filling Agnes's head with romantic notions of a love match. Ian should set her straight. But when he saw the joy and pride in her kindly face, he could not bring himself to deny it.

Miranda kept hold of the older woman's hand. “It is fine to be here, Agnes.”

“And Duffie told me much about you,
mo chridh
. If it's healing you need, you'll find it in the love Ian bears you.”

They were all listening, Ian noticed. The villagers who had shaken their heads and wrung their hands over the destruction of the MacVane family now nodded to one another and murmured words of hope, of faith. Two things he had lost the day Adder had dragged him away.

Clearly Agnes still believed these were things that could be recaptured. Ian glanced at Miranda—she looked flushed and lovely amid all the attention—and he wanted to believe it, too.

“There, Agnes,” he said with a cocky grin. “We're not an hour off the boat and you're getting sentimental on us.”

She laughed softly. “Aye, I'll save it, then, for the wed—”

A hoarse screech rent the air. The townspeople reacted with discomfited sympathy, stepping back, exchanging glances.

“Good gracious!” Miranda looked around wildly. “Someone's been hurt.”

He felt a dull horror in his gut. Someone had been hurt, aye, but it had happened long ago. He took Miranda by the arm. “Dinna worry, love—” He broke off, feeling helpless and furious as every eye in the village watched him.

“We'd best be going, then.” Tam touched Ian's shoulder. “'Tis good to see you back, lad, and on such a happy occasion.”

Others murmured their farewells, but the words were drowned by the ragged roar of a tormented soul. People drifted away to go about their business, for what else could they do?

Miranda's eyes widened in outrage. “Will they all just leave, then, when someone needs help?” She pressed against Ian as if he could protect her. “We should help the poor soul,” she said, still not understanding.

Ian MacVane could protect no one. He had failed his father the night Adder's men had shot him like a stray dog, and he had failed his brother the day Gordon had fallen from a rooftop. But the failure that haunted him most was embedded in the present moment, possessing him, hurling him back into the nightmare again...

Weeping and shivering, he crouched beside a stone wall. The screams of women and children tore into the night sky. Flame shadows from burning crofts danced a hellish jig over the village. He saw his da pulling Gordon out of the inferno.

Across the yard, a soldier raised a musket.

He wanted to cry out, but his tongue was frozen, so it stayed as he huddled there, stayed even when the musket exploded and his father fell, and later, when the Englishmen's pawing hands and hungry mouths and brutal lust turned their attention to his mother...

“What's wrong, Ian?” Miranda asked, tugging his sleeve and pulling him toward the source of the moaning. “Who is in there? Who cries out so? And why does no one care?”

Someone cares, he thought. Someone cares too much.

“I suppose you'd best meet her sooner rather than later,” Ian said grimly, starting up the path to Agnes's cottage.

“Meet who?”

He paused, his hand on the door latch, his heart seeming to hammer a hole in his chest. “My mother.”

* * *

The room was bright with the afternoon sun, the walls freshly whitewashed. Nothing like Bedlam, Miranda reflected, with its moldering filth strewn everywhere, its iron galleries. Still, she felt a chilling recognition when she looked into the madwoman's eyes.

They were beautiful eyes, like Ian's, blue as morning glories and deep with pain and secrets. They stared out of a face that might have been handsome once, long ago. Mary MacVane had regal cheekbones, a slender nose, a high, proud brow. Yet her mouth was an angry twist, her cheeks furrowed by lines, her steel-colored hair a mass of knots and matted tangles.