The Highlander (5 page)

Madame Sandrine stood, the seamstress's eyes wide with disbelief. “You are going to work for the
Demon Highlander
?”

“T-the what?” Mena gasped, unable to keep a telling tremor out of her voice. “The who?”

Farah winced, which did little to allay Mena's growing panic.

Madame Sandrine hurried on, her face luminous with ill-omened dramatics. “They say that the Marquess of Ravencroft went to the crossroads to make a deal with a demon so that he will never die in battle. He is known to charge cannon and rifles head-on, and the bullets and cannonballs curve around him as if he were not there. He has killed so many men that there is a mountain of bones in hell named after him. The most violent man alive, is he. It is said he can murder you with only a touch of—”

“Madame Sandrine,”
Farah said sharply. “That's quite enough.”

“A …
mountain
of bones?” Mena stared at the two rather guilty-looking women with pure disbelief. “Just
where
are you sending me?”

Farah stepped forward carefully. “You of all people know how the papers sensationalize these things. Yes, Lord Ravencroft was a soldier some twenty years, and was commended for his uncommon bravery in Asia and the Indies. His children are nearly grown, which means he's a much older man now. He's retired from the army life, and committed to being nothing more than a father and a farmer. I assure you, there's nothing to be frightened of.”

But Mena
was
frightened. Her stomach roiled and her legs wanted to give out. What if she'd been tossed from the pot into the flames? What if Farah's perspective was skewed by her own circumstances? She
was
married to the Blackheart of Ben More, after all. He was king of the London Underworld because he'd won the Underworld war by washing the streets of East London with rivers of blood. When one was married to such a lethal man, who would think twice about sending someone to … “The—the most violent man alive?” she finished aloud as a shudder of anxiety stole her breath and a tic began to seize in her eyebrow. Mena sank to her knees on the dais, gasping for air. “I don't think I can do this.”

Farah sank next to her and rubbed a warm hand across her back. “Mena … I know you don't know me very well, but I'm your friend. I wouldn't send you to him if I thought you'd be in danger.”

Mena just shook her head, unable to form words around her pounding heart and the heavy lump of fear threatening to choke her.

Farah took something out of her skirt pocket and gave it to Mena. A letter with a broken wax seal. “Read this,” Farah prompted. “And then make your final decision. Know that in giving you this letter, I'm entrusting you with information that not many are privy to.”

Millie sat on Mena's other side and took her hand. “I've learned something about being in a desperate situation that may help you.”

Mena stared at the letter and focused on regaining her breath. The thick paper had Farah's name on it, scrawled in substantial, heavy masculine script. The letters were the precise same height and width. All lined up like little soldiers.

“What is that?” she whispered.

“Sometimes.” Millie's usually cheerful voice was low and grave. “When in a predicament like yours, the safest place to be is at the side of a violent man.”

Dear Lady Northwalk,

This correspondence is meant to inform you and Dorian that I have retired from military duty to Ravencroft Keep to oversee clan farms, tenements, and to run the distillery.

As you may know, I have been this past decade a widower, and my children little better than orphans, as I have spent the preponderance of their lives abroad in Her Majesty's service.

In my absence, their education has been disastrously neglected.

When a soldier is fortunate enough to reach the age I have, he collects many regrets. Mine are not confined to the atrocities of war, but also to what I have abandoned. Not only in regard to my children, but also to your husband. My own brother.

I have no right to do so, but I wonder if I may call upon your gentle will for a boon.

I am not a man used to prevailing upon the kindness of others. However, as an unrefined soldier, I am ill-equipped to prepare my children for the world in which they will be expected to reside as the heirs of a marquess. Rhianna is due for a season, and Andrew wishes to go away to university when he is of age. They're in need of an exceedingly experienced governess and tutor. I would ask that you find one, not for my benefit, but for theirs. They deserve the very best in civilized education. No matter the cost. Inform her that her relocation expenses will be included, and she can have any salary you deem satisfactory.

I will owe you a debt of gratitude for your assistance.

Please extend your husband my regards.

Yours in gratitude,

Lt. Col. William Grant Ruaridh Mackenzie. Marquess Ravencroft.

Bealach na Bà
Pass, Wester Ross, Scotland, Autumn 1878

Mena considered it a kindness on God's part that the brougham carriage wheel had waited to noisily fracture until they'd crested the treacherous road through the Highland mountains and angled west on the verdant peninsula toward Ravencroft Keep. Had it broken earlier, the carriage would surely have shattered upon the black stones scattered about the moss-covered valley floor.

The kind driver in full livery, Kenneth Mackenzie was his name, had been the only one to meet her at the Strathcarron rail station. Mena never could have guessed the elderly man would climb the switchbacks of the Bealach na Bà Pass with the alacrity of a man chased by Death.

After a cursory inspection of the broken wheel, the driver had muttered something to her in an unintelligible form of English, unhitched one of the four horses from the wagon, and gone for help straightaway, leaving Mena with only three horses and the approaching storm for company. That had been—Mena checked her new pocket watch—more than an hour past now, and the torrential rain had begun to obscure the view by which she'd been captivated in her time alone.

The topography of the Highlands tantalized her until she'd quite forgotten about her tossing stomach caused by the vigorous climb up the switchbacks and the ensuing fear for life and limb.

Mena had seen beautiful countryside before, having been raised in the bucolic paradise of Hampshire. Wester Ross was nothing like the tranquil, organized fields and pastures of South England. Something feral and untamed breathed life into this place. An air of prehistoric mysticism lingered in the very stones. She could sense it as potently as the cling of brine in the air caused by water stirred by the storm, or the last fragrant gasp of the heather and thistle as autumn encroached. Moss and lush vegetation clung to the dark rock and soil, painting the landscape every conceivable spectrum of green.

But now low, rolling clouds climbed the black stone peaks like inevitable conquerors, hiding the tops of the Hebrides from view. Even the rain was different in this place. Unlike the gray storms of London, the moisture didn't fall from the lofty heavens. It crept upon her with the chill of uncovered secrets, surrounding her in a heavy mist tossed about by unruly winds.

She shivered, even in her dress of heavy wool and the blanket the footman had found for her beneath the seat. The cold here reached through her clothing and her flesh, cloying around her bones and causing them to quake.

It wasn't an ice bath. And so she could endure.

Though she wasn't certain for how much longer. What if something had happened to poor old Kenneth Mackenzie in this weather? It was barely possible to see much more than ten paces away, and over terrain like this, one could easily end up in a bog somewhere, or stumble down a ravine.

A sound like the muffled beating of her accelerating heart pounded at the earth, and Mena leaned against the window in time to see several mounted Highlanders melt out of the mists like the specters of Jacobite warriors who had roamed these very moors a hundred years past.

Her breath caught at the sight of them. Heavy cloaks protected brawny shoulders, though their knees remained bared to the elements by matching blue, green, and gold kilts. They reined their horses to a walk and lurked closer to the carriage, letting the mist unveil them to her wide gaze.

Mena was suddenly aware of how
very
alone and vulnerable she was. Chances were, she told herself, this was the help Kenneth Mackenzie had sent for, but she didn't see the driver among the mounted Highlanders.

She counted seven, each one burlier—and
filthier
—than the last. On the other hand, they could be brigands. Highwaymen, rapists, murderers …

Oh, dear God.

They circled the carriage, all peering inside the rain-streaked windows with not a little curiosity, speaking the lyrical language of the Highlands. She understood it to be Scots Gaelic, though she comprehended not a word.

Then she saw
him
.

Her mouth became dry as the desert, and a tremor that had nothing to do with the cold rippled through her.

Though he wore a soiled kilt and loose linen shirt beneath his drenched cloak, he sat astride a black Shire steed with the bearing of a king. Dark waves of hair hung long and heavy with moisture down his back, and menace rolled off the mountains of his shoulders in palpable waves.

Whoever he was, he was their undeniable leader. She saw it in the way they looked to him, in the deference they used when speaking. If not by birth, then by physical laws of nature, surely. As the largest, the strongest, and the most fearsome of them all, he towered above the brawny men as he scowled through the window at her.

Even through the mesh of her hat's veil, and the black soot streaked across his features, Mena could see the tension in his strong jaw. The aggression etched into the grooves of his fierce, deep-set eyes. Viewed through the chaotic tracks of rain upon the window, he could have been a savage Pict warrior, bred not only to survive in this beautiful and brutal part of the world, but to conquer it.

Mena gasped at the shocking flash of muscled thigh bared to her as he dismounted, and despaired that even afoot, his astounding height and breadth diminished not at all.

Dear Lord, he was coming closer. He meant to reach for the door.

Lunging forward, she threw the lock and extracted the skeleton key just as his big hand turned the latch.

Their eyes met.

And the rain disappeared. As did everything and everyone else.

Mena knew that there were moments in one's life as significant as an epoch. Existence, as a result, was split into a before, and an after, and whatever was left as a consequence of that moment illuminated who someone really was. It laid one open, exposing the most vulnerable part of one's self for honest and brutal inspection, and the acceptance that inexorable change has been wrought. She'd lived long enough to experience a few of these. Her mother's death when Mena was only nine, her first real taste of tragedy. The first time she galloped on a horse on her father's farm, and experienced true freedom. Her first kiss. The horror of her wedding night. The moment she was told she'd never be a mother.

So she recognized this as one such moment.

The leviathan on the other side of the now seemingly inadequate barrier of the window was not the only one conducting the inspection.

What Mena saw in the striations of amber and ebony in the Highlander's eyes alternately terrified and fascinated her. Here was a man capable of inconceivable violence. And yet … a weary sorrow lurked behind the incredulity and subsequent exasperation in his glare. He might even be attractive beneath all that soot and filth, but in the feral and weathered way the Highlands, themselves, were appealing.

Mena blinked, berating herself for noticing such a thing of her probably robber-highwayman-rapist-assassin, and the spell was broken.

“Open the door,” he commanded in a deep and booming brogue.

“No,”
Mena answered, before remembering her manners. “No, thank you.”

*   *   *

They called him the Demon Highlander.

Over the course of the previous two decades, Liam Mackenzie had led a number of Her Majesty's infantry, cavalry, and artillery units. He'd stormed countless mobs during the Indian Mutiny and made his fame when the so-called Indian Rebellion had been crushed. He'd facilitated the disbandment of the East India Company with espionage, assassination, and outright warfare, painting the jungles with blood until the crown seized the regime. He led the charge against Chinese cannon in the second Opium War, leaping from his horse over cannonfire and slicing through Asian artillery. He'd secretly conducted rescue missions to Abyssinia and Ashanti, leaving no trace of himself but for a mountain of bodies in his wake. He'd trained killers and killed traitors. He'd toppled dynasties and executed tyrants. He was William Grant Ruaridh Mackenzie, lieutenant colonel of Her Majesty's Royal Secret Highland Watch, Marquess Ravencroft, and ninth laird and thane of clan Mackenzie of Wester Ross. A high agent of the crown and a leader of men was he.

When he gave an order, it was obeyed by patrician and plebian alike. Most often without question.

He had no time for this. A fire had somehow ignited in the east fields this morning and his men were exhausted from frantically fighting it. The rain had been a blessing, one that had saved their winter crops. When Kenneth had ridden up and explained their predicament with the carriage, they'd raced five miles through the sac-shriveling autumn rain to save her pretty hide.

Had she
really
just locked him out of his own carriage and then disobeyed his command with a polite
no, thank you
?