The Border Trilogy (3 page)

Though her eyes were open, she dared not move her head to look directly at the intruder lest her movement startle him, for her first conjecture was that a thief had decided to take advantage of her slumber to search for booty among her belongings. But even as the thought stirred, she wondered what thief would dare attempt to enter a window fully thirty feet and more above the ground by way of a snow-crusted balcony.

Just then the intruder moved past the bed, and through quickly lowered lashes she saw his outline clearly against the glow of the dying fire. She could not mistake that tall figure, those broad, muscular shoulders, that easy stride. Indeed, he moved toward her now as though he were in his own chamber rather than hers. When he paused beside her, she shut her eyes more tightly, then had all she could do to keep from holding her breath. She breathed slowly and deeply, hoping that if he thought she was asleep he would go away again.

She sensed that he had moved nearer, then heard a rattling sound from the candle table near the head of the bed. He moved away again, and opening her eyes to slits, she saw him kneel before the dying fire. He gave it a stir with a kindling stick from the basket on the hearth, then tossed the stick onto the leaping flames and lit the candle he had taken from the table. Standing again, he turned more quickly than she had anticipated, and when she saw that he was grinning at her, she turned onto her back and sat up, clutching the bedclothes to her chin.

“Get out,” she said, pleased that the words came clearly, even calmly, from her tightening throat.

His grin widened. “Ah, lassie, you mustn’t be angry. You ought to have had more faith in me. I’ll grant I was a long time coming, but you knew my business was urgent. ’Twas right cruel to lock your door against me.”

“I don’t want you here,” she said carefully. “I never did. You merely thought to take advantage of my innocence.”

He chuckled. “There was no mistaking your invitation, sweetheart. And as for believing you had really gone to sleep, I am not such a fool. I’d have been angrier had I not chanced to recall both your uncle’s fancy for underscoring his windows with balconies and the highlander’s unnatural love of night air. To leave one’s shutters ajar is a dangerous and unhealthy practice, as all civilized persons are aware, but I was right glad to recall that misguided highland habit this night.”

“There is nothing misguided about it,” she informed him tartly. “’Tis merely that men who learn to make do with naught but a plaid betwixt themselves and the elements are a hardier lot than you weak-kneed borderers.” Nevertheless, she told herself, the habit could indeed prove dangerous, as she had just discovered. When Douglas moved nearer the bed, she wriggled back away from him. “What are you doing?”

“What I came to do,” he said. When she squirmed to the back of the bed, he set the candlestick on the candle table, placed both hands on his slim hips, and looked down at her with a frown. “This game becomes wearisome, lass. I’ve proved my desire for you by risking my hide in a leap of at least a dozen feet from one damned balcony to another—”

“They are not so far apart as that,” she said, in a voice that was beginning to fail her at last. “Not more than four feet, maybe six at the most.”

“I am persuaded they are twelve feet apart at the very least,” he said firmly. “And the parapets are blanketed with icy snow. Therefore, I have risked life and limb. Moreover, I have apologized for tarrying, though it was not my fault and it is not my habit to apologize. So, come now, sweetheart, comfort me.” With these words, he put one knee upon the bed and leaned toward her, his right hand outstretched.

“No!” Shrinking away from him, she bumped hard against the wall. He paused then, his hand still held out toward her, and in the light from the fire, she saw his eyes narrow and experienced a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. Since she knew she dared not make him angry while he loomed over her like that and since he didn’t seem open to reason, she blurted the first thought that came into her head. “Would you not like something to warm your insides first, sir? There is a flagon of my uncle’s excellent wine on that table next to the door.”

“But I don’t—” He hesitated, watching her closely for a long moment. Then he smiled and, to her great relief, moved off the bed. “I see,” he said. “You are not quite so experienced as you have led me to believe. Well, that is no bad thing, lassie. Mayhap a taste of the wine will do us both good.”

Picking up the candlestick again, Douglas turned toward the door, and with the merest rustle of rushes from beneath the feather bed, Mary Kate scrambled out at the far end the moment his back was turned. It was but a few steps from there to the wall by the open window. Snatching up the latchpole without a sound, she flew across the cold floor on silent bare feet, coming up behind him just as he set down the candlestick and reached for the flagon. Without thought for consequence and with a strength she would not have believed possible, she whipped the cumbersome five-foot pole through the air as though it had been no longer or heavier than a riding whip.

Douglas sensed movement behind him at last, but too late. As he turned, the metal end of the pole caught him solidly on the side of his head, and with a look of blank astonishment, he collapsed like a tower of bairns’ blocks at her feet.

Mary Kate stared at him for a long moment before the horrible thought that she might have killed him intruded upon her triumph. But once she had ascertained that he still breathed, she was conscious only of vexation that he had fallen across the doorway. Moving him proved to be no easy task, and by the time she had managed to drag him into the empty long gallery, he had begun to grumble and stir in a way that frightened her witless.

Whisking herself back into her bedchamber, she bolted the door, flew to relatch and bolt the shutters, and then leaped back into bed. Not until she had yanked the covers over her head did she realize how violently she was shivering, and whether that was from cold or from reaction to her own daring, she had not the faintest idea. Moments later, feeling stifled, she lowered the quilt to her chin just as the stout door to the bedchamber shook to a thunderous kick. The measured sound of retreating footsteps followed. Then came blessed silence. Douglas had recovered sufficiently to take himself off to bed.

M
ARY KATE AWOKE THE
next morning to the extremely welcome news that Sir Adam Douglas and his party had left Critchfield Manor soon after sunrise. She departed for home herself that day, expecting, indeed hoping fervently, never to set eyes upon the handsome borderer again. The thought that she might likewise never again see Kenneth Gillespie did not so much as cross her mind, nor would it have troubled her had it done so.

In the months that followed, she stayed near Speyside House, although for a time there were still parties and other amusements to be enjoyed. Christmas came and went, followed by January and February with the worst of the heavy winter’s weather. Then, some weeks after the dreadful event itself, news of Queen Mary’s execution reached the highlands, reminding Mary Kate briefly of her last night at Critchfield Manor. The story was enhanced by such lurid details as that Mary had worn a scarlet petticoat, that she had been as beautiful as ever despite the surprising discovery that she had been completely bald beneath her wig, and that she had shown no fear when she knelt at the block. Although such minutiae fascinated her, Mary Kate spoke not one word of the matter to her father or to anyone else. Douglas and the others having obviously failed in their efforts to save the Scottish queen, the incidents at Critchfield now seemed remote and her knowledge, in view of the manner by which it had been obtained, somehow a thing better left unmentioned.

Her social life dimmed during the fierce winter months and was slow to improve even when it began to look as though spring had not forgotten the highlands, because her father continued to insist that the roads were too treacherous for travel. Though Mary Kate found many pastimes to amuse her at home, she longed for the gaiety and excitement of the house parties; however, such treats were denied her until the latter end of April when a misunderstanding involving herself and the son of one of her father’s tenants finally caused big, gray-bearded Duncan MacPherson to change his mind about keeping his daughter close to home. Angrily he packed her off to visit her Murdoch cousins ten miles to the north, and since he sent her on her way with the ominous warning that she was not only to behave herself but also to put the thought of marrying
anyone
straight out of her head for the present time, it came as a profound shock to Mary Kate to be greeted upon her return with the news that Duncan himself had found her a husband.

Being neither a tactful nor a diplomatic man, he blurted out his announcement less than half an hour after she entered the house. Though Mary Kate had changed from her traveling dress into a simple light-green woolen gown before joining him in the little parlor that had been her mother’s favorite room, she had not yet taken a seat, and upon hearing his words she went perfectly still, staring blankly at him, her hands tightly gripping each other at her waist. Although the room was lit by only two branches of candles and the dancing orange-gold flames in the small hooded fireplace, her pallor would have been noted by a more observant man.

“I say I’ve found ye a husband, lass,” Duncan repeated more belligerently when she remained silent.

“I heard you, Father.”

“Is that all ye can say tae the purpose?”

“I know not what to say,” she replied in a calm tone that surprised them both. “Not a fortnight since, in this very room, you declared that I was too young to be contemplating bridals, and now I find myself on the brink of betrothal. ’Tis enough to rob Demosthenes himself of speech.”

“Aye,” he growled. “Trust ye tae fling me own words in my teeth. God’s wounds, daughter, surely ye niver believed I’d marry ye wi’ a farmer’s son! I thought a visit wi’ yon Murdochs would cure ye o’ such foolishness.”

She lifted her chin. “Since I’d never had the least notion that Robin MacLeod wished to wed with me, I never thought about it at all. I do not love Robbie as I would wish to love my husband.”

“Love’s got naught tae do wi’ marriage. Such thinkin’s nobbut rubbish. And, by the rood, ye’ll no find a finer match than this one I’ve made ye, look ye how hard.”

“You speak as though I am already a spinster, Father, although I am not yet a hopeless case by any means. I shall no doubt meet a host of good and proper gentlemen in June when my Aunt Aberfoyle takes me to Edinburgh.”

“Weel, ye’ll no be going tae Edinburgh,” he stated on a note of triumph. She understood his tone if not his reasoning, for his sister Sarah, Lady Aberfoyle, had ever been a thorn in Duncan’s side when it came to his daughter’s upbringing. But Mary Kate had no time to reflect upon the matter, for Duncan went on at once. “Have I no said I’ve accepted the mon’s offer? I’ve given Sir Adam me word, lass.”

She had a sudden, swift vision of herself looking up into a pair of impudent brown eyes, a vision that was followed by a kaleidoscope of even more vivid, albeit less welcome mental pictures that caused her to regard her parent with no little dismay. He could not mean what she began to fear he meant. “Sir Adam, Father?”

“Aye,” Duncan declared proudly, “Sir Adam Douglas, one o’ the wealthiest men in all Scotland, though he do be border-bred. In troth, he’s like tae become an earl one day, sae unco pack and thick do he be wi’ young Jamie. And he wishes tae be wed in a twink, lassie.”

“Sir Adam Douglas?” Even to her own ears the strained repetition sounded half-witted. But memories she had thought long buried were forcing themselves to the surface of her mind in a veritable eruption of outraged, confused thought. She shivered as though the chill winds from that stormy October night gusted now through the cozy parlor.

The strange chill was quickly replaced by an even odder tingling sensation that began at her toes and spread swiftly upward. Her hands trembled. It was as if, suddenly, she were watching this scene in her mother’s parlor from somewhere outside her own body. Perhaps, she told herself, if her father hadn’t fired the news at her so unexpectedly, she might be able to think more clearly. As it was, she found it difficult to remember anything beyond the Douglas arrogance, that cocksure manner in which he had described her to his friends, and more horrifyingly, the astonished look on his face just before he had collapsed at her feet. What, oh what, she wondered wildly, had possessed the blasted borderer that he must needs offer her marriage? And what had possessed her otherwise sensible father to accept such an offer?

“’Tis no wonder you’re betwattled, lass,” Duncan said then. “’Tis amazed I am m’self the mon’s no wed afore this, he’s that suitable. But he said he ne’er gave it a thought ere his family began hounding him tae beget hisself an heir. His father, Lord Strachan, is a baron, ye ken, though that willna be sae much gin the lad gets hisself belted.”

Scarcely hearing his last words, Mary Kate turned away toward the window. Duncan’s initial announcement about finding her a husband had surprised her, but for the few moments they had been discussing her betrothal to an unknown suitor, it had been easy to remain calm, to behave as she was expected to behave. She had even felt a tremor of excitement. But the discovery that Douglas was the suitor came as an unwelcome shock, and she struggled without much success to keep a rein on her quick temper. “You cannot truly mean to marry me to Sir Adam Douglas, Father,” she said stiffly. “I have no wish to marry a borderer, and I do not even like the man.”

“What manner of ill-fared deaving be this, forby?” demanded Duncan. “I’ve accepted the mon’s offer and ye’ll marry him wi’ nae more yaffing.” Frustrated, he shoved a hand through his rough gray curls. “Such talk disna become ye, lassie. I’d nae notion ye’d even remember the mon, for he said he met ye only the once and decided tae make yon offer when he found ye tae his liking and learned that Parian Drysdale’s land, which will one day be his, adjoins me own.”