The Highlander's Maiden

Not one to be distracted, Millie continued. “‘Twas a gold ring on his little finger with a blue jewel in it. I saw it plain as day, winking at me from the edge of his ragged mitten.”

“Well, there. If your father gives them leave to have supper at his table, you’ll have time to knit the poor dark man a new pair of mittens,” Cassie said. “I didn’t see any ring, myself.”

“Tha’s ‘cause ye weren’ lookin’! You only looked at his face.”

Cassie shook her head, baffled by the girl’s powers of observation. The man had very nice blue eyes and came with an endorsement from Euan’s father. That was better than a king’s seal of approval in this part of the Highlands. Even so, if he was who she thought he was, he was a dead man. Like the rest of her MacArthur and Campbell kinsmen, Cassie had been brought up believing the only good Gordon was a dead Gordon.

Cassie loosened her hair from her hood. It spilled down the back of her cloak to be played with by the wind and tangled and blown about her face. The sun picked up its fiery colors and turned it into burnished gold. That was the only time she liked it, when she was in the sun.

One of these days she hoped to get the privilege of putting her red hair up in neat coils like her mother and all of her sisters. Until the day she was actually married, to put her hair up was the next worst thing to a sin. She had heard her brother James say that in England unmarried girls past a certain age were allowed that wonderful privilege…if they attended Queen Elizabeth at court. The day that happened in Scotland, Cassie would turn cartwheels up and down the nave of St. Giles Cathedral.

In her mind, she should have been granted that privilege when she and Alastair Campbell became engaged. But her mother had said no, and insisted the answer was still no, even when they’d buried what was left of poor Alastair in their chapel cemetery alongside his parents’ infants that hadn’t lived through childhood. Cassie still felt as if her heart had gone into the cold earth with him. It had been over a year since Alastair’s death. In that time a peace treaty had been signed and no further battles had disrupted the return to normal life.

In just a few days Cassandra MacArthur would be twenty. How could she hold up her head at the spring fetes if she was still wearing her hair down at twenty? Cassie sighed and gave up brooding over the impossible.

Ian was content to hold Millie’s hands and let her pull him along. So Cassie skated away, concentrating on making her figures with her blades in the pristine ice. Eights were easy, requiring little more than the careful management of her skirts. The circle within a circle was harder.

The children’s voices filled the high meadow with laughter, making Cassie realize she was happy at Glencoen Farm, happier than she was anywhere else in Scotland.

“Auntie Cassie,” Ian called to her. “I’m hungry.”

She’d come prepared for his inevitable hunger and produced two apples from her pocket. Millie left him standing on his skates and came to her, grabbing both apples greedily.

“Sit you down then.” Cassie instructed the girl firmly. “We don’t need to tax either of your skills with eating and skating, too.”

“I’d best take off Ian’s skates. Mama will want us home well before dark,” Millie added wisely.

Night came on quickly and early during winter. The sun was already sinking to the west. Millie skated as fast as she could back to Ian while biting into one of the apples. Then a devil got inside her and she circled the boy, holding his apple just out of his reach.

“Give it to me!” Ian demanded.

“Come and get it yerself,” Millie taunted. She skated far ahead of him, close to the rockbound edge where granite stones were frosted with a coat of dripping ice. She executed a sharp, quick stop on her iron skates. “Come get it, piglet!”

“Gimme!” Ian yelled.

Crack! went the ice at Millie’s feet. The sun caught the jagged line as it ripped across the length of the frozen pool.

“Millie, don’t move!” Cassie yelled, horrified as that jagged line zigzagged under Ian’s feet.

“Gimme it!” Ian screamed again, his hunger turned to temper.

Millie froze, clenching both apples, and looked to Cassie, who sped Millie’s way as fast as she could.

“Children—” Cassie’s heart thudded in her chest, but she kept her voice as calm as she could make it “—don’t move, please. I’m coming to you.”

“I want mine no-ow!” Ian stomped his foot.

The crack underneath him shattered like glass and roared with the voice of a cupboard full of pots and pans toppling onto a flagstone floor.

“Millie!” Cassie screamed a command. “Throw yourself on the rocks!”

“Owwww—iieee!” Ian screamed as he went down into the icy pool.

Millie scrambled onto the icy rocks, terrified by the sight of the ice closing over Ian’s head. “What do I do? Ian!”

“I’ll get Ian! Get help! Get your skates off and run, Millie. Run!” Cassie raced to the fracture.

The little girl moved quicker than Cassie could speak, catching hold of the buckles over her boots as an entire sheet of ice tilted crazily under Cassie, sending her skidding downward into a shockingly cold ice bath.

“Get your father!” Cassie screamed one last instruction before she, too, plunged under the ice.

Cassie’s arms and legs thrashed against the cloud of ice shards that accompanied her descent, in a failed effort to swim. Her cloak and heavy wool skirts rose as she sank. Then they tangled around her arms until she touched the rocky bottom. There the cold water was crystal clear save for a cloud of dark mud stirred up by Ian’s violent thrashing. Cassie bent her knees and pushed against the bottom to propel herself more quickly to Ian.

The little boy was trapped under a huge slab of unbroken ice. Even with the momentum of a firm thrust of her legs, getting to Ian quickly seemed to take Cassie an eternity in her heavy clothes. She grabbed the boy and pulled him to her, swiveling, looking for the hole in the ice, out of breath and as desperate for wind in her lungs as he was.

Ian’s fingers clawed at her, tearing at her billowing hair. His shoes, skates and knees pounded her as if he were trying to walk to the surface on a ladder made of her very body.

Their heads broke the sparkling surface at the same time and the cold air on their water-chilled skin was a second shock as they each gasped for wind. “Whisht, shh, shh, now, laddie,” Cassie gasped, lifting him above the water’s surface so he could breathe deeply. “I’ve got you, sweetheart, be calm. It’s only water.”

He coughed out mouthfuls of water, choked and gasped and sputtered like a floundering fish. While he got his wind back, Cassie looked for Millie and carefully gauged her own precarious position. Millie was nowhere to be seen, but the ice under the rocks where she’d been standing was intact. Her gleaming skates and the two apples lay negligently cast aside on the rocks. That gave Cassie a moment’s deep relief. One child was safe.

Ian, still thrashing, became heavier by the moment. Now how was she to get herself and Ian out of the mess they were in?

Cassie had nothing to grab hold of near her. As Ian came to his senses, he took a breath and coughed more normally. His little arms and legs clamped onto her body, limiting her own movements severely.

The coldness of the water had ceased being important. In fact, it almost felt warm compared to the air above the water. “Ian, let go of my arms. I’ve got to swim to get us out of here, sweetling.”

His jacketed arms clutched her so tightly, he strangled her. He was crying, too, a frightened little boy, and no wonder that—trapped under the ice as he had been. Cassie hugged him a moment longer as tightly as he hugged her, using her strong legs to keep their heads afloat. Her skirts and cloak tangled in her legs. Their weight, along with her boots and skates, made every circling motion an effort.

Mentally, she prayed, Millie, Millie, sweetheart, run as fast as you can!

The silence of the mountain pool paid a credit to its isolation. If she and Ian were to be rescued, she had best see to getting them out of the water herself.

Chapter Two

Glencoen Farm was clearly in the travelers’ sight when the little girl from the skating pond came screaming and tumbling down the track, out of breath and too terrified to speak clearly.

She got out the words “ice broke” “Auntie” and “Ian” before she took off running for the farmstead, howling like a banshee again.

“What the devil?” Alexander Hamilton sputtered, confused by the child’s terror -and slurred Gaelic words.

Robert Gordon understood the child’s terror-driven message. Dropping the measuring cord in his hands, he turned and bolted back the way they’d come, running for dear life to the top of the first hill and up the twisting path to the high meadow. Pines hid the pool from sight, but he ran onward at full speed, dread building with each pounding step across the stony ground for what his eyes would find when the pond came into view.

It was worse than he’d had scant heartbeats to envision. The mountain pool had no skaters on its glistening, windswept surface. The southern corner of it thrashed with a froth of broken, disturbing shards of ice and the fractured glare of lights reflecting from it.

Broken ice, treacherous footing and no purchase anywhere, Robert stopped at the edge of the rocky pool, mentally assessing what he saw. A solid sheet of ice extended forward from his boots thirty feet. From there to the southmost bank, it had become a mire of sharp, fragmented shards. The young woman and the boy struggled to stay afloat at the edge of the solid sheet. Their heads bobbed up and down in his sight, competing with chunks of ice for space on the surface of the pond.

Robert shed his weapons, belt, sporran and plaid. In two quick jerks he removed his boots, flung off his cap, then his jerkin, and went out on the still firm ice. He felt the shock of the terrible cold underfoot.

He sighted the girl as she vainly struggled to put the little boy onto the slippery ice ahead of her. It broke, and he went under again only to be grabbed by her, and caught by her, forced forward and onto the ice again. Their dark wools performed that slow, exhausted dance over and over again as he watched, gaining only inches and losing vast ground as more and more ice shattered underneath them.

Likewise, Robert’s progress toward them felt like a snail’s dance. His heart dropped when her last effort put the boy on a floating island of ice, but caused her to sink in utter exhaustion as the island tilted and wedged under the remaining sheet of solid ice on which Robert made such laggard progress.

The child began to scream pitifully at having lost sight of his aunt. Robert picked his next steps carefully, eyeing hairline stress marks in the fractured sheet as he lay down on his stomach and inched onto the ice floe. He caught the boy by his sodden clothes and firmly tugged him off the icy island.

He turned the startled child in the direction of the shore, telling him calmly, “Stop yer bawling. I’ll fetch yer aunt. Go this way to the shore. Go!”

Ian found new hope. The other stranger was stretched out on the ice near Ian, holding open arms that promised safety and warmth only a few feet away. Beyond him, Ian’s father rode into sight with all his men from the farm, laying a whip on the horses hitched to his hay wagon. “Da!”

Robert took one look back, making certain Alex was close enough to reach the small boy to get him if the ice should break again. Satisfied, Robert shed his kilt and slid feetfirst into the ice bath. He sank to the bottom, his eyes open, actively searching for the girl among the water weeds and shards of ice that followed his quick descent.

The cold stopped his heart and his breath instantly. He found her on the bottom, struggling to remove her weighty woolen cloak from her neck. Pale white fingers clawed at her throat, unable to manage the simple work of unfastening a corded frog and eyelet. The most beautiful cloud of red curls billowed around her like an angel’s halo, sparkling with silvery bubbles of trapped air.

The maiden’s blue eyes were stricken wide with terror. She startled as he made eellike progress to her. He caught her under her arms, pulled her to his chest and kicked his legs hard, trying to lift them both to the surface. She didn’t budge. She was caught on something.

He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He let go of her and raced to the surface, broke it and took huge gasps of air, filling his lungs to capacity. Alex was there at the edge of the ice, concern written all over his long face.

“What’s wrong, Robbie?”

“She’s trapped. Give me your dirk.”

He pressed the blade into Robert’s palm instantly.

Robert plunged downward, swimming back to the bottom, feeling the length of her legs for her feet. He found the trapped foot and the skate wedged into the rocks, and, pushing the billowing wools aside, slit the laces of her boot clean to the top and hauled her foot free of the shoe.

Her arms floated out at her sides as he again gripped her chest, drawing her close, then he kicked for all he was worth and rose to the surface. Their heads broke water. Robert gasped for air as she fell limp against him. Fluids ran from her nose and mouth. Her lungs rattled in a faint reflex as Robert tightened his arm around her chest, expelling fluids.

There was no fight left in her. None. Her arms were limp and legs wooden as Robert gripped her chest securely and cut the heavy cloak loose before it sank them both. He let the cloth drop, then tossed the knife back to Alex and conserved his strength to keep them next to the firm edge of ice.

Alex had his own finely woven tartan stretched out like a rope for Robert to grasp. The men from the farm had planks laid out across the unstable ice and rope to finish the rescue.

Sweet Jesus save us, Robert prayed fervently as he moved the woman enough to tie the rope around her chest. If she was breathing at all, it was as shallow as a sleeping baby.

Robert knew why, too. The icy cold did that, robbed the body of all its strength and numbed the brain worse than 100-proof whiskey. His own deft fingers slowed down to abominable dexterity.

“Here, now!” he commanded. “Wake up, lass! We’ll have you out of here in a trice.” He grasped her chin, lifting her face, and marveled over her sweet, freckled beauty. Her cheek fell against his shoulder and water lapped at her jawline. They had to get out of the icy water soon. Alex hauled on the rope with all his might but it wasn’t enough to pull her out of the water—not in her sodden woolens. It was taking too long!

Some other sense told Robert to lend her what he could of his own supply of warmed breath. Her slackened mouth offered no resistance as he covered her full, colorless lips and filled her flooded lungs with his own warmed breath.

That action roused her more than his underwater rescue. Her eyelids fluttered open, her gaze fixed on his eyes and remained there. Again, Robert laid his mouth upon hers and breathed for her. That awoke her from her numbed lethargy, bringing forth a cough and a veritable flood of water bubbling up from her chest.

“Good, good!” Robert let her head rest on his shoulder. He stroked her cheek and throat encouragingly, treading water between breaths.

When the bubbling cough stopped he gripped her chin fast and breathed again into her mouth, giving her the only warmth he could under such intolerable conditions. The same gurgling expulsion of the pond’s water from her chest followed.

Alex held his place, flattened out on the planks of wood stretching across the ice. “Robert, they’ve got the ropes secure, man. Can you hold on? Is the woman tied?”

“Aye!” Robert released her chin and let her head fall to his shoulder as he adjusted his own hold on the rope and the familiar plaid of his companion. “Tell them to pull us out, now. Quicklike. You know how much I hate cold baths.”

“Aye,” Alex muttered to himself, backing off the ice on hands and knees, knowing that when the horse pulled, all hell was likely to break loose on this ice.

He was right, too, to anticipate that the whole pond would shatter at the intrusion of the horse-powered rescue. Euan MacGregor cracked his whip. His lead horse lurched, then pulled, pushing the remaining sheet of ice backward up the bank till it wedged on rock and the weighty human burden at the end of the secure rope came free of the water and slid across the ice, cracking what was left all the way to the shore.

Horror etched Euan MacGregor’s broad face as he knelt over his young sister-in-law, untying the tightened bad knots under her limp arm.

“Get my children away from here,” he said over his shoulder to his men. “Cassie’s dead.”

“Nay, she isn’t.” Robert let go of the heavy blanket someone had thrown around him and reached for the woman one more time. “She’s just frozen, the poor brave thing.”

He gathered Cassie into his arms once more, opened her slackened mouth and kissed her with life and breath once more. Her fingers fluttered over her sodden dress, then her arm lifted to reach up and touch his face softly before weakly pushing him away so that she could cough and breathe on her own again.

Without the slightest compunction, Robert turned her over and helped her to expel more water onto his lap. His efforts were rewarded by her first sputtering intake of breath. Granted it was no more than a short, choking breath that was followed quickly by another deep and raucous cough. The involuntary motion was started anew and continued, one labored breath after another.

“She’ll be all right,” Robert said confidently. His large hands rubbed between her cold shoulders blades to warm and soothe her. Her eyelids fluttered and her cheeks began to pinken, losing the bluish color of drowning.

Euan MacGregor laid another blanket on her. That helped greatly, but Robert knew getting her out of the wind and the elements would help best.

Euan sat back on his heels, realizing that a miracle had taken place before his eyes this day. He kissed Cassie gratefully on her cheek, thanking her for his son’s life, then gathered her and the layer of horse blankets into his huge arms and lifted her out of the lap of her savior.

“Bring the wet traveler along and his friend,” he briskly told his men as he moved his sister-in-law to the bed of the wagon. “He’s earned a place at my board whenever he wants for a hot meal.”

Chapter Three

Robert Gordon and Alex Hamilton jumped off the hay cart when it came abreast of the two packhorses tethered to the trees right where Alex had tied them. Cassandra MacArthur, as he now knew the young woman’s name to be, was conscious and on the road to recovery from her icy submersion.

It was the tidbit of bona fide information regarding her name, conceded by her solemn brother-in-law, that made Robert smile wryly as he watched the hay cart roll away.

Euan MacGregor paused only long enough to repeat his heartfelt extension of hospitality. Wrapped in rough wool, Robert thanked him for his kind offer and promised he and his companion, Alex, would be down directly. By the same token, Robert refused to be treated as some vaulted, kingly guest—accepting honors that he didn’t deserve and that these austere Highlanders would resent giving, heroic deeds or no. He’d only done what any thinking man should.

On the other hand, Robert would be grateful for a warm meal at this day’s end, provided he owed MacGregor no more than he was willing to give.

Taken back, Euan paused a moment longer, eyeing both strangers intently, understanding exactly where they stood. He was like that, too, a renegade of sorts from the eternal bonds of the Highlands’ all-pervasive feudal system of loyalties. Euan also preferred to stand on his own two feet, his word of honor his sole moral code after the word of God Almighty.

“Then ye are welcome to sit amongst the free men at my table if ye pitch the hay that was dumped from this cart into the pigs’ byre where it was intended. Do ye finish the task before sundown, the barn is free for yer beds this night. A fairer offer I couldn’t make any strangers this time of the year.”

“That will be sufficient to our needs, and I thank you again, sir.” Robert nodded his acceptance.

As the farmer’s cart rolled noisily off, Alexander Hamilton moved to their saddlebags and Robert huddled under the weight of the dry woolen blanket draped over his shoulders. Alex tucked up Robert’s weapons and handed his shivering friend a dry sark and kilt and dug in a pack of rolled garments for dry stockings.

In this part of Scotland, Alexander Hamilton was a man of few words. A Lowlander by name and association, he was better known in England as the wandering grandson of the wealthy and powerful Earl of Arundel, where he could lay honest claim to lands and estates of his own in Sussex. His heart, though, seemed permanently bonded to Scotland.

When Robert finally began stripping off his wet sark, Alex spoke for the first time since they’d been left alone by their packhorses. “I wouldn’t have objected to being transported inside yonder warm house and treated like a hero for a month or so.”

“Would you now?” In spite of his blue-tinged, goosebump-pebbled skin, Robert managed to hike a dark brow over that absurd statement. “And how long do ye think ye would last with the women of the house flutterin’ and cooin’ all ‘round ye, before that loquacious tongue of yours proved ye a Sassenach, a bloody Englishman, by birth and mother’s tongue, eh?”.

“Ah, well, a week, no more, if my luck holds.” Alex grinned, speaking the queen’s English. His bornand-raised-in-Sussex accent rang in his voice as clear as a bell. He had his English mother to thank for that. His Scottish father blessed him with other virtues: his easy smile, his height and his untainted Hamilton lineage.

“Humph!” Robert grunted. He dropped the blanket and stood stark naked in the icy air, rubbing himself down briskly with the rough wool before grabbing the dry sark Alex offered him and pulling that over his head and shoulders.

“You realize of course that we’ve found our elusive Lady Quickfoot?” Robert inquired mildly. He made fast work of pulling on socks and boots, bending to fasten the buckles.

Alex cast him a dazzling grin and ducked his head twice before looking around to make certain there was no one about to hear him speak out loud. “And here I was believing the lady a figment of fertile imagination. What a piece of luck that was. That wouldn’t happen again in a lifetime, eh, Robbie?”

Alex used the familiar nickname he’d known Robert Gordon by since childhood, before they had attended university. The moniker was used sparingly nowadays and in these hills. Only when they each knew they were safe and unattended, did either of ‘them use their Christian names.

“My thoughts exactly,” Robert added crisply.

Alex’s words reminded Robert that the king’s letter to Lady Quickfoot, Cassandra MacArthur, had gone unanswered since November. Robert knew better than to consider finding Cassandra MacArthur lucky. The renowned Lady Quickfoot preferred not to be found, or so he and the king had assumed since early in December.

Personally, Robert thought finding her in this particular circumstance and saving her life the way he had just done a piece of bad luck that boded little good for his mission in the Highlands. Now he knew for certain that Cassandra MacArthur was still a maiden. A minor detail of the sort King James rarely attended, but very problematic to the two surveyors who supposedly were in need of her guidance through the politically dangerous, Campbell-controlled shire of Lochaber.

Robert fitted his plaid across his shoulders last. His blood already ran warm again, for he was weatherhardened to the bone like every Highlander worthy of his salt. He shrugged his shoulders after he’d fitted his weapons back about his hips. “No matter, my friend. We’ll persevere. Gordons always do.”