The Highlander's Maiden

* * *

By the time Cassie rose from the tub, her recovery, as far as she was concerned, was complete.

“I should think you’d be terrified.” Maggie insisted, handing her younger sister a mug of hot mulled wine.

“Och, I was when I saw Ian trapped under the ice,” Cassie admitted as she wrapped her cool fingers around the napkin-covered cup. “But as to the rest of it, I can’t really say that I remember very much.”

The whole terrible accident had assumed an unreal, dreamlike quality in Cassie’s mind. Only two things were really clear: Ian’s desperate struggle under the ice and the sight of the stranger swimming like a fish to her from deep in the pond’s icy depths.

She had a very vague image of the stranger kissing her, but surely that wasn’t real. It couldn’t be, because the image that came right after that one was disgustingly flavored with the fear that she might have vomited in his lap. That particularly revolting thought went against every ladylike behavior she had acquired from her beautiful mother, Lady Claire, wife of John James Thomas MacArthur.

So Cassie put that thought aside and refused to dwell upon it just as resolutely as she refused her sister’s urgings to sleep.

Maggie didn’t allow a pair of idle hands any more than their mother, Lady MacArthur, did. For that matter, when she stayed at Glencoen, Cassie rarely saw her abigail, Dorcas, or her gillie, Old Angus, during the day long enough to say hello. There was too much work to be done, work that everyone pitched in to help finish. The farm’s three most frequent visitors loved every minute of the bustle, work and commotion.

Old Angus couldn’t be found indoors unless someone opened a cask of whiskey and wanted his fiddleplaying after sunset. Dorcas couldn’t stay out of Glencoen’s kitchen. She reveled in being allowed to bake all her favorite dishes from Maggie’s overflowing larder. At Castle MacArthur, Cassie’s parents’ home, Cook wouldn’t allow anyone from upstairs in his kitchens unless to pick up a tray or give instructions.

Cassie dressed quickly and went to the kitchen. There, Ian sat, devouring a bowl of brose and a biscuit. Millie had just finished her lessons at the table. Maggie handed wee Willie to Millie and told her to take the sleeping baby up to the nursery. Ian dogged his sister’s steps out of the kitchen as Millie complained that she had enough to do with numbers and entertaining the baby without Ian coming along, too. Life was going on as usual without a single look back.

Cassie took that as her own cue for the balance of the day.

With a flash of her petticoats rustling about her quick feet, Maggie went out the door with Cassie following her. They were much alike, both sisters, but their faces and hair were very different. Maggie’s lampblack curls were as dark as their mother’s had once been. Cassie’s hair was the cursed color of her father’s, and she wished it weren’t.

Just as she had her father’s red hair, she had his blasted freckles. No man she had ever met took seriously a woman with pale lashes, colorless eyebrows, flaming hair and a face full of freckles.

Maggie, with her fine dark brows and flawless clear skin, was taken seriously by all men. None had dared to call Maggie by some silly childhood nickname the way Cassie had been called Lady Quickfoot since she’d won a boys’ footrace in the Highland Games at the age of nine. On top of that, Cassie’s slender body might be similar in shape and size to her mother’s, but her face was the mirror image of her father’s. She had his long straight nose with the little bump just at the beginning of the cartilage. Her lips were wide and thick and permanently curved into her father’s trickster’s smile, which always fooled people into thinking. she was amused by what they did or said.

Worse, she had John MacArthur’s chin, broad and blunt; not the sweet pointed chin that made her mother’s face so very pretty.

Cassie held her tongue until they reached the lower floor of the house. In the spacious hall, she blandly asked, “Who’s to supper then?”

“Och.” Maggie preened in a conspiratorial voice, unable to withhold the importance of her visitors. “The travelers, Cassie, the ones who saved ye. Euan told me they are the Marquis of Hamilton’s surveyors, whom the king has commissioned to make a new map of Scotland.”

“Aye, I know,” Cassie said lamentably.

Stunned, Maggie replied, “You know that? And here, Millie told me you did not speak of anything with them save the direction of our farmhouse. Cassie? I don’t understand.”

Cassie shrugged and looked away from her sister, at a loss to explain what she knew and hadn’t mentioned in her month-long visit.

“Something is going on here, Cassandra MacArthur,” Maggie demanded, as curious as a cat let loose in a basket of knitting yarn. “How is it that you know what a marquis and a king are a-plotting?”

“I dinna say I knew that.” Cassie took a deep breath, not knowing where to start, exactly. “Would it suffice to say I guessed who they were by the way they were measuring MacDonald’s high meadow?”

“No, it will not. Cassie, talk to me for heaven’s sake. Here we are indebted to them for two lives, yours and Ian’s. So they’ve earned the right to sit to our table as honored guests. For heaven’s sake, talk. to me!”

Cassie forced herself to look her sister in the eye and reluctantly began to tell her about the king’s messenger who came to Castle MacArthur in early December. “He brought two letters from the king, one to MacArthur and one specifically to me, which I received into my hand directly. The seal had not been broken so I am assured that MacArthur does not know the contents of the letters.”

“The king wrote to you?” Maggie did her best to keep her impatience under control. Cassie could be maddeningly secretive.

“Well, that’s the thing, you see,” Cassie murmured softly. “The king’s letter was really addressed to Lady Quickfoot, but the messenger gave it to me as though it had said Cassandra MacArthur.”

“And the contents…”

“Well, it was a royal command.” Cassie sat on the long bench of the table. Maggie settled beside her and took hold of her hand. “King James commands Lady Quickfoot to put her ‘services as a mountain guide at the disposal of his surveyors, Gordon and Hamilton, as they measure and survey Lochaber.’ The king also requires that all the proprieties of the Highlands be met.” Cassie stopped short of telling Maggie the worst codicil. Should Lady Quickfoot be a femme sole, all proprieties would be satisfied by her marriage to one Robert Gordon, surveyor, upon his arrival in Lochaber. The king was thorough, she’d give him that much.

Maggie went from shock to laughter. “King James wrote all of that to Lady Quickfoot, did he?”

“Aye,” Cassie replied somberly. “‘Twere it addressed to me, I would have told you straight away about it…but…it’s such a conundrum!”

“Aye,” Maggie said, her mouth having the same difficulty keeping the smiles at bay as Cassie was. Then the two of them burst into laughter.

“Oh, that’s rich,” Maggie laughed, wiping at the tears in her eyes. “To think our king doesna know a children’s tale from reality…It’s too funny for words. Why, imagine what you would do if he commanded Lady Quickfoot to come to court.”

“Well, I guess I’d dress up Millie and her dolls and send them to court, wouldn’t I?” Cassie broke up again, holding her sides to keep from hurting her tender ribs with laughter. “You know who’s behind this, don’t you?”

“No. Who?” Maggie asked, wiping her face with her apron.

“That devil, our dear brother Jamie.” Cassie reverted to her normal solemnity easily enough. “I can just see him at court, spinning tales to the king that would make mine sound as tame as Ian’s favorite pudding.”

“Aye, it has Jamie’s mark of deviltry to it. He’s as glib as an English bard. Well, you never know, Cassie, perhaps some good would come of this. You could be invited to court. Imagine your chances for finding the richest husband inland, if that were to happen. You’d certainly no’ have to settle for one of father’s choices then, would you?”

Cassie remained firmly noncommittal on that subject, which made Maggie press her hand down upon Cassie’s resting fingers. “Are you no’ ready to be making yer own home somewhere, Cassie?” Maggie asked, saying what was on her mind.

“Aye, well, I am and I’m not.” Cassie shrugged her shoulders rather helplessly. There wasn’t an awful lot she seemed able to do about her situation either way.

“Has Father no’ had offers for ye since Alastair was-buried?”

Plain speaking seemed to be Maggie’s forte inside these walls. Cassie wasn’t particularly warm to the subject, but she couldn’t see any route around the truth. After a moment of thought, her mouth deepened at the corners in that perpetual smile that graced her face. “Well, aye, one or two that made my hair turn white.”

“Old men, then?” Maggie didn’t quite frown over Cassie’s less than forthright admission.

“Older than James and Lord Sinclair, none so old as MacArthur.”

“He wouldn’t marry you off to an old bounder, would he?”

“Not unless I make him mad again. This past May he swore he would hand me off to the next man that offered.”

“What had you done?” Maggie laughed. Her littlest sister had been telling their father off from the time she started talking. Maggie had always counted that to the fact that redheads rubbed each other raw. So it had been for their elder brother, Jamie, too, as well as their oldest sister, Roslyn.

Cassie had taken the eternal battle for autonomy to a new height. At the age of ten she began speaking of their father only as “MacArthur” whenever she was forced to refer to him in passing speech. Maggie didn’t know why Cassie did that, but she’d always been curious to discover the reason. In that regard, Cassie had been as closemouthed on the subject as their father had been.

Cassie’s face scrunched up in a comical scowl. “It wasn’t anything, really. MacArthur favors his newest confidant, Douglas Cameron. You know him, the Cameron with the black beard that struts about like he’s the good Lord’s gift to womankind.”

“Aye, I ken who, sister. I’ve heard my serving girls call him Douglas the Darling, for he’s bedded every serving wench in Lochaber. Let’s see to the table while we’re talking,” Maggie urged, and the two of them got up and set to work taking out trestles to enlarge the table for supper. The corners of Maggie’s mouth twitched. “Douglas Cameron’s a verra comely man.”

“I’ve seen handsomer.” Cassie refused to be pinned on that point.

“He gets along verra well with Euan,” Maggie added. “They arm-wrestled to see who was stronger, and damn me if it didn’t turn out to be a draw.”

To that Cassie said promptly, “Aye, well, he’s a man’s man, isn’t he now?”

“Mumph.” Maggie laughed. “So what did you do to poor Douglas the Darlin’ that put you on the black side of Papa’s temper? Stick a burr under his saddle or poison his brose?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do anything like that,” Cassie said, with her blue eyes so wide and innocent she couldn’t be speaking the truth. “He came courting Beltane night, the first of May, and asked me to walk out with him. I said no—I wasna going up to the revelry in the hills. I wanted no part of the fumbling in the bushes, though I did say I’d go to the May crowning and watch the games earlier in the day.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, he said I was being as prudish as a papist nun, and I pretended neatly not to know what exactly he meant by that. The poor vain soul was being sorely put upon to explain himself clearly, so he grabbed me and smacked me on my lips to diagram things more clearly, then groped at my breasts like he was milking a cow.”

“Did you like it?” Maggie prodded, taking a cloth from her pocket to buff down the long polished tabletop.

Cassie looked horrified at the very thought. “Has breathing the air on a mountain farm robbed you of the last of your wits, Maggie MacArthur? No, I didn’t like it at all! Douglas the Darling hasn’t taken a bath since he sprouted the first whisker of that great black beard on his face. He smells like pig farts. After I clobbered him to bring him back to his senses, I told him that, too. You know what he did?”

Maggie shook her head, helpless to contain her laughter.

“He tried to put his hand under my skirts!” Cassie complained indignantly.

As straight-faced as she could, Maggie replied, “Well, Cassie, what else is a man with his reputation to do when you’ve likened his romantic efforts to pig farts?”

Cassie gave in to the need to laugh heartily. So did Maggie.

“Curiously enough, MacArthur laughed when I told him that, too.” Cassie grinned.

“So how did you get out of randy Douglas’s clutches and into our father’s bad graces?”

“I pushed Douglas off the battery wall to get away from the bounder. He slid down the stable roof and then tumbled into the well. Douglas caught the ague from the dunking and couldn’t drag his dirty hide off his cot for more than a month. That caused MacArthur to miss the Glorious Twelfth and all the fair hunting days between.”

“Now wait there.” Maggie held up her hand. “The Glorious Twelfth is in August. Douglas should have been up and running by August.”

“Och, did I forget to mention that when Douglas crawled out of the well he had a broken leg?”

“Cassie!”

Cassie shrugged. “Serves the great big oaf right. It didn’t mend straight. He can’t track boars anymore or keep up with the other hunters on foot. MacArthur is racking his wits trying to figure out what to do with the man now when he comes a-visiting. Douglas eats as much as a horse, and we don’t even want to go into his other charming attributes. Mother has about had it with Douglas the Darling and told MacArthur not to invite him to Achanshiel anymore.”

“Ah, I get it now. So what you’re really saying is that father’s sleeping on the cold side of the master’s bed and that’s why he threatened to marry you off to the next man that asks, bounder or no’. Look at things this way, Cassie, you’ve got two new men to choose from now that surveyors have come from court.”

“One’s a Gordon, the other is a Hamilton. They’re dead men if they cross Glencoe into Lochaber. Besides, I wouldn’t have either,” Cassie replied, ignoring the niggling frisson under her skin that told her she’d definitely have one of them.

“I can tell you this—I’d likely run off to Wales if MacArthur tried to force me to marry a man I find disgusting.”

Maggie threw up her hands. “Well then, there’s a whole countryside full of eligible of men. Didn’t you like one of the young Maitlands that danced with you at Cathy’s wedding?”

“I liked talking to him. Maggie, I don’t like really big men—warriors.”

“Och, don’t tell me you want a farmer.” Maggie groaned. “You’ve been cosseted and waited on hand and foot since the day you were born. A farmer’s no good for you.”

“I’m no more a princess than you were,” Cassie said, justifying herself. “I’ve been thinking about marrying a vicar.”

Maggie rolled her eyes at the ceiling. She probably couldn’t get her Catholic husband to go to a Protestant wedding if her sister married a vicar, let alone allow the two of them to enter his house as a married couple. “A vicar, Cassie? Why a vicar?”

It wasn’t easy for Cassie to explain, since she hadn’t had much time to explore the fantasy completely herself. “What I mean is I like to read, and all the ministers I know are always reading.”

“So.you want a learned and educated man.”

“Aye, and one who isn’t adverse to bathing,” Cassie quipped with a flashing grin.

“They will all do that if you make it a requirement to touching you,” Maggie assured her.

Men, in Maggie’s estimation, were merely overgrown, hairy little boys, needing to be managed and nurtured very carefully by a wise woman who knew what she needed and he needed. Cassie clearly hadn’t caught on to that fact. But then, her sister was very used to going about things her own way—and spent too much time in the hills reading and wandering, attended by no more than a couple of elderly gillies their father trusted with her safety.

Maggie came around the table and gave her sister a hug. “Oh, you mustn’t worry, sweetling. There’s the right man for you out there somewhere. All the good ones can’t be taken. I must go and see how the cooks are doing. Set out the candles, will you please?”

“Of course I will.” Cassie squeezed Maggie back, and only cast the smallest of envious glances at Maggie’s smooth unblemished complexion as their quick embrace ended. “Why did I get all the freckles and you didn’t get a one?”

“Because God always saves his best for last.” Maggie kissed her cheek and left her with one final gem of sisterly advice. “After you’ve done the candles, do go an’ rest awhile. You’re not as strong as you think you are, and the bairns willna let you go to bed without another of your stories.”

Cassie turned to the cupboards. She tucked her hand across her lips to cover a yawn, and the unconscious gesture brought to mind a stranger’s fingers touching her mouth. An honorable stranger whose liberties had been performed in an heroic and generous manner. She was not going to think about that.

She was not going to think about King James’s letter or demands either. It wasn’t her wish to lead a Gordon around Lochaber, revealing to him where each of her kinsmens’ fortresses and strongholds were situated in the hills. King James had the wrong idea of Cassandra and Lady Quickfoot.

Cassie only elaborated on older, more traditional MacArthur clan legends. The king thought he could marry off a woman who didn’t exist. Lady Quickfoot was a character in oral stories that were over two hundred years old. She wasn’t real. She wasn’t Cassandra MacArthur!

Besides that, the last person in the world she would marry would be a Gordon. He could well be the very man responsible for killing her beloved Alastair. God might forgive the Gordons the men they killed in battle, but that didn’t mean the Campbells or MacArthurs ever would. Not this MacArthur at least.

Did she have the king’s letter in her hands this moment, Cassie would burn it. At least she was consoled by the fact that the letter commanding “Lady Quickfoot” to serve his royal interests in Lochaber was safely hidden where no one could ever find it—behind a loose panel in the headboard of Cassie’s bed at Castle MacArthur. Furthermore, its obscure addendum to Cassandra MacArthur regarding an unacceptable marriage to a Gordon would remain hidden as well.

Instead, she turned her thoughts toward supper, hoping it wouldn’t last too long tonight. She, for one, intended to go to bed as early as the children did.

Cassie took out Maggie’s tall candelabrum. Beeswax candles were kept in the stillroom, where it was damp and cool all year long. She fetched her cloak and headed outside. The darkening sky above the faraway mountains took her breath away. Cassie stopped perfectly still in her tracks, absorbing all her eyes beheld.

To the west, the faintest glow of sunset still tinted the winter sky, but to the east it was dark enough for the stars to shine though the gloaming.

Cassie leaned on the fence, enjoying the quiet and the wind and the silence that settled so peacefully around this farm. If she stayed out long enough, the stars would become so bright and thick in the cold air that they looked like faint clouds racing and twirling in the heavens, heralds of Apollo’s chariot. She had half a mind to go up in the hills to where she always felt secure and one with the elements. That would certainly solve her current dilemma.

Granted, this Robert Gordon had said nothing to her about Lady Quickfoot. But that didn’t mean he was unaware of Lady Quickfoot’s identity.

Something bothered Cassie more than it had earlier. Alone, she could feel Gordon’s hand cupping her breast, touching her throat and chin and fluttering across cold, sodden cloth stuck at her waist.

Cassie shook her head, refusing to dwell on such memories. She needed to leave her sister’s farm as soon as possible, by first light tomorrow, before the subject of Lady Quickfoot could ever be broached. Before that blasted letter from King James could ever be mentioned.

Chapter Four

A glaze of ice filmed over the water that Robert had planned to use for his ablutions before supper. One bucket was far too little if he was going to be presentable enough to sit down to the lady of the house’s table. No matter how filthy he was, Robert drew the line at immersing himself in the nearest loch. He refused to suffer such frigid torment twice.

He was too damned civilized for that.

The last hot bath he’d taken had been at an inn in Glen Orchy. He consoled himself with the hope that there would be inns up the road in Lochaber, too. He wouldn’t put the womenfolk of this house through the extra work of boiling water so he could shave or wash. They worked as hard in a day as he did. That mild consideration meant that those same ladies would have to suffer his presence at supper with a week’s stubble of beard, packing creases in his spare shirt and a kilt that had received no more than serious brushing to free it of Glencoe’s rich black mud.

He would wash anything he possessed in water drawn from a good well and did so all the time on his travels. Hence he stripped down inside the barn to his kilt and bare feet for the second night in a row, grimly facing the task before him.

A yellowed cake of hard lye soap made a gray lather on his hands. The light in the barn was dim, only a punched tin lantern helped him with his difficult task.

Road dirt was one thing, but the dirt from the muck in the byre was of another class. Robert dunked his hands in the water to rinse them and revolted against using that soil to wash his face or other parts. He had to throw it out and fetch fresh.

He shook the excess from his hands, picked up the bucket and went out into the darkening night. He didn’t really feel the snow under his bare feet. Experience on the march and through wintry mountains had hardened him to the point that he only felt the cold when he actually warmed up. There were some crofts that he couldn’t remain long in now. Robert couldn’t breathe when the air was close and overheated indoors, or so smoky it choked him.

Actually, he was most content to have a barnor a shed to pass a cold night in, sufficient harbor from the wind. Mostly he and Alex sheltered with crofters. Farmsteads like this were as rare as royal princes in Scotland. Wherever they were at suppertime, they were always invited to share what fare the family had. Glencoen Farm was a double boon. The food offered on this prosperous farm’s table was filling and plentiful.

If there was one thing Robert missed on this mission to complete the first stage of his cartographer’s work, it was hot food, served to him regularly. When this journey ended, he didn’t think he would be able to look at a blackened coney on a spit with any sort of relish. But he did now. At this moment he’d have eaten a raw rabbit. That was how ravenous he always was at the end of every arduous day of hiking and measuring mountains.

Come June, the task would be over. Nothing was going to distract Robert from the goals he had so permanently fixed in his mind—nothing. Once all of Scotland was measured, they could sit down to the next task, that of compiling all the measurements, diagrams and drawings into a concise and perfect graphic rendering of Scotland as she really, truly was.

In Campbell country, King James’s approval of their work carried about as much weight as the Marquis of Hamilton’s endorsement—none. The coin of commerce in Glen Orchy and Lochaber was the bond and goodwill of the Earl of Argyll, Archibald Campbell. Even if Robert had garnered that august man’s endorsement it wouldn’t have mattered. He was a Gordon and Highland Campbells hated all Gordons. Their ill will came with the territory.

On the positive side, Robert and Alex knew more about Scotland than any other Scotsman alive. They had cataloged the elevation of nearly five hundred mountains, identified the longitude and latitude of each hamlet, village and township in the realm and measured the length and breadth of every lake, bay, inlet and peninsula in their convoluted, mountainous homeland.