The Highlander's Maiden

All save what terrain lay in the shire of Lochaber.

Lochaber was the last. The only shire remaining on their list to be surveyed. Someday soon, the end result would be a map that was as precisely accurate as their mathematical brains could make it.

It was an occupation that would fill the best years of their lives and no small ambition. They were sworn on their scholars’ vow before God Almighty to make their map the most accurate map ever made of their Scotland. A map that navigators could use for centuries to come with complete faith in its accuracy.

Since the age of ten and four Robert had been assigned to the George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly’s vanguard, as a scout reconnoitering the terrain ahead of the earl’s army. Robert had come to cherish accurate maps and guarded them with his life. It had paid in the end. He and his brothers and most of his kinsmen were all alive and for the most part, the victors in the recent civil wars.

Too many of Argyll’s poorly prepared Campbells weren’t.

Robert shook himself out of his reverie and stamped his way to the well. He hoped the day’s luck held and MacGregor would crack open a bottle of his whiskey and invite them to share a wee dram or two of it.

The mud was more dense at the farm’s well than anywhere else outside the pigs’ byre. No matter where he’d traveled it never seemed to get cold enough to freeze the mud under a bunch of dirty pigs. He caught the rope and pulled down the well pole, dropping the bucket into the water below. The crackle of filmy ice snapped in the cold air, quite loud.

“Who’s there?” a started voice asked.

Robert turned to find the speaker and found a woman at the fence gate of a shed. He raised his hand and called out, “Don’t be alarmed. It’s only me, Robert Gordon, the surveyor.”

“Ah, the man who saved my life,” replied the woman in a rueful voice.

He squinted across the increasing gloom and found the wry speaker. It was definitely the same young lady Robert had watched skate with the farmer’s children—the redheaded maiden with freckles on her nose and lips set in a perpetual smile. The young woman whose life he’d saved and body he’d held and breath he’d shared. He’d wondered if she was avoiding him apurpose.

His Lady Quickfoot wore a most unlikely disguise—that of a simple hill farmer’s sister.

It was dark. Not so very dark that he couldn’t see her hair forming a river of captured fire against the deep darkness of her woolen cloak. Drat that, he thought. What was she doing out in the cold? She was standing still as the night air against the closed gate. Perhaps she’d only come outside to take some cooler air. He hoped that wasn’t a sign that the farmhouse felt like Lord Hamilton’s African hothouse.

Robert shook his head and told himself it was none of his business what she was doing outdoors. Did he have the good sense the Lord had blessed him with, he’d get his water and go back to the barn before his whole body turned into an icicle without his ever knowing it.

He could forget that he knew she was Lady Quickfoot and go on about his business. He didn’t need a woman’s help to complete one speck of his work.-If the truth were told—which it never could be in Scotland when Campbell kinsmen were about—Robert had his own suspicions about King James’s peculiar motives. Why the king would even want to pair another Campbell or Gordon together was beyond him. Robert needed nothing more than his own astute gifts of logic and scientific investigation to complete this mission of his in Lochaber. Yet the king thought otherwise.

Ignoring the beautiful woman, Robert tipped the dipper and poured its contents into his bucket. The excess splashed onto a layer of dirty straw. Cold water skittered across snow, ice, straw and black mud, soaking the toughened soles of his bare feet.

“There’s a huge kettle full of heated water to bathe with in the shed behind the kitchens,” Cassie said, reluctantly deducing his purpose for sojourning out into the elements in only his kilt.

It neither alarmed nor impressed her to see any man going about without his sark at this time of the day on the farm. Nor could she figure out why she was speaking to him. She might well owe him something for her life, but that debt ought to be well paid by Euan’s offer of hospitality. Then she remembered, Gordon hadn’t just saved her. He’d rescued Ian, too. So Cassie offered more…as an appeasement to her conscience. Maggie would expect that of her.

“Euan keeps soaps and razors and scrub brushes for all to use. You are welcome to help yourself. Your friend has already gone in to see to his toilette. You’ve time before supper. Do you want me to show you where to go?”

Robert looked down at the full bucket of cold water. She couldn’t have tempted him more if she’d invited him to share her feather bed, provided the sheets were clean, and her body sweet and perfumed of lavender or roses.

He made a strangled sound inside the back of his throat that Cassie took to mean “give me a moment,” about-faced and marched back into the barn. He came out moments later, his plaid swirled around his body, his feet stuffed in muddy boots, strutting stiff-legged like the soldier he really was straight to her.

She thanked the coming night for obscuring her reaction to his face and those eyes that had taken her breath away when she’d come out of her deep faint with his lips hovering over her freezing mouth. He’d been so warm and alive and concerned, she’d thought him an archangel. Thank God he didn’t know who she was. No one at this farm would reavel her connection to Lady Quickfoot, either.

“The washhouse is this way.” She gathered her cloak around her and picked up her hems, leading the surveyor to the back of the manse. There, the kitchens and laundry room became a tangled warren of additions, expanded the south wing of the house.

Cassie opened the door and peeked inside, then stood it ajar. Her quick glance confirmed that the other surveyor looked better for the washing he’d already done. He was about to shave as Cassie motioned Robert Gordon to pass inside.

She stared frankly at Robert Gordon and boldly wondered if his darkly handsome face would wash up as well as his companion’s had. A bit shy of her own romantic thoughts and troubled by the memory of his life-restoring kiss, she wagged her hand in the general direction of tubs, soaps and huge black kettle steaming above the washhouse hearth.

“Euan and Old Angus have already gone in to the hall,” she said in a husky voice. “Help yourself to what you need. Excuse me, I have to get candles for the table.”

“Your servant, milady.” Robert bowed precisely to her. She surprised the very devil out of him by dropping to a brief but very formal curtsy. Then she was gone from his sight, vanished beyond the closed door in a heartbeat.

That rattled Robert. The last deep curtsy to him personally had been given by the Duke of Atholl’s youngest daughter. The silly twit had thought him some romantic knight errant, equivalent to the gallantto-his-very-soul adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh. Granted the setting had been Holyrood and Lord Hamilton had insisted Robert and Alex attend an audience with King James and explain their ambitious plan to the king and his full court. Both Robert and Alex had been flush with enthusiasm and idealism of the kind that belongs only to the very young and foolish.

As suited the king’s pleasure, each had dressed in his foppish best to please the court. Robert Gordon had cut the best figure with his lean, athletic grace and inbred military bearing, and well he knew it. At twenty-one his young man’s conceit had been without limit. The magical part of that affair was King James was not much older than he, Timothy or Alex, and was instantly caught up in the romance of their altruistic quest. Instead of being bored to tears by their pompous reasoning, James VI was delighted.

Had a bitterly contested civil war not interfered, their map would be complete today.

But war had interfered and could do so again before this new year was out. Robert accepted what he must. When a Gordon cross truach, a fiery cross, summoned the men of clan Gordon to their laird’s aid, Robert answered duty’s call. Today was another day of tenuous peace, forced upon the Campbells and Gordons by their king. Each day that the peace continued, Robert thanked God for it and best used the time to advance his work closer to completion.

Privately, he added his own prayers that the king’s peace would continue into a second year with no renewed hostilities.

The young woman whose life he’d saved was a Campbell kinswoman, his clan’s avowed enemy in every way, shape and form. He must never forget that fact when dealing with Cassandra MacArthur. Nor could he forget that he, needed the king’s peace to accomplish his goals of finishing his work. How much could Lady Quickfoot affect the uneasy peace? Would he: be better off ignoring her identity and hillfolk title. completely?

Robert snapped out of his reverie-induced thoughts as Alex snapped a razor blade against his face. He cut a crater through the thick lather coating his cheeks and hiked a fair eyebrow into the tangled elflocks dripping on his brow. He pointed the blade at the empty tub and full kettle, then spoke. “The water’s still hot, Robbie.”

When Alexander Hamilton deigned to speak at all, it was most commonly in the acquired brogue of the Lowlands. Alex’s innate inclination to shy from conversation with most Highlanders had been honed to a finely measured reticence by their travels in Glenlyon and his reluctance to place any further claim on his Lowlander father’s good graces. That they had funding to pursue their work was enough.

“Did you see that?” Robert asked in amazement.

“Eh, Robbie, what? No, I guess I didn’t.”

“That young woman curtsied to me. To me! For pity’s sake, don’t I look like something that just crawled out of a cave or washed up with a pile of wreckage from the Armada?”

Alex looked him up and down with a familiar jaundiced smirk, then said, “Oh, aye, laddie, you look all of that disreputable and then some—with your skinny arse barely keeping that kilt around your hips. Better ask MacGregor’s goodwife if she can sew a few more pleats in that raggedy scrap before you put it back on.”

“Shut yer face, ye half-wit.” Robert flung his kilt onto a peg and folded into the steaming, soapy tub. He sat a while just enjoying the heat swirling around his feet and hips, the tub deep enough with him in it to cover his navel.

“Mayhap it wasn’t so curious. You did save her life, Rob.” Alex resumed his silent shaving, the understatement in his words reverberating against the low rafters.

Robert swatted that statement aside as he might an annoying horse fly, firmly and irrevocably. He wasn’t going to launch himself on any young woman’s heroic pedestal and remain there long enough to be snared romantically deep in Campbell territory. Not when his surname was Gordon and would stay Gordon all the rest of his days.

“What do you intend to do about your Lady Quickfoot?” Alex asked softly. As a spy this quiet man ‘was always quick to draw the clearest deductions.

Robert’s dark eyebrows narrowed in a concerned frown. “I haven’t thought it through yet.”

He didn’t want to consider it now, either. He took a deep breath of the heavily scented air of this dark room and found it achingly aromatic. The sweet smells of soap and hair tonics competed with the overpowering aroma of the haunch of mutton sizzling in the kitchen next door.

One of the farm’s servants came in from the kitchen and out though the door into the yard. Robert knew Alex would not say anything more for a good while, so he began to wash his head, soaking his long, tangled hair with hot water.

Lined up on a shelf at his elbow were. soáps and sponges, back brushes and boar-bristle brushes to get the crusted soil off his elbows and knees and hands.

It was a while before he became conscious of Hamilton’s chuckles behind him. Robert turned and glared at his friend. “Well, what?” he demanded.

“I think there must be a lot of Viking blood running in the veins of all you Gordons, Robbie.”

“And what led you to that outlandish assumption?”

“Every last Gordon I’ve ever met takes more pleasure in a teacup full of hot water than they do in an entire loch. If you weren’t so squeamish a line, you could get the same task done and over with as easily as any Hamilton does.”

“And following on that erroneous pretense to logic, the first Hamiltons were great, fat, bloody seals, were they not?”

“At least we bathe whenever the mood strikes us, ice in the lake or no.” Alex quipped, then ducked so the soapy sponge flying at him didn’t stain his only clean shirt.

Cassie’s brow puckered as she hurried back to the stillroom, her purpose high on her mind. She mustn’t dawdle any longer. She didn’t want Maggie sticking her head out one of the doors, hollering for her to come with candles before supper turned cold.

As she selected candles from the supply in the stillroom, she couldn’t help wondering about the reticent young man. That bow of his had been delivered with what she knew to be military precision, modestly correct, elegant and brief. There was no artifice involved, no courtly posing or showing of the leg, which would have been ludicrous given his state of undress.

Twelve thick candles gathered in a fold of her cloak, Cassie shut the door of the stillroom firmly behind her and hurried back to the hall. She set each candelabrum on an imaginary line bisecting the long table. By then Sybil and Dorcas had come to put out the cold platters and tankards and silver.

Cassie hurried upstairs to see to her own toilette.

She unlaced her stays and shed her day dress, changed into a clean, ironed shift and scrubbed her face with mint water and coarse oatmeal to bleach her freckles. It never helped. Neither did vinegar nor great quantities of fresh cucumbers in season nor any of the exotic creams the Gypsies concocted or the tinkers sold. She powdered the worst of the spots and smoothed the rice powder onto her throat and shoulders with a soft puff of cotton lint.

She shook out her best gown and pulled it over her head, settling it down her chest and belly. Dorcas came to tie up her laces just as she picked up her new embroidered stomacher to put on over the gown.

“Is it time?” Cassie asked.

“Not yet,” Dorcas said. She pulled the stomacher tight and threaded the laces with nimble fingers, drawing the corsetlike outer garment snug across Cassie’s breasts and stomach.

The tight serge weave of the navy wool gown suited Cassie’s coloring, darkening her pale eyes and making the pure white linen of her cuffs and shift look pristine and white. Cassie sat so that Dorcas could tuck her slippers over her heels and do up the laces. It wasn’t possible to bend forward so much as an inch in the stiff stomacher when it was laced.

“Did ye hear that one of those surveyors is a Sassenach?”

“English, you say?” Cassie tilted her head, managing to feign surprise. “Which one?”

“‘Tis the stout one, Hamilton. The handsome one is a Gordon, a Scot.”

“Dorcas—” Cassie brought her head close to the woman’s to whisper emphatically “—you dinna think they’re here to forage out MacGregor’s gold and slit our throats in the dark of night?”

“Och, Lady Cassandra.” The elder clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Dinna be teasin’ me like ye do the bairns. I’m too wise for yer tall tales. Here, let me put a brush to yer hair.”

“I’m only teasing because you well know that Hamiltons have been notoriously breeding sons and daughters openly in Scotland since the Norman conquest, even if they do have the appalling habit of kidnapping rich English heiresses for brides.”

“Humph,” Dorcas grumbled. “Those that claim to be Scottish are Lowlanders.”

“So now it’s only Highlanders that deserve to be counted our countrymen?”

“There’s no much difference between a Lowlander and an Englishman, is there?” Dorcas said firmly.

“Aye. I hear tell they both get in and out of bed the same way,” Cassie agreed, but added a codicil in a delicious gossipy whisper. “One leg at a time.”

“Lady Cassandra!” Dorcas tugged the brush against Cassie’s scalp. “Ye shouldn’t be talkin’ of such scandalous things, or thinkin’ them either. And mind that those bairns don’t spill anythin’ on this fine gown. ‘Tis lovely enough to wear to the crowning of the king.”

Cassie didn’t think so, but it was good that her abigail did. “Thank you, Dorcas, I’ll do my best not to make a mess of it. You needn’t bother with brushing my hair too much. I’ll wear it braided tomorrow for the journey home. I want to get an early start, before the house has a chance to rouse, mind you, so pack tonight, please.”

“‘Tis glad that I am to hear that,” Dorcas declared. “And will ye be telling Lady Margaret that you’re going?”

“Aye, I’ll tell her at supper. See that’you keep my plans secret from the surveyors,” Cassie said unequivocally.

“So I will do,” Dorcas snapped, giving her a puzzled look. “I’m glad of that.”

“Why’s that? You never like going back to Castle MacArthur any more than I do usually.”

“Very well, if ye must know, Lady Cassandra, I don’t want the responsibility of ye being in the company of a Sassenach.”

Cassie chuckled. Dorcas thought she wanted to escape poor Alexander Hamilton when nothing could be further from the truth. He wasn’t the surveyor whose company would bother Cassandra at all. Robert Gordon, on the other hand, bothered her a great deal. She didn’t understand why, not yet, at least. Nor did she want to stick around and find out. “Betwixt us at dinner, we’ll probably scare the poor man back to London before the pudding is served,” Cassie said, and gave her abigail’s hand a squeeze.

Dressing and grooming done, Cassie went down to her sister’s hall, wondering how this evening at Glencoe Farm would turn out. If Maggie sat poor Alex Hamilton anywhere near Dorcas, he’d likely not get through the meal without getting a dirk stuck in his heart.

To Cassie’s great disappointment, supper turned into more of a trial than she’d bargained for.

Nothing had prepared her for Gordon’s appearance in Euan MacGregor’s hall. Granted the impact his eyes had made on her at first glance should have given her a clue, but eyes were only one of a dozen or more features that could attract a woman’s heart.

From somewhere in that tinker’s pack of overstuffed saddlebags, Robert Gordon had pulled out a spotless lace-edged cravat and tied it around his throat with continental flair that was more suited to the king’s court than a hillside farm. Likewise, a set of beautiful cuffs spilled out of the sleeves of an elegantly cut black jacket. The knife-edge pleats of his kilt set off the lean lines of his tall form perfectly.

His beard-stubbled face had been scraped clean, his hair pulled back into a tightly bound queue. All in all, he quite took Cassie’s breath away.

His hands elegantly punctuated his words every time he spoke. Swallowing food she never tasted, Cassie watched him as surreptitiously as she could, fascinated, but not wanting anyone at the table to guess how intrigued by this man she really was. Robert Gordon had transformed himself from a vagabond to a peer of the realm in the space of three quarters of an hour.

And he had kissed her.

Cassie found herself blushing to the roots of her hairline. Thank the Lord no one noticed. Even Maggie was much too entertained by the humorous anecdotes the surveyors told of their travels and travails while measuring Scotland.

Listening, Cassie realized very quickly that she was in the presence of a master in the art of dissembling. Robert Gordon never gave one hint why mapping the Highlands was so important to him any more than he missed savoring a heaping serving of the excellent foods put in front of him. Nor did conversation ever stray to what purpose their patron, the Marquess of Hamilton, had in mind for funding their audacious endeavor either.

“Why must ye make a new map of Scotland? What’s wrong with the map we have?” Millie’s clear soprano voice sang out, directly asking the question they all wanted answered.

Robert Gordon laid his hands flat on the table beside his empty plate, turned to Millie and answered her in a serious voice. “Because all maps of Scotland are wrong.”

“How do ye know they’re wrong?”

Children, Cassie knew, would do almost anything to escape being bored. She wanted to applaud her niece, but a quick check of Millie’s parents’ nettling brows kept Cassie silent.

“That’s a very good question, Millicent.” That he remembered her niece’s name took Cassie aback. “How do you usually know if something is wrong, Millie? May I call you Millie?”

Now he had Cassie’s undivided attention. Men rarely took notice of curious little girls, let alone engaged in conversation with them.

Cassie watched his right hand unfasten a horn button on his coat, then settle contentedly on the warm bulge of his lean stomach. She saw that his tapered fingers and nails were as clean as her own and frowned privately because that was another mark in his favor. Drat the man! Why did she keep discovering new things about him she liked?

“Oh, aye,” Millie chirped. “That’s what everyone calls me. I know something’s wrong because my da tells me so.” Millie then thought about what she’d said and added, “Or I ask my mother.”

“And if they can’t tell you the answer?”

Undaunted, Millie responded, “I would go to the Bible.”

“Have you seen any maps of Scotland in a Bible, Millie?” He sought clarity as subtly as an Edinburghtrained tutor.

“No, they didn’t know about Scotland in Our Lord’s time. My grandfather, Laird MacArthur, has maps of Scotland. I’ve seen them, but he won’t let me play with them because he says they’re more precious than jewels.”

“When I was a little older than you, I sailed as my uncle’s cabin boy to the Orneys and learned to navigate the ship, chart the course it traveled each day at sea. I learned to use tools that correctly measure a ship’s position., Let me give you an example. Do you know how far the pond you were skating at yesterday is from your home?”

Millie’s face scrunched up in deep consideration of that question. She looked to her father, then without any prompting said proudly, “A wee stretch of the legs is all.”

“Aye.” Robert Gordon smiled at the little girl, lavishing the child with his undivided attention.

Cassie thought the smile very kind of him. He had a beautiful smile, white, even teeth and a well-formed head. His brown hair was thick and wavy, still damp and curly at the nape of his neck. She tried to imagine him in a court wig and couldn’t.

She clapped her hand to her face and looked out upon the proceedings through widened fingers. Why was she was even trying to fit a vagabond wanderer into her imaginary daydreams?

“Three miles uphill is a wee stretch of any lassie’s legs.” Robert Gordon’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Or more precisely, it is exactly fifteen thousand eight hundred forty feet or three miles.”

“Lordy! Do ye mean it for true?” Millie quit staring at the mapmaker’s clear blue eyes and looked at Cassie, exclaiming, “Aunt Cassie, no wonder we dinna skate not nearly so much that day!”

“It’s easier to come down than it is to go up,” Cassie replied.

“Not with Ian dragging on yer skirts,” Millie observed as she turned to her father to see if he had known that his wee stretch of the legs was now officially three long, measurable miles.

Robert Gordon looked over the platters of food to Cassie, who was sitting at her sister’s side. They were alike and they weren’t alike. He’d never have picked them as sisters if the similarity of their blue eyes was not so pronounced. He spoke to them both, but his words rebutted Cassie’s rather foolish observation.

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