The Highlander's Maiden. Elizabeth Mayne
this skate on your brother’s foot. You’ll hear the rest of the Lady Quickfoot story tonight.”
“But now is a verra good time to tell it.” Millie smiled winsomely.
“Annie Cass, lookie! Soldiers!” Ian swung his hand over Cassie’s head to point behind her.
“One thing at a time!” Cassie pleaded. She pushed the cloth behind her head, and gave more effort into fastening a wooden skate to a child’s wiggling brogue. “Sit still, Ian!”
“Tickles!” Ian chortled, squirming restlessly as Cassie’s fingers tied the laces firmly around his ankle.
“Lord, for another pair of hands,” Cassie proclaimed, pulling a knot secure.
“I dinna think I can wait till bedtime to find out if Black Douglas saves the last jewel of the Highlands.” Millie danced about, looking for the soldiers Ian had spotted.
“We’ve come here for a skating lesson.” Cassie firmly redirected the girl. “You’ll hear what happened to Lady Quickfoot, Black Douglas and the bard of Achanshiel at bedtime, not a moment sooner, lassie.” She sat back on her skates, muttering, “How does your mother keep clothes on your back, wiggle worm?”
“Whisht, Aunt Cassie,” Millie scolded. “Those men will think y’er daft. Y’er always talkin’ to yerself.”
“And what makes you think I care who hears my private conversations, eh?” Cassie winked at her dark-haired niece before she glanced over her shoulder. “Maybe I’m talking to my angel.”
“‘Twouldn’t be an angel,” Millie proclaimed. “‘Twould be a fairy.”
“No difference there.” Cassie shrugged “I hear fairies were angels in the beginning of time, till God sent them to stay in the Highlands because their queen was so vain.”
“Go on.” Millie shook her head. “What they need a queen for if they had God to look upon all the time?”
Cassie tweaked one of the girl’s braids. “Now that is a very good question, lassie. I don’t pretend to know the answer…save that fairies were the most beautiful angels God ever made…and I think it must have something to do with vanity. So God had no choice but to banish them from everyone’s sight. Vanity is an excessively awful sin to this very day, is it not?”
“Aye,” the child agreed solemnly.
They were high up in the north meadow, a wee stretch of the legs from Euan MacGregor’s farmstead. Within hailing distance, Euan claimed—if one had lungs as capacious as a blacksmith’s bellows—as Euan did. Cassie had heard him yell his clan’s battle cry once. He’d scared the daylights out of her.
This was a time of peace, a lull between the clan wars. Still, it paid to be alert at all times. Cassie continued to look for men in sight of the frozen pond. Here the air was frosty enough to keep ice solid until April. Lower on the mountain, everything melted in today’s mild sun.
Cassie spied the men on the mountain. Two scruffy travelers hiking through the mud-bound mire of MacDonald’s cow pasture. They led two packhorses weighted down with a great number of rucksacks, poles and bags. Cassie’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Tinkers, maybe.
A small alarm ran deep in her chest. They weren’t the Watch or king’s soldiers if their dun-colored plaids meant anything. No, they couldn’t be from the king, not coming from the south. No one knew Cassandra was at Glencoen Farm save her parents. Cassie shielded her eyes to lessen the glare of the wintry sun, studying the men more intently.
“Da says it’s fey to talk to yerself. You do it ‘cause y’er redheaded. Tha’s why he married Mama instead of ye,” Millie continued, proud of her scolding. So big she sounded and all of five. Cassie looked back at her niece and laughed over what she’d said.
“Och, and marrying yer mam wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that yer da wanted a woman to wed when he sweet-talked my poor sister Maggie into taking on this farm of his, eh? And me naught but a flat-bosomed lassie like you at the time.” Cassie tapped her niece’s nosy nose. “Fey, am I?”
She turned her chin in the direction of the two strangers, saying casually to the children, “Do you know them, then?”
Ian’s baby blue eyes rounded as he shook his head.
“They’re no’ MacGregors!” Millie’s identical eyes fixed upon the newcomers with calculating interest. She had the soul of a gossip and knew all her kinsmen and everyone who lived within thirty miles of Glencoe. “Could be MacDonalds. Da says they’re thick as flies ‘round shite hereabouts.”
“Millie! Mind your tongue!”
“Weel, Da says it.”
“And ladies don’t!” Cassie scolded.
“How come Da can say things that leddies shouldn’t?”
“Och, that’s because men say wicked things to keep all the wickedness inside them from festering like a rotten egg put on the boil. It can’t do anything but explode and ruin everything around it for a little while. Men can’t hold their passions quiet like we ladies do.”
“So we’re gooder?” Millie asked.
“Aye, we are better.” Cassie stressed the correction on the assumption that Millie’s grammar would improve with exposure to proper speech. “It’s nice to be a lady and refined like your dear Grandmother MacArthur. We must strive to be more like her every day. Besides, my child, men like doing hard and dirty work. Why, even the best of them can’t keep clean from the time they crawl out of the cradle until they fall into the grave.”
“Tha’s verra true.” Millie cast a wise look at Ian.
Not many strangers wandered into Glencoe in the wintertime. The pass to the north was beautiful but stark. You had to know what you were about to travel it in the winter. Neither of Maggie’s children had any innate fear of Highlanders walking the land their father worked. Soldiers, Englishmen or reivers were another matter. Cassie decided to wait and see.
“No’ stalkers neither.” Ian mimicked his sister’s acumen for quick judgment. “No bows or spears.”
“You’re right there, my lad,” Cassie murmured, though she saw the butt of a musket poking from between the saddlebags, and both men wore claymores and dirks, slung from broad leather belts fitted around their hips. That told her they were prepared for trouble if they came upon it.
“Can I run and ask who they are?” Millie said eagerly.
“I think we’ll wait and see if they have any business with us, first,” Cassie decided. “Speaking of which, we did come here to skate, did we not? Up you go, Wee Ian.”
She set the little one on his feet and guided him to the icy pond. His legs wobbled unsteadily on the rough skates, but he was game to give it a try.
Cassie kept a cautious eye on the strangers as they came up the steep incline from MacDonald’s meadow. They weren’t showing the slightest interest in the activities of the children or the cattle in the high field. Not reivers, then. But who were they? A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her they were the king’s surveyors, damn their eyes. What luck! That didn’t mean they knew who she was.
They seemed absorbed in the tall one’s pacing. The other stood back and counted his companion’s steps, letting out a cord, the end of which the other carried.
At the stony rise where MacGregor’s high field jutted up and away from MacDonald’s grazing pasture, they stopped and talked heatedly. The drum of their conversation carried on the north wind. At the peak of the hill, the lean one made a great commotion of pointing east, north, south and west, all of his motions becoming a sort of comic dance.
They were lost, then, Cassie concluded. Some mapmakers these two were, if they were Messrs. Hamilton and Gordon of the king’s surveyors’ ilk. She