Hard-Hearted Highlander. Julia London
THEY MEET EVERY afternoon and walk along the cliff above the cove, speaking of everything and nothing, laughing at secret jokes. Their fingers are entwined except in those moments when Rabbie leans down, picks up a rock and hurls it out to sea. Sometimes, he carries her on his back so that the hem of her arasaid will not get wet. Sometimes, they go down to the beach, and she picks up a stick and draws the shape of a heart with their initials.
They mean to be married. They don’t know when, and they have kept this promise to each other a secret. These are uncertain times—whispers of rebellion and treason seem to slip through the hills on every breeze.
On a particularly cool afternoon, Rabbie returns Seona to her family home and sees the horses there, still saddled. Inside, he hears the voices of men. Seona’s mother, a large woman with a welcoming smile, appears, but today she seems unusually fretful. As they walk past the room where Seona’s father and brothers are gathered, Rabbie sees the men who have come. Buchanan, Dinwiddie, MacLeary. All of them Jacobites, all of them known to conspire against the king. This is treacherous ground, and Rabbie glances at Seona. She doesn’t appear to notice the men. She is smiling, telling her mother about the ship they spotted passing along the coast with a flag of black and red. He doesn’t know if Seona understands what her father and brothers are about.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING TWO days after that interminable dinner, with singing so atrocious that Rabbie wished he was deaf, passed in a haze of restlessness. His thoughts kept going back to that evening and the moments he’d stood at the back of the music room, endeavoring—and failing—to grasp how he might possibly make a life with the lass.
Perhaps his father was right. Perhaps he ought to put her in at Killeaven and leave her there.
That dinner was intended to establish harmony between two families that would, in a matter of days, be forever tied by matrimony, but Rabbie couldn’t bear the thought of even bedding her. He’d escaped unnoticed from the music room, and had gone in search of drink stronger than wine.
His path had taken him to the kitchen. He’d heard voices as he approached, and figured the servants were cleaning up after the supper. He could hear Barabel’s deep voice instruct someone in Gaelic, “Have a care with the plate, lass. We’ve precious few of them now.”
He walked into the kitchen and just over the threshold, he froze. Barabel was instructing the MacLeod children. The lass glanced up at him and smiled. The lad scarcely made eye contact before turning back to his task of drying pots.
“Aye, Mr. Mackenzie, may I help you?” Barabel asked in Gaelic.
“Whisky,” he said, his voice rough with an emotion he hadn’t even realized he was holding.
Barabel disappeared into the adjoining storeroom to fetch it.
No one said a word. The two children stared at him, and Rabbie stared back. He didn’t know what to say to them, and at last, he spoke to them in Gaelic. Did they speak English? “I, ah... I knew your mother.”
The lad looked up at that admission.
“I donna remember her,” the girl announced in English. “Mrs. Maloney said I look very much like her. She was bonny and so am I.”
“Aye, she was, as are you,” Rabbie agreed. The lass—Fiona—must be five or six years old now. Ualan was nearly two when last Rabbie had seen him, and he guessed him to be seven or eight years now. “She loved you both,” he said.
Fiona smiled. The lad didn’t utter a word.
“I knew them all,” Rabbie said, and was embarrassed to hear his voice crack. “I even knew the two of you.”
Fiona’s eyes widened. “You did? I donna remember you.”
“You were a bairn, lass,” he said to her in English. “You played here at Balhaire, aye?”
The children stared at him. Perhaps they didn’t believe him. He began to perspire; he could feel a bead of it running down his back. As he gazed into those vaguely familiar faces, he could see Gavina and Seona’s eyes in the children. He could see the lad’s father in him, in his rust-colored hair, just like that of Donald MacLeod.
Barabel returned to the kitchen with a flagon. “Why do you stand idle?” she chastised the children as she handed Rabbie a flagon of whisky. “Finish your chores, the both of you,” she commanded.
Rabbie had glanced once more at the children before leaving. He was disquieted by their presence. What was to happen to them? Perhaps he didn’t want to know—to know would require some action on his part, at the very least, some thought or feeling. He couldn’t summon the strength for it that evening.
He’d taken the flagon to the top of the fortress tower, and there he had crouched on the parapet, drinking to numb the hopelessness in him. He’d absently viewed the bailey below—quite a fall that would be—but he didn’t think of jumping.
At least not that night.
No, he’d found himself instead thinking first of those orphaned children, and then of the woman with the dark hair and hazel eyes and deep red gown. Or rather, he’d thought of the way she’d glared at him. With disdain. As if she had the right to disdain him. Somehow, the maid and the children became tangled in his muddied thoughts. He was angry that she could possibly find fault with him when there were two children working in the scullery because of the English forces.
The cold eventually sent him inside, long after that haughty little Sassenach had left Balhaire, long after the candles had been extinguished and everyone had gone to bed. And then he’d tried to sleep.
It was impossible.
It puzzled him—how could a man desire sleep so utterly above all else, and yet be unable to achieve it? But between his perpetual anguish and the hazel eyes burning their disdain into his mind’s eye, he’d slept very little. Frankly, he wasn’t certain if he’d slept at all in the last two days.
And now had come the day he’d be forced to take the chit riding.
Why did women believe it such a bonny pastime to amble aimlessly about the countryside? Even when he was in good spirits he chafed at the futility of such exercise. And, naturally, his family distrusted him so completely that Catriona had once again been dispatched to chaperone him. She was leading the charge, and she determined a picnic was the thing. She’d asked Barabel to prepare a basket for them. A picnic!
“It’s a bonny day,” she’d said when Rabbie had complained. “She will like it.”
Rabbie didn’t picnic.
Aye, but he’d resigned himself to it. Even his father had lost patience with Rabbie’s surly apathy, chastising him this morning for having left the room the other night without bidding their guests good-night.
Truthfully, Rabbie had lost patience with himself. It wasn’t as if he enjoyed his state of mind, but it was beyond his ability to affect. He struggled to shepherd his thoughts in a brighter direction. He couldn’t seem to move them at all. It was as if a boulder had been placed before him, and until he could push it away, he was destined to stand still. No matter what he did, no matter how he prayed or swore that this day would be different, he could not move that boulder of melancholy. It grew bigger and heavier every day.
And today was no different.
He was to meet Catriona on the road. She’d gone to call on their father’s cousin, whom they called Auntie Griselda. Quite unfortunately, she was failing. Catriona was especially close to Zelda, and visited her every day. While he restlessly waited, his thoughts spinning, Rabbie had ridden to the cliff above the cove. Now, here he stood, his toes just over the edge.
The tide was out, and from his vantage point he could see how the color of the water below him changed from green to dark blue where it deepened. If he leaped, spread his arms, he