“Why are we here? All us boys?” he whispered urgently to Douglas.
“Don’t you know? We’re here because of what the knight of the Yellow Rose asked in return for his patronage,” he whispered and trotted on ahead. “We’re to become knights.”
FOUR
THE DIRE CONSEQUENCES OF IMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR
BETWEEN THE NOISE FROM the tavern below and the howling of the storm without, Kate slept fitfully. She dreamed about her husband, Michael, but his eyes kept turning green and a Scottish burr invested his speech. She awoke before dawn, anxious and guilt-ridden.
She had met, married, and been widowed all within two years, her father having introduced her to Lt. Michael Blackburn. In hindsight, it was small wonder her father had pressed Michael’s suit for him. Like her father, Michael was dashing and courageous and entirely dedicated. And, also like him, the son of an impoverished, if genteel, family.
She had not regretted her marriage. She did regret, however, that she’d wed a hero, the sort of man who acted without stopping to consider the fates of those he left behind.
How she did resent heroes.
She stumbled from bed, the disloyal, half-conscious thought chasing her from sleep, and set about dressing in the same cotton gown she’d been traveling in for three days. Then she packed her few belongings back into Grace’s trunk, took a deep breath, and went downstairs.
Below, men lay strewn about the room like bodies on a field after a great battle. They huddled on the floor and lined the walls. Some tilted upright against one another, while a few lucky souls had commandeered benches as pallets. The stench of stale beer and wet wood ash clogged her nostrils, and the sound of snores was punctuated by other, less pleasant noises. A serving girl hurried in from a side door, her blouse askew and her arms full of kindling.
“Mrs. Blackburn,” a deep voice called.
Kate looked around. Kit MacNeill stood framed in the open door, behind him leaden clouds churning above the dim horizon. The wind rippled the edge of his plaid, affording a few glimpses of a forest green jacket. The flat light delineated scars on his lean, burnished countenance. How many men bore the scars he’d given them? How many hadn’t lived to see their handiwork? She shuddered. She had made a mistake. She could not go with this man. He was—
“Are your things ready?”
She stuttered into speech. “I have rethought my plans.”
He waited.
“I shall stay here,” she announced. “The agency that owns the carriage will send someone to replace Dougal, or at the very least, reacquire their carriage. I shall convince the new driver to take me to Clyth rather than back to York.”
“Dougal and the carriage are gone,” Kit said. “He and one of his friends took it last night.”
“Really?” Relief swept through her.
Fate had delivered her from Kit MacNeill.
“Then I shall have to wait here until another carriage comes.”
“I have another carriage,” he said. “The innkeeper had an old phaeton in the back of the stables.”
Fate dumped her back in Kit MacNeill’s lap.
“Oh.” A phaeton? The small two-person carriage had no proper back compartment for passengers, only a bench that the driver shared with his fellow traveler. Neither was it enclosed, having only a partially retractable hood. Yet it may well be the only chance she had of getting to Castle Parnell. “I… My things are ready.”
“I’ll get them.” His cape swung out from his broad shoulders as he mounted the stairs and disappeared. He returned a few minutes later, handling the heavy chest as if it were inconsequential. He stopped at the bottom of the steps. “I’ll settle with the innkeeper—easy! Do not take me to task over something so trifling. Repay me when we arrive at your marquis’s castle.”
She flushed. “He is not ‘my marquis.’ ”
His expression accused her of being disingenuous, but he only said, “The horse is hitched and the carriage is waiting. At your leisure, ma’am.” He swept his hand out in a mocking invitation, and she preceded him into the stable yard.
At the sight of the phaeton, her heart sank. It stood in a churned yard of ice and mud, old and terribly dilapidated. Two rough wooden planks nailed together replaced what should have been the upholstered bench. A cracked and faded hood half shielded the interior, condensed fog dripping from its tattered edge. Only the young roan gelding standing in the traces looked capable.
“Where did you find a horse?” she asked.
“India. Two years ago. He’s mine.”
“India,” she repeated in surprise.
“Aye.” He deposited the trunk onto the shelf on the back of the carriage next to a saddle and came round the side. He held out his hand. She hesitated. He waited, his bare hand palm up, moisture beading on his broad shoulders and the cool fog drifting behind him.
Hesitantly, she placed her gloved hand in his. Heat vibrated through her, charged with awareness. She tried to withdraw her hand, but he gave it a little jerk.
“I’d rather your scorn than your flinches, Mrs. Blackburn.”
His words brought the heat rushing to her cheeks and her chin snapping up.
“Aye. Like that.”
She snatched her hand free and climbed unaided onto the rough plank. He grinned and left her, heading back into the tavern.
“Ma’am?” The tavern girl she had noted earlier appeared at the side of the carriage holding up a squat wicker basket and a crockery jug. “He asked me to bring ye some food.” There was no need asking who “he” was. “There’s just a bit of bread and cheese and a jar of ale,” she said apologetically. “The men what come in last night ate every bit of what we had.”
“Thank you,” Kate said, accepting the goods and stowing it under the seat. She found a coin in her pocket and handed it to her. The girl snatched it up and started off but then hesitated.
“I know precious little of what goes on in the world beyond.” She nodded to the southern hills. “But men be the same everywhere, I reckon. I seen how you watched the Scot. Yer afraid of him.”
Kate did not reply. She was afraid of him.
“The rest of the world, now,” the girl continued, “they might have cause to worrit some if he’s a mind to do a bit of destruction. But not you.”
Before Kate could reply, she hurried away, passing Kit as he emerged from the inn. Wordlessly, he secured his satchel atop the trunk and then vaulted lightly into the seat beside her. He tossed her a thick wool blanket.
“You’ll want to wrap this about your legs,” he said. “We’re heading out onto the moors, and the wind is fierce there. ’Twill be cold. Bitterly cold.”
“Then why are we going that way?” she asked.
“There were men in that tavern who were watching you with an interest that didn’t stop at your pretty face,” he said, untying the reins. “I’ll wager they watched Dougal haul your trunk up the stairs to your room, too.”
She understood. “I should think we would want to put a great deal of distance between ourselves and them, then. Wouldn’t that be best done on well-traveled highways?”
That brokered a short laugh. “There are no ‘well-traveled highways’ in the north of Scotland, Mrs. Blackburn.”
“Still, it seems to me the best course would be to stay on the most traveled roads.”
“You’re not in England now. You’ll have to trust me.” He clucked, and the carriage started forward. “We’re going by way of the moors, Mrs. Blackburn, because the Highlands are filled with murderers, thieves, and brigands these days. But not fools. And only a fool would go out onto a Highland moor come November.”
Most of the Nashes’ social acquaintances had been frankly, if not vocally, surprised that the three orphans had been able to carry on as long as they had after their mother’s death. If pushed, they would have ascribed that success to Kate’s frugality and caution. They would have been wrong.
Kate had quickly learned the necessity of what she privately called “circumspect boldness”—not only the willingness to seize opportunities as they presented themselves but, more importantly, the ability to facilitate those opportunities. If at times she had skirted the conventions of her former life or occasionally deviated from what she might consider “nice” behavior, she had done so to good effect. But this, traveling alone in the company of a very rough, very hard, and very dangerous-looking man, went beyond what even she would have imagined herself capable of doing. And the notion that she might not survive this error in judgment was occurring to her with increasing regularity as the minutes ticked by and MacNeill, his cold eyes narrowed against the horizon and his jaw limned with the red-gold stubble of a two-day-old beard, drove on in complete silence.
She looked around, gaining no comfort from her bleak surroundings. She had never been in a place so… empty. Yesterday she had traveled cocooned within the snug confines of a closed carriage, only rarely drawing back the heavy curtain to view the scenery. But the phaeton afforded no distinct separation between passenger and environs, and she found the immediacy of her surroundings breathtaking. And unsettling. Like her proximity to the taciturn MacNeill.
Near noon, MacNeill pulled the phaeton into a small copse of aspen growing by the side of the track and leapt to the ground. Kate followed on legs grown numb from hours on the hard seat and, after attending to certain necessities, returned to find MacNeill already back on the seat, stolidly chewing the bread the tavern girl had supplied. Wordlessly, he held out his hand to help her back into the carriage. When she obliged, he unceremoniously hauled her up, handed her a napkin with a portion of bread in it, and commanded her to eat. He didn’t wait before snapping the traces and setting out again.
They traveled into mountains that thrust through the earth’s crust like Atlas’s shoulders, hunched and muscular, cloaked by thin blankets of pine. Gorse and fern, dark gold and russet, crowded the roadside, shivering in a brisk breeze. The vastness, the immense emptiness, surpassed anything in Kate’s experience. It seemed to her the wind was the sound of the mountain breathing, that the road, having no proper beginning would never arrive at an end, that they would be marooned here forever, caught on a Sisyphean journey.
She had spent her life in comfortable claustrophobia, the sound of horse and harness, the muttering of street vendors and the shouts of laborers filling her ears, a potage of coal smoke and factory fumes, fresh starch and beeswax filling her nostrils. Her eye was attuned to the textures and colors of city life, the regularity of cobblestone and iron rail, the geometry of urban architecture and streets. Here there was no such imposed symmetry. The road dipped and coiled, the mountains bunched and thrust, the sky churned and bloomed.
Kate looked over at MacNeill. His profile looked carved from the same rock as the mountains. His jaw jutted in a bold block, and his deeply carved nostrils flared. Only the gilt-tipped fringe of eyelashes and the glint of red-gold in the hair that brushed his cape’s collar held any warmth. He looked every bit a part of this hard, obdurate landscape. Just as tough, just as unyielding, and just as isolated and aloof.
He hadn’t said a word since luncheon, and Kate told herself she ought to be happy for his complete indifference. Rather than worrying about what was now too late to remedy, she should be fanning the spark of satisfaction she’d felt upon leaving the White Rose.
Despite all odds, she was going to make it to Castle Parnell. She was going to petition the marquis for aid. The chance of her and her sisters returning to some semblance of their former lives, the chance that had so long eluded them, was finally within reach. Not only would she and Helena and Charlotte survive, but they might actually win freedom from this fear-laden state called poverty. The idea of sitting in a warm, comfortable room sipping well-sugared coffee without having to wonder how they would pay for it brought a smile to her lips.
“You have the look of a cream-sotted tabby, Mrs. Blackburn.”
MacNeill’s deep burr startled Kate from her reverie. She hadn’t thought he’d been paying a speck of attention to her. The realization that he had not only remarked on her expression but had been evidently watching her alarmed her. What thoughts and considerations moved behind MacNeill’s enigmatic visage?
“I was thinking of coffee,” she said, with forced brightness.
“You must be right fond of coffee then,” he said.
As Kate wasn’t certain how to take that, she ignored it. Maybe he couldn’t help intimidating people. He just looked threatening, the physical embodiment of menace. And she had learned that the best way to eliminate a menace was to make its agent your ally.
MacNeill, her ally? She swallowed, though objectively she knew the idea had merit.
Besides, there was good material for her book to be plumbed here. How often did one get to interview a ruffian? Possibly someone with bona fide connections to the dark underbelly of society? He might prove a veritable font of information on how one might circumnavigate the dangers of the lower economic orders. The opportunity was too good to pass up.
“Ahem.”
His gaze remained locked on the road ahead.
“So.” She clapped her hands together in the manner of one embarking on a pleasurable conversational voyage. “What have you been doing for the last three years?”
His head turned slowly in her direction. “I beg your pardon?”
“How have you been occupying your time? Done anything criminal? Where have you been living? In a rookery?”
He hesitated, as though trying to gauge the dangers of answering, and oddly, that comforted her. How could she pose any danger to such as him? “In India.”
“Ah, yes. Where the gelding came from.”
“Aye.”
“Were you a spy there, too?”
His gaze snapped, startled, to hers. “No!”
“You needn’t look so off-put. When you came to York, you quite clearly intimated that you had been spying in France when you were caught and imprisoned.”
“Not caught,” he corrected flatly. “Turned in.”
A long moment of silence followed.
“Did you spend the entire three years in India?” Kate finally asked. Her father had told them stories about the deprivations and hardships soldiers faced in India: heat and dust and sickness. “It must have been terribly hard. How did you endure it?”
Her sympathy was lost on MacNeill. He looked, in fact, amused. “My choices were somewhat limited, Mrs. Blackburn. A Rifleman goes where he’s sent.”
So he was a soldier in the new Rifleman’s regiment. Chosen Men, she believed the soldiers who served in that unit were called. Surely he was not an officer. How could he be? A Scottish orphan without name or money would not have the wherewithal to buy a commission.
But if he was only a simple soldier, what was he doing here? A soldier enlisted for life unless wounded. He didn’t look injured. He looked in the prime of health.
“What about the others? Did they enlist, too?”
“Others?” His brief glance was quizzical.
“The two young men who came to York with you. Mr. Ross and Mr. Munro. Are they soldiers too?”
The flint returned to his green eyes. “No.”
“Where are they?”
“Last I heard Munro is in London, teaching boys to prick each other for sport. Dand …I do not know where Mr. Ross is. I’ll find out, though.” Darkness invested his voice.
“And when you find him?”
“We’ll have a conversation,” he said. “Talk over old times.”
The words themselves were innocuous, but the way he said them made Kate shiver. So much for her momentary ease. Too much about MacNeill made Kate afraid. She hated being afraid. She reacted badly to it. She reacted badly now.
“Do you do that on purpose?” she blurted out.
He frowned without looking at her, his eyes on the road. “Do what?”
“Intimidate people? Because if you do, I think it exceptionally bad form.”
His brows flew up. “Bad form?”
“Yes.Very bad form. I should think it beneath you to intimidate helpless widows into a state of abject terror.”
“Abject terror?”
“Yes! It can hardly be worth your effort. I am far too easy a mark to waste such a talent on, but if it makes you feel somehow superior, then fine, I admit, I am entirely in awe of you.”
“In awe?”
“Would you kindly stop repeating me?” she asked, her tone edging toward shrillness. “It’s most disconcerting!”
“Disconcert—” His expression relaxed, and one corner of his mouth curved up into a grin that scored a dimple deep into his lean cheek. “Forgive me. It’s just that I’ve never had a lady confess to holding me in awe. It’s beyond flattering.”
She gasped just as the carriage jolted over a rut in the road, pitching her against MacNeill. His arm shot out, his hand clamping down on her hip, big and broad and entirely male, sealing her tightly to his side. Even through the layers of petticoat, gown and cloak, she could feel his heat. “Careful, Mrs. Blackburn. A man can handle only so much… ‘awe.’ ”
“Oh!” She jerked back, scooting as far from him as possible. The blackguard!
He laughed. “Ach, lass. Beg pardon. I’m a mannerless brute who never could resist tweaking a few tail feathers—especially when they are being swished right beneath my nose,” he said with unexpected charm.
It wasn’t the words that disarmed her. It was his smile. For the first time, she saw a hint of boyishness in his countenance and realized that he was, for all his hardness and his history, still a very young man. He seemed so capable and so… used.
She must remember not to let a person’s manner cloud her perceptions.
Abruptly, she reached beneath the plank seat and from her reticule withdrew a stub of a pencil and sheet of foolscap she kept folded within. Hastily, she jotted down her insights. He watched her without commenting until she finished and tucked the paper back.
“Difficult to write a letter in a carriage,” he said in a neutral voice. “I suppose you must miss the company of your mother and sisters.” He hesitated, as though making conversation was unnatural and uncomfortable for him.
“My mother died of a fever a few months after you saw us in York.”
His brows flashed together. “I didn’t know. I am sorry.”
Kate nodded, caught off guard by the surge of loss that swept through her, and with it, the familiar sense of panic. There were only her and her sisters now. Her mother had fought her illness valiantly, but in the end it had proved too strong. Her last words to Kate had been “I am sorry.”
Weren’t they all? Had her father, too, been sorry as he faced his executioner? Had Michael died regretting he’d volunteered for his assignment? She slammed the door shut on the hurtful thought.
“And your sisters?”
She considered telling him a lie that would leave her with some dignity, but then remembered all too vividly her confessions of the preceding night. From their first meeting, MacNeill had known the baldest truths about her. What matter if he knew the extent to which her family’s fortunes had fallen?
“Helena has become the companion to an elderly neighbor.” She did not elaborate by telling him what a despicable old cat that neighbor was or the manner in which she bullied Helena. Kate herself wouldn’t have been able to stand one hour of the old harridan’s tyranny, but Helena, cool and poised as an ice sculpture, endured all with utter aplomb and a calm, if sardonic, smile.
“You had a younger sister, too,” MacNeill prompted.
“Yes. Charlotte.” Kate smiled, thinking about the beautiful, if willful, baby of the family. At least Charlotte had landed on her feet. “She is at school. Come spring she has been invited to spend the season with her good friend Margaret Welton, the Baron and Baroness Welton’s only daughter.”
“You are impressed.”
“I am relieved,” Kate said stiffly, reacting more to the disdain in his tone than his words. “She might make a decent match yet.”
“She might make a decent match, yet here you are, sitting in an open carriage with a most indecent companion. It hardly seems fair, does it?” His voice grew musing. “How you must resent this.”
She did not reply, flustered by him: his size; the leathery masculine scent of him; the breadth of his shoulders; the rough stubble on his chin and cheeks; the easy competence of his hands on the reins. She was entirely too aware of him.
A group of sheep lifted their heads from the steep flanks of a mountainside and watched their passage. She seized on the distraction they offered. “I was beginning to think there was nothing alive out here.”
“Those are cheviots,” MacNeill said. “Four-legged Highlanders, some call them.”
“Why?” Kate asked, startled.
He shrugged. “They’re the lairds’ newest tenants. Their only tenants. The people have been moved out to make way for them.”
“All of the people?” Kate asked disbelievingly.
“Most. You ken the White Rose?” The Scottish burr had thickened in his voice. “Time was it was the center of a wee town. Until Lord Ross moved it.”
“Moved an entire village? Where?”
MacNeill’s eyes stayed fast on the road ahead. “The shore. Some to collect kelp, others to try their hand at fishing. But the Ross men are no fishermen. So they left. Sailed west. To Canada, often as not.”
“But… why would anyone do such a thing?”
“Well, lass”—his voice dripped irony—“see those great fat sheep staring down at you? Acre for acre they make far less troublesome tenants than a few old men running cattle. They produce more profit, too. And that’s the whole and sum of it,” he said. “It’s happening all over the Highlands. Soon there’ll be no Scots in Scotland.”
“It isn’t right to take everything away from a people.”
“Not everything,” MacNeill said, with a twisted smile. “You can take a man’s land and his horse, ye can outlaw his plaid and his pipes, but you can’t steal away the nature of a man, and it’s the nature of the Scot to be proud and to be loyal.
“That’s why the Highland regiments fight so hard for your king, Mrs. Blackburn. We took an oath, and we’ll stay faithful to that oath past death.” His gaze became dark and shuttered. “And damned be those who aren’t.”