book JdM6x1406931-20978754 (15 page)

How could she have misjudged that man so thoroughly, she wondered. Then again, it would appear that his intention had always been to be misjudged, so that he might serve the interests both of Clan Grant and of Clan Gordon, even while the chief of Clan Grant was not worthy of his name, let alone his title. If when the histories were written, Elisabeth thought wryly as she waited for the raiding party to storm her castle, the very existence of William Grant were somehow erased, along with the strange story of how his daughter married a Highlander, and with the help of unlikely allies, defended Urquhart, Sir James Gordon would be the one to do the erasure and smile secretly to himself about his work. Generations to come might not know of this strange story, but that was fine with Elisabeth; to live as a Highland bride and to defend her castle was all she asked.

Elisabeth had given the strictest orders, and Gordon had endorsed those orders, that no one was to try to see the MacDonalds coming. All the defenders were completely hidden, and the appearance of desertion was as complete as they could make it. Only if some of the MacDonalds got down to the loch before the main engagement took place and saw that there were many boats still there would there be any reason to doubt that the craven laird had fled again.

MacDonald feet pounded through the market square, then across the moat bridge.

And into the bailey.

Suddenly, Gordon shouted, “Stand fast, Craig Elachie!” and then, “A Gordon!” and the men at the gates heaved, and the men at the portcullis loosed the catch. The archers on the battlements began to fire at the MacDonalds in the bailey.

Shouts of “A Gordon!” and frantically but with decreasing force “Gainsay, who dare!” rang out into the darkness. Then, “Stand fast!” and “Craig Elachie!” drowned those out, and she heard the terrible screams of the dying. The gates were shut and the portcullis down, and at least a hundred MacDonalds were dying in the bailey. She was desperate to look, but she seemed at last to have found her wifely obedience.

Then the unthinkable happened: Elisabeth heard a fight on the stairs below. Gordon, at her pleading, had let her take a claymore up here with her. She stood and picked up the sword. At the same moment, according to her instructions to Gordon, the torches flared forth at the castle, and in their light she saw Ian MacDonald emerge atop the gate-house. She could see that his shirt was red with blood, and in the slowing of time that takes hold at such moments, that his dark plaid must be soaked with gore as well, for as she watched in the new torchlight, a crimson droplet fell to the stones from the wool that hung above his ankles.

His eyes widened in astonishment when he saw her. For a moment, she wondered whether she could use upon him the same trick Angus had to take him unawares, but tonight Ian MacDonald’s claymore was in his hands, and in the moment she took to wonder—a moment she knew Angus would never have taken—he charged at her with his sword raised to stab her through her chest.

How strange, Elisabeth thought in some oddly relaxed part of her mind, that it was the very same move she had mistaken when she had failed to parry and Angus had put the bung in her backside as punishment. She had practiced it after that with Calum, over and over, and so as Ian shifted his grip at the last moment as she knew he would and made to slash downward into her shoulder, covered only by the plaid of her arisaid, it was with what seemed to her the greatest ease that she parried the blow, sending him off balance, and tripped him as he traveled by.

He went to the ground as he had gone to the ground in the market square all those months ago and only a few hundred yards away.

Somewhere, perhaps those same few hundred yards distant, a voice was shouting, “Ard Choille! Ard Choille!” and another, “Cruachan!” As Elisabeth dropped her claymore and swiftly drew her dirk, just as Angus had taught her, and then put a knee on Ian MacDonald’s back and the dirk at his throat, the defenders responded, “Stand fast, Craig Elachie!” and “A Gordon!”

Then, closer, “Ard Choille!” and she realized the voice was Angus’, shouting the war-cry of Clan Gregor, probably never to be heard again alongside “Cruachan!” the cry of Clan Campbell. For, stirred by Elisabeth Grant MacGregor’s plea, the Earl of Argyll had made common cause with the Lord of Glenstrae to break the back of the strength of the Lord of the Isles at last, and Clan Donald would not threaten Castle Urquhart again. And here was Ian MacDonald at her feet.

“Do you hear that, MacDonald?” Elisabeth asked him. “Do you think you will come a-reiving Urquhart castle again? Or threatening the virtues of the maidens of the Great Glen?”

Steps pounded up the stairs.

“Elisabeth MacGregor,” said a voice full somehow both of wrath and of love, “did I not tell you not to show yourself above the battlements?”

“You do not know the half of it, Angus MacGregor,” she replied, rising, not without regret, from Ian MacDonald’s prostrate form. “You said I should not sit comfortably for a month? I fear it will be a year when I have told the full tale.”

She backed away from MacDonald, her dirk still at the ready.

She dared not look at him, yet, for she knew how many times he had told her never to turn her back on a living enemy. But she heard his ghillies on the stone, and then he had his arms around her waist.

“The night is ours,” he whispered in her ear. “Your castle is safe. I wish I could say the same of your backside.”

“MacDonald,” Elisabeth said, “Get up.”

As he was obeying, Gordon arrived with two men-at-arms. MacDonald was led away.

“The MacDonalds have fled, My Lady,” said Gordon, who was, she supposed, now her steward.

“Aye,” said Angus grimly, “save those who died in the bailey or the moat or who stay here with us.”

The thought she had in the back of her mind, ever since that night in Glenstrae when this daft plan had come to her, now emerged into the front of it. She said to Gordon, “Let every man who can walk come to the great hall.” She looked at Angus. “You, too, husband.”

* * *

There, in Elisabeth’s own great hall, Angus MacGregor knelt before her. She only colored slightly when she remembered the last time
she
had knelt before
him
, with his yard deep in her throat. With his own claymore (not that much bigger, she thought to herself, than his yard), she knighted him, Lady of Urquhart, as her steward proclaimed, “By right of her blood and of her defense of this castle when its lord had fled.”

Sir Angus MacGregor rose and folded her in his arms and said into her ear, “If you think this will save your lovely little bottom, you are much mistaken, my eagle.”

Epilogue

Lady Elisabeth Grant waited, naked, in the highest chamber in Grant tower in Castle Urquhart, over the ancient curule chair her lord husband, Sir Angus Grant, had appointed for her chastisement. It was proving very difficult to summon up the proper contrition, though she had known with delicious dread for three days that this evening was the time appointed for the bestowal of her punishment for sending a false message, failing to obey an explicit command, exposing herself to mortal peril, and frightening her husband half to death when he saw her battling Ian MacDonald, outlined in the light of the castle’s torches atop the gatehouse.

For, the process of preparing for the strap, which Angus had promised would be wielded more forcefully than it ever had been in its long history or, he hoped, ever would be again, had been most rudely interrupted by the arrival of a swift boat bearing the news from Holyrood that by Letters Patent of His Majesty James V, King of Scots, the former Sir Angus MacGregor was now Lord of Urquhart
jure uxoris
and that their name was now Grant.

It should not have mattered, she thought, and no doubt the feeling would fade, but undressing to be strapped as Elisabeth Grant, Lady by Letters Patent of Castle Urquhart, seemed distinctly different than undressing to be strapped as Elisabeth MacGregor, wife of a Highland crofter. She found herself wondering whether a lord
jure uxoris
had the right to strap his lady wife. Where she was positioned, she had a fine view through the narrow window in front of her of the great loch, where the boat that had brought the wonderful news was now making ready to sail in the fading light from the sun setting over the hills behind her, off west, where the MacDonalds of Clanranald were licking their wounds.

The door opened behind her. She had given strict instructions that only His Lordship should be allowed to open the door, but servants forget sometimes, and imagining her handmaiden seeing Her Ladyship naked and bottom up for a spanking made Elisabeth squirm over the velvet cushion and realize that perhaps the preparation was proceeding apace, for the moisture that Angus had promised he would strap her hard enough to dispel from her cunny had definitely begun to gather there.

“I said once, My Lady, that your bottom was the loveliest sight I had ever seen,” came Angus’ voice from behind her, as she thankfully heard him close the door and draw the bolt too, “but that was before I saw it here.”

At the casual degradation of his words, Elisabeth felt the wetness pool and even begin to trickle a little. She heard his boots—the boots of a knight, rather than the ghillies of a Highlander—approaching across the stone and then the luxurious carpets of this lovely marital bedchamber that they shared now.

Then, without warning, she heard the low whistling of the strap and gasped at the smart across her thighs.

“You may wonder, wife, whether I have it in me to give you what you deserve and what you need with this old strap.”

Another stroke, harder, across her bottom cheeks, and a little yelp came from her throat. Another, and she yelped again and wriggled on the chair.

“Hold still, Elisabeth MacGregor,” he growled.

“Yes, My Lord,” she cried as he strapped her again and again, harder and harder, until his prophecy was fulfilled and the wetness seemed to flee her cunny as if it had never been there.

“In this room and above all over this chair, you are not Elisabeth Grant, Lady of Urquhart,” he said as it went on, and she was nearly screaming now at the force of the blows upon her upturned backside. “You are the wife of a Highlander, and you will be disciplined as a Highlander disciplines his wife, for her good and for her instruction.”

“Yes, My Lord! Oh, please, Angus… oh heavens, I cannot…”

His voice was turning grim, for she knew he did not truly like to hurt her. “I promised you that you would not sit comfortably for a month, Elisabeth. But I am not such a brute as that, I suppose.”

He struck again, keeping up the steady rhythm he had adopted. The pain was so great that Elisabeth suddenly could not help throwing her hands up to defend her poor bottom. Angus grabbed both wrists in his enormous left hand and continued to beat her.

“I am, however, intent on making it clear to you, my lady wife, that it does not become the Lady of Urquhart to risk her life as foolishly as you seem intent on doing. And it appears that the only way to do that is to leave a lasting impression.”

The pain was now worse than anything Elisabeth thought she had ever felt, even in the clearing upon the moor. Her body was limp over the curule chair, her hands relaxed at her side as the strap continued to fall.

“I am therefore intent on making sure that you will wake up at least tomorrow, and the day after, and perhaps the day after that”—each word now was punctuated with a blow—“and remember that you were punished this evening, and remember why.”

He stopped, finally. She heard him walking over to their beautiful state bed, where they had yet to celebrate.

“Look at me, Elisabeth MacGregor,” Angus said. She turned her tear-filled eyes to where he stood, holding a hammer and a nail. The strap lay upon the bed. “You are not to forget that I am your lord husband, whatever the Latin is that says I am lord in this castle by right of my wife.” He pounded the nail into the wood of the bedpost. He put down the hammer and picked up the strap and said, “Your strap will hang here, wife, and when you have need of chastisement, you will receive it.” He hung the strap by the same loop of twine on which it had hung in his crofter’s house, now occupied by Calum and his new bride, Mary, from Achmonie.

Then he came back and raised her up from the chair and led her to the bed. They lay down upon it, together, the Lord and Lady of Urquhart. The lord held his lady close, and they were silent for a long while.

Then, “Angus,” she whispered.

“Yes, my eagle?”

“While you were strapping me…”

“Yes?”

“Well, all the… wetness went away, but…”

He smiled, wickedly. “But?”

She nestled her face into his chest. “But… just like in the barn… and on the moor…”

“Oh ho,” he said. “Is it our old problem, back again?”

Elisabeth giggled. “Is it very wicked that I wanted you to take me in the barn, before we were wed, and before I even knew what it meant to be taken?”

“Very, very wicked, my eagle.”

“Is it wicked that I want you to take me now?”

“No, for we are man and wife, now.”

“But…”

He chuckled, seemingly unable truly to fathom the strange motions of her mind and her desires. “But what now, dearling?”

“What if I wanted you to take me… the other way? Would that be wicked?”

“And you with a backside that will be sore for days?” he asked, incredulous.

“I think—” she replied, “I think that may be why.”

“It may be wicked,” he murmured, “but…” He lifted his very fine, lordly plaid, and then his silk shirt to reveal a yard that was as stiff and massive as it had ever been in his little croft-house when he had told her that he was going to take her in her little arse. “It is a wickedness for which I promise not to punish you, Elisabeth.”

She lowered her voice to the tiniest, naughtiest whisper. “It is a kind of punishment itself, isn’t it, Angus? I mean, it makes me feel that way… like I am a naughty girl, but I have a lord husband who will take care of me… even if his yard is so big that it hurts when I have to have it that way… even if it makes me scream, shamefully, at the pleasure and the pain of the way he… fucks… my… little… bottom…”