book JdM6x1406931-20978754 (5 page)

Angus looked at Elisabeth, then back at the priest. “Aye,” he said.

“Her parents?”

“She’s of age, father.”

“Very well. Half a mark.”

Angus took out his purse and counted out the coin. Shame filled Elisabeth at the thought that her price had been set, as it seemed to her, so low, but she looked defiantly from one to the other.

“Names?”

“Angus MacGregor and Elisabeth Grant,” Angus said.

The monk looked sharply at her, then at Angus. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if thinking, and then opened them again and fixed Elisabeth with his gaze. “Is this of your own free will, child?” he asked.

Elisabeth tried to keep her voice clear and steady. “It is, father.”

“Are you truly of age?”

“Yes, father.”

“Very well. I hope that God has brought you here of His good purpose.”

The wedding happened immediately, there in the door between porch and nave. It seemed to be over in a minute or two; the only impression she could retain was the feeling of Angus’ big hands around hers and then the kneeling together before the monk, at the end, for his blessing.

They stood again, and the monk brought the book and wrote in it and had them make their marks. He bid them farewell and mounted his horse and rode off for the next chapel on his circuit.

Elisabeth watched the monk’s receding back, her hands folded in front of her, trying to decide whether she felt any different now that she was the property of Angus MacGregor of Glanaidh. He gave her no chance to decide the question, however. She felt his arm around her waist, and she stiffened as the dangerous lure of her body’s longing beset her.

“Not this time, Mistress MacGregor,” Angus said and pulled her even closer, turning her around to face him. “You are mine, now.”

She let him hold her close, resting her hands upon his chest and looking up into his stern—but also kindly, in its way—face, with the dark eyes that stared down at her now with what seemed to her at that moment a fire threatening to burn her to a cinder. Her knees grew weak, the same way they had in the barn the day before, and she felt the shameful feeling again, but she resolved, even though he had her in his power, he would not know her humiliating craving for that power.

But there was also something she owed him, something that lay along the path of true pride—a pride so unlike the false, cowardly pride of her father and of her Lowland cousins that the same word, she thought, should not be used of it. As she looked up into his hungry eyes, she said quietly, “Thank you, husband. I am happy to be yours, and I shall try to make you happy that I am.”

The dark eyes narrowed in surprise. Angus had not been expecting that, or anything like it, she could see; he had a great deal to learn about her—or perhaps about the new Elisabeth who had been born yesterday in the ruin of her beloved castle. As if overmastered by his own desire, he put his left hand up to cradle the back of her head, twining it lightly in her red-gold locks, and cupped her chin in the fingers of his enormous right hand, tilting her face up to his. He canted his head a bit to the side and bent it down…

What was he doing? His face came closer; she tried to move her own away, but his hands were suddenly strong upon her, and then his lips were upon her lips… He was kissing her upon her mouth, and suddenly she remembered her cousins tittering about something they had seen a lady-in-waiting do—how the hussy had let an earl kiss her mouth. She had been sure they were making it up, for such a thing seemed so silly and wicked she could hardly believe it true or anything one person would ever desire to have another do to her.

But it was something a husband might demand of his wife, it seemed now, to her horror. His lips felt so strange as he moved them against hers; she could do nothing but wait and breathe through her nose and hope it would end soon. It was all made very much worse by Calum preparing the cart and catching sight of what Angus was doing and giving a Highlander’s cry of mocking triumph that seemed to presage the ruin of her modesty even more than Angus’ dominant kissing of her lips.

The horror, however, lay not in disgust at the feeling of Angus taking her face in his hands and kissing her upon the mouth, but at the way she felt her body yet again responding to him, despite everything she knew about her honor. Yes, she wished to be his; yes, she wanted to make him happy that he had made her his wife. But to feel the way her body seemed to melt and to pour itself into his; to feel the way she had to fight against herself to keep her lips closed against his, instead of opening the way they seemed to yearn to do—that was what truly frightened her.

Again, she wondered if he knew the terrible secret. He drew his head back and looked her in the eyes, smiling not warmly, but proudly and with an air of mastery—as one would smile at an enemy who lies at one’s feet. “You must learn to let me have my way, Elisabeth. Your mouth is mine, now, and when I kiss it, you will yield it up to me. Let us try that once more.”

He bent his face down again, and this time, unable to resist the mingling of words and bodily gesture, she felt her resistance fade away and her knees buckle as he kissed her. His right hand came down around her waist to support her, and the kiss seemed to go on forever. He tasted of burnt peat, and it seemed to her like not just her Highland husband but the Highlands themselves were commanding her mouth. His tongue darted lightly between her lips, and to her astonishment, she felt her own meet it, touch it, linger against it.

The warmth between her thighs seemed to grow unbearable, and then at last he broke the kiss, and said, “Much better, lass.” Her face was hot, and she fixed him with the coldest stare she could muster, angry at him for making her body betray her and at herself for the betrayal.

“May we go, now?” she asked.

Angus shook his head, not in refusal but in puzzlement. He was clearly mystified by the way Elisabeth was responding to him, and she supposed that was all she could ask when her own body seemed determined to deprive her of her honor. She must not let him do that again; if he tried to kiss her upon the mouth, perhaps she could say that she was ashamed, in front of his kin? Or even before heaven?

“Calum,” he called, “run to Ardblair and Kiltarlity, after you have told them here in Achmonie, and invite them to Glanaidh for our wedding feast—such as it will be. Tell them there will be mutton and whiskey enough, but that if they want aught else, they must bring it themselves.”

“Aye, Angus,” Calum said, and set off up the road.

Mutton and whiskey.
She imagined her cousins’ horror should they ever hear of it.
No pheasants, no galliards.
If someone had told her yesterday morning that she would be happy to hear that her wedding feast would be mutton and whiskey and whatever else the neighboring crofters would bring, she would have considered him daft.

Chapter Six

The wives of the district provided, as Angus had known they would. The breads and the sweetmeats arrived in great baskets on the oxcarts, and birds arrived in only slightly less profusion. When the first pheasant emerged from a basket, Elisabeth, standing by his side stalwartly to greet a half-hundred new neighbors and kinsmen, gave a little cry of joy that send his heart leaping in his chest.

“What is it, dearling?” he asked, trying out the endearment he had wished to bestow upon a lovely Highland lass for so long.

She looked at him with a smile dancing in her eyes and said, “Just that I thought we should not have pheasants, and here they are.”

He bent down to kiss her, and she did not draw away, but he felt her body stiffen, and when he pulled back, she said, “For shame. Before your kinsfolk.”

“You are mine, little Grant,” he said, “and I shall kiss you as I like,” but she made an angry face back at him for an instant and then turned to greet another crofter.

He could not understand her at all, he found. No, that was wrong—very wrong, really. He could understand certain things she said and did with an astonishing sort of clarity. Everything she said and thought about the Highlands, for one. The way she seemed to be embracing her new life, less than a day old, as a Highland crofter’s wife, and the way she looked at little Loch Glanaidh and great Loch Ness. Those things seemed to come from his dreams of what his wife might be like: a girl who loved the banks and braes more than life itself.

But when he had kissed her outside the church at Achmonie, at first she had seemed terrified, and that had been as well, for if she had not been frightened, he would not be as confident that she had never kissed a man before—a thought that made him want her in his bed at that very moment. Then, though… then he had felt her yield to him, just as he wished, and it had seemed that the earth beneath their feet had begun to tremble, and not just her darling little body—but suddenly she had withdrawn from him entirely, as if the yielding had been a performance she had given so that he would think she was obeying him.

Could she love him the way she loved the loch? The way she loved her ruined castle?

As he watched her embrace another crofter’s wife, graciously though stiffly, he set himself upon a resolution. It mattered not at all whether she could love him. He was the master of this croft, and if this noble lass thought she could play at yielding without truly giving herself to him the way he required, he would wrest from her young body such shameful pleasures as she had not in her darkest dreams imagined. He would keep her up very late this night.

* * *

The mutton had been turning on its spit since they had arrived back from the church. Elisabeth had not shied away from the work of skinning, once he had shown her how, and though he thought he had seen her turn rather green as he dressed the carcass, she had watched as he had instructed during the whole process. Someday she would do the whole of that work herself.

Now the pheasants were on their spits, too, and the peat fires were roaring against the dusk, as if to taunt the grim ruin the MacDonalds had made of Elisabeth’s home. He watched her move through the crofters and their wives with a smile on her face, curtseying prettily to everyone who greeted her. He had sent her to ask the spit-turners when they thought the trenchers might be laden, and now she came again to stand by him and whispered up into his ear, “They say the mutton might be served now.”

The closeness of her sweet breath upon his cheek seemed to fire him more than the finest whiskey he had ever tasted, and that put him in mind of what came next. He looked over to where Alan was standing by the barrels and nodded to him, then watched in satisfaction as he pounded a bung into the first of them. The unmistakable sound caused a hush to spread outward from where the nigh-sacred act was performed, until all were quiet.

“I hope you brought your finest glass beakers,” said Angus, to all the MacGregors of Glen Urquhart and a good number of their friends beside. The whole company laughed, and a few held up the metal cups without which a Highlander would never come to a wedding feast.

“For,” continued Angus, “tonight you are to toast the finest—and the most surprising—bride a humble MacGregor crofter ever brought to church—”

“And to bed!” shouted one of his cousins, to the mirth of all. Angus glanced at Elisabeth, who was blushing, the smile fixed to her face as if painted upon it, and spared him only the briefest and most inscrutable of glances before looking back out into the company.

“The finest bride ever MacGregor had,” Angus continued smoothly. Through all the beginning of this toast, the cups had been filling as Highlanders filed past the cask Alan had opened. Now he saw Elisabeth, beckoned by Alan, go to receive Angus’ own cup, full of his own whiskey from the still two hundred paces past the barn. “She is a true Highland lass, given a bit of polish in the Lowlands to be sure, but a girl who chose her home in the hills over everything else.”

Elisabeth gave him his old pewter cup, full of the fiery water of life, and he looked into her blue eyes and thought he saw, for just a moment, that she loved him. The strange sensation sent a chill from his toes all the way up his body to his face, and he realized that he was coloring under his maiden bride’s gaze.

Then the look was gone, and the distance was back, and she moved to stand beside him, but he said, “No, wife, stand here before me.” For that flash of love he had now a flash of anger, but her painted smile returned, and she obeyed him.

“Good people of this Great Glen and these fair lochs and braes, I ask that you receive into your hearts my lady wife of Urquhart. May her castle rise again, and may she always be its lady!”

Then, into the brief silence that fell when Angus’ voice rose to its final syllable, Elisabeth herself said, in a strong, clear voice, “And may Angus MacGregor be its lord!”

A huge cheer went up, and all the Highlanders who had their cups—which was most of the company—drank them off and queued up anew. Angus drank a swallow and looked again into his bride’s eyes, flashing with pride. “Have you ever had whiskey?” he asked, softly.

She shook her head.

“Have a bit,” he said, handing her the cup. “Not even a swallow, just a drop.”

She gave him a look that seemed to ask whether this was a command or a suggestion.

“Try it first and you’ll see what I mean—better yet, smell it first.”

Elizabeth put her nose down to the cup and inhaled. Her face underwent a startling, humorous transformation, and she sneezed violently. The precious whiskey would have been lost if Angus had not taken it firmly from her hand. He laughed, and Elisabeth did too.

“Try again?” he asked.

She nodded, and took a cautious sniff. Her nose wrinkled this time, but she brought the cup to her lips and took a sip and swallowed—and coughed, violently.

“Vile stuff,” Angus said, laughing, though of course he did not mean it.

“No!” she said. “Only new.”

“Like me?”

There it was again, the look that he was sure meant she did not find her new husband an affliction. Just as quickly, though, the look was gone.