In Praise of Younger Men

“It is time, dear. You must find yourself a husband.”

Devorgilla Macquair Maxwell watched for her niece’s reaction from across the supper table. They were seated in the oak-paneled dining room at Rascarrel House, a pink sandstone manor that was not quite house, not quite castle, but four hundred years of both, set high on a cliff top above the Solway Firth on Scotland’s southeastern shore. The brisk February wind whistled and keened through the stark leafless oaks that lined the front gravel drive. The air was tinged with the brisk smell of the waning winter while inside, a fire burned fitfully in the carved stone hearth, crackling and popping in the twilight-shadowed room.

Harriet Macquair Drynan, only daughter of Sir Hugh Drynan, Baron Rascarrel, couldn’t help but be taken aback by her aunt’s startling pronouncement. At seven-and-twenty, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected it. She had always known the day would come when she would have to marry, yes, but to hear it so suddenly, so definitively, and over their blancmange pudding, was something of a shock.

“You are certain?” she asked as the footman, whom they called Duff, brought their after-supper tea.

“Aye, Harriet”—the older woman nodded—“I am quite certain for I saw it in a dream.”

Devorgilla Macquair Maxwell was every bit as unique as a woman with a name like hers should be. She stood just under five feet in height, could predict the weather by the pattern of the clouds, and always wore black no matter the season. Her age was something of a family mystery, too. Though slightly younger than Harriet’s mother, who would have been two-and-sixty that year, Devorgilla had a face unmarked by age, and her hair, the same dark red as Harriet’s, a Macquair trademark, was without a single strand of gray. It was as if she knew the secret to some mysterious recipe for youth, thus the fact that she’d admitted seeing something in a dream came as no surprise. It was always something momentous when Auntie Gill had a dream. For as long as Harriet could remember, Auntie Gill had been seeing things others didn’t.

Harriet shifted in her chair, pulling her tartan shawl more closely about her shoulders. She wondered why her aunt’s words had given her a sudden chill. Her small terrier, a brindly ball of fur called Robbie, lifted his head from where he napped at her feet and blinked at her.

“What exactly did you see in this dream?” Harriet asked, offering the dog a scrap of oatcake beneath the table.

“It was nearly spring,” Devorgilla began, “and you were standing in the forest in your mother’s wedding gown, oddly, with a red petticoat underneath. Your hair was down and it looked so pretty, so red beneath a circlet of wildflowers. You make a stunning bride, dear.”

Harriet nodded, more interested in the details of the dream than in what sort of bride she might make. “Is that all?”

“No, dear. You were surrounded by trees in the forest, rowan trees, twenty-seven of them to be precise.”

“Twenty-seven?”

“Yes. They had grown up around you so thickly that there lay only one path out, one small break in the circle of them through which the smallest shaft of sunlight managed to shine. In the midst of that one small opening stood a sapling, its branches just beginning to sprout early leaves. If left to grow, the tree would shut out the light and prevent you from ever making your way through to the outside. And if that were allowed to happen, you would be forever locked in darkness and shadow.”

Darkness and shadow . .
. Her last words echoed heavily through Harriet’s thoughts. “Indeed?”

“I believe the trees were meant to represent one year of your life thus far, with the twenty-eighth—the sapling—signifying your upcoming birthday. The meaning behind the red petticoat, I must admit, escapes me, but with your mother’s wedding dress, there can be little doubt as to the dream’s significance. This is a sign, just as you have always known it would one day happen. You must wed, Harriet, and you must do it by your twenty-eighth birthday.”

In the very next moment, there came a sudden and formidable rumbling of thunder from right above the rooftop. The windows across the room rattled in their aging casements, the wind outside swirled and rushed, tossing sparks about in the hearth beside them.

“By my birthday?” Harriet was stunned. “That is but a fortnight hence! You are absolutely certain?”

“As certain as I can be.” Devorgilla looked at her. “As you well know, the visions are never precise.”

Harriet cast a wary glance out the window toward the fast-darkening sky. She reached unconsciously for the small golden locket that hung from a thin chain around her neck. Hidden inside was a likeness of her mother, Viola Macquair Maxwell Drynan, the only likeness that had survived of her. Brilliant fiery hair and dark green eyes, everyone who had ever seen it said it was the mirror image of her. And her daughter, it was often said, was the very mirror image of her mother.

Harriet had been scarcely ten when her mother had died, taken by a fever brought on by complications after the birth of her third, sadly stillborn, child. The local physician, Dr. Webster, had warned Viola not to attempt to carry another after the twins, Harriet and Geoffrey, had been born. Their birth had been too much of a trial for her, he’d said, yet Viola had put aside his warnings, following the advice of her heart instead. She’d looked so healthy, so alive, so happy during her pregnancy that everyone soon forgot the physician’s dire warning.

Everyone except her sister, Devorgilla.

The dream had come to her too late to have done anything about it. Viola had already been in the latest stages of her pregnancy and Devorgilla had known upon waking that morning that her sister would not live to see the next. Such was the way of it with “the sight.” While it may reveal events about to come, there was no earthly way of preventing its prophecy. It was a curse, sometimes, as much as it was a wonder.

From across the table Devorgilla watched Harriet closely, easily sensing her niece’s unsettled thoughts. “Your mother loved you very much, Harriet.”

Harriet nodded, still looking out the window as she battled against a sudden surge of emotion. She missed her mother more these days, it seemed, than ever. “I know she did, Aunt. It is the one thing about my life I have never questioned. I only wish—”

But whatever Harriet’s wishes might be were lost, cut off by the sudden clamor of Robbie barking as he leapt to his feet beneath the table and scampered across the carpet to the far window. He jumped wildly at the low sill.

“Whatever is the matter with him?”

“I don’t know,” Harriet answered through the canine din. “I wonder—”

She stopped as if she’d heard something, which was impossible given the racket Robbie was making. Still she sensed something, something vague and distant, but slowly coming clear . . .

Harriet looked squarely at Devorgilla. “Geoffrey.”

She quickly left her chair and crossed the room, looking out across the lawn at the single iron gate at the end of the back garden. Nearly shrouded in ivy, scarcely visible in the descending darkness, she and her father had closed the gate the day Geoffrey had gone off to war— they had vowed to keep it closed until his safe return.

Devorgilla came to join Harriet at the window. “What is it, dear?”

“Watch the gate, Auntie Gill.”

As if in answer to her words, a vague silhouette began to appear through the swirling mist of dusk, a shadowed figure of a man emerging off the lone wooded path through a break in the thicket of the trees. The back of Harriet’s neck prickled in anticipation. There could be no mistaking that familiar leisurely gait, that beloved tilt of his head. She reached for Devorgilla’s hand.

“Oh, Auntie, he’s home. Geoffrey’s finally come home to us.”

Harriet flung open the window casements, heedless of the gust of chill air that confronted her from outside, and shouted to the dusk wind.

“Geoffrey! Oh, Geoffrey! You’re back!”

Chaos instantly erupted where silence and calm had reigned moments before. Everyone within the house rushed for the nearest stairwell and door to assemble en masse to meet the returning young master. Harriet and Devorgilla swept from the dining room with Robbie yapping at their heels, and scampered down the narrow turning stair that led to the back hall where already the Rascarrel butler, Rupert, was waiting at the door.

“Miss Harriet, your coat!”

But Harriet rushed through without a moment’s pause, her eyes fixed on that single gate at the end of what suddenly seemed an endlessly long walkway. Tears swelled against her eyes, blurring her vision as the cold evening air stung her nose and cheeks. Still she ran for the gate, gravel crunching under her slippered feet, her hair tumbling from the confines of its neat chignon to fly about her face in reckless ribbons of red.

“Geoffrey!” She launched into his arms the moment he lifted the latch and stepped through the gate to meet her. “Oh, Geoffrey, is it you? Is it truly you?”

The Honorable Geoffrey Drynan, Master of Rascarrel, the eldest of Baron Rascarrel’s two children by a mere matter of moments, was thin and reedy and nearly six inches taller than his twin sister. His hair was not the brilliant red of Harriet’s, but more a ruddy brown that tended to fall over his forehead when it grew too long. Blue-green eyes, like the summer waters in Rascarrel Bay, winked above a mouth that was rarely without a grin.

“Hattie Brattie!”

Geoffrey took his sister into his arms and twirled her around, splashing in his tall boots through a stretch of murky puddle and laughing as she squealed like the same wee lass who used to toss snowballs at him from behind the cover of the great garden oak.

“Put me down, you brute,” she said, giggling, “and let me look at you.”

Harriet skimmed her gaze over her brother from head to toe, over a dark wool coat of indiscriminate color over breeches that were travel-worn and spattered with mud. His face was gaunt and darkened by a rough beard, something she’d never seen on him before. Her father would say his hair was too long, but Harriet didn’t care. She was just so happy to see him.

“Oh, Geoffrey.” Her breath fogged from the cold, her eyes alight with an excitement that had been too long absent from them. “Why did you not write to tell us you were coming? We could have greeted you properly. We would have had everything ready for you.”

“And spoil the warmth of that welcome home, lass? I wouldn’t have missed the sight of your bonny face calling out to me from that window for anything.”

Harriet beamed. “But Father’s just gone yesterday for Edinburgh. He’ll not be back for a week, maybe more.”

“Well, then, that’ll just give us more time to spend catching up for the years we’ve been away.”

“We . . . ?”

Only then did Harriet realize there stood someone else behind her brother, someone poised just outside the open gate. She turned then to look, and when she saw who it was, she nearly lost her breath.

In that first moment, she almost didn’t recognize him. The nearly fifteen years that he’d been away had brought a facet of maturity to the eyes that had once boyishly mocked her. But there was nothing at all boyish about him now. Tristan Carmichael, Viscount Ravenshall, stood apart from the others, as if reluctant to intrude upon the tender family reunion. He looked taller somehow, bigger, stronger than she could ever remember him before, his ash-brown hair damp from the misty air and curling slightly at his temple above piercing blue eyes.

For the first few moments, Harriet simply stared, struck dumb by the unexpected sight of him, until Tristan flashed his familiar grin, erasing the years as if they’d never been apart, and banishing any hint of winter’s chill. Harriet was horrified to feel herself blushing in response, and quickly lowered her eyes.

When she managed to find her voice again, she smiled softly, and stepped forward to greet him. “Tristan, how wonderful to see you. I’d never expected you’d be back in Galloway again.”

“I never expected I’d be back either.” He took Harriet’s hand and bowed over it gallantly. “It is a pleasure to see you again, Miss Drynan.”

“Miss Drynan?” she echoed on a curious smile. “We’ve known each other too long, Tristan Carmichael, to stand on such ceremony. Harriet—and something more than a formal handshake—will do much better.”

“Harriet it is.”

Tristan dropped his satchel and took her in a friendly embrace, a thing he had done countless times during their childhood, but that somehow, now, left Harriet keenly aware of the closeness of his arms around her.

He stood so near to her that their breaths mingled on the evening mist between them. She had to lift her chin to look at him. The wooded countryside scent that clung to his wool surcoat brought gooseflesh to her arms that had nothing to do with the cold evening air. Harriet stepped away, absently rubbing her tingling skin. But standing in the midst of that icy darkening dusk, Harriet felt none of the chill, none of the damp of the threatening rain. A thrilling warmth had crept straight through to the deepest part of her the moment her hand had touched his. Fifteen years had done nothing to banish her feelings for him and she found herself staring at him just as she had when she’d been a girl of thirteen.

“Come on, you two,” Geoffrey said, interrupting the sudden stretch of time that bound them. “Let us get you inside, Hattie, before you catch a cold that will leave your nose as red as your hair.”

Harriet noticed then that Geoffrey was staring at her as she, in turn, was starting at Tristan. She turned quickly for the house. “Yes, Geoffrey, you are right. You both must be half-starved. Auntie Gill and I were just finishing our supper. Come, I’ll have the cook fix something to warm you while you both clean up.”

If Harriet thought herself startled by the sight of Tristan after all the years apart, he, in turn, was utterly overwhelmed by her. Even now, he found it difficult to tear his eyes away from her, all fiery hair and breathless beauty as she turned and took her brother’s hand, leading them down the walkway toward the house where the servants had gathered at the door.

While she laughed and chatted with the others, he took in every movement of her, the gentle sway of her dark green skirts, the pert bounce of the springy riot of rich auburn-red curls that fell down her back to her waist. Her eyes, the color of the stormy Rhinns of Kells, shone gray-green beneath the arched brow that hinted at her keen intellect. Her mouth was sensuous, the bottom lip fuller than the top, and her nose was straight, strong, and nothing at all resembling “pert.” That she hadn’t long ago become someone’s wife could only be called astounding. Tristan watched her and found himself imagining that hair spread upon a downy pillow, twisting about pale shoulders and lush rose-tipped breasts . . .