Passion and Plaid - Her Highland Hero (Scottish Historical Romance) (5 page)

“That is my final decision! Calm down!” Willard
slammed the gavel down twice more, so hard that a lock of gray hair fell out of
his carefully pulled pony tail and curled on his cheek, emphasizing the
dangerous black of his eyes. “Any of you savages what can’t manage to be quiet
right
this second
will be thrown out! I won’t hear any more cases. Calm down!”

The roar quelled slightly. The mayor gripped the
sides of his podium so tight the knuckles on his left hand went red and then
white, and just as Kenna took a seat in the back of the gallery, the noise died
out the rest of the way. Willard swept his fallen tendril of hair back behind
his ear. He took a deep breath and let it out in a long, rattling sigh.

“Good. Rollo, bring me the next case.”

A short man with a limp and a back that seemed to
have a painful hunch to it – though Kenna couldn’t tell exactly because of his
heavy clothing – shuffled to a table in the front of the room and looked
through a pile of papers with the help of a magnifying glass. Rollo turned to
the Mayor, asked him what he was in the mood to hear, and Willard replied with
a roll of his eyes and a tired sweep of his hand.

“Do you see this room?” He snapped. “I have to
listen to all these complaints today. I’m not picky about what I have to hear
next. Just hand me something.”

The little man grunted and grabbed a rolled up
length of paper. He handed it to Willard before shuffling back to his seat near
the front of the room, opening a very large book, and dipping his quill,
waiting for the proceedings to begin. Kenna took a hint from him and retrieved
her notebook and pencil, jotted down descriptions before making a rough sketch
of the courtroom and how it was laid out.

Closing his eyes tightly and pinching the bridge
of his nose between two fingers, Willard plucked spectacles off his lectern and
scanned the page before reading, “Gregory Morgan, who works as a farmer, and
lives between the towns of Duncraig and Mornay’s Cleft petitions the court for
a reprieve on his taxes, on account of a storm that destroyed his harvest.”

“Stand up, Morgan. Where are you?” He took his
glasses off and replaced them upon the podium. “I said stand!”

Moments later, an infirm man with a wobble in his
hip pushed himself to his feet and stood with the help of one hand gripping a
cane and another one on a woman’s shoulder.

“Yes Councillor,” the man said. “I’m Gregory Morgan.”

“I know who you are, Morgan. Remember that you
must address me as ‘Your Honor’ while I’m functioning as magistrate.” He waited
for the man to nod. “You’re here in my courtroom at least once weekly
complaining of the same thing. Unfair taxes, a bad crop. Bad health you’ve
complained about a few times, and then once you said the weather was bad.
Another time you informed me that your daughter had left home to be married and
your son as well and that you couldn’t work your land. What is it this time, Morgan?
Why can’t you pay your taxes?”

The man stiffened and pushed the sash of his kilt
back further onto his shoulder. From the strain Kenna saw in his posture, it
was obvious that it hurt him a great deal, but she also noticed his pride. She
imagined that if her father were in a similar position that is how William
Moore would have acted, defiant of everything – including a bad hip.

“Your Honor, if you want me to be direct, I can.”

“Yes,
please
be direct. We don’t have all
day. And don’t think it’s lost on me that you’re wearing an outlawed plaid. You
Scots don’t understand what the purpose of security is, do you? You think it’s
all a game, the dissent and the uprisings and the fighting and rebellions.”

The old man grunted aloud as he walked around to
the front of the room and faced the gallery, his back to the mayor.

“Everyone here,” he said, ignoring the mayor’s
jab, “knows the story. And what Your Honor says is true. My son and daughter,
who used to work my land when I couldna do it, they are gone. My grain barely
grows and the few cows I’ve left can barely give milk. My horses canna work
with so little food as they have, and so plowing is next to impossible.”

“Get to the point,” Willard said with a heavy
sigh. “We’ve heard this a thousand times by now.”

“The point,” Gregory Morgan said, “is this. This
has always been my life. Our soil, ‘tisn’t the best here, it’s rocky and sandy
and hard to grow much of anything. Feed for the horses and the sheep is
expensive at the best of times, and almost impossible to get during a drought
or a famine. But, all that bein’ true, as it has been true for most of my
seventy-six years, this year is the first I’ve not been able to pay my tax.”

A low grumble spread through those listening to
him. Kenna furiously scribbled down what he said, trying to keep up. When she
glanced up from her notebook, she saw Rollo doing exactly the same thing, but
with the added challenge of going back and forth from an inkwell to his paper,
and taking care not to smudge what he wrote.

Judging from the looks the people in the courtroom
had, even if this story had been told before, it wasn’t done in quite this way.

“If you can’t pay the tax, Morgan, you-”

“If you’ll excuse me Your Honor, I remained quiet
while you berated me in front of God and everyone. If you’re a man of decent
manners you’ll be doin’ me the same courtesy.”

Fire blazed in Willard’s eyes and he once again
gripped his podium with such ferocity that either it, or his strained fingers
seemed ready to break.

“You’ll not speak to me that way, farmer. I’m a
man of the Crown. The King himself put me here, and you’re just-”

“Ach, just a farmer. A poor farmer. Aye I’m well
aware of what I am, Your Honor.” Morgan turned to face the bench instead of the
gallery. “And yet I continue to address you as Your Honor instead of callin’
you any of the long list of foul names what I’m bitin’ my tongue to keep from
sayin’.”

The fingers on one of Willard’s hands scratched
the top of the podium and curled into a tight fist. He collected his quill,
dipped it, and wrote something forcefully on the paper before him.

“Continue, but mind your tongue, Morgan.”

Turning back to the audience, the old man nodded.

“I’m tired, my friends. I am old and tired and
canna hardly awake in the morning without thanking God that I’m not yet dead.”
Several voices laughed. “But the tax – all of the taxes various and sundry –
which seem to appear violently in place of the old ones paid, like a
money-eating hydra, they’re killing me faster than age.”

Kenna saw the mayor begin to speak, but the old
man continued his eloquent dissection.

“We’ve never seen taxes such as these.” He paused
while someone applauded softly and a couple of canes were knocked against the
floor. “Even a year past, we’d not have dealt with this sort of grubbing. Our Mayor
Willard used to be a fair man; a man who liked his people and was liked in
return. We got along, did we not?”

Many in the audience nodded assent and a few
others agreed under their breath.

“That was a different time, Mr. Morgan, and you
know-”

“You ate of my food, Mayor Willard. You came to my
house one evening, not so long ago – scarcely a year and a half – on the eve of
my daughter’s wedding and you blessed the union, brought us a gift of a goose,
and ate it with us. You remember that, do you not?”

“I do, but-”

“We ate and drank,” he continued again cutting off
the mayor, “until only hours before the sun rose. You were with us the whole
time. Do you remember what you said then? Do you now?”

By this time, the audience was so silent that a
tap of a boot heel echoed off the walls.

“I...no, I don’t, but I fail to see the point of
all this, old man. That was long ago. The rules have changed.”

“We have differing opinions, Your Honor, on what
makes somethin’ long ago. We remember things here. In Scotland, if you do a
right, you’re always owed one in return. If you do a wrong, and you admit to
havin’ done it, you’re forgiven as soon as the words roll from your tongue. But
if you don’t...”

“Get to the point, Morgan. We don’t have all day.
What is it I said that was so obviously important?”

Both Kenna’s pencil and Rollo’s pen scratched
furiously to record the exchange. People in the gallery were beginning to
grumble again.

“What you said to me wasn’t complicated, nor was
it profound. What you said, was ‘Greg’ – for that’s what you used to call me,
if you remember – ‘Greg, there are men with honor in this world and men
without. There are men who do as they say and those who talk double and go back
on their word.’ Do you remember now, Your Honor?”

“I suppose so, what of it? The words ring as true
today as they did then.”

“Aye, they do, Your Honor. And what else they do
is show just how much you’ve changed. A man what used to be the former – an
honorable, decent man who worked hard and righted wrongs – he’s become the
latter. He’s now the one whose doin’ them. You’re trying to bury us, Willard,
and I dinna know why but you’ve lost your honor. You’re a man shamed and
disgraced, and you canna help but take out your anger on us. You’re trying to
kill us, to drive us from our land.”

He said more, but the crowd roared so loudly that
none of the words Gregory Morgan said were audible in the back of the room. But
still his mouth moved and the one of his hands not grasping desperately the top
of his cane gesticulated wildly.

“Enough!” Willard roared over top of the din of
noise. “Enough!”

He banged his gavel with such vigor that the
little wooden circle he struck it against bounced off of his podium and to the
floor, but still he kept right on slamming. As Kenna stared with her mouth
agape, the normally collected, almost menacingly cool mayor got flushed, angry,
and beat the hammer so violently against the top of his podium that little bits
of wood flew off.

“Morgan, I’ll not hear any more of this! You can’t
manage to pay your taxes and now you’ve decided to insult an officer of the
court in his very own court! I’ve had enough of this impudence. Bailiff, take
that man to jail. He’ll sit for...a fortnight. Now!”

He resumed slamming his gavel over and over until
Gregory Morgan had been escorted away.

“It’s under his house, you know. The jail.”

Kenna turned to see Lachlan, the lanky man from
Duggan’s inn.

“What? The jail is under his house?”

“Aye, it used to be they used the one here, right
outside the Hall, but when all of this happened, Willard started keeping people
under his house. He’s got a guard amountin’ to a small army there too.”

Hastily, Kenna wrote down everything the lanky man
said to her, and then looked up to see Rollo had left his desk and gone up to
the front, where he was trying to either calm the mayor or get his attention.

“Shut up! Quiet, all of you!” The mayor shouted
over top of the din. “I’m finished! You can thank Morgan’s stunt for making all
you who have reasonable requests wait until next week for me to hear them.
That’s it, court is dismissed, enough!”

It was a few minutes before everyone realized that
when Willard had left through the back door that he meant what he said, and had
no intention of returning.

“This is how it goes, lately,” Lachlan said under
his breath. “We’d best remove ourselves afore things begin to fly.”

As soon as he spoke, someone threw a lap-table,
and then someone else flung a chair. Kenna and Lachlan ducked out the back as
quickly as they could, and emerged from the Town Hall at the same time as a
desk hit the wall and shattered, breaking a window and judging by the howl that
came after, someone’s hand.

“That was...singular,” Kenna said, trying to catch
her breath.

“Why are you here, lass? This town’s not well.
You’d be served to keep moving.”

“No,” she said shaking her head. “That’s not the
way Gavin and I...we can’t just let-”

“Gavin? I thought you said his name was something
else.”

She sucked an exasperated breath, irritated at her
complete inability to keep her and Gavin’s aliases straight for any length of
time at all.
At least Gavin is terrible at this, as well, or I might be
embarrassed.

“Wait a tick, lass. Gavin? He isn’t Gavin
Macgregor is he? I’ve heard...you know people like us, simple people...common
people, we know of him.”

“Well...aye, he is. And I’m Kenna Moore.”

Lachlan’s jaw dropped.

“I had a thought about it. Meanin’ all the news of
that Laird Macdonald being disgraced and the town sheriff being carted off just
a couple of days before you two showed up. You matched the descriptions given,
and there was even a bit of a flatterin’ sketch of you in the paper. But him,
they said he always wore a heavy cloak with a hood, just like Robin of old.”

“You’ve to keep quiet, Lachlan,” Kenna said.
“We’re trying to make our way back north, but...things...keep happening.
Right?”

“You’ve got nothing but my confidence, lass. He’s
a hero to us, your Gavin is. I dinna what we’ve done to deserve your attention,
but I promise you that anythin’ you need, I’ll do. Egan too, you can trust him,
no matter what sort of foulness he spews.”

“Thank you Lachlan. You’re a good man. I’m sure
we’ll need your help – or anyone’s – but to be honest with you I don’t know
what we’re doing or even if there’s anything to be done.”

“Please help us,” he pleaded. “The mayor, he’s got
us enslaved. We canna leave town, we canna pay our taxes.”

“You canna leave town?”

“He charges us for that, too! Road use, he says.
It’s a damn shame what’s happened.”

“Alright,” Kenna said. “Nothing to be done right
now, but when Gavin gets back from Edin-”

“He went to Edinburgh? Is he getting everyone
else? I read that he’s got a gang runnin’ with him. A man called John with some
kind of hand problem, and then a couple of others the paper didn’t name.”