The Chieftain (23 page)

And before she could say anything he had gone.

She watched him, veiled by the silver
curtain, as he made his way back along the path and disappeared into the trees. Clearly any fugitive in the cave could see what went on outside without difficulty, while being completely hidden by that dramatic fall of water. Even in her present despondent state she was impressed. It would be hard to imagine a better place than this in which to hide.

Hector made several journeys, carrying heather to the cave to make beds, coldly declining Isobel’s offers of help. She noticed how pointedly he heaped the two makeshift couches at opposite sides of the cave. It hurt her, but she accepted it, as she accepted everything, without comment or complaint.

Later, when the beds were ready, Hector gathered dry sticks and lit a small fire. Isobel watched in fascination as he laid a flat stone over the fire to heat, and then mixed oatmeal and water and shaped it into little cakes to bake on the hot stone. His lean brown fingers moved quickly and neatly, with the skill of long practice.

‘You’ve done that before,’ she observed quietly.

He looked up, as if he had been so lost in thought that until she spoke he had
forgotten she was there.

‘We learned to fend for ourselves when we were hunting in the hills,’ he told her in his usual cool abstracted tone.

Isobel had a sudden longing to sting him into some kind of warmer response. Even anger would be better than this distant coldness, she thought.

‘I suppose it was useful to be able to cook whilst out on your cattle raids,’ she said pointedly. ‘John Campbell told me all about that old Highland custom.’

‘I am surprised John Campbell remembers so much of the Highland ways,’ Hector retorted, with much less fire than she had hoped.

‘Ah, then you did lift cattle now and then!’ she said triumphantly.

‘Not personally, but they were lifted. What can you expect? Our cattle are our wealth. In your part of the world men steal gold. In the Highlands they steal cattle. I see little difference. Except that it is both more skilful and more dangerous to steal cattle, which is why the Highlanders are so renowned a race of warriors.’ At that point he seemed to recollect suddenly where that renown had so recently brought his warrior race,
and fell silent, his expression once more brooding and withdrawn.

Isobel was disappointed. She wandered restlessly about the cave until he told her the food was ready. They ate, as always, in silence, while outside the shadows deepened and the silver-green light faded to grey and then to dusky blue.

Afterwards, as he extinguished the last embers of the fire in case their glow should give them away in the dark, Hector said: ‘We shall stay here for as long as I see fit. I can easily leave unobserved to seek food or news, should there be any, and I think we have as much comfort here as we can hope for at the present. When I am sure that the soldiers are less busy I will take you near enough to your home to be sure you arrive there safely.’

‘But how do you know I want to go home?’ she cried. ‘You have not asked me.’

‘I still do not understand why you ever came back, though I curse the day you did so. Or did you lie when you said it was not that your parents would not have you? If you did not, then I cannot imagine you would wish now to be anywhere else but with your parents. Do you?’

Isobel bent her head and thought how impossibly remote her parents seemed from all this. Even Ardshee seemed far away and unreal. How could she ever want to be anywhere but with Hector, after all she had been through to return to him?

But she had come back to him in the hope that she might win his love, and now she knew with chilling certainty that all her hope was illusory. He was further now from loving her than he had ever been. She had recognised long ago that she no longer attracted him as once she had done. She had never had any other hold on his affections. And she saw daily how little he wanted her.

No,
she thought,
I cannot go on like this, sharing his every moment but for ever shut out from the smallest corner of his mind and heart. I cannot go on loving and loving with no hope of return, knowing only that he wants above all to be rid of me. I cannot ask him, loving him as I do, to endure my hateful presence for a moment longer than he must. I will stay with him to keep him safe as long as I reasonably can. And then I shall return meekly to my parents when he tells me to go, and pray that somehow he will come
in the end to find safety and happiness without me.

She raised her head and gazed steadily at all she could see of him in the dimness.

‘Yes of course,’ she said gravely. ‘I shall be glad to go home.’

Chapter Eighteen

There were some moments during the weeks passed in the cave which, in spite of everything, Isobel treasured as the nearest she was ever likely to come to happiness, knowing that the final parting lay ahead. The cave itself was a strange yet beautiful refuge, where soft silver-green light bathed the simplest task in mystery, and the constant rush of water closed them in together as if this place were the whole world. On fine days the water shimmered like a curtain of silver threaded with diamonds. When, more often, it was wet they scarcely knew, for the sound of the fall drowned all other sounds.

Sometimes Hector would swim in the deep dark-brown water beneath the fall, and Isobel would watch his lithe scarred body leaping and curving in the pool, as sinuous and beautiful as those of the seals she had watched sometimes from Ardshee. At other times he left her to seek food, bringing a rabbit he had snared, a small
fish; once, triumphantly, a salmon on which they feasted for three whole days.

Often he seemed to have forgotten that she was anything other than a companion in adventure, as his clansmen would have been when out hunting in the glens. His manner towards her at such times was easy, courteous and yet reticent. He rarely smiled, and never allowed any warmth or intimacy to blossom between them, but it was better by far than the bitter coldness that shut her out so completely when he remembered who she was and why she was there.

Once or twice he crept down under cover of darkness to some friendly cottage to beg a little meal or milk and ask for news. They heard that the soldiers marched less often through the glens these days. Most of the chiefs and other rebels who had not died at Culloden, or in the slaughter afterwards, were in prison now, awaiting trial in Carlisle or York or London, knowing that the victors were eager to see the gallows at work.

When the soldiers came now it was to hunt for the fugitive Prince Charles Edward, still at large somewhere in the Highlands. If they paused on their way
to loot or rape or burn, that was merely incidental to their search. After all, Hector told Isobel with a sombre light glowing in his eyes, there was little left for them to take. Great herds of cattle and other livestock had been driven in from the glens to the military post at Fort Augustus, where the soldiers had turned cattle dealers. Buyers came from as far afield as England to stock their farms with the shaggy beasts on which the clans had depended for their prosperity and their lives. When winter came, said Hector gloomily, the people would starve. Although there was little enough for them to eat even now.

Outside the cave the vibrant green of the leaves on the trees by the river darkened and hung heavy over the water. The short hours of darkness began imperceptibly to lengthen. Isobel realised one day that the spring had gone and it was already summer.

They woke one morning after a warm night to a day of shimmering heat. The sky arched deeply blue overhead, the woods lay silent, as if the birds and animals were too hot to move. Isobel slid from her heather couch, gathered up the plaid she had discarded some time in the night, and
announced that today she would wash their clothes.

Hector sat up and cast a disparaging glance at his own plaid, stiff with dirt so that the colours of the tartan had long been indistinguishable one from another. His shirt was no better: impossible now to tell that it had once been crisply white and ruffled with fine lace.

‘I think that would be no bad thing,’ he observed with a wry half smile.

He unwound the plaid and pulled off his shirt, casting them at Isobel’s feet before skirting the waterfall and plunging deep into the pool. Isobel thought longingly of clear water on warm skin, cooling and cleansing. Like Hector, she would bathe herself as soon as she had washed the clothes.

She began carefully to undress, discarding the soiled gown and petticoat with indescribable relief. It felt strange to be naked again, after so long wearing the same garments day and night. She gathered the heap of clothes into her arms and moved towards the narrow shelf that led under the waterfall. And then she paused, feeling suddenly shy.

She was Hector’s wife, and he had seen
her naked and known her body in all its intimacy. Yet that had been a long time ago, and the ardent lover of those early days was a stranger now beside the new Hector, aloof and cold and uncaring. She watched him, the black head sleek in its wetness appearing briefly and then submerging again, followed by the smooth plunging curve of the brown body. He was absorbed in his swim, oblivious to anything else. Very likely he would not even notice her.

She edged her way along the shelf and found a wide flat rock beside the shallower waters of the pool, and crouched there, dropping the clothes in and bending to pummel and squeeze and rub vigorously at the heavy folds of the plaids. It was satisfying to watch the dirt drift away, carried on the little river out between the trees. She worked until, even naked as she was, the perspiration poured from her body and the water ran clear at last.

She hung the clothes in the trees nearby, the plaids brilliant in the sunlight, though the colours had faded a little since she had last seen them clearly. And then she stepped down into the water and edged cautiously into its inviting coolness.

It was delightful, exhilarating, and she became bold, lying down to let the water run over her, plunging her head into it with a gasp of delight, rubbing her long hair clean. Her body looked strangely white and unfamiliar, and far thinner than it had when she had last seen it, but tautened by hard exercise into an unaccustomed litheness.

She splashed happily in the pool until its icy coldness began to chill her in spite of the sun, and then she pulled herself up to the flat rock, hot to her bare skin, and went to bring her comb from the leather pouch in the cave, and sat in the sunlight pulling the teeth through her wet hair. It was not until she had almost finished that she noticed that Hector had ceased his swimming and was treading water in the pool, watching her through narrowed eyes.

The comb fell unheeded to the rock and she returned his gaze, feeling the colour rise in her face. She was conscious of every smooth firm curve of her own white body, aware as never before of his supple bronzed grace, of the alert poise of his dark head, of the glowing intensity of his eyes. She felt as if every part of her was tingling with
life. Yet she was utterly still, motionless, waiting.

Then with one smooth silent movement he glided across the pool towards her and emerged in the shallow water at her side. She could not look at him now, hearing his quickened breathing in tune with her own, trembling a little in anticipation.

Then he had her in his arms and was carrying her swiftly along the ledge back to the cave. She felt the spray tingle lightly on her skin as they passed under the fall, felt the coolness of the cave close about them, felt him fling her onto the harsh springy heather of her bed. And with an eager longing cry she reached up to welcome him.

But there her joy ended. He took her now as he never had before, urgently, harshly, without one faint trace of tenderness. Then it was over, and with neither word nor caress he left her, aching and unsatisfied and swept by a desolation more terrible than any she had known until now. When she drew her hands away from where they had moved to hide her face so that he should not see her grief, there was no sign of him. Only her own plaid and the gown
and petticoat hung in the sunlight on the trees above the pool.

She did not weep, for the pain was too deep for tears. If she had ever doubted that he despised and hated her, she knew it now. He had used her to satisfy his need, and the act had been no more significant to him than eating and drinking. Less, perhaps, for she knew how he always ate courteously, with graceful good manners. There had been no such consideration in this taking of her. In the past at least she had known he thought her beautiful, desirable. This time it was as if she had been simply a convenient body.

She lay shivering, gazing up at the arching rock of the cave roof, seeing nothing there but his face as she had seen it just now, shadowed, withdrawn. It had been almost as if he had taken her in anger, to punish her for all the disasters he thought she had brought on him; or to bring him some relief from his own pain.

After a time she got up slowly and wandered out of the cave. Her clothes were not quite dry, but they would do - she shrank now from her own nakedness.

She dressed quickly, and retreated once more into the cave, and sat on her bed, wondering what to do next. She knew she could not stay here any longer. To be parted from Hector would be infinitely less painful than this, because without him she would not be made so cruelly conscious of the gulf between them.

She examined the contents of her pouch. She retrieved her fallen comb, counted her money—they had not needed to use it—gazed unseeing at the borrowed map, fast disintegrating by now. She did not think any of these things would help her much, but from force of habit she shut them away and fastened the pouch once more beneath her plaid.

She was tempted to set out now, quickly, before Hector returned. But she might well meet him on the way, and that would not do. Besides it would be foolish to set out in broad daylight.
Tonight,
she decided,
as soon as it grows dark and Hector is asleep, then I will go
. She clasped her hands tightly together in her lap and waited, while her stomach churned with fear, and a weight of grief and despair sat heavy on her heart.