The Highlander's Virtuous Lady: A Historical Scottish Romance Novel Read online

  The Highlander's Virtuous Lady

  Her virtue is in peril, her highlander to the rescue

  Fiona Faris

  Contents

  Thank you

  About the book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Extended Epilogue

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Glossary

  Thank you

  I want to personally thank you for purchasing my book. It really means a lot to me. It’s a blessing to have the opportunity to share with you, my passion for writing, through my stories.

  As a gift, I am giving you a link to my first novel called “A Maid for the Grieving Highlander”, for FREE.

  Please note that this story is only available for you as a subscriber and hasn't been published anywhere else.

  Please click on the cover to download the book

  About the book

  Margaret Fraser wants nothing more than to become the virtuous lady and mistress of her home, Neidpath Castle.

  Sir Gilbert Fleming, a valiant Highlander, is the ideal man for her and she can’t help but fall in love with him at first sight.

  But the imminent war in the country splits them apart.

  Gilbert has to go to battle, and Margaret is forced to leave her beloved Neidpath for the wild forests and glens of the Scottish Highlands.

  The Highlands are no place for a lady, and when the newly appointed Sheriff of Tweeddale, Walter Moult, captures Margaret, he is not happy with her disobedience to his sadistic sexual requests. He is determined to make her life a living hell.

  With her virtue in peril and salvation nowhere to be found, Margaret must find a way to escape and get back to her loved ones before it’s too late…

  Chapter One

  “Joan! Will you come down from there?”

  Margaret Fraser peered up through the young foliage of the broad beech tree, shielding her eyes against the shifting glare of the dappled spring sunlight. High above the river bank, Joan climbed up through the branches, snapping twigs and rustling leaves as she progressed.

  “Joan!” Margaret repeated sharply. “Come down at once!”

  Joan kept on climbing.

  “I’m nearly there,” she called down. “I can see the nest. I’ve almost reached it.”

  Margaret let out a heavy sigh of resignation. She was annoyed. Her sister was incorrigible. Her only consolation was that there was no one around to witness Joan’s most unladylike behavior.

  Margaret shook her head and returned her attention to the daisy chain she was linking in her lap. It was almost complete and would make a pretty circlet for her head. The delicate white petals and bright yellow eyes of the flowers would perfectly complement the pale, silvery blondeness of her hair and the fairness of her brow.

  She had gathered the flowers from the swards that punctuated the forest path that ran beside the River Tweed from their home at Neidpath Castle. All the way from the castle to their chosen haunt, her sister had capered and swished at the undergrowth with a branch she had cut from a sapling near the postern gate with a dirk that Margaret was sure their parents did not know she had. They had settled in their favorite spot, on a mossy bank beside the river’s edge, where the current caught in a languorous pool beneath the overhanging trees before hurrying off over its shallow, stony bed past Neidpath towards Peebles and into the wild, lawless Marchlands beyond.

  “No treasure today,” Joan called. “Just eggs.”

  A pair of magpie eggs broke on the turf beside where Margaret was sitting with the skirts of her mustard gown and vermillion surcoat gathered beneath her tucked legs.

  “Joan!” Margaret protested, drawing her sumptuous woolen garments away from the sticky splatter and checking them for stains.

  “Filthy, ill-omened birds,” Joan remarked, by way of excuse. “Father says we should smash the eggs in any nests we find.”

  “I think he means ‘we’ in the general sense of ‘mankind’. I cannot imagine that he means it as a fitting pursuit for ladies. Though,” Margaret added archly, “given how he indulges you, I should not be too surprised to find he was giving you direct instruction by it.”

  Joan had begun her descent, which was much more sure-footed and rapid than her going up had been.

  “Pish!” she jeered. “You sound like you swallowed the psalter. I’m not a lady yet; I’m still but a lass. Where is the harm in a lass climbing a tree?”

  “And sparring with the pages on the practice field and scrambling up the crags?” Margaret replied ruefully. “You are sixteen now, Joan. How do you expect to find a mate if you so persist in being ‘a wee lassie’ so late and lang? You are beyond such things in years. You are of an age when you should be comporting yourself more sedately.”

  Joan slipped and swore before she regained her footing.

  “It is not a mate I shall be marrying for,” she told her sister. “I shall be marrying the man who can match me on the crags and at the gallop.”

  “Then you shall be marrying a filthy reiver,” Margaret retorted, “for no knight will have you.”

  “Well, providing that yon reiver is hung like a stallion, I shall not complain.” Joan laughed.

  Margaret gasped and pressed her hand to her breast. But she also blushed deeply and swallowed at the fluttering those words had set alight in her stomach.

  She gazed out across the river to still her feelings. The water’s surface glittered in the strong spring sunshine, and the Tweed chuckled as it gamboled between the stones of its rocky bed. She closed her eyes and inhaled the sultry fragrance of the blossom on the trees.

  Downstream, she could just make out the top of the red sandstone tower that was Neidpath Castle, which from its high crag commanded the river near where it emerged upstream from a steep wooded gorge. Thick forest tumbled down the Castle Braes, from the high Jedderfield Laws that loomed up behind the castle, to a half-moon meadow that fringed a broad curve of the river and which the Frasers used as their practice field.

  On the far side of the river from where Margaret sat, lay the Boat Pool, overlooked by a promontory of rock that jutted about twenty feet above the river from the South Park Woods where Sir Simon and his household hawked and hunted.

  She loved this place, it was so quiet and peaceful and encapsulated within its horizons the entire wealth of the Fraser household.

  Suddenly, there was a crash and a cry. Margaret looked up in alarm and saw Joan entangled in the branches. She jumped to her feet, the daisies falling from her lap and spilling acro
ss the grass.

  Unlike Margaret, who always chose to dress primly and properly in a gown girdled loosely by a thin belt of leather and a surcoat belted tight beneath her bosom, Joan preferred the freedom of a simple yellow kirtle. Also, whereas her elder sister always wore pointed buckled shoes and stockings hooked to the legs of her short linen braies, Joan went barefoot, and – Margaret could not help but notice, as she gazed up at her sister’s naked arse – often without her undergarments too.

  Joan’s skirt had been caught on a branch and had rumpled up over her hips. Joan herself was hissing and spitting like a wildcat.

  “Christ wept!” she squealed, as her bare legs scrambled for purchase and she hauled herself up by her strong, sinewy arms. “That bastard magpie must hae cursed me. Evil, vengeful cratur!”

  Margaret could not help but laugh, even though, dangling there with her sex on display, Joan had exceeded even the bounds of impropriety.

  “Do you need help?” She giggled.

  “Much help you could give me, feeble bitch.”

  “I could run for the squires,” Margaret sputtered in amusement. “I’m sure they would be more than happy to grapple you down.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Joan shouted.

  “No, they might see you for what you really are and not the ‘soft boy’ they think you are.”

  Joan swung her leg over a bough and tugged her kirtle free. Her face was as red as a damson fruit, and her eyes were dark with fury.

  “I’ve a good mind to jump down and scratch your bonnie blue eyes out,” she spat, as much to cover her own embarrassment as out of any genuine malice towards her sister.

  Margaret sat down on the bank again, a broad smile on her usually severe lips, and watched as two of her daisies spun lazily in the pool. Insects dabbed the water-surface while a deep glossy-blue damsel fly hovered among the rushes. On the sandy bed of the pool, three brown trout skulked in the shadows, holding themselves against the gentle current that lay outside the main stream.

  “Shush!”

  Joan’s sharp warning hiss woke Margaret from her reverie. She looked up enquiringly.

  “I hear movement over in the Park. Horses. Men.”

  The women retreated further into the cover of the trees, and parting the branches, peered like curious kittens back across the river.

  “There!” Joan whispered, pointing to the promontory above the Boat Pool.

  Six men emerged from the trees and strode out onto the flat of the promontory: two knights, their squires, and a pair of pages, Margaret judged by their garb.

  “Who are they?” Joan asked in a low voice, shading her eyes against the glare off the water.

  “I have no idea,” Margaret murmured, her eyes fixed on the dark-haired knight, who was clearly the leader of the band.

  The men were laughing and joking. Their surcoats were grimed with dust and leaves, and their boots were splattered with mud. It looked like they had traveled a long way and were clearly relieved to be taking some respite from their journey. They were in high spirits.

  “The water looks cold,” the dark-haired knight said to his sandy-headed companion.

  “Refreshing,” the second knight replied.

  “Bracing,” the first countered.

  The two squires grinned around the edge of their superiors’ intimacy.

  “There is only one way to settle this, Sir Patrick,” the dark-haired knight suggested.

  “And how is that, Sir Gilbert?” Patrick replied.

  “We must toss in a page to gauge the temperature.”

  The two knights spun around and laid hold of the slower of the two pages. They wrestled him easily to the ground. Gilbert gripped the poor lad by the shoulders, while Patrick had the ankles, and they carried him squirming and squealing to the lip of the promontory.

  “One!” Gilbert shouted as they swung the lad forward.

  “Two!” Patrick continued on the second swing.

  “And… three!” they both bellowed, as the page flew through the air, his arms and legs waving wildly, his shrill scream filling the air, before he crashed into the pool with an enormous splash and surfaced with a plume of water spurting from his lips.

  “Report, Wart?” Gilbert commanded.

  “The water is… lovely, sire!” The boy spluttered. “But very wet!”

  The knights and squires roared with laughter; the other page, judging he was safe now, edged back onto the promontory with a smirk on his face.

  “Then hold forward, men!” Gilbert cried out and started to shed his boots and clothes.

  “My goodness!” Margaret gasped. “They are undressing.”

  Joan grinned, her eyes alight with excitement.

  “So, they are,” she confirmed. “But do not worry, sister sweet; they will likely stop at their drawers – more is the pity!”

  But they did not stop at their drawers. With a whoop, the men dropped and stepped out of their linen braies before running and leaping far out into the pool, sending long plumes of spray flying across the river towards the women.

  “Oh dear!” Margaret breathed, holding her chest and shielding her eyes.

  Butterflies, and lots of them, were beating frantically in her stomach. Her breath was coming in short, shallow draughts. She had dropped her hand, and her eyes were wide and gleaming in the shadow of the trees.

  “Look!” Joan hissed in eager anticipation. “They are coming out to jump in again.”

  Margaret dropped her horrified look to the sward immediately in front of her, placing her fingertips to her temples and making blinkers of her palms.

  “I’d rather not… look.” She gulped, but she looked anyway.

  Water streamed from Gilbert’s back and limbs as he hauled himself out of the pool and onto the bank. Without pausing, he sprang to his feet and scrambled up the bank and back out again onto the promontory rock.

  The sight of the firm muscles of his finely shaped buttocks and thighs as he scrambled up the bank, and the merry dance of his penis and testicles as he padded out onto the table of the rock, flooded Margaret’s vision. She could not take her eyes off of the plump rounded tip of his flaccid cock as it nodded this way and that, like the heavy head of one of the fiery red asphodels her mother cultivated in the castle’s garden. She felt a warm tickle in her groin.

  Patrick followed hot on Gilbert’s heels. His private parts were haloed by the same sandy hair that surmounted his close-cropped head. He was slimmer and less solid than Gilbert, but just as handsome as his dark-haired companion and just as impressive in his endowment.

  Margaret heard Joan groan at her shoulder and looked around to find her staring slack-lipped and hungry-eyed at the two knights.

  “Come!” Margaret whispered. “We should not be watching this.”

  She placed a hand on her sister’s arm as if to draw her back into the trees, but Joan shook it off impatiently.

  “They will spy us if we move,” she murmured huskily. “And, in any case, this is the best entertainment we have had at Neidpath for many a day.”

  “Have you no shame?” Margaret scolded, but her voice sounded empty as her eyes were drawn once again to Gilbert as he clambered out of the pool for a second time.

  Joan gave her sister a superior smile.

  “Oh, come now,” she said. “You are enjoying this just as much as I am. Do not deny it!”

  “I do deny it!” Margaret protested, though it did not sound convincing even to her own ears.

  Joan snorted.

  “Look at you!” she said. “You are shivering like a mare who smells the stallion. And no doubt your coney is pulsing like the mare’s does too.” She gazed back across the water. “I know mine is.”

  “Joan Fraser!”

  Margaret spun around and stared determinedly into the depths of the forest. Behind her, she could hear the shouts and splashes of the interlopers. Beside her, Joan’s breath came deep and heavy, with the occasional little catch and whimper. Margaret was a lady, she kept remindi
ng herself, the future mistress of Oliver and Neidpath; she would behave like a lady, with as much dignity and decorum as she could muster and as the situation allowed. If her sister wanted to behave like a poxy whore, then let her.