A Maid for the Grieving Highlander Read online

  “It is the custom among us that a man takes a maid as his wife and keeps her for the space of a year without marrying her. And if she pleases him all the while, he will marry her at the end of the year and legitimatize her children. But if he does not love her, he will return her to her parents.” Anna peered from one to the other. “Do you consent before your people to this handfasting?”

  “I do,” both Ruairi and Sorcha avowed together.

  “Does the clachan consent to the handfasting of this couple?”

  “Aye!” the community cried as one.

  Anna cocked her ear towards the darkening sky.

  “Does Almighty God object to this handfasting?”

  Silence.

  “So be it!” she declared.

  And the handfasting was over. Ruairi Murray and Sorcha MacPherson were man and wife.

  Chapter Three

  Catriona ran down the brae to the riverbank, each jarring step wrenching free a sob from her chest. The glittering water ran west over its shoals of shingle, the clatter of its voice echoing from the cliffs that rose sharply from the opposite bank. Catriona happed her plaid over her head against the chill of the evening air off the water, but also to shut out the world that was treating her so cruelly and mocking her into the bargain. She felt the deep sting of humiliation.

  She followed the riverbank to the Wood of the White Stag, so-called because of the appearance of the mythical beast long ago to Tharracail, the man who had given his name to the ford – and hence to the clachan that had grown up beside it – when he had trespassed on Clanranald’s hunting grounds and subsequently slaughtered for his trouble. Catriona remembered the tales that the old folk transmitted to the young around the hearth during the long winter nights, the tales that her own grandmother, when she was alive, had spun to her by the fireside in Shielfoot. In those tales, the white stag is at times a messenger from the otherworld, which appears as a warning when one is transgressing a taboo. In other tales, the creature has a perennial ability to evade capture, and the pursuit of it tells of a body’s spiritual quest. Its appearance also signals to its witness that the time is nigh for them to pursue that quest. In other tales still, the white stag is associated with Flidais, the goddess of hunting and wild animals.

  But these were only tales, Catriona reflected ruefully as she tramped along the uneven riverbank towards the Wood. Life was no such tale. There were no quests; just the drudgery and daily struggle of growing enough food to see a body through another winter and of raising children to perpetuate that struggle for yet another generation. She was no white stag that could evade capture by her fate; she was but a poor crofter’s younger daughter, trapped within her situation with no prospect of escape.

  She entered the Wood. The canopy of the trees filtered the already fading light. Trunks of birch, oak, and elm gleamed wanly in the dusk. The birds had settled down to roost. The silence was complete, apart from the occasional burble of a sleepy wood pigeon.

  She trod through the trees to the clearing at the very heart of the Wood. It was a favorite trysting place for illicit lovers and for husbands and wives who wanted a little respite from the cramped shared sleeping space of the croft-house. The grass grew long and lush beneath the opening to the sky. At the heart of the clearing lay the broad trunk of an ancient fallen oak, half-swallowed by the turf and swathed in creeping moss.

  Catriona sat with her back to a tree just outside the circle of the clearing and looked up to the heavens. The sky was yet a deep azure blue, but the first stars were beginning to appear, and a large full moon had risen above the shoulder of Cnoc Uaine. The pacific blue of the sky and the profound stillness of the Wood soothed her. Sitting there, in the small self-contained world of the clearing, isolated from the troubles of the larger world beyond the Wood, she felt the tension in her shoulders and the hurt in her heart melt away, and she fell asleep.

  Hushed voices and the crack of footsteps on fallen twigs wakened her. Night had fallen; the Wood was pitch-dark between the trees, but a bright full moon hung over the clearing, illuminating it with a cool silvery light.

  Catriona gave a start. Someone was in the Wood. She was alone and vulnerable, too far from the clachan for anyone to hear her cry. She folded her fists to her breast, as if to prevent her rapidly beating heart from bursting through her breastbone and giving her away. Her breath came in short sobbing gasps. The footsteps grew closer. She held her breath, drew up her knees, and cowered back as far as she could into the tree at her back.

  Ruairi and Sorcha passed within yards of her and stepped, hand in hand, into the moonlit glade. Ruairi, Catriona noticed, was a bit unsteady on his feet. He had clearly supped his share of the beer and the water of life at the Lunastal.

  Sorcha paused just inside the clearing, tugging back on Ruairi’s hand.

  “I’m a wee bit scared,” she whimpered.

  Ruairi swayed, unbalanced by the pull of Sorcha’s hand on his.

  “There’s nocht tae be afeared o’, lass.” He grunted, yanking her onward with a sharp jerk of her arm. “We are man and wife, now, are we no’? If I get ye wi’ bairn, there shall be nae shame tae it. And if ye’re guid to me, I’ll stand by ye at the year’s end. I’ll marry ye guid and proper, in the kirk and all.”

  Sorcha’s eyes were wild with fear, like those of a heifer being presented to the bull for the first time.

  Ruairi dragged her over to the fallen oak and threw her roughly, facedown, over the thick trunk. Without hesitation, he crouched down behind her and started hauling up the skirts of her plaid.

  “Please, Ruairi, not so quickly, not so rough,” Sorcha protested. “Can we no’ hae a little daffin first, a wee bit o’ a kiss and a cuddle?”

  Ruairi slapped her naked buttocks and rummaged beneath the kilt of his own plaid to release his manhood.

  “I’ve nae time for daffin,” he exclaimed. “I must get back tae the shieling. There are the beasts that need tending.” He parted her cheeks and inspected what he found between them appreciatively. “But my, ye hae a fine arse on ye, woman!”

  Without further delay, he rubbed his thumb across the head of his cock to bring it to full hardness, presented it to the lips of her cunt and drove it in, hard.

  Sorcha yelped.

  “No, please, Ruairi,” she sobbed. “No’ sae rough. Please, be gentle wi’ me.”

  But Ruairi fell to thrusting hard and fast, his bulging thighs slapping the flesh of her rump, each forceful thrust accompanied by a beastlike grunt. Barely a minute later, he reached forward and grabbed a fistful of her hair, pulling hard on it as he bellowed and came.

  He stood up immediately.

  “Aye, ye’re a canny ride,” he remarked, leaning over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. “Ye’ll dae, lass; ye’ll dae!”

  Sorcha lay limp and humiliated over the log, weeping with bitterness. Blood trickled down the inside of her thighs, mixing its bright redness with the whiteness of his seed. After a few moments, she reached out, tore up a handful of grass, and wiped herself clean as best she could.

  “Come on, I’ll walk ye back tae the clachan.” Ruairi straightened, his breath restored. “They say it’s ay, a wee bit sair the first time.”

  Sorcha pushed herself off the log and rose painfully to her feet. Ruairi gave her his arm, and they left the clearing, Sorcha still weeping and limping with the soreness of it between her legs.

  Catriona looked on at the now deserted scene, her eyes wet with tears and still round with horror. An unspent scream lodged in her throat like a lump of dry bread she had swallowed but would not go down. She had seen the clachan beasts couple and was inured to the rawness and the violence of the act. But never had she witnessed the careless brutality with which Ruairi had visited that act on her sister.

  Perhaps, she reflected, her fate as a spinster or servant was not as unenviable as she had believed. If what she had just witnessed was marriage, she could well do without it. She would rather spin her fingers raw beneath h
er father’s rooftree than suffer so.

  What was it the mhaighstir was forever bawling from his pulpit in the kirk of a Sunday?

  ‘Unto the woman,’ he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow, thou shalt bring forth children.’

  Perhaps, she reflected, Sorcha was more to be pitied than envied for her fate.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, Catriona found herself alone when she awoke. For a brief moment, she missed Sorcha beside her on the straw pallet they shared, until she remembered that her sister would now be living with the Murrays in the neighboring croft as Ruairi’s betrothed.

  She stirred herself to see to the fire. She crouched by the hearth in the center of the room and removed the peats beneath which the flame had been banked the night before. She blew on the smoldering embers until they raised a glow, then she added some dry straw as tinder. When the flame lowed, she loosely stacked the peats back over it, and their aromatic smoke began to spiral lazily to the rafters. She took a hand-besom and brushed the earthen floor around the oval of the hearthstones and used her cupped hands to tip the stour she had gathered back into the fire.

  Once the fire had caught, she ladled some oatmeal for the morning porridge into a pot, along with some water from the pail, and hung the pot from the chain that dropped from the rafter above the hearth. In the far corner of the room, nearest the gable end, her parents stirred. Her mother went to relieve herself in the byre. Her father lumbered over in his sark, scratching his armpits. His skinny legs reminded Catriona of those of a chicken strutting on the midden.

  “You were late home,” Aonghas grumbled out. “I hope you weren’t up to hochmagandy with any of the lads. The last thing we need is a lass wi’ a bastard in her belly.”

  Catriona did not deign to reply. She stirred the pot with the wooden spurtle, then took the milk cogie inside the cow shed to fetch some milk from the goat. She found her mother crouched over the drain that carried the waste under the wall to the midden, her sark hauled up over her scraggy hips.

  “You will have to take on Sorcha’s chores,” Floraidh observed, contemplating her remaining daughter. Then, after a pause, she added with an air of womanly conspiracy, “Pay no heed to your father. He is no more than a blathering auld skyte. He should not have said the things he said last evening.”

  Catriona kicked a low three-legged stool over to the goat that was tethered to a ring fixed into the wall and hunkered down on it.

  “Aye, but it is true all the same, Mither,” she said, coaxing the animal’s teats and squirting milk rhythmically into the wooden bowl. “There will be no fine young Ruairi for me.”

  Which might well be a blessing, she added to herself.

  “Och, you are a bonny lass, Catriona, my dove,” Floraidh remarked as she straightened up and smoothed her sark. “It would not surprise me if some handsome young chiel was to take you to wife just for the taking of you.”

  “Aye!” Catriona said cynically, nodding at the chickens that scraped in the corner. “And yon hen might fly with the eagle.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, the MacPhersons received a visit from the parish minister, the mhaighstir, Dughlas Middleton.

  Middleton rode into Ath Tharracail on a small shaggy gray pony. The children of the clachan ran out to meet him. He was, after all, a sight to behold: a tall, lanky man whose toes almost dragged the ground beneath his diminutive bow-backed mount, wearing a coffin-black jacket and trews and a starched white cravat, with a plain three-cornered felt hat perched on the crown of his head. In a whiney nasal voice, he enquired grandly of the children where he might find MacPherson of Shielfoot.

  The children’s brows creased in puzzled frowns until Eairdsidh Beag – Wee Archie – piped up:

  “MacPherson? Is that no’ Auld Aonghas, Catriona’s pa?”

  The children directed Middleton to the croft-house on the western edge of the clachan.

  The mhaighstir wrinkled his nose in distaste as he rode the quarter mile or so down towards the cottage. It had been built, he noticed, according to local custom: a timber frame, with sod walls erected on foundations of loose boulders and a grass and heather thatched roof through which seeped the reek from the fire. It had no windows and only one door.

  Bloody savages, Middleton swore to himself. When will the Highland landowners accept improvements? Were Middleton to have his way, the land would be cleared of the starveling filth and given over to sheep. The land was too poor to support proper scientific cultivation. Mind, you, he reflected, the landowners – the clan chiefs – are little more than savages themselves.

  Floraidh was cutting kale for the soup in one of the nearby riggs. Catriona sat in the doorway at her small spinning wheel. Floraidh straightened, her cutty-knife in her hand, when she caught sight of the mhaighstir. She started back towards the cottage and intercepted him just as he reached the door.

  “Good day, Mistress MacPherson,” Middleton greeted her as he swung his spindleshank over the rump of his pony. Catriona noticed with a smile that he stood taller than he did when he had been sitting. “I am here to speak with your husband, Aonghas.”

  “Oh, aye?” Floraidh replied, bridling inwardly at his form of address. As was customary, she had not taken her husband’s name when they had been wed; she was still and proudly a MacDonald. “I am afraid Aonghas is out cutting peats.”

  Middleton drew an impatient breath through his teeth.

  “Well, perhaps you can send for him,” he suggested. “I have come a long way to see him, and it is on a matter of no small importance.”

  Floraidh looked up and down the great length of him, then cast a sidelong look at the small pony.

  “Aye, well… We would not want your poor wee cuddy to have so labored for nothing,” she remarked. “Catriona!” she called. “Go and fetch your pa.”

  Catriona stood and set her spinning wheel inside the door, before setting off at a jog towards the peat-bank that the clachan had dug on the moorland that lay between the river and the foot of the braes of Cnoc Uaine.

  “Would you care to come ben the house, Mister Middleton?” Floraidh asked. “I’m sure we could spare you a ladle of milk after your long ride.”

  Middleton gave a curt nod of acknowledgment.

  “It is Doctor Middleton,” he corrected, “and I don’t mind if I do come ben. I am a little dry from the stour of the road.”

  Floraidh led him inby, and the stench of smoke, stale sweat, and manure instantly assailed him. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he took in the earth floor and the walls roughly plastered with a skim of the same mud and sand cement that had been used to hold the sod bricks together. The house, he noticed, was divided into two areas. The first and lowest in elevation held the animal pens of the byre, above which an open straw-loft receded into who-knew-what vermin-infested darkness. Again, he knew that in this backward corner of the new forward-looking North Britain the livestock was still kept in the house during the worst part of the winter. The family at this time of year would often sleep in the loft above the byre, to benefit from the heat rising from the animals and to help keep the piercing cold from penetrating their bones. The rest of the house was the living area, serving as the family sitting room, kitchen, and bedroom. Smoke from the fire in the center of the floor escaped through a hole in the thatch and through the thatch itself, making the cottage appear from a distance as if it were on fire. At the far end of the room stood a general storage area and the very special box bed, reserved for child-bearing and the leave-taking of death, when both came, as they inevitably did. No walls were separating the different areas, just dividers woven from wicker.

  Floraidh dipped a ladle into the milk bowl and passed it to Doctor Middleton. He took it from her and raised it with caution to his lips. He sniffed at it through his long penlike nose.

  “Are you sure this is fresh, Mistress MacPherson?” Middleton wondered in alarm. “It smells a little bit… off.”

&nbs
p; “It came fresh from the goat this morning,” Floraidh assured him, making a suggestive milking gesture towards him with a curled hand, which Middleton found more than a wee bit unseemly. “And it is Mistress MacDonald,” she added with a nod and a wink.

  They spent the rest of the time waiting in polite silence; Middleton taking small, tentative sips from the ladle, and Floraidh fetching the high chair reserved for visitors and planting it beside the hearth.

  Aonghas arrived, at last, grimed with dirt and sweat from his labors.

  “Ah, MacPherson!” Middleton greeted him but omitted to offer Aonghas his hand. He indicated one of the low stools by the fire. “Please, take a seat.”

  Aonghas bridled at being offered a seat by another man in his own house.

  “I would prefer to stand,” he said, holding his head high. “If it is all the same to you.”

  Middleton turned to Catriona.

  “And here is little Catriona! How are you, my child?”

  “I am well enough, sir,” Catriona replied, bobbing a little curtsy.

  Middleton ran an appreciative eye over her trim, petite body, taking in the nut-brown plait that fell down her cheek from beneath her kerchief, her milk-white complexion, and lingering on the small ripe breasts that shifted and snuggled beneath the fabric of her sark. He ran his tongue over his thin top lip.

  “What age are you now, child?”

  “She shall be seventeen years in the spring,” Floraidh told him, before turning to Catriona. “Catriona, go and see to the hens, will you?”

  Catriona gladly nodded and bid good day to the mhaighstir. The man’s eyes made her skin crawl.

  “Such an obedient child,” Middleton observed as he watched Catriona’s bare legs disappear through the door. “And pious too. A regular kirk attender with her mother, Mister MacPherson… unlike yourself.”