A Maid for the Grieving Highlander Read online

  Aonghas lowered his brows and glowered at Middleton.

  “I am obliged to work all the hours God sends me to keep the body and soul of my pious child all of a piece.”

  “And yet,” Middleton returned, casting his eyes heavenward, “God Himself commands us to rest upon the Seventh Day and keep his Sabbath holy?”

  “Aye,” Aonghas conceded with a nod. “But God sent us his only Son; he did not have two daughters to keep.”

  The mhaighstir winced at the irreverence.

  “As a matter of fact,” Middleton continued, “it is your other daughter, Sorcha, that I have come to speak to you about.”

  “Oh, aye?” Aonghas said, knowing what was coming next.

  “Yes, I have been traveling around my parish, visiting all the clachans, to warn my flock of the perils of backsliding that may assail them at this season of the year, into the pagan customs associated with Lammas night – the Lunastal, as I believe it is sometimes still called in these parts.”

  Aonghas nodded.

  Middleton grimaced as if what he was about to say was something he found difficult or distasteful.

  “I believe your daughter has entered some arrangement with the Murray boy, some ‘trial marriage’ by which they are permitted to lie with one another without the blessing of holy matrimony.”

  “They are handfasted, if that is what you mean.” Aonghus lifted his head high and jutted out his chin. “It is a perfectly respectable arrangement.”

  “Maybe to the heathen who does not know God, but in a Christian society, it is far from respectable. It is little more than a license for fornication. We are a special people, Mister MacPherson, a godly nation. We are called by the grace of God to live according to his laws. It is part of his covenant with us, the elect, his chosen people, the new Israel.”

  “Dare I say, Mister Middleton, that the custom of handfasting is much older to us God-fearing souls in Muideart than is the covenant the great Lords signed with the Almighty in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh a bare hundred years ago. A covenant, moreover, that has set father against son and brother against brother and won us nothing but burning crofts and mangled limbs and widows’ tears and orphans’ moans and all else that misery’s hand bestows.”

  Middleton’s eyes flashed, and he took a step towards Aonghas, towering over him and all but raising his fist.

  “Watch your words, MacPherson,” he seethed out. “Beware the righteous vengeance of the Lord. For the Lord takes vengeance on His foes and vents His wrath against His enemies. One day, MacPherson, your foot shall slip. For the day of your calamity is near, and the impending things are hastening upon you.”

  Aonghas lifted himself onto his tiptoes and placed his face close to Middleton’s.

  “Then away back to your Fair City of Perth and the gentle life that suckled you and leave us to our heathen ways. You are lucky to have your fine stone manse in Gleann Fhionnain and the clachans for the work of your glebe-land, which puts the food in your belly and the siller in the Kirk’s plate. You may not have them always.”

  Middleton cowered at the implied threat in Aonghas’ words.

  “Be careful, MacPherson,” he warned. “Your words speak sedition to the Kirk and State. Your first loyalty is to God and his Kirk…”

  “My first loyalty is to Clanranald, who feeds his children when they are starving and upholds their rights when they are wronged. So, watch yourself… mhaighstir.”

  Aonghas spat the last word, and a speckle of spit landed on Middleton’s cheek.

  Without another word, Middleton stormed out of the cottage, mounted his pony, and set it at a brisk trot back to his fine stone manse in Gleann Fhionnain.

  Chapter Five

  “I cannot believe that you spoke to the mhaighstir in that way!” Catriona exclaimed when she returned from feeding the hens.

  She had been startled by the sight of Middleton exploding from the cottage door, his face as puce as a plum, striding past her without a word, stepping one of his long legs over his short pony and setting off at a scamper up through the clachan and onto the drove road that ran along the length of Loch Seille to Gleann Fhionnain.

  “I mean, a man of the cloth,” she added, “the mhaighstir, a man of God!”

  Aonghas gathered the phlegm in his throat and spat it into the fire.

  “Man of God, indeed!” he grumbled out. “A lang streak of sanctimony, more like. He’s nae mair a man of God than was last year’s pig.”

  “Pa!”

  “Well…” Aonghas brushed a dislodged ember into the fire with his toe. “Ye ken I have nae time for sic trash as him.”

  Floraidh slapped the heel of her hand into his shoulder and gave him a hefty skelp on the ear.

  “Yon tongue of yers shall get ye set in the jugs aside the kirk door, Aonghas MacPherson. If it were not for the shame it would bring upon the family and the clachan, I would clamp the collar and chain on ye myself.”

  Aonghas laughed.

  “Aye, so ye would, my dearest heart. I believe ye would!”

  She gave him a rough shove towards the door.

  “Get yerself away back tae the peat-bank, ye daft auld heathen, afore the Hounds o’ Hell come and drag ye away tae Auld Nick… Or do ye plan on letting the fire go out as well?”

  Aonghas threw up his hands in mock horror.

  “I’d sooner be damned than let yer hearth grow cold, oh flame of my life,” he cried, sending Floraidh a lascivious wink. “If I had a stick, I would poke it!”

  He fled through the door, with Catriona’s pealing laughter chiming in his ears.

  * * *

  The following morning, Shielfoot received another visitor.

  This time, the caller rode in on a fine roan stallion, which foamed at the mouth and clashed at the bit and stamped great hoofprints into the turf as it danced and snorted before the croft-house.

  “MacPherson!” the rider commanded.

  Aonghas crept from the cottage, worrying his bonnet inside-out with his nervous fingers as he cowered before the impressive beast.

  “Sir?” he announced himself, in an obsequious voice.

  “I am from Muideart, his steward,” the horseman said. “I would speak wi’ ye, man.”

  “Then you had better come ben the house.” Aonghas turned and called through the door, “Catriona, lass. Prepare a dram for our guest, Muideart’s man.”

  The guest dismounted and handed the reins to three lads who had run down from the clachan to see the spectacle. Aonghas eyed them dubiously; he feared the stallion would drag them all the way home to its master’s castle at Tioram if it took a mind to.

  Inside the cottage, the visitor extended his hand to Aonghas.

  “Tamhas, steward of Muideart.”

  “Aonghas, master of Shielfoot,” Aonghas returned formally.

  Catriona handed Tamhas a quaich of uisge beatha and a small jug of water, while Floraidh placed the high chair beside the fire. Tamhas accepted the quaich but refused the chair, squatting down on one of the short stools instead.

  “If ye don’t mind, I winna sit up there amang the reek, but hunker doon here wi’ ye in the fresher air.”

  Aonghas inclined his head in assent.

  Tamhas slackened the spirit with a drop of water from the jug, to release the sweet aroma of the heather blossom and the dark flavor of the peat.

  “Sláinte!” Tamhas said, taking a sip from the quaich, rolling the golden liquid around his mouth with appreciation, and passing the vessel to Aonghas.

  “Sláinte!” Aonghas responded, took a sip, and set the quaich down on one of the hearthstones.

  “Now, to business,” Tamhas declared. “As ye know, Eoin of Muideart, son of the Clanranald, heir to Clanranald, recently lost his wife in childbirth.”

  “God rest her!” Aonghas whispered.

  “This has left him wi’ his first child, Donald, and the need of a lass to raise the infant. He has heard good reports of yer lass, Catriona.” Tamhas indicated to Catrio
na, who had retreated to her pallet against the back wall. “And is proposing to take her into his service as Donald’s nurse. She has a good way wi’ children, it is said.”

  “She does,” Aonghas replied.

  Tamhas rose to his feet.

  “Then it is settled,” he said. “The lass is to present herself tomorrow at Castle Tioram.”

  “Tomorrow?” Floraidh exclaimed, clutching the knot of her plaid where it lay over her heart.

  “Wheesht, woman!” Aonghas hissed out, cutting the air with his arm. It was not her place to speak; this was business to be transacted between the men.

  “So be it,” he said to Tamhas.

  They shook hands on the arrangement, and Tamhas turned towards the door before pausing.

  “She should arrive three hours after noon. That is when the tide will be at its ebb.”

  “I will see to it, Tamhas,” Aonghas assured him.

  And with that, Tamhas was gone.

  * * *

  Catriona could not believe that her fate had been decided in so few sudden minutes. One moment, she had been mucking her father’s byre, and the next, she was bound to the laird’s household. Her heart was racing, her mind reeling.

  Aonghas clapped his hands and rubbed them together.

  “Well, that was a stroke of good fortune,” he congratulated himself. “Who would have thought that you would end up in the Clanranald household – eh, Catriona? You will be gentry now, my lass. And, who knows, you might just catch the eye of one of the future Clanranald’s lieutenants with your endearing young charms.” He laughed. “Soon, you will not be wanting to know us, we will be so far beneath you! Your nose will be so high in the air it shall have snow on it!”

  Catriona smiled wanly. She was bemused by her father’s words; she simply could not comprehend them. It had all happened so suddenly that she had not yet fully taken in the implications of what had just transpired.

  Floraidh noticed her daughter’s bewilderment. Her heart both soared and ached for her.

  “Perhaps,” she suggested, “you should take a wee walk, Catriona, to straighten it all out in your mind.” She turned to Aonghas. “It has all happened too quickly for the lass to have taken it all in. It must seem like a tangled ball of string to her. Leave her be a while and give her time to sort through all the threads of it.” She turned back to Catriona, put her arm around her shoulders, and led her to the door. “Go now, lass.”

  Catriona took the path away from the clachan, down towards the banks of the Seille. The day had become overcast, and the river slid gray beneath the dark cliffs. She cast a look back at Cnoc Uaine. The cloud had descended and lay sluggishly on the hilltops. The contrast with the day of the Lunastal was stark.

  It suddenly struck her that there was no sky. The lowering gray of the clouds and the dull gray of the river were the same. She peered over the clachan to the east and the broad waters of Loch Seille that stretched all the way to Gleann Fhionnain at its far end. They too were the same leaden gray. The world that two days earlier had been so enchanted and alive with sunshine and song was now so drab and unpromising that it would break a body’s heart. Yet she was the same person, the same Catriona.

  What had happened? Sorcha was gone, taken and spoiled by the brutish Ruairi. Ruairi himself had gone, the big handsome and virile neighbor, whom all the laddies looked up to and whom all the lassies adored. He had been replaced by the slavering beast she had watched violate her sister so cruelly. Her parents had gone: her beloved father had become her barterer, selling her off to the least worst of her prospects; and her mother… The image of her mother crouching in the byre flashed before her eyes… Her mother was no longer the soft and creamy flesh against which she had snuggled as a bairn; her mother had become a withered crone, old and weary.

  She looked back at Shielfoot, its boulder and sod clinging close to the earth, the smoke from the hearth seeping through its thatch, the hens scraping their meager living from the midden… Her home already appeared strange and alien. She, Catriona, was no longer there. But where then was she?

  She could not envision herself in the household of Eoin of Muideart, a nursemaid to his son, among strange folk with their strange ways. What would she do all day while she was watching the child? Watching a child is not work, she reflected; it is something that accompanies work, something you do while you are working. That is how a child learns; how you teach a child the work that needs to be done. What could she teach the son of Muideart? How could she raise a Clanranald? All he could learn from her was how to milk a goat, spin flax and wool, and muck a byre.

  It suddenly struck her that she was no longer a daughter of Ath Tharracail, but nor could she see herself as ‘gentry’. She was nowhere. She had no place.

  Deep in thought, she had reached the edge of the Wood of the White Stag. A chilly breeze rose suddenly from the surface of the Seille, and a shiver ran along Catriona’s spine. She closed her eyes against the memory of Sorcha lying prone across the fallen oak, with her blood and Ruairi’s seed running down her buttocks and thighs.

  But, she forced herself to think, what were the alternatives to a life of service at Castle Tioram? A withered crone, pissing in a byre? Some old and toothless man, or some senseless brute of a day-laborer, pawing at her in the straw, forcing his stinking cock into her, slobbering over her breasts? A pious virgin, spinning her father’s flax and mourning her lot as a cursed daughter of Eve at the kirk on Sundays?

  She suddenly felt that she was trapped between two rocks, either of which could crush her as surely as Cnoc Uaine would were it to come crashing down upon her head. And she knew that she would go to Castle Tioram – as she must, it being her pa’s will and his word to Clanranald – if only because the future it offered was unknown and therefore held out to her at least a chance of happiness, it being the only path that did not completely rule it out. Was that, perhaps, what her pa meant when he had spoken of it as ‘good fortune’? Is that the best a dowerless lass like her could hope for?

  * * *

  The following morning, Catriona rose as normal, saw to the fire, and cooked the porridge. The chores were special to her, as she knew that she was performing them for the very last time in her parents’ house. She took extra care to sweep up every last mote and ember from around the hearth; she added a pinch of the costly salt to the pot as a fond extravagance, knowing that for her mother ‘taking porridge without salt is like kissing a man without whiskers.’

  Late in the morning, as she was mucking the byre, Floraidh appeared at her elbow.

  “You need not be doing that, lass.”

  “The work needs doing,” Catriona replied simply, pausing and leaning on the muck-rake.

  “But you have a long walk ahead of you this afternoon, to Eilean Tioram and your new life.”

  Catriona let out a loud sob that tore at her mother’s heart. She cast aside the rake and threw herself into Floraidh’s arms, burying her face against her thin bony shoulder.

  “O, Mither! I so do not want to go!”

  “Wheesht, wheesht, my lamb,” Floraidh hushed her. “I know, I know. But go you must.”

  “I know, I know!” Catriona acknowledged, quieting her weeping, though the tears still flowed. “But why can things not just be the same? Why can’t we go on living as we have always been – you and me and Sorcha and Pa?”

  Floraidh smiled ruefully.

  “Ah, my pet, that is just the way of things. We bring new life into the world, we grow old, we pass… That is our fate.”

  She pushed Catriona gently from her and held her at arms’ length.

  “Now, away and wash your face in the spring. We cannot be having you turning up at the laird’s castle with your face all smirched like that. What a sair affront that would be!”

  Catriona sniffed back her tears and laughed.

  “Aye, he would be wondering what sort of tinker he had taken in to look after his wee laddie.”

  Floraidh raised her hand and tenderly touched t
he plait of her daughter’s hair and her cheek.

  “Away, my pet. Fly away, my laverock; fly high into the sunshine and sing your heart!” A tear glistened in her eye as she drank into her memory a last long deep draught of her daughter. “Now, you must be running across to Sorcha and saying your goodbyes. She will be missing you too.”

  * * *

  Sorcha was grinding the barley into meal when Catriona stepped into the Murray’s croft-house. She set aside the quern at the sight of her little sister, rose from her stool, and wrapped her in a fond embrace.

  When they separated, tears were rolling down the cheeks of both.

  “Wheesht, Sorcha.” Catriona laughed. “It is your tears that are making me cry.”

  “And yours that are bringing mine!”

  Their tears became tears of laughter until, after a struggle, they eventually stopped, and the lassies stood flushed and breathless in each other’s arms.

  “I am sorry to be leaving you, Sorcha,” Catriona said, running the backs of her fingertips along Sorcha’s cheek. She looked up into her eyes with a frown full of solicitude. “Are you alright? I mean… with Ruairi and everything.”

  Sorcha shrugged and made a face.

  “Ruairi is away back up to the shieling. I’m still a wee bit sore and bleeding after… well, you know. But no doubt I’ll get used to it. They say it is always a wee bit sore the first time.”

  Catriona bit her tongue. She did not want to compound Sorcha’s hurt by revealing that she had witnessed it.

  “And what about you?” Sorcha asked. “Off to service in the house of Muideart, heir to Clanranald. Soon you will be wanting nothing more to do with your clarty old sister in the clachan.”

  “Och, away with you!” Catriona playfully pushed her sister’s shoulder. “I shall be back at the next quarter day to help with the slaughter.”

  “Ach, you won’t be wanting to soil your fine servant’s clothes with the pig’s blood.” Sorcha giggled. Then, growing suddenly more serious, she added, “If you have any sense, lass, you will fly from this life and not come back. At least as a servant, you shall have a good roof over your head and meat in your belly. And in the service of Clanranald you shall have the chance of meeting a fine young gallant who will take you for his wife and dress you in silks and ribbands and love you gently.”