A Maid for the Grieving Highlander Read online

  Catriona fixed an imploring look on her sister’s eyes.

  “I’m fearful, Sorcha.”

  Sorcha shook her head and smiled at her.

  “You are a capable, hardworking lass, with a pretty face and a voice that would charm the birds from the trees. You have nothing to be afeared o’. Just keep your hand on your thingummy-jig…”

  They both snorted and fell again into one another arms, complicit in an old, long-standing private joke. ‘Thingummy-jig’ was a pet name they’d had since childhood for their vaginas.

  “… lest a boy comes and steals it away!” Catriona completed the chorus.

  They fell silent, the old childhood song recalling to both of them fond memories of the life they had shared, a life that had now come to a parting of the ways.

  “I shall think of you often,” Catriona promised.

  “Oh, dinna waste your thoughts. I have my fate. Attend to your own.” Sorcha clasped both her sister’s hands in hers and bore a solemn look into her eyes. “You have been given a rare opportunity, Catriona. You have a chance to make something of your life. Grasp it with both hands. Grasp it for the two of us, and for the sake of Pa and Mither, whose labor might finally come to mean something by having lifted at least one of us out of the muck and mire.”

  Catriona gazed at Sorcha with fondness.

  “I must go,” she murmured. “I have a long walk in front of me.”

  “Aye,” Sorcha agreed, giving her a final hug. “Safe journey!”

  Catriona turned and stepped towards the cottage door, the tears pricking again at the back of her eyes.

  “And mind!” Sorcha called after her. “Keep your hand tight on your thingummy-jig…”

  Chapter Six

  Castle Tioram sat squat on its rock in the slack gray waters of Loch Muideart, at the confluence of the River Seille. The sky was low and overcast, and a fine drizzle wetted Catriona’s face and bejeweled the shawl of her arisaid with shimmering pearls. Between her and the island lay the long, curved sliver of a sandbar, along which a roughly cobbled causeway stretched the quarter mile or so to the island foreshore.

  Catriona hesitated. She had reached a point of no return. It was low-tide; shortly the tide would turn, and the waters of the sea-loch would rush back to swallow the sandbar and the causeway, cutting off the small island and the castle that clung to it from the mainland. If she crossed to Castle Tioram now, there would be no going back.

  But she thought of her pa and the summons delivered by the laird’s steward, Tamhas. There could be no going back anyway. With a deep sigh of resignation and trepidation, Catriona stepped out onto the causeway.

  The stones were green and slippery with slime, but Catriona’s bare toes provided her with a surefooted grip. A chill breeze rose from the loch, shivering its still surface and causing Catriona to grip the knot of her plaid tighter over her breast. Black-headed terns skittered back and forth across the sandbar, harvesting the snails and insects from the tangled lines of seaweed that ran parallel to the causeway. Ahead of her, behind its five-sided round-angled curtain wall, the castle itself loomed gray and brooding against a colorless sky.

  A rough grassy path led from the shore, past the ruins of a small chapel, and up a shallow incline to the castle entrance. Tamhas was at the gate to meet her. He looked her up and down with a frown, clearly unimpressed by her appearance.

  “Here ye are then, lass,” he observed. He turned around into the maw of the barrel-vaulted gate. “Come along; we shall get ye settled in.”

  Catriona followed him through the gate and into the castle yard. It lay empty and desolate. Not a soul was to be seen anywhere, leaving the castle with a deserted feel to it. The drizzle had become a steady shower and puddles were beginning to form on the cobbled surface. It was not as Catriona had imagined it would be.

  She looked around herself in wonder. It was very different from the clachan. To her left, against the south wall, rose a three-storied tower house with an external stair turret and topped with crenelated ramparts. Adjacent to that, straight in front of her against the western wall, stood a smaller block that housed the garrison’s quarters. The remaining walls were crowded with a line of lean-to stables, workshops, and storerooms. A low-parapeted well squatted in the center of the courtyard.

  Tamhas led Catriona to the turret stair. Inside, they turned right into a low, narrow passageway that led to the kitchen, which was wedged between the tower and the garrison building.

  “The lassie is here,” he announced.

  A big broad woman, with arms like ham shanks and hurdies like the distant hills, stepped away from the kitchen fire, wiping her large red hands on her apron.

  “Come away ben,” she welcomed the newcomer. “I’m Peigi, Muideart’s cook. And this…” She indicated to a small, pert, catlike girl about Catriona’s own age, with coal-black hair and green eyes, who was cleaning and skinning a brace of rabbits on a broad deal table “… is Deirdre, his scullery maid. Ye must be Catriona MacPherson. Welcome to Castle Tioram.”

  She took Catriona’s hand and crushed it warmly between her own.

  Deirdre’s jaw gaped, and amusement danced in her eyes.

  “But my, will ye look at what the cat’s dragged in?” she declared.

  “Wheesht, noo!” Peigi hissed out.

  Deidre stepped forward, lifted the braid from Catriona’s breast, then let it fall.

  “But where did ye find this article. Tamhas?” She snorted, wrinkling her nose and running her eyes up and down Catriona’s appearance with a contemptuous look. “I mean, look at her! She’s dressed like a tink, and she’s just… filthy.” She waved a hand at Catriona’s mud-streaked bare legs and feet. “I can still smell the smoke of the clachan and the stink of the byre off her. Are we to keep her with the sow?”

  “That is enough!” Peigi snapped.

  Deirdre gave a scornful tsk, shook her head, and turned away to resume skinning her rabbits.

  “Ye’re a fine one to talk,” Peigi continued, “with ye up to yer elbows in rabbit guts and blood all over yer skirts and brow. It’s not so long ago that ye were mucking out yer own father’s byre at An Aird Mholach.”

  “But we will have to make her more presentable before I show her to the laird,” Tamhas observed. “The lass might have put it more daintily, but she does have a point…”

  Peigi cast her eye over Catriona and grimaced.

  “Aye, I dare say…”

  Catriona’s eyes were wide with fright, and her face had drained of all its color.

  “Och, dinna fret!” Peigi made light of the criticism. “It’s just, ye’re not in the clachan now, doing land-work. Ye’re in service to the laird, in the laird’s house. Yer dress is after the Irish, whereas servant-folk dress more in the guid Scots style. We’ll need to get ye out of that heathenlike woolen blanket and into a fine Christian bodice and skirt. But ye’ll need a bath first…”

  “A bath!” Catriona gasped.

  “Aye, a bath.” Deirdre sneered. “Ye won’t know what a bath is, of course. It’s where ye scrub the muck out of yer skin and hair with soap and water.”

  “Deirdre!” Peigi barked out.

  She turned to Tamhas, who still stood glowering at the door.

  “Tamhas, away and draw some water to warm on the fire. Deirdre.” She turned to the latter. “Wipe yer hands and fetch out the clothes tub and a cake of soap, while I get out some clothes from the kist. Catriona, ye go ben the washhouse and strip those duds from yer back. We’ll soon hae ye looking like a proper body.”

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Catriona stood shivering in her nakedness in the cold laundry room next to the kitchen, her arm pressed against her small breasts and a hand covering her thingummy-jig. Peigi and Deirdre dragged a broad wooden tub across the threshold and into the middle of the floor.

  “Ye’ll need to let yer hair down out of that heathen plait,” Peigi told her. “We wear it loose.” She appraised Catriona’s nut-brown tress. “It
will look bonny all brushed out down yer back.”

  Deirdre glowered at Catriona’s milk-white skin and long firm legs, her eyes darkening to a deeper shade of green.

  “Now,” Peigi said, straightening her back and planting her fists on the broad plateaus of her mountainous hips. “Just ye stand in the tub and give yerself a good scrub with the soap and flannel, then dip yer head and give yer hair a good wring to get the smell of the croft-reek out of it.” She laid a pile of clothes on a stool. “We’ll leave ye to get on in peace.”

  Peigi and Deirdre withdrew, taking Catriona’s old arisaid with them and closing the heavy door behind them. Catriona cautiously stepped into the warm water. It lapped soft and silky around her calves and knees. She untied the ribband from the plait that fell over her cheek and breasts and ran her fingers through her hair until it spread in a thick mane across her shoulder. She squatted down and began to cup the water over her breasts and shoulders.

  She had never bathed in warm water before. In fact, she had never bathed her whole body since she had been a wee lassie frolicking naked in the summer burn. Once her breasts had begun to bud and the hair had begun to sprout between her legs, she had forsaken her nakedness and made do with a wash from a bucket in the corner of the cottage, and only then when her pa had absented himself.

  Her womanly body was strange to her, and there, in the unaccustomed privacy of the washhouse, she looked upon it with curiosity, as if seeing it for the first time. She ran her fingertips down the length of her arm and up the across the crease of her elbow. She cupped her small, firm breast in her hand and playfully trapped the nipple between her fingers, smiling in surprise as it stiffened beneath her touch. She examined her long slim thighs and let her fingers stray to the cleft of her vagina, tracing the line of its soft lips and thrilling at the little shock that ran through her at the touch of it. She ran her palm over the slender contour of her hip and across the flatness of her stomach. Her body pleased her. It was, she thought, a thing of grace and beauty, like a sweet song.

  After she had bathed and wrung her hair as dry as she could, she dressed in the clothes that Peigi had left her. She found her own bodice, along with a snowy-white linen shift with a frilled collar, a black bodice with lace trim, a long ankle-length gray skirt – and shoes and stockings!

  Catriona had never worn shoes before. She had always gone about the clachan barefoot. She pulled the woolen stockings over her feet and ankles and along her calves and pushed her feet into the unfamiliar leather. They pinched her toes and heels, and she tottered when she stood. She found it unnerving that she could no longer feel the ground beneath her feet. Being shod like a horse would take some getting used to.

  There was a lot that would take getting used to in this new life, she reflected as she trod unsteadily back towards the kitchen.

  Chapter Seven

  Once she had been approved, glowingly by Peigi, more grudgingly by Deirdre, Tamhas led Catriona without remark up the stair turret to the hall on the second floor.

  Catriona let out an involuntary gasp as they emerged from the stair and into the hall. The room took up the entire second story of the tower and formed the largest enclosed space that Catriona had ever set eyes on. The room was dominated by six high glassed windows that looked over the courtyard and beyond to the broad sweep of the loch itself and the far craggy mountains to the north. The windows left the hall bright and airy, in contrast to the gloom of the stair turret Catriona and Tamhas had just entered from. Sky-blue wall hangings covered the dressed stone walls between the windows from ceiling to floor, adding to the lightness of the room. Set into the wall opposite the windows was a large open fireplace with a stone mantle carved with depictions of twined serpents and sea monsters. A musicians’ gallery extended the length of the gable adjacent to the turret door, while the opposing gable was decorated with clan trophies: dozens of sets of stag antlers from innumerable hunts, and the shields, swords, and daggers of vanquished enemies. In the center of the room, surrounded by stools, sat a long oak table on massive legs, at the far head of which stood an imposing high-backed chair. On that chair sat Eoin, Lord of Muideart and heir to Clanranald, pouring over some papers.

  “The MacPherson lass, my Lord,” Tamhas briefly announced, before withdrawing down the stairs.

  Eoin raised his head and gave Catriona a cursory glance. His eyes were drifting back down to his papers when he suddenly realized what he had seen, and his head snapped back up again.

  “Cairistiona, isn’t it?” he said, rising to his feet, his eyebrows raised and his mouth slightly open.

  “Catriona, sir,” she corrected him with a small curtsy.

  He nodded and sat down again, blinking rapidly as if he were fretting over something and clasping and unclasping his hands on the table in front of him.

  Catriona gazed at him, awestruck. She had never been this close to gentry before – if you excepted the mhaighstir, Dughlas Middleton. Did mhaighstirs count as gentry, she wondered, suddenly unsure. But, in contrast to the mhaighstir, she liked the look of this Muideart chiel.

  He was of medium height with well-made shoulders, a thin waist and hips, and a swarthy cast to his skin, as if he had some foreign – French? Spanish? she wondered – blood in him. His chestnut-brown hair was gathered back from his finely chiseled temples and brow by a black ribband tied at the nape of his neck. His eyes were an indeterminable cast of brown and green. He wore a white linen shirt, loose at the neck and cuffs, brown breeches buckled just below the knee, and gray silk stockings. Catriona noticed that he was wearing a belt with a loop for a sword, but no sword. He had clearly put aside his sword as the customary symbol of bereavement.

  “Well, welcome to Castle Tioram,” he said. “A gloomy place, I’m afraid, but I am hoping that you may be able to dispel some of that gloom.” He smiled wanly and sighed. “My steward, Tamhas, will have told you why I have brought you here?”

  “To look after your wee boy, Donald, sir,” she replied. “The poor wee mite has lost his mither…”

  “His mother… aye!”

  A heavy weight of hopelessness seemed to settle over Eoin. He let out a heavy sigh, and his shoulders sagged.

  “My wife, Isbeil MacDonald, died in childbirth, bringing into the world what would have been a wee brother for Donald. That was three weeks ago, and the lad has not spoken a word since. He has withdrawn into his grief and endures our company only when he must; otherwise, he spends his time alone in his chamber or wandering around the island. I am hoping that you are the one who will bring him out of his great despondency. I have heard good reports about you. You are loved by children, I am told.”

  Catriona was so deep in thought that she forgot herself.

  “And you too have withdrawn yourself in your sadness to this bare rock, with only your man, a cook, and a slattern maid to see to your needs. Is this any place to keep a grieving child? Would he not be better healed in the hubbub of a busy household?”

  Eoin leaped to his feet, his heavy chair scraping back on the timber floor.

  “Don’t be impertinent, you wee tinker bitch!” he roared out.

  Catriona gave a start. She had not realized that she had spoken out loud.

  He placed his hands on the table and leaned over them heavily as he struggled to compose himself.

  “You forget yourself, lassie,” he continued in a quieter voice, blinking and still quivering with emotion. “It is not your place to criticize me; your place is to obediently carry out my commands.”

  Catriona was mortified by her own tactlessness.

  “I-I’m sorry, sir,” she stammered, close to tears. “I-I should not have spoken out of turn.”

  He glanced up at her, shamefaced.

  “And I am sorry for calling you… well, what I called you. I know your father. He is a fine clansman, an honorable and hardworking man. I would have no man, let alone myself, cast such aspersions on his head or on those of his family. Forgive me, if only for your father’s sake.”
r />   Catriona was taken aback. He was speaking of her pa almost as an equal, as a fellow child of Clanranald, a kinsman. Bemused, she nodded acknowledgment of his apology.

  “You will assume sole charge of my son. You will tend to his care and his early learning.” He looked up sharply. “You know your letters and numbers, I take it?”

  She nodded rapidly.

  “Good. I will take you up to him just now, so you can make one another’s acquaintance.”

  He walked past her to the turret door and turned to ascend the stairs. She hurried after him in her unfamiliar shoes.

  Her feet were killing her.

  * * *

  They found Donald in his father’s withdrawing room in his private apartments on the third floor of the tower. The six-year-old was lying on his side, his head propped in his hand, tracing the pattern on a rug with his finger.

  “There you are, Donald,” his father said brightly. “Stand up and say hello to your new nurse, Cairistiona…”

  “Catriona,” Catriona corrected him again.

  “Yes, Catriona,” Eoin repeated.

  Donald struggled with reluctance to his feet and proffered a limp hand to Catriona.

  “I am very pleased to meet you.” Catriona took his hand in hers and squeezed it gently. “You must be Donald, then?”

  The boy made no reply and gazed past Catriona into the mid-distance.

  “I am new here,” Catriona continued, undeterred. “I am hoping we can be friends.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You are the only young boy about the place. I shall have no one else to play with.”