Elizabeth Mayne - The Highlander's Maiden

“That will be sufficient to our needs, and I thank you again, sir.” Robert nodded his acceptance.

As the farmer’s cart rolled noisily off, Alexander Hamilton moved to their saddlebags and Robert huddled under the weight of the dry woolen blanket draped over his shoulders. Alex tucked up Robert’s weapons and handed his shivering friend a dry sark and kilt and dug in a pack of rolled garments for dry stockings.

In this part of Scotland, Alexander Hamilton was a man of few words. A Lowlander by name and association, he was better known in England as the wandering grandson of the wealthy and powerful Earl of Arundel, where he could lay honest claim to lands and estates of his own in Sussex. His heart, though, seemed permanently bonded to Scotland.

When Robert finally began stripping off his wet sark, Alex spoke for the first time since they’d been left alone by their packhorses. “I wouldn’t have objected to being transported inside yonder warm house and treated like a hero for a month or so.”

“Would you now?” In spite of his blue-tinged, goosebump-pebbled skin, Robert managed to hike a dark brow over that absurd statement. “And how long do ye think ye would last with the women of the house flutterin’ and cooin’ all ‘round ye, before that loquacious tongue of yours proved ye a Sassenach, a bloody Englishman, by birth and mother’s tongue, eh?”.

“Ah, well, a week, no more, if my luck holds.” Alex grinned, speaking the queen’s English. His bornand-raised-in-Sussex accent rang in his voice as clear as a bell. He had his English mother to thank for that. His Scottish father blessed him with other virtues: his easy smile, his height and his untainted Hamilton lineage.

“Humph!” Robert grunted. He dropped the blanket and stood stark naked in the icy air, rubbing himself down briskly with the rough wool before grabbing the dry sark Alex offered him and pulling that over his head and shoulders.

“You realize of course that we’ve found our elusive Lady Quickfoot?” Robert inquired mildly. He made fast work of pulling on socks and boots, bending to fasten the buckles.

Alex cast him a dazzling grin and ducked his head twice before looking around to make certain there was no one about to hear him speak out loud. “And here I was believing the lady a figment of fertile imagination. What a piece of luck that was. That wouldn’t happen again in a lifetime, eh, Robbie?”

Alex used the familiar nickname he’d known Robert Gordon by since childhood, before they had attended university. The moniker was used sparingly nowadays and in these hills. Only when they each knew they were safe and unattended, did either of ‘them use their Christian names.

“My thoughts exactly,” Robert added crisply.

Alex’s words reminded Robert that the king’s letter to Lady Quickfoot, Cassandra MacArthur, had gone unanswered since November. Robert knew better than to consider finding Cassandra MacArthur lucky. The renowned Lady Quickfoot preferred not to be found, or so he and the king had assumed since early in December.

Personally, Robert thought finding her in this particular circumstance and saving her life the way he had just done a piece of bad luck that boded little good for his mission in the Highlands. Now he knew for certain that Cassandra MacArthur was still a maiden. A minor detail of the sort King James rarely attended, but very problematic to the two surveyors who supposedly were in need of her guidance through the politically dangerous, Campbell-controlled shire of Lochaber.

Robert fitted his plaid across his shoulders last. His blood already ran warm again, for he was weatherhardened to the bone like every Highlander worthy of his salt. He shrugged his shoulders after he’d fitted his weapons back about his hips. “No matter, my friend. We’ll persevere. Gordons always do.”

* * *

By the time Cassie rose from the tub, her recovery, as far as she was concerned, was complete.

“I should think you’d be terrified.” Maggie insisted, handing her younger sister a mug of hot mulled wine.

“Och, I was when I saw Ian trapped under the ice,” Cassie admitted as she wrapped her cool fingers around the napkin-covered cup. “But as to the rest of it, I can’t really say that I remember very much.”

The whole terrible accident had assumed an unreal, dreamlike quality in Cassie’s mind. Only two things were really clear: Ian’s desperate struggle under the ice and the sight of the stranger swimming like a fish to her from deep in the pond’s icy depths.

She had a very vague image of the stranger kissing her, but surely that wasn’t real. It couldn’t be, because the image that came right after that one was disgustingly flavored with the fear that she might have vomited in his lap. That particularly revolting thought went against every ladylike behavior she had acquired from her beautiful mother, Lady Claire, wife of John James Thomas MacArthur.

So Cassie put that thought aside and refused to dwell upon it just as resolutely as she refused her sister’s urgings to sleep.

Maggie didn’t allow a pair of idle hands any more than their mother, Lady MacArthur, did. For that matter, when she stayed at Glencoen, Cassie rarely saw her abigail, Dorcas, or her gillie, Old Angus, during the day long enough to say hello. There was too much work to be done, work that everyone pitched in to help finish. The farm’s three most frequent visitors loved every minute of the bustle, work and commotion.

Old Angus couldn’t be found indoors unless someone opened a cask of whiskey and wanted his fiddleplaying after sunset. Dorcas couldn’t stay out of Glencoen’s kitchen. She reveled in being allowed to bake all her favorite dishes from Maggie’s overflowing larder. At Castle MacArthur, Cassie’s parents’ home, Cook wouldn’t allow anyone from upstairs in his kitchens unless to pick up a tray or give instructions.

Cassie dressed quickly and went to the kitchen. There, Ian sat, devouring a bowl of brose and a biscuit. Millie had just finished her lessons at the table. Maggie handed wee Willie to Millie and told her to take the sleeping baby up to the nursery. Ian dogged his sister’s steps out of the kitchen as Millie complained that she had enough to do with numbers and entertaining the baby without Ian coming along, too. Life was going on as usual without a single look back.

Cassie took that as her own cue for the balance of the day.

With a flash of her petticoats rustling about her quick feet, Maggie went out the door with Cassie following her. They were much alike, both sisters, but their faces and hair were very different. Maggie’s lampblack curls were as dark as their mother’s had once been. Cassie’s hair was the cursed color of her father’s, and she wished it weren’t.

Just as she had her father’s red hair, she had his blasted freckles. No man she had ever met took seriously a woman with pale lashes, colorless eyebrows, flaming hair and a face full of freckles.

Maggie, with her fine dark brows and flawless clear skin, was taken seriously by all men. None had dared to call Maggie by some silly childhood nickname the way Cassie had been called Lady Quickfoot since she’d won a boys’ footrace in the Highland Games at the age of nine. On top of that, Cassie’s slender body might be similar in shape and size to her mother’s, but her face was the mirror image of her father’s. She had his long straight nose with the little bump just at the beginning of the cartilage. Her lips were wide and thick and permanently curved into her father’s trickster’s smile, which always fooled people into thinking. she was amused by what they did or said.

Worse, she had John MacArthur’s chin, broad and blunt; not the sweet pointed chin that made her mother’s face so very pretty.