Snow Swept Moors: A Highland Winter Collection, page 50
Robbie, the eldest of Catriona’s brothers, pivoted from pacing, hands clasped behind his back, to confront them. “I say we also return to Scotland, Da. We have lost everything here.”
“But there is no land for us in Scotland,” their father reminded them in a chiding tone.
Anne rose to pour more tea, as if by moving she could forestall other worries. “Nor work to be had.”
“Well, we have something here still,” Catriona’s mother said, pausing to take a sip of the watered-down tea. “We have opportunity.”
Over the rim of her cup, she peered meaningfully at her husband. Then to Catriona, “Ranald and I have been talking. About uniting our future with the United States’ future. Almost every week, ye hear of entire communities, organized by tacksmen, migrating westward, over the Blue Ridge to Kentucky territory. Ye must have learned a lot those months at Kinsfolk Landing about pioneer life that would serve us in guid stead.”
Catriona tightened her red plaid around her now gaunt frame, then gently swished the tea in her cup. She had shared little about her captivity with the Indians and nothing about its horror and Barrett’s role in it. Although he was known to have worked with the notorious Tory Rangers, her parents were wise enough to wait until she felt ready to volunteer details. “I knew enough to get by – with a lot of help from the settlers.”
“If the family,” her mother paused to bestow a collective nod on Catriona’s father and brothers, “should decide to migrate to Kentucky, would ye be willing to accompany us come spring, when the river runs full?”
She had not expected this. She realized she had been drifting through the darkness of depression these last wintry months. Food was ashes in her mouth. Sleep evaded her. “Barrett has planned on asking you, Da, for me hand.”
He studied her closely. “Why has he not?”
“I have put him off until I can file for an annulment.”
“And why have ye not yet filed?” he asked, more softly than was usual for his confrontational manner. “What for be ye waiting?”
What was she waiting for? The answer was obvious. Barrett fitted her way of life so perfectly. As Abigail fitted that of Jacob’s. But surely Félicité did not. Did she?
For all Catriona’s reasoning and logic, she could not control her feelings. Her feelings were chips of iron brought close to a magnet, swerving abruptly and invariably toward a man whom she sometimes feared, so well did he read those feelings and therefore so easily did he have the upper hand.
Yet there was something to that adage that opposites attracted – and complimented one another. Life was certainly not boring with one’s opposite. On the contrary, it was the adventure Jacob had once predicted.
Was she once again stalling for time, waiting for the Highlander Games to reconvene and hoping for Jacob to come to claim her as he had that first time . . . when she knew in her heart of hearts he would not. When would she learn?
What a fool she was, wanting his happiness beyond her own, even knowing that happiness meant another woman in place of her, in his life, in their bed, bearing his child.
“Well?” Andrew asked her. That was so like her brother, always prodding her to venture further up the tree’s spindly top, deeper into the creek’s swishing water, closer to the tail-bristling skunk.
“In all truth, I feel somewhat stifled here. Surrounded by people and houses and things. Hemmed in.”
She missed the solitude of the wilderness – and the independence it afforded. She glanced down at the horsehair wedding band she had yet to remove. It had chaffed the skin of the fingers on either side of it until the flesh there had callused.
“Aye,” she conceded softly, while covertly working the ring from her finger. “I’ll move with ye to Kentucky.”
Jacob would never find her in that wilderness. And she hoped thoughts of him would not either. Beyond the parlor window, the last rays in the whole world were fading.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
April’s Highland Games arrived, with a much lesser turn out of able bodied men. They were away fighting for either the Loyalists or the Patriots – or they had died in battle. And, of course, Jacob Dare made no appearance.
Her own appearance, according to her brother Jamie, left a lot be desired. “Tis knackered, ye look, Sis.”
And her father agreed. “Ye’ve lost too much weight, mo ulaidh, and your eyes look like gray coals.”
Aye, the fire had gone out of her. She was a nothingness.
The next week, under the dappling shade of spring’s leafy oaks and ashes, Barrett joined her and her family on the public square as they made their farewells to the aggregation of friends. “Despite being a rejected suitor, I am here, nevertheless, to send you off. I shall walk you down to the docks.”
She laid her hand in the crook of his elbow, and he patted her fingers. “As you have yet to file for an annulment, I do not suppose it is too much to hope that you may soon be widowed?”
“Knowing Jacob Dare, I would say nae.”
“Alas, I would have to agree. He will most likely be one of the few plucky souls on the frontier to live to old age.”
“But I do have in mind for ye, Barrett, a lovely, high-stepping French lady that I wouldna be surprised if she were shortly widowed – Félicité Newell of New Bern.”
“Can she hold my interest, as well as you? You know how easily polite society bores me.”
Frivolous Félicité? “She would lead you on a merry chase.” The two would strive to outdo one another with never a boring moment between them. She smiled at him. “But then, why dunna ye find out for yourself?”
Yet Félicité could already be ensconced in Jacob’s cabin. With that thought, Catriona’s heart felt like a mop being wrung dry.
Moored alongside skiffs and schooners was the Kincairn’s huge, square barge with its three sheds, one wagon, two canoes, a number of horses, and seven people, not counting the four polers.
With its flat bottom and shallow draft, it could negotiate the small rapids and falls, running fuller than last year, more easily than a periauger. The first day on the river, cold spring rains pelted the passengers, who took refuge in their deck sheds.
Within the shed that Phoebe and Catriona shared, she lay listlessly on her pallet and, wrapped in a woolen blanket, watched between the slits of boards beside her head the forested shoreline slipping by. When that evening the barge nosed in at a small side stream, the welcoming caucus of squirrels and woodpeckers and frogs surprised her. She had forgotten how the town sounds had drowned out nature. Even with the gently rocking barge, she could not sleep.
“Turnin’ and tossin’ ain’t gonna git ya what ya want,” Phoebe cracked from her pallet.
Catriona did not have to ask what the woman was talking about. “He dunna want – or need – me.”
“Yewr too prideful, Missy. A mon like Jacob Dare would be the kind to love his woman till the day is long, but also the kind that would ‘spect his woman to come to him.”
“What if there is someone else?” Unwanted came the memory of Félicité’s open ogling of him and Abigail’s shy giggling that last night to taunt her own deficiencies.
“Only one way to find out.”
No. She simply could not face him again, could not endure that easy assurance he had that bordered on arrogance. It was not his rejection she feared, as much as that impassivity as he watched her flounder with her words, words that should have been her superior defense against his superior strength.
Still, she knew she would be on deck the next day, even if the heavens poured, to watch as the craft breached the falls, then wallowed past the dock of Kinsfolk Landing, and past its higher bluff one mile beyond.
Dawn delivered one of those perfect spring days – mild temperatures and the cloudless sky a clear crystalline blue. By mid-afternoon, the scow rounded the point for which she had been watching. Men, none of whom she recognized, paused from their work to wave greetings.
A mile farther along rose the highest point of Kinsfolk Landing’s cliffs. Heart thumping, she put her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun. Craning her neck, she stared up, up to the bluff’s rocky rim. Nothing. Had she foolishly expected that Jacob, given his acute intuition, would be standing there with his ever-present long rifle cradled in the crook of one arm?
After all these months, she could still recall him quite clearly. Recall the long, lean, and muscle-roped body, gloriously naked in the morning . . . recall the strong line of his jaw and the quizzical, forest-dark eyes regarding her as she moved around their cabin. And all too readily recall that smile, slow to come but powerful enough when it did to change her world.
She plopped down on a coil of rope. It was all she could do to keep from crying or cursing. Confusion, pain, longing and guilt – they were her traveling companions. The rest of the day, she simply watched with unseeing eyes, only sensing the shoreline changing, the river narrowing, and the trees canopying the barge.
Instead, images of Jacob continued to besiege her. The way he moved, with an erotic grace, slow and easy and yet as quick to spring as Red Rover. That damned unblinking regard, as if could read her every thought, as if he understood her better than she understood herself.
When the barge once more put in for the night, she forced herself to join the others gathered around the deck’s cooking fire, built atop a square of sheet iron propped on bricks. Not that she felt like eating, but because she owed it to family to stop behaving like a disappointed, spoiled child.
She sought a seat next to her mother. Enya wrapped her comforting arm around Catriona’s waist. “Passing Kinsfolk Landing . . . I could tell . . . ye are hurting like the saints, are ye not?”
She swallowed and hugged her own arms around her waist, bending forward with the acute pain. “Aye, Mam” she mumbled into her lap. “But how do ye make your heart stop loving someone?”
“This Jacob Dare, he is a mon who loves fearlessly. Like your father does. Ye have confronted life fearlessly. Can ye do no less now?”
That night, curled on her pallet in the shed, Catriona knew she could hurt no more than she already did. Toward dawn, she stealthily rose so as not to disturb Phoebe, softly snoring. She collected her red plaid and the precious item wrapped within it. Slipping on both, she headed toward the murky light thrusting through the slit of the blanketed doorway.
“I’m going with ya,” came Phoebe’s crackly voice behind her.
She nearly shrieked with surprise. She turned to stare into the darkness and whispered. “I am only going to relieve myself.”
“No, yewr not. Besides, ya need me to help ya row the bloody canoe.”
“You would leave mam and da – after all these years?”
“Got my sights set on another husband. ‘Sides, I’m determined to see ya yet whelp a passel of brats.”
She squinted at the woman. “Another husband? That wouldna be Fergus Monroe, would it?”
“Stop yer blathering. We need to shove off.”
“I had wanted to break the news to Mam and – ”
“I ‘spect they already know.”
The air was nippy. A rosy light rimmed the tree tops. Birds were beginning to chatter and critters were stirring. The canoe slipped loose from its mooring, and Phoebe, floundering with the oars, muttered, “The canoe’s a creation of the Devil hisself.”
The fast current sent the canoe and its two paddlers fleetingly downstream, so fast, it made Kinsfolk Landing by midmorning. They caught a wagon on its return trip up the bluff, after having unloaded barrels of pitch dockside. But barrels of pitch no longer manufactured by Jacob’s distillery, Catriona thought guiltily.
She climbed down from the wagon and, rubbing her damp palms on her skirt, she marched with Phoebe inside the dimly lit trading post. At the sight of Jacob’s old friend, she felt a drumbeat of genuine panic. There was no mind changing now.
Fergus turned from where he was looping a spool of fishing line over a peg. At the sight of her, his hooded eyes flared, and a genuine grin parted his whiskers. Then, his gaze took in Phoebe, and his grin compressed abruptly into a sour scowl. “Well, I’ll be a cornholed polecat if’n my gut didn’t have a feelin’ this was gonna be another one of those bloody mornin’s.”
“’Tis gonna be yewr lucky mornin’ for once, Fergus Monroe,” Phoebe said, slapping her bony palm on the counter. “And ya be daft if ya don’t recognize it.”
From behind them, at the open doorway, a female’s voice called out, “Fergus, dost thou ‘ave – Mistress Catriona!”
Slowly, she pivoted to face Abigail – an Abigail visibly with child. Sunlight haloed her, the Madonna.
A maelstrom whirled around Catriona, so that she saw nothing, heard nothing but a roaring anguish. Instantly, tears backed up at her throat. Her mouth went dry as bone. Bile churned in her stomach. Her hand groped for the support of the counter’s knife-notched edge. God help her, she had wrought both her fondest desire – that higher part that is unselfishness – and her worst nightmare.
Eventually her vision cleared, and Abigail was beaming, her palm placed atop the mound of her stomach. “Guess I surprised thee. It was a surprise for me and Jethro, too. Just hoping the circuit rider makes it to Kinsfolk Landing in time to marry us before another new member is added to its population.”
The corners of Catriona’s mouth tilted in a broad smile. She crossed the puncheon to cup Abigail’s heart-shaped chin and plant a kiss on her forehead. Why, the young woman was perfect for Jethro, Catriona realized. How had she not seen that from the outset? Abigail would take him firmly in hand and guide him. “Ye will make a beautiful bride, Abigail. Ye are already a beautiful mother.”
As she hoped she would one day be. But she hoped for so much more. For someone to share the unbearable awe and majesty of a blue heron soaring and skyrockets flaring and, just maybe, later, a wee bairn’s gurgling.
There was only one way to find out.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jacob had been gone for five days. He got out his steel and flint and started a small fire with the tinder. Then he peeled off his wet hip-length leather wrappers and moccasins, both of which were cold and clammy. He set them on the stone hearth to dry. Naked, he strode to the cupboard to fill the brass kettle with water and added it atop the coals.
While waiting for the water to boil, he turned his attention to the priming of his rifle, recharging the piece and untying the leather cover from its lock to set it on the table. His gaze alighted on the pewter cup with its six-month-old dried wildflowers. Sturdy lavender and larkspur, most had lost their petals, but some still stubbornly remained. As she did in his thoughts. Cat.
His long fingers reached out in that habitual gesture to crush the flowers. Then, as he always did, he shrugged and returned to examining his long rifle. Crushing the dried flowers would not crush the sweet musky scent of her that he would swear was still present in the cabin. And it would never crush his voracious want of her.
His mind’s eye all too easily would catch him off guard and sneak in the sight of her corkscrew hair in pleasing disorder around her bare shoulders in the first light of dawn; her shapely forearms and calves, exposed when she pushed up her sleeves and hiked her skirts to do laundry; the flush of her cheeks when he simply stared, not hiding his desire for her, and the responsive flame in her gray eyes . . . and always her lilting brogue to vanquish the cabin’s crushing silence.
One striking image of her claimed his thoughts most often – her standing on the bluff that first day at Kinsfolk Landing, her hat dangling from its ribbons that she held. The breeze played with the curly tendrils of her fire-red hair and seductively hugged her water-ruined wedding gown tightly about her body’s curves.
Yet it was her expression as she stared off into the vista that haunted him. In her features, elation and excitement and reverence were all combined. He had known then he had not made a mistake in using all his resources – contriving and wrangling and maneuvering – to make her his wife.
Abruptly, he swung the rifle toward the door. After having been absent, he had scoured the perimeter of the cabin that morning, searching for prints – any disturbance of the sumac vines and other ground cover – to indicate unwarranted visitors. He had found nothing. Some moments elapsed before the shadow appeared, but the rifle was at his shoulder, his finger easing back the trigger.
Then she stepped inside. Cat. His wife. Her left hand, the one wearing his horsehair ring, was fisted upon her breast. The fingertips of her other rested on Red Rover’s head. As always, the unexpected sight of Cat stirred in him a throbbing thrill. But this, this feeling far exceeded anything he had ever felt.
His wife’s eyes flared at the sight of both his long rifle aimed at her and his blatant nudity. Quickly, her gaze dropped down to Red Rover and her fingers busied themselves, lightly stroking its reddish fur. The cat’s tail switched lazily, and its purr rumbled through the room’s significant silence.
He strained mightily to keep his words spaced, without inflection. “You are back to stay?”
Her shoulders shot up defensively and her lively face shuddered over. “I dinnae ken if it was me ye wanted or merely a wife, strong of arm and able to bear your children. Ye dunna speak much. So, I came to find out, once and for all.”
Half afraid she would bolt for the door, he eased a step nearer it, seemingly for the sole purpose of restoring his rifle to the hooks above. Blocking the doorway, he turned to her. So close to him she was that his very flesh prickled with the sheer intensity of his need for her. He could smell the heat of her, could hear her heart pounding.
Or was it his? He was afraid to say something that would scare her off. He doled out his words carefully. “What made you decide to return here? To find out for sure?”
“Your Christmas gift.” She looked him in the eye now with a cool steadiness. “But I was not sure that ye still felt as I. That we were meant to be together from the first. We have done so much to hurt one another, ye see.”
He felt a lump in his throat. “And you are sure now, Cat?”
