Love, however unorthodox, in whatever shape it took…love was a beautiful thing, was it not? “When will the wedding be?” I asked, wondering how we would possibly celebrate such a thing with every meal rationed and every glass of liquor watered down.
“Now that part’s a wee bit o’ a mystery,” Arabella said, her eyes widening conspiratorially. “Davy says he must do something for the laird and prove himself, and when he’s done it, then we may marry. He was slippery about the whole thing, and he was gone from the bed before dawn, so I haven’t had a chance to ask anything else.”
I fought down my urge to scold her for so openly admitting that she shared a bed with a man who was not yet her husband, but I did the same thing, did I not? And unlike my sister, I wasn’t going to get a marriage from it. No, my sister, who had never wished for a respectable hearth and home was going to get one…of a sorts. Whereas I was going to be the laird’s harlot until he cast me off. And yet, it was only the last part that frightened me.
“I have something for you,” Arabella murmured, a glint in her eye.
“For me? But you’re the one who is betrothed this day!”
“Heather, did you forget your own birthday?”
“Oh, that,” I said, blushing a bit. “A nineteenth birthday isn’t important.”
“T’is important to me,” Arabella replied, and pushed up from the straw bed to rummage about in a trunk at the foot of it. She came back to me with a tiny glass vial. “The physicker doesn’t believe in the healing properties of rose oil—but I made some anyway and you might like it to scent at your pulse points.”
She’d made for me a perfume. A fitting gift for my circumstances, and a thoughtful one too. I pulled the stopper and inhaled the scent, then sputtered with delight. “Oh, but it’s a beautiful scent! Do you want to try some?”
“Get away with you,” Arabella said, pulling her wrist away with a laugh. “I’m no laird’s lady, swanning about, smelling sweetly, with flowers in my hair. I am more like to roam about smelling of pungent herbs with dried bark powder under my nails.”
She took pride in it, I thought. In being useful. In having a place at the castle where she was valued as an assistant to the physicker. I envied her that more than anything.
I did my work at night, in the laird’s bed. But by day, I was lost.
When the sun rose, everyone in the castle seemed to have useful work to do but me. The warriors repelled attacks, shot at any approaching boats, and kept watch over the enclosure against tests of our defenses. The castle staff went about their work. And even the villagers found ways of assisting by hauling water or seeing to it that ammunition was easily available to the men on the walls. And the guards kept watch over my laird and his larder.
I was worried for my little siblings, far from my reach now. For most of my life, I’d been the mistress of my father’s cottage, tending to farm chores and to the little ones. Keeping them fed and clothed, since our mother had died giving birth to the littlest one, and
there was no one but me to care for them. After the laird had taken me, I relied upon Arabella to care for the little ones. But who was caring for them now? My father hadn’t come into the castle for protection. He’d fled with the children into the mountains to stay with kin. With the enemy roving the countryside, my heart ached wondering who was cooking up the meals and seeing to it that their little bellies were full.
Perhaps that’s why I found my way to the castle kitchen, where the cook saw me lingering near the door. “Out!” the intimidating woman said, waving her spoon at me like a sword. She hadn’t liked me much since the time I boasted that I could make the best meat pie in the clan. She’d liked me even less when I proved it. Though I’d sensed a brief appreciation for me when she’d tested the flake of my crust, the siege—or discovering that I’d stolen her cast-off paddle—had made her hostile again.
“I only want to help,” I told her.
“Keep the laird happy,” she said. “That’s how you can help. That’s your job.”
Well, it was, wasn’t it? And it was work I had come to treasure. The easiest, most pleasurable work of my life. Work made even more pleasurable that evening when the laird sniffed at my neck, and said, “Roses?”
“Aye, do you like it?”
He pulled me closer against his broad chest, smiling all the while. “I like the scent of roses. Reminds me of warmer days. T’is not my favorite flower, though.”
“What is?” I asked, for I wanted to make a study of him.
“Heather,” he said at once. “I love the purple blossoms of heather, just like your eyes. Heather has always been my favorite, even before I met you. Now that you have come along, no other shall ever supplant it.”
My breath caught at the seriousness with which he spoke these words and I desperately hoped to believe he meant more by them than a discussion of flowers. “I—I don’t know if there is such a thing as heather perfume, or I’d wear it for you.”
“I like the perfumed scent of you now, but your own scent is no less perfect. Especially when you are aroused,” he said, stroking my nude hip to bring us closer together in the bed. Arousing me so easily with his touch, as he always did, even though we’d already been intimate. “But I have something else for you to wear…”
“Oh?”
“Aye,” he said, grinning. “Go to my wardrobe and open the little chest inside.”
I rose from the warmth of his bed, naked, as I crossed the room. And inside the little chest he indicated, I found such a remarkable thing that I gasped to see it. Pearls. A long strand of them, with that peculiar sheen that drew the eye and made the heart skip a beat. I could not begin to imagine the expense of them. “I’m afraid to touch them.”
“They were my mother’s,” the laird said. “Now they are yours.”
I whipped my head around to look at him, to be sure he was not jesting. For it would be a cruel jest, one that would wound me, truly.