Tender Feud

To her immense frustration and dismay, however, Katrine had little opportunity during the next few days to implement her notions of either escape or retaliation. As much as she despised admitting it, she realized that she would have to bide her time for the moment.

Escape seemed hopeless; her captors were watching her too closely. The day after her arrival at Cair House she twice tested the limits of her prison. At her first attempt, a stout footman barred her path the instant she set foot outside the house. The second time she made it all the way to the stables before Lachlan sounded the alarm. Katrine went scurrying back to the kitchens, for she had no intention of allowing her beefy nemesis to throw her over his shoulder again. It was humiliating enough to be chased back across the yard under the contemptuous, watching eyes of the MacLean men. She would simply have to wait until her captors relaxed their guard, she decided.

As for her plan to make Raith MacLean miserable, she was required to postpone that, too, for she never saw him. She had ample cause to remember her vow of revenge, though; not only had Raith abducted her, he’d added insult to injury by expecting her, a prisoner, to earn her keep.

Yet she’d already learned that stubbornness and pride availed her little; her earlier defiance of him had only earned her blisters and a skinned knee. What was more, Raith’s actions then had given her every reason now to believe he meant his threat to imprison her. And so Katrine gritted her teeth for the time being and performed the menial tasks she was assigned, suffering the indignity with grim determination.

In a way, though, the work was welcome. She had never fancied idleness, and the occupation kept her from thinking too much about her fate. And it was better than being locked in her room. She would have gone daft, sitting and worrying about what would happen to her.

The work was hard, but her reception was worse. The other household servants, some half dozen in all, barely tolerated her presence, treating her with a stony chill and even sullen hatred. They were obviously under orders not to speak to her, but she had no doubt their repudiation was primarily due to her being a half-English Campbell.

The scullery maid was the only person who seemed kindly disposed toward her. But that, Katrine decided, was only because she had assumed many of the scullery chores. The day following her arrival she was put to work in the kitchens, chopping vegetables and scrubbing pewter dishes.

As far as the servant hierarchy went, Katrine figured she ranked somewhere beneath the scullery maid, down among the milk cows and sheep. Indeed, it was clear some of the servants would just as soon have tossed her to the corbies, the Scots’ term for carrion crows. She might be a captive, but no one should be subjected to such disrespect, as she would have told Raith MacLean if he had ever come near her.

Her chief jailer, the housekeeper at Cair House, dealt with her a bit more kindly at least. Flora MacDonald, Katrine discovered shortly, was a dour, hardworking woman, wiry and gray-haired, with a long nose that looked out of place on her full-cheeked face. Her sharp blue eyes missed little of what went on in her domain.

If she remembered what the Campbells had done to the MacDonalds at Glencoe, she never let on. It was fortunate, however, that Katrine was never one to shun work and that the housekeeper was a fair taskmaster; for this was a typically frugal Scots household, where every able-bodied person was expected to pull his own weight. Flora accepted Katrine’s presence with a stern admonition that she wouldn’t be ill-treated if she did as she was bidden. How ironic, Katrine found herself reflecting with ill-humor, that her Aunt Gardner, that most fastidious of housekeepers, would have thought highly of Flora.

Flora, no relation to the Flora MacDonald who had helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape after the disastrous 1745 rebellion, had come to Cair House with her late mistress, who was also a MacDonald, Katrine was to learn.

“‘Tis nigh on seven years I’ve been here,” Flora confessed in a rare slow moment while Katrine cleaned turnips, “and six since I’ve had the running of the house. Above my station, it was, but the mistress would give me the position, whether I wanted it or no’.” A sad look crept into the older woman’s eyes. “Ellen MacDonald was the sweetest lass ye could e’er hope to meet, God rest her soul.”

“Would Ellen be the laird’s mother then?” Katrine asked, taking advantage of Flora’s nostalgic mood. She meant to discover everything she could about her captors in hopes of increasing her chances for escape.

“Nay, Ellen was the laird’s wife.”

Katrine’s eyes widened in surprise. She hadn’t pictured Raith MacLean as being human enough to have a wife. But at least she knew now who Ellen was. And she now understood why Raith had turned so fierce when Callum said she and Ellen were of a size. The Laird of Ardgour wouldn’t want to besmirch the memory of his late wife by allowing a Sassenach Campbell to wear her clothes.

It was sacrilegious, as well, for someone like her to wear the MacLean tartan. Several of the maids were garbed in skirts of bright MacLean red and green, the dark green tartan being the MacLean hunting plaid, but Flora had found her an old skirt of brown wool homespun that was too long. It was made to be worn over side hoops, so Katrine had to take care not to trip over the hem. Even so, she was grateful to have a garment to don besides her shortened nightshift. Flora’s generosity didn’t go so far as to include a corset or petticoat with the outfit, but she must have been concerned for modesty, for she provided Katrine with a white kerchief to tuck into her bodice, along with a cambric apron and stockings. There was no mobcap, for Scots lasses normally went bareheaded or covered their hair with a length of plaid.

As for the Laird of Ardgour, Katrine saw nothing of him for three days, and his absence only added to her frustration; it was obvious that Raith MacLean considered her quite beneath his notice. Nor did she lay eyes on his roguish cousin Callum, or anyone else who might have been willing to disobey the laird’s orders to give her the time of day.

The enforced silence wore on Katrine’s nerves even more than her imprisonment. She was accustomed to sharing her thoughts with her sisters and speaking her mind with her cousins, and the fact that there was no one on whom she could vent her frustration and anger set her temper to boiling.

Worse, she still had too

much time for contemplation. Her despairing thoughts kept returning to the same questions. How long would it be before she was released? How long before her uncle discovered she was being held in these isolated Highland mountains? Could she possibly expect a detachment of English soldiers to come riding to her rescue? If not, would her frugal uncle be willing to pay her ransom? How could she effect an escape on her own? She had only her wits to rely on, that much was obvious, for she would get no help from the MacLean servants.

Yet loneliness was her chief grievance. By the third day after her arrival, Katrine was so anxious for company that even Lachlan’s stout figure would have been a welcome sight. She hadn’t spoken to a soul except Flora, and even that discourse was infrequent, since after observing her work, Flora decided Katrine didn’t require as much supervision as some of the younger maids.

That, in fact, was why Katrine was left alone for a moment on her third morning at Cair House, in the large room that served as a laundry. She was stirring a huge caldron of simmering linens when she felt the strange, hair-prickling sensation of being watched.

When she glanced over her shoulder, though, she could see only the practical furnishings of the room: a wooden tub and scrub board, a long pine table that served for folding the dried clothes and a copper hip bath that was used for bathing.

Katrine returned to her kettle of wash, but the odd feeling wouldn’t go away. Some moments later she looked again, and this time caught the flash of something dark behind the hip bath.

Lifting her skirts to keep from tripping, and raising her stirring stick to defend herself if need be, she cautiously edged her way across the room and peered behind the bath. The sight of a small girl of about eight cowering on the floor astonished her.

She was a pretty child with rosy cheeks and long black hair—or she might have been pretty, Katrine amended, had she been cleaner. Her face was begrimed with a layer of dirt, her hair scraggly and unclean and her calf-length tartan skirt soiled. Her wide brown eyes stared at Katrine with frightened wariness.

At once Katrine lowered her stick and returned a relieved smile in greeting. “Don’t be so alarmed. I’d never strike you. Indeed, I was only preparing to protect myself in case you wanted to take a nibble out of me. I thought you might be a rat, you see.”

Her teasing brought no change whatsoever to the girl’s expression.

“I should have known better, of course,” Katrine added, her tone light. “Flora would never abide rats in the house. And you’re much too large for a rat. Too pretty as well.”

The child only stared at her with those huge haunted eyes, glancing once at the door, as if she would bolt.