The Corn Maiden, page 18
Her mind twisted this way and that, still struggling to find a solution. Surely her proud cousin would never give his consent to her marrying his steward? The possibility only entered her mind to be ruefully dismissed. She might lower herself to such a liaison, but Roderick Lindsay would never countenance it. And Moidart had not mentioned marriage to her anyway. Indeed, he had not said a word about any future they might have together. He had not even said he loved her. He had talked freely of making love but had never uttered the words she yearned to hear.
Perhaps awareness of the gulf between the Lady Elinor Somersham and the steward on a remote and impoverished Scottish estate had held him back but, dully, the thought crept into her head that perhaps she had, after all, been deluded, deceived. Perhaps she was no more to him than a passing fancy, and he might even arrange her post chaise back to London with some relief tomorrow. An innocent remark of Lucy’s that first morning flashed with clarity into her mind. Sharing the gossip of the servants’ hall, she had said, “No one ever says no to Moidart!” Could it be that the steward of the house assumed that he had the right to bed any visiting maidservant? And he had, as he had freely confessed, taken a fancy to her on the road when he had thought her to be a servant.
There had been nothing in her subsequent behaviour, she remembered, to check his advances. She had roused him from his room in the night, and though her terror had been real enough, perhaps he had put quite a different interpretation on events, particularly, as she thought with a blush, when she had made it clear that she wanted him to stay with her. And in the bothy? One imperious gesture from her, one chilling word, and she would have returned to the castle unscathed. Indeed, she blushed to recall that he had himself attempted to abandon the seduction. And since their return? Her door had a lock, did it not? That lock had not been used to bar him from her room at any time on the following nights. She had behaved like a light-skirt, she concluded—small wonder if he treated her as such.
He entered her room silently, without knocking, and, throwing off his dressing gown, slid into bed beside her.
“What’s this, my lass? Tears?” he said in surprise, kissing her cheeks.
The familiar warmth and tenderness of the man triggered a storm of sobs that would not stop, and he held her close, murmuring softly until she began to grow quiet.
“Now then…that’s better. Now tell me why you’re taking on so?”
“I was thinking that very soon I must leave for England and leave you behind, Moidart, and…and…it will be hard for me to go away and never see you again…” was the best she could manage to whisper.
He raised himself on one elbow and looked intently down at her. “Would you want to be seeing me again, Elinor?”
She had never been able to dissimulate her feelings for him and, even now when she was coming to suspect his motives, she could not have said other than, “Every day, Moidart, until I die.”
“Are you saying, perhaps, that you love me, your ladyship?” he persisted. “And I’m asking you now, before I have made love to you, and not in the outfall when you might say things you wouldn’t mean a minute later.” His face was alive with an emotion she was not sharing with him. Was it elation, pleasure—triumph, even?
She closed her damp lashes, sighed raggedly, and murmured indistinctly against his neck, “I fear that I do. Yes, I love you Rorie Moidart.”
As though he were taking the next step in a set dance, he asked, “And the House of Lindsay? Have you been happy here?”
She looked up quickly at the unexpected question and replied carefully, “I have never been happier in my life. I shall never forget this place where I feel I have lived fully for the first time.”
For a long moment, he stared at her, his dark eyes devouring her features and his forefinger slowly tracing the line of her jaw. “Then all will be well with us, Nell Lindsay. Never fear!” And gentle fingers began to loosen the ribbons of her nightgown.
12
The combination of a fine autumn morning and nerves stretched as taut as a fiddle string urged Nell to put on her cleaned and pressed russet walking dress, her bonnet, and boots and leave the hurly-burly of the castle for a brisk walk down by the burn. She was glad also to be able to avoid Moidart, whom she was finding an increasingly puzzling and disturbing presence. He was anxious to know her movements at each moment of the day, and she had the distinct feeling that she was being watched over closely, if not by him directly, then by Coll. She needed time by herself to rehearse her speech to her cousin and to get her thoughts into order. Eluding Lucy and Mrs. Fraser, she set out to walk by the burn and then crossed over to dip into the fringes of the woodland. So enchanting were the light, the stillness, and the woodland noises that she walked farther than she had intended. She realised with a glance up at the sun that she had been gone longer than was wise and that she had long ago strayed out of earshot of a carriage or horse arriving at the castle, heralding her cousin’s arrival.
She struck back in the straightest possible line towards the castle and, within a mile of it, where her path crossed the main carriage road, she saw a figure advancing up the road. By his bag and his limping walk, she recognised the old postman from Vennacher. He was waving to attract her attention, and she paused and waited for him.
When he drew level with her, he addressed her in the open way of the Highlands. “Good day to ye your ladyship. Are ye now on your way back to the great house? Ye are? Then it’s my lucky day! Would ye consent to take this letter the last bit for me and save my old man’s legs?”
Nell smiled and murmured her agreement. He held out the letter and pointed to the seal, involving her in his innocent inquisitiveness, “See here, it’s from the Laird’s man of law in Glasgow.”
Nell turned and started on her way again, looking closely at the letter as she did so. From his lawyer? The contents might very well relate to her own future. It was addressed to Roderick Lindsay, Moidart Castle, by Vennacher. Her eyes slid back along the line of elegant, clerkly script and saw again the words “Moidart Castle.” She hurried back on her tracks and seized the old man by his shoulder.
“Postie! This is to go to Moidart Castle?” she said. “Where would that be?”
His jaw gaped and he looked at her as though she were mad. “Why, Missie, it’s where you’ve just come from,” he said, backing away. “That’d be the House of Lindsay—yon great pile of granite,” he added, cocking a splayed thumb at the house. He hobbled off hastily back down the track, casting a puzzled glance back over his shoulder to check that she was walking towards the castle.
Mind awhirl with confusion and suspicion, Nell ran back to the castle and found Lucy stationed by the front door and looking anxiously out for her. “Thank God you’ve come back, Miss Nell! Was there ever such a stirabout! Moidart’s been shouting for you all morning! He flew into a terrible rage when he couldn’t find you…thought you’d run away…then he accused me and Coll of not keeping an eye on you! ‘This is not a prison, sir!’ I says. ‘And Coll and I are not her ladyship’s keepers! Miss Nell is accustomed to going about wherever she chooses!’ I hope I didn’t go too far Miss Nell?”
“No, Lucy. Quite the right thing to say. It’s a silly fuss about nothing, and you are to pay no heed to these strange Scottish ways. But where is Moidart now?”
“He went off to the stables with Coll, Miss. I heard them saying they were going to get out the carriage and go to Vennacher. Word came that the pastor’s horse had gone lame and he and Mrs. Pastor are having to be fetched for the dance. They set off an hour ago. But Miss Nell!” Lucy’s eyes sparkled with excitement. “He’s here! Your cousin’s arrived! Tibbie brought word not ten minutes ago that you are to attend him in the business room the minute you get back. I’ve been posted here to make certain you got the message.”
“Thank you, Lucy, I will go straight there,” said Nell with a firmness she did not feel and, pausing only to lay down her bonnet, she hurried in a welter of foreboding and anger along to the business room.
Catching her breath in an attempt to still her pounding heart, she stood for a moment outside the door and then firmly opened the door and stepped in, closing it behind her. Her eyes took in the friendly brown glow of the room; the ranks of leather-bound books; the orderly piles of documents stacked on the table; a copy of Tom Paine’s book The Rights of Man, recently abandoned on a footstool with a sprig of heather marking the place; and moved to the great, upholstered, high-backed chair by the fireside.
Roderick Lindsay lounged with his back to the door, one arm foppishly extended in its silk embroidered sleeve and lying along the arm of the chair. On his hand, projecting from a frilled white cuff, gleamed the heavy emerald ring she remembered having seen on her great-grandfather’s hand in his portrait. Tibbie’s words came back to her: “…whiles the Laird will wear it to this day…” This was surely the ring taken from the dead hand of John Lindsay younger on the field of Culloden! With a gulp, she realised that Cousin Lindsay was wearing it in deference to what he saw as an important occasion—a realisation that did nothing to quell her inward quaking. Surely he had heard her enter, yet the figure remained motionless, his long leg, elegant in grey silk knee breeches, white stocking, and buckled shoe stretched out carelessly in front of him.
She approached the chair and said in a voice low with control, “Cousin Roderick?”
Her guardian leapt to his feet, spun round, seized both her hands in his, and leaned forward to kiss her affectionately on both cheeks.
Nell was for the moment turned to stone. When she could find her voice again, she pulled her hands away from his clasp and said, “Moidart! I suspected some mischief or other! What have you done with my cousin? Where is Lindsay? Have you killed him, man?”
Moidart, almost unrecognisable in fashionable morning dress—handsome and confident, his eyes alight with mischief—said, “In a manner of speaking I suppose you could say that I had killed him off, but only temporarily, and now, you see, he is resurrected, and believe me, Elinor, he is enchanted to make the acquaintance of his charming ward.”
In a state of shocked disbelief, all Nell could think of to say was, “But…what are you telling me? I don’t believe this! You are Moidart, Rorie Moidart—no one calls you Lindsay!”
She sank weakly onto a chair and he knelt in front of her, regaining possession of her hands and saying easily, “Well, that at least is true. And it made it very easy to deceive you. In this country, men of substance are called by the house or the place they live in—why, even their wives call them so. Old Alan McBride, who lives in the great house at Vennacher, is simply Vennacher to everyone, including his Lizzie and his daughters. And the short form of Roderick is Rorie, the name everyone knows me by. It was only necessary to make certain that Jennie and Tibbie and Coll knew what I was about…though I had some trouble with Jennie! She did not approve of my deception and was several times on the point of telling you who I was.”
“But…I do not understand why…why you are not old? I was expecting to see a man of my father’s age…”
“Your grandmother Alice,” he explained, “from whom you are to inherit all this, was the eldest child of your great-grandfather, the child of his first wife, as I told you. When his wife died, he married again, and at the age of forty-five he produced my father.”
“So there was a gap of twenty years between the sister and the brother—a generation almost,” Nell said.
“Yes, and as a result, there are but eight years between us, cousin. I call you cousin,” he added with a smile, “though we are but half cousins once removed, because I like the word and I like the idea of our kinship. It is said that Alice continued to be the old man’s favourite and that he had never time for my father, who was a weak and studious boy, one more ready to lift a book than a claymore. And when my father married an Ogilvie, he found himself cut off from his father’s estates. They were willed to Alice, good Alice, who had married well and produced a son. I would think Grandfather hoped that this son of an English lord would come home to Scotland and run Moidart, but that never came to pass, and my father was kindly allowed to linger on here, living on borrowed time and using borrowed money, struggling to keep the clan alive!” For a moment, his voice had resumed the bitter tone of earlier days, and she heard again the scathing and dangerous tone that had first made her quail on their ride through the forest on her arrival in the lands of Lindsay.
“So, you see, Elinor, I did not lie or deceive you in that I, and my father before me, have been your stewards, holding these lands but never having them, fostering them for the absentee lord who barely knew of their existence, apart, of course, from the revenue he reaped from them—revenue that should, by rights, have gone back into the land that produced it and not into putting jewels around the throats of hen-headed Englishwomen!”
She was dumb. With a glacial calm, she realised that there was nothing she could do, nothing she could say, to turn the tide of mocking dislike in his tone. He had begun by hating her and all that she, however unwillingly, represented and—could it be?—in spite of all that had passed between them, he was still unknown to her, foreign, inimical. In a moment, her hopes, her future had been undone.
“It cannot have been easy for you growing up on land that had been passed away from you,” she whispered with sudden insight.
“No indeed! It would have been struggle enough without the constant reminders from my father that I must not count on anything becoming mine. The work I did, I was doing for an Englishman I had never seen and who cared nothing for us! I was worse off than my own tacksmen! In the end, I grew so sick of waiting for the blow to fall that I embraced a different family tradition and, as you might say, exchanged the plough for the broadsword. Three weary years of march and counter-march through the bare hills of Spain! I loathed soldiering! And my heart—whatever the future might hold—was here in Lindsay lands. I found my heart yearning to be back in my own place.
“The times were troubled, my father was failing, and I was needed here. I sold out and came home. I brought nothing back with me from the wars. Nothing, that is, but a determination to fight if I could to regain my own for the honour of Lindsay and for the people of these glens.”
She could not reach him. She could understand him, sympathise, and agree with him, but she felt that all warm contact between them had been broken. “I cannot see why you should so deceive me, Moidart,” she said, looking for meaning in his eyes. “Why did you let me go on thinking you were the steward here? Why could you not tell me you were my cousin?”
“Your cousin and your guardian,” he said with emphasis. “With the power to make your happiness or break it, at least for five years. How would you have viewed me? As someone hostile who would give an outright no to your schemes? As an unthinking, blind idiot who would give you permission to form an alliance with a worthless booby? Either way, you would have gone posting straight back to London on the next coach and that would have been the last I would have seen of you. Is this not true?” He took her by the arms and made her look up at him.
Dumbly she nodded her head.
“Oh, Elinor!” he said in a voice full of emotion, folding her rigid body closely in his arms, “I could not have risked that! Did you not realise what I was feeling for you from the moment I saw you? I came with Coll through the trees to see if we could help when we heard the shouting on the coach road and stood there transfixed. There before me was a lass bonnier than any I’d ever seen with a cloud of hair the colour of a wheatfield at noon, the face of an angel, and the cussedness of a sergeant-major. I had no idea who you were—I didn’t care. I had left home early that day for the hunt and had not received your warning letter—and, indeed, I took you at first for a maid, but whoever you were, I knew you were going to be mine!
“When you told me you were Lady Elinor Somersham, whose very name I had come to loathe and curse, I could not accept it. I refused to acknowledge the relationship of guardian and ward, which would have put us at loggerheads at once and cut short our acquaintance.”
“But, cousin, you offered me marriage…” she interrupted in astonishment, remembering the episode that had triggered her flight to Scotland, “You wrote to me—a curt, offensive letter! What did you intend by that? Was that more of your pretence? Were you ever in earnest, or have I wasted my time in coming here?” Anger was beginning to make her eyes sparkle and narrow in a way that had intimidated many a bold fellow, but he looked straight back at her with a guilty grin.
“I regret to tell you, Elinor, that I was not in earnest when I made you my offer. I was so incensed by the notion that you expected me, with so little formality, to sign over everything I possessed to a nincompoop like Collingwood, whom I had the misfortune to encounter in the Peninsula, that I thought I would teach you a lesson. I had my lawyer dash off a very choleric piece of nonsense, and it was only later it occurred to me that the notion of an arranged marriage was not without its possibilities. Even so, I was much amazed by your swiftness in pursuing my cynical suggestion! And, all the more reason, when I met you, for not confessing who I was—I guessed that the writer of that pompous letter would not find much favour with you! I thought I would have a better chance of getting to know you as Moidart.”
“You were better placed also to demonstrate to me the injustice of my claim on the estates,” she said quietly.
“Aye, that too,” he agreed.
“And could you not have done that without…without?”
“Seducing you, I think you mean?” he smiled. “I’ll never be certain who did the seducing, your ladyship!”
She blushed with shame and anger at the memory. “I feel as though I have loved a man who does not exist! I loved Moidart! I do not love, I do not know, I do not want to know Roderick Lindsay! He is the same scheming, selfish, unprincipled scoundrel as those who line the walls of the ballroom at Carlton House! His motives are the same, but oh, his cunning is deeper!”
