Page 9 of Highland Fire

“What I mind,” he said, taking the reins out of her hands, “is the danger to you on these nocturnal excursions. With the Randal in residence, the risks increase.” Observing her flashing eyes, he went on soothingly, “No one is disparaging all that you have done, Caitlin. If it were not for you, there would be no smuggling and no money for bread to fill the mouths of the hungry children in our glen. I am aware of all that. But you are only a woman. These things are best left to men.”

“For the longest time you thought in very truth that I was a lad.” Her voice had risen, and the hound at her side growled.

“Aye. So I did. And we both know what happened when I discovered my error.” His eyes were dancing.

Caitlin was glad of the dark to hide her blushes.

The incorrigible Daroch had tried to have his way with her!

In self-defense, she had blurted out that if he touched her he would be committing incest, or near enough to it.

It was a terrible thing to say, especially when it was untrue, but he had caught her off guard, and it was the first thing that popped into her head.

Daroch had laughed away her fears. “Lass, if you are telling me that you are one of my late father’s by-blows, you can save your breath. He was my stepfather. I thought everyone knew?”

She had known. It had simply slipped her mind. Daroch’s real father was one of the Gordons of Fyvie. When he bent to her again, she had caught him a resounding blow with her fist.

Rubbing his cheek, he had backed away. “A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed,” he’d said reproachfully.

From that moment on, they had become firm friends. Latterly, such as at the present moment, he was inclined to take a high hand.

“I shall decide if the risks to myself are too great,” she told him.

“We shall talk more of this later,” he said gently.

At any other time, she would have tried reasoning with him. She was too sore, too spent to waste her breath. “You may go to the devil,” she told him, very much on her dignity. “And now, I’ll say good night to you.”

“Temper, temper!” he reproved, laughing, and began to unbuckle her pony’s girth.

With her head held high and holding onto her hound’s collar, she hobbled around the side of the house and dragged herself through the front door.

It took only a moment or two to light the lantern which was set on a table in the center of the room.

Hanging onto the table for support, she breathed deeply.

“Damn Lord Randal,” she told her deer hound.

“Damn Daroch, and damn all men in general!” Bocain, the deer hound, sensing that something was expected of her, whined in sympathy.

“Why is it men always underestimate a woman’s faculties?”

The hound, who by this time had settled herself in her usual spot before the great stone fireplace, cocked her huge head and listened intently to each and every syllable which fell from her mistress’s lips.

It seemed to take forever before Caitlin managed to disrobe.

When she had washed the dark stain from her hands and face, and was down to bare skin, the transformation would have stunned the men who knew her as “Dirk Gordon.” Her skin was milky white and made a dramatic contrast to the dark curtain of hair which fell to her waist. She was small-boned and slim, but there was nothing masculine in her svelte curves.

Some women would have rigged themselves out to exploit that dark Celtic beauty.

Caitlin was too unaware. In the morning, when she presented herself to the world as Miss Caitlin Randal, no one, not even the men who knew her as Dirk Gordon, would give her a second stare.

The next part, she knew, was going to be excruciating.

Fortifying herself with a small medicinal dram of uisge-beatha , she liberally doused a cloth in the same potent medication, hesitated, then doused it some more before gingerly applying it to the most tender part of her anatomy.

At the first burning touch, she sucked in several breaths in quick succession then moaned, low and long. So did the hound.

“His name is Lord Randal, Bocain,” grated Caitlin, addressing the hound. “Remember that. He is the enemy. If I catch you flirting with him when my back is turned, it will be all up with you.”

After donning her nightdress, she opened the shutters, as was her habit, and looked out.

The view from her bedroom window was one of the best to be had in the whole of Deeside.

Off to her right, she could just make out the lights of Lord Randal’s place.

Of all the residences in Deeside, Strathcairn was the grandest, a veritable fortified manse.

But grander still, across the Dee, far off in the west, were the ancient peaks of Lochnagar.

It was a view that her mother had never tired of in her last days.

A fragment of a conversation came back to Caitlin.

“It reminds me of your father.”

“What does?”

“Lochnagar.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh…it’s where we used to slip away and meet.”

Caitlin had not pursued the subject. Her mother tired easily, and rarely finished a sentence in those days.

Now, as she looked out at Lochnagar, she shivered and turned away.

As if sensing her mistress’s mood, the hound padded silently from her place on the hearth, and entered the little bedroom.

When no counter-command was given, Bocain crossed to the bed, then sat on her haunches before Caitlin, offering the comfort of one great, woolly paw. Caitlin couldn’t help smiling.

“Sometimes I wonder if you really are a spirit. You always seem to sense my mood.”

Kneeling on the floor, she brushed her hands along the silky beige coat, from ears to haunches. Bocain practically purred. “You are almost as big as my pony. It wasn’t always so. When I first found you, you were no bigger than a squirrel.”

Caitlin cast her mind back to that day. She had gone out gathering brambles for her mother, and had made for the very quarry that had been the scene of her whipping by Lord Randal only an hour or two ago.

The juiciest brambles were always to be found along the rim of it.

From below, had come such a commotion that she would have believed murder was being done.

Clutching her basket to her, she had raced down the path and stopped dead at the quarry entrance before the sight that had met her eyes.

Tinkers and their dogs had tracked a badly injured deerhound to her lair and had finished her off.

A tiny pup, no bigger than a squirrel, was mewling and snarling from a perch three feet above the ground. The dogs were about to start on her.

She supposed that the tinkers had backed off because they had known she was Glenshiel’s granddaughter.

The deerhound had gone wild, they told her sullenly, and could never be tamed now.

It was the same for her last surviving pup.

Caitlin didn’t argue. Using her plaid to shield her hands from the pup’s sharp teeth, she had captured it and had taken it home in her basket.

It had taken months of patient nurturing to win the pup’s trust. Bocain , her mother had called it, because at night, the hound had set up such a caterwauling that it seemed as if all the spirits from the nether world had come to visit them.

“Where did you come from?” Caitlin asked softly, gazing into the soulful brown eyes that gazed steadily back at her. There would never be an answer to that question now.

Rising, she made to take her dog back into the other room.

She hesitated on the threshold, then glanced toward the lonely bed.

That glance was enough for Bocain. She leapt onto the foot of the bed and made herself as small as she could manage.

Sighing, laughing, Caitlin doused the candles and crawled in beside her.

When the lights in Caitlin’s cottage winked out, a shadow detached itself from the dense foliage of a stand of pines and materialized into the shape of a man. Within minutes, he was striding along the track which led to the road to Crathie.

An hour was to pass before he had made himself comfortable at his own desk. Dipping his pen into the inkpot, he began to write. After the usual salutations, he went on:

I have discovered enough about Glenshiel’s granddaughter and the laird o’ Daroch to have criminal charges laid against them.

They are a wild lot. As for that other matter, I would say that the old feuds have not abated.

Something is very far wrong here. If you have made up your mind to act, I suggest it be sooner rather than later.

In the meanwhile, I shall see what I can find out.

Your obedient servant…

Though the following day was the Sabbath, Caitlin was up at the crack of dawn.

To her great surprise, she had enjoyed a comfortable night’s rest. Her bottom still smarted, but only when she sat on it.

She only hoped that the prayers during church services would be as long as ever they were.

At the kirk at Crathie, the congregation always stood during prayers.

She dressed in her Sunday best. The frock she chose was plain, dark, and serviceable and made no pretension to fashion.

Her shoes, stout leather brogues, were ideally suited for walking, as was proper.

It was a three-mile hike to the church, yet only the infirm or the gentry escaped the minister’s censure if they arrived in their gigs and carriages.

For everyone else, the Sabbath must be observed to the letter.