A Maid For The Grieving Highlander - Fiona Faris

A MAID FOR THE
GRIEVING HIGHLANDER
FIONA FARRIS
Copyright© 2018 by Fiona Faris
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CHAPTER ONE
“
C atriona! Catriona! Sing us a song! Please, Catriona,
sing us a song!”
The children of the clachan swarmed around Catriona, the

youngest of them plucking at her skirts. Catriona smiled at
them fondly, touching their heads as if she were rearranging
some flowers. The children had been working hard all
morning and were tiring now; they deserved a wee
diversion.
Catriona sat down, cross-legged, with her back against one

of the stooks she had been gathering. The August sun beat
down on the outfield where the people of the clachan were
harvesting their barley crop. A welcome breeze blew up the
glen from Loch Muideart, bringing with it a faint tang of the
sea. Her father was working his way along a rigg, swaying to
the rhythm of his scythe as it swung its wide whispering arc
through the barley stalks. To either side of him, the menfolk
formed a line across the entire width of the long narrow
2 A MAID FOR THE GRIEVING HIGHLANDER
field that lay between the baulks, edging forward with every
sweep of their blades, leaving a carpet of short stubble in
their wake. Their feet and legs were bare, their plaids kilted
up around their pale sinewy thighs.
Catriona’s heart soared. These were her people, her kinfolk,

the eight families that made up the clachan of Ath Tharra-
cail – Torquil’s Ford. A little way further down the brae
towards the infields, on a patch of greensward, her mother
and the other women of the clachan were beating the mown
barley with flails to separate the grain from the straw and
tossing it into the winnowing breeze, pausing periodically to
let the children gather up the straw in armfuls to stand into
stooks to dry in the sun and the younger lassies to scrape up
the grain left on the grass. The women too worked in kilted
plaids, their torsos stripped to their sarks and bodices.
The children gathered around Catriona. Two naked

toddlers scrambled onto her lap and cooried into the crooks
of her arms, the older children arranging themselves in a
half-circle around her bare feet. She settled herself, then
began to sing in a low, conspiratorial voice, her brown bird-
like eyes dancing around the children’s eager faces, drawing
them into the conspiracy of her song.
She sang a nonsense-rhyme about a field mouse which loses

its tail to a reaper’s sickle and repays the reaper by creeping
into his house at night and nibbling a hole in the seat of his
Sunday breeches. The children squealed with delight at the
vision Catriona wove of the reaper appearing at the next
kirk service with his dowp protruding out like a hare’s tail
from the hole in his breeks.
Catriona lay back against the straw and let the sun bathe
her face and the breeze caress her naked legs. Before her, at
Chapter One 3
the foot of the brae, beyond the infields and the scattered
houses of the clachan, the River Seille wended its way
through the glen. Ath Tharracail lay on a bend where the
river emptied from Loch Seille and swung sharply to the
north. Cliffs rose on the far side, fringed by a flat shingle
beach. Behind her loomed Cnoc Uaine, on the higher slopes
of which the clachan’s animals – cattle, sheep, and goats –
had been turned out in the spring for the summer shieling.
Catriona was suddenly seized by a sharp yearning for the
land, for her people. She settled the two toddlers, one in
each arm, as a love song came unbidden to her lips.
Her voice rose clear and pure, spilling like spring water
across the gentle slope of the hillside. It had the timbre of a
bell and chimed cleanly in the warm breeze. She sang of a
lover lost in the mountain and the longing of his beloved
that goes out forever to the tumbling burns and corries, the
crags and the wild heather-clad fells, wherein his soul now
dwells. And she sang of the beloved’s plea to the golden
eagle that soars above the mountains, encompassing the
whole world with its godlike eye, beseeching it to find her
lover and lead him home to her, ere her heart breaks into a
thousand pieces.
By the end of her song, the outfield had fallen silent. The
men were resting on their scythes, the women on their
pitchforks and flails. Several of the women were weeping, as
they remembered their loves lost to warfare, illness, and
starvation. The children too had fallen silent, awed by the
beauty of Catriona’s lament. The two toddlers had fallen
asleep against her breast.
Then the spell was broken, and the work resumed, the men
swinging their scythes and the women threshing and
winnowing the grain. But their chatter was more subdued as

they each reflected privately on the hardships and uncer-
tainties of their lives.
Catriona stirred the children and, standing up, clapped

her hands.
“Come on, now!” she cried brightly. “It’s time for the Stookie
Lairds.”
The children cheered, and the adults smiled.
Catriona divided the children into two groups, roughly

equal in the distribution of age and sex, and set each group
to build and defend a stook of straw while trying to knock
down the other group’s stook.
The battle commenced.
While the children shrieked and fought, Catriona sought

out her older sister, Sorcha. Sorcha was with the threshing
party, gathering the grain into small sacks and binding the
neck of each one filled with a twist of straw. In contrast to
Catriona, who was small-built and pale in complexion,
Sorcha was tall and tanned by the sun. Her long legs and
broad hips moved with an animal grace beneath the skirts
of her arisaid as she stooped and rose with the work. A long
tress of hair fell over her brow from beneath her linen head-
scarf and gleamed in the sunlight with the gloss of a raven’s
wing. She straightened and pressed the heels of her hands
to the ache in the small of her back as Catriona approached.
“I was thinking,” Catriona said with a smile, “that it will not

be long now until Ruairi is back from the shieling. They will
be bringing the animals down for the winter in just a few
weeks’ time.”
Chapter One 5
Sorcha swallowed and grinned shyly.
“I shall see my Ruairi sooner than that.” She blushed. “He

is coming down for the Lunastal. I will be with him
tonight.”
Catriona beamed and grabbed both of Sorcha’s hands in

her own.
“Och, Sorcha! That is wonderful!”
“It is that. Our families have agreed to our handfasting. It is

to take place at the ceilidh tonight.”
“So, you are to be wed.” Catriona sighed, averting her eyes

from Sorcha’s. There was an edge of disappointment to her
happiness.
“A year to the day if the handfasting goes well.” Sorcha bit

her lip and dipped her head to look up with solicitude into
Catriona’s downcast eyes. “You are happy for me, Catriona,
are you not?”
Catriona beamed again, dispelling whatever sweet sadness

she had been feeling and meeting her sister’s look with a
fulsome smile that extended to her hazel eyes.
“Of course, I am,” she affirmed, squeezing Sorcha’s hands.

“It’s just… Well, you know…”
Sorcha understood. As the younger daughter, there would

be no dowry for Catriona, leaving her little prospect of
making a good marriage. Unlike Sorcha MacPherson, whose
marriage to the handsome and virile Ruairi Murray had
been an understanding between the two families ever since
they had been small children, Catriona’s fate would be to go
into service as either an indoor or an outdoor servant until
some wizened old widower took her to work for him and to
keep his bed warm.
“I am sorry, Catriona,” Sorcha said quietly.
“Och, what for?” Catriona replied with a smile. “It is just the
way of things. There is no blame; and even if there were,
none of it would be yours. I wish you nothing but happi-
ness, Sorcha. And you will be happy with Ruairi; I know
you will.”
Sorcha returned her sister’s smile and pulled her into a

warm embrace. Then they separated; Sorcha returning to
the threshing green while Catriona went to pacify the
Stookie Lairds.
CHAPTER TWO
T hat evening, the clachan gathered around the

Cross to celebrate the Lunastal, the first bread of
the harvest, a return to times of plenty.
The ‘Cross’ was a massive shard of gray-lichened stone, as

old as the land itself and no more a Cross than the river was
a baptismal font. It was a remnant of a bygone age, a
standing stone whose purpose was as mysterious as the
ancient people, the Picts, who had raised it. But, whatever its
original significance to the clachan’s forebears, the stone
remained the focal point of the community, standing proud
and haughty on its little knowe, watching over them as a
stern father might watch over his children.
From the cottages came the freshly baked bannocks and

bowls of creamy butter, the cloth-wrapped cheeses, the
barley brose flavored with honey, cream, and early raspber-
ries from the woods. From the cottages too came clay flasks
of uisge beatha, the water of life, and fat-bellied flagons of

small beer. It was all laid out on a large square of white
linen, spread on the grass in the long shadow of the
standing stone. Old Hector MacLeod brought out his fiddle
from its soft velvet sack, rubbed the bow with a knob of
resin, and set to tuning the strings.
“Is that a baudrons I hear being drawn?” Catriona’s father,

Aonghas MacPherson, called to him, then laughed a single
loud bark of a laugh as Hector raised two gnarled fingers
from the bow and cocked them in Aonghas’s direction. “I am
told you are meant to drown the cat before you draw its guts
for strings.”
Catriona’s mother, Floraidh, put a hand on Aonghas’ arm to

stay his mischief.
“Wheesht, Aonghas!” she hissed out under her breath. “Or

Auld Hector shall take the huff, and there won’t be any
music for us tonight.”
A murmur ran through the clachan’s eight families as

Hector’s wife, Anna, appeared below the Cross and raised
above her head a round wooden trencher on which was
piled a stack of three bannocks.
“Blessed be the harvest,” Anna’s voice crackled out. “May

the season be a good one. And may we never starve a
winter.”
“We’ve never starved a winter yet!” the clachan responded in

unison.
And, just so, the ceilidh was begun.
The evening was still bright with the late summer sun,
Chapter Two 9
though the shadows were lengthening, and a chill breeze

scurried up from the river and shook the hems of the
women’s plaids and the tapered tails of their headscarves.
Old Hector struck up a reel, and the children danced
around him, darting at him every now and again to pluck at
his baggy breeks. The adults ate and passed the flasks
around, their conversation and laughter growing ever
louder until Hector could no longer compete with it, and he
laid his fiddle aside and joined with the eating and drinking
and the craic.
“A song, Catriona,” Aonghas suddenly called out.
He was tipsy from the uisge beatha and staggered uncer-

tainly as he cast about, looking for his younger daughter.
“Aye, a song,” several voices echoed.
Catriona broke away from the group of women with whom

she had been talking and came to stand in front of the
Cross. The clachan fell silent. She stood for a moment in the
honeyed light, silently contemplating what song she might
sing. Then her voice rose like a laverock into the sky. The
clachan let out a collective gasp at the sheer beauty of
the sound.
She sang a simple ballad, in which the singer meets a hand-

some young man on Lunastal night, who walks her home
beneath a silver-shining moon, where he takes leave of her
on the threshold with a kiss ‘sticky from the eating of honey
brose.’
The song ended to an awed silence.
One of the women sighed, a long, heartfelt sigh.

Then Aonghas sniggered.
“Aye, there’s the pity of it!” he declared too loudly, swaying

and rubbing the bristle on his chin. “That shall not be the
fate of my poor Catriona, I’m afraid.” He sniggered again. “I
am a man cursed, I tell you! Two daughters and ne’er a
tocher but one. I fear that there shall be no handsome
young laddie to buy you, my lass. I fear you shall be spin-
ning the flax at Shielfoot for the rest of your days.”
The men and women of the clachan looked at their feet, at

their hands… everywhere except at Catriona who stood
before the Cross with her mouth dropped open in shock.
Floraidh turned on Aonghas with a fury.
“Shut your drunken gab afore I rip the tongue from your
gullet,” she cried at him. “How dare you affront the lassie
like that, afore all her neighbors?”
“I was just saying…” he weakly protested.
He looked around the faces of the clachan in appeal, but his

look was met by only the dark glowers of the women and
embarrassed glances from the men. The children’s play stut-
tered to a stop as they detected a change in the atmosphere
of the celebration.
Suddenly, Catriona pressed her hands to her face and fled

into the twilight. Floraidh made to follow her, but Aonghas
caught her by the arm.
“Let her go,” he told her. “I have said hurtful words, and for
that I am sorry. But she must come to know that her father is
a poor man and cannot afford two marriage portions. Leave
her to bear that in her sadness and know that life is not a
ballad.”
Chapter Two 11
Floraidh wrenched her arm free of Aonghas’ grip.
“Aye, I shall let her go,” she hissed out with venom. “But I
shall not forget this evening, Aonghas MacPherson, not for a
long time. And I shall make damned sure that you will not
forget it either.”
“And what is going on here?” a voice called out from beyond

the Cross. “I thought it was a handfasting I was coming to,
and not a wake.”
It was Ruairi Murray, come down from the shieling.
He cut a fine figure as he tramped down the last brae

through the heather. He was tall and broad-chested, with a
mass of red curly hair tumbling to his shoulders from
beneath his blue bonnet and falling across his piercing blue
eyes. His calf muscles bulged beneath the hem of his kilted
plaid, and he hefted the crook that he held in his thick fist as
if it were as light as a twist of straw. He was, as they said in
the glens, a bull of a man!
“Och, Ruairi, lad!” His father clapped him on the shoulder

as he joined the company. “We were just taking a wee rest
from the feasting and the dancing.” He swept his arm
towards the food and drink. “Help yourself. You must be
famished after the long traik down. Help yourself; there is
plenty still.”
Ruairi stooped and picked up a wad of bannocks and broke

a hunk from a large round cheese.
“And what is the matter with Catriona?” he enquired as he

tore and chewed the food in full hungry mouthfuls. “I just
heard her singing as I came down the braes; beautiful it was.
But now she seems a little put out.”
“It is nothing, Ruairi,” his mother said, casting a black look

at Aonghas. “Some words were said that should have
remained unsaid. But they will be soon mended.”
Ruairi hooked his finger through the loop on one of the big-
bellied bottles, rested its weight across his forearm, and
hefted its neck to his lips.
“If it is a man she is fretting after, there is a gang of randie

chiels up on the shieling that would gladly ‘tup’ her. They
are growing tired of having to make do with the ewes.”
“Ruairi Murray!” his mother scolded him, casting mortified

glances at her neighbors. “Mind your tongue too and
remember the company that you are in. You are not on the
high pastures with the randies now, to be talking of the
lassies like that.”
Ruairi shrugged and took another deep draught of beer.
“Anyway,” he said, casting his eyes hungrily around the

clachan, beer dribbling down his beard. “Where is my
lassie? Where is my Sorcha?”
Sorcha’s voice came clear and proud, as she stepped into the
circle around Ruairi. “It is here that I am.” Sorcha’s voice
came clear and proud, as she stepped into the circle around
Ruairi. Her eyes were demurely downcast, and a soft pink
blush colored her cheeks.
Ruairi’s jaw fell slack; his eyes grew round like saucers. Beer
continued to drip unheeded from the ends of his mustache.
A murmur of appreciation passed through the clachan.
Sorcha was dressed in a plain white plaid, into which had

been woven a few small stripes of black, blue, and red. It
Chapter Two 13
reached from her neck to her heels and was tied above her
breast with a buckle of brass and below with a leather belt.
A fine kerchief of linen tightly covered her hair and tapered
down her back. A single large lock of crow-black hair hung
down her cheek to rest on her breast, the end tied with a
knot of ribbands and into which a few daisies had been
twined.
The clachan hushed and Anna stepped forward.
“Give me your left hands,” she commanded them in her

hoarse cracked voice.
Ruairi and Sorcha came together in front of Anna in the

shadow of the ancient standing stone and raised their left
hands. Anna took one in each of her own arthritic hands
and placed them together, one on top of the other.
“It is the custom among us that a man takes a maid as his

wife and keeps her for the space of a year without marrying
her. And if she pleases him all the while, he will marry her
at the end of the year and legitimatize her children. But if he
does not love her, he will return her to her parents.” Anna
peered from one to the other. “Do you consent before your
people to this handfasting?”
“I do,” both Ruairi and Sorcha avowed together.
“Does the clachan consent to the handfasting of this

couple?”
“Aye!” the community cried as one.
Anna cocked her ear towards the darkening sky.
“Does Almighty God object to this handfasting?”

Silence.
“So be it!” she declared.
And the handfasting was over. Ruairi Murray and Sorcha

MacPherson were man and wife.
CHAPTER THREE
C atriona ran down the brae to the riverbank, each

jarring step wrenching free a sob from her chest.
The glittering water ran west over its shoals of shingle, the
clatter of its voice echoing from the cliffs that rose sharply
from the opposite bank. Catriona happed her plaid over her
head against the chill of the evening air off the water, but
also to shut out the world that was treating her so cruelly
and mocking her into the bargain. She felt the deep sting of
humiliation.
She followed the riverbank to the Wood of the White Stag,

so-called because of the appearance of the mythical beast
long ago to Tharracail, the man who had given his name to
the ford – and hence to the clachan that had grown up
beside it – when he had trespassed on Clanranald’s hunting
grounds and subsequently slaughtered for his trouble.
Catriona remembered the tales that the old folk transmitted
to the young around the hearth during the long winter
nights, the tales that her own grandmother, when she was
alive, had spun to her by the fireside in Shielfoot. In those
tales, the white stag is at times a messenger from the other-
world, which appears as a warning when one is trans-
gressing a taboo. In other tales, the creature has a perennial
ability to evade capture, and the pursuit of it tells of a body’s
spiritual quest. Its appearance also signals to its witness that
the time is nigh for them to pursue that quest. In other tales
still, the white stag is associated with Flidais, the goddess of
hunting and wild animals.
But these were only tales, Catriona reflected ruefully as she

tramped along the uneven riverbank towards the Wood. Life
was no such tale. There were no quests; just the drudgery
and daily struggle of growing enough food to see a body
through another winter and of raising children to perpet-
uate that struggle for yet another generation. She was no
white stag that could evade capture by her fate; she was but
a poor crofter’s younger daughter, trapped within her situa-
tion with no prospect of escape.
She entered the Wood. The canopy of the trees filtered the
already fading light. Trunks of birch, oak, and elm gleamed
wanly in the dusk. The birds had settled down to roost. The
silence was complete, apart from the occasional burble of a
sleepy wood pigeon.
She trod through the trees to the clearing at the very heart
of the Wood. It was a favorite trysting place for illicit lovers
and for husbands and wives who wanted a little respite from
the cramped shared sleeping space of the croft-house. The
grass grew long and lush beneath the opening to the sky. At
the heart of the clearing lay the broad trunk of an ancient
Chapter Three 17
fallen oak, half-swallowed by the turf and swathed in

creeping moss.
Catriona sat with her back to a tree just outside the circle of
the clearing and looked up to the heavens. The sky was yet a
deep azure blue, but the first stars were beginning to appear,
and a large full moon had risen above the shoulder of Cnoc
Uaine. The pacific blue of the sky and the profound stillness
of the Wood soothed her. Sitting there, in the small self-
contained world of the clearing, isolated from the troubles
of the larger world beyond the Wood, she felt the tension in
her shoulders and the hurt in her heart melt away, and she
fell asleep.
Hushed voices and the crack of footsteps on fallen twigs

wakened her. Night had fallen; the Wood was pitch-dark
between the trees, but a bright full moon hung over the
clearing, illuminating it with a cool silvery light.
Catriona gave a start. Someone was in the Wood. She was

alone and vulnerable, too far from the clachan for anyone to
hear her cry. She folded her fists to her breast, as if to
prevent her rapidly beating heart from bursting through her
breastbone and giving her away. Her breath came in short
sobbing gasps. The footsteps grew closer. She held her
breath, drew up her knees, and cowered back as far as she
could into the tree at her back.
Ruairi and Sorcha passed within yards of her and stepped,

hand in hand, into the moonlit glade. Ruairi, Catriona
noticed, was a bit unsteady on his feet. He had clearly
supped his share of the beer and the water of life at the
Lunastal.
Sorcha paused just inside the clearing, tugging back on

Ruairi’s hand.
“I’m a wee bit scared,” she whimpered.
Ruairi swayed, unbalanced by the pull of Sorcha’s hand

on his.
“There’s nocht tae be afeared o’, lass.” He grunted, yanking

her onward with a sharp jerk of her arm. “We are man and
wife, now, are we no’? If I get ye wi’ bairn, there shall be nae
shame tae it. And if ye’re guid to me, I’ll stand by ye at the
year’s end. I’ll marry ye guid and proper, in the kirk
and all.”
Sorcha’s eyes were wild with fear, like those of a heifer being
presented to the bull for the first time.
Ruairi dragged her over to the fallen oak and threw her
roughly, facedown, over the thick trunk. Without hesitation,
he crouched down behind her and started hauling up the
skirts of her plaid.
“Please, Ruairi, not so quickly, not so rough,” Sorcha

protested. “Can we no’ hae a little daffin first, a wee bit o’ a
kiss and a cuddle?”
Ruairi slapped her naked buttocks and rummaged beneath

the kilt of his own plaid to release his manhood.
“I’ve nae time for daffin,” he exclaimed. “I must get back tae
the shieling. There are the beasts that need tending.” He
parted her cheeks and inspected what he found between
them appreciatively. “But my, ye hae a fine arse on
ye, woman!”
Without further delay, he rubbed his thumb across the head

Chapter Three 19
of his cock to bring it to full hardness, presented it to the lips

of her cunt and drove it in, hard.
Sorcha yelped.
“No, please, Ruairi,” she sobbed. “No’ sae rough. Please, be

gentle wi’ me.”
But Ruairi fell to thrusting hard and fast, his bulging thighs
slapping the flesh of her rump, each forceful thrust accom-
panied by a beastlike grunt. Barely a minute later, he
reached forward and grabbed a fistful of her hair, pulling
hard on it as he bellowed and came.
He stood up immediately.
“Aye, ye’re a canny ride,” he remarked, leaning over with his

hands on his knees to catch his breath. “Ye’ll dae, lass;
ye’ll dae!”
Sorcha lay limp and humiliated over the log, weeping with
bitterness. Blood trickled down the inside of her thighs,
mixing its bright redness with the whiteness of his seed.
After a few moments, she reached out, tore up a handful of
grass, and wiped herself clean as best she could.
“Come on, I’ll walk ye back tae the clachan.” Ruairi straight-
ened, his breath restored. “They say it’s ay, a wee bit sair the
first time.”
Sorcha pushed herself off the log and rose painfully to her

feet. Ruairi gave her his arm, and they left the clearing,
Sorcha still weeping and limping with the soreness of it
between her legs.
Catriona looked on at the now deserted scene, her eyes wet

with tears and still round with horror. An unspent scream
lodged in her throat like a lump of dry bread she had swal-
lowed but would not go down. She had seen the clachan
beasts couple and was inured to the rawness and the
violence of the act. But never had she witnessed the careless
brutality with which Ruairi had visited that act on her sister.
Perhaps, she reflected, her fate as a spinster or servant was

not as unenviable as she had believed. If what she had just
witnessed was marriage, she could well do without it. She
would rather spin her fingers raw beneath her father’s
rooftree than suffer so.
What was it the mhaighstir was forever bawling from his

pulpit in the kirk of a Sunday?
‘Unto the woman,’ he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow

and thy conception; in sorrow, thou shalt bring forth children.’
Perhaps, she reflected, Sorcha was more to be pitied than

envied for her fate.
CHAPTER FOUR
T he next morning, Catriona found herself alone

when she awoke. For a brief moment, she missed
Sorcha beside her on the straw pallet they shared, until she
remembered that her sister would now be living with the
Murrays in the neighboring croft as Ruairi’s betrothed.
She stirred herself to see to the fire. She crouched by the

hearth in the center of the room and removed the peats
beneath which the flame had been banked the night before.
She blew on the smoldering embers until they raised a glow,
then she added some dry straw as tinder. When the flame
lowed, she loosely stacked the peats back over it, and their
aromatic smoke began to spiral lazily to the rafters. She took
a hand-besom and brushed the earthen floor around the
oval of the hearthstones and used her cupped hands to tip
the stour she had gathered back into the fire.
Once the fire had caught, she ladled some oatmeal for the
morning porridge into a pot, along with some water from
the pail, and hung the pot from the chain that dropped
from the rafter above the hearth. In the far corner of the
room, nearest the gable end, her parents stirred. Her

mother went to relieve herself in the byre. Her father
lumbered over in his sark, scratching his armpits. His
skinny legs reminded Catriona of those of a chicken strut-
ting on the midden.
“You were late home,” Aonghas grumbled out. “I hope you

weren’t up to hochmagandy with any of the lads. The last
thing we need is a lass wi’ a bastard in her belly.”
Catriona did not deign to reply. She stirred the pot with the
wooden spurtle, then took the milk cogie inside the cow
shed to fetch some milk from the goat. She found her
mother crouched over the drain that carried the waste
under the wall to the midden, her sark hauled up over her
scraggy hips.
“You will have to take on Sorcha’s chores,” Floraidh

observed, contemplating her remaining daughter. Then,
after a pause, she added with an air of womanly conspiracy,
“Pay no heed to your father. He is no more than a blathering
auld skyte. He should not have said the things he said last
evening.”
Catriona kicked a low three-legged stool over to the goat

that was tethered to a ring fixed into the wall and hunkered
down on it.
“Aye, but it is true all the same, Mither,” she said, coaxing
the animal’s teats and squirting milk rhythmically into the
wooden bowl. “There will be no fine young Ruairi for me.”
Which might well be a blessing, she added to herself.
“Och, you are a bonny lass, Catriona, my dove,” Floraidh

remarked as she straightened up and smoothed her sark. “It
Chapter Four 23
would not surprise me if some handsome young chiel was

to take you to wife just for the taking of you.”
“Aye!” Catriona said cynically, nodding at the chickens that

scraped in the corner. “And yon hen might fly with
the eagle.”
T hat afternoon, the MacPhersons received a visit from

the parish minister, the mhaighstir, Dughlas
Middleton.
Middleton rode into Ath Tharracail on a small shaggy gray

pony. The children of the clachan ran out to meet him. He
was, after all, a sight to behold: a tall, lanky man whose toes
almost dragged the ground beneath his diminutive bow-
backed mount, wearing a coffin-black jacket and trews and a
starched white cravat, with a plain three-cornered felt hat
perched on the crown of his head. In a whiney nasal voice,
he enquired grandly of the children where he might find
MacPherson of Shielfoot.
The children’s brows creased in puzzled frowns until Eaird-

sidh Beag – Wee Archie – piped up:
“MacPherson? Is that no’ Auld Aonghas, Catriona’s pa?”
The children directed Middleton to the croft-house on the

western edge of the clachan.
The mhaighstir wrinkled his nose in distaste as he rode the

quarter mile or so down towards the cottage. It had been
built, he noticed, according to local custom: a timber frame,
with sod walls erected on foundations of loose boulders and
a grass and heather thatched roof through which seeped the
reek from the fire. It had no windows and only one door.
Bloody savages, Middleton swore to himself. When will the

Highland landowners accept improvements? Were Middleton to
have his way, the land would be cleared of the starveling
filth and given over to sheep. The land was too poor to
support proper scientific cultivation. Mind, you, he reflected,
the landowners – the clan chiefs – are little more than savages
themselves.
Floraidh was cutting kale for the soup in one of the nearby
riggs. Catriona sat in the doorway at her small spinning
wheel. Floraidh straightened, her cutty-knife in her hand,
when she caught sight of the mhaighstir. She started back
towards the cottage and intercepted him just as he reached
the door.
“Good day, Mistress MacPherson,” Middleton greeted her as

he swung his spindleshank over the rump of his pony.
Catriona noticed with a smile that he stood taller than he
did when he had been sitting. “I am here to speak with your
husband, Aonghas.”
“Oh, aye?” Floraidh replied, bridling inwardly at his form of

address. As was customary, she had not taken her husband’s
name when they had been wed; she was still and proudly a
MacDonald. “I am afraid Aonghas is out cutting peats.”
Middleton drew an impatient breath through his teeth.
“Well, perhaps you can send for him,” he suggested. “I have

come a long way to see him, and it is on a matter of no small
importance.”
Floraidh looked up and down the great length of him, then

cast a sidelong look at the small pony.
“Aye, well… We would not want your poor wee cuddy to

Chapter Four 25
have so labored for nothing,” she remarked. “Catriona!” she

called. “Go and fetch your pa.”
Catriona stood and set her spinning wheel inside the door,
before setting off at a jog towards the peat-bank that the
clachan had dug on the moorland that lay between the river
and the foot of the braes of Cnoc Uaine.
“Would you care to come ben the house, Mister Middle-

ton?” Floraidh asked. “I’m sure we could spare you a ladle of
milk after your long ride.”
Middleton gave a curt nod of acknowledgment.
“It is Doctor Middleton,” he corrected, “and I don’t mind if I

do come ben. I am a little dry from the stour of the road.”
Floraidh led him inby, and the stench of smoke, stale sweat,
and manure instantly assailed him. As his eyes became
accustomed to the gloom, he took in the earth floor and the
walls roughly plastered with a skim of the same mud and
sand cement that had been used to hold the sod bricks
together. The house, he noticed, was divided into two areas.
The first and lowest in elevation held the animal pens of the
byre, above which an open straw-loft receded into who-
knew-what vermin-infested darkness. Again, he knew that
in this backward corner of the new forward-looking North
Britain the livestock was still kept in the house during the
worst part of the winter. The family at this time of year
would often sleep in the loft above the byre, to benefit from
the heat rising from the animals and to help keep the
piercing cold from penetrating their bones. The rest of the
house was the living area, serving as the family sitting room,
kitchen, and bedroom. Smoke from the fire in the center of
the floor escaped through a hole in the thatch and through
the thatch itself, making the cottage appear from a distance

as if it were on fire. At the far end of the room stood a
general storage area and the very special box bed, reserved
for child-bearing and the leave-taking of death, when both
came, as they inevitably did. No walls were separating the
different areas, just dividers woven from wicker.
Floraidh dipped a ladle into the milk bowl and passed it to

Doctor Middleton. He took it from her and raised it with
caution to his lips. He sniffed at it through his long penlike
nose.
“Are you sure this is fresh, Mistress MacPherson?”

Middleton wondered in alarm. “It smells a little bit… off.”
“It came fresh from the goat this morning,” Floraidh assured
him, making a suggestive milking gesture towards him with
a curled hand, which Middleton found more than a wee bit
unseemly. “And it is Mistress MacDonald,” she added with a
nod and a wink.
They spent the rest of the time waiting in polite silence;

Middleton taking small, tentative sips from the ladle, and
Floraidh fetching the high chair reserved for visitors and
planting it beside the hearth.
Aonghas arrived, at last, grimed with dirt and sweat from his
labors.
“Ah, MacPherson!” Middleton greeted him but omitted to

offer Aonghas his hand. He indicated one of the low stools
by the fire. “Please, take a seat.”
Aonghas bridled at being offered a seat by another man in

his own house.
Chapter Four 27
“I would prefer to stand,” he said, holding his head high. “If

it is all the same to you.”
Middleton turned to Catriona.
“And here is little Catriona! How are you, my child?”
“I am well enough, sir,” Catriona replied, bobbing a little

curtsy.
Middleton ran an appreciative eye over her trim, petite

body, taking in the nut-brown plait that fell down her cheek
from beneath her kerchief, her milk-white complexion, and
lingering on the small ripe breasts that shifted and snuggled
beneath the fabric of her sark. He ran his tongue over his
thin top lip.
“What age are you now, child?”
“She shall be seventeen years in the spring,” Floraidh told

him, before turning to Catriona. “Catriona, go and see to the
hens, will you?”
Catriona gladly nodded and bid good day to the mhaighstir.

The man’s eyes made her skin crawl.
“Such an obedient child,” Middleton observed as he

watched Catriona’s bare legs disappear through the door.
“And pious too. A regular kirk attender with her mother,
Mister MacPherson… unlike yourself.”
Aonghas lowered his brows and glowered at Middleton.
“I am obliged to work all the hours God sends me to keep

the body and soul of my pious child all of a piece.”
“And yet,” Middleton returned, casting his eyes heavenward,

“God Himself commands us to rest upon the Seventh Day

and keep his Sabbath holy?”
“Aye,” Aonghas conceded with a nod. “But God sent us his

only Son; he did not have two daughters to keep.”
The mhaighstir winced at the irreverence.
“As a matter of fact,” Middleton continued, “it is your other

daughter, Sorcha, that I have come to speak to you about.”
“Oh, aye?” Aonghas said, knowing what was coming next.
“Yes, I have been traveling around my parish, visiting all the

clachans, to warn my flock of the perils of backsliding that
may assail them at this season of the year, into the pagan
customs associated with Lammas night – the Lunastal, as I
believe it is sometimes still called in these parts.”
Aonghas nodded.
Middleton grimaced as if what he was about to say was

something he found difficult or distasteful.
“I believe your daughter has entered some arrangement

with the Murray boy, some ‘trial marriage’ by which they are
permitted to lie with one another without the blessing of
holy matrimony.”
“They are handfasted, if that is what you mean.” Aonghus

lifted his head high and jutted out his chin. “It is a perfectly
respectable arrangement.”
“Maybe to the heathen who does not know God, but in a

Christian society, it is far from respectable. It is little more
than a license for fornication. We are a special people,
Mister MacPherson, a godly nation. We are called by the
grace of God to live according to his laws. It is part of his
Chapter Four 29
covenant with us, the elect, his chosen people, the new
Israel.”
“Dare I say, Mister Middleton, that the custom of hand-

fasting is much older to us God-fearing souls in Muideart
than is the covenant the great Lords signed with the
Almighty in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh a bare
hundred years ago. A covenant, moreover, that has set father
against son and brother against brother and won us nothing
but burning crofts and mangled limbs and widows’ tears
and orphans’ moans and all else that misery’s hand
bestows.”
Middleton’s eyes flashed, and he took a step towards Aong-

has, towering over him and all but raising his fist.
“Watch your words, MacPherson,” he seethed out. “Beware

the righteous vengeance of the Lord. For the Lord takes
vengeance on His foes and vents His wrath against His
enemies. One day, MacPherson, your foot shall slip. For the
day of your calamity is near, and the impending things are
hastening upon you.”
Aonghas lifted himself onto his tiptoes and placed his face
close to Middleton’s.
“Then away back to your Fair City of Perth and the gentle
life that suckled you and leave us to our heathen ways. You
are lucky to have your fine stone manse in Gleann Fhion-
nain and the clachans for the work of your glebe-land,
which puts the food in your belly and the siller in the Kirk’s
plate. You may not have them always.”
Middleton cowered at the implied threat in Aonghas’ words.
“Be careful, MacPherson,” he warned. “Your words speak

sedition to the Kirk and State. Your first loyalty is to God and
his Kirk…”
“My first loyalty is to Clanranald, who feeds his children

when they are starving and upholds their rights when they
are wronged. So, watch yourself… mhaighstir.”
Aonghas spat the last word, and a speckle of spit landed on

Middleton’s cheek.
Without another word, Middleton stormed out of the

cottage, mounted his pony, and set it at a brisk trot back to
his fine stone manse in Gleann Fhionnain.
CHAPTER FIVE
“
I cannot believe that you spoke to the mhaighstir
in that way!” Catriona exclaimed when she
returned from feeding the hens.
She had been startled by the sight of Middleton exploding

from the cottage door, his face as puce as a plum, striding
past her without a word, stepping one of his long legs over
his short pony and setting off at a scamper up through the
clachan and onto the drove road that ran along the length of
Loch Seille to Gleann Fhionnain.
“I mean, a man of the cloth,” she added, “the mhaighstir, a

man of God!”
Aonghas gathered the phlegm in his throat and spat it into

the fire.
“Man of God, indeed!” he grumbled out. “A lang streak of

sanctimony, more like. He’s nae mair a man of God than was
last year’s pig.”
“Pa!”
“Well…” Aonghas brushed a dislodged ember into the fire

with his toe. “Ye ken I have nae time for sic trash as him.”
Floraidh slapped the heel of her hand into his shoulder and
gave him a hefty skelp on the ear.
“Yon tongue of yers shall get ye set in the jugs aside the kirk
door, Aonghas MacPherson. If it were not for the shame it
would bring upon the family and the clachan, I would
clamp the collar and chain on ye myself.”
Aonghas laughed.
“Aye, so ye would, my dearest heart. I believe ye would!”
She gave him a rough shove towards the door.
“Get yerself away back tae the peat-bank, ye daft auld

heathen, afore the Hounds o’ Hell come and drag ye away
tae Auld Nick… Or do ye plan on letting the fire go out
as well?”
Aonghas threw up his hands in mock horror.
“I’d sooner be damned than let yer hearth grow cold, oh

flame of my life,” he cried, sending Floraidh a lascivious
wink. “If I had a stick, I would poke it!”
He fled through the door, with Catriona’s pealing laughter

chiming in his ears.
T he following morning, Shielfoot received another

visitor.
This time, the caller rode in on a fine roan stallion, which

Chapter Five 33
foamed at the mouth and clashed at the bit and stamped

great hoofprints into the turf as it danced and snorted
before the croft-house.
“MacPherson!” the rider commanded.
Aonghas crept from the cottage, worrying his bonnet inside-

out with his nervous fingers as he cowered before the
impressive beast.
“Sir?” he announced himself, in an obsequious voice.
“I am from Muideart, his steward,” the horseman said. “I

would speak wi’ ye, man.”
“Then you had better come ben the house.” Aonghas turned
and called through the door, “Catriona, lass. Prepare a dram
for our guest, Muideart’s man.”
The guest dismounted and handed the reins to three lads

who had run down from the clachan to see the spectacle.
Aonghas eyed them dubiously; he feared the stallion would
drag them all the way home to its master’s castle at Tioram
if it took a mind to.
Inside the cottage, the visitor extended his hand to Aonghas.
“Tamhas, steward of Muideart.”
“Aonghas, master of Shielfoot,” Aonghas returned formally.
Catriona handed Tamhas a quaich of uisge beatha and a

small jug of water, while Floraidh placed the high chair
beside the fire. Tamhas accepted the quaich but refused the
chair, squatting down on one of the short stools instead.
“If ye don’t mind, I winna sit up there amang the reek, but
hunker doon here wi’ ye in the fresher air.”
Aonghas inclined his head in assent.
Tamhas slackened the spirit with a drop of water from the

jug, to release the sweet aroma of the heather blossom and
the dark flavor of the peat.
“Sláinte!” Tamhas said, taking a sip from the quaich, rolling

the golden liquid around his mouth with appreciation, and
passing the vessel to Aonghas.
“Sláinte!” Aonghas responded, took a sip, and set the quaich

down on one of the hearthstones.
“Now, to business,” Tamhas declared. “As ye know, Eoin of

Muideart, son of the Clanranald, heir to Clanranald,
recently lost his wife in childbirth.”
“God rest her!” Aonghas whispered.
“This has left him wi’ his first child, Donald, and the need of
a lass to raise the infant. He has heard good reports of yer
lass, Catriona.” Tamhas indicated to Catriona, who had
retreated to her pallet against the back wall. “And is
proposing to take her into his service as Donald’s nurse. She
has a good way wi’ children, it is said.”
“She does,” Aonghas replied.
Tamhas rose to his feet.
“Then it is settled,” he said. “The lass is to present herself

tomorrow at Castle Tioram.”
“Tomorrow?” Floraidh exclaimed, clutching the knot of her

plaid where it lay over her heart.
“Wheesht, woman!” Aonghas hissed out, cutting the air with

Chapter Five 35
his arm. It was not her place to speak; this was business to
be transacted between the men.
“So be it,” he said to Tamhas.
They shook hands on the arrangement, and Tamhas turned

towards the door before pausing.
“She should arrive three hours after noon. That is when the
tide will be at its ebb.”
“I will see to it, Tamhas,” Aonghas assured him.
And with that, Tamhas was gone.
C atriona could not believe that her fate had been decided
in so few sudden minutes. One moment, she had been
mucking her father’s byre, and the next, she was bound to the
laird’s household. Her heart was racing, her mind reeling.
Aonghas clapped his hands and rubbed them together.
“Well, that was a stroke of good fortune,” he congratulated

himself. “Who would have thought that you would end up
in the Clanranald household – eh, Catriona? You will be
gentry now, my lass. And, who knows, you might just catch
the eye of one of the future Clanranald’s lieutenants with
your endearing young charms.” He laughed. “Soon, you will
not be wanting to know us, we will be so far beneath you!
Your nose will be so high in the air it shall have snow on it!”
Catriona smiled wanly. She was bemused by her father’s

words; she simply could not comprehend them. It had all
happened so suddenly that she had not yet fully taken in
the implications of what had just transpired.
Floraidh noticed her daughter’s bewilderment. Her heart

both soared and ached for her.
“Perhaps,” she suggested, “you should take a wee walk,

Catriona, to straighten it all out in your mind.” She turned
to Aonghas. “It has all happened too quickly for the lass to
have taken it all in. It must seem like a tangled ball of string
to her. Leave her be a while and give her time to sort
through all the threads of it.” She turned back to Catriona,
put her arm around her shoulders, and led her to the door.
“Go now, lass.”
Catriona took the path away from the clachan, down

towards the banks of the Seille. The day had become over-
cast, and the river slid gray beneath the dark cliffs. She cast
a look back at Cnoc Uaine. The cloud had descended and
lay sluggishly on the hilltops. The contrast with the day of
the Lunastal was stark.
It suddenly struck her that there was no sky. The lowering

gray of the clouds and the dull gray of the river were the
same. She peered over the clachan to the east and the broad
waters of Loch Seille that stretched all the way to Gleann
Fhionnain at its far end. They too were the same leaden
gray. The world that two days earlier had been so enchanted
and alive with sunshine and song was now so drab and
unpromising that it would break a body’s heart. Yet she was
the same person, the same Catriona.
What had happened? Sorcha was gone, taken and spoiled

by the brutish Ruairi. Ruairi himself had gone, the big
handsome and virile neighbor, whom all the laddies looked
up to and whom all the lassies adored. He had been
replaced by the slavering beast she had watched violate her
sister so cruelly. Her parents had gone: her beloved father
Chapter Five 37
had become her barterer, selling her off to the least worst of

her prospects; and her mother… The image of her mother
crouching in the byre flashed before her eyes… Her mother
was no longer the soft and creamy flesh against which she
had snuggled as a bairn; her mother had become a withered
crone, old and weary.
She looked back at Shielfoot, its boulder and sod clinging

close to the earth, the smoke from the hearth seeping
through its thatch, the hens scraping their meager living
from the midden… Her home already appeared strange and
alien. She, Catriona, was no longer there. But where then
was she?
She could not envision herself in the household of Eoin of

Muideart, a nursemaid to his son, among strange folk with
their strange ways. What would she do all day while she was
watching the child? Watching a child is not work, she
reflected; it is something that accompanies work, something
you do while you are working. That is how a child learns;
how you teach a child the work that needs to be done. What
could she teach the son of Muideart? How could she raise a
Clanranald? All he could learn from her was how to milk a
goat, spin flax and wool, and muck a byre.
It suddenly struck her that she was no longer a daughter of

Ath Tharracail, but nor could she see herself as ‘gentry’. She
was nowhere. She had no place.
Deep in thought, she had reached the edge of the Wood of

the White Stag. A chilly breeze rose suddenly from the
surface of the Seille, and a shiver ran along Catriona’s spine.
She closed her eyes against the memory of Sorcha lying
prone across the fallen oak, with her blood and Ruairi’s seed
running down her buttocks and thighs.
But, she forced herself to think, what were the alternatives

to a life of service at Castle Tioram? A withered crone,
pissing in a byre? Some old and toothless man, or some
senseless brute of a day-laborer, pawing at her in the straw,
forcing his stinking cock into her, slobbering over her
breasts? A pious virgin, spinning her father’s flax and
mourning her lot as a cursed daughter of Eve at the kirk on
Sundays?
She suddenly felt that she was trapped between two rocks,
either of which could crush her as surely as Cnoc Uaine
would were it to come crashing down upon her head. And
she knew that she would go to Castle Tioram – as she must,
it being her pa’s will and his word to Clanranald – if only
because the future it offered was unknown and therefore
held out to her at least a chance of happiness, it being the
only path that did not completely rule it out. Was that,
perhaps, what her pa meant when he had spoken of it as
‘good fortune’? Is that the best a dowerless lass like her
could hope for?
T he following morning, Catriona rose as normal, saw

to the fire, and cooked the porridge. The chores were
special to her, as she knew that she was performing them for
the very last time in her parents’ house. She took extra care
to sweep up every last mote and ember from around the
hearth; she added a pinch of the costly salt to the pot as a
fond extravagance, knowing that for her mother ‘taking
porridge without salt is like kissing a man without
whiskers.’
Late in the morning, as she was mucking the byre, Floraidh

appeared at her elbow.
Chapter Five 39
“You need not be doing that, lass.”
“The work needs doing,” Catriona replied simply, pausing

and leaning on the muck-rake.
“But you have a long walk ahead of you this afternoon, to

Eilean Tioram and your new life.”
Catriona let out a loud sob that tore at her mother’s heart.
She cast aside the rake and threw herself into Floraidh’s
arms, burying her face against her thin bony shoulder.
“O, Mither! I so do not want to go!”
“Wheesht, wheesht, my lamb,” Floraidh hushed her. “I

know, I know. But go you must.”
“I know, I know!” Catriona acknowledged, quieting her

weeping, though the tears still flowed. “But why can things
not just be the same? Why can’t we go on living as we have
always been – you and me and Sorcha and Pa?”
Floraidh smiled ruefully.
“Ah, my pet, that is just the way of things. We bring new life
into the world, we grow old, we pass… That is our fate.”
She pushed Catriona gently from her and held her at arms’
length.
“Now, away and wash your face in the spring. We cannot be

having you turning up at the laird’s castle with your face all
smirched like that. What a sair affront that would be!”
Catriona sniffed back her tears and laughed.
“Aye, he would be wondering what sort of tinker he had

taken in to look after his wee laddie.”
Floraidh raised her hand and tenderly touched the plait of

her daughter’s hair and her cheek.
“Away, my pet. Fly away, my laverock; fly high into the

sunshine and sing your heart!” A tear glistened in her eye as
she drank into her memory a last long deep draught of her
daughter. “Now, you must be running across to Sorcha and
saying your goodbyes. She will be missing you too.”
S orcha was grinding the barley into meal when

Catriona stepped into the Murray’s croft-house. She set
aside the quern at the sight of her little sister, rose from her
stool, and wrapped her in a fond embrace.
When they separated, tears were rolling down the cheeks

of both.
“Wheesht, Sorcha.” Catriona laughed. “It is your tears that

are making me cry.”
“And yours that are bringing mine!”
Their tears became tears of laughter until, after a struggle,

they eventually stopped, and the lassies stood flushed and
breathless in each other’s arms.
“I am sorry to be leaving you, Sorcha,” Catriona said,

running the backs of her fingertips along Sorcha’s cheek.
She looked up into her eyes with a frown full of solicitude.
“Are you alright? I mean… with Ruairi and everything.”
Sorcha shrugged and made a face.
“Ruairi is away back up to the shieling. I’m still a wee bit

sore and bleeding after… well, you know. But no doubt I’ll
Chapter Five 41
get used to it. They say it is always a wee bit sore the
first time.”
Catriona bit her tongue. She did not want to compound

Sorcha’s hurt by revealing that she had witnessed it.
“And what about you?” Sorcha asked. “Off to service in the

house of Muideart, heir to Clanranald. Soon you will be
wanting nothing more to do with your clarty old sister in the
clachan.”
“Och, away with you!” Catriona playfully pushed her sister’s

shoulder. “I shall be back at the next quarter day to help
with the slaughter.”
“Ach, you won’t be wanting to soil your fine servant’s clothes

with the pig’s blood.” Sorcha giggled. Then, growing suddenly
more serious, she added, “If you have any sense, lass, you will
fly from this life and not come back. At least as a servant, you
shall have a good roof over your head and meat in your belly.
And in the service of Clanranald you shall have the chance of
meeting a fine young gallant who will take you for his wife
and dress you in silks and ribbands and love you gently.”
Catriona fixed an imploring look on her sister’s eyes.
“I’m fearful, Sorcha.”
Sorcha shook her head and smiled at her.
“You are a capable, hardworking lass, with a pretty face and

a voice that would charm the birds from the trees. You have
nothing to be afeared o’. Just keep your hand on your
thingummy-jig…”
They both snorted and fell again into one another arms,
complicit in an old, long-standing private joke.

‘Thingummy-jig’ was a pet name they’d had since childhood
for their vaginas.
“… lest a boy comes and steals it away!” Catriona completed

the chorus.
They fell silent, the old childhood song recalling to both of

them fond memories of the life they had shared, a life that
had now come to a parting of the ways.
“I shall think of you often,” Catriona promised.
“Oh, dinna waste your thoughts. I have my fate. Attend to

your own.” Sorcha clasped both her sister’s hands in hers
and bore a solemn look into her eyes. “You have been given
a rare opportunity, Catriona. You have a chance to make
something of your life. Grasp it with both hands. Grasp it
for the two of us, and for the sake of Pa and Mither, whose
labor might finally come to mean something by having
lifted at least one of us out of the muck and mire.”
Catriona gazed at Sorcha with fondness.
“I must go,” she murmured. “I have a long walk in front

of me.”
“Aye,” Sorcha agreed, giving her a final hug. “Safe journey!”
Catriona turned and stepped towards the cottage door, the

tears pricking again at the back of her eyes.
“And mind!” Sorcha called after her. “Keep your hand tight
on your thingummy-jig…”
CHAPTER SIX
C astle Tioram sat squat on its rock in the slack gray

waters of Loch Muideart, at the confluence of the
River Seille. The sky was low and overcast, and a fine drizzle
wetted Catriona’s face and bejeweled the shawl of her
arisaid with shimmering pearls. Between her and the island
lay the long, curved sliver of a sandbar, along which a
roughly cobbled causeway stretched the quarter mile or so
to the island foreshore.
Catriona hesitated. She had reached a point of no return. It

was low-tide; shortly the tide would turn, and the waters of
the sea-loch would rush back to swallow the sandbar and
the causeway, cutting off the small island and the castle that
clung to it from the mainland. If she crossed to Castle
Tioram now, there would be no going back.
But she thought of her pa and the summons delivered by

the laird’s steward, Tamhas. There could be no going back
anyway. With a deep sigh of resignation and trepidation,

Catriona stepped out onto the causeway.
The stones were green and slippery with slime, but Catri-
ona’s bare toes provided her with a surefooted grip. A chill
breeze rose from the loch, shivering its still surface and
causing Catriona to grip the knot of her plaid tighter over
her breast. Black-headed terns skittered back and forth
across the sandbar, harvesting the snails and insects from
the tangled lines of seaweed that ran parallel to the cause-
way. Ahead of her, behind its five-sided round-angled
curtain wall, the castle itself loomed gray and brooding
against a colorless sky.
A rough grassy path led from the shore, past the ruins of a
small chapel, and up a shallow incline to the castle
entrance. Tamhas was at the gate to meet her. He looked her
up and down with a frown, clearly unimpressed by her
appearance.
“Here ye are then, lass,” he observed. He turned around into

the maw of the barrel-vaulted gate. “Come along; we shall
get ye settled in.”
Catriona followed him through the gate and into the castle
yard. It lay empty and desolate. Not a soul was to be seen
anywhere, leaving the castle with a deserted feel to it. The
drizzle had become a steady shower and puddles were
beginning to form on the cobbled surface. It was not as
Catriona had imagined it would be.
She looked around herself in wonder. It was very different

from the clachan. To her left, against the south wall, rose a
three-storied tower house with an external stair turret and
topped with crenelated ramparts. Adjacent to that, straight
Chapter Six 45
in front of her against the western wall, stood a smaller

block that housed the garrison’s quarters. The remaining
walls were crowded with a line of lean-to stables, work-
shops, and storerooms. A low-parapeted well squatted in
the center of the courtyard.
Tamhas led Catriona to the turret stair. Inside, they turned

right into a low, narrow passageway that led to the kitchen,
which was wedged between the tower and the garrison
building.
“The lassie is here,” he announced.
A big broad woman, with arms like ham shanks and hurdies
like the distant hills, stepped away from the kitchen fire,
wiping her large red hands on her apron.
“Come away ben,” she welcomed the newcomer. “I’m Peigi,

Muideart’s cook. And this…” She indicated to a small, pert,
catlike girl about Catriona’s own age, with coal-black hair
and green eyes, who was cleaning and skinning a brace of
rabbits on a broad deal table “… is Deirdre, his scullery
maid. Ye must be Catriona MacPherson. Welcome to Castle
Tioram.”
She took Catriona’s hand and crushed it warmly between

her own.
Deirdre’s jaw gaped, and amusement danced in her eyes.
“But my, will ye look at what the cat’s dragged in?” she
declared.
“Wheesht, noo!” Peigi hissed out.
Deidre stepped forward, lifted the braid from Catriona’s

breast, then let it fall.
“But where did ye find this article. Tamhas?” She snorted,

wrinkling her nose and running her eyes up and down
Catriona’s appearance with a contemptuous look. “I mean,
look at her! She’s dressed like a tink, and she’s just… filthy.”
She waved a hand at Catriona’s mud-streaked bare legs and
feet. “I can still smell the smoke of the clachan and the stink
of the byre off her. Are we to keep her with the sow?”
“That is enough!” Peigi snapped.
Deirdre gave a scornful tsk, shook her head, and turned

away to resume skinning her rabbits.
“Ye’re a fine one to talk,” Peigi continued, “with ye up to yer

elbows in rabbit guts and blood all over yer skirts and brow.
It’s not so long ago that ye were mucking out yer own
father’s byre at An Aird Mholach.”
“But we will have to make her more presentable before I

show her to the laird,” Tamhas observed. “The lass might
have put it more daintily, but she does have a point…”
Peigi cast her eye over Catriona and grimaced.
“Aye, I dare say…”
Catriona’s eyes were wide with fright, and her face had
drained of all its color.
“Och, dinna fret!” Peigi made light of the criticism. “It’s just,
ye’re not in the clachan now, doing land-work. Ye’re in
service to the laird, in the laird’s house. Yer dress is after the
Irish, whereas servant-folk dress more in the guid Scots
style. We’ll need to get ye out of that heathenlike woolen
blanket and into a fine Christian bodice and skirt. But ye’ll
need a bath first…”
Chapter Six 47
“A bath!” Catriona gasped.
“Aye, a bath.” Deirdre sneered. “Ye won’t know what a bath

is, of course. It’s where ye scrub the muck out of yer skin and
hair with soap and water.”
“Deirdre!” Peigi barked out.
She turned to Tamhas, who still stood glowering at the door.
“Tamhas, away and draw some water to warm on the fire.

Deirdre.” She turned to the latter. “Wipe yer hands and
fetch out the clothes tub and a cake of soap, while I get out
some clothes from the kist. Catriona, ye go ben the wash-
house and strip those duds from yer back. We’ll soon hae ye
looking like a proper body.”
H alf an hour later, Catriona stood shivering in her

nakedness in the cold laundry room next to the
kitchen, her arm pressed against her small breasts and a
hand covering her thingummy-jig. Peigi and Deirdre
dragged a broad wooden tub across the threshold and into
the middle of the floor.
“Ye’ll need to let yer hair down out of that heathen plait,”
Peigi told her. “We wear it loose.” She appraised Catriona’s
nut-brown tress. “It will look bonny all brushed out down
yer back.”
Deirdre glowered at Catriona’s milk-white skin and long

firm legs, her eyes darkening to a deeper shade of green.
“Now,” Peigi said, straightening her back and planting her

fists on the broad plateaus of her mountainous hips. “Just ye
stand in the tub and give yerself a good scrub with the soap
and flannel, then dip yer head and give yer hair a good
wring to get the smell of the croft-reek out of it.” She laid a
pile of clothes on a stool. “We’ll leave ye to get on in peace.”
Peigi and Deirdre withdrew, taking Catriona’s old arisaid

with them and closing the heavy door behind them.
Catriona cautiously stepped into the warm water. It lapped
soft and silky around her calves and knees. She untied the
ribband from the plait that fell over her cheek and breasts
and ran her fingers through her hair until it spread in a
thick mane across her shoulder. She squatted down and
began to cup the water over her breasts and shoulders.
She had never bathed in warm water before. In fact, she had
never bathed her whole body since she had been a wee
lassie frolicking naked in the summer burn. Once her
breasts had begun to bud and the hair had begun to sprout
between her legs, she had forsaken her nakedness and made
do with a wash from a bucket in the corner of the cottage,
and only then when her pa had absented himself.
Her womanly body was strange to her, and there, in the

unaccustomed privacy of the washhouse, she looked upon it
with curiosity, as if seeing it for the first time. She ran her
fingertips down the length of her arm and up the across the
crease of her elbow. She cupped her small, firm breast in
her hand and playfully trapped the nipple between her
fingers, smiling in surprise as it stiffened beneath her touch.
She examined her long slim thighs and let her fingers stray
to the cleft of her vagina, tracing the line of its soft lips and
thrilling at the little shock that ran through her at the touch
of it. She ran her palm over the slender contour of her hip
and across the flatness of her stomach. Her body pleased
Chapter Six 49
her. It was, she thought, a thing of grace and beauty, like a

sweet song.
After she had bathed and wrung her hair as dry as she
could, she dressed in the clothes that Peigi had left her. She
found her own bodice, along with a snowy-white linen shift
with a frilled collar, a black bodice with lace trim, a long
ankle-length gray skirt – and shoes and stockings!
Catriona had never worn shoes before. She had always gone
about the clachan barefoot. She pulled the woolen stockings
over her feet and ankles and along her calves and pushed
her feet into the unfamiliar leather. They pinched her toes
and heels, and she tottered when she stood. She found it
unnerving that she could no longer feel the ground beneath
her feet. Being shod like a horse would take some getting
used to.
There was a lot that would take getting used to in this new
life, she reflected as she trod unsteadily back towards the
kitchen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
O nce she had been approved, glowingly by Peigi,

more grudgingly by Deirdre, Tamhas led Catriona
without remark up the stair turret to the hall on the second
floor.
Catriona let out an involuntary gasp as they emerged from

the stair and into the hall. The room took up the entire
second story of the tower and formed the largest enclosed
space that Catriona had ever set eyes on. The room was
dominated by six high glassed windows that looked over the
courtyard and beyond to the broad sweep of the loch itself
and the far craggy mountains to the north. The windows left
the hall bright and airy, in contrast to the gloom of the stair
turret Catriona and Tamhas had just entered from. Sky-blue
wall hangings covered the dressed stone walls between the
windows from ceiling to floor, adding to the lightness of the
room. Set into the wall opposite the windows was a large
open fireplace with a stone mantle carved with depictions of
Chapter Seven 51
twined serpents and sea monsters. A musicians’ gallery

extended the length of the gable adjacent to the turret door,
while the opposing gable was decorated with clan trophies:
dozens of sets of stag antlers from innumerable hunts, and
the shields, swords, and daggers of vanquished enemies. In
the center of the room, surrounded by stools, sat a long oak
table on massive legs, at the far head of which stood an
imposing high-backed chair. On that chair sat Eoin, Lord of
Muideart and heir to Clanranald, pouring over some
papers.
“The MacPherson lass, my Lord,” Tamhas briefly

announced, before withdrawing down the stairs.
Eoin raised his head and gave Catriona a cursory glance. His
eyes were drifting back down to his papers when he
suddenly realized what he had seen, and his head snapped
back up again.
“Cairistiona, isn’t it?” he said, rising to his feet, his eyebrows

raised and his mouth slightly open.
“Catriona, sir,” she corrected him with a small curtsy.
He nodded and sat down again, blinking rapidly as if he

were fretting over something and clasping and unclasping
his hands on the table in front of him.
Catriona gazed at him, awestruck. She had never been this

close to gentry before – if you excepted the mhaighstir,
Dughlas Middleton. Did mhaighstirs count as gentry, she
wondered, suddenly unsure. But, in contrast to the mhaigh-
stir, she liked the look of this Muideart chiel.
He was of medium height with well-made shoulders, a thin

waist and hips, and a swarthy cast to his skin, as if he had
some foreign – French? Spanish? she wondered – blood in

him. His chestnut-brown hair was gathered back from his
finely chiseled temples and brow by a black ribband tied at
the nape of his neck. His eyes were an indeterminable cast
of brown and green. He wore a white linen shirt, loose at the
neck and cuffs, brown breeches buckled just below the
knee, and gray silk stockings. Catriona noticed that he was
wearing a belt with a loop for a sword, but no sword. He had
clearly put aside his sword as the customary symbol of
bereavement.
“Well, welcome to Castle Tioram,” he said. “A gloomy place,

I’m afraid, but I am hoping that you may be able to dispel
some of that gloom.” He smiled wanly and sighed. “My
steward, Tamhas, will have told you why I have brought
you here?”
“To look after your wee boy, Donald, sir,” she replied. “The
poor wee mite has lost his mither…”
“His mother… aye!”
A heavy weight of hopelessness seemed to settle over Eoin.

He let out a heavy sigh, and his shoulders sagged.
“My wife, Isbeil MacDonald, died in childbirth, bringing

into the world what would have been a wee brother for
Donald. That was three weeks ago, and the lad has not
spoken a word since. He has withdrawn into his grief and
endures our company only when he must; otherwise, he
spends his time alone in his chamber or wandering around
the island. I am hoping that you are the one who will bring
him out of his great despondency. I have heard good reports
about you. You are loved by children, I am told.”
Catriona was so deep in thought that she forgot herself.

Chapter Seven 53
“And you too have withdrawn yourself in your sadness to

this bare rock, with only your man, a cook, and a slattern
maid to see to your needs. Is this any place to keep a
grieving child? Would he not be better healed in the
hubbub of a busy household?”
Eoin leaped to his feet, his heavy chair scraping back on the
timber floor.
“Don’t be impertinent, you wee tinker bitch!” he roared out.
Catriona gave a start. She had not realized that she had
spoken out loud.
He placed his hands on the table and leaned over them

heavily as he struggled to compose himself.
“You forget yourself, lassie,” he continued in a quieter voice,

blinking and still quivering with emotion. “It is not your
place to criticize me; your place is to obediently carry out
my commands.”
Catriona was mortified by her own tactlessness.
“I-I’m sorry, sir,” she stammered, close to tears. “I-I should

not have spoken out of turn.”
He glanced up at her, shamefaced.
“And I am sorry for calling you… well, what I called you. I

know your father. He is a fine clansman, an honorable and
hardworking man. I would have no man, let alone myself,
cast such aspersions on his head or on those of his family.
Forgive me, if only for your father’s sake.”
Catriona was taken aback. He was speaking of her pa almost

as an equal, as a fellow child of Clanranald, a kinsman.
Bemused, she nodded acknowledgment of his apology.
“You will assume sole charge of my son. You will tend to his
care and his early learning.” He looked up sharply. “You
know your letters and numbers, I take it?”
She nodded rapidly.
“Good. I will take you up to him just now, so you can make
one another’s acquaintance.”
He walked past her to the turret door and turned to ascend

the stairs. She hurried after him in her unfamiliar shoes.
Her feet were killing her.
T hey found Donald in his father’s withdrawing room

in his private apartments on the third floor of the
tower. The six-year-old was lying on his side, his head
propped in his hand, tracing the pattern on a rug with his
finger.
“There you are, Donald,” his father said brightly. “Stand up

and say hello to your new nurse, Cairistiona…”
“Catriona,” Catriona corrected him again.
“Yes, Catriona,” Eoin repeated.
Donald struggled with reluctance to his feet and proffered a

limp hand to Catriona.
“I am very pleased to meet you.” Catriona took his hand in

hers and squeezed it gently. “You must be Donald, then?”
The boy made no reply and gazed past Catriona into the
mid-distance.
“I am new here,” Catriona continued, undeterred. “I am

Chapter Seven 55
hoping we can be friends.” She lowered her voice conspira-

torially. “You are the only young boy about the place. I shall
have no one else to play with.”
She could not be sure, but she thought she saw his eye
flicker towards her at this.
He was, she thought, the image of his pa. He had the same
chestnut-brown hair, the same dark complexion, and most
strikingly of all the same green-hazel eyes. Only, whereas
Eoin’s eyes gleamed with his troubles, Donald’s were utterly
flat and dead. It was as if the wee boy had fallen beyond
even grief.
The boy slumped back down onto the floor and resumed
tracing the pattern in the rug.
Eoin seemed about to chide him for his rudeness, but

Catriona stayed him with a touch to his arm. She flopped
down onto the floor beside Donald and tucked her legs
beneath her skirts.
“And what pictures can you see in the rug?” she asked,
tracing the pattern with her own finger. “I see… the swirl of
water from the oars of a pirate ship as it pulls through the
mouth of a sea-loch.”
Donald’s finger retraced the pattern Catriona had just traced

with hers, a pensive but guarded look on his face.
“And here,” she said, moving her finger around the lines of
another corner of the pattern, “the smoke rising from the
chapel beside the causeway. Those pirates have sacked it
and stolen all its gold plate and its jeweled Bible.”
She looked up and saw that Donald had shifted his thought-
ful, guarded look to her face.
“Do you know,” she confided in him, “I have heard tell that
Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles, intercepted the pirates
as they left the island and they had to hide their plunder
somewhere on the island itself.” She shuffled closer and put
her mouth to his ear so that Eoin wouldn’t overhear what
she had to say. “Somerled and all the Lords of the Isles
since, right down to your grandfather, Ranald, have
searched for the treasure but have never been able to find it.
I wonder where the pirates might have hidden it.”
The ghost of a smile flitted across Donald’s face. His eyes

widened at the possibility.
Catriona began to fidget. She straightened out her legs and

rubbed her shod feet together.
“You know,” she said to Donald, “these shoes are new, and
they are pinching my toes worse than the blacksmith’s
pliers.”
Donald looked at her with concern. His brow furrowed, and

his lips worked silently for a few seconds.
“Well… take them off, then,” he suggested.

CHAPTER EIGHT
H
“ is first words in the past three weeks,” Peigi
repeated with an air of wonder and amaze-
ment. “It is a miracle indeed!”
They were in the servants’ quarters, a warren of nooks and

crannies and arched storerooms on the tower’s ground floor
beneath the hall. In one of the smaller cells, among a
jumble of sacks and gear, Peigi, Deirdre, and Catriona lay on
the straw pallet they shared as a bed, a heap of woolen blan-
kets piled on top of them against the chill of early fall.
“Well,” Deirdre remarked, somewhat petulantly, “it’s not as

if he’d had the tongue torn from his head.”
“But the shock had turned it to stone,” Peigi observed.

“Catriona has restored the life to it.”
Deirdre snorted her skepticism at this.

“The poor wee soul just needs taken out of himself,”

Catriona said. “It’s like he’s become lost in a forest and is
frozen to the spot, terrified to move. He needs someone to go
into the forest to find him and lead him out.”
Deirdre snorted again.
“A damned good shake and a skelp are what he needs,”

she said, “not humoring and mollycoddling. All that soft
treatment will just encourage the wee attention-seeking
get.”
Peigi stirred, her massive frame hauling the blankets from

Catriona to leave her shivering in her shift as she rolled over
to confront Deirdre.
“And what would ye know of children, a mere slip of

a girl…?”
“And what of that slip of a girl at yer arse? She’s no older

than I am.”
Peigi considered Deirdre for a moment, slowly shaking her

large tousie head at her.
“Ye know yer trouble,” she told her darkly, in a low voice. “Ye
are an envious wee minx.”
“Envious?” Deirdre cried, sitting up and pointing at

Catriona with disdain. “Of that?”
Catriona grabbed the blankets and, with a sharp tug, pulled

them back over her body.
“Och, will the pair of ye just haud yer wheesht and go to

sleep. It’s like trying to sleep in a henhouse, with all yer
burbling and cackling.”
Chapter Eight 59
The three of them fell silent, each alone with her own
thoughts, but none of them could fall over into sleep.
“I thought there would have been more folk in the castle,”

Catriona murmured at length.
“Normally, aye,” Peigi told her. “Mostly, the men-at-arms

who lodge in the garrison. But the laird sent them all away
after his wife died, and all the servants except Deirdre,
Tamhas, and myself. That is why Deirdre and I share a bed;
it can get very gloomy and dreesome in the undercroft o’
a night.”
“The laird seems to have taken the loss of his lady sorely,”
Catriona observed in a whisper.
“Och, aye; very sairly,” Peigi whispered back. “He was

besotted with her; some may say ‘bewitched’. The marriage
had been arranged from the time he was just a wee laddie,
not much older than Donald is now. His father, the Clan-
ranald, is a great one for the diplomacy, ye see. But it was a
case of love at first sight when the couple came of age and
were brought together for the betrothal. Ah, the Lady Isbeil
was a bonny work though. Tall and slender like a silver
birch tree, with fine almost silver hair, eyes as blue as the
summer sky, softly spoken and demure. And he… well, ye
have seen him for yerself. As handsome a young man as ye
shall ever meet, gallant and true, with yon bonny brown
hair and the Italian cast to him. That’s from his grand-
mother, of course, the Lady Mariotta, whom his grandfather
brought back from his adventures in Lombardy.”
“I did wonder about the darkness of his complexion,”

Catriona said.
“Aye.” Peigi giggled and dug Catriona in the ribs with her
elbow. “And his men-at-arms used to say that he was built

like a Lombard stallion too, if ye catch my meaning.”
Catriona shifted uncomfortably on the straw pallet. A

memory of Ruairi’s engorged member cleaving her sister’s
flesh rushed into her mind.
“But anyhow,” Peigi continued, “they were a devoted couple,

Muideart and the Lady Isbeil. He doted on her. It is as if a
madness has come upon him since she was taken. I think he
blames himself for her death. She had a hard enough time
of it, pushing out wee Donald. He almost lost her then, and
she was always a wee bit delicate in her health after Donald.
I think he believes that, had he not got her with child again,
she would still be with him. Which is probably the truth
of it.”
T hey must have fallen asleep, for the next Catriona

knew was that Peigi no longer lay between herself
and Deirdre. She raised herself on her elbows and looked
around at the dark shapes that filled the room.
“If it is Peigi ye are looking for, she’ll be with Tamhas,”

Deirdre’s voice chimed in the darkness.
“Tamhas?”
“Aye. Most nights, Peigi rises to go to the garderobe for a

piss. Or so she will tell ye. But really, it is to go to Tamhas in
his bed.” Deidre giggled. “Can ye imagine it? Tamhas’ wee
white arse jigging away in that mountain of flesh…? It’s a
wonder he disna get lost in her hills and glens. And if ever
he fell into the crack of her hurdies, he’d be crushed like a
peck o’ corn between the stones o’ a mill.”
Chapter Eight 61
“And she goes to him?”
After what Catriona had witnessed between Sorcha and

Ruairi, she could not imagine any woman going willingly to
any man.
“Oh, aye,” Deirdre responded in surprise. “She’s a randie

auld cunt. She has her needs, and Tamhas seems to satisfy
them.” She reflected in silence for a moment, then gave a
little shiver. “Ugh, I canna see how though. Imagine yon wee
runt slobbering all over ye.”
She rolled over into the space that had been vacated by Peigi
and threw her arms around Catriona. Catriona stiffened.
“The maister though; he’s another matter,” Deirdre crooned.

“Can’t ye just imagine his big golden Italian prick between
yer legs…” She placed her hand between Catriona’s legs and
gave her a playful rub. “I imagine it every night. I’ve rubbed
myself that sair wi’ the thinking o’ it.”
“Stop it!”
Catriona leaped from the pallet, tugging her shift dress

down over her groin.
Deirdre eyes slowly widened in amusement.
“Ye never have!” she exclaimed in a loud whisper. “Ye have

never played with yerself, down there, have ye?”
She began to laugh. Then she stopped, and her eyes grew
even wider. A malicious grin spread across her face.
“Ye’re fearful, aren’t ye? Ye’re so fearful of having a man’s

cock in ye that ye can’t even bear to imagine it.” A fresh
thought dawned on her face. “Or is it lassies ye prefer? For if
it is, ye can play wi’ me while I dream of Muideart.”
Catriona snatched up her clothes from the stool on which

she had folded them and bolted from the room.
“You’re an evil wee bitch!” she cried at Deirdre.
“And ye’re just a frigid wee virgin,” Deirdre cried after her,
then added to herself, “And here was me fearing that ye’d be
vying wi’ me for the maister’s attention.”
CHAPTER NINE
T
playmates.
he days passed into weeks, and Catriona and
Donald became ever closer and fonder
They began by tracing more and ever more complex stories

in the swirls of the rug in the withdrawing room. Then
Catriona asked Donald to show her the island, which he
was delighted to do.
They spent whole mornings and afternoons, come rain,

hail, or sunshine, scrambling over the four rocky outcrops
that constituted Eilean Tioram, exploring its rugged coast-
line and small beaches, and the sandbar and marshland
that joined the island to the mainland at low-tide. They
played in the chapel ruins and around the old smokehouse
down by the shoreline beyond the curtain wall and spied on
the seabirds as they wheeled and soared and dove in the
wind that whipped the broad surface of the loch into
choppy waves. When the weather was impossible, they
played in the hall and private apartments and delved into

every nook and crevice in the passageways of the tower.
As his confidence in her grew, Donald gradually opened up,

revealing more and more of himself to his playmate, both
directly in their conversation and indirectly through the
tales they acted out, tales of pirates and princesses and
buried treasure and knights and great chieftains. However,
there yet remained a core of sullen withdrawal from which
Catriona could not coax him out of.
One day, while they were playing on the rug and they were
each silently tracing their own dreams in the pattern,
Donald suddenly announced:
“You can never be my mother.”
Catriona gave a start.
“What do you mean, Donald, my pet?”
Donald continued to follow the route of his thoughts with

his finger on the rug.
“My father brought you here to be my new mother because

my mother has gone away. But you can never be my mother,
even though my mother is no longer here.”
Catriona looked at him seriously. She took his hands, pulled

him around to face her, and gazed steadily into his eyes. His
face bore a solemn, somber look, a look of profound
sadness.
“I know I can never be your mother,” she said slowly and

deliberately. “And I wouldn’t even pretend to be or want to
be. I am your friend, not your mother.”
Donald thought about this for a moment.

Chapter Nine 65
“Where is my mother?” he asked, a look of desperate

longing in his eyes. “Father said she had to go away and
won’t ever be coming back, and that’s that. Why can’t she
ever be coming back? Does she not love me anymore?”
A bolt of shock shot through Catriona’s body. Surely to

goodness they had told the boy that his mother was dead.
Surely, someone had spoken to the boy and explained.
She placed her hand on his chest.
“Your mother has gone nowhere. She is still here, in you, in

your heart, where she has always been. She flows around
your whole body, in your veins, in your blood. She will
always be here with you, Donald, always. And you can
always speak to her, whenever you like.”
Donald’s eyes shown as if he had experienced some great

revelation, an epiphany.
“Oh, but I do speak to her,” he said, as if realizing it for the

first time. “I speak to her all the time. She always sounds so
sad....” He listened for a moment. “But now she sounds
happy!”
He leaped up and threw himself into Catriona’s arms, and

tears sprang to her eyes.
B ehind the door of the withdrawing room, Eoin stood

in the passageway, eavesdropping on Donald and
Catriona. A single teardrop traced a line down his cheek.
What Catriona had just said to Donald was the most heart-
achingly beautiful thing he had ever heard, even more beau-
tiful than the lullabies she sang to his son to help him fall
asleep.
He thought about going in and sweeping both of them into

his arms, Catriona in gratitude, Donald in love, but he did
not want to intrude on their moment of intimacy, which
would be so healing for Donald. Instead, he carried on
along the passage to his chamber.
He closed the door behind him. She really was the most
remarkable lass. Barely a child herself, she had an adult’s
wisdom and a gift with children. He had done well to have
brought her there. It lifted his spirits slightly to think that he
had at last done something right by his son. Since Isbeil had
been taken, he had been unmanned. He had Tamhas to
thank for holding together what remained of his household
and for carrying out his day-to-day affairs; now he had
Catriona to thank for saving his Donald from drowning in
his grief and despair.
They would get through this yet.
She was also a fine-looking lass, though he immediately

chided himself for this last thought. She was young, only
half his age, and it was unbecoming, he knew, to be thinking
of her in that way, with his Isbeil not long in her grave. But
he could not help but admire her neat form, the slimness of
her hips, the shimmering nut-brown tresses that fell down
her back as far as her waist, her smooth milk-white
complexion and her dark eyes. He also found attractive her
quiet modesty and lack of artfulness, in contrast to that
scullery maid, Deirdre or Dorcas or whatever her name was,
who was forever flashing her feral eyes at him and waving
her pert tail at him like a cat in heat.
He had been meaning to speak to Tamhas about her.

CHAPTER TEN
W ith Donald abed and sleeping the sleep of

the just, Catriona threw a shawl over her
shoulders and took herself down to the shore for some time
to herself.
She wandered east alone the seaward-facing shore until she

reached the sandbar. Dusk was falling. The tide was rushing
in and, already, the causeway was several feet under water,
cutting the island off from the mainland. She looked long-
ingly to where the River Seille poured its strong stream into
Loch Muideart and thought of her people three miles
upstream at Ath Tharracail. She wondered how her mither
was managing with the work alone, now that both her
daughters had been plucked from her nest, and if her pa
was behaving himself and keeping his big mouth shut. She
thought of Sorcha. The summer was over, and Ruairi would
have returned home from the shieling. She hoped that her
sister was bearing up under the lovemaking, such a brutal

business it was.
So wrapped she was in her own thoughts that she did not
see or hear her master come up behind her.
“Good evening, Catriona,” he greeted her.
She gave a jump and clamped her fist to her throat.
Eoin frowned.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Catriona recomposed herself.
“No, sir. There is no need to apologize.” She waved a hand in

front of her face and gave a small nervous smile. “I was away
in a dwam.”
“Homesick?” he conjectured, giving a nod in the direction of

the river.
“A wee bit, sir.” She smiled coyly. “I am thinking on my

people back at the clachan, and the troubles they have.”
Eoin laughed.
“Always thinking of others,” he observed. “Do you ever

think of yourself?”
“All the time, sir, for they are the same thing. As the future
Clanranald, you must know that, sir. You are your people,
and they are you.”
Eoin stared at her in round-eyed astonishment.
“Quite!”
They fell silent for a few moments. She gazed out across the
Chapter Ten 69
loch, narrowing her eyes against the blustery sea breeze,

while he watched how that same breeze whipped her hair
restlessly about her throat and cheeks.
“I came down to thank you for the grand job you have done
with Donald,” he resumed. “He is almost back to his old self
again, the way he was before… well…”
Catriona turned her eyes on him, hooking her hair back

over her shoulder.
“Ah, but he is not the same; nor can he ever be the same wee
boy again. He has lost his mother…”
“Aye, but he seems to have found her again – sort of – with

your assistance.”
She gave him an enquiring look, edged with annoyance.
“Have you been spying on us, sir?”
Eoin shuffled uncomfortably, unable to meet her eye.
“I only overheard what you said to him this afternoon.”
“You were spying on us!”
“Och, I wouldn’t say ‘spying’. That’s putting it a bit too

strongly. ‘Eavesdropping’ maybe…” He dismissed his quib-
bling with a curt sweep of his hand. “Whatever, I just
wanted to say, ‘Thank you!’ Your words have helped the boy
no end.” He met her eyes with his, and they glowed with
sincerity. “They have also helped me.”
She bobbed a little curtsy.
“Thank you, sir; I am glad.”
A smattering of raindrops blew in on the breeze.

“We should be getting back,” he suggested. “It feels like rain

is coming. And, anyway, it will soon be dark. Shall we walk
back along the sand?”
“As you please, sir,” she replied, then hesitated. “Only…”
“What…?” He caught himself just before he added

‘my dear’.
“Would you mind if I took these damned shoes off?”
He roared with laughter.
“You can throw them into the loch for all I care!” he
declared.
She sat down on a rock and unbuckled her shoes. Then

she hitched up her skirt and began to peel down her
stockings. Eoin caught himself admiring the smooth
gleam of her slim white calves in the dusk. Catriona
balled the stockings and stuffed them into one of
her shoes.
“There.” She sighed, standing up and working her toes into

the sand. “That is better.”
They began to walk along the narrow strip of beach towards

the darkening mass of Castle Tioram. They strolled with
leisure; neither of them seemed to be in any hurry to end
their encounter.
“You know,” Catriona said carefully, “I meant what I said at

our first meeting. Donald has not just lost his mother; he
seems to have lost his father as well, you have become so
distant towards him.”
She glanced aside at him, fearing the same reaction that he

had given to her observation at that first meeting, but he just
Chapter Ten 71
hung his head and watched his boots kick up little plumes
of dry sand.
“You should play more with him,” Catriona continued. “It

will strengthen your bond by giving you a place in the new
story Donald is weaving for himself. We all need to make
stories of our lives. It is those stories that carry us into the
future. You want to be part of Donald’s future, don’t you?”
“Of course, I do,” he grumbled out.
“Donald has made a story-world for himself, coloring the

features of the island with his own fantasy, and acting out
those fantasies to see where his imagination might lead him.
In his grief, his mother has become the princess he must
defend from being abducted by marauding pirates. He acts
out this story over and over again, in an attempt to stave off
losing her altogether.”
“But you have succeeded in giving her back to him, with that
little story about her living in his heart.”
She stopped and shook her head at him in astonished

disbelief.
“That was not a story; that was the truth. Isbeil still dwells in
his heart, as she does in yours. Do you not understand? Go
on! Deny the reality of it. Do you not feel the reality of Isbeil
alive in your heart?”
“I feel her only as an absence,” he replied, his voice crack-

ing. “A painful absence.”
“And do you want to be nothing more than an absence in

wee Donald’s life?” she insisted. “A painful absence?”
Eoin stopped walking and put his hand up to his face to

cover his eyes. His shoulders shook. Catriona realized that

he was weeping.
Without thinking, she stepped towards him and took him in

her arms. After a brief hesitation, as if he were trying to
resist the onslaught of his tears and the transgression of
accepting comfort from a social inferior, he buried his face
in her shoulder and released his emotion. He clung to her,
his hands clutching the fabric of her shawl, drawing her
against him, as if she were the last hope of a drowning man,
while she rubbed his broad shoulders through the satin of
his fine coat.
They stood like that for a long time, as the darkness fell, and
a rising gale drove rain and spume from the surface of the
loch against them on the rocky shore.
Meanwhile, Deirdre watched from the high windows of the

tower, her arms wrapped around her stomach, nursing a
wrath that had her half-stooped in pain.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
T he next morning, Catriona and Donald were

playing by the old smokehouse, where the
herring used to be kippered for the castle stores, but which
by then stood empty and abandoned, still reeking of the
peat smoke that had cured the fish. It sat in a shallow gully
in the lee of the castle wall, a stone’s throw from a small
sandy cove.
Donald was engaged in combat with a party of pirates, who

had beached their galley in the cove and were besieging the
smokehouse, which, in Donald and Catriona’s world, had
become Donald’s keep, an outpost of Argyll, Somerled’s
Kingdom of the Isles. The pirates, of course, were North-
men, privateers of King Haakon of Norway, armed with
spears and battle-axes, whom Donald was driving back into
the sea with his little wooden sword.
Suddenly, Eoin appeared. He was wearing a sleeveless

leather jerkin over a snowy white sark and trews of the
Clanranald check. He scrambled down into the gully from

the small postern gate at the rear of the castle and presented
himself to Donald and Catriona.
“Good morning, Donald,” he declared. “Muideart, at your

service.” He gave a curt bow.
Catriona smiled.
“Och, Muideart will not do,” she trilled. “You shall be

Magnus Barefoot, King Haakon’s trusted lieutenant, who
has led this raiding party on Castle Tioram to capture the
Holy Grail, which Lord Somerled has entrusted to the care
of Donald, captain of Castle Tioram.”
Catriona slid a short rudely-fashioned wooden sword into

the still bereft loop on his belt, then grinned and pointed at
his shod feet.
“You shall have to take your shoes off, Barefoot!”
Donald, as if on cue, began to make darting feints at Bare-

foot with his sword.
Eoin drew and parried with his own sword as he hopped

around the sward, struggling to tug off his shoes and
stockings.
“Yield, Magnus Barefoot!” Donald commanded.
“Never!” Eoin rejoined, casting his footwear onto the gully

bank and setting to in earnest.
The two danced around each other, thrusting and parrying,

with shouts and catcalls. Donald’s features were set in a
frown of grim determination, while Eoin’s face began to
flush slightly with the effort and the excitement of the fray.
Twice, Donald almost succeeded in slicing Eoin’s
Chapter Eleven 75
hamstrings with his wooden blade, but twice Eoin

succeeded in deflecting the blow. At any time he wished,
Eoin could have lopped Donald’s head from his shoulders,
but instead, he played his part as the hapless invader.
Donald inexorably drove Eoin back towards his beached

galley. At one point, Eoin slipped and fell to his knee
beneath the onslaught of Donald’s blows. But, leaning back,
he managed to fend off the rain of downward cuts from
Donald’s sword to his head and shoulders and struggle back
to his feet.
“Quit our land!” Donald demanded shrilly, as the surf began

to wash over Eoin’s feet and ankles.
“I shall!” Eoin cried. “But not before I seize my prize.”
With that, he darted around Donald, and wrapping his arm

around Catriona’s thighs, hoisted her over his shoulder.
Catriona screamed, then fell to giggling, as Eoin swung her

around, her legs kicking the air and her small fists
pummeling his back.
“Put me down, you beast! Help me, Donald, help me. The
Northmen are carrying me away into slavery.”
Donald’s eyes rounded in horror; his blood ran cold. Then

his features contorted in fury; his nostrils flared, his face
turned puce, and tears of rage sprung to his eyes. He emitted
a shrill blood-curdling scream.
“Dh' aindeoin co theireadh e!”
The slogan of the Clanranald: ‘Gainsay me who dares!’
Donald redoubled his attack, cutting and stabbing at Eoin’s

legs with vicious ferocity. With his right arm clasped tightly
around Catriona’s thighs, Eoin could only parry with his

weaker left hand, and it proved an inadequate defense.
Donald was like a child possessed. His lips curled back to
reveal gritted teeth, each blow was delivered with a
desperate sob, and his eyes rolled wildly with an unfocused
madness.
Eoin blanched at the frenzy of his son’s attack. He set

Catriona down and shifted his toy sword to his right hand,
while Catriona knelt and enveloped Donald in a smothering
embrace.
“There, there,” she crooned, clasping his face between her

hands and kissing his hair. “It is only a game. Your father did
not mean me any harm. We are all safe. Safe!”
Donald gradually regained control of his emotion. He threw

his head back, and tears of tortured anguish flowed down
his burning cheeks from beneath his tightly shut eyelids.
“Wheesht, wheesht…” Catriona continued, as Eoin looked

on aghast.
Then Donald suddenly pushed Catriona aside, cast his

wooden sword away, turned on his heel, and went scam-
pering off, back up the shallow gully towards the castle.
“What in God’s name…?” Eoin began in a hollow voice.
Catriona shook her head and bit her lip.
“You should not have laid hands on me,” was all she said.
“
I s the wee man alright now?” Peigi asked with concern as
Catriona entered the kitchen.
Chapter Eleven 77
With a deep sigh, Catriona sat herself down on the settle

bench beside the fire.
“Aye, he is sleeping now, the poor wee soul,” she reported.

“He is exhausted.”
Peigi turned the dough on the broad kitchen table, casting it

down with a loud slap.
“What on earth came over the laddie? He fairly flew at his

father, ye say?”
Catriona stared into the flames.
“Aye, with his wee wooden sword. It’s just as well it wasn’t a
real one, else the wee mite would have hacked his father to
pieces.”
Peigi worked the dough with her massive red fists, her
bulbous breasts rolling ponderously beneath the fabric of
her apron.
“The laddie has been sairly troubled since he lost his

mother…”
“Maybe he thought he was about to lose his false mother

too.” Deirdre sneered from the corner, where she was
plucking from her apron the eggs she had lately collected
and placing them into a large earthenware bowl.
Catriona shot her a look of panic.
Peigi paused her pummeling of the dough.
“That is a wicked thing to say!” Peigi declared in a shocked

voice.
Deirdre’s expression fell into a smug, self-satisfied look as

she continued carefully transferring the eggs from apron

to bowl.
“All I am saying is that maybe he thought he was about to

lose his playmate to another, to a rival. There has been a lot
of that recently, playmates being taken from below-stairs.”
Peigi rested her knuckles on the table and glowered at

Deirdre.
“And what do ye mean by that?” she rumbled out.
Deirdre threw a quick knowing smile at Catriona.
“So… for instance…” she revealed, closing one eye and

squinting up into a corner of the ceiling, taking her time,
savoring to the last drop the nervous anticipation she was
causing the two women. “What have ye been doing in the
good rooms up the stair in the middle of the night, Peigi
Campbell? I trust ye are not up to any hochmagandy with
our Tamhas, though the very thought of that turns my
stomach.”
Peigi snorted and returned to kneading her dough, as if

Deirdre’s insinuation was not worth the penny of a
response.
“And what about ye, sweet innocent Catriona from the

clachan? Did ye let the master get a good feel of ye up yer
skirts when he hoisted ye down by the smokehouse? And in
front of his wee laddie. Have ye no shame? No wonder the
laddie went mad! And who was that I spied, canoodling
doon by the causeway yesterday? Ye had a’ but your hand
doon his breeks, ye dirty wee whore.”
“That’s enough, Deirdre MacLauchlan!” Peigi slammed her

fist down on the table, causing the flour shaker to jump.
Chapter Eleven 79
“‘That’s enough, that’s enough…!’” Deirdre mimicked. “Is

that what poor Tamhas shouts when ye’re giving him yer
stinking hole? Yon hole must gawp as wide as Fingal’s Cave
with the whole garrison o’ soldiers that have passed
through it!”
Peigi took two long strides across the kitchen flags and
caught Deirdre an almighty clatter across the jaw with her
open hand.
The eggs flew, the bowl shattered on the flagstones, and

Deirdre sprawled across the floor. Rising to a crouch, Deidre
let out a hiss and flew at Peigi like the baudrons, with her
fingers curled and her claws unsheathed. Peigi caught her
another clatter, sending Deirdre sprawling again. Without a
word, Peigi calmly returned to her bread-making, as if
nothing had happened.
A strong, deep voice rang from the doorway.
“Deirdre, lass,” Tamhas intoned calmly, “away and collect

yer things. I shall be returning ye to yer father at An Aird
Mholach. Ye are of no use to us here.”
He turned on his heel and went to fetch his horse from the
stable.
Weeping with bitterness, Deirdre skulked from the

kitchen.
Catriona sat on the settle, her face buried in her hands. Peigi
covered her dough with a linen cloth to prove and, wiping
her hands on her apron, went over and sat down beside her.
She contemplated the fire for a few moments, then threw
her thick arm around Catriona’s shoulders and drew her
into her considerable breast.
“Is it true, what she said?” she asked. “Has the maister taken
ye to his bed?”
“No, no!” Catriona protested with a shudder, as if the very

idea repelled her. “Yesterday evening, on the beach, he
became distressed at the thought of his wife and child,
and… well, I comforted him. And he consoled me; I was
feeling that homesick.”
Peigi sighed.
“Aye, well… Just watch yerself, that is all I am saying. The

maister… well, he is in a vulnerable state and might easily
fall for the charms of a bonny young lass like yerself. He
may just be seeking comfort, but comfort can easily lead to
other things. If he were to get ye with child, lass, ye would
be cast out onto the road. There are no two ways about it. He
is the laird, and you are the servant; even if he was so
minded, for that reason alone, I doubt he could make an
honest woman of ye. Forby, I’m sure the Clanranald shall
have designs for him – another marriage that would bring
advantage to the clan. He would never endure his son taking
a servant lass, except as a plaything.”
Catriona nodded into Peigi’s breast and remembered

Sorcha. She would keep a protective hand on her
maidenhood.
CHAPTER TWELVE
T hat evening, Catriona returned to the little bay by

the smokehouse to watch the sun set over the
western end of the loch. When she arrived, she found Eoin
sitting on a rock by the shore, tossing pebbles into the gently
lapping waves.
“Ah, good evening, Catriona,” he said, rising to his feet to

greet her before she could make her escape.
“Good evening, sir.” She curtsied.
He looked out across the loch at the flame-red clouds on the

horizon, where the loch met the sea, flanked by the towering
silhouettes of the mountains.
“It is a fine sight, is it not?” he said. “The beauty of it makes

your heart soar.”
“It does indeed, sir,” Catriona replied, looking awkwardly

and self-consciously at her feet.
“Donald is doing well,” Eoin observed after a pause. “You

have fairly brought him out of himself. He seems devoted
to you.”
He smiled as he remembered the ferocity with which

Donald had defended his princess that morning.
“He is a brave wee lad,” Catriona said, raising her eyes with
a scolding look. “He has suffered greatly with the loss of his
mother and the poor wee mite has been left too long to
endure that suffering by himself.”
Eoin lowered his eyes, chastened.
“I know,” he murmured. “I have been a poor father to him in

his time of need. I have been selfish, thinking only of my
own sorrow.” He looked up. “But I realize that now and I am
ready to spend more time with the boy. You have helped me
much too.”
Catriona colored and looked away to the far distance, to the

dark, rugged outline of the mountains. The clouds had
thickened, she noticed, and were slowly creeping in from
the west. Her countrywoman’s eye told her they would be
bringing rain in from the ocean.
“I have seen you down by the loch often in the evenings,”

Eoin said.
Catriona’s heart gave a start. Had he been watching her?
“You seem very melancholy, gazing out over the waters,” he

continued. “Are you really that homesick?”
Catriona chose her words carefully.
“I do miss the clachan, and my family of course,” she

confessed with hesitancy. “I often think of what they will be
Chapter Twelve 83
doing and how my mither will be managing without her

daughters.”
“You have sisters?”
“Aye, one. Sorcha, her name is. She is handfasted to our

neighbor’s son, Ruairi Mor, Big Ruairi Murray.”
Eoin reflected on this.
“So, she shall be living in the Murray household. And, with

you gone, that shall leave your mother alone with the work
of the croft.”
Catriona gave a long heavy sigh.
“Aye, sir. And she is not getting any younger in years.”
“Well,” Eoin said with decisiveness, “that is easily remedied.

I shall call on the clan to send a dowerless daughter to live
with your mother and father, to help them with the work. It
shall be another mouth for them to feed, but she shall be
earning her keep.”
Catriona’s face lit up with a smile, and her whole body

relaxed as if a great weight had been shifted from her
shoulders.
“Thank you, sir. That is a great relief.”
It was Eoin’s turn to color. He looked away bashfully.
“It is nothing compared to the relief you have brought to

Donald – and to myself.”
He looked at her with meaning. Their eyes met, and some-

thing intimate passed between them, something like a
secret, a complicity, an understanding.
Suddenly, large drops of rain plopped onto their heads and

shoulders. Out of nowhere, a violent squall rushed over the
surface of the loch and enveloped them in its fury. The rain
came pelting down.
Catriona quickly covered her head with her shawl and

turned to run back up to the castle.
Eoin stayed her with a hand on her arm.
“We’ll be soaked before we reach the track,” he shouted

through the roar of the gale. “Quick, let’s take shelter in
here. It is just a squall; it will be pass in a few minutes.”
He pulled open the door of the old smokehouse and, with a

hand on her back, pushed Catriona inside. He hurried in
after her and closed the door. They were immediately
engulfed by the darkness of the windowless room.
She could hear his breathing close to her ear and feel the
warmth of his body emanating from him. She could not see
but could sense his broad chest rising and falling only
inches in front of her. Butterflies took flight in her tummy,
and her own breath came in short, shallow gasps.
He shifted and stumbled in the darkness. She gave a start

and a little cry as he grasped her upper arm to steady
himself. The hand immediately withdrew, and she found
herself strangely regretting its absence.
They stood in silence, each trying to control their breathing.

A trickle of rainwater scurried down Catriona’s brow and
along the length of her nose. Then the hand returned, to
rest gently on her upper arm, midway between shoulder
and elbow, and remained there.
“Sir…” she said.

Chapter Twelve 85
“Catriona,” he whispered.
He drew her onto his chest, and an arm came across her
shoulders. She turned her cheek to his chest and snuggled
into his tentative embrace. A face nuzzled her hair and
dropped a light kiss on the top of her head. She wrapped
her arms around Eoin’s waist and held fast to the safety and
security of him.
His hand left her arm and fingertips began to lightly stroke
her cheek. She closed her eyes and moved her cheek against
them. The butterflies in her tummy fluttered down into her
groin, and she shifted her legs. This was a new and strange
sensation for her, and it felt to her a little like it did when a
warm summer breeze passed over her skin and stirred her
skirts against her legs.
Eoin pulled her down to the floor and pushed her back
against one of the wooden smoking racks. The room
smelled of burnt peat, rich and aromatic. His hands began
to hunch her skirt upward.
“No, sir!” she whimpered, feeling at the same time both

desire and revulsion, anticipation and fear.
Images of Sorcha, weeping and bleeding over the fallen log

in the clearing of the White Stag Wood, while the wild-eyed
Ruairi mounted her roughly from behind and plunged his
cock into her over and over and over again, flashed before
her in the darkness. At the same time, however, she felt an
irresistible craving for… what, she could not tell.
“Catriona,” Eoin implored softly.
Tears sprang to Catriona’s eyes.
“I’m fearful, sir,”

He ran the back of his fingers along her cheek, gently

sweeping her tears away.
“There is no cause to be scared, lass. I’ll be gentle.”
He lifted her higher onto the sloping rack, eased her skirt
down over her slight hips and let it slip from her legs to the
floor. He lifted her legs onto his shoulders, and she felt his
lips in the hollow behind her knee. Her tension melted, and
she felt a warm wave ripple through her flesh. His tongue
ran up the inside of her thigh, and she shivered as his lips
settled like a honeybee on the petals of her rose.
She ran her fingers through his hair as his lips nibbled
gently at the delicate folds of her flesh and his tongue began
to probe between them. His fingers raked the short, thick
reddish-brown hair of her pubes and swept across the flat-
ness of her stomach. A delicious yearning grew in her
tummy, like a hunger that was about to be satiated.
Eoin rose from between her legs.
“Do you trust me, lassie?”
“Yes!” Catriona breathed out after a moment’s pause.
“Do you want this?”
There was another hesitation, then…
“Yes,” Catriona replied.
He began to unlace the front of her bodice. Her eyes had

become accustomed to the darkness, and she could see, by
the thin sliver of light that seeped in from beneath the door,
his ghostly head and shoulders moving in the gloom. She
reached up with both hands and grasped the topmost spar
of the timber rack on which she was lying as the bodice fell
Chapter Twelve 87
away. He drew her sark over her head and arms, and she lay
naked in front of him.
By the dim light, he could see the slim, willowy shape of her
body and the dark scatter of her long tresses where they fell
across the timber slats. The paleness of her skin was broken
only by the dark areolae of her small breasts and the narrow
slash of hair between her legs.
He quickly discarded his own clothing and stood over her.

Catriona’s body flooded with desire at the sight of his broad
hairless chest, the well-defined muscles of his arms and
shoulders, and the ripple of his flat stomach. But she
recoiled at the sight of the long rigid cock protruding from
between his legs.
He saw her anxiety.
“It’s alright, lass. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”
He reached down and cupped one of her breasts in his

palm, lightly flicking his soft thumb over its nipple. She
shuddered as the thumb of his other hand began stroking
the slit of her vagina. He leaned over her and took her other
nipple into his mouth, suckling on it gently and running his
tongue around the puckered skin. Pulses of pleasure lapped
through her body and flooded her vagina with wetness.
He removed his hand from between her legs, and she felt
the head of his cock nuzzling her entrance. She tensed and
let out a frightened whimper.
“Relax, lassie, relax,” Eoin crooned as he began to push

gently but firmly against her maidenhead.
She clenched her eyes shut in anticipation of the searing

pain and gripped the smoke rack tightly. But the agony
never came. There was a small ‘nip’ as he slowly slipped

inside her, no worse than the nick of a thistle on a
bare ankle.
She opened her eyes in wonderment. She felt his hardness

fill her and a swirl of warm pleasure radiating through her
body from its focus. She reached forward and clung to his
narrow hips, drawing him deeper into her.
“Is that alright, lass?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she hissed out in reply. “Yes!”
He began to move slowly inside her, looping his arms

beneath her legs to clutch her hips to him with his hands.
“Oh, faster!” she sobbed, thrusting her own hips against his
in frantic impatience.
He increased the rhythm, bending his knees to angle his

cock deeper. She shook with pleasure as his hips crashed
against hers. He brought his hand back to her pubes and
raked the hair with his fingers while his thumb pressed and
massaged her clitoris. Catriona bucked and screamed. He
felt the head of his cock swell and tingle and start to
explode. At the last moment, he slipped from her, and his
cock jerked spasmodically in the air as he spurted his seed
all over her stomach.
Catriona grasped his penis and held it possessively to her

pubes, as the aftermath of her own climax flooded over her.
She lay back on the spars of the smoke rack, utterly spent,
her breath coming in deep, rapid gasps. Sweat from Eoin’s
brow dripped onto her stomach and breasts.
“Was that good?” he panted out.

Chapter Twelve 89
“It was awful, unbearable,” she sobbed. “But in a nice way. A

very nice way.”
He knelt and embraced her. She clung to him and rested her
head in the crook of his neck.
“I think the rain has stopped,” he observed.
She listened.
“Aye! You can hear the birds complaining about how

drenched they got!”
“So you can.” He laughed, then added ruefully, “We really

should be getting back. Peigi will be fretting.”
“That we should, sir,” Catriona agreed.
She slid from the smoke rack and began to gather up her
clothes in the semi-darkness.
“And you can stop calling me ‘sir’,” Eoin told her.
Catriona considered this for a moment.
“I think I should keep calling you that, for appearances’

sake,” she concluded. “Otherwise, what would people say,
me just a wee tink lass from the clachan and you so recently
widowed and all?”
Eoin frowned but said nothing.
C atriona lingered by the smokehouse after Eoin left to

return to the castle so that they would not be seen
returning together.
The sward was damp after the squall, with drops of rain-
water beading the gray-green tufts of marram grass that

fringed the sandy cove.
Catriona wrapped her arms around her middle, closed her

eyes and lifted her face to the deepening sky. She felt… just
right, she decided. For the past few weeks, she had felt
adrift, cut loose from the certainties of her old life, no longer
the Catriona of the clachan and not sure where she was
going or what would become of her. Now, she felt as if she
had drifted into a safe haven.
She remembered Eoin’s embrace following their lovemak-

ing. He had not just used her then cast her aside like an old
clout or rag when he was done with her. He had drawn her
to him, and she had felt warm and safe in his arms. And the
lovemaking itself had not been as forced and brutish as she
had feared it would, as Ruairi’s lovemaking had been with
Sorcha; it had been sweet and gentle and had made her
soul, as well as her flesh, soar like a laverock singing its wee
heart out in the heavens.
Wanting to savor the bliss of the moment for a little longer,

Catriona turned and began to walk along the southern land-
ward shore of Eilean Tioram towards the sandbar. She
skirted the ruined chapel, its gray tumbledown walls
streaked with plumes of wet from the earlier rain. An owl
flew out from its broken tower, its white face a specter in the
twilight.
The tide was out, and the gleaming sand stretched away on
either side of the causeway. Silver ribbons of water twisted
through the marshy mudflat that fringed the mainland.
Catriona reflected that there was nothing to stop her from
leaving the island, from simply walking across the sandbar
and disappearing into the big wide world beyond. But she
Chapter Twelve 91
knew she would stay; although her head told her otherwise,
her heart told her that Eilean Tioram was where she
belonged at that moment, where her destiny lay. She also
knew that destiny was still uncertain.
As she gazed across the sandbar to the opposite shore, she

saw a flash of white flit at the edge of the woodland. She
peered into the dusk and then suddenly drew in a gasp. A
white stag had emerged from the trees and now stood on
the shingle, with its proud head raised and staring straight
at her.
The old superstitions came tumbling into Catriona’s head. It

was an auspicious moment, there was no doubt about it, but
what it portended was by no means clear or unambiguous
to her. What message did Flidais bring from the other-
world? Was it a sign that she had transgressed a taboo? Or
did it signal that the time had come for her to pursue what
might prove an elusive destiny?
What should she do, now that she had tasted of the
forbidden fruit?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
T he following morning, Tamhas came into the

kitchen and announced that Catriona had to
gather her gear and move to a room in ‘the maister’s apart-
ments’, to be closer to Donald who was still having occa-
sional nightmares.
Tamhas delivered his errand shortly and impassively, but

his dour tone was laced with an almost imperceptible hint
of disapproval. As soon as his duty had been discharged, he
turned on his heel and walked briskly from the room.
Peigi said nothing, but her silence spoke volumes to Catri-

ona, whose ears burned as she moved around below stairs
to gather her few possessions together.
Thereafter, Catriona spent less and less time with Peigi in

the kitchen and more and more with Eoin and Donald in
the hall and the private apartments above. Catriona began
taking her meals with Eoin and Donald at the great table in
Chapter Thirteen 93
the hall, though she was mortified by having Peigi and

Tamhas serve her. She acknowledged this to Peigi soon after
the new dining arrangements had begun, but Peigi just
dismissed Catriona’s concerns with a flap of her large hand.
“It is how the maister wants things,” she said. “And it is not
like ye ‘lady’ it over us with airs and graces. Ye have the good
grace to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and ye have yet to snap
yer fingers at us as if we were a pair o’ wee dogs.” She
leveled a warning look at Catriona. “But if ye ever do, I shall
clatter the head from those bonnie shoulders of yers.”
However, the arrangement clearly rankled both Peigi and

Tamhas. Their disapproval of their master’s behavior hung
like a dark cloud in the air. Catriona had no doubt that they
muttered about it between the two of them when they
were alone.
Eoin had also taken to going to Catriona in her room at

nights. During these visits, the pretense they had to
publicly maintain as master and servant for the sake of
appearances could be cast aside. Their lovemaking
became ever more equal and adventurous. Catriona
explored and experimented with their bodies, discovering
new joys and sensations. She was particularly fascinated
by Eoin’s cock, which she stroked and tasted and clutched
like a little girl who had been given a new toy. She loved to
slide the foreskin back to reveal its smooth rounded head,
and to dab the tip of her pinkie finger and her tongue into
its little eye. She would giggle when her explorations
resulted in him ejaculating a jet of warm white semen over
her hand and wrist or into her hair and face. And when he
took her, he took her gentle and tender. And when she
took him, she rode him lithely like an elven queen, until
he bucked and kicked like a foal turned loose in the spring

pasture.
On the nights that he did not visit, Catriona hungered for him
and thrilled at the risk they were taking. She still dreaded the
ruin that could befall her. They were careful not to spill his
seed inside her, but it occasionally happened, especially
when she lost herself in the frenzied pleasure she took in
him. She knew that they could have no future together, that
his destiny as the prospective Clanranald precluded a lasting
happiness for her, but she lived for the moment that her loins
erupted in ecstasy and she melted into the forgetfulness of
her climax. Such moments became the culmination of her
life, and she cared not what lay beyond those moments.
Eoin, on the other hand, was more pragmatic. While

Catriona spent her days in trembling anticipation of their
next bout of lovemaking, Eoin schemed about how he might
contrive a life for them – he, she, and little Donald. He felt
guilty at his ‘betrayal’ of his sweet Isbeil, not long in her
grave, but he reasoned that she would want both he and her
son to be happy rather than miserable in a lasting grief. He
did not care what the world might think of him, taking a
servant girl and clachan ‘tink’ to his bed for his mate; he
was, after all, Muideart, heir to Clanranald and future Lord
of the Isles – he rose in his nobility far above the judgment
and criticism of the lave. The only thing he feared was the
wrath of the Clanranald, his father, who had his own
designs on Eoin’s future and who would no doubt disown
him if Eoin did anything that would thwart those designs.
The nub of Eoin’s problem was the Clanranald and how he
could win his father’s consent to his making a future with
Catriona, or else make a life with Catriona outside the clan.
Chapter Thirteen 95
Whatever the solution, he was determined to make a life

with her, however.
“I do love you, Catriona,” he assured her one morning, as

the light seeped into a murky October morning sky beyond
the window and she lay languid in the crook of his arm in
the bed in her chamber, stroking the smooth skin that
stretched across the firm muscles of his chest. “Even if it
means giving up my birthright and forsaking my family.
You, Donald and I are all the family I desire.”
“Wheesht, Eoin,” Catriona crooned sleepily. “The Clan-

ranald shall never allow it. Let us just enjoy the present we
have. Let us not spoil it by worrying about the future.”
Eoin twirled a tress of her long brown hair around his

finger.
“Aye, lass, but the future will soon be upon us,” he replied.
“It will not take long for word of us to travel back to the
Clanranald and for him to be riding down to Castle Tioram
in a fury. On that day, I must either win him around or quit
the country for good.”
Catriona rested her brow against his neck and frowned.
“That can never be,” she whispered. “You must take your
rightful place at the head of the clan. If you must give me
up, so be it… Though it shall break my heart, my love.”
Eoin’s hand clasped her shoulder, and he drew her to him

with a strong arm.
“Is that what you want?” he asked rhetorically. “I know it

isn’t. And it is not what I want either.”
“But it cannot be!” Catriona sobbed, like a rabbit trapped in

a cruel snare
Eoin fell silent for a few moments, a pensive look furrowing

his brow.
“I have been thinking,” he began. “I have a friend in

Glaschu, Archibald Ingram, who has begun trading in
tobacco in the Americas. He has recently begun his own
plantations in Virginia and Maryland and is looking for
factors to run these estates. I could speak to him and
perhaps secure a position in his company; then we might
begin a new life in the colonies.”
“America!” Catriona sat up in alarm. “But that is a wild

place, full of bears and wolves and savages.”
“Not much different from Muideart, then,” he quipped. “We

would feel at home.”
Catriona’s eyes were wide with wonder.
“But… America! ‘Tis the ends of the Earth!”
“And Ath Tharracail is the center of the universe, you are

telling me?” Eoin laughed.
Catriona looked at him seriously.
“It is the center of my world,” she told him. “Coming to

Castle Tioram took me right out of myself. I would lose
myself completely in America!”
Eoin crushed her in his embrace, his eyes twinkling with

amusement.
“Am I not your world, then, Catriona, my love? For I know

that you are mine. You and Donald.”
Chapter Thirteen 97
He was quickly warming to the idea.
“Just think,” he continued with growing enthusiasm. “In

America, there would be none of yon ‘laird this’ and ‘servant
that’; there would just be ‘Eoin and Catriona’, ‘Mister and
Mistress MacDonald’.”
“‘MacPherson’,” Catriona insisted. “I would yet be Catriona

MacPherson.”
Eoin raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“Lassie, you could be Mistress Mac-Coo-in-the-Midden, for

all I care, as long as you were my wife.”
Catriona suddenly became conscious of their nakedness;

they really were no different, just flesh and blood, just a man
and a woman in love.
“But… the Lord of the Isles… Chief of the Clanranald…” she

whispered in a low, frightened voice. “Would you really give
all that up for me?”
“Gladly!” He hugged her. “And for myself, and for wee

Donald. Our happiness is all that matters.”
“And you will tell all this to the Clanranald?” she enquired
with skepticism.
“If he does not consent to our marrying, then – aye – I will!”
Catriona considered him as if she were looking at a

madman.
“Then, if you are still alive after the roasting he shall give
you, I will go to America with you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A s she had promised Sorcha, Catriona returned to

Ath Tharracail for Martinmas, which in the old
calendar was ‘cthe feile na marbh’, the Gaelic ‘day of the
dead’, the Samhain. It was the time for the slaughtering of
the beasts in preparation for winter, and a busy time in the
clachans.
It was also a time of festivity, with bonfires and lantern

parades to mark the month or ‘moon’ of blood sacrifices.
That year, the eight families of the clachan had a pig to

slaughter. It had been rooting around the middens since the
spring, and each family had been donating whatever slops
they had to the fattening of it. Occasionally, someone would
take it down to the Wood of the White Stag to let it root
around the forest floor.
When Catriona arrived, the children were already stocking

Chapter Fourteen 99
the fire under a large cauldron in the Murray croft and a

multitude of receptacles – bowls, buckets, basins, pots, pans
– from every household had been piled up beside a large
trough, which had been turned upside down on the green in
front of the Cross.
In the glen, the sun was just beginning to melt the frosting
of ice on the grass.
Old Anna was beside the trough, unrolling her cloth of

special knives, testing each of them on the heel of her
thumb, and sharpening them all with steel.
Catriona went up and greeted her.
“A fine day for the slaughtering,” she observed.
Anna gave her a toothless smile. Her face was as small and
wrinkled and brown as a walnut.
“It could not be better,” she replied. “A fine day in the

waning moon. It is perfect.” Anna cast her eyes back to the
distant past. “I remember the first winter after the ’89. It
rained for a week, by which time the cycle of the moon was
wrong. We were fearful that King William’s soldiers would
come and carry off the pig for the slaughter and nothing
would be left for the clachan.” She cackled. “But they were
too scared of trespassing on the Clanranald.”
Catriona gave a mighty shiver.
Anna cast her eye in amusement over Catriona’s servant’s

clothes.
“Ach, lassie!” she said. “It is too cold for you to be waiting
out here. Away ben and speak to your mother and your
sister. I believe they are making the soup for when after the
work is done. They shall be all the gladder for the seeing
of you.”
Thanking Anna, Catriona turned towards Shielfoot. She

was suddenly filled with nervousness and trepidation. It had
been three months since she had seen her mother and
sister; so much had happened and she feared they would be
strangers to her.
She found Floraidh, Sorcha, and a flaxen-haired girl with a

harelip fussing over a large cauldron that was hanging
above the hearth. They were so intent on the soup-making
that they did not hear her coming in.
“That broth shall be spoilt from having too many cooks!”

Catriona declared loudly.
The three women turned and peered at her through the

peat smoke.
“Och, will you see what the cat has dragged in?” Floraidh
cried. “What is she like in those fancy duds? It is her lady-
ship herself.”
Floraidh and Sorcha came forward. They each embraced

Catriona in turn, long and warmly.
Catriona found her eyes nipping from the reek.
“Is this the lass that Eo—Muideart sent?” She gestured at

the raw-boned girl who was concentrating hard on the
serious business stirring the pot.
“Aye, yon is Brighde,” Floraidh said, then lowered her voice

and brought her head close to Catriona’s ear. “She’s not
Chapter Fourteen 101
quite right in the head, but she is a strong and willing

helper. Yon soup will not be burning to the pot, you can
be sure!”
Floraidh held her younger daughter at arm’s length and

looked her up and down with appreciation.
“But look at you? You have fairly put on the beef with your
easy living at Castle Tioram. And such fine linens and
shawls! You will not be wanting to besmirch them with the
pig blood. Will you not shift out of them and put on your
old arisaid? It is still folded over there by your bed.”
Catriona went behind the wicker screen and found her old
working plaid, freshly laundered and pleated where her
mother had laid it out for her homecoming. Her mother
followed her and sat down cross-legged on the straw pallet.
She looked on wide-eyed as Catriona unhooked her bodice,
unbuckled her shoes, and slipped out of her skirt and
stockings.
“How can you endure all those hooks and buttons?”

Floraidh wondered with a small giggle.
“Och, you get used to them.” Catriona smiled. “You even get
used to the shoes – eventually.”
Her mother watched her fold her good clothes in silence.
“Is your maister good to you?” she asked. There was a timo-
rous reluctance to her voice, as if she was nervous about
asking.
Catriona glanced at her with suspicion as she draped the

plaid of her arisaid over her shoulders and kilted up its
skirts to buckle around her waist.
“He treats me well enough,” she replied carefully.
“It’s just,” Floraidh said, “there is this Deirdre MacLauchlan

over at An Aird Mholach, late of Laird Muideart’s service,
who is slandering you all over the country as the laird’s
wee whore.”
Catriona bridled.
“Deirdre MacLauchlan is a slatternly wee minx who should

look to her own reputation rather than passing judgment on
others.”
Floraidh picked slivers of straw from the blanket of the bed.
“Sorcha was spitting like the baudrons when it came to her

ears. She was all for going over to An Aird Mholach and
tearing the hair from the lassie’s head.”
“Which would have been no more than the wee bitch

deserved,” Catriona affirmed. “She is an evil piece of work.”
Her mother looked away into a corner of the stall.
“So,” she ventured, in a small voice, “there is no truth to it?”
Catriona huffed. How could she explain?
“It… It is not like that, how she says.”
Her mother raised her eyebrows with apprehension.
“And how else is it?”
Catriona looked about her, as if searching for the words that

could explain it all.
“Muideart… Eoin wants to take me for his wife,” she said

hurriedly. “He is to speak with the Clanranald. If the Clan-
Chapter Fourteen 103
ranald will not agree to it, we are going to run away to

America.”
Floraidh stared at her in open-mouthed disbelief. After a

moment, she began to laugh.
“You are serious, so you are? You really believe that this is
going to happen? That Muideart, heir to the Clanranald, is
going to give up all that for his wee doxy from the clachan,
his wee bit toy?”
“He loves me, Mither,” Catriona said simply.
“Loves you my arse!” Floraidh snorted. “He’s just missing his

hochmagandy, with his wife dead… Christ, and his wife died
just this four months gone! You would have thought that the
randie loon could have denied himself for a decent period –
until the poor woman’s soul was rested.”
“It is not like that, Mither.” Catriona smiled benignly, for all
her mother’s harsh words. “He loves me, he truly does. And
I love him.”
Floraidh stared up at her and realization gradually replaced

the cynical sneer on her face.
“My God, it is true, isn’t it? He has pledged himself to you.

You have made your own handfasting. But… America?”
Catriona laughed.
“Only if the worst comes to the worst. America shall be our

last resort. I am hoping that we shall only have to elope as
far as Gleann Fhionnain.”
Floraidh struggled to her feet and enveloped her daughter

in a warm hug.
“Well, good luck to you, lass. I wish you every happiness.

Though I doubt it will be a rocky road for the pair of you.”
She kissed Catriona’s cheek.
“And speaking of Gleann Fhionnain,” she added, “I shall be

expecting you to attend the kirk this Sunday.” She laughed.
“It shall be well for you to pray for your soul in any case!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
T he air was rent by a roar of outrage, followed by

squeals of fury and the loud curses of men.
Floraidh, Sorcha, Catriona, and Brighde flew from Shielfoot

and ran to the Cross. The pig protested in terror and bewil-
derment as the menfolk of the clachan hauled it to the
upturned trough, its trotters tied together across its belly.
It took eight men to wrestle the beast on to the back of the

trough. But once they had it on its back, the screaming of
the pig and the shouts of the men died away.
Brighde gave a loud moan, and one of the women had to

lead her away, with an arm around her shoulder. To Brighde
the victim looked hideously human, a grotesquely fat baby
lying on its back, its totters joined like beseeching hands, its
ears flapped back and its snout in the air.
Old Anna picked up one of the knives and again tested its
keenness against the ball of her thumb. The womenfolk

gathered around her, each clutching a bowl or a basin. In
their gray arisaids, moving in unison, they looked like
priestesses officiating at a religious ceremony.
With a single swift stroke, Anna slit the side of the pig’s
upturned throat. She stepped aside, and the women filed
forward, one by one, to catch the fountain of blood that
pulsed from the wound. The first few were spattered by the
drops that showered up from the force of the blood hitting
their pans.
The pig shrieked, its harsh scream ululating in time to the

spurting of its blood. Everyone watched in reverent silence
for the long minutes until the flow reduced to a trickle, and
the pig’s cry fell to a sob and then to silence.
The menfolk then brought buckets of boiling water from

the cauldron that had been set up for the purpose in the
Murray croft and poured them over the pig. Then they set
to, scrubbing it furiously to lift off the bristles, which the
children gathered up and put aside to be made into brushes.
The women carefully carried the blood into the Murray
croft-house.
The clachan then gathered in Shielfoot for their soup. The

wicker partitions had been removed and the room trans-
formed into a Spartan feasting hall. Floraidh ladled the
thick mutton broth into wooden cogies and Sorcha, Catri-
ona, and Brighde passed the cogies around. The children
were quickly done and ran back up to the Cross to poke at
the slaughtered pig with sticks, but the adults hunkered
around the Shielfoot hearth, supping their soup and
enjoying the craic, until the soup pot and cogies had all
been scraped clean.
Chapter Fifteen 107
Catriona looked around the assembly, resting her eyes on

each face and putting a name to it. She knew this was a
leave-taking, and she wanted to place a blessing on the head
of each of her kinsfolk. This would be the last time she
would see them together like this and she was keen to
imprint the scene in her memory.
Her eyes came to rest on Ruairi and Sorcha, who were

sitting together by the hearth-stones, their heads nodding
against each other like those of courting doves. Ruairi’s
flame-red beard was besmirched with long dribbles of soup
and Sorcha was tenderly stroking it clean with a corner of
her plaid. His large calloused hand rested on her bare knee,
and he was gazing into her face with the devoted look of one
of his sheepdogs.
Planting a kiss on his lips, Sorcha rose to fetch water from

the drinking pail.
Catriona rose from her haunches and intercepted her.
“You and Ruairi seem to have eyes only for each other,” she
observed, taking the dipper from Sorcha and helping
herself to a draught of the freshly drawn spring water. “How
are things between the two of you?”
Sorcha blushed and smirked.
“Och, we are getting along just fine,” she said. “He was a bit
rough, to begin with, and he hurt me terribly. But when
Mistress Murray discovered how badly he had been treating
me, she took the besom to him and beat him loudly up and
down the clachan, calling out his shortcomings as a son and
husband. Ruairi nearly died from the shame of it! At the
hinder end, she drove him into the mud of the midden, but
Ruairi dared not lift a finger to his mother and accepted his
punishment meekly. Then he begged my forgiveness in

front of the whole clachan, that had turned out at the racket
of it, admitting that he had been thoughtless to me and that
he was distraught to learn he had been hurting me so. He
said that he did not want to lose me; he declared that he
loved me as the sunshine loves the loch or some such
nonsense. And since then he has become so biddable and
gentle with me that I can get him to do anything I desire.”
She put her lips to Catriona’s ear. “He’s a bull of a man and a
fine plaything; we are never away from the Wood. We are
expecting our first child in late spring.”
Catriona grasped Sorcha’s hands in her own, and the pair of

them beamed at one another.
“Och, Sorcha, that is wonderful news. I am so glad that

things are well between you and Ruairi. I have been so
worried about you.”
With lunch finished, the clachan returned to the Cross. A

large tripod was set up, and the pig hauled up by its hind
legs on a metal hook until its snout just touched the ground.
A large linen cloth was spread out, and Anna selected a long
knife from her cloth and made a long, careful cut down the
length of its belly. Its entrails tumbled out onto the fabric,
which was gathered up by the corners and taken away for
the children to clean for pudding cases.
Meanwhile, the women moved in and began to butcher the

pig as fast as they could. The pluck was set aside for the
haggis, the lungs for tripe, and the head and trotters for
potted brawn. By late afternoon dusk, the entire pig had
been divided into its component parts, and each family
departed for their steading with a sizeable joint of pork
Chapter Fifteen 109
rolled up in a cloth. All that was left of the beast was an

echo of its squeak.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
T he following morning, the clachan assembled to

walk the six miles to the kirk in Gleann Fhion-
nain. The weather had closed in over the glen, and a steady
rain fell. The men happed their plaids with their bonnets,
and the women did the same with long tapering head-
scarves. Aonghas and a few other men announced that they
would not be going; they had some leaking thatch that
would have to be attended to before the rains really set in.
The track took them east, along the southern shore of Loch
Seille. A chilly wind blew off the water and moaned in the
trees that peppered the braes by the water’s edge. Fallen
leaves lay across the path in deep slippery drifts of yellow
and red. The children began by racing ahead and kicking
the leaves to the wind. But the morning was so cold and
miserable, and the leaves so heavy with damp, that they
soon tired of the game and trudged along beside their
parents.
Chapter Sixteen 111
After a two-hour traik, the village of Gleann Fhionnain rose

into view from between the trees, dominated by the square
tower of St. Finnan’s Kirk, which had charge of the spiritual
well-being of the scattered people of Gleann Seille and
Muideart. Folk from clachans all over the parish were
descending on the kirk from the glens.
The people of Clanranald’s lands had been obliged to

become adherents of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland
following the final triumph of the Reformation. After the
overthrow of the Stuart dynasty and the Hanoverian succes-
sion, Catholicism had been outlawed, and Presbyterianism
established as the state religion, with the Kirk taking over
the entire network of parishes that crisscrossed the entire
country like a spider’s web.
Although nominally Calvinist in religion and Hanoverian in

their political allegiance, the clansmen’s first loyalty lay not
with church or state, but with their chieftain, the Clan-
ranald, who remained staunchly Catholic and a Jacobite.
While they were obliged on pain of punishment to worship
according to the Westminster confession of faith, their alle-
giance both to the ‘wee German lairdie’, George the First,
and to the Kirk was ambivalent, to say the least.
The same could not be said of Dughlas Middleton, the

minister of St. Finnan’s. He was an enthusiast in the literal
sense of the term; like his spiritual hero, John Knox, whom
he sought to emulate, he believed himself possessed of
divine revelations and special communications from God, a
person inspired. He rained fire and brimstone down on his
charges from the pulpit every Sunday, reminding them that
they were the elect, God’s chosen people, and of the special
obligation of moral rectitude that this placed them under.
He suffered no backsliding when it came to enacting God’s

Word in one’s daily life; he rooted out and punished sinful-
ness with God’s own vengeance and with all the authority
that Kirk and State had vested in him.
As his congregation filed into the pews of St. Finnan’s, he

sprawled on the large wooden chair that sat like a throne in
the shadow of his pulpit on the far side of the communion
table from his flock, his cheek resting on his fist, his eyes
aflame with righteous wrath, and his lips twitching in
prayer.
As soon as the congregation had settled, Middleton rose.
“We shall begin this Lord’s day service by praising God with
Psalm forty-three, to the tune of ‘Martyrs’.”
Acting as precentor, Middleton led the congregation in the

gloomy psalm, their voices rising to heaven in a keening
wail, as if they were lamenting the harshness of their lives in
the shadow of death’s dark veil. As the psalm ended, the
congregation stood, and their mhaighstir led them in prayer,
in which they called on the Lord to be their staff and
comforter and to give them the strength to resist the tempta-
tions of the flesh, by which Satan sought to divert them from
the straight road to righteousness.
An elder then stood up and approached the lectern to read

Scripture.
“I take our first reading from Exodus, chapter twenty, verse

fourteen: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’”
The elder lifted over the pages of the heavy Bible to the next
marked reading.
“In Ezekiel, chapter sixteen, verses fifteen to seventeen, we

Chapter Sixteen 113
find written: ‘But thou trusted in thy beauty and played the
whore because of your renown and lavished your whorings
on any passerby; your beauty became his. Thou took some
of your garments and made for yourself colorful shrines,
and on them played the whore. The like has never been, nor
ever shall be. Thou also took your beautiful jewels of my
gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made for
yourself images of men, and with them played the whore.’”
Finally, he read: “‘But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the

detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcer-
ers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake
that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.’”
“Blessed be the Word of the Lord and all those who hear His
Word,” Middleton rumbled out as the elder closed the Bible
with a thump and resumed his seat among the
congregation.
The mhaighstir rose from his chair and trod slowly and
pensively up the steps to take his place in the pulpit for the
delivery of his sermon, the main part of the service. He
placed his hands on the rail and worried at it until his
knuckles were white.
“Iniquity!” he suddenly bellowed.
The word reverberated around the rafters.
“I call Catriona MacPherson and Sorcha MacPherson!”
Sorcha and Catriona looked at one another in fright. A

whispering ran through the rest of the congregation, and
one or two heads were turned in the sisters’ direction. Two
elders rose from the front pews and moved down the aisle
towards them.
“I also call Ruairi Murray and Eoin Muideart!”
There was a rumbling of voices among the pews.
“Silence!” Middleton shouted.
One of the elders turned towards the pulpit.
“Neither Ruairi Murray nor Lord Muideart is here,” he said.
“Ruairi is at home, fixing the roof,” his mother cried.
“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor
in vain,” Middleton bellowed down on her. “Unless the Lord
watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. You
are failing in your duty, woman, when you do not bring the
fruit of your womb to the Lord. For, behold, children are a
heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward for
your righteousness.”
“Aye,” Floraidh raised her voice. “That is all very well and
true, but the roof is leaking all the same.”
A snigger ran around the kirk.
The elders seized Catriona and Sorcha and half-dragged

them to the front of the congregation. Four low ‘cutty’ stools
had been placed before the communion table. The elders
shoved the women down onto two of them.
Middleton scanned the congregation with a look of deep

contempt.
“There is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is

not tolerated even among Christians, for a man lies with a
woman outside of wedlock. Repent of your sin, Sorcha
MacPherson!”
Sorcha hung her head in shame but remained silent.

Chapter Sixteen 115
Floraidh laughed.
“And you are arrogant, Floraidh MacPherson! Ought you

not rather mourn? Let those who have done this be removed
from among you. For though absent in body, the sinners are
present in spirit; and, as if present, the Lord pronounces
judgment on those who have done such a thing. When you
are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, with the power
of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for
the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in
the day of the Lord...”
The door to the kirk crashed open, and there stood Eoin of
Muideart and his man, Tamhas, both with swords drawn.
“And so I am here in body as well as spirit, minister, that you

can deliver me to Satan yourself.” He raised his sword for
the entire congregation to see. “But you’d be a damned fool
to try and lay your delivering hands on me, a child of the
Clanranald.”
A disturbance ran through the congregation. A few of the

men grumbled out the slogan of their clan: “Dh' aindeoin co
theireadh e!” – ‘Gainsay me who dares!’
“You papish rogue,” Middleton roared out. “How dare you

invade this house of God and profane it with your arms and
your blasphemy. May you be damned to Hell!”
“And may you be damned to Hell for persecuting two inno-

cent women and calling them like pigs to the slaughter to
sate the bloodlust of your false god,” Eoin returned. “Christ
wept for such injustices as this.”
He strode down the aisle and took Catriona by the hand.

The two elders took a step forward to intervene but thought
better of it when Eoin raised his blade to show them the

sharpness of its edge.
High in his pulpit, Middleton raised his good right hand to

Heaven and called down a malediction on Eoin’s head.
“Beware the righteous vengeance of the Lord,” he seethed

out. “For the Lord takes vengeance on his foes and vents his
wrath against his enemies. One day, Muideart, your foot
shall slip. For the day of your calamity is near, and the
impending things are hastening upon you… and the
Clanranald.”
“Your arse!” Eoin cried as he led Catriona and her sister

from the kirk.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
W ith Catriona mounted behind Eoin on his

fleet gray mare and Sorcha clinging to
Tamhas on the back of his fiery roan stallion, the four rode
away from the kirk and into Gleann Seille.
The rain had settled into a persistent downpour. But

although the track beneath their drumming hooves was
treacherous with the slickness of the fallen leaves, they
pressed on quickly along the backs of the loch and were
soon entering the clachan at Ath Tharracail.
The men who had stayed behind to repair the thatch of the
croft-houses in preparation for winter stopped their work to
stare in astonishment at the riders. Eoin and Tamhas were
soaked, having borne the brunt of the deluge as they pushed
their mounts into the driving rain; Catriona and Sorcha had
been in the shelter of the men’s broad backs but were just as
wetted. The skirts of their plaids were plastered to their
thighs, and the braids of their hair dripped like rats’ tails.
Ruairi was holding a crude wooden ladder against the wall

of Old Hector’s house, at the top of which Aonghas was
weaving some fresh reeds into the thatch.
“What the…?” Ruairi asked.
Aonghas quickly scrambled down the ladder and joined

Ruairi and the other men as they gathered around the
steaming horses. Ruairi lifted Sorcha down from behind
Tamhas with a single easy movement.
Eoin dismounted and helped Catriona down.
“Away and collect your gear, lassie,” he told her. “We press
on to Castle Tioram.”
Catriona raced down the brae to Shielfoot, as Sorcha

explained what had transpired at the kirk.
“The bastards!” Aonghas spat. “That they could do such

a thing.”
Remembering himself, he doffed his bonnet to his laird.
“Yon Middleton is a devil,” he spoke through gritted teeth. “I

will have his guts for this. He comes around here, like a
sleekit fox, preaching against fornication and the old ways,
while all the time slavering over the lassies in his lascivi-
ousness…”
Eoin placed a firm hand on Aonghas’ shoulder.
“I hear he has made an enemy in you, MacPherson. He

inveighs against your sedition and your blasphemy too.”
Aonghas sighed.
“Aye, well… I would not be surprised that he persecuted the

lassies as much for my sake as theirs. He gives me the
Chapter Seventeen 119
impression of being that kind of a man, a sleekit cunning

bastard.”
Eoin looked up at the mist-covered mountains, and a steely

gleam flashed in his eyes.
“The days of Middleton and his ilk are numbered, mark my

words,” he murmured. “The King Over the Water will
return one day soon, and we shall drive the sleekit cunning
bastards from our lands.”
Aonghas smiled grimly.
“Well, let us hope and pray that it shall be so. I fear the
powers wish to uproot us from the land. When the time
comes, my Lord, you can count on the men of the clachans –
the Clanranald.”
“And the women too!” Sorcha declared, clinging to the

broad chest of her Ruairi. She looked up at her man’s rugged
face with adoration. “We shall bear warriors for you to free
our lands with.”
Ruairi grinned and crushed her shoulders with his massive

muscled arm.
“And I will take pleasure in the making of them!”
Sorcha playfully punched his chest.
They all laughed, except Eoin. He gazed down Gleann Seille

towards the sea with a look of grim determination.
“The day will surely come,” he promised. “Dh' aindeoin co

theireadh e! – Gainsay me who dares!”
O nce Catriona had retrieved her servant’s clothes

from the croft-house, Eoin pulled her up behind
him on his mare and, together with Tamhas, set off at a
steady canter along the river valley towards Eilean Tioram.
Catriona shivered in the chill November wind. The rain had

not let up, and she was drenched to the bone. Her brow was
burning, and she hoped that she was not coming down with
a fever. She suspected that she would have to have all her
strength and wits about her over the next few days; her fate,
she felt, would depend upon it.
When they arrived at the castle, they found Peigi waiting for
then, wringing a clout in her hands and fretting with worry.
“Come away inside to the fire, the lot of ye,” she instructed,
“and I’ll sort ye a toddy.”
They trooped into her kitchen and threw themselves onto

stools in front of the fire, leaving trails and pools of water on
the swept stone floor. Peigi filled silver quaichs with a
generous measure of uisge beatha and poured boiling water
over the spirits.
“Here,” she said, handing them around. “Hopefully, this will

drive away the ague.”
They sipped the potent liquid in silence. Steam began to

rise from their clothes in the heat from the fire.
“How did you know I was for the cutty stool?” Catriona
suddenly wondered.
“I was ‘summoned’ to attend the kirk to bear witness to my

sins,” Eoin replied, staring angrily into the flames. “It seems
we were denounced as fornicators by Deirdre MacLauchlan.
I would not have dignified the proceedings by attending, but

I knew you would be at the kirk with your family and what
lay in store for you.”
Peigi snorted.
“‘Fornicators!” she sneered out. “The wee whore!”
Catriona handed the quaich back to Peigi.
“I must away up and get out of these wet clothes, afore I

catch my death…”
“… and find yourself in Middleton’s eternal flames.” Eoin

laughed. “Aye, I must shift out of these clothes myself.”
He tossed back the remainder of his toddy, and the couple

went up the stairs to their private apartments.
E oin peeled off his sark and used it to wipe the worst of

the wetness from his hair. He did not see Catriona
standing naked in the doorway.
She watched as he toweled furiously at his head. She took in

the swarthy hue of his skin, the firm muscles that worked
beneath it, the slim waist and hips, the round hard buttocks,
and the flaccid penis and testicles that danced between his
legs as he worried his hair. She felt a stirring deep in her
stomach and an ache of longing in her heart. Despite
herself, she let out a little sigh.
His head emerged from the bundled cloth with a look of

surprise. Catriona giggled at the boyish look on his face as if
he were a child just arose from sleep with his astonishment
at the world renewed, so lost he had been in his dreams. He
froze with a sharp intake of breath.
“Catriona,” he breathed out, his eyes moving over her

nakedness. “You are so beautiful.”
She watched in amazement as his penis swelled and rose to

salute her, doubling then tripling its length. A spasm of fear
and awe shivered her body. She stepped forward and
dropped to her knees before him. She took his cock in her
hand and pulled back the foreskin to reveal its head. She
took it on her tongue, like a communion wafer, and carried
it into her mouth.
He groaned and arched his head backward, closing his eyes.

He let his fingers play gently over her temples and ears. She
began to rock her head slowly, backward and forward, her
lips sealed around his shaft.
He too began to move against her, his hips trembling. She

ran her hands up the backs of his thighs and clasped his
firm buttocks and squeezed them. His fingers thrust deep
into her still damp hair. She ran her tongue around the head
of his cock. He moaned, then withdrew himself from
her mouth.
He drew her up and, holding her against him in a strong

embrace, lowered his lips to her eager upturned face. He
covered her mouth with his own and drank of her deeply.
Their tongues met and twined like the frenzied mating of
adders on a sunny bank among the heather. He picked her
up and carried her across the room to his bed.
He laid her down and slid onto the sheets beside her. He
smoothed the nut-brown tresses from her cheeks and brow
and gazed upon the beauty of her face. Her hazel eyes
glinted with desire and permission. She wanted him with all
her body and soul; her eyes told him this. He ran the backs
of his fingers down her milk-white throat and across the

small apples of her breasts. She gasped and clutched his
hand and moved it down to her groin. He massaged her
mound with the heel of his palm, while his fingers probed
among the petals of her vagina.
She threw her head back, and a moan purred in her throat.
He stroked the hardening bud of her clitoris and felt her
grow wet beneath his touch. She reached out and grabbed
his throbbing cock.
“Please!” she whispered breathlessly, as she slipped beneath

him and positioned his cock over her entrance.
He slid in, the full length of him, and she luxuriated in the
feeling of fullness it brought to her. She pushed against him,
then wrapped her slim legs around his hips and drew him
still deeper into herself. He began to thrust, gentle at first,
then more forceful as he lost his mind to the joy of it.
“Come on!” Catriona hissed into his ear. “Fuck me, my Lord.
Fuck me hard!”
He thrust faster and faster, driving into her as deeply as he

could. Their breathing quickened. Waves of pleasure began
to break upon her, like the gentle lapping on a beach. He
plunged and bucked; the tide grew stronger within her, its
powerful undertow dragging her further into the depths. A
choke caught in his throat and he made to withdraw, but she
clamped her legs tighter around his hips, holding him fast
within her.
“No,” she crooned in his ear. “It does not matter. I want to
feel you come inside me. I want to make you warriors.”
With a roar, he loosed himself. Her eyes widened as his cock

engorged still further before filling her with its warm seed.
In the same moment, the surf broke and flooded through
her flesh, carrying her swirling like flotsam high up onto
a beach.
As they slowly descended from the heights of their ecstasy,

Eoin swore.
“Jesu!” he gasped out, trying to catch his breath.
“Eoin MacDonald,” Catriona chided him, reaching around

from under his spent body and smacking him firmly on the
bottom. “Fornicating and blaspheming at the same time!
What would the Good Reverend Middleton say?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
T he next morning, the Clanranald descended

upon Castle Tioram with a retinue of six men-at-
arms. Tamhas saw to their horses and, while the men took
ale in Peigi’s kitchen, the clan chieftain held conference with
his son in the hall above.
Eoin had dressed for the occasion. He had donned tartan

trews and a moleskin doublet, with a short ornamental
plaid looping over his left shoulder from the waistband of
his trews and pinned to the chest of his doublet by a large
silver brooch set with an amber cairngorm. A rapier hung
from the sword loop on his belt.
The Clanranald and Muideart sat opposite one another

across the large table in the center of the hall. They each
occupied an ornately carved high-backed chair. Clan-
ranald’s chair creaked ominously as he shifted his consider-
able frame in a futile effort to make himself comfortable. He
was more a man of action than of sitting. A flask of uisge
beatha and a small jug of water sat on the table between

them.
“So, lad,” Clanranald said, “what is this I have been hearing,

about ye storming the kirk in Gleann Fhionnain with force
of arms?” He chuckled. “I hear tell that the minister there
shat himself.”
Eoin snorted and shifted his quaich on the table in front

of him.
“The wee bauchle had the temerity to summons me – ‘sum-

mons’ me, mind – to sit on the stool of repentance in his wee
byre of a kirk.”
“And ye took offense at that?”
“I did,” Eoin confirmed. “Moreover, he was unjustly perse-

cuting the clan’s folk at Ath Tharracail, and I was upholding
their rights.”
Clanranald grunted. He could not fault his son for that; it

was his duty, after all.
“But did ye have to go in there wi’ your blade bared an’ your
man barring the door?” He chuckled again. “It is supposed
to be a house of God, after all, a sanctuary. Ye might as well
hae charged up the aisle on a warhorse. Some folk might
think it a queer way o’ righting an offense by givin’ greater
offense to the Almighty.”
Eoin glowered at his father.
“Ye ken fine that the Almighty is not to be found in the

houses of heretics.”
Clanranald pursed his fleshy lips and nodded.

Chapter Eighteen 127
“Aye, I suppose… But still,” he said, prodding the table with

a blunt sinewy finger. “these people are dangerous, and we
must not go off half-cocked. The wee German lairdie is in
the ascendancy for the moment, and his redcoats could
come marching into Muideart on any pretext to crush the
Clanranald. In fact, I would not be surprised if this was why
his sniveling wee lackies, the Middletons of this world, are
going around their parishes stirring up resentment. They
may be trying to provoke trouble to give the Government an
excuse to move against us. Remember what befell our
cousins in Gleann Comhann in ’92. We must tread canny
and bide our time until the King Over the Water musters
French support for a rising. Otherwise, we might wake up
one morning to find that our throats have been cut.”
Eoin sighed.
“I was never one for the diplomacy,” he admitted. “I am not

the wily old fox that my father is.”
Clanranald smiled at the compliment and raised his quaich

in acknowledgment.
“Which brings me to the matter that most vexes me,” he

said with a pained expression.
Eoin looked at the ceiling as if invoking divine help. He

knew what was coming.
“I hear that you have taken a wee doxy to your bed.”
Clanranald paused to give his son an opportunity to deny it.

The moment passed, and he chuckled with indulgence.
“I’ve nocht against it, though it might hae been mair decent
had ye waited until Lady Isbeil was cauld in her grave.” He
leaned forward and laced his fingers together over the table.
“She is a comely lass, by all accounts, and a bonny wee slip

of a thing.” He unlaced his fingers and stabbed at the table
again. “But that’s all she must be, hear ye – a bit tickle for
yer cock.”
Eoin fixed Clanranald’s eye with a steely look.
“I love her,” he said simply.
Clanranald barked out a laugh, then curled his nose in a

contemptuous sneer.
“Love!” He scoffed. “Love never built alliances. Love never

strengthened the arm that wields the sword against our
enemies.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Keep the
lassie, by all means; just keep her quietly, keep her privily.
Wear your wife in public and your wee cunt in the
bedchamber.”
Eoin bridled at the slur against his Catriona. His nostrils

flared, and his face darkened. Clanranald looked on at his
reaction with a kind of detached curiosity, his bushy
eyebrows raised.
“I don’t have a wife,” Eoin reminded him.
“No.” The look on the Clanranald’s face was unwavering,

challenging. “And I’m sure your wee lassie has been a great
comfort to you. A man needs… release, if his brain is not to
overheat. And a cunt from the clachan is as good as a cunt
for the Royal Court when it comes to a bit of relief. But we
spoke of diplomacy…” Clanranald leaned forward across the
table and all but clutched at the collar of Eoin’s doublet to
make his meaning clear. “I have spoken to Badenoch about
a marriage of the two branches of our clan through you and
your cousin, Mairi. It will strengthen us for the future. The
Chapter Eighteen 129
wedding will take place at the end of next summer,

following a decent period of mourning.”
“I will not marry her,” Eoin replied in a low steady voice,

meeting his father’s hard, unwavering look with his own.
The stared each other out for several seconds, then Clan-
ranald slammed his palm down on the table with a force
that toppled the whiskey flask and made the water
jug jump.
“You will defy me in this?” he bellowed.
Eoin’s look did not flinch.
“I will,” he replied quietly but firmly.
Clanranald shot to his feet, sending his chair screeching

across the oak floor, his rapier drawn, its tip a hair’s breadth
from Eoin’s throat.
Footsteps clattered up the stair-turret.
“I will not draw my sword against the Clanranald,” Eoin

said, still staring his father down. “But neither will I submit
to his tyranny. I would sooner die than do either”
Clanranald’s men-at-arms fanned into the room, their

weapons drawn. Behind them, Tamhas stood framed in the
doorway, an ax in one hand and a broadsword in the other,
eyeing the men-at-arms as if deciding which one he should
dispatch first.
The father stood, and the son sat, stalemated. Clanranald

loomed over the smaller Eoin, seething with fury. Eoin
faced down Clanranald’s menace with his jaw set. The tip of
the rapier trembled against Eoin’s throat. Eoin ran the tip of
his tongue over his dry upper lip, but he did not flinch.
At last, Clanranald swore and cast his sword across the floor.
It came to rest against the end wall on which the clan
trophies were displayed.
“You have three days to quit Castle Tioram and the lands of
Muideart. I renounce you and your heirs, especially any
bastards you get by your wee whore. From this moment on,
you are dead to me. May the Lord have mercy on you, for I
will not!”
He stormed from the hall, shoving his way through the line
of his retainers.
Tamhas hastily stepped aside from the turret door to let

him past.
The men-at-arms collected themselves and scurried off after

their Lord.
Minutes later, the Clanranald was spurring his horse across

the sandbar through the incoming tide, his men-at-arms a
ragged chevron trailing in his wake.
EPILOGUE
T hat evening, Eoin, wee Donald, Catriona,

Tamhas, and Peigi sat at the kitchen table and
feasted like royalty on the castle provisions. Eoin had
decided that they would quit Castle Tioram the very next
morning. Peigi had begged Eoin to dine as he had always
done in the hall, but Eoin had pointed out that, since he was
no longer the Lord of Muideart, heir to Clanranald, he had
no claim to the castle’s noble comforts – nor, indeed, to the
allegiance of either Peigi or Tamhas.
“In fact, I am duty-bound to release the pair of you from

your service. You are free to go, Tamhas, Peigi. I am sure
there will be a place for you in my father’s household or in
that of one of his loyal lieutenants.”
Tamhas puffed out his lips and considered his outstretched

feet for a moment before speaking.
“I believe that I will follow where my master and…” He

nodded to Catriona. “… my mistress go,” he declared.
Eoin grinned at him with fondness, then turned to Peigi.
“And what about you, Mistress Campbell?”
Peigi stood and went around the table to link her arm
through Tamhas’.
“And I will go with my man.”
Catriona winked at her.
“And how do you think you will be liking Glaschu, Peigi?”
“Och, I shall like it as much as it likes me,” she replied cryp-

tically. “And I am thinking I will like it well enough; it is,
after all, a Highland town, with all the Highlanders that
have gone there lately to make their fortunes.”
“Will we make our fortunes, Father?” Donald piped up,

excited at the prospect of such a radical change in their lives
and the promise of adventures.
“That may all depend on Mr. Ingram,” Eoin replied. “Either

we will be fighting savages in the forests of Virginia, or else
we shall be pirates on the Spanish Main.” He reached across
and ruffled his son’s hair. “It will be either a flintlock musket
or a cutlass for you, my lad!”
Donald’s eyes swam with delirium; he was so happy.
“
A nd what of you, Catriona, my love?” Eoin teased her
as they lay in each other’s arms in their bed that
night. “Will you be going with your man?”
Epilogue 133
Catriona screwed up her eyes and considered the

proposition.
“Och… I am thinking that, maybe, I will,” she reckoned. “But

only to the ends of the Earth,” she added. “No further!”
Eoin laughed.
“But you know I have no claim on you either, my love, any

more than I have on Peigi or Tamhas. I am no longer the
master, and you are no longer the servant. We are both
tinkers cast out on the road and obliged to make a living as
best we can.”
Catriona slapped him playfully on the shoulder.
“‘Tinkers’, indeed!” she protested. “You speak for yourself,

Eoin MacDonald! I’m a decent maid from the clachan, not a
dirty-filthy tinker like yourself.”
She suddenly realized that she was happy. She was no

longer a daughter of Ath Tharracail, nor was she ‘gentry’.
But neither did she any longer feel herself adrift between
the two worlds. She had found her place, and it was beside
her man.
Catriona and Eoin lay side by side and contemplated their

future life together. Who knew what fate would lie in store
for them. They had been cast loose from their respective
destinies, she as a daughter of the clachan, he as the son of
Clanranald, and who could tell on what shore they would
wash up.
But there was one thing of which Catriona could be sure: it

would be their hand that was on the tiller.
Suddenly, Eoin threw back the covers and leaped naked

from the bed. Catriona fell into a fit of giggles as he capered

about the room, making a show of looking for something,
his cock and balls bouncing like a sporran in his lap.
“What on Earth are you doing now, my love?”
She shook her head with a look of bemusement on her face.
“Pen and paper, pen and paper,” he repeated. “I have letters

to write.”
Then he glanced over at her and grinned.
“We are for the Americas, lass!”

PLEASE REVIEW IT ON GOODREADS
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Goodreads.
Let’s keep in touch
Email: fiona@fionafaris.com
Website: fionafaris.com
Facebook: Fiona Faris

GLOSSARY
A Ach – oh
Afore – in front of/before
Ay – yes
Aye – yes/always/still
B Bairn – child
Bannock – flat quick bread
Bauchle – useless/worn out/worthless
Baudrons – cat
Baulks – boundaries
Ben – inside
Besom – broom
Glossary 139
Brae – hill
Breeks – breeches
Brose – uncooked form of porridge/oatmeal
Byre – cow shed
C Canna/cannae – can’t
Canny – careful/cautious/hesistant
Cauld – cold
Ceilidh – a party with music, dancing, and often storytelling
Chiel – lad/young man/fellow
Clachan – village
Clarty – dirty
Clout – cloth/to patch/clothes
Cogie – insult/unwashed
Cooried – crouched/cowered/stooped
Craic – fun/entertainment/gossip
Croft – farm
Cuddy – donkey
Cutty – short/stubby
D Dae – do
Daffin – larking
Dawm – daydream/reverie
Dinna – don’t
Disna – doesn’t
Doon – down
Dowp – buttocks
Doxy – mistress/floozie
Dreesome – fear/fearsome
F Forby – besides
G Gallant – a noble
Get – child/called
Guid – good
H Hae – have
Handfasting – commitment ceremony
Hap/happed – cover-ed/wrap-ped
Haud – hold
Hochmagandy – sex
Hurdies – buttocks or loins

Glossary 141
I
Inby – inside/enclosed
K Kirk – church
Kist – chest
Know – a small hill/a knoll
L Lang – long/for long
Lave – the others/of persons or things/one

among many
Loch – lake
M Mair – more
Maister –master/mister
Mhaighstir – master/teacher/lord
Mither – mother
Mucking – remove manure or dirt
N Nae – no
Ne’re – never
Nocht – nothing/nought
O
O’ – of
Och – Oh
P Papish – disparaging
Q Quaich – drinking cup
R Randi – lawless
Ribbands – decorative ribbons
Roan – a horse or cow with a coat of one main color inter-

posed with hairs of another color
S Sae – so
Sair – sore/to serve/sairly (sorely)
Sark – shirt
Shiel/ing – temporary rough hut
Shift – Tartan dress
Shod – shoed/equipped
Sic – such
Sillar – silver
Siller – money/silver
Glossary 143
Skelp – slap/to spank
Skyte – squirt
Sleekit – crafty/deceitful
Spindleshank – long slender leg
Spurtle – wooden kitchen tool
Steading – a farmstead
Stook – pile/bundle (namely straw)
Stour – Dust
T Tae – to
Tocher – (to give a) dowry
Tousie – disordered/disheveled/rough/shaggy
Traik – long/tiring walk
Trencher – a type of tableware: a flat, round of bread used as

a plate
Trews – Tartan trousers
Tup – a ram
U Uisge beatha – whiskey
W Wha – who
Wheesht – be quiet
Wi’ – with
tTink – a scruffy and smell person
Winna – won’t
Y Ye – you
Yer – your

A Maid For The Grieving Highlander - Fiona Faris

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A MAID FOR THE

The children of the clachan swarmed around Catriona, the

Catriona sat down, cross-legged, with her back against one

Catriona’s heart soared. These were her people, her kinfolk,

The children gathered around Catriona. Two naked

She sang a nonsense-rhyme about a field mouse which loses

winnowing the grain. But their chatter was more subdued as

Catriona stirred the children and, standing up, clapped

The children cheered, and the adults smiled.

Catriona divided the children into two groups, roughly

The battle commenced.

While the children shrieked and fought, Catriona sought

“I was thinking,” Catriona said with a smile, “that it will not

Sorcha swallowed and grinned shyly.

“I shall see my Ruairi sooner than that.” She blushed. “He

Catriona beamed and grabbed both of Sorcha’s hands in

“Och, Sorcha! That is wonderful!”

“It is that. Our families have agreed to our handfasting. It is

“So, you are to be wed.” Catriona sighed, averting her eyes

“A year to the day if the handfasting goes well.” Sorcha bit

Catriona beamed again, dispelling whatever sweet sadness

“Of course, I am,” she aﬃrmed, squeezing Sorcha’s hands.

Sorcha understood. As the younger daughter, there would

“I am sorry, Catriona,” Sorcha said quietly.

Sorcha returned her sister’s smile and pulled her into a

T hat evening, the clachan gathered around the

The ‘Cross’ was a massive shard of gray-lichened stone, as

From the cottages came the freshly baked bannocks and

of uisge beatha, the water of life, and fat-bellied flagons of

“Is that a baudrons I hear being drawn?” Catriona’s father,

Catriona’s mother, Floraidh, put a hand on Aonghas’ arm to

“Wheesht, Aonghas!” she hissed out under her breath. “Or

A murmur ran through the clachan’s eight families as

“Blessed be the harvest,” Anna’s voice crackled out. “May

“We’ve never starved a winter yet!” the clachan responded in

And, just so, the ceilidh was begun.

though the shadows were lengthening, and a chill breeze

“A song, Catriona,” Aonghas suddenly called out.

He was tipsy from the uisge beatha and staggered uncer-

“Aye, a song,” several voices echoed.

Catriona broke away from the group of women with whom

She sang a simple ballad, in which the singer meets a hand-

The song ended to an awed silence.

One of the women sighed, a long, heartfelt sigh.

Then Aonghas sniggered.

“Aye, there’s the pity of it!” he declared too loudly, swaying

The men and women of the clachan looked at their feet, at

Floraidh turned on Aonghas with a fury.

“I was just saying…” he weakly protested.

He looked around the faces of the clachan in appeal, but his

Suddenly, Catriona pressed her hands to her face and fled

Floraidh wrenched her arm free of Aonghas’ grip.

“And what is going on here?” a voice called out from beyond

It was Ruairi Murray, come down from the shieling.

He cut a fine figure as he tramped down the last brae

“Och, Ruairi, lad!” His father clapped him on the shoulder

Ruairi stooped and picked up a wad of bannocks and broke

“And what is the matter with Catriona?” he enquired as he

“It is nothing, Ruairi,” his mother said, casting a black look

“If it is a man she is fretting after, there is a gang of randie

“Ruairi Murray!” his mother scolded him, casting mortified

Ruairi shrugged and took another deep draught of beer.

“Anyway,” he said, casting his eyes hungrily around the