скачать книгу бесплатно
Mr Sinclair was handing my bags up to the groom, and suddenly I felt very alone. Neither the coachman nor the groom seemed inclined to speak to me, and neither had vouchsafed anything beyond a surly greeting.
Mr Sinclair came alongside the window to bid me farewell, and for once the impudent light was gone from his eyes. He looked sombre and very serious.
‘I wish you good fortune, Miss Balfour,’ he said, quite as though we might never meet again.
‘Do you ever go to Glen Clair to call upon your third cousin twice removed, Mr Sinclair?’ I asked impulsively.
He smiled then. ‘Very rarely, Miss Balfour,’ he said. ‘But you will see me in Glen Clair before the month is out.’
I felt relief and a strange sense of pleasure to hear it, but naturally I was also rather annoyed with myself for making it appear that I actually wanted to see him again. I tilted my chin haughtily and gave him my hand in what I hoped was a dignified manner. But he simply turned it over, kissed my palm, and gave it back to me with quizzically lifted brows. The colour flamed into my face and I wished Mr Sinclair at the bottom of the loch.
‘Thank you,’ I said frostily, ‘for the service that you have rendered me, Mr Sinclair.’
‘A pleasure, Miss Balfour,’ he said. He smiled straight into my eyes. ‘Should you reconsider my offer, you need only send to me.’
‘A refusal so often offends, Mr Sinclair,’ I said. ‘You must be a brave man indeed to risk a second rebuff.’
He laughed. ‘You have not seen Glen Clair yet,’ he said cryptically.
‘So you are the lesser of two evils?’ I enquired. ‘I shall bear that in mind.’
His laughter was still in my ears as the carriage lurched out of the inn yard and away along the cobbled street that fronted the quay. I craned my neck for a last view of the sea, until the road turned inland towards the high mountains and the last shimmer of sparkling blue was lost from my sight. And though I tried not to think of Mr Sinclair paying court to the ladies of Edinburgh, the thought of him stayed in my mind for most of the long journey to my new home.
Now, it may appear to readers of my narrative that I am much concerned with modes of transport, but it could not escape my notice that the carriage sent from Glen Clair was much inferior to that of Lord Strathconan. As I sat down on the straw-stuffed seat a thick cloud of dust arose and settled on my skirts in a clinging grey film. I was sure that I saw a flea jump out of the cushions.
It seemed that with every rut in the track the coach threatened to shake to bits. I began to feel a little travel sore, so to take my mind from the journey I tried to concentrate on the view as we lurched along the road. Afternoon was well advanced by now, for our progress was slow, and the sun was dipping behind the high mountains. The heather on the slopes merged with the bracken into a purple and amber mist. Above the rocky peaks soared a single eagle, the sun bright on the gold of its head. The road wound its narrow way along the valley bottom beside a trickling burn fringed by pines. It was very beautiful, but to me, accustomed to the friendly scatter of the homesteads at Applecross, it seemed an empty landscape and a deserted one. I imagined that the jagged peaks and the bare hillsides might drive some men mad with loneliness.
The sun had long vanished behind the mountains, the purple shadows were fading to shades of grey and I was very hungry when we turned down an even narrower lane, rattled over a wooden bridge across the stream and drew alongside a broad loch that I realised must be Loch Clair at last. I sat forward, searching the dusk for my first glimpse of the house, but there was nothing ahead—no lights, no sign of life but the last flickering silver of the light on the water.
I sat back again, feeling slightly disappointed. As I did so the carriage lurched to a stop and there was a silence. I waited a few moments for one of the servants to come and tell me the reason for the delay. No one appeared, so I tried to open the carriage window to see what was going on. But the frame was splintered and the window stubbornly refused to move. I opened the door and stuck my head out.
We had stopped halfway along the edge of the loch. To one side of the carriage there was the water, and on the other side the rocky wall of the hillside rose straight and sheer from the edge of the road. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I was able to open the door wide enough to jump down.
Gathering up my skirts, I hurried around to the front of the coach. The horse—a tired old beast with a white star on its head and manners far more pleasant than that of its driver—whickered in greeting and nuzzled my pockets for a treat. I patted his nose.
The road unrolled before me, stretching away to a small wood at the end of the loch. There was no sound but for the whisper of the wind in the reeds by the water. The same wind brought the scent of woodsmoke faintly on the air. It was cold air, and it breathed gooseflesh along my skin, for the coachman and groom had completely vanished.
A second later instinct made me aware that I was no longer alone on the road. I spun around, but I was a moment too late. Strong arms had caught me from behind, pulling me backwards against a hard male body. A hand came down over my mouth. Through my struggles—for I wriggled and kicked and strained to be free, of course—I had a confused impression of movement about me, and I heard the scrape of steel on stone.
I never scream. I have never been able to. When I was a child and the village boys teased me and pulled my hair, my cries of anger always came out as frustrated squawks. It was most vexatious to lack this accomplishment at a moment when it would have been useful to scream loud enough to make the mountains ring. It would also have been useful to be built along more generous lines, for I was slight and thin, and no match for my captor’s strength. In less than a moment he had both my hands held behind my back in just one of his. His grip was tight, and he held me hard against his own body so I had no chance to escape nor even to see his face.
‘I never scream,’ I said, when I had ceased my struggles and caught my breath. Since he still had his hand over my mouth, this came out something like, ‘Mmmmmfffff.’
Surprisingly, he took his hand away.
‘I never scream,’ I repeated.
‘No one would hear you if you did,’ he said. He spoke with a remarkably strong Highland burr, so his words came out something like, ‘Nae oon wuid hear ye an ye did.’
I have always liked the Highland brogue, and his voice was low and melodious and oddly attractive. I had to remind myself that he was a felon and up to no good. His words were all too obviously true. There was not a soul in sight. No one would come to save me even if I had a scream like a banshee.
I sighed instead. ‘What have you done with the coachman and the groom?’
‘They ran away.’ The laconic answer held a hint of amusement.
I made a sound of disgust. ‘Cowards!’
He moved slightly, though his grip on me did not slacken. ‘I cannot disagree with you there.’
‘So what do you want?’ I demanded. ‘Are you a footpad? If so, I can tell you that I have no money.’
This was not precisely the case. I had the five pounds that the trustees of St Barnabas had sent, plus a further five pounds donated most generously by my father’s scholarly colleagues, and yet another pound confided to me by Mr Campbell—who had probably taken it, most improperly, from the Sunday collection plate. This grand total of eleven Scottish pounds would be riches indeed for a thief on the road.
I thought that I felt my captor shake with silent laughter. ‘I do not believe you,’ he said. ‘You are a lady. You must be rich.’ He slid his free hand caressingly down the length of my body and I stiffened with outrage beneath his touch. ‘Shall I search you,’ he continued, ‘to see if you tell the truth?’
‘Do so and I shall see you hanging on the end of a rope for your pains,’ I said, between my teeth. It was strange, but I had a feeling that robbery was not his aim at all—nor the ravishment of innocent young ladies. Even as we spoke I sensed that his mind was working with some other urgent preoccupation.
‘So you think me a highwayman?’ he said.
Something clicked in my mind then—the smell of the smoke, the other men who had passed, the scrape of metal on the stone. I realised that they must have been moving a whisky still. The Highlands were rife with illicit whisky distilleries, tucked away in every mountain glen. It was the curse of the excise men, because all the local populace would be part of the conspiracy—even to the point of local ministers hiding bottles of malt in coffins in the church.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you are a highwayman. I think you are a whisky smuggler.’
I felt the surprise go through him like a lightning strike, and in that moment his grip on me loosened and I pulled free and ran.
On reflection it was not a sensible thing to have done. The light was fading fast now, and I could barely see to put one foot before the other. I did not know where I was and I had nowhere to run to. Besides, my captor was a lot quicker and stronger than I was.
He caught me within six paces, as I dived into a copse of pine trees in a vain attempt to hide. If I had thought him rough before, it was nothing to how he treated me now. He grabbed my arm, knocking me to the ground and pinning me there with the weight of his body on mine. All the breath was crushed out of me.
The ground beneath me was dry and soft with last year’s pine needles. I lay still, inhaling the sharp, fresh scent and trying to catch my breath. It was too dark to see his face, but I was aware of every tense line of his body against my own. My hands were trapped against his chest, and beneath the coarse material of his coat I could feel the hardness of muscle and his heart beating steadily. In that moment all my senses seemed acutely sharp, so much so that I could smell the scent of him: leather, horses, fresh air and an echo of citrus that mingled with the smell of pine. His cheek brushed mine, and I felt the warmth and roughness of his skin against my own. A shiver seemed to echo its way through my entire body. And in that moment, although I could see nothing of his face in the darkness beneath the trees, I recognised him and knew who he was.
‘Mr Sinclair!’
I heard him swear, and he clapped a hand over my mouth again. ‘Quiet!’
I ignored him, trying ineffectually to struggle free from beneath his weight.
‘When you said I would see you within the month,’ I said, ‘I had no notion you meant it to be so soon.’ I took a deep breath. ‘And what the devil,’ I added, ‘do you think you are doing, smuggling whisky and accosting young ladies on the road?’
His grip relaxed a little, though he still held me pinioned beneath him. It was, in truth, disturbingly pleasant to be held thus, so hard against him. My body, which seemed to have developed a will of its own from the first moment I had met Mr Neil Sinclair, was busy telling me just how pleasurable the whole business was. I tried to ignore the stirring of desire deep inside me, but Neil would not let me up, trapping me with one leg across my skirts and thus keeping me trussed up beneath him.
‘Stop struggling,’ he said, and his voice sounded lazily amused. ‘I rather like you like this, Miss Balfour.’
I gave an angry sigh. ‘You have not answered my question,’ I said. I relaxed for a moment, staring at the spiky pattern of the pine needles against the dark blue of the night sky. ‘Why smuggle whisky?’
‘Why not?’ He sounded maddeningly reasonable. ‘The King’s taxes are criminally high.’
‘But you are an officer in the Navy and heir to an earldom!’
‘Which has nothing to do with the exorbitant state of the taxes.’ He moved slightly, his hand coming up gently to brush the tumbled hair away from my face in what was almost a lover’s touch.
‘I cannot have a conversation about tax with you in this situation,’ I said, resisting the urge to turn my cheek against the caress of his fingers. ‘It is ridiculous.’
‘As you say.’ His voice had dropped. ‘Taxes are not the matter uppermost in my mind, either.’ He leaned closer. And at that point, when every fibre of my being was aching for him to kiss me, we heard the sound of horses on the road.
We both froze absolutely still.
‘Excise men?’ I whispered.
‘Maybe.’ In the darkness his face was set in taut lines.
‘I could call out for help—’
His gaze came away from the road and focussed hard and fast on mine in the moonlight. ‘Then why do you not?’
For a long, long moment of silence I looked up into his face, and then I took a deep and deliberate breath.
Throw down the gauntlet…
His mouth came down on mine so swiftly that I never had a chance to call out, and after the first second I completely forgot that that was what I had been intending to do. The sensuality flared within me in a scalding tide, drowning out thought. He kissed me again, fiercely, hungrily, and I instinctively understood somewhere at the back of my mind that this was something that been going to happen between us from the very first moment that we had set eyes on one another.
No one had ever kissed me before. My being the schoolmaster’s daughter, the village lads had thought me above their touch, whilst the gentlemen who had visited the Manor had thought me beneath their notice. So, although I understood the theory of love from my reading and from observation, I was quite an innocent. But Neil Sinclair did not kiss like a gentleman, and he made no concessions to my inexperience, so I had no time to worry about what to do, or how to go about the whole business of kissing. In fact, I do not believe that I spared it one thought, but simply responded to the ruthless, insistent demand of his mouth on mine.
When he let me go, the pine needles and the stars pricking the skies above them were spinning like a top. I saw the flash of his smile in the darkness.
‘Thank you,’ he said. And then he was gone.
I lay still for another long moment, thinking of the arrogance of the man in thanking me for something he had not had the courtesy to request in the first place but had simply taken, like the thief he was. Then I struggled to sit up, and from there, by degrees, to stand on legs that felt all too unsteady. I could still feel the imprint of Neil Sinclair’s lips on mine, a sensation that threatened to rob me of any remaining strength. Then I told myself that I was acting like a silly little miss—and that Mr Sinclair had behaved like the scoundrel he undoubtedly was, and deserved everything that was coming to him. I took that long-delayed deep breath and found that I could scream after all.
‘Help! Smugglers!’
I stumbled out of the woods and onto the road—right in front of two English Army redcoats. Their horses shied and almost set the poor old coach horse off at a gallop—except that it was long past such excitement. One of the soldiers was so startled that he already had his musket raised and wavering in my direction.
‘What the hell—’
Indeed. What I can have looked like, tumbling out of the trees with pine needles in my hair and my clothing askew, can only be wondered at. He was a short, stocky man, and from what I could see of his expression in the rising moonlight I would have said he looked of nervous disposition. Not the kind of temperament to suit hunting smugglers through the Scottish glens.
His companion was a very different matter. Tall, fair and languid, he put out a hand to soothe the other man and stop him shooting me in a fit of anxious overexcitement.
‘Put away your gun, Langley,’ he murmured. ‘Can you not see this is a lady? You will frighten her.’
He dismounted with one fluid movement and was bowing before me. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘Lieutenant Arlo Graham, at your service. Smugglers, you say?’
‘Whisky smugglers in the woods,’ I said. ‘What are you waiting for?’ I looked from one to the other. ‘They are getting away.’
Lieutenant Graham sighed. He seemed utterly disinclined to plunge off up the wooded mountainside in hot pursuit. Perhaps it would have disarranged his uniform.
‘Too late,’ he said. ‘They will be well away by now.’ He turned to the carriage. ‘Is this your conveyance, madam?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am Miss Balfour, niece to Mr Ebeneezer Balfour of Glen Clair.’
‘But where is your coachman?’
‘I have no notion,’ I said truthfully. ‘I believe the wretch ran off when the smugglers stopped the coach.’
‘And why should they do that?’ Langley interposed. Rudely, I thought. ‘If they were smuggling whisky why draw attention to themselves by stopping the coach?’
‘I have no notion,’ I said again, rather less patiently this time. ‘I am not in their confidence, sir.’
Lieutenant Graham smiled. ‘Of course not, Miss Balfour.’
Langley frowned suspiciously. ‘And what were you doing in the woods yourself?’
I looked at him. ‘Hiding, of course. What else would I do with such ruffians about?’
‘What else indeed?’ Lieutenant Graham said. ‘That blackguard of a coachman, running off and leaving a lady unprotected! I am sure your uncle will turn him off on the spot. Now, pray let me escort you to Glen Clair before you take a chill, Miss Balfour. Langley, you can drive the coach and lead your horse. I will take Miss Balfour up with me.’
Before I could protest, he had remounted the very showy chestnut and reached down to swing me up before him. His arm was strong for such a deceptively indolent fellow. The horse, clearly objecting to the excess weight, sidestepped and threatened to decant me on the verge. I grabbed its mane and reflected that it was only in stories that the heroine was so featherlight that the poor horse did not suffer.
‘Unchivalrous fellow,’ Graham said, bringing it ruthlessly under control. ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Balfour.’
‘When you are quite ready, Graham,’ Langley said crossly. He had already mounted the box and efficiently tied his own horse’s reins to those of the poor old nag.
Graham pulled an expressive face. ‘I apologise for Langley,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I fear the climate in the north suits him ill. He is in a permanent bad mood.’
‘He is lucky it is not raining,’ I said. ‘This is fine weather for these parts.’
‘But cold,’ Graham drawled. ‘Always so cold, Miss Balfour. And on the rare occasions that it is warm the mosquitoes bite. Langley, poor fellow, is fatally attractive to the mosquito.’
It seemed to me that if Neil Sinclair was a handsome knave, then Arlo Graham was the smoothest gentleman this side of the Tweed. But both had one thing in common. They were well aware of their own attractions. Lieutenant Graham certainly did not require me to join the ranks of his followers, being his own greatest admirer.
We set off at a decorous trot. After we had covered but a few yards, Langley enquired irritably whether Lieutenant Graham could not hurry it up a little, for the coach was in danger of running us over. Arlo Graham sighed, but speeded up slightly. It also meant that he had to tighten his arms about me as I sat in front of him, to ensure that I did not lose my balance. This was by no means an unpleasant experience, but I found that rather than dwelling on Lieutenant Graham’s most respectful embrace, I was thinking of Neil Sinclair’s rather less deferential one. Not that I needed to worry that either of these two were likely to catch him, for the one would end up shooting at shadows and the other would do nothing so strenuous as chasing criminals. So it seemed it was left to me to have a few severe words with Mr Sinclair when I next saw him.
After about ten minutes we clattered across another wooden bridge, passed a dark and silent lodge house, and found ourselves on a wide sweep of drive before the Old House at Glen Clair. I was home.
Chapter Five
In which I meet my family and receive a less than warm welcome from my uncle.
Although it could only have been nine o’clock, there were no lights. The house crouched silent like a pouncing cat. I shivered.
Lieutenant Graham dismounted and helped me down. He strolled across to the door and tugged on the iron bell-pull. It came away in his hand, so he knocked. I heard the sound echo through the house like a distant roll of thunder.
‘Are they not expecting you?’ he enquired.
I was saved the complicated explanations as the door sighed open with a shuddering creak. A tiny pool of light fell on the step.
‘Who is it?’
