The Highland Countess Read online

  Her distress was soon increased by sheer physical discomfort. The earl proved to be a good landlord for, as soon as the carriage had lurched from the boundaries of his land, the roads degenerated into little more than rutted tracks of dried mud, and more than once Morag’s head came into contact with the carriage roof. The earl at last awoke after his own head had received what he termed “a sair dunt.” The coach had at last to be abandoned for a pair of stout pack horses, and after two days of this form of travel, broken by nights in ill-kept inns, Morag began to feel an ache in her back and a blinding headache behind her eyes.

  On the evening of the fourth day, they arrived in Edinburgh and made their weary way to the High Street.

  The High Street ran from the Palace of Holyroodhouse along a ridge to the castle, a grim, medieval building which crouched atop a hundred-foot jumble of rocks. The mile-long street was bordered by gloomy tenements, built as far back as the sixteenth century.

  Nothing had prepared Morag for the noxious smells emanating from these apartment houses which compressed between them a dark maze of sloping alleys and courtyards. There was ample evidence that this was the city where “every gentleman is a drunkard and every drunkard a gentleman.” The apartments were often thirteen stories high and crammed with people; tailors, lawyers and aristocrats sharing the same building with a free and easy democracy which startled the English visitor.

  The noise was incredible. Everyone seemed to be selling something at full pitch, although the light was fading—coals, white sand, herring—and the jumbled, jostling crowd was occasionally kept in order by the much-detested City-Guard, a band of fierce Highlanders who used battle-axes to keep the citizenry in line.

  This then was Morag’s first impression of the city of her dreams—noisy, smelly, gothic, medieval. But she was too tired to care.

  She wearily followed the earl and his servants up a particularly vile-smelling close and then up a pitch-black narrow stone stair to the earl’s apartments which were on the middle floors. To her relief, she was greeted by a motherly housemaid who was almost clean. The earl’s “town house” was very small and dark, consisting only of five rooms and a kitchen. Morag had one bedroom; the earl, to her great relief, had the other. The three other rooms acted as parlor, dining room and drawing room. The housemaid bedded down under the dresser in the kitchen and the rest of the servants were put out for the night like so many household cats.

  Morag arose early as usual, hearing the raucous clamor of the High Street rising faintly up on the cold, still air.

  She climbed stiffly from her bed and moved to the window. The panes were so smeared with dirt that she thought what she saw through them must be an optical illusion.

  She opened the window and leaned out, gasping at first at the shock of the cold air and the fact that the ground plummeted down below her as if she were perched on the edge of a cliff.

  Then she raised her eyes and there it was. Camelot! The Promised Land. The dream country.

  Over the thousand-foot grimy span of the North Bridge which sprang out from the High Street lay another land. The elegant squares and houses of the New Town basked in the morning sun. The splendid terrace called Princes Street smiled benignly across smooth gardens and a great gully of jagged rock which cut it off from the squalor of the High Street.

  Morag felt as if she were living in the Middle Ages seeing a vision of the future. There was an old brass bell on the washstand and she rang it loudly, waiting impatiently until the housemaid appeared, yawning, from the kitchen.

  “What is that? Where is that?” cried Morag.

  The maid peered sleepily out of the window. “Och, that’s the New Town, my leddy. ’Tis where the gentry live now.”

  “Why don’t we live there?” said Morag breathlessly.

  “Oh, all the grand folk hivnae moved ower. The earl and some o’ the ithers likes it fine here. ’Tis what they’ve been used to.”

  “What is it like?” cried Morag.

  “It’s a long way away, my leddy,” said the maid as if Morag had been asking her to describe America. “I hivnae had the time.”

  “I shall wake my husband directly and we will go there now,” breathed Morag.

  “My lord is oot and aboot,” shrugged the maid, wiping her nose on the corner of her apron. “Gone tae see his cronies.”

  “I cannot go alone,” said Morag desperately. “I know. You shall accompany me. What is your name?”

  “Maggie—Maggie Sinclair,” said the maid, remembering her manners and bobbing a curtsy. “I cannae go. I’ve a lot of work.”

  Morag bit her lip in vexation. “When will my husband return?”

  “I cannae say. He aye goes to Dowie’s Tavern for a dram and then tae the Right and Wrong Club and maybe on tae the Spendthrift.”

  “Then I shall go alone,” decided Morag.

  “I widnae dae that,” said Maggie shaking her head. “Whit’ll my lord say?”

  My lord would not be in a fit state to say anything by the time he finished patronizing his favorite watering holes, thought Morag grimly, so she did not answer, merely proceeding to dress. Maggie shrugged and left. It was not for her to criticize her betters.

  When Morag eventually ventured timidly out into the High Street, she shrank back from the jostling throng. But the New Town with its quiet gardens and squares beckoned so she pushed forward down the hill in the direction of the North Bridge. She did not see the earl but he saw her. He had returned with some of his cronies to show them his beautiful, young wife, having already bragged a great deal about her charms.

  But as he was about to hail her, his eye was caught by the sight of a servant girl bending over to lift a pail of water. Her ragged skirts were kilted up around a pair of well-turned, if dirty, ankles. A long rip in her skirt revealed tantalizing glimpses of pale leg.

  The earl forgot about Morag, forgot about his friends. His hands twitched. “Deil tak’ me,” he muttered. “Will ye look at that!”

  The girl turned around and caught the earl’s avid stare. Bending down, she slowly raised her skirt. On her calf were the brave and tattered remains of a scarlet garter. Although it was obviously only doing service as an ornament, the lady having no stockings on, it seduced the earl’s senses so much that he startled the street with a joyous “Halloo!” and bounded forward.

  Morag hurried on, spurred by the sound of the wild cry behind her. She thought it sounded like a bull in pain.

  Although several pawky gallants tried to block her path, she managed to avoid them and at last hurried over the North Bridge, her eyes fastened on the New Town beyond.

  It was like stepping into another world. Edinburgh had already been established as the Athens of the North for some years and now boasted many English visitors who had come to see this peculiar city where society rated metaphysics higher than money.

  Morag stared open-mouthed at the ladies in their thin dresses and wondered why they did not die of cold. She herself was wearing her blue wool dress with a pelisse buttoned over it and a shapeless bonnet. She turned to look after one young miss who was wearing so little that practically nothing was left to the imagination and, turning back, bumped full into a tall figure. She stammered her apologies and looked up into the greenest pair of eyes she had ever seen. They were not hazel with flecks of green nor were they that pale gooseberry color. They were as green as emeralds and as unwinking as the eyes of a cat. She ducked her head and muttered an apology and scurried off down Princes Street.

  The sun shone down bravely and the air was warm until she came to one of the many crossings where an arctic wind whipped down all the way from the North Sea. A faint feeling of unease told her that she was being followed and she looked back. Sure enough, there he was—the man with the green eyes. The fleeting glimpse was enough to show her that he was tall and slim and very fashionably dressed. He wore a riding coat and buckskins, the little gold tassels on his glistening Hessian boots swung jauntily and the crisp white of his elaborate cravat, da
zzling against the black of his jacket.

  She turned round quickly as she caught the beginnings of a strange smile of… recognition?… on his face. She felt strangely breathless and somehow obscurely threatened. She saw the cool dark doorway of a bookseller’s shop and dived for cover, casting another quick look back.

  Morag breathed a sigh of relief. He had been accosted by a party of friends. She found that the palms of her hands were damp and her knees trembling. What on earth was she afraid of?

  She turned her attention to the bookshelves. So many, many books, hitherto forbidden. Miss Simpson was a great believer in the destructive influence of romantic literature. So although Morag was allowed to know the names of various famous writers, she had not been allowed to read their work.

  She idly turned over the pages of a slim volume of poetry. It was secondhand and the pages had already been cut. “Poems,” said the title page, “by the Reverend John Donne.”

  Feeling on safe and familiar ground, Morag began to read. Pandora’s box was opened wide. Her eyes were fastened on the pages, her senses and emotions reeling under the impact of some of the most beautiful love poems in the world.

  “All Kings, and all their favorites,

  All glory of honors, beauties, wits,

  The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass,

  Is elder by a year, now, than it was

  When thou and I first one another saw:

  All other things, to their destruction draw,

  Only our love hath no decay;

  This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,

  Running, it never runs from us away,

  But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.”

  She read on, her eyes misted with tears, feeling a strange lost yearning.

  Her right to innocent love and passion had been forfeited by this arranged marriage to an old man. Her tremulous, adolescent half-formed feelings were being given a guide, an explanation, as she read her way steadily along the shelves, oblivious to the other customers and the dry, impatient cough of the bookseller.

  Here was Shakespeare, there was Pope, all around her the witty, clever voices cried love. Andrew Marvell cynically berated his coy mistress. Was this how her husband felt?

  “Then worms shall try

  That long preserv’d virginity,

  And your quaint honor turn to dust,

  And into ashes all my lust,

  The grave’s a fine and private place,

  But none, I think, do there embrace.”

  As the sun outside climbed higher in the sky over the grim castle, Morag read on, dazzled, moved, elated and despairing as she lost her emotional virginity in an orgy of reading.

  The cough behind her was now sharp enough to make her swing around, blushing furiously.

  The bookseller was a small, chubby man in a pepper-and-salt frock coat and knee breeches. He had begun to assume that the young lady in the good but unfashionable clothes was under the misapprehension that she was in a circulating library and hoped to at least sell one book to her.

  “Can I help you, madam?”

  “Oh, yes. I mean, I would like to buy some books,” said Morag, wildly scooping up armfuls. The bookseller’s fat, white face creased up into a smile like that of a pleased baby. Then his face fell as his strange customer put the books down again and started scrabbling frantically in her diamond-shaped reticule.

  “I have forgot to bring money,” wailed Morag. She could not go home bookless; she could not!

  The bookseller caught the gleam of gold on Morag’s finger through the lace of her mittens. “Perhaps madam’s husband…?” he began.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Morag. “I shall find him and then I shall return. He is the Earl of Murr—perhaps you know our address. It is in the High Street and it should not take me very long to walk there and back…”

  “That will not be necessary,” said the bookseller with an avuncular smile. Oh, the magic of a title! “My lady may choose what she pleases and my boy, Jimmy, will carry them for you.”

  A half hour later, Morag set out for the High Street with Jimmy, the bookseller’s boy, trotting behind her, bowed down under a sack of books—poetry, plays and, most priceless, several sets of novels which the bookseller had assured her were read by all the ladies of the ton.

  For the next few days Morag did not leave the sanctuary of her room. She barely noticed her husband’s absence, she barely noticed his return at the end of two days when he was helped up the stairs, having drunk himself into an inflammatory fever.

  By systematically dosing himself with a mixture of brandy and mercury, the earl once again felt returned to the land of the living and remembered that his drinking friends had latterly begun to doubt the existence of this pretty wife he had bragged about so much.

  He accordingly decided to promenade his wife down the High Street between the hours of one and two, which he vaguely remembered as the fashionable time to be seen. He brushed aside Morag’s faltering apologies for the amount of books she had bought—although his lordship read little else other than the game laws and the Guide to the Turf—with the remark that the whole of Edinburgh was book daft.

  Morag dressed in her finest clothes at his bidding and, her eyes still clouded with dreams, she allowed her husband to lead her into the jostling crowd on the High Street. The earl and his bride made their stately progress, only jumping nimbly away from the tenements as a wild cry of “Gardez loo” from above presaged the emptying of the contents of a chamberpot into the street.

  The earl espied two of his elderly cronies and hustled Morag forward. The men were called, it seemed, Erchie and Cosmo. They reeked of old spirits and their clothes were none too clean but they treated Morag with great admiration and courtesy, Erchie, who hailed from Glasgow, pronouncing her to be “a veritabubble ferry,” which Morag translated into “veritable fairy” after some difficulty.

  The courtesies being dealt with, the earl and his friends fell to comparing the virtues of various taverns. Soon the three were hard at it, gossiping, and each one plying that instrument which is euphemistically known as a back scratcher—an ivory hand at the end of a long stick—which is really for scratching at the livestock in your head without disturbing the hairdresser’s art. Morag was left to survey the busy scene.

  The day was steel-gray and cold. Edinburgh was giving a fine example of why it had earned its nickname, “Auld Reekie,” as the fumes and smoke rising from the myriads of chimneys blotted out most of the little light from the lowering sky and turned midday into midnight. The crowd jostled and pushed, exchanging greetings, nobles and their ladies rubbing shoulders with the lowest of the citizens. Newhaven women with strident voices and striped aprons sold “caller herrin,’” a knife grinder called his trade, his shrill voice rising above the other cries of pies and coal, soot and sand. Anyone who had anything to sell tried to sell it. An old man who seemed nothing more than a bundle of rags held together with string placed a dirty cloth on the ground and carefully placed on the cloth a pair of worn and cracked boots and proceeded to add his voice to the cacophony.

  And then Morag experienced that strange feeling of unease. She turned her head slowly and across the jostling, moving throng, she met the gaze of a familiar pair of green eyes. Blue and green eyes met and held. Morag could not look away. For now she had poetry, wicked seductive poetry, to clarify her thoughts, and a quotation leapt unbidden into her head.

  “Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

  Our eyes, upon one double string;

  So to entergraft our hands, as yet

  Was all the means to make us one,

  And pictures in our eyes to get

  Was all our propagation.”

  She blushed suddenly and painfully and dragged her eyes away.

  “There she is again,” murmured Lord Toby Freemantle.

  “Where? Who?” demanded his friend, the Honorable Alistair Tillary.

  “Toby means the redhead,” drawled the thir
d of the party, Harvey Wrexford. “Don’t meddle with the local natives, Toby. You’ll only come to harm.”

  The three Englishmen were visiting Edinburgh.

  Neither their fathers nor grandfathers would have been seen dead in the place, but Scotland was once again fashionable, and Edinburgh hailed as an intellectual paradise.

  Lord Toby, of the green eyes, was twenty-five years old and had already earned himself a reputation as a rake. Part of it was well deserved but most was a fiction spread around by disappointed mothers of marriageable daughters. Lord Toby was an extremely wealthy young man. He was a model of athletic grace and exquisite tailoring. Life had been very easy for him and therefore had left him with a perpetual nagging feeling of boredom.

  His two friends were equally fashionably dressed but neither was blessed with Lord Toby’s romantic face and figure. Alistair Tillary was round and fat with a chubby, jovial face held prisoner by the enormously high starched points of his shirt. Harvey Wrexford was thin to the point of emaciation and had a long, mild face. He looked like an undernourished sheep.

  “I must find out who she is,” went on Lord Toby, his eyes fastening on a shining curl which had escaped from Morag’s bonnet. “Did you ever see such hair?”

  “It’s red,” yawned Alistair. “Very unfashionable.”

  “But such a red,” said Toby. “It’s almost purple, and, oh, those eyes! Who are these old men with her? One of them must be her father.”

  “All the more reason to leave her alone,” said Harvey.

  “Nonsense! She escaped me before. Look, there is a servant giving that one next to her a snuffbox. I shall catch him when he leaves and find out her name.”

  Lord Toby watched until the servant drew back a little into the crowd. Morag was staring at her boots. He approached the servant and dropped a couple of coins into the man’s hand.

  “You must refresh my memory,” he said in a low voice. “What is the name of your master?”

  The servant was Highland and had no love of the English but he had accepted the money and his rigid code of honor told him he would need to give this accursed Sassenach the information he wanted. “Earl of Murr,” he mumbled in a surly voice and melted away into the crowd.