The Loveless Marriage Page 7
Scarves and jerseys also were knitted, but often badly, for those who have to go out at night and guard their sheep.
“Now tell me, mademoiselle,” Yvonne MacSteel was saying, “exactly what you need.”
Fyna threw out her hands.
“Everything. I have one or two pretty gowns, which I bought last year when I stayed with friends in Edinburgh. But I am sure that they are not smart enough for anyone who has been in London.”
She made another expressive gesture and then queried,
“Perhaps in the months that have passed since I bought them the fashion has changed.”
“Leave it all to me,” Yvonne MacSteel said. “My family in France, because they know it interests me, send me many magazines, which have illustrations and show the latest fashions in Paris.”
She smiled and continued,
“You will, I do promise you, mademoiselle, look very chic. Even if I cannot make many gowns before the marriage, others will follow as quickly as we can complete them.”
“Can you do it?” Fyna asked. ‘It is very important to me because, although his Lordship did not say so, my father thinks that as we will already be married when the King arrives, I shall be expected to meet him,”
She saw by the expression on the French woman’s face that this was indeed a challenge that delighted and excited her.
“I have,” she was saying almost to herself, “some material with me that I brought from France that would make a lovely gown.”
“I think my mother put some things away,” Fyna replied. “But you must come and look for yourself. Perhaps some of my mother’s gowns, which, of course, are still there, could be altered.”
She saw by the expression of Yvonne MacSteel’s face that she thought this unlikely, but she was, however, too polite to say so.
Firmly the French woman said,
“You go back to The Castle, mademoiselle. I will call the women in the village together and tell them what I want them to do. I will come and see you as soon as William gets back and can look after the baby.”
Fyna had forgotten that Yvonne MacSteel had a baby of four or five months old.
Now, as she glanced out of the window, she could see just why she had not noticed him before. He was asleep in his pram in the garden.
“You are very kind,” she said, “and I have no one to help me except for you.”
“Leave it to me, mademoiselle,” Yvonne MacSteel repeated. “I promise, if it is humanly possible, that you will not be disappointed.”
Fyna thanked her again and left to walk back slowly to The Castle.
She could not help thinking that she was very lucky.
Who would have expected that there would be a French woman who understood dress design in such an unlikely place as the small village in the Highland?
Otherwise, the only thing she could have done was to rush down to Edinburgh and try to buy enough ready-made garments from the shops.
Because she was so slender, this had not proved satisfactory in the past.
Even when she was at school she had to have her dresses specially made for her.
She knew now that anything Yvonne MacSteel could produce would be far preferable to clothes that were too large for her.
Such clothes could never do justice to her figure or express her own personality as she tried to do when she had anything made for her.
Equally how could she compete with the smart Ladies of the Court?
The stories of their gowns, jewels and fur-trimmed cloaks had by now reached the North, especially after the Coronation, when the King in his glory had outshone everyone else.
That was what the Earl was accustomed to.
He could hardly expect anyone from the Highlands to compete with them.
Scotland, like England, was aware that the King was infatuated with the Marchioness of Conyngham.
And the stories of the expensive jewels he gave her had lost nothing in the telling.
Fyna had not been particularly interested.
Yet anyone who came to The Castle seemed to want to chatter about the King.
There was a great deal of keen speculation as to whether the Marchioness would come to Edinburgh with him or be left behind.
‘That is the sort of woman,’ Fyna thought, ‘I have to compete with or find that the Earl is ashamed of me.’
Back in The Castle, she went first to her mother’s room to see, as she had mentioned to Yvonne MacSteel, if there were any materials there.
In her bedroom, which had not been occupied since she had died, there were a number of gowns hanging up in the wardrobe.
As they were all in rather dark colours, Fyna did not think them to be very appropriate for a bride.
She then remembered that her mother had a store cupboard in one of the Towers.
There she was more successful and she found here some yards of soft chiffon.
Her mother must have bought it to make into a summer dress or perhaps a nightgown.
Then she saw something that she thought Yvonne MacSteel would appreciate.
It was a muslin in a soft green embroidered cleverly with silver speckled with diamanté.
As she could not imagine her mother wearing it, Fyna thought that she must have been given it as a present. It had been put away in a drawer that otherwise contained materials to be made into tablecloths and napkins.
Whatever else, it was certainly unusual.
She thought that, as an evening gown, it would be so different from anything anyone else would wear.
It made her think of the river running through the Strath or the trees when they were touched with frost in the winter and glittered in the sunshine.
She carried the materials down to her bedroom.
She next sat down in front of the dressing table and looked at her reflection in the mirror.
It was then that she felt she could not do it.
How could she dress herself up and marry a man who would have no wish to marry her?
And she had no wish to marry him.
She wondered what would happen if she ran away.
Then she told herself simply that she was a soldier going into battle.
She was fighting to save the lives of many men and women who depended on her father to protect them.
The only weapon he could use to do so was herself.
Therefore she had no choice.
Nevertheless, at the mere thought of the Earl, she shivered.
She felt as if an icy hand was clutching at her heart.
*
By the following day what had occurred at Brara Castle was well known throughout the whole Clan.
Everyone, men and women, were discussing the Wedding in detail amongst themselves, some excitedly, but some were violently against it.
Those were the Clansmen who had suffered the most from losing their sheep and their cattle, also the widows of the men who had been murdered or who had died later of their injuries.
Yet Fyna knew that the majority of women were thankful that they need no longer fear when night came what horrors would take place in the dark. And they need no longer go to sleep wondering whether they would be woken up by someone starting to burn the thatch on their roofs.
Wherever Fyna went, she was aware, from their suddenly falling silent, that people were talking about her.
She soon learnt that the girls, at any rate, thought that she was incredibly lucky.
As one of them said to her,
“You’ll be a Countess, miss, and that be awful grand. And you’ll be meetin’ the King and we all thinks you be ever so lucky.”
Fyna wished that she herself could think the same.
As the days seemed to hurry by, she became more and more acutely aware that Saturday was only just ahead of her.
She had a great deal to do in her Castle.
Her father was determined that her Wedding should be celebrated in traditional style.
Six stags were to be killed and roasted in the co
urtyard.
A marquee was being erected where the bride and groom would receive their guests.
A fine Wedding cake, which was being made in The Castle kitchen, would be cut with the Earl’s claymore.
The cooks were making it in the shape of a Castle and stuck into the top of it would be the Laird’s Skean Dhu.
It was a very impressive idea.
Because they were so intent on what they were preparing for the Wedding, Fyna and her father had to put up with hurried and simple meals.
Pipers were practising day and night what they would play at the Wedding.
Even when Fyna could escape down to the river to be alone, she could still hear them.
They disturbed her concentration on what she was trying to think out for herself.
First of all she found it very difficult to escape from Hamish.
When she came back to The Castle after seeing Yvonne MacSteel, her father was out.
She was alone in the sitting room when he burst in.
She looked up at him apprehensively, knowing by the expression on his face that he was in a rage.
“What is this I hear?” he demanded furiously. ‘That you are to marry the Chieftain of the McBraras? I don’t believe it.”
“It is true,” Fyna answered him quietly.
“Do you think I will allow that?” he asked. “You are going to marry me. I have asked you often enough. You cannot sell yourself to a man who has always been our enemy just to keep him from attacking a few unimportant shepherds.”
“They are our people and not unimportant to us,” Fyna parried.
“Then marry me, as I have asked you to often enough,” Hamish said, “and if you do, I promise that there will be no more attacks on the McBraras, swine though they are.”
It was the first time he had acknowledged that he was responsible for the onslaughts that had been made in the past.
Fyna shook her head.
“It is too late,” she said. “If Papa had not by this means prevented the McBraras from attacking us after you had killed their shepherd, we might all be dead by now. The only way he could prevent this from happening was to join our Clans by marriage.”
She put it very clearly in case Hamish had got the story wrong.
But he merely thumped his fist down on the table in front of her and shouted,
“You will marry me! Then there will be the peace you talk so much about and the Clans can kiss each other if that is what they want to do.”
He was spitting out the words.
Fyna rose and asserted,
“It is no use, Hamish. You have carried things too far. Nothing can be done now except to make a union of the Clans. That requires me to marry the Earl.”
“I will not allow it! Do you hear me? I will not allow it!”
Hamish shouted out the words.
She thought that he was only showing off and he must be aware that there was nothing he could do.
He left because he heard the Laird arriving back.
Fyna knew, however, by the expression on his face and his last words that he intended to make considerable difficulties.
“You are mine,” he hissed at her. “You are mine and I will not let you go. I have always sworn that you will be my wife and I am not going to be beaten by some stuck-up McBrara who thinks he can pipe his own tune because he is friendly with the King.”
There was fury and jealousy in his voice.
When he went out of the door, slamming it behind him, Fyna sighed with relief.
‘He is mad,’ she told herself, ‘and it is no use listening to what he has to say when he is at the bottom of all this trouble.’
There was no sign of Hamish for two days.
Fyna was busy arranging the things that her father required and she was also being fitted by Yvonne MacSteel.
She was relieved that she did not have to listen to or look at Hamish at least for a while.
On Wednesday night she was very tired, having had a busier day than usual.
There had been a number of items that she had had to fetch from the nearest town. They were required by those who were doing the catering and she had to drive over to find them.
When she returned, she discovered that her father was upset.
A number of the Clan who lived some distance away from The Castle had not been told about the Wedding.
Letters had to be written and men despatched to walk over the moors with them.
It was getting late in the day when finally Fyna was able to retire to bed.
As she undressed, it was inevitable that she should think about what lay ahead for her.
It was always the same.
When she was busy, she tried to forget that there was a man waiting to marry her, whom she would meet for the first time on Saturday morning.
She had half-expected that he might drive over to meet her.
However, her father told her that the Earl had sent a message to say that he was obliged to go to Edinburgh for several days.
It was, of course, to make arrangements for the King’s visit and this involved meetings with a number of those who would be entertaining and escorting him in Scotland.
Fyna had wondered whether, before they were married, it would be better for her to meet the Earl privately and alone. Otherwise they would encounter each other for the first time in the Kirk.
That question, however, had been decided by the Earl going to Edinburgh.
She could think only of how strange and embarrassing it would be when they did leave the Kirk.
The first words he would speak to her would be that of a husband to his wife.
She undressed slowly as she was deep in her thoughts.
Only when she was ready for her bed and about to say her prayers did she suddenly feel afraid.
For a moment she could not understand why, the fear just seemed to seep through her body.
She had felt afraid when she thought of the Earl and her life ahead, but this was different.
It was something very physical, something that her whole body shrank from.
Then she knew that it was a warning she could not ignore because it came from within herself.
It was part of her because she was fey, as were so many Scots.
She stood in her bedroom irresolute.
She was telling herself that it was really absurd and there was nothing at the moment to be physically afraid of.
It was just part of her imagination.
Then she knew, so strongly and so unmistakably, that she was in danger, grave danger.
It was a feeling that she could not ignore.
Without arguing with herself any longer, she picked up the eiderdown that lay on her bed and one of the pillows.
Then, carrying the candle which was the only one she had not yet extinguished, she left her bedroom almost as if she was being led by a guiding hand.
She did not go along the passage into the other rooms.
Instead, she went up the stairs of the Tower.
At the very top of it was a room that was very seldom used.
It was recounted in the legends to have been the prison for some years of an enemy who the MacSteels had captured.
The prisoner had employed his time in writing poetry and it was published after his death and acclaimed by the literary world.
When she was a child, Fyna had always been especially fascinated by the room and so had her brother.
He had insisted on sleeping there and he said that he hoped he would be inspired to write in the same way as the prisoner had.
He had made a great effort, but complained bitterly that he still could not find a rhyme to anything he wrote.
Fyna, when she was a little older, had done the same thing.
Not surprisingly her father had thought that the poems she produced were charming.
He had, however, made no effort to have them published and he said that she must write a great deal more before they could make a book.
 
; Now, as she slipped into the small room, she saw that there were blankets on the bed but no sheets.
So she was glad that she had brought her own quilt with her.
She then closed the door of the room.
Long after it had been used as a prison, her father had changed over the bolts from the outside to the inside of the door.
They were old and cleverly made and he wanted to make sure that they were never lost.
Almost as if a Power greater than herself was telling her what to do, she bolted the door.
Then, wrapping herself in her eiderdown and putting her pillow down for her head, she lay on the bed.
She must have been asleep for about an hour.
Suddenly there was the sound of someone trying to push open the door.
As she had bolted it, it was impossible for whoever it was to open it.
Then she heard heavy footsteps going down the long stairway that she had climbed up.
It was not until the early morning that she realised that she had been saved from being kidnapped and carried away from her own home by the dreaded Hamish.
He had climbed up the steep outside wall of The Castle and he was, she well knew, a very experienced climber.
He had entered her bedroom, determined to carry her away.
When he found that she was not there, he had torn open the wardrobe, creating a great mess.
He had then gone down the passages of The Castle doing the same in almost every room.
Then, as she now knew, he had climbed up the stairs of the Tower.
Only because she had been sensible enough to obey her premonition and bolt herself in had he been unable to carry her away.
She was shivering at the thought of what might have happened if he had done so.
He would have taken her away to the house where he lived, which was a strange and rambling old building.
She guessed that he would have ravished her before her father could have come to her rescue.
‘He is wicked and evil,’ she told herself.
At the same time no one could prove that it was Hamish who had created such a mess in The Castle.
He had been crafty enough not to make a noise directly outside the Laird’s room.
“How clever of you, my dearest, to guess what might happen and go up into the Tower,” the Laird exclaimed.