One Man's Love Read Free Page B

them to do so.
    He stood staring down at the scene before him, memory furnishing the quiet moment with details.
    For six years, from the time he was five until his eleventh birthday, their coach had stopped in exactly the same place. His mother would lean out of the window beside him in order to view her childhood home. Gilmuir sat like a welcoming beacon, a wondrous world that might have been created solely to grant her every wish. She would begin to smile in a different way than she did in England, as if she, too, threw off all constraints.
    What would his mother think now, all these years later, to discover that Fate, or a vengeful God, had sent him back to her native country? A foolish question to ask because he’d never know the answer.
    For most of the year this land was covered by a stark, inhospitable grayness, a monochromatic hue that announced it was Scotland. But now heather and thistles and wildflowers bloomed riotously over the hillsides, casting shadows among the green grass and clover. Loch Euliss was deeply blue, surface waves stirred by the sudden fierce wind.
    A storm loomed, as if to greet him. The sunlight, diffused through the curtain of clouds, bathed the castle in an otherworldly light. It was a strange welcome to this place of memory.
    The promontory was a place ideally suited to repel invaders. But the builders of the castle had not been prescient about English cannon or the anger of the Empire as they extracted revenge against the recalcitrant and rebellious Scots. Gilmuir had evidentlybeen bombarded into submission and now nothing more than a roofless shell.
    Will Gilmuir last forever, Grandfather?
    As long as the sea, Ian. As long as the sea.
    But it hadn’t. Instead, it had fallen and now lay broken and shattered, a skeletal companion to the newly constructed Fort William.
    Cumberland himself had chosen Alec among the cadre of officers in Flanders to accompany him back to Scotland to quell the rebellion. For his ability to stay alive in battle and for his greater capacity to remain silent and obedient, Alec had been given command of Fort William.
    He’d wanted to protest, to give the duke some rational refusal of the post, but it would not be wise to tell Cumberland of either his heritage or his reluctance. The first could get him hanged; the second would only result in the duke’s displeasure.
    A mist was blurring the horizon, tinting the mountains blue. The glen was heavily forested on the western side, but on the east was cropped as cleanly as if sheep grazed on the grass. Below him, in a secluded corner of the glen, was the village he knew almost as well as Gilmuir. A clachan, the Scots called it. He had been a visitor to many of those houses, almost a third son in the place Fergus and James called home.
    The stones of the cottages were tinged with green, moss having added its own hue over the years. Each was alike, a long rectangular structure intersected in the middle by a door and flanked by two tall windows. The thatching on the roofs had matted over the years until they appeared like crisp brown crusts on freshly baked bread loaves.
    Yet another place of memory, one he would do well to avoid.
    He mounted again, gave the signal, and began to ride toward Gilmuir, banishing all thoughts of the past. It was easier to concentrate upon his task, and the duty given him.
     
    The sky was darkening even as the wind increased, the gusts blowing bits of leaves and grasses past the open door of her cottage. Leitis glanced outside. A beam of light suddenly speared a menacing cloud, brushing its outline in gold as if announcing the presence of God in the oncoming storm. Sadness seemed to linger in the air as if the earth prepared to weep.
    Leitis closed her eyes, hearing the murmur of the threads beneath her fingers. The sounds became, in her longing mind, teasing conversation between her brothers. The wind, laden with the scent of rain, was not unlike the subdued laughter between her parents. The