The Tartan Touch Read Free Page B

will be your decision . ”
    I thought longingly of London and freedom and knew them both to be impractical. I stared out at the mist through the kitchen window, inwardly weeping because I knew now that romance was forever doomed to pass me by. Then a shaft of sun broke through the mist, lighting up the glen below us. I turned and looked pleadingly at Mr. Fraser.
    “Is there no other way?” I whispered.
    He shrugged his shoulders, his grey eyes hard. He didn’t care either way, I thought. I was no more than a convenience to him, to care for his precious ward and to thwart poor Margaret, and she a widow and entitled to his regard.
    “I fancy you’d find it hard to get work here without any proper training,” he reasoned slowly. “But you’re entitled to try, if that is what you wish?”
    I swallowed, hating him, wondering how he knew that I knew nothing at all except how to cook and keep a house on next to nothing.
    “I’ll pay you,” he said.
    I lifted my chin proudly. “You can keep your bawbees ! I’ll come to Australia because I must, I have nothing else to do, but I’ll not sell myself to you or any man!”
    “Right,” he said coolly, “Then we’d best settle your affairs as quickly as we can. I want to be gone before the end of the week.”
    S o soon? I bit my lip. But then why not? If it had to be, the sooner the better!

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    There w as no one to tell how I felt about him, a despiser of widows and orphans, who sought his own will before all else. I vowed I would do all in my power to ease the lot of Margaret Fraser if I could. Her heart must have broken when she heard that her daughter had been left in the charge of Andrew Fraser. I flattered myself that I knew a little of what she was feeling, for wasn’t I, too, another sacrifice to his relentless single-mindedness ?
    The minister over the way asked no questions about the wedding. Mr. Fraser was waiting for me in the plainly furnished church that was much the same, and yet very different from the one I had known all my life. It was strange to see another man in the role my father had so often taken. This was a thin, bespectacled man, gentler of aspect and gentler of word. He preached a fine sermon, there was no doubt about that. If I had indeed been committing my whole life into Mr. Fraser’s keeping, I would have taken his words to heart, but as it was, they served only to accentuate the fact that we were strangers entering into a bond that I more than half thought was sinful under the circumstances. Marriage, the minister said, is a holy estate, and whosoever mocks it mocks God. I might have t urned and fled then out of the church and away across the glen, but Mr. Fraser held my hand in his own and listened impassively, not showing by so much as a flicker that the words meant anything other than some play he had come to watch.
    The minister dwelt long on the obedience a wife owes to her husband. It was the same, he said, as that due from the Church to her Lord. It was cold comfort to know that I was not Andrew Fraser’s wife and never would be. I owed him no duty, for this was only a farce we were playing for his own purposes, but I wondered if it had been otherwise how it would have been between us. I have a temper to match my hair and I had already met his implacable will to be master.
    And so I was married. It was an unbearably beautiful morning, with the heather shining purple on the hills beneath a gentle, blue sky that peeped at itself in the distant loch, like a beautiful woman admiring herself in a looking glass.
    “You see,” I said to Mr. Fraser, “how beautiful is my Scotland!”
    “It’s certainly better without that mist,” he answered gravely.
    I pulled my plaid closer about my best white dress and smiled my forgiveness for his disparagement of my native land .
    “I think it is as beautiful as the Song of Solomon,” I said, and I quoted softly: “ For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The