Highland Courage (Highland Brides) (3 page)

“Excellent, it hasn’t been finalized yet. Since that is the case, I would like to negotiate a betrothal.”

Cathal surveyed him cautiously. “Ye have a clansman who seeks her hand?”

“I seek her hand, Laird. I would like to marry your daughter.”

Although it looked as if she tried to remain unaffected, Brigid seemed unable to hide her delight.

Tadhg went on. “It is time I marry. I respect ye and your sons a great deal. A closer alliance between the Mathesons and the MacKenzies is in both of our best interests. I know ye wanted Mairead to be close to her family, and Cnocreidh is less than a day’s ride from Carraigile. Furthermore, as Flan is my squire, she will have at least one family member with her.”

“By all that’s holy, did Flan put ye up to this?” asked Cathal.

Tadhg laughed. “Well, he mentioned it, but so did Peadar and Quinn. Frankly, I considered it myself over a year ago, and I was inclined to make an offer then. However, I knew ye wanted to improve other ties. I was also aware ye wanted a husband for her who would live at Carraigile, so I didn’t act. Flan told me this morning ye were considering Laird Fraser’s heir. If ye are willing to let her leave home, I would like for ye to consider my suit.”

Cathal looked shocked by Laird Matheson’s answer and perhaps slightly embarrassed by Flan’s boldness. “Ye’re right. Lachlan refused to discuss a betrothal to one of his nephews before ensuring a good marriage for Darcy.”

Brigid frowned at Cathal, obviously irritated. “He had the nerve to suggest he was doing
us
a favor by offering his heir.”

“Brigid, I told ye not to let Lachlan bother ye so.”

“Well, Clan Fraser has precious few strong allies and they need us more than we need them. Mairead will be much happier nearer home, with Flan close at hand.”

Cathal nodded, evidently having made his decision. “Aye, she will be. Laird Matheson, I would be honored to have ye to marry my daughter.”

“Then it is settled. Shall we draw up the papers before Fraser gets his back up about it?”

Cathal rubbed his head as if trying to fend off this new headache. “Och, no question, this will cause a problem with Fraser. How will I appease him?”

Thinking back to Peadar’s comment from the previous evening, Tadhg offered the solution. “Lachlan has two daughters and only one son. He will have no trouble finding a bride for his heir. Ye have three sons who are not betrothed. Make an offer for one of his daughters.”

They were finalizing the details as Lachlan arrived. When Cathal broke the news, Lachlan roared, “What in the hell is the meaning of this, Matheson? Ye have ties already with MacKenzie and ye snuck in behind my back to steal my son’s bride? MacKenzie, I thought we had an agreement!”

“I’m sorry, Lachlan. Ye know I wanted Mairead to be closer to home. I think this will make her happier. Ye have daughters. Surely ye understand.”

Lachlan’s anger fizzled when reminded of his daughters. “Aye, those lassies will be the death of me. I should have married again after their mother died.”

“If ye are still interested in an alliance, would ye consider a betrothal for one of them with one of my sons? Rowan is quite taken with Sine.”

“Not my little dove, Sine. Like your Mairead, I want her closer to home. Eara is my oldest daughter. She is a real beauty that one. A bit willful at times, but she will make Rowan a fine wife.”

Three

Mairead nervously waited in the courtyard with Lily, Rose, Cullen, and Marjean after the watch announced Laird MacKenzie’s party approached. Her parents had been gone for ten days. It was utterly foolish to hope they had not arranged a betrothal. When the first hugs and hellos were exchanged and everyone had entered the great hall, her father said, “Mairead, my sweet, we have very good news for ye. Ye will be marrying Laird Tadhg Matheson on the Feast of St. Mairead.”

The family fell nervously silent. Everyone stared at her expectantly. Surely, they didn’t mean for her to marry within weeks.
Remain calm, Mairead
. “Ye mean the Feast of St. Mairead next year?”

Her mother shook her head and gently put an arm around her. “Nay, love, next month.”

Mairead didn’t react. She stood there for a moment in her mother’s embrace then nodded her head and left the hall. She stopped just inside the stairwell with her arms clenched to her chest trying not to panic. Footsteps followed her, but they stopped when her mother said, “Nay, Rose, give her some time.”

“But if she is marrying the laird, she won’t be able to live here,” Lily said. The tone of her voice suggested she thought there must have been some mistake. “Da, how could ye do that? How can ye send her away?”

Peadar said, “It is an excellent match, Lily. She will be Lady Matheson, and I consider Tadhg a friend. He is a good man.”

Rose wailed, “Mama, how could ye let this happen?”

“Enough!” roared their father. “Ye’re acting as if I am sending her to the depths of hell. Cnocreidh is less than a day’s ride away. Do ye think I want her to leave home? She is not a bairn. She’s a grown woman, and it is time she was married. Furthermore, she is marrying one of the richest, most powerful lairds in the Highlands and by all accounts, a fine and decent man. God’s teeth, by yer reaction ye’d think I planned to marry her to a troll. ” There was a moment of bleak silence before her father cursed, “Damnation! Ye will stop moaning this instant and ye will be happy for her. If ye aren’t, how can ye expect her to be? Perhaps this is the best thing. If she doesn’t have the lot of ye to shield her, she may just have to stand on her own two feet!”

Her siblings must have looked affronted at his statement because her father growled and added contritely, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just she has lived her whole life surrounded by people who love and protect her, and she only grows more timid. Maybe this will help.” With steely resolve he added, “There will be a feast tomorrow where we will announce the betrothals to the clan. And curse it all, every one of ye will be there with smiles on your faces.”

“Betrothal
s
?” sniffed Rose.

“Yes! Betrothals,” roared her father. “Rowan will be marrying Eara Fraser in the spring,” he shouted and stormed out of the hall toward his solar.

After he left Lily finally asked, “How did Da get Tadhg Matheson?”

Her mother’s tinkling laughter sounded before she answered, “Ye wouldn’t believe me if I told ye.”

Mairead didn’t want to hear any more and rushed up the stairs to her bedchamber. In her agitation, she paced the room. This was happening. In a matter of weeks she, who had lived her quiet little life safely within the grounds of Carraigile, would be leaving to be married to a stranger. Sweet Mother of God, she didn’t want to do this.

Right after the attack, fear and guilt had consumed her, and she couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone in her family what had happened. Mortified, she believed it was her fault. She should never have snuck away with Flan. She didn’t want anyone to know what had happened. She had begged the priest who saved her from the men to hear her confession, knowing by doing so he could not reveal anything. At the time, the priest urged her to tell her parents. “Lass, your only sin was in disobeying your parents. Those lads are responsible for the rest of this. The sin is theirs, not yours. Ye know very well I can’t do anything about this now, but in addition to the prayers for your penance, I want ye to tell your parents. If ye want me to talk to them with ye, I will.”

But she didn’t tell them. She told herself she would...someday, but she felt soiled and ashamed. She didn’t want to talk about it yet.

Of course, their father was furious with them for wandering off. In fact, the entire family was extremely disappointed in her because they believed at ten and four she should have been more responsible. She still remembered the things her older siblings said that night.

“God’s teeth, Mairead, what were ye thinking?” demanded Cullen. “Ye have no idea what could have happened to ye.”

“To make matters worse, ye risked Flan’s safety, too,” scolded Gannon.

“Don’t yell at her,” said Lilias, “Da already has. She knows she was wrong, and ye’ll just scare her.”

“She should be scared, Lily,” Peadar said. “Mairead needs to be frightened enough never to do something so colossally stupid again.”

Mairead remembered Flan trying to take some of the blame but Rowan told him, “Flan, ye are but seven years old. Mairead is old enough to know better.”

She cried for hours the night after it happened.
Colossally stupid
,
old enough to know better—
of course, they were right and their disappointment in her simply compounded her guilt. After returning home, it still scared her. So she handled this fear the way she did everything else in her life that made her uncomfortable. She avoided it. She never wanted to think about those cruel eyes again.

She could not avoid it anymore. Nor could she avoid this marriage. In truth, she didn’t exactly fear the marriage itself. Although desperately afraid of men for a long time, as she grew older and her sisters married, they obviously enjoyed the physical relationship they shared with their husbands. It took years for her to understand fully that what had happened to her had been ugly and violent. Clearly, the lovemaking they whispered about was not what she had experienced. She believed it would be different with someone who cared about her, and deep down was a little envious of her sisters. They seemed so happy. Nay, she wasn’t afraid of intimacy with a man who respected and perhaps even loved her.

Mairead feared her family would learn the truth. Her husband-to-be would expect a virginal wife, and she wasn’t one. A huge scandal would erupt when he learned her secret. Once again, she would face the devastating disappointment of her family, and she didn’t think she could bear it.

She thought about her options well into the night. It was too late to say she wanted to choose a religious life. No one would believe she truly wanted to enter a convent. They would assume she was only trying to avoid the marriage.

Maybe her husband wouldn’t notice her lack of virtue. Nay, she wouldn’t be able to lie. Once he learned the truth, the resulting scandal would be unforgivable.

She could tell her parents now and be sent to a convent. It would be the honest thing to do, and it would avoid a public scandal, but her family would know her disgrace, and she would have to live with it forever.

The only option she could see which might prevent a public scandal and had a remote chance of preserving her dignity, within her family at least, was to tell her betrothed before the wedding. Perhaps like St. Joseph, if he was a good and upright man and she was honest with him, he would not expose her to public disgrace. Perhaps he would be willing to break the betrothal and allow her to enter a convent without telling her family the reason. She heartily doubted an angel would appear to Laird Matheson, as one did to St. Joseph, and tell him to marry her anyway.

The result would be the same. She would leave her family forever to enter a convent, but their disappointment in her would be much less crushing. Maybe, if she only revealed her shame to one man, whom she would never have to see again, she could survive it. She had to try.

The plan didn’t make her happy, but at least she had a plan. When morning dawned, she steeled herself and faced the inevitable. She made it through the celebration that day and accepted the congratulations of the clan with as much grace as she could muster.

Mairead supposed her whole family breathed a collective sigh of relief at her apparent acceptance of the betrothal. They stopped treading carefully around her and threw themselves into the wedding preparations.

~ * ~

Laird Matheson had announced the betrothal on his return from the Michaelmas Festival, shocking his clan. Although they greeted him with the appropriate congratulations and good wishes, he had the vague feeling not everyone was as happy for him as they professed. Until then, he had never discussed any potential betrothals. Therefore, he supposed it came as a bit of a shock. He hadn’t planned to arrange a betrothal so imminently.

Tadhg also found himself questioning his decision. What had happened to her? Was she attacked; did someone hurt her? If she was attacked, she should have told someone. God’s teeth, why wouldn’t she have told someone? Flan said when he caught up to her she was crying, and her clothes were dirty. If she had only been roughed up a bit, why wouldn’t she say so? What could have happened that made her so frightened she wouldn’t speak about it? Had the worst happened? Had she been raped? By all the saints, he hoped not, but it would explain her silence. She would have been old enough to know her father could have forced a betrothal with her attacker. That alone must have been petrifying. Even the thought of it now made his heart ache for the lass.

Cathal seemed like a loving father, but there would have been few other options for him. If he didn’t arrange her betrothal to the attacker, he could have either quietly sent her to a convent or leveled an accusation of rape. An accusation would have opened the entire family and Mairead particularly, to public scandal. While if convicted, a rapist could be maimed or put to death, convictions were rare. Furthermore, once publicized, the rape would have made it difficult to ever secure a betrothal for Mairead. It is likely she would have ended up in a convent anyway. With this knowledge, how could a terrified lass have been expected to know what to do? If she were raped, she would not come to him as a virgin.
Did that really matter?
He didn’t want it to. If someone had hurt her, she hadn’t freely given herself to another man.
Did it matter?
Perhaps he was jumping to conclusions anyway. The betrothal was already set and there was no sense in borrowing trouble. He set his doubts aside. He believed he made the right decision by offering for her. Now he just had to figure out to handle a bride who had likely been brutalized in some way and was scared witless.