The Highland Countess (3 page)

“Really! Why?” asked his brother coldly.

“Come, man, ye must have hoped to inherit. Aye—I’m sure ye didnae think for a minute that I would wed such a lusty young bride.”

“Lusty, indeed,” murmured Lady Phyllis coldly, making Morag feel as if her bosom were too large and her mouth too wide and her hair too red.

Lord Arthur dabbed fastidiously at his rabbity mouth with his napkin. “You are teasing, brother,” he drawled in a high, fluting voice in which Scottish and English accents were perpetually at war. “I am well enough. Money is a vulgar subject and not fit for the dining table. Let us talk of something mair entertaining. We had a monstrous amusing time in London and had the honor to be invited to Lady Mumpers’s ball.”

“Did ye now?” said the earl with a great horse laugh. “Mumpers! Whita name. What was sae great about going there?”

“The Mumpers,” said Lady Phyllis with a deprecating cough, “are related to the Fangles.”

“Double Dutch to me,” said the earl, swallowing claret in great noisy gulps.

Lady Phyllis gave a genteel sigh. “It is useless,” she said, addressing her husband, “to talk of the
ton
in such surroundings. Ah, dear London. How I miss you!”

The earl picked up his gamecock from his plate and stuffed it in his mouth. “Issawunneryedonttayayre,” he said.

“I beg your pardon,” said his sister-in-law.

The earl spat out a small hail of crushed bones onto his plate. “I said, ‘It’s a wonder ye don’t stay there’—or does it take too much siller?”

“We have money enough,” remarked his brother.

“Oh, aye,” sneered the earl, laying a finger alongside his nose. “Ye forget, I ken fine your lands are mortgaged to the hilt.”

The earl returned to his chomping while a cold, hostile silence fell on the dining room. Morag racked her brains for something to say. At last she turned to Lady Phyllis, who was examining a piece of smoked lamb as if doubting the animal’s pedigree. “You must tell me about the fashions of London, Lady Phyllis,” she said, addressing that lady’s cold face.

Phyllis looked down her long nose. “I think it would be a waste of time to try,” she finally tittered. “High fashion is impossible to explain to the unsophisticated mind.”

Morag’s face flamed as red as her hair. “It seems to me,” she replied in a level voice, “that being sophisticated means having no manners or breeding at all.”

“Are you addressing me?” gasped Phyllis.

“Yes, I am… you whey-faced bitch,” said Morag, gleefully using one of her husband’s pet expressions. Morag was still very much a schoolroom miss.

The earl’s great booming laughter seemed to fill the castle. “Go to it, Morag,” he gasped when he could.

Lady Phyllis rose to her feet, her languid airs and poise melting away.

“How dare you, you common little strumpet!” she howled at Morag. “For the likes of you to criticize the likes of me. It makes me sick to… to…”

“Your stomach,” said Morag helpfully, watching with fascination the cracking of Lady Phyllis’s veneer.

With a great effort, Lady Phyllis pulled herself together. “Come, Arthur,” she said grandly. “Take me away from this vulgar company.”

Her lord looked down at the table. “Sit down,” he said reluctantly. “You take things too much to heart. Don’t refine on it so.”

“We are leaving, d’ye hear,” screamed Phyllis, leaning over the table and gazing at him as if she could not believe her eyes.

“Sit down!” squeaked her husband, “and dae as ye are told.”

Phyllis collapsed in her chair, her eyes filling with shocked tears. Never before had her husband disobeyed her commands. Lady Phyllis could not know that her husband had just remembered the sole purpose of his visit—that of borrowing money from his rich brother—and that when he wished to borrow money, there was no one in the whole of Caledonia stern and wild who could be more single-minded.

And so she continued to sob over the tansey pudding and almost tottered when the time came to leave the gentlemen to their wine.

Morag followed her out, feeling miserable. It was one thing to be rude to the icy, haughty Lady Phyllis but another to be unkind to this pathetic weeping girl. Her soft heart was touched.

“I am truly sorry,” said Morag awkwardly, “to have caused you such distress.”

“Of
course
it was all your fault,” said Phyllis, drying her eyes on a wisp of cambric and looking jealously at the younger girl’s glowing beauty. “But you cannot blame me for saying you would not understand high fashion. Why—one has only to look at your gown.”

“What is wrong with it?” asked Morag, curiosity overcoming her temper. She privately thought her gown of gold damask very fine.

“So outmodish,” sighed Phyllis. “The cut is antique and one never wears such heavy materials. One has the waist of the gown
here
”—she pointed to below her bust—“and only wears the thinnest of muslins, even in winter.”

“I am to go to Edinburgh tomorrow,” ventured Morag. “Perhaps I may purchase something t-tonnish there.” Morag stammered slightly over the pronunciation of the unaccustomed slang.

Phyllis treated her companion to a small, superior smile. “Edinburgh,” she said in accents filled with loathing. Then she shrugged. “On second thought, perhaps
Edinburgh
will suit you very well.”

“Why are you so rude and unkind?” Morag demanded hotly. “Because, really, you do it very badly.”

Lady Phyllis looked totally nonplussed, but the door opened and the gentlemen entered. Both were in high spirits: Arthur because he had got his money, and the earl because he had had a most enjoyable time humiliating his younger brother—unaware that when it came to the pursuit of money, nothing could really humiliate Lord Arthur Fleming.

Arthur was so pleased with himself that he was inclined to flirt genteelly with Morag, a fact which distressed his wife even more.

Morag, for her part, could only be glad when the evening came to an end. Phyllis was the first young lady of nearly her own age she had met and the whole experience had been a sore disappointment.

There was more to follow. For after the unwelcome guests had gone, the earl cocked his great head on one side and listened to the song of the rising wind. “Weather’s turning bad,” he remarked. “We’ll no be going to Edinburgh if this keeps up. Off tae bed with ye. I’m right proud of the way you told that puddin’-faced coo what you thought but, och, I’ve had enough of yer cauld manners.”

Morag trailed miserably to her room. Nonetheless, she packed a trunk, listening all the while in case her husband should join her, dreading the prospect as she used to dread being dragged before her father for a beating. But the earl did not come. At last, she pulled the bed curtains close. She would never see Edinburgh, she thought unhappily. She would molder in this draughty castle until the day she died.

She awoke in the morning and lay very still. The sound of the wind had died and had been replaced by the sleepy chirping of birds. She drew back the bed curtains. A shaft of sunlight was shining through the small dusty windowpanes into the room. A vision of Edinburgh rose before her eyes and she fairly scrambled into her clothes, tugging impatiently at tapes and buttons in her hurry to get dressed.

She was going after all!

The child that was Morag blithely skipped downstairs to take her leave of the castle—not knowing that she would return a woman.

Morag prepared herself for a long task of persuading her incalculable husband to get ready, but when she descended the curved stone stairs, it was to find the earl not only ready but on the point of departure, his cumbersome traveling carriage having been brought round to the door.

He told her curtly that she would need to forgo breakfast if she wished to come and barely gave her time to don her bonnet and pelisse.

Morag sat on the edge of the carriage seat in an agony of anticipation, frightened the earl would change his mind. But the coachman cracked his whip, and, flanked by two outriders, the earl’s carriage moved off.

It was barely seven in the morning and an early mist was burning off the fields. The sun flashed and jogged through the overhead trees on the castle drive and, as the carriage clattered out of the woods, out of the shelter of the trees, a flock of woodpigeons sailed up, swooping and diving under a sky of pale, washed blue.

Cow parsley spread their lacy heads through the red and thorny spikes of unripe brambles in the hedgerows and tangled vetch rioted in a mass of blue and purple. The clear air was like champagne. The carriage rolled sedately past a field of incredibly green grass which turned and rolled in the morning breeze like the waves of some enchanted ocean. The leaves were already turning to red and gold, and a hail of beechnuts rattled on the carriage roof. Now a field of stubble, blazing in the morning sun like cloth of gold, dotted with fat and roosting seagulls, looking awkward and strangely prehistoric so far from the sea.

Morag turned to say something to her husband but he had fallen asleep, his great head lolling to the swaying of the carriage and his wig askew. She felt a strong twinge of unease. She did not feel as if she had behaved like a proper wife. Her mind, still adolescent, still innocent, nonetheless told her that she should have welcomed her husband’s attentions with more warmth. The castle housekeeper was efficient and the domestic arrangements of the castle were well run. Morag felt young and useless, a child adrift in an adult world.

Assailed by a feeling of loneliness so deep it was almost a physical pain, she longed to belong somewhere, anywhere. She missed her home. She even missed the severe and reproving face of Miss Simpson. Distance lent her stern father enchantment and imbued him with a parental kindliness he did not have.

She watched the passing fields through a mist of tears, all her excitement at seeing the capital gone.

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.”