Chapter 7
Madelyn
sat—very uncomfortably—and listened to Moraig MacLeod chat easily in perfectly passable English. Of course, her r’s still trilled like a flock of song-birds and her other vowels and consonants danced about to music Madelyn doubted she could ever play, but she was on the whole quite intelligible.
Not that being able to understand the woman was of paramount importance at the moment, as this stop was most definitely not on the agenda.
Neither was falling off her horse, but that was another story.
She needed to get back on that horse and get going so she could decide if the surrounding flora and fauna—or any of the buildings she’d so briefly had a glimpse of—was indeed on her list.
Take the castle down the way. She was pretty sure it had been magnificent.
Gloomy, gray, and very well preserved had been the brief impressions she’d had.
She was eager to get back there and see if a brief glance had been accurate.
And she could hardly wait to get her hands on the rock, smell it, put her cheek against it, see if it was as cold as it looked.
How would it have been to have grown up in such a place? Or to live there now?
Almost too marvelous to contemplate.
But the sooner she was off contemplating it at close range, the sooner she would be doing a bit more roaming and hopefully checking a few more things off her list. Then she could get back to the hotel and see if Roddy had an ice block to sit on.
She suspected that might be the only thing to help her.
Though she had to admit that Moraig’s tea was starting to make inroads into something.
She was still in pain, but she was starting not to care.
She opened her mouth to ask Moraig what she’d put in her brew, took one look at the woman sitting on a stool near the fire, stirring something in a black kettle with a long wooden spoon and cackling wildly, and thought better of it.
Moraig seemed to be content to stir and chuckle, so Madelyn took the opportunity—or, rather, seized the distraction in a desperate attempt to forget she was trapped with a woman who in any reasonable fairy tale would have been classified as a witch—to look around and see how Moraig had chosen to decorate her house.
It was, just like the woman herself, straight from a fairy tale.
The room was crooked, as if some illustrator had been slightly inebriated when he’d drawn it.
Herbs hung in bunches from the ceiling, from the hooks on the walls, from twine that was wrapped around a worktable.
The smell alone was enough to make her light-headed.
Sunny would have been in seventh heaven.
She could have identified each and every one of those weeds, enumerated their virtues, expounded at length upon their uses.
The fairy tale feeling didn’t end with the fauna hanging everywhere.
The pot over Moraig’s cooking fire was ancient, as were the other pots stacked on a rickety shelf.
The pots kept company with a few wooden dishes and bowls, all stacked haphazardly, all looking as if they’d been made several centuries ago and weathered the storm somewhat badly.
Madelyn wasn’t sure that the outside of the cottage hadn’t come through the walls and was growing on the inside.
It was difficult to tell where the herbs ended and other kinds of underbrush began.
She would not have been at all surprised to hear the strains of dwarf-song coming through the ancient leaded-glass windows, celebrating the fact that they were finished with their work for the day, or to have had faeries and sprites pop out of the corners and dance a jig upon the weathered table.
But the longer she sat, the more normal things seemed to become. Good grief, what was in that tea? Madelyn sipped, but found herself completely incapable of identifying the taste. Was Moraig hiding a bottle of Valium there behind that dried bunch of flowers? Hard to say.
Madelyn shifted slightly and her backside set up a horrendous protest. All right, no Valium in the tea after all. Just herbs.
But despite the pain, she began to unwind. There was something hypnotic about the way Moraig stirred her brew. Even the smell was soothing. Madelyn couldn’t decide if her head was clearing or she’d sniffed a bit too much of nature’s bounty.
Maybe it was just the peace inside the small house.
She could see Moraig’s bed over in the corner, made up with a surprisingly comfortable-looking duvet.
The kitchen was small, but serviceable. The living room boasted a pair of old but comfortably overstuffed chairs and the kind of sofa that took a person prisoner and didn’t let him go until a serious nap had been accomplished.
And it was more than the simplicity of the furnishings.
There was simplicity in the lifestyle. Madelyn suspected Moraig gathered herbs, cooked, walked in the woods, and not much else.
No television, no radio, no defending spoiled executives from stacks of parking tickets.
It had to be a very unfettered, very free kind of life.
Sort of like Sunny’s, actually. Madelyn loved her sister, though she’d never understood Sunny’s method of rebelling against their parents’ very organized, very clinical existence.
Sunny’s place was a lot like Moraig’s except Sunny believed quite firmly in electricity and hot showers.
But her sister had the same kind of relationship with simple things.
Birth, death, the cycles of the earth. She was a midwife, an herbalist, a brewer of potions and maker of healing sachets.
Sunny wore lots of linen.
Madelyn didn’t mind linen. It beat the hell out of polyester.
She took another sip of tea, then another.
As she neared the bottom of the cup, she began to wonder if perhaps she had dismissed Sunny’s way of life too quickly.
She could get into natural foods, natural fibers, natural cosmetics.
She could recognize a few important herbs, like basil and oregano.
Really, was there much more to it than that?
It might be good for her to get out of the sterile environment of a law office.
She reached for a bunched bit of dried herb and brought it to her nose. She sniffed deeply.
She sneezed heartily.
Well, maybe giving up her allergy-free environment wasn’t quite for her at the moment.
Then she looked at Moraig and realized the woman had been speaking—and that she’d said something important. Madelyn blinked.
“What?”
“A fine lordling,” Moraig said, looking up from her stirring.
“Who?”
“Patrick, the young Himself.”
Madelyn frowned. “What does that mean? The young Himself?”
“Himself proper lives at the keep down in the meadow,” Moraig said, as if she hadn’t heard. “Patty’s older brother is he. Both lords of their own halls.”
“Interesting,” Madelyn said, wincing as she shifted.
At least she was only wincing. Half an hour ago she’d been on the verge of tears.
Whatever Moraig had put in her tea was potent stuff.
But Patrick a lord? He didn’t look like one, but she supposed she wasn’t much of a judge.
Maybe he had scores of servants at his command to polish his black cars.
He would need a whole troop of them to bang out the dings he’d acquired on the highway.
“Interesting is the tale of those two brothers,” Moraig said. “’Tis a tale that would interest you, to be sure.”
“Would it?” Madelyn honestly couldn’t imagine why.
Patrick was very handsome, he had rescued her quite nicely that morning, but he was most certainly not her type—her unsettling experience at Culloden’s field, and the subsequent flashes of it, aside.
He was rude. He drove too fast. He probably knew a dozen really lousy lawyer jokes he liked to trot out at the slightest provocation.
And he was most certainly not her soul mate. She was pathetically grateful he hadn’t heard her bleating that out like a lovesick sheep the day before.
“Oh, aye,” Moraig said, tasting, then putting her spoon aside. She turned to look at Madelyn. “What a fine, strong, braw pair of lads they are.”
Madelyn smiled politely. “How nice.”
“Both of a height, both with hair the color of night, and both with eyes the piercing green of the rightful King’s finest emerald.”
Madelyn looked at her skeptically. Maybe Moraig was hiding a few romance novels under those herbs.
She would give her this much: Patrick MacLeod was drop-dead gorgeous.
But she wasn’t all that sure about his manners.
He hadn’t been overly friendly at Culloden.
And he’d tried to plow her over not once but twice.
Never mind that he’d certainly gotten his just desserts the first time.
He could have caused her to have a serious accident.
But he carried you here.
“Hrumph.” She ignored her conscience. She had a harder time ignoring whatever it was about him that pulled at her soul, that haunted her just like the otherworldy music that seemed to follow her from place to place.
Briefly, her long-cherished fantasy of being swept off her feet by a handsome Scottish Highlander swept over her with such force, she had to catch her breath.
Good grief, she really had to get out more.
“And ever willing to extend themselves to aid another,” Moraig continued. “’Tis that sort of nobility that a body doesn’t see these days.”
“Nobility?” Madelyn echoed, dragging herself back to the present. She looked at Moraig in shock. “Nobility? Why, he almost ran over me!”
Moraig waved her hand dismissively. “An excess of energy and lack of purpose.’Tis a hard thing in these times to find cattle to raid and enemies to slay.”
“Yes, society frowns on both those things as diversions.”
“Today, aye.”