Chapter 11
The bedroom door flew open with a crash, startling Melody out of a strange and not unpleasant dream. She had been dreaming of Callum, but it was one of those dreams where she was naked and trying to hide the fact.
She had found herself fleeing through the drafty corridors of the keep, shivering with cold. Callum had been pursuing her for some reason, and while she kept trying to hide, in the dream, she could not shake the unsettling knowledge that she wanted him to find her.
Best not to think too hard about that.
There was no time to think about anything, in fact, because at that moment Sophie came sailing in, followed by Kat.
“Wake up, me dear, wake up!” Sophie chirped. “Oh, ye have thrown off yer blankets in the night, I see. Ye must have been freezin’.”
“I dreamt about being cold,” Melody mumbled, sitting up and clawing her blankets back onto the bed. “What time is it?”
“Sunrise, lass. Ye have overslept! Up, up!”
Melody swallowed thickly. At home, she generally slept until she woke up naturally. The night after a party, neither she nor Victoria tended to get up before ten or eleven o’clock. It was rather hard to rise early when one had danced until dawn.
Well, Victoria would dance till dawn, and Melody would slink from room to room and wish that she were brave enough to talk to more people.
That was England, however, and this place seemed to be a different world altogether.
And of course, I was sent to my room early, like an errant child, she thought, swallowing back a flush of anger. The Laird had no right to speak to me in that way.
Sophie hobbled over to the window and threw back the curtains, letting in a stream of angry white sunlight. Melody yelped and hid behind a pillow.
“Can’t I sleep a little longer, Sophie?” she pleaded.
“Nay, ye may nae,” Sophie responded mercilessly. “We’ve brought a few gowns for ye to wear. Then I want to take the air, so we’ll take a turn around the Keep courtyard. Hurry, hurry, dress! The day will wait for nay one, lass, nae even ye!”
Kat laid out a plain-looking green gown over the bed and shot Melody an apologetic, faintly amused smile.
Melody bit back a sigh.
It seems that I am rising early today, then.
A worryingly short period of time later, Melody found herself scuttling along the hallway after Sophie.
“She can move fast when she wants,” Melody gasped to Kat. “I’m going to hear that cane click-clacking in my dreams.”
Kat snorted. “Oh, aye. Where did ye go last night? Ye disappeared rather early, and I could nae find ye.”
“I… I went to bed. I was tired.”
Kat shot her a sharp look, and Melody sensed her lie hadn’t been believed. Well, that was just too bad. She had no intention of telling her the truth.
And what truth is that? That my betrothal is all false, and that my false-betrothed dragged me into a secluded corridor and told me to go to bed?
Or should I tell her that I was so sure he was going to kiss me, and that the idea did not repulse me? Quite the opposite, in fact.
That in itself was worrying. Respectable English ladies did not allow men to kiss them before marriage.
The idea of them wanting to be kissed… well, ladies did not want anything; everybody knew that.
It was unladylike to crave anything, even a sweet treat, even dinner when one was starving.
To want to be kissed, touched… oh, that was unforgivable.
Melody swallowed hard, trying to work some moisture into her mouth.
The plain fact was that she had looked at Callum’s large, rough hands and imagined what they might feel like placed on her waist, on her bare arms, on her…
well, enough of that. She had imagined what it would be like for him to touch her, and worse, she had imagined what it would feel like for him to kiss her.
“What are courtships like in London?” Kat asked abruptly. Melody flinched, throwing a horrified look at her companion. For one awful moment, she feared that she’d said everything out loud.
“What?” she managed faintly.
Kat shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “Courtship is different everywhere, is it nae? I’ve heard that in England, there are all sorts of hoops to leap through before ye can declare yer feelings.
Over here, men and women are more… more bold, I’d say.
If a man likes a woman, he steps forward and tells her so.
Sometimes she tells him. So, if ye care for somebody and they daenae tell ye so, ye can assume that they daenae care for ye.
” She was turning progressively redder. “I just wondered if it was the same in England.”
Melody frowned, trying to decipher what Kat was truly trying to say.
“Are you saying that there is somebody you like, but you fear that they do not like you in turn?” she hazarded.
Kat scoffed. “Nay. Of course nae.”
“Of course not,” Melody echoed, voice dropping to a murmur.
“Well, I can say that there are rules about courtship in London. All sorts of silly rules and traditions, but people ignore them all the time. My sister used to say that people are the same everywhere, though. Sometimes people are shy or have reasons not to declare themselves. They may be afraid of rejection or some other consequence. So, regardless of whether you are in London or the Highlands, there is no reason to think that a person does not care for you simply because they do not declare themselves. Not if their behavior implies that they do care. Perhaps that is their way of declaring themselves, after all.”
Kat frowned, chewing on her lower lip. “Nay, there’s more to it than that.”
“More to what?”
Kat flushed. “Nothin’. I didnae mean… nothin’.”
Melody opened her mouth to ask another question, but decided against it. Kat seemed happy enough to be friends, but there was no denying it was early days. It would not do to scare her off yet.
A friend, Melody thought, biting back a smile. At last. Emma would love her, I think.
The maze of corridors spat them out into the wide, drafty hall that led outside. The door was open, letting in a gust of fresh, cold early-morning air.
“Here we are, lassies!” Sophie called back cheerfully and went clattering outside. The two women were obliged to jog to catch up with her.
When Melody stepped outside, unforgiving sunlight seared her eyes, forcing her to raise her hand to block out the light. The air was crisp and cold, and even at that early hour, there were people everywhere.
The courtyard buzzed with activity. Women dashed to and fro with large baskets of laundry balanced on their hips.
Men rolled barrels and maneuvered hand-pulled carts over the uneven cobbles.
Chatter filled the air, dozens of conversations crossing over each other, interspersed with sharp bursts of laughter.
It was bewildering, and if Melody hadn’t had Sophie’s hunched back to follow, she would have easily gotten disoriented.
“Where are we going?” she called, noticing how several heads turned at the sound of her English accent.
“I thought we could take a tour of the trainin’ grounds,” Sophie called back. It sounded as though she was holding back laughter.
The two women had no choice but to follow. Abruptly, the crowded cobblestones of the courtyard gave way to hard-packed dirt and patches of scrubby grass. The people all but disappeared, and the noise gradually receded behind them.
New sounds appeared. Melody craned her neck at the sound of blades clashing together, trying to see where the noise came from.
Sophie led them along a narrow terrace, sheltered by an overhang, and turned to face the training fields.
They were training fields, Melody could see that now. A gaggle of about six or eight men stood in the center, most of them leaning on wooden training swords and staves, watching two men fight in the middle.
These men were not using wooden swords. The clang she heard was the clash of metal on metal.
Both men were bare-chested, dancing nimbly around each other. They were large men, stocky and broad-shouldered, but moved as lightly as dancers.
With a jolt, Melody realized who they were. The larger of the men was Callum, and the smaller was Lucas.
Transfixed, she took a step forward. Callum had his back to her and did not glance back to look at them, not even once.
When he moved, the muscles on his back rippled and knotted, sliding evenly under sweat-glossed skin.
He lunged forward, swinging the sword as easily as if it weighed nothing at all.
Lucas dodged, the blade hissing through the air only inches from his ear. Kat gave a barely-smothered gasp of panic.
The two men moved again, their feet skimming across the ground until their positions were reversed. Now Lucas’s reddened, sweat-drenched face was hidden from their view, and Callum was instead looking straight at them.
Melody had, of course, never seen a bare-chested man, not in real life.
However, there were occasional sculptures and paintings depicting men in states of undress.
Respectable ladies were not, of course, supposed to look at such things, but as far as she could tell, everybody took a peek sooner or later.
Callum looked exactly like the sculptures she had seen, the men draped in stone-carved cloth.
His torso narrowed to a sharp V, the shape disappearing beneath the waistband of his kilt.
A fuzz of damp black hair curled over his chest, and the trail continued down the line of his abdomen, also disappearing beneath his kilt.
Melody’s throat had gone dry. She could not look away. Was he not cold? She was not close enough to see if there were goosebumps raised on his damp skin. He moved again, swinging the sword, and she saw how his muscles bunched and tautened with the movement. There was something else, a mark, or…
A scar. It was a scar.
Over the swell of his left pectoral, there was a knobbled circle of scar tissue, a darker shade than the rest of his skin. The scar rested directly over his heart and perfectly matched the scar she had seen in that pamphlet.
“That scar,” Melody managed, not quite able to keep herself quiet. “How awful it is.”
She felt eyes on her, and glanced sideways to find Sophie watching her with something like amusement.
“Aye, it’s a bad one, all right,” she agreed neutrally. “There are wars amongst the clans from time to time. It is easy to be hurt.”
Melody swallowed, nodding. “So I see.”
Footsteps approached, and Melody glanced up to find a soldier hurrying toward them. He bowed to Sophie, smiled at Kat, then threw a look of obvious uncertainty toward Melody.
“Forgive me, me Lady,” he began hesitantly, addressing Sophie. “But I have a letter. For her.”
He jerked his chin in Melody’s direction. Sophie narrowed her eyes.
“If by her ye mean Lady Melody, Laird MacDean’s betrothed, then say so,” Sophie answered, her voice light and audibly dangerous.
The man blushed. “A-Aye, me Lady, that is what I mean. The letter was heavily sealed.”
“And ye are tellin’ me this, why? Of course, the letter is sealed. Did ye think we would wish to open Lady Melody’s correspondence and read it before she does?” Sophie clicked her tongue. “I certainly hope that is nae what ye mean.”
The man had gone as red as a beet. He mumbled something under his breath and fumbled in his jerkin, drawing out a neatly folded envelope almost buried under a variety of seals.
There were at least four, possibly five, and there was no chance the letter would ever be opened without breaking the seal.
To Melody’s chagrin, he handed the letter to Sophie, not to her.
Sophie shook her head and gave an impatient sigh, waving the man away.
“Forgive his rudeness,” she commented to Melody. “They daenae ken what to make of ye. Here, take ye letter. Judgin’ by the crest on the seal, I’d say it comes from Clan MacLeon.”
“MacLeon? It’s from my sister, then,” Melody gasped, snatching at the letter.
She moved a few steps away, snapping the seals one by one.
How long had it been since she had received a letter from Victoria?
Correspondence between London and the Highlands took far too long to arrive, but now that she was also in the Highlands, perhaps they could communicate more quickly.
The letter was not long, and took her only a few minutes to read.
My Dearest Melody,
I was shocked to receive a letter from Laird MacDean, informing me that you are in his keep and betrothed to him. There is more to it, I am sure.
I would come to see you at once, except that I am still vomiting regularly and cannot travel.
Pregnancy is not very enjoyable so far, let me warn you, sister.
Arran does not wish to leave me, and worries that sending an envoy of soldiers to collect you and bring you to us might be seen as a declaration of war.
So, I have sealed this letter very thoroughly, so you will know at once if it has been opened and read by anyone before you. I should have a reply from you within three days, sooner if Laird MacDean sends a rider. If there is no response, Arran and I will come for you, and we will bring soldiers.
If you are being held at Keep MacDean against your will, Melody, rest assured that I am coming to save you. I have spoken to my husband, and we are in agreement. Any insult or outrage to you is an insult to us. We will start a war to free you, if need be.
Write back to me quickly. I’ll have no rest until I know that you are safe, either at Keep MacDean—if you have indeed chosen to be there—or here with us.
All my love,
Your Sister, Victoria
“Oh, dear,” Melody mumbled aloud. The letter was hastily written, full of misspellings, blots, and crossed-out words, with none of Victoria’s usual graceful handwriting.
She is furious.
“All well, lassie?” Sophie enquired, sounding as if she had already guessed what was inside the letter.
“Y-Yes, but I need to reply to this letter at once,” Melody responded. “My sister is worried for me. Will you excuse me? This really cannot wait.”
Sophie inclined her head. Putting her back to the training field, Melody set off at a brisk run back toward the Keep.
What on earth am I going to say? And what if Victoria doesn’t believe me? Would this really trigger a war? And if it does, what on earth shall I do about it?