Four #3
“You’ll be pleased to know, Uncle, that a party is being planned.”
Michael wasn’t pleased. Roughly twenty-four hours ago, his very own wife had nearly kneed him in the ballocks, and not entirely by accident. The notion still upset him.
Angus pulled a pipe from between his teeth. “A gathering, ye say? Imagine that. Best start sobering old Davey up now. If he arrives drunk, then we’ll no’ be dancing after midnight. Man plays a mean fiddle, and he’s the best piper in the shire, drunk or sober.”
The first of the tenant calls lay ahead of them, and for Michael, another difficult night beside his difficult wife lay behind him.
“I’m sure Brenna will see to Davey’s state of sobriety. Tell me about these cousins of hers.”
Angus slipped his pipe into his pocket, a mannerism that had fascinated Michael as a small boy. He’d waited in vain for the day when his uncle’s jacket caught fire.
“They’re hard workers.”
When a man could say nothing else complimentary about another fellow, he offered that very observation. Among the English, “he can hold his liquor” was a similar sort of damning with faint praise.
“What are their names?” Because this was another of the many topics Brenna had been unforthcoming about—or perhaps Michael hadn’t had the fortitude to ask her directly.
“Three remain, two having gone for the fair woods of Pennsylvania. The oldest is Hugh, and the other two take their direction from him. The middle one’s Neil, and the youngest is Dantry.
Stubborn, the lot of them. Typical MacLogans.
They think to raise cattle, and yer da gave them good bottom land to do it. ”
“Cattle? Up here?”
“Aye.”
Many a female would have said Angus was in his prime, and yet he had the elderly ability to put contempt in a single syllable.
“There’s demand for beef.”
“Let the Lowlanders raise their beef. Cattle require fencing, and fodder in winter, and they take nigh a year to produce a single calf. Cattle produce no wool, and a good sheep hide will answer most any need for leather.”
Michael turned the topic rather than listen to another panegyric to the ovine.
“Other than a profane interest in cattle, have you any complaints against the MacLogans, or will they have any against me?”
Campbell tried to snatch a mouthful of grass, for which Angus whacked him smartly on the shoulder with his crop, sending the animal dancing sideways.
“The MacLogans keep mostly to themselves,” Angus said when he’d brought his horse under control.
“Hugh lets Lachlan help out around the castle, because he knows Brenna will give the boy a few coins and will teach him to read, though you ask me, reading isn’t always a good thing.
Letters put ideas in a fellow’s head, and there’s no dealing with a female who reads anything other than her prayer book or her recipes. ”
Brenna read. Michael had found her with a book more often than not when she’d been a girl.
“Has Hugh MacLogan only the one child?”
“He also has a daughter.”
Again, the way Angus said only a few words suggested having a daughter ranked along with raising cattle and allowing a son to learn to read, though clearly, the worst transgression was—as it had been for centuries in the Highlands—having the wrong last name.
“Hugh, Dantry, and Neil. The boy’s name is Lachlan. They’re interested in raising cattle, and they’ve good land to work with. What else?”
Angus drew up at the foot of a track that lead off to a pair of whitewashed stone crofts. “You forgot stubborn, contrary, and independent.”
“Now that’s odd,” Michael said, nudging Devil down the track.
“Those are the very same qualities that distinguished many a Highland soldier when the fighting was at its worst. We stormed walled cities, climbed mountains, marched on nonexistent rations, and beat the damned Corsican’s men clear back to France—all on the strength of stubborn, contrary, and independent. ”
None of which, in Michael’s mind, had to necessarily result in the sort of close-minded, judgmental pontificating Angus was in a mood to dole out. The idea that Brenna had endured years of Angus’s tiresome sermonizing added another dreary dimension to an already dreary day.
“You’ll see,” Angus muttered. “Can’t tell a MacLogan a damned thing. Never could. The lot of ’em are contrary and half-daft.”
Because Michael knew little about raising cattle, he didn’t try to tell his tenants anything.
Hugh MacLogan had Brenna’s red hair, her height, and the lanky build of many a crofter.
Hard work and Highland weather had planed him down to muscle and bone.
Being a MacLogan on a Brodie holding likely accounted for a lack of small talk and smiles.
“You don’t interbreed the Highlands with the Angus?” Michael asked as he and Hugh walked along a stone wall between two pastures. Country-fashion, they traveled opposite sides of the wall, each man stopping occasionally to replace a tumbled stone from whence it had fallen.
“They have different purposes, the Angus and Highland,” Hugh said. “Though the Angus are tough for all they gain weight more quickly than the Highlands.” He slapped a sizable rock back onto the top of the wall as if it weighed nothing.
“MacLogan, is there a reason you keep glancing back at the crofts? Do you expect Angus will steal your chickens?”
Something crossed Hugh’s craggy features, something between disgust and despair. “He’s your uncle.”
“Yes.”
“Ask Brenna why I might want to keep an eye on Angus Brodie.”
A girl child with hair as red as her father’s came scampering out of the croft. At the sight of her, Hugh turned back, though he and Michael hadn’t walked half the perimeter of the pasture.
“You’ve no wife,” Michael said. “Who looks after your daughter?”
Hugh stopped and hefted another rock. “We do. She’s sensible, is my Annie, and a good girl.”