The Laird who Tamed her (Lairds of Ruin #2)
Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Sitting cold and alone on the stones overlooking the loch, nineteen-year-old Beatrice Whitmore paid no attention to the auburn hair whipping about her face or the storm threatening to break on the distant horizon.
The dark roiling clouds and the bitter wind weren’t nearly as distracting as she needed them to be today.
News of her fate was coming, and everyone knew it. Gossip somehow traveled fast in the Highlands despite the distance between dwellings, and Beatrice knew full well that a message sealing her fate was probably already on its way to her father’s house.
At the sound of footsteps approaching on the gravel path that led down the bluff, her stomach twisted into a knot. She deliberately didn’t turn around when the footsteps stopped close to the rock where she sat.
“It has come, Beatrice,” her father Patrick Whitmore said to her back, using the affectionate shortening of her name that meant he was trying to be kind. “Ye cannae sit up here forever. Yer mother wants ye home.”
Beatrice only shook her head, as if that could dispel the news her father bore. The wind whipped between them, its noise like a series of painful, shuddering moans. She might pretend not to have heard her father, but what would be the use in that?
“I cannae abide that decree ye bring and nor can I sit up here forever,” Beatrice answered moodily. “So, what would ye have me do?”
Receiving no answer to this question, Beatrice pulled herself up. Her limbs felt heavier than the stones around her, her heart thudded a pained beat and her stomach was a mess of knots.
It seemed that the implacable expression on her father’s face when she turned was all the reply he would make.
“Is it too much to want to choose me own path?” Beatrice put to him, knowing that this was a second impossible question.
Her parents saw only one path, one answer, and one course of action, regardless of what that meant for their daughter. It seemed they were incapable of seeking anything beyond this and always had been. Their impotence and inertia infuriated Beatrice because she had no power either.
Down at the loch below them, the black surface of the frigid water was frosted with white-tipped waves. It wasn’t the largest loch in this part of Scotland, but it churned with such intensity during foul weather that Beatrice used to imagine it was connected to the ocean.
She knew now that the enclosed, icy loch connected to nothing beyond itself and this idea saddened her. The lock was trapped, as the Whitmore family was trapped and as Beatrice herself was trapped.
I cannae accept this…Yet I must…
“Beatrice,” her father’s voice sounded again, over the wind, drawing her attention back from the water below.
Patrick Whitmore held out a hand to his daughter, a wrinkled piece of parchment and a broken wax seal in his grip.
It contained her future and Beatrice wanted to snatch it from him, tear it into pieces as small and fine as ash, and spread it over the loch like a body burned after a funeral.
Let the waters swallow the unwanted decrees of men…
“It’s nae important what each of us wants, lassie,” her father told her, though the tremor in his voice and outstretched hand betrayed him. “There are things that must be done and reasons we must do them.”
Beatrice took the parchment and read, finding grim confirmation of everything she had expected in its lines.
So, I am to be a wife. Aye, that’s all they expect me to be anyway. It makes nay difference to me parents who me husband is.
With only a curt nod of acknowledgement, she then returned the communication to her father and set off back along the path.
Although he kept pace beside her as they walked down the side of the hill to their house, Beatrice could clearly see advancing age in how Patrick Whitmore stood and walked and hunched against the wind.
In this landscape of green and gray, her father’s physical presence had once been a slash of black steel, unshakeable in his strength, but no longer.
With compassion, she reached out and took his hand, finding his grip far weaker now too than she remembered from her childhood.
The decree made on the parchment had been issued on behalf of her father’s creditors.
Just as it forced Beatrice into the role of grown woman and soon-to-be wife, it apparently forced Patrick Whitmore into the role of an old man.
Neither of them spoke again until they regained their home and stepped inside out of the high winds and light drizzle. Within the house’s walls, no winds blew but blustering of another kind disturbed the air nonetheless.
Beatrice watched their servants’ gazes swivel towards her as she passed, waves of muttering moving down the large open hall with her. It seemed everyone had views on what was happening, although none could do anything about it.
“Ye’ll live through this, lassie,” an elderly maid whispered to Beatrice as she walked past, the only person to address either Beatrice or her father directly.
The maid’s mouth clamped quickly shut under a cold glance of reproof from Patrick before he ushered his daughter into the open family dining room, set back from the large hall.
At the table, backlit by the massive fire in the hearth, Beatrice’s mother, Iola, sat motionless, her eyes closed and hands clasped on the tabletop as though in prayer.
She was so still that it looked as though she might have fallen asleep in the posture.
When Iola abruptly rose to her feet, Beatrice started.
“Ye have heard the news?” her mother asked.
Beatrice didn’t bother to answer, only moving her head slightly in acknowledgement. There wouldn't be a soul in the household who hadn’t heard.
“Ye daenae ken what this will mean for our family, Beatrice,” Iola said, with more excitement than Beatrice’s father had shown. “We havenae had hope like this for an age.”
“Hope,” the young woman repeated bitterly and her mother nodded, losing none of her eager expression.
“We didnae believe our debts would ever be forgiven, but now our creditors have finally sent us this joint decree. All those years ago, yer marriage was mooted as a bargainin' chip in this mess, but nothin' ever came of it and the debt only grew. Now, finally, it will be wiped away.”
“It will be wiped away if I marry a laird from among the families of the creditors,” Beatrice said, noting aloud the point in all this that was most salient to her personally.
“The decree gives Beatrice three weeks,” her father observed, gesturing to the parchment. “That doesnae seem like enough time to—”
“Patrick,” Iola interrupted as Beatrice unfolded the decree on the table and regarded it warily, as though it would bite her. “She will be married in three weeks. It has been decided and there need be no great feast or celebration under the circumstances. It is time enough.”
Beatrice slammed her hand down on the table beside the parchment, knowing that she could not give voice to her own feelings in any more violent words or gestures.
What she really wanted to do was scream until her lungs collapsed in on themselves, or tear out into the night, hoping the cold would free her from all of this before some wild animal did.
Anythin' would be better than this. Why must I be bartered to fix the mistakes of me parents? If Father had been more sensible with money all those years ago, this would nae be happenin'.
Yet, Beatrice would never abandon her parents to the disgrace and utter penury that must follow such actions. Neither of her parents even blinked, even as Beatrice shuddered at the thought of her fate.
“I cannae do it,” she whispered and felt her mother’s hand settle on her shoulder in response.
“Ye must,” Iola told her firmly. “There is nae choice.”
From the shadows of the hall beyond the dining room, where neither sunlight nor firelight could fully penetrate, Beatrice detected the gleam of eyes upon her. Of the few distinguishable figures in the gloom, she suspected one to be her maid Margo, awaiting instructions.
The family’s servants likely hoped as strongly as Iola for forgiveness of the debts hanging like the sword of Damocles over the heads of the Whitmore house. If a house rotted out at the foundation, then all within it would suffer its collapse.
“So, I am to be married,” Beatrice said in an even tone, her attention still on the eyes she believed to be Margo’s.
“But to whom isnae written, is it? It says only that I will be married to a laird from the families of the creditors. If nothing else, I should be able to choose the laird who will have me.”
“The lairds we owe must choose, but who among them wouldnae want ye?” said her mother, brightly despite the tension in the air between them.
“They’ll be fighting for ye, I’ll be bound, at least with words, and the best man will win.
Nae laird could turn ye away, not with such a figure. I’ve always said that.”
Beatrice shuddered again, hoping that her mother wasn’t about to start talking of “child-bearing hips” and “ample breasts for feeding bairns.” She had heard these remarks before and always hated them.
It made her feel more like livestock than family member.
The talk of men fighting to have her was almost as bad.
“The laird they’ll choose for ye will be a good one, I’m sure,” Iola continued, reaching out to stroke Beatrice’s hair, the auburn streaked bronze from even the faint hint of sunlight in their gloomy town.
“Have nae fear. I didnae ken which of five brothers I was to marry before me wedding day and it all turned out well enough.”
Beatrice said nothing. Her parents’ marriage did not strike her as something to aspire to.
It had been arranged by their families to consolidate two small neighboring estates, the value of which was now mortgaged to the hilt.
The pair had learned tolerance and civility over the years, if not really anything Beatrice could describe as love.