Chapter 1 #2
“Ye must listen to yer mother, Beatrice,” Patrick urged. “Ye’ll be married and supported well enough, whoever takes ye. They’re all richer than I am, anyway.”
Beatrice despaired, knowing that neither of them really understood. But what could they even do, even if they did understand? The workings behind the creditors’ decree would already be in motion. A prospective husband might even have been chosen already, one way or another.
As a child, when first learning that she might be traded for debt someday, Beatrice had prayed that when this time came, she would at least be ready to accept her fate.
Later, with more understanding, she came to the terrible realization that there would never be time when this arrangement didn’t seem like an instrument of torture, weighing down her ankles and wrists with fetters fixed for life.
I cannae. I cannae. I willnae.
The willful voice in her head refused to be silent even when Iola leaned in close. Beatrice avoided her mother’s eyes.
“Ye wouldnae refuse, would ye?” Iola put to her daughter, her voice crackling sharply like the fire in the hearth.
“I didnae think of it,” Beatrice answered, unable to look her mother in the eye, for fear that she would reveal the truth of her heart and mind.
“Then remove that look from yer face because we can see yer thoughts writ there clear as day,” snapped her mother, evidently knowing the truth despite Beatrice’s averted gaze.
Patrick took a step closer to the table, the wavering outline of his shadow eclipsing Beatrice as he leaned forward and rested a hand on the wrinkled parchment before her. He seemed for a moment like an fortress looming above a helpless town in enemy hands.
“I am thinkin' only that there must be a solution,” Beatrice made herself say calmly in response to her mother’s question. “There must be a way to solve this other than handin' me over to a complete stranger.”
Beatrice heard her mother inhale sharply through her teeth and her father loomed ever more ominously at her shoulder. Neither of these things had any effect on the young woman. The germ of an idea had taken root in Beatrice’s mind and was now growing and flowering rapidly.
“A solution?” Patrick repeated, his voice growing severe now. “I owe half me estate to MacSween and as much again to the other lairds together. Debts must be paid, one way or another. That is the only solution, Beatrice. All else is dreams and fairy tales for bairns.”
MacSween was almost a name to frighten children in this part of Scotland.
The old laird had been a monster who was said to have murdered his own wife and the present laird had a peculiar reputation of his own.
Leo MacSween was said to be ruthless in battle, cold-hearted in negotiation with other clans and utterly uninterested in marriage, despite being a widower with only a daughter.
Beatrice knew too that Clan MacSween and its laird were rich and that Leo MacSween was considered handsome, although she only ever saw him from a distance and usually on horseback.
Everyone knew of the emissaries and offers of arranged marriage that came frequently to this eligible man from clans across the Highlands, all of them summarily dismissed.
Other men lived and died to get heirs, but apparently not Leo MacSween.
Years ago, Patrick Whitmore himself had considered bargaining his daughter’s hand against his debt to MacSween.
Beatrice remembered overhearing him telling her mother how his initial approaches were rejected by the laird’s council.
They had still hoped back then to persuade their laird into a politically or financially advantageous marriage.
As the Whitmores’ debt grew, the notion of exchanging it for marriage became impractical in any case.
Even in the unlikely case that MacSween had agreed to accept Beatrice against his own debt, the other creditors would still have been clamoring at the family’s door.
It was only now, with agreement among the creditors, that Beatrice’s marriage could wipe out everything her father owed at a stroke.
“Aye, Father, I ken well enough that our family’s debts must be paid,” Beatrice answered stiffly. “I swear I willnae bring shame upon our name. I have more pride in our honor than that. Still, I shall make me own way.”
As Beatrice made this unusually forceful assertion, she perceived Margo’s eyes dropping back into the gloom and vanishing from sight.
Likely, the maid was among those shadowy figures now stealing out of the hallway, unable to eavesdrop any longer on the brewing row that could only have one ending, and not the one that the daughter of the house favored.
Beatrice felt no ill will towards servants fleeing the scene. If she could, she would have followed them away from her parents, from this table and from an atmosphere that felt hot, tight and thick with obligation.
“Make yer own way? What do ye mean by that?” Patrick demanded. “I’m in nay position to tell these lairds that ye’ll take one of them and nae another. Ye must accept their choice.”
There was anger in her father’s voice now, and perhaps more than a touch of fear. If Beatrice refused to cooperate, her parents would be utterly ruined and she knew it. But she was not refusing to cooperate.
The plan in her head was now fully formed and Beatrice got to her feet, a new resolve strengthening her tongue and sinews. To her surprise, her father took a step back when she looked at him, quailing at whatever he now saw in her eyes.
“I willnae sit waitin' here to be bound to a stranger from among yer creditors,” she stated boldly. “It seems I must be bound to one of these lairds, but I willnae marry a man I didnae choose.”
Shocked and frowning, Iola shook her head.
“They willnae accept that, Beatrice,” she warned her daughter. “These are powerful men and as yer father said, he cannae bargain with them. He is too indebted.”
“They will accept it if I marry the most fearsome among them,” Beatrice disagreed. “They wouldnae dare otherwise.”
“Ye cannae mean that,” objected Iola, coming now to Beatrice’s side with real maternal concern in her face as she grasped what the young woman had in mind.
“Let some other laird come courting ye, when they’re agreed on it.
Any other will make ye an easier husband than him.
He admits himself that he is a strange and dangerous man, and he is set against marriage. ”
“Beatrice, lassie,” said her father, swallowing, and seeming to shrink back into an old man again, as he had when he brought the decree out to her by the loch.
“If ye marry that man, I cannae offer ye any protection. God willing, he’ll nae have ye anyway.
All the others would, as yer mother tells ye. ”
“Me mind is made up,” Beatrice declared. “I will only marry Laird Leo MacSween. If danger comes to me from any direction, I shall be ready for it.”