Chapter Twelve
“I need your help,” Harry said to Portia.
They had just enjoyed a very strenuous and very happy bout of lovemaking. She was exhausted and lay with her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat.
Portia’s excuse to leave the house for her trysts with Harry continued to be her need to help Crazy Lizzy, and she did not lie about the old woman. She did deliver the food.
But only after spending an hour, sometimes more, in Harry’s arms. And he had been true to his word. They now took precautions to prevent a child.
Of course, her sister and mother didn’t appear to care where Portia was. Minnie was caught up in planning her marriage to Mr. Tolliver. They would wed on January 2 of the new year. The banns had been posted twice now.
Surprisingly, Lady Maclean no longer spent her days in bed.
She was up and ready for General Montheath’s call.
Any of her earlier complaints about him vanished as she almost gleefully spent his money.
She still wouldn’t let any of his many dogs into the house, but Portia had caught sight of her mother’s hand reaching down to scratch Jasper’s ear a time or two.
Therefore, Portia was able to do exactly as she pleased, with only a semblance of propriety. No one questioned her, not even Glennis was suspicious. So far their liaison was a secret, and Black Jack Maclean’s older daughter liked it that way because she was proving to be his child.
They’d turned the bothy into their own paradise. Harry brought a stack of fur-lined blankets to keep them warm and they didn’t need much else. The weather might be cold or windy or wet, but there in his arms, the world was perfect.
Her lover was a masterful teacher and Portia was an eager student. Nor did she weigh the rights and wrongs of what she was doing. She knew it would end someday, but for now, this was what she wanted.
Indeed, there was only one small matter that concerned Portia—she hadn’t seen Owl since that day she’d first met Harry at the bothy. The cat seemed to have disappeared. Everyone told her cats did that from time to time, but that didn’t stop Portia from worrying and calling for Owl to come home.
“What do you need help with?” she asked Harry, propping her head up on her hand resting on his chest.
“The book.” He sat up, forcing her to move. She pulled the blanket up around her breasts. Heedless of his own nakedness, he rose from their makeshift bed and went over to where his saddlebags lay.
She liked his body. He was hard muscle. She imagined that the Spartan warriors of old must have looked like him. Not even the scar on his leg deterred from his masculine beauty.
“How did you receive that wound?” she asked.
A frown marred his brow as he pulled the book from his bags. “A French sword. It came at me and I forgot to move.”
“The cut must have been deep.” The scar was angry and occasionally she had noticed him favoring the leg.
She remembered at the dance, when they’d been on the floor together, he hadn’t hopped and skipped the way the other men had.
She’d assumed his reserve was because of pride.
Some men didn’t like to dance. But now she understood.
“It was.” His voice was curt. He returned to her just as she shivered in the cool air. He pulled the blankets over them.
“What battle were you in?” she asked, snuggling against him and running her hand along the scar.
“Vitoria. I don’t like talking about it.” He opened the book.
“Why not?”
Harry gave her his full attention, his expression somber. “Because I proved myself to be a vainglorious fool and cost many good men their lives.”
“It was war, Harry. War always costs lives.”
His lips twisted into a sardonic smile. “How callously they speak who don’t witness the cost.”
“I’m not trying to be callous,” Portia said, a bit hurt by the label. She sat up.
For a second, he appeared ready to say something but shook his head and opened the book.
Portia wasn’t ready to let it go. “You should say what you think instead of swallowing your words.”
“No one cares what I think,” he answered, turning a page.
“I do.”
The word seemed to hover in the air. Harry looked to her. “You shouldn’t, Portia.”
Her throat tightened. “But I do.”
“I’m not worth it.” He slipped a hand around her neck and kissed her forehead as if ending the subject.
There was great sadness in him, a sadness that she had seen that moonlit night when he had been on his knees.
She placed her hand on his chest, right over his heart.
His heart. She loved the steady rhythm of it.
When they made love, and his weight was on her, she relished its pounding beat as much as she did his heat and strength.
“Yes, you are,” she said.
Again, he pressed a kiss against her brow. He did not believe her.
He held up the book. “I’ve read this from cover to cover three times,” he said. “I can’t find any clue as to what can be done to break the curse. I find nothing ‘witchy.’ ”
“What are you looking for?” she asked. He’d changed the topic. He did not want to discuss the matter further and she knew he remained unconvinced of her belief in him. She reached for her spectacles on the stool and placed them on her nose.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he admitted, stabbing his fingers through his hair in frustration. “I suppose something such as ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog.’ ”
Portia smiled, recognizing the reference to Macbeth.
“Another Scot with a witch problem,” she murmured.
She took the book from him and turned a few of the pages.
“Why don’t we read this aloud to each other?
Sometimes, I miss details when reading silently.
Hearing the words spoken makes them clearer to me. ”
“Capital idea. You start, my lady.” He stretched out on their bed of furs.
She glanced at him, at his spent maleness, knowing that before she went home, he would please her again. He saw where she was looking and laughed. “Read,” he ordered, slipping his hand beneath the covers and placing it possessively on her thigh, and so she obeyed.
It wasn’t easy reading. Some of the recipes were in the old Gaelic and the ink of many of them had faded. He listened as she stumbled along, watching her intently.
Portia didn’t read every recipe. She’d scan them for something of interest. There were hundreds of them. She’d barely had time to investigate the book at all before she’d given it to him.
“Here is something,” she said. It was the last entry in a section. “Reunioning a soul with an animal,” she read. She looked to Harry. “What does that mean?”
“In the East there is the thought of reincarnation where the soul returns to live again. The Hindus believe all life, including animal life, reincarnates. Read on.”
“Choose the animal you wish to live on in. Very old power. From Gypsy.” Several of the recipes had given their source. “Make an elixir of mugwort oil and powdered spruce needles. Mix with frankincense resin. Chew while repeating, ‘Life come hither, Life is mine’ until passing.”
Portia looked up in shock. “What does it mean by ‘until passing.’ ”
Harry frowned. “Death, I suppose.”
“How strange,” Portia said, and made a face as she shivered in distaste. “I don’t like this spell.”
“It can’t work,” Harry assured her. “How many of us choose the hour of our death. How would one know when to start chewing the resin—” He broke off as if struck by a new thought. “Wait a moment, a suicide would know the hour of her death.”
Portia looked down at the recipe and shook her head. “There is no way of knowing if this spell was used or not. I don’t like thinking about it.” She started to shut the book but Harry placed his hand on the page.
“How did you find this book? Has it been in your family?” he asked.
“No, I found it in the attic at Camber Hall.”
“Was it in a trunk?”
“Actually,” she said, a strange sense of foreboding rising within her, “Owl gave it to me.”
“The cat?”
Portia nodded and told him of going up the attic to put a bucket under where the roof leaked.
“So the book was on top of something it could be knocked or pushed off of?” Harry asked.
“I assume that was the case,” Portia answered.
“I don’t really know. There are stacks of wooden boxes and crates and trunks up there.
I was weaving my way around them when the book dropped down in front of me.
I didn’t know why until I saw Owl peek around a corner.
She could have jumped from the top of something and knocked the book off. ”
Harry sat up. “Where is the cat now?”
“I don’t know,” Portia admitted. “The last time I saw her was the first time we met here. She was waiting for me. I haven’t seen her since.”
He pushed the covers away and stood, pressing his brow with the fingers of one hand as if trying to answer a riddle. He looked to her. “I said to you once, I thought the cat was Fenella.”
“And I thought the idea ridiculous. I still do.”
“Fenella took her own life as well,” he said, ignoring her criticism. “She knew when she was going to die.”
“Oh, not again. Why do you keep suggesting that Owl, a poor little cat with deformed ears, is a two-hundred-year-old witch? That’s impossible.”
He knelt beside her. “Not if she is reincarnating herself.”
“Over and over again?” Portia let her doubts show. “Cats can’t repeat chants.”