Page 21 of The Shadow of a Laird
Maura was deeply puzzled. “Why would they want tae hurt me?” she asked, frowning. “Who are ye? It is no’ just anybody who can walk intae the castle o’ a Laird. Dae ye know him well?”
“Our fathers were friends,” Gavin replied. This was not strictly true, but it was not a lie either. The two men had been merely negotiating a potential alliance—secured Gavin and Elspeth’s marriage—when Laird Forsyth died.
“So, who is your father?” she asked.
“Was. He is dead now, as is my mother.” He clasped his hands together in front of his face and thought of the last time he had seen his mother. She had said farewell to him with a strange intensity that day. Looking back, he could almost suppose that she knew what was about to happen.
“Goodbye, son,” she had murmured as she hugged him and kissed his cheek. There had been tears in her eyes, and he had laughed as he wiped them away for her.
“Heavens, Mother!” he said, laughing. “I will see you in two weeks. You’re not going away forever.”
“Of course not,” she replied, smiling. “I am being silly.” She had given him one last loving look and climbed into the carriage.
He never saw either of his parents again.
The memory came back to him as clear as day as he sat opposite Maura, and she saw the shadow of sadness in his eyes. She was about to give him some words of comfort when he said, “My full name is Gavin Ewan Forsyth, Laird of Duncairn.”
Maura gave a gasp of shock. “You—a Laird?” she asked, her voice high with disbelief.
Gavin nodded slowly. “A very bad one, I’m afraid,” he confessed. “The only reason I am here now is because of the help and the heroism of a very good friend. You see, when my parents died, I took my sadness out on everyone else. I became harsh and insensitive because I was so angry that I needed to makeeveryone else suffer. I was angry at myself for letting them go to their deaths that day. I was even angry with the coach driver, even though it was not his fault that their carriage went into the river. Worst of all, I was angry at them for dying.”
Gavin paused to collect his thoughts before telling her the worst part of his story. “I let the family down. I treated everyone with contempt—even my tenants, and the estate began to suffer. Several of the elders came to reason with me and begged me to change my ways, but I only took my fury out on them, though they did not deserve it. They were only trying to help me, but I threw it back in their faces.
After a while, they could take no more, and they came to take care of the problem once and for all, my death would be the solution.” He sighed heavily then stood up and crossed the room to fetch more ale, not because he really wanted any, but because he could hardly bear to look at Maura.
“Looking back, I can see that if I had to deal with a person like the one I was then, I might have done the same.” He took a sip of his beer; it tasted foul, but Gavin swallowed it anyway. He knew there was nothing wrong with it; the problem was him. “Anyway, as I said, my friend, the Captain of the Guard, came to rescue me. I thought he had been killed while doing it, but today I was overjoyed to find he was still alive.
He came to give me a warning; apparently my enemies have found out I still breathe and are sending out people to kill me. God knows, I deserve such a fate, but I am more worried about you. I don’t want my association with you to put you in any danger.”
Maura stood up and slowly backed away from him. She was incandescent with rage, and her face showed it; her eyes were blazing. She could not believe that she had been so easily deceived, she, who had always congratulated herself on being such a fine judge of human nature. Now, as she glared at theman she had actually thought she loved, she felt fury boiling up inside her until eventually, it erupted.
Her voice was throbbing with fury as she said, “Tae think I trusted a hypocrite like you. Ye never cared about your people—only about yourself! I cannae believe I was foolish enough tae have faith in a piece o’ filth like you that even his own people dinnae want, and’ I was stupid not tae see the truth in the first place. Ye fooled me.”
“Wait!” Gavin cried. “I never set out to hurt anybody. I was just in so much pain myself that I lashed out.”
“An’ ye think ye are the only one who has ever lost a loved one?” Maura was scathing, and she looked him up and down with disgust as she once more backed away from him. “It was your family that poisoned our water an’ killed my parents. If I had known who ye were, I would have let ye freeze tae death the first night ye came here. I should have turned ye away, but like a fool, I fed ye an’ gave ye a bed for the night, an’ I thought underneath a’ your nastiness there was a good man. I was wrong. Ye disgust me!”
“Let me explain—” Gavin began to speak, but she cut him off.
“No! Not another word,” Maura yelled. “I am no’ a monster, so I will gie ye time tae pack your bags an’ hit the road. Go an’ finish your shift an’ I will pay ye what ye are owed, then go. I never want tae see ye again.” She stormed out, slamming the door behind her.
10
Maura could hardly make sense of anything that evening, and was almost unable to smile or crack a joke with her customers as she usually did. She tried to force the argument with Gavin out of her mind, but it lurked at the back of it all evening like a malevolent shadow. Many of her friends and fellow workers began to whisper amongst themselves when she snapped at them or spilled their drinks, wondering what was amiss. Maura valiantly tried to calm down before she completely lost her temper. She could see that Gavin was not having a good time either, and that gave her a perverse pleasure.
He was looking threateningly at some of the men who had begun to taunt him by questioning his masculinity. “Hey, big man!” one of them shouted. “This wee lassie”—he pointed to Maura—“has got ye wrapped around her wee finger. Nice place tae be.” He held up his pinky finger to illustrate his point, and his friends laughed. Gavin grabbed it and squeezed it hard, and the man yelped with pain.
“I do not think so,” he said, with an evil smile. “I am wrapped around yours now, and you do not like it at all, do you? I doubt Maura would either.”
He let go, shooting a warning glance at the man. He might be leaving soon, but until he did, no half-drunken idiot was going to insult Maura.
Gavin was trying to look at her while he was working, storing up every memory of his last night in this strange, uncouth place he had come to think of as his home. If he could, he would have bought it from her uncle and made it into a palace for her, with brocade curtains at the windows and Turkish carpets instead of the grubby wooden floor.
He would have put in a fine marble fireplace and carved mahogany furniture with the chairs upholstered in velvet—and a dog. He had always wanted a pet dog, a big rumbustious hound who would run beside him when he was hunting and sit at his feet at nighttime. He knew that Maura preferred cats, though, and in his daydream he could see her sitting nursing one on her lap.
As he watched, he saw another young woman join her, and they went into a conspiratorial huddle, as he had often seen young women do. Her friend was blonde, without Maura’s fine features, but she had an air of mischief about her that Gavin found appealing. He tried to watch them without being too obvious about it, and noticed that the young blonde woman kept sneaking glances at him. He was obviously being discussed. What were they saying about him?
“Ye look a bit under the weather, hen,” Una, Maura’s closest friend, observed.
