Page 51 of Laird of Twilight
“They did not arrange the poor weather.” Yet she frowned. Had they? Her grandfather had always encouraged her to see meaning in everything around her. Nothing was as simple as it seemed, Donal MacArthur often insisted.
Ahead, she glimpsed the old bridge through the mist. As they rounded a difficult descending curve, James concentrated on his task and Elspeth watched the water, rushing and foamy, just ahead as the gig approached the bridge.
“Stop!” she cried out, placing her hand on his arm. “The water is too high!”
He drew hard on the reins. “Wait here,” he told her, and leaped to the road.
Not about to wait, she climbed down herself, lifting her skirt hems out of the mud to follow him toward where the bridge spanned a gorge. Her boot heels sank in mud, her walking impeded by her stiff ankle. Her skirt snagged on gorse and she tugged it free, soon joining James at the edge of the wide, heavily flowing stream.
The wooden bridge spanned a gap of twenty feet or so, the stone pylons embedded in earth and rock. The stream gushed through and lapped at the sides of the arched bridge, water splashing over the planks. The stream was the color of milky tea.
“Careful, Ellie,” James murmured in a distracted tone, taking her elbow. His use of the shorter name that her grandfather sometimes used grabbed at her heart. She set her gloved hand on his arm, glad for his strength and sureness.
“The burn is rarely this high,” she said. “Once or twice I remember seeing it like this.” Along the sides of the gorge, tree roots and bracken thrust up out of the water, and fallen branches swept by in the fast current.
Placing his gloved hand over hers, James stepped back a safe pace and took her with him. “Is there another place to cross?”
“There’s a level place two miles or so that way, at the head of the gorge. But the burn is very wide there and one must step from rock to rock to cross. There is no bridge. It heads us the other direction, and would make the journey even longer.”
“We have little choice unless we return to Struan House and wait for the water to subside. Is there no other access?”
“Not close by. Some people jump the gap,” she said. “Downstream there’s a leap, where one side of the gorge is higher than the other.” She pointed in the other direction.
He laughed. “I will not chance that, and you should not either, though I would not be surprised if you have given it a go in the past.”
“Intuition, sir?” she asked, amused.
“Logic, Miss MacArthur, knowing you.” He inclined his head.
She smiled. Learning more about him with each moment, she knew there was true warmth and heart beneath his cool exterior and staunch skepticism. “True, I did try the Leap with friends when I was younger. They made it, but I fell. I could make it now, I think, now that I am taller.”
“And not very tall at that. Out of the question.”
She remembered his leg. “Of course,” she murmured.
“You have a turned ankle, and what of our horse and gig?”
“Perhaps we could walk the horse over the bridge.”
“Possibly.” James went forward to step tentatively on the bridge, jumping up and down to test its soundness, then walking toward the middle.
Elspeth heard the low groan of wood and iron. “No, stop!”
He moved back to the grass. “It might hold, but the water could wash over at any moment. We must go upstream to cross, or return to Struan.”
“The bridge will hold for me. I can get across from here. You return to Struan with the horse and gig. You need not escort me all the way home.” She did not want to say farewell yet, but did not want him to take any risk for her.
“The viscount keeps you alone at Struan, and then tosses you out of his gig to walk home on a poor ankle over an unsafe bridge? My girl, they write ballads about cruel lovers like that,” he said. “Your grandfather would be after me to hang me.”
Lover,she thought, thrilled at the casual way he said it, accepted it. “He would bring a reverend, not a rope.”
“Which one would be worse, to Miss MacArthur’s thinking?”
She did not answer, walking back to the gig beside him. He lifted her inside, his grip firm on her waist, then leaped up and took the reins to turn the placid mare. He guided the horse along the earthen track beside the gorge in the direction of the other crossing. Below, the water rushed and brimmed nearly to its sodden banks.
Soon the sides of the gorge disappeared to flatten into moorland, and Elspeth saw then that the run-off had flooded the grassy, rocky meadow to either side. “There is a place to cross on foot,” she told James. “The rocks are flat and it is usually easy to walk across. But the water is too high for that now.”
James stopped the horse. “I see it. But it is not an easy hop and step across just now. If we come closer to the banks, our wheels will bog.”
