Page 6 of The Highlander's Alluring Spy
“Magnolia,” he said after a reasonably long stretch of silence had passed. “My dear Daughter. I hope you know that you are still free to change your mind. If you felt at all pressured into this, I do not wish—”
“I don’t feel pressured, Father,” Magnolia replied. She had the same decisive smile on her face that Eleanor had worn whenever she decided an argument was won. “I know my duty as well as you. Will you please relax? For my sake, if nothing else?”
Daniel smiled. “My brave little girl,” he said. “Though not so little anymore. Have I done right by you, involving you in all of this? Should I have kept you from the Order and valued your safety more?”
She leaned over the table and took his hand in her own. “Father,” she said firmly, “you have always done right by me. Since Mother died, you have served as mother and father both. You have trained me and educated me and allowed me freedoms that many women of my rank could never dream. Never doubt yourself on my behalf.”
Daniel felt a swell of pride and love threaten to overwhelm him, and tears pricked at his eyes. “Promise me, child, that you will do everything in your power to remain safe.”
“I love you, Father,” she told him earnestly. “I love my Country. I love the Crown. I will return with the information we need to help our country protect itself.”
He watched her, the passion and enthusiasm and seriousness in her expression, and had never been so gratified…or so worried.
That isn’t what I asked, Magnolia,he thought but did not say. After all, it was he who had raised her this way–Country before self, Crown above all.
Later, they walked together through the streets of Edinburgh, and Daniel marveled, as he always did, over how similar it was to home but with a different flavor. It was a city indeed, not all that different from any in England except, of course, London. The Scottishness was here, in the flags that flew and the way they spoke, but it was similar enough to feel...comfortable.
“Isn’t it amazing, Father, how everything changed at the border?” Magnolia asked him, looking around with a half-smile on her face.
Daniel gave her a questioning look.
How is it that she sees something so different from what I see?
It seemed that this was always the case, ever since Magnolia was a child. She’d always had a unique take on otherwise simple ideas. She spoke the kind of thought processes that, if she were a man, would have her lauded as a great philosopher.
He remembered the first time this had stood out to him and made him realize how different his daughter really was compared to other girls of her age and time.
“Father, Mother,” she’d once asked them both over dinner, aged just nine. “When my brother died before I was born, did he go to Heaven?”
“He was not baptized,” he’d told her, truthfully, a sad note in his tone now. It was something that often worried him, deep in his soul. “I do not know. We did not even have the chance to name him.”
Magnolia had tilted her head and said, “I think he is there, with all the others who were never born. After all, God already knew the name of his heart, even if we didn’t yet.”
Eleanor had burst into tears and embraced her, and Daniel had never known such love as he felt for his clever little daughter at that moment.
Back in the present, Daniel asked, “Different in what way, my dear?”
Magnolia gestured vaguely to the air. “Surely you can see it too, Father. The grass seemed more alive the second we crossed. Greener, somehow. I suppose it is all the rain they get here in the north. Even this city, which isn’t all that different; there’s something odd in the air, isn’t there?”
Daniel nodded slightly. He couldn’t deny that. “I suppose so. You seem to feel it much more intensely than I do, though.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Is it so…strange as all of this up in the Highlands, too?”
No. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. I don’t even know how to begin to prepare you.
But all Daniel said was, “It’s different up north.”
Magnolia just nodded, smiled trustingly at him, and took his arm.
They walked together like that until they reached the carriage stop. Magnolia embraced her father tightly before she boarded. “Do not worry, Father. I will be quite all right.”
“I know you will,” Daniel told her. He helped her onboard then kissed her cheek through the open window. Then he stood back, and with a final wave, the carriage took his daughter from him, away up to the wild north and the unknown.
He watched the horses trot away with the carriage until it turned a corner, and then he could see no trace of it anymore. It was as though it, and Magnolia, had never been here at all.
As a Lord, he could not be more pleased with the opportunity his child had been offered and accepted. As a father, though, he could not be more afraid.
* * *
