Saved by the Highlander (4 page)

Alice began to shout in protest then. “But… ow… stop it, sir.”

Niall kept spanking, seeing in the way Alice’s bottom had begun to squirm under the chemise that the punishment had started to take effect. “I cannot see my men,” he said, trying to invoke her sense of modesty to shorten this trying exercise. “Are they watching your punishment, my lady?”

“Ow! Yes, you… you… barbarian!” Alice had been holding her hands in front of her, but now she grabbed his thigh with her left hand, and threw her right back to try to ward off his spank. He took it firmly in his own right hand, and then transferred it to his left. Then, resuming the spanking just as hard and fast, he held her down over his knee with her right arm bent back.

Alice started to weep then, in great wracking sobs that had, Niall thought, a cleansing quality to them. He slowed the pace of the spanking, but he did not stop it. At the sound of Alice’s sobs, the urge to rub her bottom soothingly, the way he had used to do for Megan, came upon him, but he resisted it firmly. “Will you come with me, my lady?” he asked, and gave her yet another hard spank through the chemise.

“Oh, heavens…” she sobbed. “Yes, very… very well. You… I hope, sir, that you live to… to regret this foul deed, as you should.” Again Niall thought he could hear that she spoke out of a duty that she did not truly feel.

“And I hope you will forgive me, my lady, for this deed, though I do not deem it foul,” he said. “I do not know if my suspicion as to where the true foulness lies in this day’s blood be true or not, but if it be true, I think you may have cause to thank me even for spanking you.”

Alice wrestled against him then, and he let her go. She stepped away from him, and turned to regard him with angry eyes in which he saw that he had indeed guessed at some of the complexity of her heart: alongside the anger there seemed to lay an odd sort of gratitude to him for giving her a reason to resent him. He shook his head in a bit of incredulity, and the gesture seemed to increase Alice’s wrath.

“Are you well content, sir, to have struck me so shamefully?” she asked.

Niall bent to pick up the plaid, then straightened and began to fold it so that he could help Alice belt it into an arisaid. Looking at the fabric between his hands as he folded, he said, “No, my lady, I am not well content to have had to punish you, though I am glad that I have made you see reason.”

“Reason?” Alice asked with scorn. “You have made me see force, certainly.”

Niall did not answer; he had already told the proud girl, after all, exactly why he had done what he had done, and though he regretted the suffering he had caused her, he did not regret his course of action. He turned his eyes to Alice’s for a moment, hoping she would see in the calm of his face what it appeared she could not hear in his words. Then he turned halfway round and called to Callum who, along with the other highlanders, was standing watching them from the other side of the road. “Callum,” Niall called, “can you fash yourself to fetch me a length of rope?”

He had tried to keep his tone as light as he could, in hope of moving past the spanking his men had just witnessed, but he succeeded too well in bringing out the highlanders’ jocularity. “Aye, Niall,” Callum replied, “so long as you promise not to use it upon the poor girl’s rump.”

“Callum,” he replied, “I’ll have no talk of what just happened. Lady Alice will accompany us to Kilmorin, and she needs to belt an arisaid.”

“Aye,” Callum said, nodding. His nephew could be relied on despite his youthful age of nineteen years, Niall knew. Callum liked his jests, but though he did not yet have the same serious turn Niall did, he could already put away the freedom of his wit when the occasion required.

Niall turned back to Alice. “An arisaid might seem barbaric to you, my lady, but it will keep you warm as we climb into the highlands, and it may be well for you to look like a highland lass just at the moment.”

Alice took a deep breath, seeming with it to put away her weeping, though her eyes remained red-rimmed and the spanking had added fresh tear tracks to her dusty face. Somehow her long golden hair, which had long since come free of its coif, seemed to float around her face in such a way as to make her seem a much ill-used angel. Niall had to give his head a firm shake to clear it of the distracting vision. Why did fair hair have to bewitch him so?

“You have said that word several times,” she said, “but I do not think I have ever heard it. What is an arisaid?”

Niall laughed, and Callum arrived with the rope then. “Ach,” Callum said, “it is what women wear, instead of the great kilt.”

“And the great kilt is the strange thing you wear over your shirts?”

“Aye,” Niall said. “They are both made from plaids.”

“And a plaid is a woven blanket?” Niall felt his mouth twist into a rather perplexed smile. This English earl’s daughter seemed to have more curiosity than her governess might have thought seemly, about highland life.

“A woven blanket!” said Callum. He looked at Niall. “Is she daft?”

“Daft?” Alice said. “If a plaid is that thing you are wearing, is it not daft to call it anything but a woven blanket?”

Not only curious,
Niall thought, more and more diverted by the girl’s resilience, if by nothing else.
Spirited, as well.

Callum laughed. “Aye, perhaps a Sassenach must see it thus. And there is no doubt that a Sassenach girl could wrap herself in one on a cold night.”

“Callum,” Niall said warningly, just in case the young man decided to add a highlander to the admittedly enchanting picture of Lady Alice Lourcy wrapped up in nothing but a plaid, lying abed and awaiting what might befall her.

“But you seem to say,” Alice persisted, “that a highlander’s plaid is much more than that.”

“Aye,” Niall said, “the plaid is woven from yarn that highland women spun and dyed, that grew upon our sheep, who grazed upon our hills. Whether we belt it into a great kilt or into an arisaid, to wear plaid makes us who we are.”

He saw her take in his words, and smile a bit as she considered them. “I would be honored,” she said then, “to make trial of this barbaric dress.”

Chapter Five

That same afternoon Lord Roderick Sperry went to the bedchamber of Alana, one of Lormoran’s chambermaids, to fuck her, as he did most days.

Alana was a sweet young highland lass of nineteen, red-haired and blue-eyed as all highland lasses, Roderick thought, ought to be. Six months before, on the pretext of finding fault with her cleaning of a floor, Roderick had gone to her room to whip her with the castle’s ancient punishment strap. He had then deflowered her, telling her forthrightly that although he would retain the right to whip her whenever he pleased, it making a necessary part of his pleasures, Alana would find him much kinder, and might even enjoy the whipping, if she went into the special service Roderick reserved for his very favorite maids.

Like three other chambermaids before her, if she gave herself over to his regular voluptuous use, whether in her sparsely furnished little room in the servants’ hall or on occasion in Lord Roderick’s own bed—or even from time to time in his library—Alana would not be whipped with the severity Roderick reserved, as the reverse of the medal, for those chambermaids who refused him. Roderick, who liked to take care of his bastards—at thirty years of age he already had five of them—also promised Alana that should she get with child, he would see after her lying-in and after the fostering of the child.

Then, without compunction, he fucked her the way he liked to fuck compliant highland lasses: Alana’s palms flat on her narrow bed with its plaid blanket and his hips pounding against her well-punished backside, and the lass crying out her submission to the noble cock of the laird of Lormoran. Truly he loved Alana enough to fuck her face to face from time to time; she wasn’t like Catriona, her predecessor in the laird’s special chamber where he instructed Mrs. Grant, the housekeeper, to house new girls whom he planned to fuck. With Catriona, now raising Roderick’s third son (the second to be named Roderick) in the village of Lormoran, as the wife of a crofter, the fucking of his special maid had been an exciting battle of wills. Roderick had to conquer Catriona over and over, winning her submission with his hands and his strap and his cock, until her cries had rung out so loudly up and down the servants’ hall that Mrs. Grant had even ventured to ask the butler Herter to ask Lord Roderick to be a little more lenient with the maid.

Herter said, sliding into the library one morning just after breakfast, “I wonder if I might have a word, my lord.”

“Certainly, Herter,” Roderick replied, thinking that the butler wished to discuss arrangements for the hunting party that would soon arrive at Lormoran. Among other things, of course, Roderick had ensured that each of his bachelor guests would have a sweet little bedmate to welcome him home from the chilly days of stalking.

“My lord,” said Herter, looking rather uncomfortable. “I thought you should know that Mrs. Grant has overheard the footmen speaking about Catriona.”

Roderick smiled. “Saying what, pray?”

Herter looked grave, which made the sport all the better. “Well, my lord, young George, I gather, was heard to say, though perhaps in rather coarser terms, that you, my lord, must have found some very serious fault with her conduct, to… treat the girl as, it seems from the sounds that emerge from her chamber, severely as you do.”

“I have indeed,” replied Roderick. “Catriona is a little minx who stands in grave need of daily correction.” He tried to bring some solemnity and hauteur into his tone, but really Roderick felt too much delight at the idea that the servants knew all about his amorous and disciplinary pursuits to bring it off. If the marriage with the earl’s daughter came about, how much fun could he have watching the girl’s discomfiture at learning of the nature and frequency of her bridegroom’s visits to his special maid?

But he would probably have to kill the earl’s daughter, more was the pity. The excuse Roderick needed to clear the MacAlpins out of his hills lay ready to hand, in such a marriage; no amorous pleasure could outweigh the pleasure of knowing that his cattle grazed safely and that he had driven the proud highlanders away forever.

“I understand, my lord,” Herter intoned. “And I do hope that you would never suppose me to question either the need to chastise her severely or your right—indeed your obligation—to see personally to her correction.”

Roderick was having so much fun that he decided to see how uncomfortable he could make his poor old butler. It was wicked of him, he supposed, but here at home in Lormoran, where he could suppress any knowledge of his various sorts of uncommon sport with gold or even with a dirk in the night, he loved to let his fancies fly free. In the South, in the dining and drawing rooms of the English nobility, he knew very well how to conceal his schemes and his little pleasures, but that facade of high moral character became very wearisome after a few months in London and his friends’ country houses, and he longed to return to his own castle where such delights as the whipping and fucking of his special maid awaited him.

“And, Herter,” Roderick continued, “if I should decide that little Catriona’s penitence, and indeed her penance from the castle strap, had pleased me greatly? If I should take it upon me to allow her to please me as well-trained maids have always needed to know how to please their masters?”

He looked at Herter, who seemed to have a need to swallow and to clear his throat simultaneously.

“To be perfectly clear,” Roderick said, pressing the point—very wickedly, he knew. “I should never dare such enormities as they say my great-grandfather committed. You have heard the stories, I am sure, Herter.”

“Yes, my lord,” Herter said, clearly seeking an occasion to end the conversation.

But Roderick did not allow it, and thought upon consideration he should not allow it, in order that Herter understand just how set his master was in his lustful practices. “You have heard the one about how in his day, the laird’s special maid lived in a room that had peepholes for the other servants to look in, and see what befell their fellow servant?”

“Yes, my lord.” Herter had fixed his eyes on a corner of the library’s ceiling, it appeared, and a very slight flush had appeared upon the papery skin of his old cheeks. Just one more turn of the screw, Roderick thought, and he could deliver his peroration so that he need not worry anymore about Herter or Mrs. Grant questioning the sounds they heard from the special maid’s chamber.

“And the tale of how he would often let the footmen go in to his special maid after he had finished?”

Herter cleared his throat. “Yes, my lord.”

“To be perfectly clear, then,” Roderick repeated. “I should never dare to do such things myself, in our enlightened times. But if I should, Herter, I would expect that you would see how very right it was that I should do them, since I am the laird.”

Herter’s eyes darted to Roderick’s face in an expression of alarm at his master’s severe tone.

“Yes, my lord,” he had said.

“And I would similarly expect that you would ensure that any servant who mentions the way I correct the conduct of little Catriona learns the value I place upon loyalty.”

“Yes, my lord.” The butler’s eyes had returned to the corner of the ceiling. “Will there be anything else, my lord?”

The incident had diverted Roderick, and he had told Catriona about it that afternoon while he whipped her, encouraging the girl to picture the other servants listening to the disgraceful sounds she made when punished, and the even more disgraceful ones she made when fucked. For several days, Roderick had even contemplated trying to reinstitute the practices of his great-grandfather’s time. It was probably better that the news of Catriona’s embarrassment came later that very week, and instead of trying to find a way to bore peepholes into the door of the special maid’s chamber, Roderick had to instruct Mrs. Grant to find a place for the girl to lie in, and to put it about that a new chambermaid was wanted at the castle.