Saved by the Highlander (9 page)

Perhaps he would even bring back the things his grandfather had abolished, as well: the naked choir and the lord’s choice. If there were any laird to show his people just how far his authority went, it would be Lord Roderick Sperry, a man who would not hesitate to order the rape and murder of his own betrothed—an earl’s daughter, no less.

In a book that lay always open upon a stand on his desk—just at Roderick’s right hand now, as he stood to face his housekeeper—there were lovely engravings of the old days. In them, Roderick loved to look above all at the depictions of the naked choir, called in the Latin legend that accompanied the picture the
chorus denudatus
.

In the first engraving, twelve angelic, naked girls stood in two ranks upon a table, while the
Dominus Lormorani
and his guests sat at the table gazing up at them in rapture. The girls’ cunts seemed to have had the hair removed from them, and the men watching them perform—doubtless the girls sang some bawdy parody of a church anthem—thus had a view that Roderick always greatly envied. He had often considered asking Mrs. Grant to shave the cunts of the maids, but, to his shame, she held him enough in awe that he had not wanted to see the look upon her face when he gave the order.

In the next engraving, the entire choir had been bent over the table, and each man had three of its members to himself. In the center, Roderick’s ancestor—though the book was not definite upon the matter, it would probably have been his great-great-grandfather, the second lord of Lormoran—had the three girls in the middle of the picture, and fucked the one in the center while he fondled the bottoms of the girls to either side.

The third engraving showed the same scene from the other side, as if the artist wished to draw all the possible pleasure of the spectacle. Here one could see the faces both of the girls and of the noble gentlemen: the former masks of shame and woe and the latter visages of triumphant passion.

In that same book, which had responsibility in the highest degree for the modest skill in the reading of Latin that Roderick possessed, there was an account of
Electio Domini:
the lord’s choice. Roderick’s translation, made at the same age of eighteen when he had been admitted to the revels of his father, went thus:

On midsummer’s eve, all the girls of the village who had reached the age of eighteen in the preceding twelvemonth are brought, by force if necessary, to the castle. There the stable master takes charge of them, stripping them of all their garments and washing them as if they were young fillies. There is a place in the dungeon of Castle Lormoran for the keeping of girls like horses, and there the girls are washed. The stable master and his stable lads do not spare the whip, if it be necessary to ensure the girls’ obedience, and often a girl receives six or even twelve lashes upon her bare backside because she has shown herself slow to obey when told to come for her washing.

When the stable master and his stable lads have washed the girls, they bind them over a long beam called the lord’s railing. They make the girls kneel upon well-spread knees, and then they bind the girls bending over the rail, with their bottoms up and their faces down in the straw. Then the stable master and his stable lads go from bottom to bottom and visit upon the girls all manner of shameful indignities, with fingers and plugs of leather and even of wood. They oil the bottoms’ little rings thoroughly, so that their lord’s pleasures might be well pleasing unto him.

Then the stable master summons his lord, and the lord of Lormoran comes down to the special girl stable. When he enters, he says unto the stable master, “Do these girls consent to undergo my choice?”

Then the stable master says unto the girls, “Girls, do ye consent to the choice of your lord?” and the girls answer, all together, “We consent.”

Then the lord enters unto them, and thrusts his hardened member into each girl’s bottom in turn. As he takes his pleasure, he speaks unto the stable master about the pleasure provided by the girl in whose bottom-ring he is thrusting his manhood, telling the stable master how well he likes the bottom. And a clerk records the lord’s judgment of each bottom upon a roll of vellum.

When the lord has entered each young rear, he makes his choice of the best bottom. Then he returneth unto that bottom, and entereth it again. While the stable master and his stable lads whip the other bottoms, the lord rides to his victory inside the rump of his choice, as all the girls cry out their submission unto the authority of the lord of Lormoran.

Roderick imagined telling Mrs. Grant that he would reinstitute the naked choir and the lord’s choice at midsummer this year, and found that his heart misgave him. He took pride in that misgiving, though, just as he took pride in enforcing his will as to the general correction. To whip all the maids of the castle represented no more than his ancestral right, and a nobleman must assert such rights in the modern world above all. But to feel some misgiving about bringing back such enormities of his ancestors as even they themselves must have seen could no longer be practiced—else why would they have been abolished?—showed that Roderick was a moral man. Certainly he was not to be held to the standards of morality used by commoners, and he supposed he had no doubt that he was bound for a very long time in purgatory, but at least he knew not to instruct his housekeeper to see to his fucking of every eighteen-year-old backside in the village.

“Surely, Mrs. Grant,” Roderick said, “my villagers understand the need for discipline. And surely they themselves know what befalls a man who must whip one pretty backside, let alone a dozen.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Mrs. Grant. “But can you not restrain yourself until you have Alana in private? Why must you have the other girl, too?”

“Mrs. Grant, I do not think—” Roderick was about to say that he did not think Mrs. Grant could ever understand the importance of fucking Alana while he looked at the bottoms he had punished, and making Alana worship the cunt of another girl with her lips and tongue as he did so—or of seeing the look of shame, and then of passion, upon the other girl’s face as she received the indecent caresses she must if she wished to keep her position. But at that moment Herter glided into the library and said, “My lord, a man has come who says he has news of Lady Alice Lourcy.”

Chapter Eleven

In the three days after he strapped Alice for insulting his breeding, Niall did not see much of her. He had his own flocks, and then the flocks of others to see to; shearing time drew near, and the days for it needed choosing, so that all the Kilmorin fleeces could be gathered up with some regularity and no man be left without help for his shearing, or woman for her carding and spinning. More yarn went to the weavers thus than had gone in the days when every crofter must shear and spin for himself, but it placed the burden on the chief to canvass his men and make sure that Angus had not had a falling out with Geordie, or Mistress Aileen with Mistress Donalda, which must be made up before a day to shear all their sheep could be fixed.

In the meantime, he had decreed that Alice should be allowed to walk in the village, such as it was (for truly four croft houses and a church made the entirety of it, with a little green by the church into which the graves of the MacAlpins slowly crept year by year). When Fiona had asked him what he wished her “to do with the noble lass,” he had felt grateful to say, “She will not long be with us. I have sent Callum with a letter to post in Glasgow, and I am sure her father will send an escort within a fortnight.”

“A fortnight is a long while, Niall,” Fiona said, “when a girl has nothing to do. May she have books? Paper?” Both those things existed in Kilmorin, only in Niall’s house. The kirk had its services said by a minister who traveled to Kilmorin from his home twelve miles away.

The idea of Lady Alice Lourcy reading his few precious books, passed down to him from his Grant grandmother—printed in London and sent North, and cherished, the big Shakespeare volume above all, and also the stories of Troy that were Niall’s real favorite—made him feel very strange. He felt the blood rise to his face a little as he realized how lovely a vision it was, of Alice sitting at his table with the Shakespeare before her, and he felt the need to push the impossible idea away.

“Oh, Niall,” Fiona said. “You are sweet on her, aren’t you? And why shouldn’t you be, the dear thing?”

That almost made him say, “No,” to the idea of her reading his books and using his dwindling supply of paper, simply in order to disprove his aunt’s assertion. Then he almost said, “She may read the Bible, but nothing else,” but that would have been ridiculous.

Careful not to respond to Fiona’s suggestion of his
sweetness
on the Sassenach earl’s daughter, he said, “She may read, and she may have a single sheet of my paper.”

“A single sheet?”

“Let us see how she uses it. I’ll not have her writing silly letters to her noble friends, when she will see them again soon enough.” He made his voice as gruff as he could, trying hard to imply that Fiona had erred about the
sweetness
without having to lie to her.

But when he had returned to his croft house that evening, the third of her stay in Kilmorin, she had left her work on his table.

An account of a visit to the highlands of Scotland, by Lady Anne Lourcy.

The handwriting was delicate, beautiful, and tiny. It hurt Niall’s heart to see how very tiny she had made her letters, because he had permitted her only a single sheet of paper.

After some unpleasant events that I shall not here set down, I was received by the folk of a village called Kilmorin. Owing to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, I was not able to show proper gratitude for that reception, and thus my first impressions of the highlands will always be of the extremity—the excess, indeed—of their natural beauty and at the same time the severity of the life lived in that setting, for I found myself having to accept the discipline of the clan chief, which discipline he delivered, in the highland style, to my hitherto unpunished posterior. Moreover, to my shame, he—a fierce and uncompromising man, but by no means a truly uncivilized one, as I had thought at first—commanded me to bare that posterior, previously entirely innocent of such things as straps and birches, to receive the correction of his fearsome highland strap! The shame of it seemed so terrible to me that I did not know if I should faint, but at the same time a queer feeling came upon me, that to suffer chastisement at the hands of so strong, and even wild, a man was not truly an awful fate. Indeed, afterward, when I had to stand with my backside exposed to demonstrate my contrition, the strangest feeling of all came upon me, and…

A knock came at the door. Fiona’s voice called, “Niall?”

Niall found that his cock had grown hard as iron, reading Alice’s writing. Why had she left it there? Should he pretend he had not seen it, or should he say something about it?

“Niall?” Fiona said, opening the door. “I am sorry to enter without permission, but Lady Alice…” Niall saw Fiona’s eyes go to the paper on the table. Thankfully, he had stepped back from it when he heard his aunt opening the latch, so that—Niall thought—Fiona could not tell that he had been reading it.

“Did you read the paper?” she demanded.

Niall’s mind worked furiously. “Only the first line,” he lied. What else could he do?

Fiona breathed a sigh of relief. “That is alright, then. Lady Alice is in tears, thinking that she left it there, and you might have read it. It has… things she did not wish you to read, in it. Give it here, then.”

Niall took the sheet carefully from the table and stepped toward his aunt, handing the paper to her.

“Are you sure you did not read more than the first line?” Fiona said suspiciously. “I do not know what she wrote, but she is terribly distraught over it. If it so happens that you know something you should not know, Niall MacAlpin, I will tell you only once to forget it. Do you understand me? Lady Alice is a dear, sweet girl, and she has already seen enough distress for twelvemonth, let alone a fortnight in the hills.”

“I understand you,” Niall said, forcing a smile. “Truly, I know nothing that I would hold against Lady Alice.”

Now Fiona looked at him very shrewdly. “Do not mince those canny words of yours with me, my lad.” She closed her eyes for a moment then, though, and said, opening them again, “If only I thought…”

Niall thought perhaps he had never longed to hear a person’s thoughts more than he craved the hearing of Fiona’s at that moment. But his aunt shook her head. “Best to stay away from her, I think.”

“She may have all the paper she likes,” Niall blurted out. Fiona’s shrewd, narrow look returned to her eyes. “She writes so small,” Niall finished lamely.

“Best to stay away,” Fiona repeated.

Niall nodded in resignation. “Only make sure she stays in the village then, aunt,” he said. “I fear the laird will hear that she is here with us.”

“Aye,” Fiona said. “That is sensible.”

She left him wishing he had copied the paper, for the words—the wonderful words—had already begun to slip from his mind. She had certainly called him
civilized
. And she had certainly written about a
strange feeling,
had she not? He wondered, oh, how he wondered, why she had written it. Had Alice started out writing about the highlands, and then found herself unable to keep from writing of how Niall had strapped her? Did Niall’s correction of her have so strong a hold upon the English girl’s mind?

* * *

Niall took Fiona’s advice. For the next five days he found more to do than really must be done in a proper ordering of the shearing. Only once did he see Alice, as he returned from the folds in the twilight, with the setting sun twinkling off the loch. Alice seemed to be returning from a walk to the shore. Niall saw her from a hundred yards away, but Alice’s head was bent downward to look at the path before her, and she did not notice Niall.