In Praise of Younger Men (3 page)

A flash of lightning suddenly rent the night sky outside the dining room window. Thunder rumbled. Robbie whimpered under the table as Devorgilla went on with the tale.

“This was the mother’s way of teaching Alain of Macquair that age and experience do not necessarily the best man make. Her son truly loved the maid, and she him, and true love must never be denied. Still, Alain scoffed at the ominous curse and arranged for the wedding of his daughter to the warrior regardless. But, on the day of their wedding, as the warrior groom came to meet his bride at the altar, he was seized by a sudden tremor, and fell dead at her feet. Thrice more this came to pass, until no one would court the Macquair maiden for fear of losing their lives. No one, but the valiant young lad who had rightfully won her hand.”

“So the chief saw the error of his ways and let the lovers wed?” Tristan finished, guessing the end of the story.

Devorgilla nodded. “Fearful of becoming the
last
Macquair chieftain, and the one responsible for this noble line’s downfall, Alain did finally consent to the marriage of his daughter to the younger man. Upon their marriage, he even named the lad the next Macquair chieftain to assuage the sorceress’s anger at the wrong he had done. Thereafter, the lovers lived a long and happy life together. But the curse which had been cast lived on, and for the generations afterward, the prophecy has held true. Those red-headed Macquair maidens who married younger husbands lived long and happy lives blessed by healthy children. Those who did not suffered heartache and tragedy because of it.”

Tristan had begun to wonder if he’d somehow traveled back in time several centuries, back to the days of witches and wizards and dark magic spells. “This all makes for an interesting story, and it is easy to see how it has come down through the years, but this is the nineteenth century, not the ninth. These sorts of things just don’t happen any longer.”

“Aye, they do, Tristan Carmichael.” Devorgilla’s expression darkened dolefully in the muted light. “For I was one such unfortunate Macquair maid.”

“Auntie Gill!” Harriet exclaimed. “In all these years, all the times we’ve talked of the legend, you’ve never said anything to me about this.”

“I had no need, child. There is no point in dwelling on tragedy.” She turned back to Tristan. “When I was sixteen, I believed myself in love with a neighboring landowner, a man much older than my tender years. I had believed that since Harriet’s mother, my sister, Viola had already wed, I was free to wed the man of my heart. My mother warned me against it, but I refused to listen and betrothed myself to my suitor. All was well until, on the eve of our wedding, my love took a sudden tumble down a narrow flight of stairs, breaking his neck in the fall. I have never forgiven myself for being so foolish.”

“This is why you never wed?” Harriet asked. “Why you wear mourning to this day?”

Devorgilla simply nodded.

The room fell silent for several moments as each of them reflected on the tale. The fire burned sluggishly, casting shadows on the wall while outside, the rain began to fall anew.

Suddenly Harriet spoke out, “Oh, would that I had been born bald instead of marked by this red hair!”

Devorgilla smiled. “I remember your mother Viola once saying something very similar to our mother when we were young girls. I will tell you now what she said to us then. ‘Tisn’t a blemish, dearest Harriet. Your hair is a blessing, for it is you who has been given the honor of preserving the Macquair heritage for another generation.”

“Perhaps I should just not wed at all, like you.”

“You cannot do that, Harriet. Once your mother had you, it became clear who the next Macquair maiden would be. I am too old now to bear any children. The Macquairs are one of the last great ancient Scottish clans. So many like the MacAlpin have been adopted into other clans, their own history lost to the shadows of time. If you were to disregard the prophecy and your special place in it, history hundreds of years in the making would come to naught.”

But Tristan remained skeptical. “Truly though, just how much could Harriet possibly be risking by choosing a man her same age?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Harriet answered him. “It isn’t a risk I am willing to take.” She stared at him, and her eyes grew misty. When next she spoke, her voice trembled. “Because I love you, Tristan. I think I have all my life, at least since the day you rescued me from that tall tree I had climbed.”

A single tear escaped to trail softly down her cheek.

The torment she felt was reflected on her face in the candlelight.

“You saved my life that day, Tristan Carmichael, and it is for that reason I will not be your wife—because doing so could very likely take your life away.”

I like this man;

pray heaven no harm come of it
!

—Lady Susan,
Jane Austen

Tristan awoke before dawn the following morning after a restless night spent more awake than asleep, his twilight hours plagued by images of flame-haired Macquair maidens and a witch’s evil eye.

He was downstairs before most of the house had yet begun to stir. Rather than trouble one of the maids with an early breakfast, he quickly saddled one of the horses in the Rascarrel stables and headed off through the morning mist for the forest shadows to the west.

Just a mile. It was all the distance that separated him from the place he’d been born, where he’d been raised, and then ultimately inherited. In the years Tristan had been gone from Ravenshall, its upkeep had been seen to by a steward he’d never met named Whitmore who sent monthly reports to him by way of his godfather in Edinburgh. He scarcely knew if the place had prospered, or fallen to neglect in his absence. But as he came through the trees and caught a glimpse of it—his first glimpse in nearly fifteen years—his breath left his body in a rush, fogging to the cold of the morning.

After all this time, it still hadn’t failed to stir him.

Surrounded on all sides by dense pine forest and rugged woodland landscape, Ravenshall Tower lay hidden from view of the main coaching road like a slumbering pastoral giant, unseen, but not forgotten. Never forgotten. It was a place that had been a part of the Galloway landscape longer than most of the ancient gnarled trees that grew around it. Dutch gin, French brandy, and Brussels lace were known to be smuggled from the beaches and into the caves that ran beneath the tower even to the present day.

Tristan stood for some time, watching the single square tower keep reflected in the morning light on the waters of the quiet burn that stretched behind it. He loved that the very walls still came alive as they had when he’d been a lad, the native pink Galloway sandstone that formed it winking and shimmering as if made of diamond dust in the mellow sunlight.

The foundations for the ancient tower had been laid at almost the same time Edward I had been snatching the Stone of Destiny from Scone Abbey in the late thirteenth century. It had been at various times wrecked and rebuilt, added to and passed through several notable families, until it had come to the Carmichaels early in the previous century after the Jacobite uprising of 1715. Childhood had been happy there, days spent with Geoffrey poking about the same dense woods and hidden caves the smugglers used by night. They had explored every tree, every bit of shoreline, vowing never to leave—until the day the coach carrying Tristan’s mother and father had plunged off a cliffside, forever changing his life.

At the age of thirteen, Tristan had inherited the viscountcy and had become the sole heir to all that Ravenshall encompassed. And with that, he’d had to leave his home, Geoffrey—the friend he held closer than a brother—and everything he loved, to attend university nearer the home of his godfather and guardian. Afterward, he’d traveled. Then the war had come. Somehow, fourteen years had passed, bringing Tristan to stand again before the home he’d been taken from all those years ago, the home he’d thought never to see again.

The home he had hoped to make again—with Harriet.

Tristan spent the next hours meeting with Whitmore and getting acquainted with the overall workings of the estate, which proved to have grown profitable in the years of his absence. As he walked through the quiet hallways and chambers shrouded by dust cloths, the house felt emptier than he could have ever imagined it.

“Shall I have the maid air out a bedchamber for you tonight, my lord?” the steward asked as they toured what had been his mother’s rose garden on the sunny side of the tower. He could almost still picture her standing amid the vibrant blooms.

“That won’t be necessary, Whitmore,” Tristan replied. “I’m for Edinburgh this afternoon to see my godfather. I will write to let you know when I intend to return and permanently settle in.”

Truth be told, Tristan no longer knew when that might be.

Thanking the man for his fine work, Tristan hoisted himself into the saddle to return to Rascarrel for his belongings and to bid his friend good-bye. He had just come into a clearing at the edge of the wood when he suddenly caught sight of Harriet riding in the distance ahead.

Her red hair was tucked up beneath a tall derby hat, the dark skirts of her riding habit draped over her horse’s flank as she cantered off across the dew-kissed field toward the firth’s northern shore. Morning mist swirled about her, making it look almost as if she were floating on a cloud. Maybe, he thought, maybe if he tried once more to talk to her, this time alone, he could convince her to change her mind and become his wife.

By the time he caught up with her, Harriet was nowhere to be seen, just the mare she’d ridden standing alone and riderless on a remote height overlooking the firth. Tristan left his own mount to graze upon a tuft of grassland, and took the narrow pathway of natural stone steps leading down toward the rocky stretch of shoreline below.

The Solway Firth was the border Mother Nature had created between England and Scotland, and from where he stood, on a clear day, Tristan could see all the way across to Cumbria. Many a sailing vessel had come to grief on her shifting sands and unpredictable surging tides. At this particular point on the bay, vast crags spilled out into the water, winds collided and surged, making it far too treacherous a landing point for even the smallest vessel—thereby leaving it the most secluded spot in all of Galloway.

Tristan followed the path of Harriet’s bootprints to a small opening no higher than three, maybe four feet nearly hidden beneath an overgrowth of gorse. He carefully pushed aside the thorny brush, ducking his head to enter, and arrived at a natural cave no doubt carved out of the tumbledown wall of rock thousands of years before.

Only the smallest finger of sunlight shone inside, enough for Tristan to make his way back into the darkness. He stopped when he reached a rock wall and could go no farther. But Harriet wasn’t there. He was about to call out to her when he heard a sound, a splash that seemed somehow to come from behind the cave wall.

Tristan felt around in the darkness until he found a small opening in the rock wall that led to a second chamber. It was high enough for him to stand and lit by two small openings in the rock overhead, allowing the morning sunlight to pour inside. At the foot of the chamber, carved out of the granite by nature’s hand, was a small crystal spring fed by fresh waters from some underground source. Over the centuries, it had formed a pool that twisted and turned, weaving its way for some distance inward along the cave floor. Even now, in the waning of winter, the air inside the cavern was comfortable, not cold. The waters of the pool would be warm as well, he suspected, softened by the natural minerals of the earth like a Roman bath.

Tristan watched in silence as Harriet threaded her way easily across the surface of the water, her arms cutting in gentle strokes, her hair, the darkest red, floating softly behind her. She moved with the grace and ease of a swan, beautifully poetic, and he was utterly mesmerized by her. When she turned suddenly and began floating on her back, Tristan found himself holding his breath as the peaks of her breasts rose just above the surface. In the light beaming down, they were palest white, tipped in rose beneath the sheer wet fabric of the shift she wore.

Tristan was taken by an image then, an image of himself standing naked with Harriet in that glistening underground pool, water dripping off of them both as they wound arms and legs together. He would make love to her here hidden away from the rest of the world outside. Together, they would forget that anything else existed but them.

He watched as Harriet kicked her feet, gliding to the pool’s edge. She pulled herself up with her arms to sit with her feet dangling, threading a toe across the rippling water as she wrung out the dripping weight of her hair. The sunlight shone down through a cleft in the rock above her, lighting her glistening skin. The steady rise and fall of her breasts beneath the damp shift nearly did him in.

Tristan hadn’t realized that he had stepped from behind the cover of the wall until he heard his own voice echoing to his ears. “Harriet ...”

“Tristan!” Harriet scrambled to her feet, taking up a tartan blanket she’d brought along to cover herself. “How . . . how did you find me here?”

“I saw your horse alone up on the height while I was riding nearby. I worried you might have been injured or gotten lost, so I followed your footsteps into the cave.”

The water dripping off of her was creating quite a puddle beneath her feet. She nodded, her initial uneasiness fading. “Well, thank you, but as you can see, I’m quite fine.”

“Yes. Yes, you are.”

He could see her skin grow flushed in the sunlight. He watched as she snatched up the pile of her clothing and retreated behind the shelter of a rock wall to dress. He should leave, he knew, but he didn’t. Instead Tristan made his way down toward the edge of the water where moments before she had been sitting, limned golden by sunlight. Even standing beside it, he could feel the warmth rising from the water’s surface. The heady scent of her wet skin, earthly and floral, surrounded him.

“How did you ever find this place?”