Enraptured Page 15

  “And this—something about—the dory, perhaps? Can you read this word? You are better than I at deciphering her hand.”

  “I’ve had some practice the past two months, reading Mardoun’s chicken scratches. Clearly handwriting is not an attribute valued in earls. Nae, I think that word is Davey, not dory.” His voice sounded odd, distracted.

  Was he leaning closer to her? “I see. ‘Davey is very good to me.’ ” He was closer; she was certain she felt the touch of his breath on her hair. She lost her place on the page. “I, um . . .”

  “What are you wearing?” Coll blurted out.

  “What?”

  Color flared along Coll’s cheekbones, and he pulled back. “You smell different.”

  “I smell different?”

  Now the red washed over the rest of his face. “Not that you smell, well, I mean you do, of course, you smell wond—quite nice. But tonight you—it’s something different. Your perfume. A different perfume, that’s what I . . .”

  He looked so flustered and furtive that Violet began to chuckle. “Sally McEwan made a cream for my hands. They were chapped from the cold. It has attar of roses in it. See?” She stretched out her arm toward him.

  His hand clamped around her wrist, and he pulled in a breath, his eyes closing. “You smell like summer.” Coll released her arm, almost shoving it away, and jumped to his feet. He began to pace, his hands jammed into his pockets. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Violet watched him, uncertain. Her insides were a tumult of sensations. The touch of his hand around her wrist, the look on his face as he breathed in her scent, the husky quality of his voice—all vibrated through her, turning her warm and shaky and eager. “Coll, are you all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” His tone was sharp and impatient. “I’m sorry. I’m—it’s just a problem . . . with one of the crofters. I’ve been distracted; I apologize. Let’s go on.”

  “All right.” Violet was sure he was lying, but it would serve nothing to say so. Her instinct was to pursue it, to wring a better answer from him, but she held her tongue, afraid to speak lest the answer cut her.

  He slid the book closer to Violet. “Why don’t you read aloud, and I’ll listen? I think better on my feet.”

  “Of course.” Violet returned to the journal. “That’s all she says about that. There’s another recipe.” Violet read each snippet, which ranged from comments on the weather to the pain in her back to the black feelings that plagued her in the middle of the night. “Poor woman. It’s clear she’s close to despair. ‘The bairn is my hope.’ Now it’s ‘wet November.’ Wait, now she says, ‘I watched the sun rise this morn, all gold and pink glory. It made me think of him and how we watched it.’ ” Violet swallowed against the unexpected tears rising in her throat. “There’s a space, and she says, ‘My burden should rest with those who went before.’ Coll . . .” She turned toward him.

  He stared back at her. “Her burden? The bairn? Didn’t she say the baby was her burden?”

  “We thought that was what she was talking about. But, Coll, what if she meant something else?” She flipped back through the pages. “Here. She wrote, ‘He has given me my burden and my blessing.’ ”

  “Aye. The bairn.”

  “Yes, we assumed that the baby was both a burden and a blessing. But every other time she mentions the baby, it’s happy, hopeful. What if the burden and the blessing are two different things? After all, Sir Malcolm gave her both the baby and the gold. The gold would have been a burden—a great deal of responsibility for a young woman, what with him disappearing and her having to find a place where no one would discover it.”

  “You’re right. It was a heavy thing for her to deal with.” Coll strode back to the table and leaned down, hand braced on the tabletop. He leafed through the pages.

  “Stop.” Violet laid her hand on his, and Coll went still. His skin was searing hot beneath her fingers. “I thought I saw something on the page before.”

  He straightened up, folded his hands together behind his back. He nodded toward the book. “Where? What did you see?”

  “Maybe nothing.” Violet turned the page. “Here, where it says December sixth. Beneath the date, it reads, ‘May our ancestors guard it, as we have guarded them.’ Ancestors could be referred to as ‘those who have gone before,’ couldn’t they?”

  “Certainly. So if she is talking about the treasure, then she put it in a—”

  “Cemetery!” Violet said the word with Coll. She jumped to her feet, her face glowing. “She buried it in a cemetery. Among the Munros; that’s where we’ll find it! Oh, Coll!”

  She reached out impulsively, laying her hands on his arms. Coll’s face changed, mouth softening and a light flaring in his eyes. Suddenly heat and hunger pulsed from him. He dropped his gaze to her mouth. She knew in that moment that he was going to kiss her. His hands went to her waist, and he leaned down. Violet’s eyes fluttered closed and she turned her face up to his.

  “Bloody hell!” The words were barely above a whisper but charged with anger. Coll jerked his hands away and whirled around, charging out of the room.

  Violet lingered in her bedroom the next morning until almost nine o’clock, knowing that Coll always ate breakfast early and left the house immediately thereafter. It was cowardly of her, she supposed, but she could not face him this morning after making such an idiot of herself last night. Why was she always so wrong about Coll?

  Violet was realistic about her looks. Her mother and sisters had told her time and again that she would be pretty if only she would make an effort. However, men were not drawn to her like bees to honey. They found her unladylike, unseemly, and lacking in femininity. She knew she was not a woman to arouse grand passion in a man. She had never before mistakenly thought a man desired her, and her behavior with them had always been decorous. Even during her brief courtship, she had been cool and contained.

  But now, with Coll, she found herself surging with eager yearnings. Clearly these strange new feelings were coloring her judgment, making her see desire in him that was not there. He had been forced—twice—to reject her. It was no wonder he had been so tense the past few evenings. He was worried Violet would plague him with unwanted advances.

  When she was finally sure that Coll would be gone, she made her way downstairs to grab a quick, cold breakfast. Hurrying along, head down, she did not realize her mistake until she stepped into the dining room.

  “Oh!” Violet pulled up short as she saw Coll standing by the window.

  He turned. His face was taut and stamped with signs of sleeplessness. Violet’s heart sank. He was about to tell her he did not wish to look for the treasure any longer. Maybe even that he had decided to move out of the main house. It was alarming how much she dreaded that possibility.

  “I thought you would not be here.” Realizing how ungracious her words sounded, she hurried on, “I mean, I assumed you would have gone to work.” That was just as bad. “I am rather late this morning.” She went over to the sideboard and began to pour a cup of tea. Sally’s tea was strong enough to wake the dead; perhaps it would improve her thinking. “I must hurry. No doubt the men are wondering why I haven’t arrived.”

  “They won’t be there. It’s Sunday.”

  “Oh.” She turned to face him. “You are right. I forgot.”

  There would be no work to occupy her today. Indeed, just yesterday morning she had been looking forward to today, thinking that she and Coll would spend the afternoon poring over Faye’s journal. Little chance of that now. Picking up a scone, she took it and her tea to the table.

  “Well,” she began brightly, not looking at him, “I suppose I shall spend the day working on my notes from the excavation. We have dug down, I believe, to the bottom stratum, exposing one entire wall, and in doing so, we exposed two more walls at either end, both at right angles to the original. That would indicate, I believe, a structure much more likely to be a building of some sort rather than an outer fortificati
on.”

  “Ah. I see. You will be working on your notes, then, all day?”

  The inquisitive tone of his voice made Violet pause in the midst of buttering her scone and look up at him. “No, it shouldn’t take that long. Did you have something else for me to do?”

  “I thought . . . if you would like . . . we might go to the Munro graveyard this morning.” Coll’s voice was as stiff as his posture. “I mean, unless, of course, you have something else to do. Perhaps you intended to go to the kirk. Though the service has already started; Mrs. Ferguson and the servants are all gone.” He rambled to a stop.

  “Oh, yes!” Violet sprang to her feet, then sat back down, remembering that she was going to be cool and collected. “That would be most pleasant. I mean, useful. Hopefully we shall find something.”

  “At least it will be a chance to get outside.”

  Outside where they could maintain a decorous distance from each other. “Yes, no doubt.”

  Violet hurried through her breakfast. It was difficult to get the food down, and after a moment, she set the remainder of the scone aside and stood up. Awkward as it might be to go anywhere with Coll, it could not be any worse than sitting here, trying to eat and maintain an equable attitude, while he watched her in silence.

  She was surprised when Coll took her out through the gardens in back. “Are we not going into the village?”

  He shook his head. “We are not buried there. The Munros have never been fully accepted by the kirk. There have always been those who were suspicious of their ability to heal people.”

  “Mm. Knowledge has often been equated with evil, I fear.”

  “The Munro graves are behind Meg’s cottage.”

  He led her down the tiers of the garden to the stairs at the very end. Violet thought they were going to the docks, but Coll turned in the opposite direction, taking a path that led to a breathtaking view of Loch Baille and the gray-stone eminence of Baillannan on the other side. From there the path dropped down through the woods.

  On this tranquil, inviting walk, the air held a hint of mist and was rich with the scent of earth and pines. Violet would have enjoyed it at another time, when she wasn’t walking in awkward silence with Coll. Violet was achingly aware of him beside her. She could not keep her eyes from going to his pale hair, where tiny droplets of mist clung, or to his long fingers, remembering them on the journal, gentle and careful—or on her waist, their heat searing through her dress. Nor could she forget his fingers digging in convulsively and practically pushing her away.

  A pebble rolled beneath her foot, and she slipped. Coll’s hand lashed out and seized her arm, fingers digging into her flesh to hold her upright. As Violet straightened, he released her, and the back of his hand inadvertently brushed her breast. Heat blossomed where he had touched her, and Violet saw again the look that had been on his face last night, taut and intense. For a moment, the air seemed to hum between them. Violet stared at him, eyes wide, waiting. Coll jammed his hands in the pockets of his coat and strode down the hill.

  14

  Violet followed, her thoughts tumbling in confusion. What did that look mean? Was what she read as passion in reality anger? Dislike? She was certain that the emotion was not mild. And why did it stir her so? She was grateful that he was not watching her; whatever Coll’s expression meant, she knew that hers held only desire.

  The path widened as it leveled out, ending in a fork. Coll took the trail to the right, and they had not walked long before a cottage came into view. Made of brown stone with a thatched roof, it sat huddled among a cluster of trees. The leafless remains of plants and shrubs lined the front and sides. No smoke came from the chimney, and though it was tidy, an air of emptiness lay about it.

  “Meg’s cottage.” Coll nodded toward the house. “The graves are this way.” He left the trail, curving around a small garden and starting up into the trees behind it.

  “Why do you call it Meg’s cottage? Was it not where you lived, as well?”

  “As a lad, aye. But when I grew up, I moved to Baillannan to work as the gamekeeper. It’s a wee place.” He shot her a humorous glance, seeming more like himself now. “I take up too much room.”

  “That’s true enough.” Violet was happy to fall into the familiar teasing tone. Maybe they could be at ease again.

  “The cottage has always gone from mother to daughter, just as the healing arts do. I never had the interest in it Meg did. It dinna seem my lot in life. The Munros run to small families, and in truth, there are not many men among them.” He lifted a branch for her to pass under.

  “What is your lot in life?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a tradition, a bond our family has with the loch, the glen. ’Tis hard to describe in words. A duty as well as belonging. A need to help, to protect.”

  “You feel you must protect this place?”

  “Perhaps more to help it. Meg feels it more than I, the bond. She is connected here and I think she would never be happy for long anywhere else.”

  “But you could.”

  “I think I would be much the same wherever I am. That makes me, I guess, a very dull man.”

  “No.” Her words were quick and sure. “Inconstant is not the same as interesting.”

  “I envy Meg a little, being sure of who she is and what she should do. There is no questioning for her. She wants to heal, to help the people who come to her. She would not be happy without doing so.”

  “But you help the people around here. Not healing, but it’s always you they come to with problems. I’ve seen them. Not just the tenants or the servants; it’s the people in the village, fishermen, other crofters. It’s you who gives them advice, who helps them repair their roof or build a new pen.”

  He shrugged. “Well, I’m handy with wood.”

  “You are kind and generous.”

  He slowed, turning to regard her for a long moment. “Is that what you think?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  His mouth curved up slightly. “Some would say I’m meddling.”

  Violet smiled. “Perhaps some. But most people in the glen rely on you. Respect you. Why else would they come to you for help?”

  “Sometimes I wish they would respect me a bit less.”

  “I can see that it would be tiring.”

  “It’s not that; it’s just—there are times when I feel so . . . so weighed down.” He shook his head, smiling in an embarrassed way. “That probably makes no sense.”

  “No. I think I understand. Responsibility drains one’s freedom, too.”

  His eyes drifted over Violet’s face. “Yes, I suppose it does.” He turned away, stepping over a low stone wall and reaching a hand back to Violet to help her. She put her hand in his, very aware of his touch even through her gloves. Determinedly she kept her eyes on her feet as she stepped over the stones. His hand remained on hers an instant longer, then fell away. He was turned away from her, gazing at the markers in front of him.

  “Here we are. This is where the Munros lie.”

  The small, simple plot was shaded by two trees, one a dark, twisting yew that reminded Violet of the tree that spread over Meg’s cottage. Huge and gnarled, it stood in place of the fourth wall of the little cemetery. The other three sides were built of stones, rustic chunks of gray, spotted with green, dark yellow, and black lichen. A wild rosebush grew just outside the wall, low and scrubby and devoid of leaves, leaving only its sharp thorns. A dead tree, far smaller than the yew, stood a few feet beyond another of the walls. Ivy wrapped around its trunk and into the lower branches, dripping down over a few of the graves like a green waterfall. Some of the graves had wooden boards at their heads, weather-beaten, the inscriptions long worn away. A few were adorned with cairns, and those toward the farthest edge had headstones, simply but carefully engraved.

  “How many are there? How far back do they go?” Violet’s voice was hushed and a little awed even though she was used to age and burials. Something about this spot, hidden away among th
e trees, guarded by the yew, was timeless and compelling.

  “We dinna know. The dates are nearly all gone. The oldest ones I can read go back over a hundred years. Some, I think, had only marks, not words. I’ve no idea how many there are without markers. Or how many more lie on the other side of the tree.”

  Violet gazed at the giant yew. A hole near the bottom of the trunk opened up into the nearly hollowed-out interior. Yet still the tree lived. “The tree of eternity.”

  “My grandmother used to call it the goddess tree.”

  “I’ve heard that as well. It figures in a good deal of the ancient lore.” Violet strolled among the markers, looking at the names and inscriptions. She felt, as she often did at excavations, as if she were standing in history. But here, the progression and continuity, the age-old tree, seemed to place her in the flow of time itself. Violet thought of the bond of the Munro women with the land. She would like to meet Coll’s sister. She wished she could have met his mother.

  Violet glanced over at Coll. He was standing in front of the newest marker, gazing down at it. His mother, she thought, a clutch in her chest. She wanted to go to him and take his hand, though she was too sensible to do it. Violet had always considered herself a woman of intellect, not heart. But with Coll her emotions were always near the surface. She didn’t understand what she felt for him. Indeed, she did not want to reason it out; she had no desire to dwell in that part of herself for long.

  Coll raised his head and smiled when his eyes fell on her. Her heart lifted within her. Danger was here, she knew, and the worst of it was that she yearned for it. Violet turned away.

  “I don’t know how we can find anything here.” She sent an encompassing look around. “ ’Tis not a large area, but we can’t just start digging.”

  She wound her way between the graves to the rough, twisted tree and bent down to look inside the large hole.

  Coll followed her. “I thought the same. Is there anything in the hollow?”

  “No.” Violet sighed and pulled back. “It seemed a fitting place, but, even secluded as it is, it’s too exposed.” She cast a frustrated look around the small graveyard. “I have no idea where to start.”