The Highland Countess Read Online Free Page A

Off tae bed with ye. I’m right proud of the way you told that puddin’-faced coo what you thought but, och, I’ve had enough of yer cauld manners.”
    Morag trailed miserably to her room. Nonetheless, she packed a trunk, listening all the while in case her husband should join her, dreading the prospect as she used to dread being dragged before her father for a beating. But the earl did not come. At last, she pulled the bed curtains close. She would never see Edinburgh, she thought unhappily. She would molder in this draughty castle until the day she died.
    She awoke in the morning and lay very still. The sound of the wind had died and had been replaced by the sleepy chirping of birds. She drew back the bed curtains. A shaft of sunlight was shining through the small dusty windowpanes into the room. A vision of Edinburgh rose before her eyes and she fairly scrambled into her clothes, tugging impatiently at tapes and buttons in her hurry to get dressed.
    She was going after all!
    The child that was Morag blithely skipped downstairs to take her leave of the castle—not knowing that she would return a woman.

Chapter Three
    Morag prepared herself for a long task of persuading her incalculable husband to get ready, but when she descended the curved stone stairs, it was to find the earl not only ready but on the point of departure, his cumbersome traveling carriage having been brought round to the door.
    He told her curtly that she would need to forgo breakfast if she wished to come and barely gave her time to don her bonnet and pelisse.
    Morag sat on the edge of the carriage seat in an agony of anticipation, frightened the earl would change his mind. But the coachman cracked his whip, and, flanked by two outriders, the earl’s carriage moved off.
    It was barely seven in the morning and an early mist was burning off the fields. The sun flashed and jogged through the overhead trees on the castle drive and, as the carriage clattered out of the woods, out of the shelter of the trees, a flock of woodpigeons sailed up, swooping and diving under a sky of pale, washed blue.
    Cow parsley spread their lacy heads through the red and thorny spikes of unripe brambles in the hedgerows and tangled vetch rioted in a mass of blue and purple. The clear air was like champagne. The carriage rolled sedately past a field of incredibly green grass which turned and rolled in the morning breeze like the waves of some enchanted ocean. The leaves were already turning to red and gold, and a hail of beechnuts rattled on the carriage roof. Now a field of stubble, blazing in the morning sun like cloth of gold, dotted with fat and roosting seagulls, looking awkward and strangely prehistoric so far from the sea.
    Morag turned to say something to her husband but he had fallen asleep, his great head lolling to the swaying of the carriage and his wig askew. She felt a strong twinge of unease. She did not feel as if she had behaved like a proper wife. Her mind, still adolescent, still innocent, nonetheless told her that she should have welcomed her husband’s attentions with more warmth. The castle housekeeper was efficient and the domestic arrangements of the castle were well run. Morag felt young and useless, a child adrift in an adult world.
    Assailed by a feeling of loneliness so deep it was almost a physical pain, she longed to belong somewhere, anywhere. She missed her home. She even missed the severe and reproving face of Miss Simpson. Distance lent her stern father enchantment and imbued him with a parental kindliness he did not have.
    She watched the passing fields through a mist of tears, all her excitement at seeing the capital gone.
    Her distress was soon increased by sheer physical discomfort. The earl proved to be a good landlord for, as soon as the carriage had lurched from the boundaries of his land, the roads degenerated into little more than rutted tracks of dried mud, and more than once Morag’s head came into contact with the carriage roof.