“Just because we were outside together, alone in the moonlight doesn’t mean a wedding.”
“No, lassie, but I’ll wager those grass stains on your back mean there’s bound to be either a wedding or a birthing.”
Then the whole room cheered and laughed while Amy blushed bright red.
Chapter Forty-Five
You can marry more money in a minute than you can earn in a lifetime.
—Anonymous
Bright and early the next morning, a procession of women all chattering in a mixture of English and Gaelic swarmed over the dockside and onto the coaster like ants on a sugarloaf. Since they had first arrived, Calum had been bunking in the temporary quarters with the men, so Amy had slept on the coaster.
She awoke this morning to almost thirty woman standing in the cabin, grinning at her, and more women lined up on the dock, all there to make certain her wedding day had no ill winds cast over it.
To insure her luck that day, she had to get out of bed backwards—which someone had to explain to her because she wasn’t certain which way was backwards. She had to turn counterclockwise three times before she put on her shoes, which someone had slipped pennies in the toes of to ward off poverty.
That one had made her laugh. If they only knew poverty was not her problem. She was made to wash her face with morning dew gathered from the huckleberry bushes by some of the young girls. She was assured that this would keep her beauty well into her golden years.
Her wedding dress was a special dress. The women had stayed up in the wee hours, sewing a wedding dress of fine linen whitened in the Highland sun and threaded with velvet ribbons fitting for the bride of the MacLachlan.
She had her feet bathed in a bowl of water filled with the wedding rings of the older women to make certain the marriage would last. Blue ribbons were laced into her hair for luck. She wore old satin wedding slippers that had belonged to Mrs. MacKinnon’s great-grandmother and she was to borrow Widow Drummond’s fancy lace collar.
When all was ready she had to stand at the companionway and wait. At two o’clock sharp there was a gunshot at the dock. She was to not move. A second gunshot came five minutes later and then a third shot. She walked up the companionway and down to the dock where Calum was waiting, dressed in tartan and a kilt and looking as proud as he could for a man with eyes so bloodshot it was like having two crabapples staring down at you from behind his spectacles.
He took her hand and placed it on his arm and led her down the dock to the grassy field where Reverend Munro was waiting beneath the shade of a willow tree.
She looked up at him. “Hard night?”
He looked down at her from a squint and grunted one word. “Whisky.”
Considering a wedding was something a girl waited for and dreamt of all her young life, the ceremony was all over almost too quickly. But the dancing was wild and lively and she and Calum tossed coins to the children as they danced the first reel.
The food was plentiful and the cider and whisky flowed long into the dark night, when the moon was high and the young girls rushed to their makeshift beds with pieces of bridal cake to put under their mats so they could dream of their future husbands. And one lucky lass, Mairi MacConnell, the one who’d caught Amy’s silk stocking with the gold piece hidden inside, would go to sleep that night and dream of the future she hadn’t had back in Scotland.
Calum carried Amy to the coaster along with a procession of singing Scotsmen who had drunk too much whisky and couldn’t carry a tune in their sporrans. He did his duty and to ward off the witches he carried her over the threshold—that being the entrance to the cabin stairs in this instance—then he went back on deck to send the wedding carolers all away.
Amy sat on the edge of the bunk and waited, her hands knotted in her lap. She didn’t know whether she was more excited or more worried about what would happen next.
He came down into the cabin and then leaned against the handrail for a moment. “I never knew marriage was going to make me this tired.”
She raised her chin. “It isn’t marriage that has tired you out. It’s all that carousing last night and tonight.”
He sighed and took off his spectacles and put them in a cabinet in the wall. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Aye, lass, you’re probably right. Too much whisky. Not enough sleep, and now I’m too tired to be a husband tonight.”
With that pronouncement he yawned and stretched his big arms high, so high his hands could touch the rafters.
Too tired?Amy sat there stunned and hurt and feeling as if he had slapped her. She couldn’t even look at him. She tried to reason this scenario in her mind, telling herself that he hadn’t done it on purpose, that they had a whole lifetime to have a wedding night.
But it did her no good. This was her wedding night. And there could only be one. Ever.
She stood and began to try to unbutton her dress, pulling at the buttons and bending this way and that, trying to reach every last one. She certainly wasn’t going to stop and ask him for help. She had one arm flung over her back at an odd angle and the other was reaching around her back, trying to grasp the last few buttons.
“Having trouble?”
She inhaled a deep breath. “Yes, but I don’t need your help.” She bent this way and that, struggling to reach the buttons and failing miserably.
She heard his laughter and glanced up, scowling. Her scowl fell away.
