He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Just what did you mean? Do you think because I’m a woman I shouldn’t feel a calling, like you did? Am I supposed to sit around and drink tea and sew samplers and ignore everything else?” She planted her hands on her hips. “If that’s what you meant, Calum, then that was a stupid thing to say.”
He looked completely perplexed. “You’re twisting my words around.”
“I’m trying to make you understand how I feel. This is important to me.” She crossed over to him and placed her hand on his chest. “You are important to me.
He looked down at her hands as if he didn’t know how to take her touch, then he covered them with his own hands and they stood like that for a while.
She tried to explain. “I want to help. Perhaps if I can help someone else, if I can make a difference in even one person’s life, then my life won’t seem so wasted and empty. Can’t you understand that?”
“Oh, Amy-my-lass. I understand all too well.”
“Then you’ll let me help?”
He shook his head as if he didn’t want to agree, but he said, “Aye.”
She grinned up at him. “That’s good, because I wouldn’t have left.”
He laughed and turned her around by the shoulders. “Well, you need to leave now. I have something to do here. Go up on deck. If you hurry you can watch the ship come in. It’s a sight you don’t want to miss.”
She looked back at him over a shoulder. “Will you come?”
“I’ll be up soon enough.”
She went up the stairs and out onto the deck where she stood by the railing and just looked all around her.
In the distance, the hills had turned a deep heather purple. The outline of the thick pine forests that topped those hills cut a jagged line across the horizon. The river inlet looked like a thin silver ribbon coming down from those hills, where it flowed past ploughed green fields, the small farms and houses that dotted the river’s rolling hillsides, on past the docks and wharves to the edge of the wide open bay.
There was a strong breeze with the incoming tide and gulls wheeled about the blue and cloudless sky, screaming and calling as if they were heralds. Amy walked to the other side of the boat, where the ship was a clear and vivid image as it came toward them with sails full, slicing through the tidal water and up the river.
An American flag flew high in the masts, its red and white stripes rippling like May ribbons in the wind. She could see the people gathered at the ship’s rail, watching like she was, and she wondered how many of these ships and how many people had come up this same river before.
She could see the sailors scurry about the masts and upper decks like starlings in the tallest trees. They pulled lines and maneuvered the ship up the river toward the wharf. There was an eerie silence about the passengers. No one called out. No one pointed. They only stood and looked around them.
She heard a noise and turned.
Calum stood on the deck facing her, but he was watching the ship. No one who looked at him would have any doubt who this man was. He didn’t looked like the man she’d first seen on that foggy night or like the man who had saved her in the cave.
He looked like what he was: the clan chieftain, for the MacLachlan of MacLachlan was wearing the kilt, his muscular legs showing from beneath and his feet in leather brogues. He wore a black woolen jacket with silver buttons and his red plaid swagged over one broad shoulder. A bonnet with a feather was cocked on his dark head and he stood as tall and as proud as any man could be.
The sight of him took her breath away. As if he knew it, he turned, gave her a long look, then moved to the dock where he was joined by the men he had met with in Portland, the MacDonalds, who were dressed in their own green plaids.
Within seconds the skirls of a bagpipe filled the air and the men followed the piper as he walked down the dock. Except for the lilting notes of the bagpipe, there was not a sound. Even the gulls had grown silent, as if they understood the solemn ceremony of this moment.
Her gaze followed Calum. She could not have looked away if she had tried to. The men stopped at the base of the gangplank and the piper’s song rose high and higher, then stopped, the notes floating in the air for only a second.
Cheers erupted in waves from the ship and bonnets flew high in the air. The noise went on for a long time, minutes that stretched on seemingly forever. When the cheering finally stopped, Amy realized she was crying.
She felt Calum’s gaze shift up to where she stood still gripping the railing. She smiled and gave him a short wave. Then another pipe began, this one coming from the deck of the ship, and the Highlanders walked down the gangplank, everything they owned tied into small bundles or slung over their backs.
She had heard people claim the sound of the bagpipes could tear your heart out, and it would have, but her heart was already gone. It belonged to the man who stood on that dock dressed in a red plaid and kilt, a tall and noble Scotsman with hair as black as sin.
Chapter Forty-Two
Whilst in her prime and bloom of years,
Fair Celia trips the rope,
