She’d soon be bound by her husband’s rules, forced to abide by correct behavior and manners for the rest of her life. It would be an ornamental, useless existence as the pretty young wife of a man in his dotage, his to be proudly kept and displayed the way some men held works of art or porcelain figurines.
She turned her horse and headed off the track. “Where are you going?” John asked.
“I need a moment to myself.” She rode between the ferns and the trees until she was out of sight.
“Gillian?” she heard John calling her, but she ignored him. She dismounted by the burn, knelt to drink, knew that Tam and Callum and the others would leave her be for a few minutes.
She heard the crack of a twig and looked up into the eyes of the stag on the other side of the wee stream. It was fine and fat and young. It would feed a family for a good many weeks. There were no does with him, no one depending on him. Gillian slowly unhooked her bow from her saddle and took aim. “Forgive me,” she said to the deer and let the arrow fly.
* * *
John scanned the woods where Gillian had disappeared. The MacLeods dismounted and took advantage of her absence to relieve themselves as well, unconcerned. “Shouldn’t someone have gone with her?” John asked.
Ewan MacLeod laughed, and Tam raised one carrot-red eyebrow. “She only wants a moment of privacy. She’ll be back, and if there’s trouble, she’ll—”
A sharp whistle split the air. All five MacLeods were on their feet at once, drawing their swords and dirks and running into the undergrowth. John followed, his heart in his throat. He pictured a wildcat holding her at bay, or a wild boar, or a wolf—she’d be terrified.
They found her standing in a small clearing near a stream, waiting calmly.
She nodded to two of the MacLeods and pointed, and soon they were splashing through the small burn to the opposite bank.
Tam nudged John hard in the ribs. “Our Gillian shot a deer.”
John gaped at her. She blushed and smiled shyly. “We can stop at a farm, offer the meat in exchange for a night under a roof,” she explained.
“But I have coin,” John said, still stunned. “We could have just paid.”
“Nay, they’ll be happier to receive the venison, and they’ll cook it for us, share it. It’s the Highland way,” Lachlan MacLeod said, watching Keir and Ewan carry the carcass back across the stream. The creature hadn’t suffered. She’d hit it cleanly, killed it with one expert shot.
She would have made a fine trapper. There’d been plenty of Scots trappers, and Englishmen, and Cree, and Frenchmen, but it was a dangerous life for one not suited to it, or for a woman.
He glanced at her again. While her men dressed the deer, Gillian picked blaeberries from a lush patch of the dark fruit, filling a pouch with them.
She looked as placid as an English lass out on a picnic.
When the men carried the deer out of the wood, Callum returned her arrow, freshly cleaned in the stream, and she thanked him with a blush and a sweet smile, as if he’d presented her with a rose. She put it back into her quiver. As Lachlan led her garron back to the track, John took Gillian’s arm and guided her through the ferns. He didn’t say a word. But he felt his heart blooming in his breast.
