CHAPTER ONE
Sitting cold and alone on the stones overlooking the loch, nineteen-year-old Beatrice Whitmore paid no attention to the auburn hair whipping about her face or the storm threatening to break on the distant horizon. The dark roiling clouds and the bitter wind weren’t nearly as distracting as she needed them to be today.
News of her fate was coming, and everyone knew it. Gossip somehow traveled fast in the Highlands despite the distance between dwellings, and Beatrice knew full well that a message sealing her fate was probably already on its way to her father’s house.
At the sound of footsteps approaching on the gravel path that led down the bluff, her stomach twisted into a knot. She deliberately didn’t turn around when the footsteps stopped close to the rock where she sat.
“It has come, Beatrice,” her father Patrick Whitmore said to her back, using the affectionate shortening of her name that meant he was trying to be kind. “Ye cannae sit up here forever. Yer mother wants ye home.”
Beatrice only shook her head, as if that could dispel the news her father bore. The wind whipped between them, its noise like a series of painful, shuddering moans. She might pretend not to have heard her father, but what would be the use in that?
“I cannae abide that decree ye bring and nor can I sit up here forever,” Beatrice answered moodily. “So, what would ye have me do?”
Receiving no answer to this question, Beatrice pulled herself up. Her limbs felt heavier than the stones around her, her heart thudded a pained beat and her stomach was a mess of knots.
It seemed that the implacable expression on her father’s face when she turned was all the reply he would make.
“Is it too much to want to choose me own path?” Beatrice put to him, knowing that this was a second impossible question.
Her parents saw only one path, one answer, and one course of action, regardless of what that meant for their daughter. It seemed they were incapable of seeking anything beyond this and always had been. Their impotence and inertia infuriated Beatrice because she had no power either.
Down at the loch below them, the black surface of the frigid water was frosted with white-tipped waves. It wasn’t the largest loch in this part of Scotland, but it churned with such intensity during foul weather that Beatrice used to imagine it was connected to the ocean.
She knew now that the enclosed, icy loch connected to nothing beyond itself and this idea saddened her. The lock was trapped, as the Whitmore family was trapped and as Beatrice herself was trapped.
I cannae accept this…Yet I must…
“Beatrice,” her father’s voice sounded again, over the wind, drawing her attention back from the water below.
Patrick Whitmore held out a hand to his daughter, a wrinkled piece of parchment and a broken wax seal in his grip. It contained her future and Beatrice wanted to snatch it from him, tear it into pieces as small and fine as ash, and spread it over the loch like a body burned after a funeral. Let the waters swallow the unwanted decrees of men…
“It’s nae important what each of us wants, lassie,” her father told her, though the tremor in his voice and outstretched hand betrayed him. “There are things that must be done and reasons we must do them.”
Beatrice took the parchment and read, finding grim confirmation of everything she had expected in its lines.
So, I am to be a wife. Aye, that’s all they expect me to be anyway. It makes nay difference to me parents who me husband is.
With only a curt nod of acknowledgement, she then returned the communication to her father and set off back along the path.
Although he kept pace beside her as they walked down the side of the hill to their house, Beatrice could clearly see advancing age in how Patrick Whitmore stood and walked and hunched against the wind. In this landscape of green and gray, her father’s physical presence had once been a slash of black steel, unshakeable in his strength, but no longer.
With compassion, she reached out and took his hand, finding his grip far weaker now too than she remembered from her childhood. The decree made on the parchment had been issued on behalf of her father’s creditors. Just as it forced Beatrice into the role of grown woman and soon-to-be wife, it apparently forced Patrick Whitmore into the role of an old man.
Neither of them spoke again until they regained their home and stepped inside out of the high winds and light drizzle. Within the house’s walls, no winds blew but blustering of another kind disturbed the air nonetheless.
Beatrice watched their servants’ gazes swivel towards her as she passed, waves of muttering moving down the large open hall with her. It seemed everyone had views on what was happening, although none could do anything about it.
“Ye’ll live through this, lassie,” an elderly maid whispered to Beatrice as she walked past, the only person to address either Beatrice or her father directly.
The maid’s mouth clamped quickly shut under a cold glance of reproof from Patrick before he ushered his daughter into the open family dining room, set back from the large hall.
At the table, backlit by the massive fire in the hearth, Beatrice’s mother, Iola, sat motionless, her eyes closed and hands clasped on the tabletop as though in prayer. She was so still that it looked as though she might have fallen asleep in the posture. When Iola abruptly rose to her feet, Beatrice started.
“Ye have heard the news?” her mother asked.
Beatrice didn’t bother to answer, only moving her head slightly in acknowledgement. There wouldn't be a soul in the household who hadn’t heard.
“Ye daenae ken what this will mean for our family, Beatrice,” Iola said, with more excitement than Beatrice’s father had shown. “We havenae had hope like this for an age.”
