Page 3 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

Lorna frowned but didn’t defend her home, and Maggie was a little sorry for being quite so blunt.

“And perhaps to swing through the trees like a monkey,” she added to make the other woman laugh.

“A monkey!”

“Jory was forever climbing trees when I was small, and I was desperate to join her. Now I suppose I’ve missed my chance.”

Lorna’s face said she couldn’t fathom such a thing.

“She looked so free. But even when I was little, I was afraid⁠—”

“You? Afraid?” This was the notion that finally caused Lorna to laugh. How little they knew each other.

“Not of the tongue lashing I’d receive for mussing my pinafore. I was afraid the lads wouldn’t like me if I were as wild as I wanted to be, and oh, but I was desperate for the lads to like me.”

“And now?” Lorna asked, amused.

Maggie fingered her short hair. It had grown back almost curly after she’d shorn it when her husband died, a final act of rebellion against his accursed soul. “Now I don’t care what the lads think at all, but there aren’t any trees to climb,” she laughed helplessly.

Lorna’s face was open and easy to read. She had always found Maggie a bit silly, and though politeness demanded she try to hide it, some things weren’t easily hidden. She’d grown up on Orkney and married a local fisherman she’d known all her life, the same fate as most of the island’s young women. He spoke little more than grunts in Maggie’s presence, and she wondered how well even Lorna knew him. She cooked his food and mended his clothes, bore his children, and offered no complaints. She took life as it came without any thought to whether or not she particularly enjoyed it. Perhaps she was even fond of her fisherman in the way that familiarity can breed affinity as well as contempt. They seemed companionable at least, both of them too tired or even-tempered to fight.

But Maggie had seen the fire crackling between Finn and Jory, even from across a crowded room. She’d witnessed her sister bloom under the sunshine of Silas MacKenzie’s worship.

Now, after one year of marriage and one year in mourning dress, she couldn’t help thinking she’d imagined it all. Such love was all right for fairytales, but if it could be found in real life, well, then perhaps she was the problem. Maggie wasn’t a heroine from fairy stories. She was as stubborn as the sun that refused to set in summer, too wild and self-centered to take care of a husband or children the way they would need.

That night, she lay in bed staring up at the discolored spot where the roof used to leak. After Jeremiah’s funeral, the village men had turned out in force to repair the thatch so she could almost pretend her husband had never been there at all, as though they hadn’t fought, and she hadn’t thrown the bucket full of rainwater at his head, as though he hadn’t climbed up on the roof in the middle of a lightning storm just to prove a point.

The lightning strike had accompanied the loudest crack of thunder Maggie’d ever heard. They said the roof would’ve caught fire if Jeremiah hadn’t been struck instead.

Shivering, she burrowed deeper beneath her quilts. She’d meant it when she told Lorna she longed for warmth. How sad that all her youthful dreams had been reduced to something so basic and primal. At least if her father took her back to Inverness, she could enjoy a bit of summer weather before MacFadyen dragged her off to whatever place he had in mind. God help her, if he put her on a ship to America, she would throw herself into the sea. Not because of any particular objection to the New World, but because the choice wasn’t hers.

When it came down to it, she supposed she was an ungrateful brat. There was really no getting around it. She despised this low stone house at the end of the earth, miles and miles from everything she’d ever known, loathed the uncle who died leaving the place to Jeremiah, and perhaps hated her father most of all for deciding they must wed. Michael MacFadyen might surprise her by being the kindest man she’d ever met, but she didn’t want him, and so she hated him, too.

Disappointed by her father’s selection of Jeremiah Budge, Maggie had initially underestimated the former pupil. Lanky and scholarly, she’d thought Jeremiah was a timid sort. He was still a bachelor at thirty-six, and she’d naively expected him to be putty in her young hands. Instead, he was constantly annoyed by her inexperience and found her lacking in every way.

For starters, Maggie’s stitching wasn’t prettily done. Her cooking, when she didn’t burn the soup, was far from savory, her housekeeping abysmal, and her thighs never spread wide enough or often enough for his liking. The only thing he seemed to approve of was her hair.

Pushing herself up in bed, she snatched her sewing shears from the table and trimmed it even shorter, the tiny chestnut curls dropping to the floor like autumn leaves in a place which had no trees. See if her father’s new stud pony would take her now!

From her perch atop the tumbledown broch wall that morning, she’d watched sailors spill off their brigantine like sun-browned ants marching about their busy lives. They must be merchant mariners sailing back and forth from somewhere quite warm to be so tan. Mercy, how she envied them—such freedom, such endless adventures. She couldn’t begin to fathom the things they must have seen, because she’d read all the wrong kinds of books.

Even now, they were probably swapping stories in the tavern over pints of ale and bowls of mutton stew, laughing and singing, strangers to the notion of setting down roots anywhere as windswept as this.

Hugging her knees to her chest, it struck Maggie again that if she were a boy she could run away and join them.

She laughed grimly.

If she were a boy, she wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. She wouldn’t need to run away and join them, because her father wouldn’t be so desperate to be rid of a son. No, he’d find a son very useful indeed, apprenticing her out and demanding she hand over all her wages.

If she were a boy, she might have run away to sea long ago just to find a taste of freedom from her father.

Freedom.

She shrugged back down under the blankets, but the thought wouldn’t let her go so easily.

Freedom.

She tossed and turned like she was caught in a whirlpool eddy.