The Passionate One Read online

  The Passionate One

  Connie Brockway

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  For the nameless young dog killed in

  Minneapolis, and for all nameless neglected,

  mistreated, or abused animals everywhere.

  God grant them safe haven.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, David, for listening way beyond midnight on so many nights, and thank you, darling Rachel, for never complaining about the thrice-weekly pizzas. Many thanks to my agent, Damaris Rowland, for her belief in me and to my editor, Maggie Crawford, for her talent and support. Thank you, Mrs. H. (AKA Christina Dodd), for always finding the weak spots and more important, always pointing them out. And finally, thank you, Anne Horde, a great sister-in-law, and a better friend.

  Prologue

  In 1523 the McClairen chieftain, Dougal of Donne, stood on northern Scotland’s high headlands, looked out at a rocky island rising from the churning sea, and ordered a fortress built there. He had carefully picked this particular ground, it being an isolated, pine-strewn island connected to the headland by a single ramp of flinty rock more oft submerged than dry. No man would step foot on that isle without being seen and no army would cross that narrow land bridge if Dougal deemed differently.

  Dougal designed the castle in the shape of a U, the short central façade facing squarely north against the sea while its two wings swept back, forming an open courtyard on the south. Below the courtyard he had a terraced garden cut into the rock where, protected from north gales by the castle’s bulk, orchards and kitchen gardens could flourish, making the fortress proof against any siege.

  For four years the proud castle gradually took form under Dougal’s careful, albeit impatient, eye. Yet, for all its foreboding strength, Dougal did not stint on supplying his castle with creature comforts, blanketing the chill walls with thick tapestries, and carpeting the flag-stoned rooms with Oriental rugs.

  When it was done, Dougal set off to bring back the inspiration for his work, Gordon McIntere’s black-haired daughter.

  He’d seen Lizabet only once before, on her thirteenth birthday. Dougal knew that McIntere had planned to align his child with a richer clan than the McClairens. It mattered not to Dougal; he swore to have her whatever the price. He persuaded the old McIntere chief of the fervor of his suit with gifts and coins—and the sight of Dougal’s seventy well-armed highlanders. Happily the wench had not yet married, though Dougal swore to his deathbed it wouldn’t have mattered if she had. And so they wed and he carried her back to his island.

  Legend says that on their arrival Dougal stopped some distance from the isle rising from a sea of mist, and pointed at the great castle, and vowed that once in those walls Lizabet would remain innocent of any man’s touch save his own. The lassie’s cheeks grew red on hearing her new husband’s ardent oath, thus christening the great, gray fortress with the unlikely name of Maiden’s Blush.

  Maiden’s Blush she had remained throughout all Dougal’s long life and that of his sons. Throughout the bloody sixteenth century not once did she fall to enemy hands—not even when Scotland’s Queen Mary was beheaded.

  The castle remained a loyal Stuart keep through the Hanovers’ rule and civil war, and into the seventeenth century. When James II was exiled to France and the German George took the throne, her thick stone walls listened to a gathering of Highland chiefs swearing allegiance to the “king across the water.”

  Maiden’s Blush herself kept George from seeking redress against the McClairens. The castle was impregnable. Any army attempting to take it by force was doomed to failure. It could only prove an embarrassment when it stood against the might of George’s army—and held. Thus the crown never ventured and Maiden’s Blush never fell, nor was she ever threatened.

  Until, that is, one rare summer in the third decade of the eighteenth century when heather grew so thickly it hid the island’s sharp old bones beneath a mantle of lavender flowers, and a gentle trade wind charmed a riot of brambled roses into bloom. That year Maiden’s Blush housed a score of McClairens from diverse branches of that clan, all living under the care of Ian McClairen, Marquis of Donne.

  Ian had come unexpectedly into his rank of chief. His three older brothers had died as a result of their part in the uprising of 1719. Colin, his younger brother, had gone to make his fortune in the East Indies, leaving Ian laird.

  Ian never married. Instead, over the years, he gathered his clan in the castle. All of them were black-haired and fervent, with the McClairen knack for loyalty and the McClairen curse of bullheadedness. The youngest and prettiest of these was Ian’s distant cousin, Janet, whom Ian doted on as the child he’d never had. He would have given her anything in his power to give, anything she’d wanted.

  She wanted an Englishman named Ronald Merrick.

  Merrick was the eldest son of the Earl of Carr, the half-mad scion of an ancient Sussex family. He’d befriended one of the McClairen men in Edinburgh and come up to McClairen’s Isle on the young man’s invitation.

  Ian had heard the rumors about his cousin’s new English friend, that Merrick was profligate and ruinously extravagant, that he’d been in Edinburgh fleeing a huge pack of London creditors. But Ian, having more heart than insight, paid little heed to the tales. All young men, Ian reasoned, were wont to such excess if they lacked purpose, and everything Merrick said gave Ian reason to believe that the Englishman had found his purpose, the same one Ian owned, returning James III to the English throne.

  Ian little suspected that Merrick had long been in the throes of quite a different driving passion, one far more compelling than any political loyalties.

  Gorgeous, charming, and urbane, well-read and inbred, Ronald Merrick was a penultimate example of amorality. Yet Merrick was by no means the black sheep of his family. He was representative of that breed, being no better or worse, simply blessed—or cursed—with a spectacular combination of good looks and an agility of mind that allowed him to better serve his master—his own desire.

  Merrick’s desire was simple: He wanted society to bend its collective knee before him.

  His self-absorption was unparalleled, his sense of duty nonexistent. He served what best served his purposes and those purposes were whatever best served himself.

  Of course his companions knew naught of this. To them he was simply a charming guest who had the devil’s own luck with cards and a right handsome way with women.

  But Fate has a fine sense of the absurd, she does. For though Merrick wooed the McClairens, thinking to cheat from them and their friends what Highland riches he could, he won Janet. Before he quite understood what had happene
d, he found himself wed to a rich, highland heiress. She was bonny and generous of heart and body and she adored Merrick. And if Merrick considered the world a penal colony and himself a prisoner barred from the center of his universe, that being London, at least he’d found himself a comfortable cell with a comely cell-mate.

  The years passed and Merrick got two sons on his beauteous highland bride, so pleased with her that he almost forgot his purpose, his desire. Almost.

  But one day as he rode into the courtyard, he thought how he would have liked to replace the central stone well with a marble fountain … if Maiden’s Blush were his. A seemingly harmless, idle thought, but a seed of evil planted in a fertile bed swiftly bears poisonous fruit.

  Thenceforth, each time Merrick entered the courtyard he would see some other item that he would replace or embellish or alter if it were only his to do so. Quickly other irritations chafed his never easy peace. Soon he could not dine without being acutely aware that the food he ate had been prepared to please another’s palate, or that the dogs lounging in the hall were suffered there because another man willed it, or that the flowers spilling from the silver urns had been placed because of another’s preference.

  Envy grew in him like a canker, insidious and deep. It became so entwined in his every thought, so directed his every decision, that soon his hunger defined him. Not even his bonny bride could ease it.

  He grew to hate the McClairens and all things Scottish, seeing them as manacles keeping him from his true desire. His eyes began to turn ever southward toward London, like those of a deserted lover pining for a former mistress. The newly rekindled desire burned in his imagination until it became an all-consuming conflagration. He needed to return to society. To London.

  He kept the canker well hidden. Only Janet knew of it—and that only because she’d seen the cold distance in his eyes when he looked on their sons.

  About this time, Colin McClairen, Ian’s long absent brother, sent his wife and children to McClairen’s Isle while he remained abroad. Ian offered them rooms at the castle but Colin’s bride chose instead to live on the mainland.

  Then, two years later in 1745, Bonny Prince Charlie landed in the north of Scotland. The McClairens rallied to him and were instrumental in his triumphant march to Edinburgh. They would have been instrumental in his even more triumphant march to London—but someone had betrayed their plans.

  Prince Charlie was routed at Culloden and fled to France. Ian and his comrades were captured, taken to Newcastle, tried, and executed. Even Colin’s sons were imprisoned while the Duke of Cumberland, who’d led the king’s troops, swept through the Highlands like a burning scythe in a monstrous demonstration of merciless reprisal.

  At first, Janet did not suspect Merrick of her clan’s betrayal. But when he accepted Maiden’s Blush from King George she grew uneasy. She fought to believe him when he told her that he’d accepted the castle because, as an Englishman, he could better hold it until, Colin, the new laird, returned.

  Treachery had achieved what no amount of force could; for the first time in two centuries no male McClairen lived on McClairen’s Isle. The new laird had not returned, and with no voice raised in their defense, his sons rotted in London’s Tower.

  Merrick commenced renovations on the castle.

  Janet knew then, though she did not ask. She’d dared not. It was too late for Ian and his men, Colin’s sons, but it was not too late for her children.

  Or so she’d told herself.

  For a time she grew more ill with her suspicions. Now, as twilight rolled across the North Sea, she turned from where she sat at the far end of the terraced gardens and gazed at the castle.

  A wit had renamed it Wanton’s Blush because of the embarrassment of ornamentation with which the old fortress had so lately been bedizened. It was an apt enough appellation. For centuries she’d worn the battered armor of a guardian; now she resembled nothing so much as a self-conscious and elderly bride. Decked out in fresh plaster, her dark bones covered in the tuck-pointed brick, her mossy roof replaced by gleaming slate, she’d been remade.

  Even her ancient setting had been reappointed. The gorse and wind-stunted pine that had tangled like squabbling retainers at her feet had been replaced by curtseying ranks of tame gardens. Only the old kitchen gardens where Janet and her children rested remained intact. The stone walls still held the manacled limbs of ancient espaliered pear and apple trees, while thin onion stalks glowed fluorescent in the half-light, and marjoram and mint scented the air.

  “Is it ours?” her eldest son, Ash, asked.

  Lady Carr brushed the silky black curls from his forehead, a tender expression on her face. He was a beautiful boy and just coming into manhood, slender and elegantly fashioned.

  “No,” she answered. “We’re just minding her a spell until Colin McClairen is free to claim her.”

  “Father says Wanton’s Blush is his,” Ash insisted in a troubled voice.

  She must be careful of how she dealt with this. Of her three children, Ash was the most passionate one. He felt things too strongly; he saw things too clearly. No wonder his father avoided him. Ash had always been able to see beneath his father’s thin veneer of charm to the emptiness within.

  “She belongs to the McClairen, laird of the clan.”

  “Then where is he?” Raine appeared suddenly beside her, taking a combative stance.

  Two years younger than his brother, Raine was already nearly as tall, answering Ash’s fine-boned beauty with his own rough, elemental grace. He was her reckless one, impulsive and impetuous, capable of generosity as well as ruthlessness.

  “Where is who?” At the sound of the smooth English voice, Ash stumbled to his feet.

  A man moved down the marble steps toward them, sparkling like one of the marzipan fantasies the new French chef created. His coat was encrusted with gems, stitched with metal threads. Glittering gold lace cascaded from beneath his square jaw, and the white wig he wore shimmered with diadem dust.

  Lord Ronald Merrick, now Earl of Carr. Until his father’s recent death Janet hadn’t even known Merrick’s father had lived, let alone that he’d been an earl.

  Carr arrived at her side, his expression becoming annoyed when he saw Fia asleep in her arms. “Where is the nurse?”

  “I wanted to rock her to sleep myself, Carr. She’s my own bairn. I don’t need strangers to raise her.”

  “If you want to flaunt your coarse ancestors, so be it.” Carr’s voice was uncharacteristically indulgent. “But at another time. Our guests will be coming down soon and you need to get dressed.”

  “I am dressed.”

  Carr ignored her, peering instead at the little black-haired toddler she held. “You did well with this one.”

  Janet gazed down at Fia’s creamy cheeks and pink rosebud mouth. Though just a child, even now one could see the beauty promised by the fine, regular features and dramatic coloring. Fia would be the ravishing one.

  “Very well,” Carr murmured. He glanced at Ash and Raine, a glance that did more to dismiss than acknowledge. “She’ll have a thousand hearts laid at her feet—and her pick of a thousand titles,” Carr predicted. “But not for a few years, eh?”

  He flicked the edge of Lady Carr’s plaid scarf with his fingertip. “Despite your mumbled bravado, my dear, you are not yet dressed. Did you honestly think I’d let you wear that McClairen rag to my ball?”

  “I thought it was our ball,” Janet said quietly.

  “Why would you think that?” Carr’s forehead lined with puzzlement. “I am the one who was lost to society, my dear. I am the prodigal whose return they’ve awaited, and you will not exhibit your political sympathies by wearing the McClairen plaid at my ball.”

  The wind ruffled the gold lace at his throat. “Such an act would not only be stupid, but dangerous. ’Tisn’t that many years since the McClairen were ruled traitors. Or have you forgotten their fate?”

  Beheading. No, she hadn’t forgotten.

  “Mother sa
ys Wanton’s Blush doesn’t belong to us,” Raine interrupted suddenly, thirsty for his father’s attention. “That it belongs to a laird.”

  “Does she now?” Carr queried, directing his sardonic smile toward his youngest son. “And were you so stupid as to believe her?”

  Even in the faded light she could see Raine’s skin darken.

  “And what of you, boy?” Carr’s probing gaze swung toward Ash. “Did your mother’s prattle scare you? Did it offend you to think some unknown hairy-legged brute might someday stomp in and declare your inheritance for his own?”

  “No, sir,” Ash said.

  “No?” Carr’s brows rose. “Then you are a fool or a weakling.” His smile never wavered; the gleam of amusement did not die in the brilliant eyes. “I despise both.”

  She did not know why he loathed his sons so. But he did. Each year more so than the previous one. Perhaps he hated them for their Scottish blood, or for having a stronger claim to Wanton’s Blush than he, or simply for their youth and promise, promise he’d turned his back on years before. Only Fia seemed to have escaped his animosity.

  “Sir, I only meant—”

  “There will be no inheritance,” Janet interrupted, unable to watch him toy with the boy any longer. “You’ve spent all my dower on tricking out Maiden’s Blush like a cheap Vauxhall whore. And she isn’t yours.” The words came from her in a rush, long held, now finally spoken. “She belongs to the McClairens. You swore you’d plead Colin’s case, explain that he wasn’t even in the country when Ian plotted against the crown. But Colin is living like a pauper in a tumbled tower and you’ve done nothing to aid him.”

  “I’ve done what I could to deal with Colin McClairen.” Carr’s perfectly smooth face frightened her.

  He’d done something to the new laird. She could see it in his eyes. A trembling began within her. She would have done anything for her children, anything. She’d held her tongue for their sake, but now, for the first time, she wondered if she’d done them a disservice. The truth might arm them better for the life they were destined to live than could her silence.