The Highlander's Brave Baroness (Blood 0f Duncliffe Series Book 10) Read online

  The Highlander’s Brave Baroness

  Blood of Duncliffe Series (A Medieval Scottish Romance Story)

  Emilia Ferguson

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  A Personal Note From Emilia Ferguson

  Dedication

  About The Author

  THE HIGHLANDER’S BRAVE BARONESS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  EPILOGUE

  Join My VIP Readers’ Club List

  Also By Emilia Ferguson

  Acknowledgement

  If You Have Enjoyed This Book…

  Publisher’s Notes

  Copyright © 2017,2018,2019 by EMILIA FERGUSON

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real or dead people, places, or events are not intentional and are the result of coincidence. The characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author/publisher. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover designed by Ms Melody Simmons. Author has the copyrights to this cover.

  A PERSONAL NOTE

  FROM EMILIA FERGUSON

  * * *

  To My Dearest Lovely Readers,

  There is something picturesque and dramatic about the Scottish Highlands. Not only the landscape, which is mysterious, with its own special wildness and drama. It is the people themselves.

  Scottish people are the original untamed spirits: proud, wild, forthright, in touch with their inner selves. The Medieval period in Scotland is a fascinating one for contrasts: half the country was steeped in Medieval culture - knights, ladies, housecarls and maids - and the other half was a maelstrom of wild clans people; fighting, living and loving straight from the heart.

  If the two halves - the wild and the courtly - meet up, what will happen? And how will these proud women and untamed men react when brought together by social expectations, requirements and ambitions?

  Read on to find out the answers!

  Thank you very much for your strong support to my writing journey!

  With Hugs, Kisses and Love…

  ~ Emilia

  DEDICATION

  Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be man's last romance.

  Oscar Wilde

  * * *

  This Story Is Specially Dedicated To You, My Dearest Reader!

  It is with gratefulness and gratitude that I am writing to you this personal dedication.

  Thank you once again for giving me this opportunity to share with you my creative side.

  I hope you will enjoy reading this story as much I have enjoyed writing it!

  It is with such great support from you that we authors continue to write, presenting you with great stories.

  Have you checked out my other western historical romance books series?

  Click the link below to get started

  *** AMAZON USA ***

  * * *

  Do you like what you have read?

  I want to hear from you!

  Please do get in touch with me:

  facebook.com/EmiliaFergusonBooks

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Emilia Ferguson is the pen name of an author who writes historical romance with her husband.

  When she is not writing her Medieval Historical Scottish Romance pieces, she enjoys taking long walks with her husband and kids at the nearby beaches.

  It was these long walks where she got inspirations and ideas for her stories. She credits her wonderfully supportive husband John, her great cover designer Ms Melody Simmons and her advance review reviewers for helping her to fine-tune her writing skills and allowing her creativity to explode.

  ~ Emilia

  THE HIGHLANDER’S BRAVE BARONESS

  A MEDIEVAL SCOTTISH ROMANCE STORY

  * * *

  by

  EMILIA FERGUSON

  PROLOGUE

  May, 1746

  The smell of smoke and ash curdled the air around Adeline. Mixed with the harsh sulfur of gunpowder, it was the smell of the battlefield. She breathed it in, struggling to find calm.

  The mist was rising as the sun set, its fingers chilled with the cold from the river. Adeline watched it, aware that it was getting colder, but was too distracted and distressed to note the growing chill in the air. A strand of black hair whipped across her vision, coming loose from the bun she’d tied it into. She wiped it out of her eyes and looked to her right.

  “Son, we should go.”

  Beside her, Tam stood, his back straight, the ashes sifting through the trees and falling on his dark hair like late snow.

  He didn’t respond. Staring at the battlefield, Tam seemed made of stone. Adeline looked at him from the corner of her eye. At sixteen years old, he was a handsome looking youth, all broad shoulders, cleft chin and dark curls.

  He has the looks of his father, but, thankfully, not his nature.

  Adeline blinked, letting the image of her late husband, Camden, Lord Ginsbrook, fade into the past. She shivered. He had been a cruel, merciless man. Her family had wed her to him at sixteen, knowing nothing of the hard, pitiless and distorted soul that lurked beneath those careful, courtly manners. Her son was nothing like him. He was kind, attentive and steady – a fine boy. Looks were where the similarity ended.

  “Tam,” she said again, this time shaking his hand gently. “Son, we should go. It’s not safe here.”

  Tam turned towards her with almost dreamlike slowness. He blinked those heavy-lidded eyes and nodded.

  “You’re right, Mama,” he said softly. “There’s nothing more we can do. Is there?”

  Feeling sorrowful, she shook her head. Ran a hand through her thick black hair, shaking out the ashes that clung there. She hated to admit to defeat.

  “No,” she agreed. “All that can be done, we have done already.”

  Tam nodded. “McRae has the wounded to take back to the town. We have no further tasks here.”

  “Aye, son,” Adeline said softly. “We should go.”

  Neither of them moved. Adeline felt rooted to the spot, as if the smell and sound of battle had made time stop, turning this evening glade a fixed point, frozen in memory. She listened to the wind, sighing in the leaves overhead. Ever since the defeat at Culloden, these smaller skirmishes had sprung up. As a mother of a boy who had joined one of them and lived, Adeline felt drawn to help. She had been
working hard this month.

  Now, it was late springtime, and the leaves were thick and full overhead, the air scented with late spring rain.

  “Mama?” Tam turned to her. His face looked anguished, as pale as the shirt he wore above the tartan kilt, the green and blue of Ginsbrook.

  “What, son?” she asked, though she knew what plagued her son so. He felt the agony of the dying, and he felt helpless against it. She squeezed his hand.

  “I feel as if we should stay longer,” he said. “There must be something more we can do?”

  “No, son,” she said sadly. “We’ve done all we can. None of these fellows will recover, methinks.” She glanced briefly across the battlefield, where corpses lay like felled wood before the winter kindling was cut. In the late light, the place looked like a land of the dead. The scene found an echo within her heart. Like this field, it seemed populated by the dead, as bleak and scarred as the battlefield. It was so long since she had loved, or been loved. Her life was empty of all care, except that she felt for Tam, and for her dead parents. It did not feel like springtime in her heart, however, but the deepest winter nights without a star.

  She swallowed, hearing her son say something, his low voice breaking her silence.

  “Should we not check one more time?” Tam asked. Ever since they had started following the skirmishes, assisting wounded men, he had been thus. He refused to leave until each body had been checked, each man accounted for. Adeline could, in the frosty wind, have wished he was less thorough. However, she admired his care.

  He has all the grace of his father’s appearance, and all the gentle heart of his grandmother.

  Her own mother, Lady Ettie, had been known for her generous ways. Adeline felt her heart tighten remembering her face, made old before its time, yet still glowing with tender care.

  Remember the path you must follow is written in your heart.

  Those were her last words to Adeline. She swallowed, feeling tears prick her eyes as she recalled them. She had taken her mother’s hand then and promised to always follow the path within her heart. That was when Tam had been a boy yet, and Camden still alive. Now, ten years later, she still was not sure if she had kept that promise.

  All I know is that I wish to be here, doing what I do.

  Since the rescue of her own son from joining a failed rebellion attempt, she had decided to dedicate her time to helping all those Highlanders fleeing Culloden’s defeat. It had become her calling, the first thing since Tam’s rescue that had lit a fire in her sorrowing, battered heart. She would open the Manse at Ginsbrook Village to them, and try to tend the wounds of whomsoever she found injured on the field – Hanoverian and Jacobite alike.

  What does it matter, which creed they follow? There are no words worth dying for.

  As she thought that, she thought she heard something. A groan.

  “Tam?” she called to her son. “Tam! I think that one’s alive.”

  ON THE BATTLEFIELD

  Alexander opened his eyes. As he did, his vision blurred and his head lanced with a searing agony that made him groan. He closed them again, and drew in a breath that smelled of blood, ash and the acrid smell of powder. He coughed.

  I never want to smell that in my life again.

  Memories of the battle flooded into his mind. He recalled it as he laid there – the blur of tartan as the Highland troops surged towards the cartload of armaments, the flash of red as the English soldiers stood and fired, and ducked again behind the concealing bulk of cannon. As he recalled it, his heart twisted painfully.

  If we could have captured that cart, we’d have had a chance when reaching Ruthven.

  That was the plan – assemble the regiments again and try and make a final attempt to rise against the Hanoverian's.

  Culloden was a disaster, a memory that made Alexander want to be sick. He had just missed the battle, arriving late with the troops in reserve. The sight of the men leaving it still haunted him – they walked empty-eyed, more corpse-like even than the stiffening bodies on the field. The dead had lost their lives, the living their hope.

  Alexander had joined the first band he’d seen, heading off toward Ruthven. They had tried their best, but now they all lay, dead or dying, on damp ground under the trees.

  The wind shifted, bringing the scent of damp loam to his nose. It was evening, he guessed, and he could smell the coming rain. He tried to sit up, and groaned. His chest and abdomen were a bruised mass of pain and he found he couldn’t move for the pain of it. At least one shot had found its mark, and he knew it would only be a matter of time before he died.

  Alexander risked opening his eyes, and this time it hurt less. Keeping them open, he studied the battlefield. He could see fallen men nearby him, their poses contorted, the shadows of the dying light painting them in grays and mist-pale colors. The mist was already rising from the stream nearby, and soon the whole glade would be swallowed in its white breath.

  And then I’ll just lie here until my Maker comes to summon me.

  He felt sorrow at that thought, which surprised him. He had not thought to be sorrowful before death came to take him.

  When Brenna crossed from the lands of life, I wanted anything more than to follow behind her. And now here I lie, about to join her, and I feel sad.

  He snorted. Five years after he thought he’d cried himself empty, a tear slid down his cheek. He missed her.

  Brenna, darling Brenna, with her brown hair shining with red highlights like a sheet of flame, her generous mouth turned up in a smile. The way those brown eyes crinkled at the corners, and the twisted, playful tilt of her lips.

  He grinned. He could almost see her. Brenna had been – while perhaps not beautiful by any strict canon of art – simply stunning. She had been the love of his life. He’d wed her without thought of his father’s approval – as the heir to the baron McRurie, he had reckoned his father owed him the freedom to wed a wealthy farmer’s lass.

  “Brenna,” he whispered.

  Alexander had changed after her death. He’d cared for nothing, drunk himself into a stupor every night. Nothing mattered to him anymore. His uncle had taken his birthright, the Manse, in his place. He remembered it fondly. The two floors of roughly hewn bricks, the tiled roof and the windows looking out over bleak moors and crags. It had been a harsh place, but he had loved it. He had not wished to have to turn his back on it, but he had let it down. He had not been fit to take on the mantle of his fathers before.

  And if McRade hadn’t taken me into his household troops, I’d probably be dead in a ditch, a beggar, five years ago. Instead of dead on a field of war.

  The irony was not lost on him. He grinned, but it made his headache worse. Something must have hit him hard on the skull, bruising each part of it.

  Well, those are bruises I’ll have forever now.

  Alexander narrowed his eyes, catching sight of a vague movement.

  “Brenna?”

  His eyes widened. His heart stopped. It was her.

  Her brown hair hung long and loose, curling and lit with chestnut highlights. She wore a plain brown linen dress she’d always favored. Her wide mouth was turned up in a smile, brown eyes glinting. She saw him, and came over, kneeling beside him.

  Alex, she said.

  He heard her voice in his head, echoing through his heart, bones and soul. It seemed it spoke inside him.

  “Brenna?” he whispered. “You are here, to find me?”

  Against all his expectations, she had come! She was crossing from the lands of death, to meet him. To bring him home!

  Can I come with you? His mind framed the question, and it seemed as if he spoke. He saw her close her eyes, brow furrowed with pain.

  Beloved, alack. You must stay here…I cannae bring ye hence.

  His reply was instant. I dinnae want to stay.

  His voice was desperate, speaking from the very bones within him. She smiled, radiant.

  I know, she said. And I wish for it as little as you.


  Her sorrow was in her eyes, so deep and profound it stole his breath.

  Why can you not take me? He cried.

  Much as I wish I could do so, I cannae. It’s not your time.

  My time? Who cares for that? I want to stay with you! I miss you.

  You think I do not miss you too? Her reply was fond, her mouth twisted in that aching, familiar smile. I wait here on the shores of life daily, longing for the time when I will take you in my arms. But not yet. Here, where I am, there is no time, and I will rejoice in the moment you join me here. But for you? There is much time left. And things ahead.

  What things? He wanted to know. Abruptly, he felt curious. She sensed that, for she smiled.

  Many things, she said. So many. The heart is infinite. There is room in it for you, and me, and all those who must come ahead.

  “Who?” he gasped. “What do you mean?” He didn’t want anybody else. He wanted her. He wanted to leave now, and go with her forever.