Midnight Honor

explaining each piece and its purpose. This progressed to teaching her how to plan menus, and when he discovered that her education had stopped at a rustic, poorly spelled scrawl, he discreetly arranged for a tutor to visit each day until she was able to copy out full pages of poetry and prose in an elegant script. At her further shy request, he added lessons in elocution, carriage, and deportment. She balked at learning how to embroider or play the pianoforte, but she enjoyed sketching and showed a genuine flair for painting with watercolors.
    Hardy, governed by ingrained and unbreakable rules of conduct, had kept Angus apprised of each new accomplishment. The laird, in turn, had discussed other interests she mentioned in passing, so that when the suggestion came from Hardy, she would not feel obligated or guided by her husband's hand in any way.
    It was reward enough for Angus just to see the pride shining in her eyes after each new achievement. He had no burning desire to see her transformed into a preened and perfumed chatelaine; on the contrary, he still smiled when he remembered the looks on the faces of several starched visitors when she had come running into the room, flushed and out of breath, her hair scattered around her shoulders, her feet bare and her skirts rucked up to avoid the nipping teeth of the puppy in hot pursuit.
    Anne had entered his life like a small storm. The sound of her laughter across the dinner table had left him staring on more occasions than he cared to admit, not because he disapproved of the sound, but because he wondered why it had never been there before. The thought of his mother joking with his father, whether alone or in company, was as foreign to him as the notion that they must have been intimate on at least four occasions through their marriage.
    Last night he had gently chided Anne for speaking her mind, but how he envied her the freedom to do so. How he wished he were free to admit how desperately he wanted to be as open and honest with his emotions as she. But the MacKintoshes could trace their lineage back to King Malcolm IV, who reigned in 1153, and there had not been one day in his youth that he had not been reminded of it. Nor had he been allowed to forget that it was the misguided zeal of his grandfather, who had righteously declared for the Jacobites in the ill-fated Fifteen, that had cost the clan dearly in forfeited fines and estates. It had taken nearly two decades and a sworn vow of allegiance to the English king to restore the family titles and position.
    Angus had not asked for the burden of becoming clan chief. In fact, there had been some debate among the other lairds that the title should fall to Cluny MacPherson, for they were unsure of a man whose leadership had never beentested, a man who had spent ten years on the Continent attending operas and studying the ancient languages of dead poets.
    Angus Moy would be the first to admit he was a scholar, not a fighter. He appreciated fine art, music, literature. He had been taught to fence by a Spanish master, but had never fought a duel, never wielded a broadsword or fired a pistol in anger. To his secret mortification, he had once vomited at the sight of a beggar's hand crushed to bloody pulp beneath the wheels of a wagon.
    He had been appalled the first time the lairds of Clan Chattan had gathered to acknowledge his title and confer upon him the traditional oaths of fealty. Many of them had arrived in velvet and lace, but an equal number had stalked into the hall, their faces bearded and sullen, their
clai' mórs
slung across their backs. He was quick to discover that very little had changed in the decade he had been away, which was to say that nothing much had changed in the past six hundred years of feudal law. While the Lowlands had more or less come to accept the progressive realities of English rule, and were even learning how to prosper by exporting wool and coal and raw iron, the Highlanders still clung to the clan system that had always dominated the mountainous regions. Lowlanders embraced the fair practices of the courts and knew that just because they had been born on a farm did not mean they had to die on a farm. In the Highlands, the crofters could not even marry without the permission of the chief, let alone sell a bale of wheat without giving nine tenths of any profit to the overlord.
    Angus had needed no one's permission to marry; he could have nullified the agreement between his father and