Midnight Honor

officiallywelcomed to the celebrations, her gaze strayed along the crowded hallway. Splashes of red from bright scarlet uniform jackets were predominant among the male guests, their various companies denoted by facings of blue and yellow, buff, and green. Women wore every shade of silk imaginable, their throats glittering with jewels, their laughter tinkling in the air like crystal prisms. Fully three quarters of the visitors were military officers, and at least half that number wore the kilt identifying them as belonging to a Highland regiment. Anne readily recognized members of the MacLeod and Campbell clans, The MacKenzie of Seaforth, The Munro of Culcairn— a thoroughly disagreeable fellow who had lost an eye in the Fifteen and wore the hideous scarring like a badge. One by one she saw them turn and stare as she and Angus mounted the final step to the second floor, their conversations fading to an obviously tense hush.
    Had it been just Angus arriving at the party, she suspected they would have met him with gregarious shouts and much shoulder-clapping. In her eyes, however, they were all traitors trying desperately to justify their treachery, and if Angus's jibe about unsheathing visual knives was to be believed, she would have liked to meet each cold stare in turn and hold it until they bled away into lifeless heaps.
    Sensing as much, Angus hastened her forward, presenting her first to the Reverend Robert Forbes. He was an innocuously pompous man given to making sermons out of common sentences, and he did not disappoint now. He offered the usual droll observations on the weather, then bemoaned the fact that his parish was so far away in Leith as to make more frequent visits to Inverness an impossibility. His wife, too dull to realize she was expected to offer nothing more than a stiff nod to Anne Farquharson Moy, exhausted her repertoire of compliments. By the time she had praised Anne's gown, and said how lovely it was to see her again, the silence behind them was almost deafening.
    Angus was received with the utmost cordiality by both Duncan Forbes and his son, who greeted him with the traditional
cend mile failte
—a hundred thousand welcomes—and a glass of ladled whisky. But when he, in turn, bent over toshout birthday wishes in the dowager's trumpet, both men deliberately tipped their chins a notch higher so they could look down along their noses at Anne. Their wives were less subtle. They allowed their gazes to travel slowly from Anne's unpowdered hair to her shoulders to her waist to the hem of her skirts, leaving her with the distinct impression she had not bathed in hot enough water. Their delicate little nostrils flared and their pinched little lips formed puckers that suggested no amount of silks or perfumes could disguise the odor of countless stable floors and sweaty sex that clung to her.
    “Be that de'il o' a gran'faither o' yourn still alive?”
    Startled, Anne felt the dowager's bony hand clamp around her wrist. Somewhere in the back of her mind she recalled hearing whispers of a torrid affair years ago between Fearchar and Lady Forbes, and she guessed by the sudden twinkle in the rheumy eyes that the older woman was remembering it too.
    “Yes. He is still very much alive.”
    “Eh? What's that ye say?”
    Instead of bending to speak into the ear trumpet, Anne merely raised her voice. “I said yes, my lady. My grandfather Fearchar Farquharson of Invercauld is very much alive and healthy. I am sure he will be pleased to hear you asked about him.”
    The dowager cackled. “Fleas, has he? Aye, well, he alus were a hairy mon, but a guid scrub wi' lye soap will burn the wee bastards out o' their roosts. Mind, I wouldna kick him oot ma bed just f'ae the sake o' a few hornie-gollachs. Alus gave a lass a right guid tickle, he did. A pintle ye could ride the whole blesset night long an' still have some left f'ae the morn. Eh?” She batted the side of her wig to straighten it and glared at her son for dislodging it in his haste to whisper in her ear. “What are ye on aboot now? Flush what? Speak up, mon, I canna hear ye over all this blather.”
    The fact there had been no blather whatsoever to conceal the exchange darkened the Lord President's complexion and caused him to signal a quartet of footmen standing nearby. They lifted the chaise and carried the dowager into anadjoining room, with the current Lady Forbes and her pallid daughter-in-law scurrying after them.
    “You must excuse my