Highland Courage(7)

But she didn’t tell them. She told herself she would...someday, but she felt soiled and ashamed. She didn’t want to talk about it yet.

Of course, their father was furious with them for wandering off. In fact, the entire family was extremely disappointed in her because they believed at ten and four she should have been more responsible. She still remembered the things her older siblings said that night.

“God’s teeth, Mairead, what were ye thinking?” demanded Cullen. “Ye have no idea what could have happened to ye.”

“To make matters worse, ye risked Flan’s safety, too,” scolded Gannon.

“Don’t yell at her,” said Lilias, “Da already has. She knows she was wrong, and ye’ll just scare her.”

“She should be scared, Lily,” Peadar said. “Mairead needs to be frightened enough never to do something so colossally stupid again.”

Mairead remembered Flan trying to take some of the blame but Rowan told him, “Flan, ye are but seven years old. Mairead is old enough to know better.”

She cried for hours the night after it happened. Colossally stupid, old enough to know better—of course, they were right and their disappointment in her simply compounded her guilt. After returning home, it still scared her. So she handled this fear the way she did everything else in her life that made her uncomfortable. She avoided it. She never wanted to think about those cruel eyes again.

She could not avoid it anymore. Nor could she avoid this marriage. In truth, she didn’t exactly fear the marriage itself. Although desperately afraid of men for a long time, as she grew older and her sisters married, they obviously enjoyed the physical relationship they shared with their husbands. It took years for her to understand fully that what had happened to her had been ugly and violent. Clearly, the lovemaking they whispered about was not what she had experienced. She believed it would be different with someone who cared about her, and deep down was a little envious of her sisters. They seemed so happy. Nay, she wasn’t afraid of intimacy with a man who respected and perhaps even loved her.

Mairead feared her family would learn the truth. Her husband-to-be would expect a virginal wife, and she wasn’t one. A huge scandal would erupt when he learned her secret. Once again, she would face the devastating disappointment of her family, and she didn’t think she could bear it.

She thought about her options well into the night. It was too late to say she wanted to choose a religious life. No one would believe she truly wanted to enter a convent. They would assume she was only trying to avoid the marriage.

Maybe her husband wouldn’t notice her lack of virtue. Nay, she wouldn’t be able to lie. Once he learned the truth, the resulting scandal would be unforgivable.

She could tell her parents now and be sent to a convent. It would be the honest thing to do, and it would avoid a public scandal, but her family would know her disgrace, and she would have to live with it forever.

The only option she could see which might prevent a public scandal and had a remote chance of preserving her dignity, within her family at least, was to tell her betrothed before the wedding. Perhaps like St. Joseph, if he was a good and upright man and she was honest with him, he would not expose her to public disgrace. Perhaps he would be willing to break the betrothal and allow her to enter a convent without telling her family the reason. She heartily doubted an angel would appear to Laird Matheson, as one did to St. Joseph, and tell him to marry her anyway.

The result would be the same. She would leave her family forever to enter a convent, but their disappointment in her would be much less crushing. Maybe, if she only revealed her shame to one man, whom she would never have to see again, she could survive it. She had to try.

The plan didn’t make her happy, but at least she had a plan. When morning dawned, she steeled herself and faced the inevitable. She made it through the celebration that day and accepted the congratulations of the clan with as much grace as she could muster.

Mairead supposed her whole family breathed a collective sigh of relief at her apparent acceptance of the betrothal. They stopped treading carefully around her and threw themselves into the wedding preparations.

~ * ~

Laird Matheson had announced the betrothal on his return from the Michaelmas Festival, shocking his clan. Although they greeted him with the appropriate congratulations and good wishes, he had the vague feeling not everyone was as happy for him as they professed. Until then, he had never discussed any potential betrothals. Therefore, he supposed it came as a bit of a shock. He hadn’t planned to arrange a betrothal so imminently.

Tadhg also found himself questioning his decision. What had happened to her? Was she attacked; did someone hurt her? If she was attacked, she should have told someone. God’s teeth, why wouldn’t she have told someone? Flan said when he caught up to her she was crying, and her clothes were dirty. If she had only been roughed up a bit, why wouldn’t she say so? What could have happened that made her so frightened she wouldn’t speak about it? Had the worst happened? Had she been raped? By all the saints, he hoped not, but it would explain her silence. She would have been old enough to know her father could have forced a betrothal with her attacker. That alone must have been petrifying. Even the thought of it now made his heart ache for the lass.