The Highlander's Stronghold (Searching for a Highlander Book 1) Read online

  An hour of mindless digging passed, but I knew what I had signed up for when I entered the field of archaeology—long periods of backbreaking, knee-aching, mind-numbing troweling broken only rarely by an occasional “find.”

  That day was apparently the day I would discover my find. I had been carefully picking away at turf and mud in a crevice between stones when something metal fell to the ground at my knees. Metal was always an exciting find! Unlike organic material, it lasted for centuries. I set my trowel down and eyed what looked like a darkly tarnished silver dagger or a dirk.

  I barely breathed as I studied the dagger on the ground without touching it. Only when I grew dizzy did I drag in a deep breath and turn to call out to my fellow diggers. But they had moved away, probably to take a break around the other side of the mound, where an area had been set aside for hot drinks and refreshments.

  My first instinct was to run around the base of the mound and locate someone, Dylan, anyone, to shout out my find, but I dared not leave the artifact. How could I? What if it disappeared? What if one of the many seagulls flying overhead snatched it up and carried it off? The dagger looked heavy, and I doubted whether a bird could carry it in its beak, but still I couldn’t bring myself to leave it and run for guidance. Given that I was a bit loopy from the excitement and the blood pounding in my ears, I did what I thought was right. I removed both pairs of gloves and picked up the dirk to take it to Dylan.

  On contact, the metal seemed to flare, and yet it didn’t burn. I eyed it wildly, almost tempted to drop it, but I held on. The sky darkened, or so I thought. Perhaps it was just my vision. Flashing lights blinded me, and I shook my head. Suspecting that I must have held my breath too long and was about to faint, I tried to drag in a deep breath, but it didn’t help. I clutched the dagger by its hilt and slipped into a dizzying whirlpool of unconsciousness.

  THE HIGHLANDER’S

  STRONGHOLD

  Bess McBride

  The Highlander’s Stronghold

  Copyright 2016 Bess McBride

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the publisher and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  Cover art by Tara West

  Contact information: [email protected]

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For my Morrison ancestors.

  Thanks for letting me make up stories about you!

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dear Reader

  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

  Books by Bess McBride

  About the Author

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for purchasing The Highlander’s Stronghold. The Highlander’s Stronghold is book 1 in the Searching for a Highlander series of Scottish historical time travel romances set in the Outer Hebrides. As many of you who read my books know, I enjoy incorporating my ancestors into my stories. For the Searching for a Highlander series, I fell in love with the idea that my Morrison ancestors may have once lived in the Outer Hebrides, maintaining a medieval stronghold on a tiny intertidal sea stack off the coast of the Isle of Lewis called Dun Eistean. Then again, my Morrisons may have been lowlanders. Nevertheless, my readings on the archaeological digs and history of Dun Eistean inspired me to begin this new series of Scottish historical time travel romances. Please note that I have taken numerous liberties with the findings of the digs and with the history of the Clans Morrison, Macleod and Macaulay. This is a work of fiction. In other words, I’m making it up! Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of my imagination or are used fictitiously. That being said, I hope you enjoy the figments of my imagination!

  Ann Borodell, a graduate student scrambling to find an archaeological dig to finish her degree, lands a project in the remote Western Isles of Scotland. With a concentration in Colonial American studies, she knows almost nothing about Scottish history and the sixteenth-century island stronghold of the Clan Morrison.

  That changes though when she discovers a medieval dagger embedded in the rubble at the base of a tower house on the island. As the dagger pulls her back in time, she awakens in the arms of a suspicious Highland laird who thinks she is a spy—for the English or for his enemies, the Macleods.

  Ann believes that getting the dagger back from its owner, John Morrison, is her way back to the twenty-first century. So does the laird. And he has no intention of letting Ann leave the stronghold...or him.

  Thank you for your support over the years, friends and readers. Because of your favorable comments, I continue to strive to write the best stories I can. More romances are on the way!

  You know I always enjoy hearing from you, so please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or through my website at http://www.bessmcbride.com.

  Many of you know I also write a series of short cozy mysteries under the pen name of Minnie Crockwell. Feel free to stop by my website and learn more about the series.

  Thanks for reading!

  Bess

  Chapter One

  “Good morning, Ann. Did you sleep well?” Dylan asked me.

  I slid into the Rover and fastened my seat belt before turning to smile at the handsome thirty-year-old archaeology professor. A navy-blue watch cap covered the majority of his wavy blond hair. The Nordic golden color was reflected in neatly trimmed facial hair covering the lower half of his face.

  Like me, he wore a hooded sweatshirt to stay warm under the onslaught of the cold winds blowing onto the Outer Hebrides from the North Atlantic. Although Dylan had the heater going in the Rover, I huddled further into my dark-gray sweatshirt and rubbed my gloved hands together.

  “Good, thank you,” I said. “How about you?”

  “I am used to the warmth of Glasgow. But I love being up here on the Isle of Lewis and couldn’t wait for the school term to end so I can return to Dun Eistean. The family with whom I am boarding
are absolutely lovely, but a peat fireplace is something I would rather study, not actually try to stay warm by.”

  I laughed.

  “I agree with you on that. The MacIvers are wonderful as well, but I could use some central heating myself. They use little electric heaters, and I tend to huddle around the one in my bedroom in the cool mornings.”

  “Do you regret volunteering to come up here?” he asked. A deep rut in the perpetually muddy road sent me flying out of my seat, belt or no.

  “Sorry about that!” Dylan said with a grin.

  “It’s not your fault. Does this place ever dry out?”

  “Rarely,” he answered. “I did e-mail you that the weather would generally be uncomfortable.”

  “Yes, you did, and to answer your question, no, I have no regrets at all. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to come on this dig. I don’t know that my future will involve Scottish historical sites after I graduate— probably not—but I’m just so grateful that you had an open spot.”

  “No worries,” Dylan said. “Your e-mail was very persuasive. How could I refuse a lass who writes that she cannot graduate with her master’s degree if she does not get onto an archaeological dig within the next week? I was very surprised though that nothing was available close to home.”

  I shook my head.

  “Me too. I’m planning on pursuing my doctorate in historical archaeology with an emphasis on Colonial America, but I don’t have to decide that right now. Thanks to you, I’ll get my archaeology field-experience credits, graduate with my master’s, and I can decide on my emphasis after I start my doctorate in the fall.”

  “I fear you will struggle with the cold, windy weather here, coming as you do from the balmy shores of Virginia.” He grinned again, his smile open and kind.

  I chuckled.

  “Yes, William and Mary College. It does get hot in Williamsburg. I’m originally from Ohio, but I never liked the cold winters there, so Virginia actually suits me.”

  “And yet here you are.”

  “And yet here I am.” Another rut in the road almost sent my head through the roof, a rather significant bump since I was only five foot three inches. Dylan, on the other hand, stayed planted in his seat.

  We pulled up to a short line of several other vehicles parked haphazardly on a graveled pseudo parking lot. On my third day at the dig, I still marveled at the vast expanse of turbulent azure and white-capped sea that surrounded the small island known as Dun Eistean.

  It was on that tiny intertidal sea stack where the University of Glasgow had been conducting archaeological studies of the remains of a Highland clan stronghold for the past several years. How on earth anyone actually lived on that little blip of land, I would never know. Separated from the rest of the Isle of Lewis by a steep ravine and accessible only at low tide via a rocky path, the island had once been the stronghold of the Clan Morrison of Lewis.

  Rather than await low tide to descend the cliff into the ravine, cross over and ascend the opposite equally slippery and rocky path, the Clan Morrison Society, who had asked the university to investigate the site, had erected a steel-girded footbridge to facilitate crossing over to Dun Eistean.

  I swallowed hard, as I had for the past three days, and followed Dylan over the bridge. The gusting wind, always stronger over the ravine between the mainland and the island, buffeted me, and I grabbed the cold metal railing with a squeak of fear.

  Dylan looked over his shoulder and paused.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes?” I answered, still squeaking. I wasn’t sure if I was asking him or telling him. I really wasn’t all right. I hated heights, and the sight of the crashing waves against the rocks in the ravine about thirty-six feet below didn’t help.

  Dylan grabbed my arm and guided me across the bridge.

  “I’m good!” I exclaimed once we’d reached the safety of the island. We passed through a break in what had once been a fortified stone wall, which encircled the two-thirds of the sea stack closest to the mainland. “I’m good!” I said again, my cheeks flaming with embarrassment.

  “It can be a wee bit frightening, I know, but you’ll get used to it.”

  “Yes, I’m sure I will.”

  “Let’s see what’s on, shall we?”

  I followed him across an expanse of thick, matted emerald-green turf toward an improbable hill on the otherwise flat surface of the island. I knew that buried within the mound were the remnants of a sixteenth-century keep once belonging to the Clan Morrison, and it was there that the current summer’s archaeological dig was focused. There was evidence that the structure now being surveyed had been built upon an earlier twelfth-century site, but the evidence was limited and subject to speculation.

  The keep had once been a surprisingly tall tower house that overlooked the Minch, a strait between Scotland’s northwest Highlands and the Outer Hebrides. Dylan had explained that the keep, though narrow and rectangular, had probably been used both as a permanent dwelling and a lookout to protect the island from invaders.

  “It seems so remote out here, but it does appear as if a segment of the Morrisons of Lewis lived here on the sea stack. You will see small turf-covered mounds beneath which we’ve discovered dwellings, several boathouses, storage buildings, even a kiln. There is a catchment pond on the island as well, which we believe is at least medieval in origin, so they always had fresh water. I presume they left the island only at low tide or by boat, as there is evidence of a crevice where they once hauled their boat from the sea.

  “Though Clan Morrison held only the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis as their territory, they once wielded an enormous amount of power, serving as brieves, or hereditary judges, to the much-larger neighboring Clans Macleod and Macaulay,” Dylan continued.

  “Hereditary judges?” I had asked.

  “Yes, experts in law, dispensers of justice. It is said that the Clan Macleod sought to destroy their power and petitioned King James VI for ‘Letters of Fire and Sword’ in the sixteenth century. That branch of the Morrisons disappeared sometime after that. There is another branch who survived and live farther south on the Isle of Harris.”

  “Letters of Fire and Sword? That sounds impressive. Very mythological.”

  “Perhaps. In this case, a certain Madam Macleod slept with a Mister Morrison, and that started a series of feuds. King James VI granted the Macleods permission to destroy the Morrisons via a directive dramatically referred to as ‘Letters of Fire and Sword.’ The Morrisons were besieged for years, ultimately retreating to Dun Eistean. After that, the trail goes cold. The rest of the family vanished...to the mainland, to the colonies.”

  “Oh, how sad,” I’d said.

  Since Dylan had told me the haunting tale of Dun Eistean’s history on my first day, a poignant sense of grief had stayed with me, grief for the clan who had once lived on the sea stack.

  Now, we climbed the hill and stopped just short of the peak of the mound at the active dig site. Dylan had told me the tower had once probably been about fourteen feet high. The hill, the culmination of hundreds of years of blowing dirt and dust that had covered the mound, seemed much higher though.

  Dylan moved away to consult with one of his colleagues, and I greeted my fellow budding archaeologists, six students from the University of Glasgow, before picking up a trusty trowel to resume my work from the day before—scratching away at the base of the keep. Sadly, the keep walls now stood only about five feet high, most of the stones having been carried away over the centuries, some used to build a memorial cairn on the island.

  Over the past two summers, the team had etched out the shape of the defensive perimeter wall, complete with squints to watch for enemies; the remains of a gatehouse to control access to the tidal island; the tower, or dun; the retention pond; a grouping of small stone structures with central hearths that appeared to be dwellings as well as a barn; and corn-drying kilns. It was the dwellings that gave archaeologists the impression that the Morrisons had act
ually lived on the sea stack, rather than use it only as a lookout for seagoing enemies or as a refuge in times of unrest and violence.

  Some of the artifacts found consisted of fifteenth-century German glass, seventeenth-century Hebridean pottery shards as well as used pistol shot—all suggesting a history of trade and perhaps a period of violence.

  I lowered myself to my knees, thankful for the thickness of my jeans, and eyed the edge of the rock wall. Without evidence of having been mortared, the wall featured hundreds of nooks and crannies filled in loosely by dirt, and it was here that I had been tasked to dig. I pulled thick work gloves from the pockets of my sweatshirt and pulled them over the soft gloves I already wore. Picking up the trowel where I’d left it the previous day, I went to work.

  An hour of mindless digging passed, but I knew what I had signed up for when I entered the field of archaeology—long periods of backbreaking, knee-aching, mind-numbing troweling broken only rarely by an occasional “find.”

  That day was apparently the day I would discover my find. I had been carefully picking away at turf and mud in a crevice between stones when something metal fell to the ground at my knees. Metal was always an exciting find! Unlike organic material, it lasted for centuries. I set my trowel down and eyed what looked like a darkly tarnished silver dagger or a dirk.

  I barely breathed as I studied the dagger on the ground without touching it. Only when I grew dizzy did I drag in a deep breath and turn to call out to my fellow diggers. But they had moved away, probably to take a break around the other side of the mound, where an area had been set aside for hot drinks and refreshments.