The Adventurer by Jaclyn Reding

his hastily donned periwig. The crew, taken unawares, hadn’t put up any fight. They’d essentially drifted in and then sailed right off with Lord Belcourt’s trunks all within the space of an hour.
    It wasn’t until the very end of the story that Calum nearly choked on his tea.
    “You did what!?”
    He hoped, prayed he’d heard Fergus wrong.
    Unfortunately, he hadn’t.
    “We took the lass. The one I told you about.”
    “What do you mean you
took
her? Are you saying you brought her here? To the castle? Are you completely daft?”
    Fergus had to raise his voice to be heard above Calum’s outrage. “We had to bring her with us, Calum. We had no choice.”
    In that instant Calum’s day had gone from not so nice to very, very bad.
    “We’re not real pirates, you bluidy idiots! What next? Will you burn a village? Torture a small child perhaps?”
    “Calum, will you listen t’ me? We had to take her. She has the stone.”
    Stone.
    Just the word had Calum’s mouth shutting with an audible snap. He looked at Fergus. “The ... ?” His voice fell to a near whisper. “You are certain? You are certain it is
Clach na Bratach?”
    “As certain as any of us can be since we’ve ne’er seen the stone for ourselves, only heard tell of it in stories. ’Twould be our da who could tell us true but he wasna there to ask. It looks just as we were always told, and there it was, hanging from the neck of this lass like a tinker’s bauble. What were we supposed t’ do? We cudna just let her go aff with it and have it disappear for anither age.”
    M’Cuick had come into the room then, bringing Calum’s porridge and a fresh pot of tea. He sat at the table to join them, and it was quiet for a few minutes while he ministered to his tea, adding sugar, a touch of cream, stirring it.
    Finally Calum spoke.
    “Who is she?”
    “We dinna know.”
    “Who is who?” asked M’Cuick, having missed the first part of the conversation.
    Calum didn’t answer him. He was too busy trying to figure out what could have made men he’d always thought of as canny do something so utterly muckleheaded. Now, suddenly, he had a captive to deal with. Beyond being a considerable inconvenience, it went against the very articles of the letter of marque that governed their deeds on the sea, the letter of marque that had been signed by the prince himself.
    In essence, Calum had just become the pirate he’d been accused of being. They’d be lucky if it didn’t lead the whole of the Hanoverian army straight to their door.
    “She was with Belcourt, you say?” he asked absently, trying to put some semblance of legitimacy to the thing. “Perhaps she is a daughter, or a niece ...”
    “We could ransom her,” suggested Mungo. “ ’Twould be interesting to see how much of a ransom Belcourt would be willing to pay for his own kin when the value of ours is so apparently worthless.”
    Hugh was of another mind. “I say we send her back home t’ him, but with a Scotsman’s bairn growin’ in her belly. I heard tell of it among the French in our regiment at Falkirk. They called it the
droit du seigneur
or something like that.”
    Lachlann looked at Calum. “What the bluidy hell is he talkin’ aboot?”
    “It’s an old medieval custom. It allowed the lord of the land rights to a new bride’s body, and thus her virginity, on the night of her wedding. A way of improving the blood, they called it.”
    “Aye,” said Hugh. “Auld Edward Longshanks gave his men the right back in the days of Wallace and the Bruce. They used to take our lasses and pass them around to their lords like playthings, thinking they could breed the Scots blood right out of us. So I say why shouldna we return the favor with this lass? We can all have a go at her.”
    Calum was just about to tear into Hugh for the vulgar suggestion when M’Cuick took one hammy fist and banged it down upon the table. “I refuse to be left out of this conversation any longer. What the de’il