Insatiable

1

August 1886

Scottish Highlands

S
carlet-­soaked storm clouds loom overhead like the wool of blood-­spattered sheep. I sprint over the hill, protecting the contents of my basket as best I can with my free hand.

Those who say Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight! are not seventeen-­year-­old girls racing home through empty fields. I must return before nightfall has a chance to wring the last shimmer from the sun and leave me stranded alone in the darkness.

Anything can happen in the shadows.

Rivulets of sweat stream down my spine as I hurry to the barn to deposit the last batch of dried grass. When my brother Hamish is home from school, it’s his job to bind blocks of hay to feed the livestock over the long winter . . . But it was also his duty to cut and dry the fields of grass to begin with, yet I’m the one with calloused hands and a spasming back.

With a grunt, I toss the basket into the barn and yank the heavy wooden door closed. The setting sun will glower with dangerous beauty for at least half an hour more, affording me enough time to make it home safely.

It’s reckless to linger alone and unprotected after dark. The capricious fairies who lurk out of sight won’t protect me from trouble. Their whims and their magic are more frightening than any human mischief.

Soon, I barge through the open doorway of my home with aching feet and a drumming heart. The hearth smokes faintly, the scent of soil and grass clinging to my mother’s skirts. She turns, broom in hand, and smiles at me. Relief floods the last remnants of fear from my tense muscles. I am home. I am safe. I am loved.

It should be enough.

Before Mother or I can utter a single word of greeting, raucous laughter erupts from the sitting room. Hamish and Father relax in comfortable armchairs, sipping mugs of ale as they play yet another round of draughts on the square table between them.

“Catriona, wait,” hisses my mother, but I’m already crossing the threshold.

I used to sit on my grandmother’s knee in this room to hear her clever tales. The whispered ones that were passed down from grandmother to granddaughter for generations.

My father and brother are neither so old nor so wise, but their stories are irresistible all the same.

Hamish is fifteen and has spent the past two years at his board­ing school in Inverness, studying to become a solicitor.

Words cannot convey the depth of envy that causes.

I’ve never even been to Inverness, or to any big city, really. I’ve only left our small village in my parents’ company during holiday celebrations in the next town. I cannot imagine the sights Hamish has seen, the food he has tasted, the friends he has made.

The cramped schoolhouse next to our church—­both run by the same ancient minister—­cannot possibly hold a candle to the sprawling grounds of the Royal Academy of Inverness. I’ve memorized every word my younger brother says about the buildings, the professors, the sporting clubs, the cèilidh dances. His experiences match the stories our father tells of his own years there, before he returned home to become a tanner and take over this farmland from my maternal grandfather.

Hamish won’t have to come back at all, unless he’s of a mind to do so. My brother will go to university and become important and rich and happy. He’ll enjoy a career he likes and marry a lass he loves. He’ll know things, and have things, and do things. All because he happened to be born a boy.

My eyes water at the unfairness.

Hamish glances up from the black-­and-­white checked board as though the waves of bitterness and jealousy rolling off me had reached all the way across the sitting room to tousle his hair.

We have the same big, thick black curls, though mine are stuffed in a lopsided bun, whilst he keeps his cropped closer to his head. Our skin is a similar shade of golden brown, neither the deep brown of our mother’s nor the bone white of our father’s. Both of us have wide smiles and apple cheeks blessed with dimples. Bright brown eyes and curling black lashes. Strangers can tell we’re siblings at first glance—­though that’s where the similarities end.

I need only to look over my shoulder at Mother by the fireside to know where my future lies.

Father twists in his seat to see what has captured his son’s attention. “Catriona, there you are!”

As if I spent all day from six in the morning to eight o’clock at night breaking my back in the fields because doing Hamish’s chores in addition to my own seemed more fun than drinking ale and playing draughts.

“Here I am” is all I murmur.

Father clucks his tongue. “You are rather unkempt and windswept. Won’t catch a husband that way, will you?”

He always says things like this. As if it were possible to harvest fruit and shear sheep and cut hay whilst corseted and bustled into a floor-­length silk gown.

But I know better than to argue with a man.

“Won’t catch one today,” I agree lightly.

“We’ll see.” An unsettling twinkle in my father’s eyes sends gooseflesh skittering down my exposed skin. The words themselves aren’t unusual, but the way he said them . . .

“I was telling Father about me winning the caber-­tossing competition,” Hamish says, oblivious as always to any tense undercurrents. “Plenty of lassies were there to cheer my team on, though I daresay you would’ve spent the day indoors making dour crocks or weaving a creel.”

He doesn’t mean this with malice, I remind myself for the thousandth time. Hamish conflates what I do with what I wish to do because the only women he knows are me and our mother, and all he’s ever seen us do is work.

Then again, he’s spent nine months of each year in Inverness since he turned thirteen. The boarding school may be all male, but the city isn’t. Surely some young woman somewhere in Scotland has the freedom to do as she pleases?

“Pottery isn’t boring,” I reply. “Some artisans have remarkable craftsmanship.”

Hamish’s eyes glaze over.

“You began after the hammer throw . . .” Father prompts, all interest in me forgotten.

Hamish lights up and is off and running again, prattling on about his endless heroic wins at feats of strength.

I place my hands at the small of my back and attempt to rub some feeling other than pain into the sore muscles.

This is but a wee a taste of what’s to come. Once Hamish goes back to school next week, Mother and I will no longer have to cook and clean for him . . . but his chores will fall to us. Or just to me.

But he’s here right now. Couldn’t this tale of physical prowess have waited until suppertime?

It’s not that I wish my brother to be stuck out in a field all day. It’s that I wish to heaven I had the same opportunities he does. Though I’d never say so aloud. Even thinking the word wish makes me flinch.

In the Highlands, there is little more perilous. Never say the word without retracting your foolish statement and invoking God’s protection. Ever. If one of the many fairies overhears your wish, they might choose to grant it . . . in the worst way possible.

According to legend, a mother once wished for enough money to feed her family—­only for all three of her babes to turn into tiny figurines of gold. I heard a hundred more such stories at my gran’s knee. Wishing invites disaster.

So I dream of a better life. One in which I’m as educated as my brother. I long to become an educator myself someday. A governess or a boarding school professor . . .

Mother appears in the doorway. “The stew will be ready in fifteen minutes.”

Father wrinkles his nose. “I don’t feel like stew.”

My muscles tighten. He doesn’t feel like the specific dish he said he wanted this morning at breakfast, causing my mother to change her plans for the day and spend the hot August afternoon bent over a fire instead?

“What do you feel like, love?” Mother asks with infinite patience.

She’s had forty years of practice. I’ve only had seventeen. With luck, there are many more decades to come, for us both.

“Chicken tonight,” Father replies. “Catriona, go and butcher a few for your mother.”

My mouth falls open. I hate killing animals.

“Th-­that’s Hamish’s chore,” I stammer. “He loves breaking their necks. And he’s sitting right here. Until he goes back to school—­”