Wedded to the Highlanders by Katie Douglas

Chapter 2:

"Mam, tonight, is it all right if I go walking oot with Steen from the bakery?" Lucy stood hesitantly in the doorway to the kitchen, where her mam was washing pots in the big Belfast sink.

Lucy stared around at the granite walls, decorated with little cross-stitch pictures and cheap paintings from the market. Her eyes fell on the dresser, beside the stove. The lower shelves were mismatched cups, plates and bowls, but the highest one was stacked with tiny decorative thimbles. Her mam had collected them from all over Scotland, and relatives had always brought her more, when they ever went anywhere. It hardly seemed like her family was well-travelled, and they spent most of their time in Glenash, but over the course of fifty years, Lucy's mam had managed to amass an impressive collection.

Lucy had been to Fort William three times in her life, and once to Inverness. She wasn't especially sure what was so important about chasing around going to lots of places, when she was generally content being in Glenash. It was where her oven was, and more importantly, it was where all her friends were. She couldn't imagine living anywhere else.

Anyway, she always found it strange and slightly flat when she remembered, outside this secluded village, most of the rest of the world was a place where one man married one woman. It broke her mind to try and visualise her childhood with only one father, instead of two.

In preparation for meeting Steen, Lucy had washed her face and re-tied her hair into a braid to keep it tidy, since she wasn't very accomplished with updos and didn't have any make-up.

She hadn't changed her dress. She owned three floor-length dresses in various pleasant tartan patterns. Since the Highland clearances of old, and the ban on men wearing tartan (officially, anyway. Lucy knew most of the men in Glenash flouted that law on a daily basis), the various tartans were no longer associated with clans so much as areas. The local weaver had his own pattern, which had probably belonged to Clan Glenash back in olden days.

The weavers around Fort William had their own colours and patterns, too, and Lucy liked to pick and choose the ones that suited her. There were other, non-tartan fabrics making their way into the Highlands these days, too, but Lucy didn't like the flimsy silky materials. They looked nice enough on the woodcuts of wispy women from southern England, and France, but they'd be no good in the cold of a real Highland winter.

Today's dress was a pleasant, summery, light green tartan with stripes of crimson and black, and it fitted her shape nicely, accentuating her ample cleavage. Being shapely wasn't the fashion du jour, either. Women were supposed to be thin whalebone-created cylinders with no breasts at the moment, but it hadn't caught on in Glenash.

Lucy had never really seen the need for the fancy corsets she knew women wore in refined places like Inverness and Glasgow; the corsetiers didn't exist in Glenash and the nearest place a woman could buy anything fancy was Fort William. Such things were also rather costly, and she did not especially want to ask her parents for money for underwear whose sole purpose seemed to be to squash a woman until she literally fell at men's feet. She certainly didn't want her mam to see her in it. It was too embarrassing. Anyway, none of the other girls in Glenash wore such things, aside from the mayor's daughter, Catriona, who, as the daughter of the village's leader, had the money and inclination to wear whatever fashions she chose. She didn't have to mix dough in that getup, though.

The morning encounter with Hugh had been quite a disaster. Everything always was, where he was concerned. Luckily, the rest of the day had gone smoothly and Papa Merrin's digestive catastrophes had been avoided.