Rightful Heir

About the Book

For ten of her fifteen years Margret has been held captive in the Scottish Highlands by the outlawed MacGregor clan. She does not know who she is or why she is held. Then on a bleak December day in 1691, her captors drop an injured man on the earthen floor of her hovel.

Under Margret’s care he recovers quickly and takes over the household chores, lighting the fire, taking out the chamber pot, bringing in the water and the peat.  He does not object when Margret decrees he is henceforth her manservant, nor when she invents a name for him.

She finds Dougall an impertinent fellow frequently in need of a rap with a cudgel. He keeps asking her questions about her past that she cannot answer.  The MacGregor women share gossip with him; the Chief’s cook plies him with venison stew.  Margret has never been so well informed or so well fed before.

Dougall takes her out hunting a Yule log and teaches her to make snowballs. Margret tells him about Sara, a girl abducted and ravished by Rob, the Chief’s favorite son.  Sara lived with Margret for a year, the only happy year Margret knew.  Sara taught her the things a lady should know: to read, to write, to figure, to speak English, the language of the gentry, to wash her golden hair with birch buds in the spring, bringing out its red highlights.  She promised to take Margret home with her.  But when her father came to rescue her, she ignored her promise.

This betrayal makes it hard for Margret to trust Dougall fully, though she longs to comb his curls with her fingers and is blissfully comforted when he rocks her in his arms after a nightmare terrifies her. Together they plot to escape the MacGregors. But before they can carry out their plans, a dandy turns up claiming to be her brother. He intends to take her home and marry her to an elderly neighbor.

Margret and Dougall are forced to go with him, but plot to escape when they reach Glen Coe. There they are caught in a massacre that leaves Dougall wounded.  Friends carry him home to Inchgarv, a Macdonald stronghold by the sea.  They take Margret with them.  On the way she learns Dougall’s true identity and what his plans for her are.

 A forced marriage, a clan power struggle, an exile to her brother’s castle where she is befriended by her brother’s wife, a birth, a death, a seduction, a clan war, and her scarred infant nephew teach Margret to grow from the one who is rocked to the one who does the rocking.

About the Author

For ten of her fifteen years Margret has lived in a hovel deep in the Scottish Highlands. She does not know who she is or why the outlawed MacGregor clan holds her captive. A recurring nightmare forces her to relive her abduction. Again she feels a snap of pain as her beloved nurse bites off her little finger, smells burnt flesh when her mother brands her with a bronze cross and watches as strangers burst into her chamber and drag her out of the castle. Waking, she vows to escape the MacGregors, find her betrayers, and exact her revenge.