An Auctioned Bride (Highland Heartbeats #4)(5)
No, for her court life was the epitome of boredom, at least for women. How utterly wasteful were the days spent fussing over wardrobes and hairstyles, the needlework, the soirees and gatherings that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. No wonder some of her compatriots laid abed until the early afternoon!
Not the life for Dalla. No, she loved to be up with the sun, roaming through the forests surrounding her father's estate. Riding the horses during the occasional fox hunt, or just riding through the countryside enjoying the beautiful vistas and brisk air.
She had spent most of her life living at the estate in the countryside, at her father’s rural residence in a low and secluded valley not far from the western shores of the southwestern peninsula in the lowlands between Stavanger and Kristiansand. It was a land of towering, steep mountains interspersed with fjords, all of them wild and beautiful. Throughout her ordeal, she had kept the images of them in her mind, terrified that she might never see them again.
If she had been closer to the throne, she might've worried about her safety, but surely, her position in the royal family wasn't enough to put her in danger. She'd been mistaken. Why else would she have been kidnapped and thrown into the hold of a ship with other unfortunate female captives. What would happen to them, she didn't even want to contemplate. Still, if she'd been kidnapped for political reasons; perhaps for ransom, she surely would have been kept isolated in a castle somewhere, not bound and tossed, blindfolded, into the hold of a ship that she discovered was bound for northern Scotland. But if not political, then what? It was no secret that her father, Alfred Jorstad had made many enemies in his lifetime. Revenge? His brother, Amund Jorstad, had also been involved in numerous, somewhat questionable dealings with not only his fellow Norwegians, also the English, and the French, and scandalously enough, with the Scots themselves.
Unfortunately, Dalla had no way of knowing if anybody even realized she was gone, especially if Megan had not survived the attack. Poor Megan. She spent much of the time at the countryside estate with her companion and the house staff, her father and uncle often gone to Oslo to deal with business, royal obligations, and so forth. She rarely paid attention to their comings and goings.
With no love lost between herself, her father, or her uncle, and not for lack of trying on her part, she doubted that they would even display much concern over her sudden disappearance. Her father had never shown any affection toward her. As she grew older, she realized that he blamed her for his wife's death during childbirth. When Dalla was a young child, he'd often left her to her own devices, which perhaps was the reason she'd grown up with the reputation of being a wild child, often disappearing for hours on end in the meadows and forests surrounding the estate.
It was only when she had her tenth birthday that he hired a companion for her, to teach her how to be a lady, to read and write, learn English and French, and of course, to groom her for her eventual marriage. It was when she'd turned fourteen years old that she learned that her father had betrothed her to Manfried Gundersen, a man thrice her age, of German ancestry. Some type of business deal, she was sure. She had met the man once, had been immediately wary of him; the way he looked at her, his dark green eyes roaming speculatively over her blossoming body. She had mentioned her unease to Megan, who confided in her that Gundersen had already lost two wives to illness, and that he was a notorious rake.
By the time she was sixteen, her father had insisted that she marry the man, but thank the heavens, he had died falling from a horse a month before the deed was to have been done. After that, her father had tried to push her toward one man or another, but she'd purposely behaved so badly that none of them wanted her. Why, what decent man would want to marry such a willful woman; one who thought nothing of riding bareback, one who eschewed the gentler arts of cooking and needlework for digging in a garden or tending the falcons with the falconer, down to cleaning their cages.
Scandalous. That's what her father called her behavior.
By the time she'd turned nineteen years old, well past marriageable age, he'd put his foot down. He'd arranged yet another marriage, this time to a distant member of the royal family from the paternal line; one who lived far away from the court on one of the hundreds of small islands dotting the northern coastline of Norway.
She and her father had gotten into a terrible argument about that, and she'd refused. As a result, he threatened her with sending her to a convent. Dalla had considered running away, but run away to where? With what? She had no access to her inheritance, if there was any left of it, and she certainly couldn't go running to the court.
Dalla had ultimately decided that living in a convent was preferable to being forced into a loveless marriage with any of her father's choices for a husband.
She was to have been sent away to a convent in northern France at the end of the month, but she'd been kidnapped just days before her departure. And what about Megan? Had she survived the attack? Dalla’s heart grew heavy, thinking about her companion and friend, a woman barely ten years older than herself. Though Megan had been hired to fulfill her position as part governess and part teacher, she and Megan had soon grown into fast friends, so close that Dalla looked at her as a beloved older sister.
What if she—
They were roughly guided down several wooden steps into a room. A room filled with men who now hooted, whistled, and made rude, vulgar comments. Was that all these Scots could do?