Somewhere Along the Way - Softcover

Elaine Coffman is the award-winning author of several bestsellers, including the New York Times bestseller If You Love Me.  Her other novels include Angel in Marble, For All the Right Reasons, Somewhere Along the Way, So This Is Love, Heaven Knows, A Time for Roses, Escape Not My Love, Someone Like You, and If My Love Could Hold You.  A native Texan and former elementary-school teacher, she is the mother of three children.

She lives in Washington, D.C.

Dornoch Castle, Scotland, 1848

The trouble all began when her mother named her after a horse.

Thinking about her best friend back in England, and how she must be enjoying the last of the season in London right now, Lady Annabella Stewart shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.  Resentment and humiliation seethed within her.  Everything had looked so bright promising that day a few months ago when she left Saltwood Castle and journeyed to her family's town house in London.  She had just turned seventeen, it was to be her first season, and she had considered herself the most fortunate of women.

Oh, how the world had turned upon her! You should have known Bella.  You should have known.  Anyone named after a horse...

Shortly before she was born, her mother had attended a horse race, and had watched a beautiful dapple-gray filly named Lady Annabella cross the finish line first to win.  "But, Bella," her mother had often said since, "it was a very beautiful horse.  And it did come in first."

Only when a glass of champagne was thrust in her hand did Annabella pull her thoughts away from England and the past to Scotland and the present.  Over, she thought.  My life will soon be over.  This couldn't be happening.  Not to her.  She stared at her father, feeling the panicked pounding of her heart, the choking fingers of fate tightening around her throat.  Feeling sick and desperate, she let her eyes do her pleading.  The Duke of Grenville narrowed his eyes slightly and cleared his throat.  He did not speak.

Annabella closed her eyes, shutting from her sight the vision of her father's grim face.  He's going to do it, she thought.  He's really going to go through with this.  She would be betrothed coldheartedly, and without feeling, to a man she had just met, a man who had been twenty years old when she was born.

Humiliated, Annabella felt the chill of the castle reach out to her from the far corners of the room.  This was a celebration, a gathering of family and clans to seal a bargain and honor a betrothal.  It should be a happy occasion.

But instead, it was a day of sadness.  Annabella's mother tried to look cheerful, but her eyes sparkled a bit too brightly to be anything but tears.  Upstairs, Bettina the maid was crying.  Jarvis, the duke's valet, had something in his eye.  Outside, the rain poured down.  Even the candles in the candelabra dripped.

"Here's tae us and to hell with the English!"

The loudly flung toast sliced through the soft tones of conversation like a thunderclap, leaving nothing but the eerie silence of a tomb behind.

Anyone in the great hall of Dornoch Castle could have shouted it.  At any other time that toast would have been enough to raise the hackles on any red-blooded Englishman, but Alisdair Stewart, the Duke of Grenville, simply looked at his daughter, Annabella, and John Gordon, the Earl of Huntly, her betrothed, and raised his glass.  "May you enjoy a long and happy life together."

He looked at his wife and smiled.  The duchess raised her glass, and smiled, looking at their daughter.  But Annabella did not smile.  She did not look at anyone.  Instead, she stared at a fixed point in the tapestry across the room, her breathing uneven, and tried to hide the outrage she felt at being betrothed to this Scot.

She prayed for a sudden shot of courage, but all she felt was shame--shame for being such a coward; shame for wanting to cry instead of resist; shame for being the shivering, quaking thing that she knew she was.  Why could she not think of the hundred things a woman of spirit could say or do at a time like this?  Why could she merely tremble and go pale, or look heartbroken and wretched?  It was a painful thing to see herself as she was--meek, obedient, green as grass; a malleable young woman submissive to parental authority with no more spunk than a sleeping babe and very little optimism.

"To my betrothed," Huntly said with an edge to his voice that stirred terror within her.

Knowing she must look at her husband-to-be, she turned to face him, smiling to cover a growing wave of hysteria.  Cold and terrified, she blinked to hold back tears and prayed her thoughts would take their prodding elsewhere.  In a blur of misery, she thought again of Emily, her best friend back home in England.  How Emily must be enjoying the last of the season in London right now.  Annabella shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.  She had never felt so lonely, or so wretched.  She wanted to cry.  She wanted to go home.

She had said as much to her mother only that morning.  "I want to sleep in my own bed and wake up to a real English breakfast.  I want to have tea at Aunt Ellen's.  I want to paint pictures of the caravans in Peasholme Green during Martinmas Fair.  I don't care is I never put another foot in Scotland for as long as I live.  I don't like seaweed jelly.  I don't like eels.  And I hate haggis.  I don't know how anyone could like it.  I don't understand these people.  They're insulting and intimidating.  They talk strangely.  They look at me strangely.  They don't even like me."  She swiped at the tears dripping onto her bodice.  "I "ate the thought of being married.  I don't want to spend the rest of my life eating all this horrible food with a man I don't even like.  Why are things like this always happening to me?"

"Oh, Bella," her mother had said, enfolding her in her arms.  "Would that I could do something to make you happy.  I feel so helpless.  All I can think to do is send for the hartshorn."  "he two of them stood together and cried.

"I shall never be happy again, " Annabella had said at last.

Even now, here at this gathering several hours later, she felt the same way.  She would never be happy.  Never, never, never.

Across the room, Annabella's uncle, Colin McCullock, studied her thoughtfully.  She stood pale and still as a pine, her eyes so full of unshed tears it was impossible to tell their exact color.  Unlike Annabella and her mother, he didn't look particularly sad, but he also didn't look too pleased with the way things were going.  As if sensing that Annabella could do with a little cheerful humor, he raised his glass for another toast.  "May old Douglas Macleod loan you his Fairy Flag for your nuptial bed," he said, looking directly at Annabella.  And then he did the strangest thing.  He winked.

The wink would have been enough to send a spot of color to her cheeks.  But the mention of the nuptial bed turned her entire face red.  She looked at her uncle Colin, wondering what he meant.  Colin McCulloch was the Earl of Dornoch and her mother's eldest brother.  He was the head of the McCulloch clan and as boisterous and redhearted as they came--a Scot from the red pom-pom on his bonnet to the sgian-dubh in his stocking.

"I'll be loaning them my Fairy Flag all right, but judging from the looks o' the wee lass, this betrothal isna sittin' too well with her," said Douglas, called the Macleod by his kin.

"Aye," Colin said.  He studied her gently.  "She may be wishing for it to bring herring into the loch instead o' bairn to her belly."

While the laughter was at its loudest, the duchess looked at Annabella, wondering how to soothe he sad, bewildered youngest child.  Leaning closer, she whispered, "The Fairy Flag is a Macleod treasure that supposedly came from the Crusades.  It has three properties--carried into battle, it increased the number of Macleods; placed on the marriage bed, it ensures fertility; and it brings herring into the loch."

Annabella felt her mother's arm around her waist.  She longed to drop her head on her mother's shoulder, as she had so often done as a child, as if that simple action could somehow act as a mighty stick in the spoke of wheels that had already been long in motion.  Trying to still her panic she looked up at her mother.  "Uncle is right," she whispered back, unable to keep the apprehension from a voice that was breathy and unsteady.  "I'd rather have herring in the loch."

"Perhaps," her mother said, giving her a pat on the arm, "you will be blessed with both."  The pat was bracing, but the voice quivered too much to offer comfort.  And with good reason.  The duchess was feeling mixed emotions herself.  Her heart went out to Annabella for the grief she knew she was feeling, and it hardened toward her husband for his lack of understanding, for the ease with which he seemed to forget what it was like to be young and so influenced by the ways of the heart.  She had tried to explain this to Annabella the day before by saying, "Your father simply has a sort of unruffled practicality that would drive a sober man to blue ruin."  She would have gone on to say more about the urge to take a nip or two of gin herself, but about that time the duke walked into the room--which was always an effective curb to any conversation.

Whatever the duchess was going to think next was interrupt...