Even In Darkness (Between) (11 page)

Chapter 11

A gentle caress on my shoulder woke me from dreams of cannon fire and cloying, acrid smoke. Disoriented, I
rubbed my eyes with the heel of my palms as I rolled onto my back in the bed. “Wha—?” I started, but was interrupted by a deep, male voice.

“Shhh...
everything is fine,” Eagan said softly, his face partially illuminated by the candle he was holding. “I came to wake you because we’ve arrived.”

“Arrived?” Sitting up, I brushed my bedhead hair out of my face.

“Yes, in England. We must disembark now. I’ve a carriage waiting to take us to my home where you can stay while I complete the paperwork for the commutation. Our ship to the new world will be departing in two days.”

“Wait.
Home?” I asked and he nodded. “Where’s Aiden?”

“He’s left the ship already.”

“What?” I cried, bolting from the bed. My ankle immediately started aching, but I gritted my teeth and hustled toward the door. “What have you done with him? Where did you take him?”

Eagan caught up with me in two strides. His touch was no longer gentle.
“Stop. You’ll only injure yourself further.”

Yanking my arm out of his grasp, I stared him down. “I don’t
care. Take me to Aiden. Now.”

A muscle twitched near his eye as he glowered at me.
“I can’t do that. He’ll be held in the prison until we board the day after tomorrow. It’s naught but two nights. He’ll survive.”

“And I’ll survive, right there next to him.”

“You’re coming with me.” A sane person would have been intimidated by the authority in his voice, but I wasn’t deterred.

“The hell I am. I’m not going with you to some ritsy titsy English mansion while Aiden rots in a jail cell.”

“Mansion?” He actually had the gall to laugh. “I’m flattered, but my dwelling could hardly be called thus.”

I poked him in the chest.
Hard. “I don’t give a crap what your house looks like. If Aiden’s staying at the prison, then so am I. Our deal—”

“—is that you’ll sleep in my bed from this day forward.”

I crossed my arms and swept a disgusting look over him. “I think you can manage to keep it in your pants two more days until we’re on the boat.”

Eagan’s jaw worked silently like he wanted to call me the filthiest names,
and I had a sudden flash of terror that he was going to drag me to the bed right that second. What was I thinking, baiting him that way? But before I could beat myself up for running my mouth, he simply nodded and said, “As you wish, my lady.” Then he opened the door and bent his head slightly, indicating with a sweep of his hand that I should walk through before him. He followed me out and closed the door behind us.

“Callison!” he shouted. The bane of my existence came barreling over to the captain’s side. I
shot razor blades at him with my eyes, but he ignored me.

“Yes, cap’n?
Something ye needed?”

“Lady MacRae wishes to join her husband,” he said as sweetly as if we were meeting for tea instead of heading into the bowels of a prison.

“She does, does she?” He smiled so wide that I discovered even more gaps in his teeth. “Well, well. ‘Twould be my pleasure, then, to escort the lady.” Callison gave me an elaborate bow that made me want to kick out the few teeth he had left. With an extended arm, he grinned and said, “Shall we?”

There was no way I was playing along with his act, so I folded my arms across my chest and snapped, “Give it a rest. Just move.” Callison mocked me with a hurt expression
, his fingers splayed wide across his heart. I leveled a glare at Eagan, only to find his face lined with regret. Unable to deal with that, I tromped off toward the opposite end of the boat where others were disembarking. Eagan said something to Callison behind me, but I couldn’t quite make out the words.

A moveable set of stairs
had been pushed up against the ship, leading onto a long, wooden dock that disappeared into the shadows. Heavy fog covered the seaside, making it impossible to see more than a few yards in front of me. I grabbed the railing for support as I made my way down the steps. My legs felt wobbly upon hitting land, like coming off a roller rink and taking off my skates. The world was no longer moving beneath me as it had out at sea, but my head still felt that rocking motion inside. The stench of fish and sweaty dock workers assaulted my nose, adding to the nausea that churned in my gut.

“Good to be home,” Callison said next to me, sucking in a deep breath of the salty air.

The thought of someplace as bleak and ugly as this being ‘home’ only made me more depressed. The realization that I’d never see my home again pierced through my heart, but I was damned and determined not to let Callison see my weakness.

“Figures a place like this would birth something like you,” I said, earning a hearty chuckle from the sailor.

“Merlin’s beard, ye’re the feistiest wench I’ve e’er met! Let’s just see if a couple of nights in the gaol doesn’t cool yer tongue.” He grabbed my arm and dragged me over to where an ornate horse-drawn carriage was waiting. British military insignia—at least that’s what I figured it was, since it looked very official and I hadn’t seen anything like it before—emblazoned the side of the Cinderella-like vehicle. A red-coated man sat in the perch up front, his hands loosely gripping the reins to two beautiful horses. A wave of longing hit me as I thought of the ride I’d taken with Aiden in Between the first time. His uncle’s carriage had whisked us away to a royal ball where we’d danced all night. And now this one was hauling me off to rot in the clink.

Callison didn’t even give me a second to absorb this before he h
oisted me up the small flight of steps and shoved me face-first into the carriage. The inside was like a medieval limousine, with two deep red, upholstered cushions facing one another and windows on either side. But instead of glass, the windows were holes in the exterior covered by shades that pinned at the base. The fog followed us in and breathed through the gaps in the fabric of the window coverings. Wishing I had a shawl or something to pull around myself, I scooted as far away from Callison as I could and refused to look at him. When he pounded on the roof, the carriage jerked forward and then we were moving, bumping and rolling over cobblestone streets. I bit my bottom lip tight in an effort to keep it from quivering.

They were taking me to Aiden. That was all that mattered.

It took what felt like a million years to get there so that when the carriage finally skidded to a stop, a jolt of panic shot through me. Callison only grunted, then crawled out the too-small door and dropped to the ground.

“Come on, then! Ye’re the one what wanted to come ‘ere, so dinna make me drag your sorry arse out!” he shouted.

I considered telling him to keep his pants on, then thought better of it, since I didn’t want to put any ideas in his repulsive fat head. So I just grabbed my skirts in one fist and stepped down the stairs, keeping one palm pressed flat against the carriage to steady myself. A gentleman would have offered his hand to help me down, but we both knew my escort was anything but.

Even though I was sure we’d ridden for miles, we had no
t escaped the fog, which closed in tight like a hand around my throat. Struggling to quell the rising anxiety within me, I followed Callison’s wide frame past a guard at the entry and down a torch-lit, damp hallway. The concrete path turned right, then left, then seemed to double back on itself. He forced me to scramble after him up two flights of stairs, past jail cells whose occupants clung to the bars and shouted sexual invitations to me, and then down more stairs into a dungeon so dank and moist that water literally seeped from the walls.

It finally occurred to me that he was leading me on a wild goose chase so that, if I decided to make a break for it, I wouldn’t know the way out. My ankle was screaming bloody murder and I had reached the outer limits of my patience, so I just stopped and waited for him to notice. A few paces later, he did.

“Given up, have ye?” He turned to look at me, the corner of his mouth quirking up in a self-satisfied grin.

“You win, okay? I have no freaking clue how to get out
of here even if I wanted to, so just take me to Aiden and be done with it. You’ve made your point.”

His face split into a wide smile. “I like tha’. ‘You win.’ Remember ye said that, as I’m fair certain it won’t be the last time.” He grabbed
a key ring from his belt and fingered through the keys until he found the one he was looking for, then unlocked a heavy wooden door to the right. It appeared to be a storage closet of some variety that opened from both sides. We stepped over a broom with a broken handle and a mop bucket, then emerged on the other side, where a long line of empty jail cells greeted us.

At least, I thought they were empty until I saw the one all the way down at the
end where two hands gripped the bars tightly.

“Who’s there?” Aiden’s voice called from the last cell. “Come and fight me like a man, ye English bastard!”
I took off running towards the end of the hallway, but Callison grabbed me from behind.

“Not so fast.
Aye, that’s ‘im, but I’ve orders to give ye a cell of your own.”

“What?” I shrieked, struggling to free myself from his iron grip. He pulled out a different key and
unlocked the empty cell beside Aiden’s, then flung me inside. The metal doors clanged shut behind me, the reverberation pounding into my skull like a railroad spike.

“No!” I grabb
ed the bars and tried to shake them. They were cool under my hands—wet, even—but they didn’t budge an inch. “This was not the deal! He promised to take me to Aiden.” I could feel myself starting to come unglued. “I want to see the captain. Bring him down here now.”

Callison tsk
’ed his tongue at me and shook his head. “Ah, how soon ye forget. I win. And the captain won’t be helping ye now, as these were his orders, direct from his mouth. Nighty night!” His laughter bounced off the walls as he headed back the way we’d come and disappeared from view.

“Lindsey, what on
Earth are ye doing? They told me both you and Willie would be kept safe at the captain’s residence in town.” The initial shock in his voice turned to disgust. “Filthy whoresons. Liars, every one of them!”

“I chose to come,” I replied in a small voice, realizing that by saying this, I sounded like I was defending the captain.

“You what? Why would ye go and do a—” The sound of Aiden taking a deep, calming breath seemed to echo in the stillness of the jail. When he spoke again, his words rang with finality. “Ye mustn’t stay here. ‘Tis not right.”

“I’m not leaving you.
Even if they carted you off to hell...” My eyes flickered over the wadded blanket in the corner that was probably crawling with lice and rats. A shudder ran through me. “I would go with you.”

“Nae!
Don’t say such things!” The anger in his voice made me take a step back. “You’ve your whole life to live yet and I’m naught but a condemned man. Don’t ye understand?” Footsteps scraping on the dirty ground told me he was pacing. “Find someone else, some bloke who can love ye like you deserve, not a criminal fated to swing from the gallows.”

“
But you won’t,” I replied. The dejection in his voice broke my heart and after a beat, I opened my mouth to tell him about the deal I’d struck with the captain, but he cut me off before I could speak.

“Are ye daft? Of course I will!
I killed five English redcoats in combat. Their king would call me a traitor and demand my blood. He’ll not be satisfied until every Jacobite is cut down and slaughtered. They are monsters and I’d not put it past them to hang you right beside me. Is that what ye want?”

“No! I—”

“Ye shouldn’t be here. When they next come with a meal, tell them you’ve changed your mind. Beg, whine, cry—whatever it takes—but get them to take a message to the captain that you want out. I’ll not have you die because of me.” With that, his feet scuffed the ground as he walked to the opposite end of his cell, moving as far away from me as possible.

Tears ran down my cheeks and I shook my head
at the stone wall that separated us. Part of me wanted to alleviate his fears, to tell him that I’d sacrificed myself so that he and Willie would live, but now I wasn’t sure how he would take that news. He was so resolute, so determined to be the martyr, that I didn’t know what to say at all. So instead, I just slid down the wall to the ground and curled in on myself. With my arms tucked around my knees, I lowered my head and let the tears come. It was my fault we were here to start with—I was the one who’d gotten us knocked off that cliff—and even with certain death looking him in the face, Aiden was trying to save me. But I hated the words coming from his mouth. How could I cling to him through this when he was shoving me away? We should have been helping each other, praying together. The thought gave me strength as I remembered the many times Aiden had held my hand and asked for God’s guidance and blessing. Sniffling, I offered up a prayer for both of us.