“I have to wash your feet,” she explained with a sigh. “It’s my penance for spilling milk on your habit.”
A reluctant grin lit his face. “You’re joking, lass.”
“I am not. Now lift up your skirts and for heaven’s sake, pull that veil over your face. Your jaw is looking like the Black Forest.”
He glanced up, trying not to sigh in enjoyment as her small fingers pulled off his stocking, slid around his ankle, and gently massaged. The meal was ending. His men were snatching bites of food even as a pair of convent schoolgirls efficiently whisked the plates away.
One girl, who apparently did not obey rules any better than Marsali, lingered overlong at his side. He tried to ignore her. She was too curious, a troublemaker, he was sure. He hunched down deeper into his habit.
Finally, he worked up the nerve to look into her face. Surprise widened his eyes because for a puzzling instant he saw his own mother staring back at him. The girl gave a
sharp gasp of astonished recognition; presumably one didn’t expect the new abbess in the convent to boast shoulders as wide as a warship and a buccaneer’s square bearded jaw.
Would she ruin everything?
Would she run to fetch Judith from the infirmary?
He clenched his pewter spoon, suspense ticking away between them as her gaze darted questioningly to
Johnnie, then Lachlan, and Owen.
He couldn’t read her expression. He could only see something bold and disturbingly familiar in the strong features of her face.
She smiled slowly, a shy but knowing smile, and the power of it slammed into his chest with unexpected force. Who the hell was she?
“Bless you, Reverend Mother Abbess,” she murmured, then she began to back away from the table with an armful of dishes, leaving Duncan to puzzle over her in silence.
“You have the biggest feet I’ve ever seen,” Marsali whispered under the table.
He frowned, distracted by her voice. “Who was that girl? Look, quickly, the one just going to the door.”
Marsali twisted her agile body between the table and the bench to see. “Oh, her. That’s only Hannah. She’s one of the orphans who’s been here forever.”
“But she isn’t a nun?”
“No, she isn’t a nun. She’s a prefect.” Marsali’s voice was thoughtful. “She’s said to be related to your sister, which I suppose means she could be related to you. She swears like you sometimes.”
Sister Bridget had returned to the lectern; she wasn’t shouting again; now she was gesturing wildly with her arms for Owen and Lachlan to come to the makeshift stage.
“What is that woman trying to do?” Duncan asked in a wary undertone.
“It’s time for the pantomime,” Marsali whispered back. “She’s just chosen Adam and Eve. We’ve been acting out the Book of Genesis. It’s the only excitement we’re allowed.”
Owen and Lachlan had risen from the bench, bowing and
grinning like idiots to have been singled out for the honor of playing the original outcasts.
“Sit down,” Duncan hissed. “We don’t have time for a play.”
Sister Bridget was waving her arms at Duncan like a windmill. He pretended not to notice. Marsali wriggled out from under the table to whisper in his ear.
“She wants you, my lord.”
He looked alarmed. “She wants me for what?”
“She wants you to play God.”
“God? She wants
me
to play God? What for?”
Marsali gave him a little encouraging push off the bench. “You’re the only one in the convent with the beard for it.”
Duncan lumbered to his feet, nodding to the nuns around the table, who politely motioned him forward. “I don’t want to be God,” he said in a peevish undertone. “I don’t know
how
to be God.”
“Listen, my lord, you were born
for this part. In fact, it’s what you do best. Giving orders. Frightening the hell out of people.”
“I hate this, Marsali. There are probably twelve armed men waiting outside the door to abduct you while I prance around in a dress playing God.” He flipped back his veil to glower at her. “How am I supposed to pantomime God anyway?”
The other nuns were beginning to look at them in earnest now. Sister Bridget frowned in admonishment at Marsali across the room. From the corner of his eye, Duncan noticed the girl named Hannah slipping back through the door.
He swore to himself. Judith would probably burst in at any second. He wanted to get the hell off this misty little island with Marsali. And now he was going to stand in front of a room full of women, nuns, pretending he was a woman pretending to be God.
Marsali nudged him again. “Just put a curse on the serpent.”
“What serpent?”
“I think it’s Sister Douglas. Yes, it’s that chubby nun writhing around the lectern in spectacles.”
“This is absurd.”
“Put a curse on the ground too, and then you can toss Lachlan out of Eden. I assume Owen is taking Eve’s part since he’s shorter.”
Duncan stomped toward the candlelit space cleared for the pantomime. “Don’t forget to put enmity between their seed before you toss Lachlan out,” Marsali whispered as he went. “Oh. There’s a flaming sword at the end too. But never mind about the angels. You don’t want to overact.”
D
uncan flailed his arms and made a menacing grandfatherly face. It was the best he could do, having never met God in person. He felt more confident when it came to the part about the flaming sword.
He feinted. He parried. He thrust his pewter spoon with one hand negligently poised on his hip. He even got a little carried away and jumped up on an unoccupied bench, kicking up his skirt to lunge across the table. Sword fighting, after all, was his forte. Disengage. Extend.
The nuns absorbed this dramatic display in utter silence, but Duncan thought he looked rather good, especially if one discounted the fact that he was wearing a linen headdress and a habit.
But had God Himself actually engaged in swordplay in the Garden of Eden?
Duncan couldn’t remember much of the Bible, except the Twenty-third Psalm, which he read when a soldier lay dying on the battlefield, and then it was always with a sense of doubt and sadness that he could not bring himself to believe.
He executed a swift God-like riposte into the air. Damn, but it felt good to wield a sword again, power flowing through his veins as he jabbed at an imaginary enemy. MacFay. Yes, that was it. He was fighting MacFay.
He lowered his spoon with a swallowed curse, suddenly becoming aware of the shocked faces that watched him. Was he insane? Had he forgotten what the hell had brought him here?
Marsali, Owen, and Lachlan clapped politely as he jumped down off the bench. Only Johnnie showed any sense at all, standing by the door with a worried expression wrinkling his forehead.
“I thought I heard the gate, my lord,” he explained softly as Duncan backed inch by inch toward him.
Duncan gave a terse nod. Sister Bridget studied him in open suspicion now. He shouldn’t have been surprised. In his asinine display of derring-do, he had gotten his skirt hitched in his belt. The length of calf and thigh that bulged with muscle and gleamed with myriad white scars were a dead giveaway that he hadn’t spent his life in spiritual pursuits.
The secret was out: The Irish abbess was a man.
Sister Bridget had caught on too, for she was stalking him in slow lethal silence.
He glanced at Johnnie.
“
Now.
Douse the candles. We’re getting Marsali out of here. Holy hell. That nun’s got murder in her eyes.”
Within thirty seconds the refectory lay in smoky darkness. A few schoolgirls screamed, more in anticipation than alarm, but to their credit the nuns did not break their silence. Duncan decided that they were frozen in terror. Not wasting another moment, he grabbed Marsali’s hand and whisked her outside, down the long arcade, breaking into a run when the infirmary door opened and he glimpsed Judith standing before him with a horrified expression on her face.
“Wait,” Marsali whispered, balking like mule behind him.
Duncan spun around, catching his feet in Lachlan’s skirts. “We are not waiting, Marsali. I can’t face my sister looking like this.”
“Where’s Owen?” Johnnie asked suddenly, his bulky form looming out of the dense mist.
“That’s what we have to wait for,” Marsali explained.
Lachlan untangled his skirts from Duncan’s feet. “He was still in Eden the last time I looked.”
“Eden?” A note of hysteria exploded in Duncan’s voice. “What is the idiot doing in Eden? I thought I banished him.”
Lachlan gave a sheepish shrug. “Ye banished me, my lord. Owen and I weren’t sure whether he had to leave too, so he decided to stay while ye were doing that fancy sword dance.”
The convent had never heard the creative flow of curse words that issued from Duncan’s mouth. In fact, Marsali and his clansmen were still standing in a stupefied trance when Duncan returned with Owen a few moments later, Judith and Sister Bridget hot on their heels in angry pursuit.
T
hey took refuge inside the small detached belltower, only to find that they had escaped one danger to face another. A far worse danger. The moment he stepped into the dark timber building, Duncan’s nerves prickled down his back in belated warning.
MacFay and six of his retainers sprang out from behind the rickety wooden stairs to the tower. The scrape of half a dozen broadswords unsheathed in the silence reminded Duncan of his own sword locked up uselessly in the gatehouse. Unarmed. Outnumbered. Trapped. Dressed like a damn woman. Could it get any worse?
Still, he had the element of surprise on his side. In the dark he and his clansmen resembled the good sisters of the convent closely enough to seize the advantage.
Except that Owen tripped over a broom on the floor and went flying into Johnnie’s arms, shouting “Hell’s bells!” before anyone could shut him up. Which wasn’t the sort of thing a nun would say under the circumstances.
“They’re no bloody nuns,” a MacFay clansman said in astonishment. “Look—that big one wi’ the beard is the MacElgin himself.”
Jamie pushed his way forward, his sword lifted, to confront Duncan. “Draw your weapon, MacElgin. I told ye I wasn’t finished wi’ ye in the castle.”
Duncan raised the pewter spoon he was still clutching in his left hand. “En garde?” he said hopefully.
For a moment Jamie faltered, apparently not expecting the world-celebrated swordsman to counter his assault with a kitchen utensil.
“Defend yerself,” Jamie said, thrusting the tip of his broadsword toward Duncan’s chest.
Duncan raised his other arm, blocking the attack with
the
length of billowing black sleeve like a
giant bat’s wing. Fron the corn
er of his eye he noti
ced a slender figure sneaking up
the stairs to the belfry. Marsali? Blast her. What the hell wa
s
she trying to do? Ringing the bell to summon the sisters to their defense? A damn lot of good it would do to have a bunch of screaming women in his way.
Jamie glanced uneasily from Duncan to the armed retainers who stood guard at the door. “Give him a weapon. Jamie will fight like a man.”
A broadsword flew through the air and landed at Duncan’s feet. He stared down at it in violent longing, his hand aching for the reassuring weight. “You’re a wanted outlaw, Jamie,” he said, the words calm and deliberate. “This is a convent, for the love of God. No Highland law will save you from being hunted down even if you kill me.”
Contempt rippled across Jamie’s features. His men-at-arms stirred in the shadows, sharing furtive looks as if asking why MacElgin would suffer this humiliation.
“He’s a coward,” Jamie said in amazement with a low nervous laugh, and when that drew no reaction, he flicked his sword across Duncan’s face, flinging off his veil and wimple and raising a tiny trickle of blood down his cheek. “Look, I’m slicin’ him to bloody ribbons, and he’s lettin’ me.”
“Stop it, Jamie.” Her voice trembling with fury, Marsali ran down the stairs toward him. “I’ll go with you, but you have to promise to stop hurting people.”
Duncan barely felt the hot sting of pain in his face as his own anger, frustration, and anxiety over Marsali trampled down the tender vow he had made. He had been bo
rn
into violence. He didn’t have the faith to rely on some intangible power that might or might not deign to help him.
“Get her into the boat.” Jamie gave Marsali a cursory glance before returning his narrowed gaze to Duncan. “And watch yer backs. I’m smellin’ a trick.”
The first shaggy MacFay clansman took a tentative step toward Marsali; Duncan had the broadsword in his hand and he sent Jamie sprawling flat on the floor between Owen and Lachlan before anyone realized what had happened. In the blink of an eye he had become the barbaric warrior that the world revered and feared. The power he exuded was palpable. Johnnie grinned in relief.
Jamie’s breath quickened as the sword pressed against his
Adam’s apple. “Kill him,” he said through his teeth. “Somebody kill the bastard. He’s hurtin’ Jamie.”