FIFTEEN
REVIVING FLAGGING SPIRITS
THE HEAT FROM THE WATER soaked into Kate’s tired muscles as the scent of expensive milled soap inveigled her senses. Exhaustion finally allowed her to relax after the strain of the last week.
While Kate soaked, Megan had washed out her petticoat and the chemise, tch ’ing over the condition of her gown. Now she spread them across the back of a chair before the fire and lifted the steaming kettle from its hook. Carefully, she added more water to the copper tub.
“There, ma’am. That’ll be better.” The dour-looking woman had slowly unbent as she tended Kate. “Lovely hair ye have. A proper shame ’twas allowed to go wild like, but up here people don’t know or care fer what a lady values or a gentleman admires.”
“No?” Kate murmured vaguely.
“Tha cap’n cares, clear enough,” Meg said slyly.
Kit? Yes. He cared. Unhappily, grimly, and grudgingly. “Why do you call him a captain?”
“What? Oh.” Meg brushed at the dress hem. “Believe me, I seen enough uniforms to know one when I see one. Half the young men of Scotland wear regimental rags. That’s an officer’s jacket he’s wearing. As fer why I says cap’n, well, captain is as good as a major when you don’t have to prove it.
“Did he come up to join the militia?” she went on. “Cause if he did, I’d warn him not to make it known here in Clyth.”
Kate frowned. “What militia?”
“Them that’s been staying at Parnell Castle ever since their captain was killed.”
“Killed?” Kate repeated.
Meg’s little knot of a face closed even tighter. “Aye. His replacement showed up last week, a Captain Watters, and at the marquis’s insistence brought the soldiers to the castle.” She sneered. “The marquis wouldn’t allow what protection he could find to stray far from his own concerns, would he? Besides, no one is fool enough to put militia in Clyth.”
“And why is that?” Kate asked, troubled anew.
“Because.” Meg’s eyes narrowed. She closed them, as though deliberating on something and then spoke in a rush. “Tha last excise man took more’n a day to die.”
Kate froze. Fear, abrupt and gut-emptying, flooded her.
Meg cleared her throat, scowling fiercely. “No need for you to look like that.” Amazingly, she sounded offended. “Ye dinna see him with his blood spilling from his belly,” she muttered. “And him so white and scared—” She broke off abruptly, and in rising horror Kate realized: Meg had seen the excise man murdered. She had been there.
Revolted, she hunched low in the water. She’d thought she was safe. She wasn’t safe. She would never be safe. Not as long as—
“Aye! I was scared!” Meg said shrilly, as if answering an accusation, and Kate suddenly understood that Meg had told her because she was a stranger and because Meg could no longer live with the secret or her guilt. “I’m still scared. Too scared to help meself, let alone a stranger. I stood there. I couldn’t move! I couldn’t breathe.” With sudden eagerness she leaned closer, whispering. “But mayhap I can help you. Have a care, ma’am. Be wary of Callum Lamont.”
Then, as if she’d alleviated some of her terrible guilt, Meg straightened. “There. As good as I can do.”
Kate shivered.
“Ach! Look at ye!” She dashed the back of her hands across her red cheeks. “Yer getting cold. No matter. We’re done now.” Her tone was determinedly casual. She might never have spoken of murder. “Up with ye now, Mrs. Blackburn.”
Kate rose, somehow managing not to flinch when the woman settled a thick towel over her shoulders. What if Meg told Lamont that she’d confessed to her what she’d seen? What would he do?
“Don’t look so worrit, ma’am.” Meg wagged her finger playfully, and Kate fought the gorge rising from her belly. How could Meg act as if she hadn’t just confessed to witnessing a murder? How could she live with herself for having done nothing to stop it? “Ye’ll be fine at the castle. It’s only us left here that need fear, and we’re used to that.
“Now, yer petticoat and chemise is dry, so you put them on and bundle up in yer cloak and go up to yer room. No one will ken that you’ve no dress beneath. Seem a shame to put filthy clothes over clean skin.”
Kate donned her undergarments, her emotions a riot of conflicting impulses: to condemn, to weep, to flee. To pity.
Would nothing in her life ever be straightforward again? Every turn took her into avenues she had not even known existed, let alone desired to explore. Smugglers and highwaymen, victims and victimizers, she thought, panicked and resentful. Poverty came with an additional penalty: knowledge.
She didn’t want to know any more. She needed to get to the castle, to a place where she understood the rules. She wanted nothing to do with such savagery and bestiality. She did not want to know men who killed, or wounded, or hunted one another. Men like Christian MacNeill.
She wanted her sheltered, blissfully ignorant life back.
And the first step to recovering that was to prepare for her arrival at the castle by dressing like a lady. Yes, she thought, her limbs shaking so badly she could barely navigate the sloping kitchen floor. Yes. That is what she would do.
She would wear the lilac batiste. Once she looked like a lady, all this would fade away. She would never again see men brawl in a tavern. She would never speak to another witness to murder. She would never lie sleepless, fearful that she might be accosted during the night. She would never trust her welfare to a stranger.
And Kit MacNeillwas a stranger. Regardless of what her body told her. She would stop dreaming about his sweet, ravishing kisses and hard, muscular body. She would forget his rare laughter and his brooding eyes. She would not concern herself over wounds she could see and others she only guessed at.
She gathered up her cloak, searching the hem for the last of her coins, and wordlessly placed them in Meg’s hand. Then, before the woman could draw her any deeper into her fear-framed life, she fled through the kitchen door.
Only a few men occupied the public room, and Kate lurched up the stairs that led to her room, her urgency to leave growing with each step. She must convince someone to take her to the castle tonight. She could not stand the idea of lying awake through the night, wondering which of the men drinking in the room beneath had knifed open another. She felt ill. Light-headed. Her body trembled.
She pulled the door open and froze.
Grace’s trunk lay empty on its side, its blue silk lining ripped, the gold-embroidered stars winking at her from the floor. Smashed and rent, strewn and heaped, the entire contents of the trunk had been upended in the room and rifled through: a ship’s barometer, a ruined Chinese puzzle box, Grace’s telescope, a smashed porcelain clock, books, their bindings ripped, their pages torn. Her gaze moved dazed among the debris. With a terrible sense of inevitability, she looked down at her feet and saw Charles’s leather medicine traveling chest, the drawers yanked out and the vials spilled of their staining contents.
All over her dresses.
Callum Lamont stared ahead of him, fingering his rapier. He was not in the best of moods. He’d been cheated of a grand treasure. True, he’d found some satisfaction in sending both Charles Murdoch and his bitch-wife to their deaths, but that satisfaction had long since disappeared, leaving only impotent anger.
He’d been hasty. He saw that now. But he’d been so very angry. Not only had Charles Murdoch kept secret the message from their “friend” that outlined the route of a richly laden French yawl, but he’d used four of Callum’s own men to wreck the damn thing and hide the booty in one of the—Callum looked up at the ceiling and pensively scratched his chin—five? ten thousand? caves or inlets or underwater grottoes that lined the coast. Cheeky bastard.
Charles, Callum thought darkly, had not been a very good associate—not like his “real” partner. Though that devil gave Callum the shivers, what with the way he was always poking holes in his own skin.
Murdoch would have gotten away with his treachery, too, if Callum’s partner hadn’t warned him. When Callum had found out what Murdoch had done, he’d killed him along with his wife, maintaining just enough presence of mind to set the bodies in Murdoch’s yacht and wreck it against the reefs. Then he’d gone in search of his men and the treasure that was rightfully his. So far, so good.
But then, the unthinkable had happened. He’d discovered that Charles Murdoch had killed the men who’d aided him—Callum’s men—to keep them from either disclosing his treachery or going off with the treasure themselves. At any rate, the men were dead. Blast Murdoch’s sly eyes. That had been some months ago, and he’d yet to find the treasure.
Callum drained the last of his whisky. The door banged open, and Callum lifted his head, expecting some of his lads to join him. Instead, the tall “driver” for the dark woman entered. He had the stink of a soldier about him, starting with that jacket and ending with the claymore strapped between his shoulders. And he looked familiar.
Callum cocked his head, considering whether the militia had sent him. Nah. The man was probably just a deserter who’d kept his coat out of sentiment or ire. The militia hadn’t stopped one boat from landing, and that, or so he’d been told, rankled Captain Watters, the replacement for the officer who’d been killed.
Callum’s dark mood lightened.
The tall man swept the plaid from his shoulders, looking around the room with the natural caution of a man used to danger. His gaze checked on Callum, then moved up the stairs before he crossed the room and commandeered a chair, calling for Brodie to bring him a whisky.
Brodie complied at once, answering the stranger’s imperious manner as much as his tone. Both irritated Callum Lamont. He didn’t like lads getting above themselves, lest that lad was himself. Callum Lamont was the King of Commoners. Nodding to Brodie to bring him another whisky, he rose and made his way over to the Highlander.
“What regiment did you run off from?”
The stranger slowly raised his gaze. His eyes were pale and dark at the same time, like ice coating basalt, all sparkling clear on the surface and ebon depths beneath. God. Where had he seen this bastard before?
“I don’t recall being introduced to you.”
Callum’s brows flew up. “Introduced, is it? My, aren’t we grand?” He dragged a nearby chair to the opposite side of the table, swung his leg over it, and sat down. “No,” he answered his own question, leaning forward, his hands flat against the table’s surface, “we’re not grand. We’re Highland rubbish, is what we are.”
“Are we?” The newcomer met Callum’s gaze uninterestedly.
“I did not hear your name.”
The light, deep eyes flickered up. “I didn’t give it.”
“Well, you might consider giving it now.”
With the speed of a striking serpent, twin daggers suddenly appeared in each of the Highlander’s fists and slammed deep into the table, scoring Callum’s wrists as they pinned his sleeves to the wood surface. Calmly, the stranger released the hilts and lifted his cup to his mouth. He took a drink. “Or I might not.”
Callum’s lips twitched. “You don’t want me for an enemy, lad.”
“I don’t want you at all…lad .”
“My men’ll be comin’ soon. They’re not a nice crew.”
“ ’S truth?” the Highlander asked with more amusement than trepidation.
“They’re the sort of lads who like a brawl.” Callum’s voice dipped suggestively. “Or a good lay.” His gaze moved suggestively toward the stairway.
The Highlander followed his gaze and then looked back at Callum’s sneering visage.
“Unfortunate you can’t do both at the same time now, isn’t it? But a man can only be in one place at a time,” he said, confident the stranger would heed his none-too-subtle threat.
The Highlander’s hand shot out, seizing Callum by the throat. For a second, Callum was too amazed to react, then he was fighting for his life. Without the least change of expression, the stranger’s grip tightened.
Exploding lights skittered across Callum’s vision. He heard a rattling sound and through a fog of pain recognized it as himself, trying to breathe.
“Do not ever,” he heard the Highlander say quietly, “ever threaten Mrs. Blackburn again.”
But prudence had never been Callum’s strong suit. He couldn’t back down from this man. Not in front of Brodie.
“She’ll be thanking me when I’m done with her!” he gasped, finally wrenching his arms free. But weakened, he could only claw uselessly at the hand tightening inexorably around his throat.
Above him, eyes as remorseless and cold as the arctic seas gazed down at him. A memory bubbled through the panic gripping him. Green eyes. Guinea gold hair. A filthy, undernourished lad with green eyes and a cold savagery in him that made Callum think he might be useful someday. Might be worth troubling over. Might be worth—
“You gonna kill the man what saved yer hide, Christian MacNeill?” The grip around his throat eased a fraction. The cool eyes flickered with sudden recognition.
“Aye!” Callum croaked in triumph.“Ye owe me. Ye can’t take me life, ye bastard!”
He could feel his windpipe crushing under the brute force of a grip used to wielding a claymore. His ears thrummed with pressure. Darkness covered him and he heard Christian MacNeill say, “It wasn’t much of a life anyway.”
And he knew nothing more.
Le
Mons Castle dungeon, France May 1799
“Watch out!” The Englishman launched himself into Kit’s side, knocking him down. Kit rolled and exploded upright, spinning around just in time to see a blade bury itself in the snarling Frenchman’s throat as a dagger dropped from the dead man’s hand.
Kit’s heart raced thickly. He knew the dead man, a savage beast who preyed on the young men in the prison and who’d become enamored of Kit’s green eyes. Until Kit had disenamored him with his fists.
“Thank you,” Kit said, turning to his champion.
The Englishman nodded, panting, toward the dead man. “He was goin’ to kill you.”
“Thank God you saw what he was about,” Douglas said as he and Dand appeared.
“Lucky for you I saw what the bastard was up to.” The Englishman nodded vigorously “I reckon you owe me proper, in’t that right?”
“Indeed.” Ramsey arrived, taking in the situation at once. “Ask and you shall receive. What’s the price of a man’s life these days? More to the point, what do you want?”
“I know you.” He pointed at Ram. “I seen you with a stick, playing at swords, with some of these Frenchie bastards. Look real good doing it. Elegant-like.”
Ram inclined his head. “You are too kind.”
“That’s what I want. I want you to teach me how to do all that fancy swordwork.”
“I am in your debt. Not him,” Kit said coolly.
“So you are, but I ain’t seen nothing you have that I want. Yet.”
“Leave off, Kit.” Ram shrugged. “Cut off your arm and pitch it at the poor bugger, you bloody prideful Scottish cur, if you think your honor demands it, but then let me have my bit of fun, will you? It should at least help relieve the tedium between beatings.”
“All right.” Kit allowed grudgingly. “But someday I’ll repay him.”