Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] (8 page)

Madeline’s gut clenched at the sight.
Had she truly burst through the palace gates, dodging the bishop’s own guardsmen, and giving poor Nella no choice but to tear after her? Had they really careened through orchards and herb gardens, sprinting past startled lay brothers, and clambering over walls and other obstacles like common riffraff?
Like beggary thieves?
Aye, they had, and the truth of it blasted heat onto her cheeks and lay like a cold, hard clump in the pit of her belly.
Shuddering, she leveled her most resolute look at Nella. “Do not speak of ‘the Lady of Abercairn’ again.”
Nella snorted, her brows shooting heavenward. “If the Lady of Abercairn is no more, then who was in such a fine ferment o’er a certain pinched-faced sacrist not so long ago?”
“Oh, bother!” Madeline blew out a gusty breath and eyed the swift-moving burn. A wade in its icy waters would cool more than her aching feet. “Certes, I am still . . . me,” she capitulated, struggling to yank off her right boot. “I fled because. . . .” she paused to catch her balance. “It . . . it was him again.”
Nella’s eyes rounded. “Your shadow man?”
“Aye.” The boot came free. “And more powerful than e’er before,” she added, pleased when her left boot slipped off without a fight. “Between his emotions welling inside me and the hawk-eyed sacrists crowding our every step, I could scarce draw breath.”
“In mercy’s name,” Nella breathed, tucking a damp-frizzled lock of red-brown hair behind her ear. “Now I see, my lady.”
I pray you do not,
Madeline almost blurted.
She didn’t want Nella to see, wasn’t quite ready to reveal she’d actually glimpsed the man.
Or risk having her friend guess the smooth richness of his voice had spelled her . . . especially when the few words he’d uttered had been anything but flattering.
For a very brief moment, other unflattering words, other masculine slurs echoed in her mind. Scornful voices expressing what they truly thought of her and why they’d come to Abercairn seeking her hand.
Cruelties she’d suffered repeatedly o’er the years, hearing them not with her physical ear but with her heart, thanks to her unusual talent . . . a plaguey gift surely bestowed on her by the devil himself.
The taunts, uttered by past suitors, still cut deep enough to send waves of emptiness and cold regret tearing through her.
Breasts resembling the udders of a milk cow, one marriage candidate had scoffed.
Hair so glaring a red, gazing upon it would blind a man, another insisted, incensing her further by declaring her curls too unruly for even an iron-tined comb to address its tangle-prone masses.
Lips as wide as the River Tay.
And most mortifying of all: passable enough to bed if a man simply dwelt on the depth of her sire’s pockets.
One by one, they’d crushed her confidence and stomped without mercy over her femininity until she’d wanted naught but to be left alone . . . perhaps even to seek the solitude and blessed peace of a veiled life.
And now, for good or nay, she must.
Madeline blinked, furious at how deeply her shoulders had dipped upon recalling the slurs, discomfited more to discover Nella’s sharp, perceptive stare on her.
“You were not meant for cloistered life, my lady,” the other woman commented with all the quiet confidence Madeline lacked, and so admired in her well-loved friend.
“Nay, verily I was not,” Madeline agreed, her gaze on a long series of splashing rapids. “Nor is it even close to what I’d once wanted of life.”
She sighed, wishing the cascading waters could carry away the remembered barbs.
And her dreams, for recalling them hurt far worse.
Especially now that she’d come face-to-face with the manifestation of those dreams.
She turned back to Nella. “I ne’er wanted aught but to be loved, truly and passionately loved, and for myself,” she said, the admission an ache on her tongue. “Not falsely, and not for my father’s fine keep and plentiful coffers of gold.”
“And you think to find such a man behind cloistered walls?”
“You ken why I shall take the veil,” Madeline said, folding her arms tight against her ribs, hugging her waist as she spoke. “And it scarce matters, for a man capable of such loving does not exist except in the songs of bards.”
Nella tilted her head. “Or in dreams, my lady?”
“Aye, in dreams, too,” Madeline admitted, looking aside.
In dreams . . . or at the sides of the privileged women who held their hearts.
As her shadow man’s heart was held.
Wholly and irrevocably, just as hers was inextricably bound to his.
Tied to him by invisible cords of golden silk.
The strange bond leaving her to suffer a dull, throbbing ache for what she intuitively knew could have been so dear if only they’d crossed paths in another time and place.
Unfolding her arms, Madeline pressed her hands against the small of her aching back and heaved a great, weary sigh. Such disturbing notions were best examined later, when she was no longer quite so tired, hungry, and dispirited.
Perhaps after she’d avenged herself on Silver Leg and whiled safe and secure behind the shielding walls of a suitably remote and obscure nunnery.
But even as she shrugged off her cloak and gathered up her skirts to join Nella in the burn’s chill waters, a tiny voice somewhere deep inside her laughed aloud at the flimsiness of her intentions.
In a different but not too distant corner of the same teeming bishop’s burgh, frustration gnawed on Iain’s dwindling patience with ever-increasing vigor. Gritting his teeth, he wished himself anywhere but in the midst of the noisome, tight-packed throng pressing through the arched pend of Glasgow’s busy Trongate.
A stench of unidentifiable foulness clung to the crowd, the unpleasant odor rising up from the jostling wayfarers to hover beneath the low stone-vaulted ceiling. The rank smell soiled the air in the pend as thoroughly as the refuse-strewn cobbles paving its length posed hazards for even the most surefooted Highland garron.
Iain coughed, near choking on the smoke of two pitchpine torches sputtering wildly in iron-bracketed holders in the middle of the tunnel-like passage. He blinked and dragged the back of his hand across his eyes, the biting sting of the acrid air making them water and burn.
Swinging about, he glared at the shaggy-maned Islesman riding close behind him. “By the mercy of God,” he said through tight lips, “let us be far from here by nightfall.”
The quintessence of calm, Gavin MacFie made no change of expression. “With His good grace, we shall be.”
“Be warned, MacFie, for I cannot account for my actions if we are not. I have not the stomach for—” Iain broke off when his garron lost its footing, its iron-shod hooves slip-sliding on the muck-slicked paving.
He should have iron-shod nerves!
Biting back a litany of craven mumblings, he tamped down his vexation long enough to soothe the garron, but the moment the beast calmed, Iain swore.
Just one quick oath, and muttered beneath his breath, but black enough to curl the devil’s own toes.
Feeling a wee bit better for letting loose such a prime epithet—and trying not to inhale too deeply—he urged his steed around a large pothole brimming with a particularly vile-smelling liquid.
Vile-smelling, and topped with slime.
Iain grimaced. “Ne’er in all the four corners of the world can I imagine a fouler place,” he groused. “Forging a path across a well-slagged peat bog would prove less trying.”
“A bairn’s work by any comparison,” Gavin agreed, his mild tone making subtle mockery of his supposed commiseration.
Iain’s tightly held composure at grave risk of unraveling any moment, he drew a leather-wrapped wine sack from within his cloak and helped himself to a healthy swig . . . to wet his parched throat and, if only for a moment, camouflage the reek of the pend’s dank, grimesmeared walls.
A blessedly short pend, praise the saints.
But his eyes widened in dismay, his mood worsening the instant he rode through the gatehouse arch. Instead of lashing his mount’s sides and putting Glasgow’s stench and chaos far behind him, he was forced to rein in, an even greater swell of humanity effectively barring the way.
Slack-jawed, he surveyed the open cobble-paved area abutting the gatehouse, and saw naught but shoving, shouting rabble, litter, and squalor.
Pilgrims, badge-and potion-peddling hawkers, women and children, barking dogs and scurrying pigs hurried about, their incredible number overrunning the streets and clogging the narrow rutted road stretching away toward St. Thenew’s Well, a lesser shrine some miles distant, and dedicated to St. Kentigern’s mother.
The next station on his journey of penance . . . as prescribed by his brother, and enforced by one Gavin Mac-Fie.
A man who believed himself descended of the seal people, and now Iain’s own gaoler.
Iain’s brows snapped together.
Selkies!
He
had no time for such drivel and nonsense.
Frowning, he shifted uncomfortably in the hard seat of his saddle and seriously considered the merits of throttling the bland-faced varlet.
Sorely tempted, he slid MacFie his darkest glare, but the unfazed lout maintained his placid mien, returning Iain’s stare as calmly as if he scarce noted the cacophonic chaos brewing all around them.
Iain ground his teeth in irritation. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear the mild-mannered bastard practiced schooling his features into blank-faced expressions of neutrality.
Without doubt, he swallowed broomsticks to keep his back so straight. Almost unconsciously, Iain squared his shoulders and began straightening his own spine . . . until he caught himself.
Compressing his lips into a taut line, he stared at the pandemonium ahead of him, refusing to further acknowledge the annoyingly even-tempered churl.
Aye, ridding the world of Gavin MacFie was tempting, but with innumerable lackwits, pilgrims, and scoundrels surrounding them, his chances of having done with Mac-Fie and breaking away before his brother’s brawnyarmed guardsmen set upon him were about as great as one such as he sprouting angel’s wings.
Donall’s grim-faced henchmen sat their own mounts a scarce lance length away, and on his brother’s orders no doubt, the dastards ne’er took their eyes off him, even taking turns tagging along when he went about his most private affairs.
So Iain MacLean, Master of Nothing, heaved a great sigh, swallowed his anger, and turned his mind to matters of more immediate import . . . such as the little silverlegged ex-voto resting in the small leather purse hanging from his waist belt.
Her
stolen treasure, plucked off the cathedral steps by the ever-observant MacFie after it had slipped from her fingers when she had bolted into the crowd.
Resting a hand over the pouch, his fingers sought and found the hard outline formed by the votive. It pressed against the soft leather and, pray mercy be his, but his loins began to tighten and twitch even at that dubious connection to the large-eyed lass.
Large-eyed
postulant,
a gleefully malicious voice from his darker side reminded him.
Full-bosomed, sweet-lipped, and every fair inch of her, his . . . if he dared for once trust his instincts.
Nay, his
should-have-been,
his MacLean heart amended.
“The devil himself couldn’t brew a greater travesty,”
he
muttered, and loud enough for any who cared to turn an ear his way.
Sore beset, he squirmed, the tightening of his male parts besieging all consideration of sticky fingers and nunhood, the unwanted bestirrings a greater nuisance than his aching throat, smarting eyes, and the jammed roadway combined.
Equally perturbing—nay, alarming—he couldn’t seem to lift his hand from his leather purse. His fingers stuck fast as if spelled, the image of the little silver-cast leg dancing before his mind’s eye, its significance perplexing him.
Abandoning his resolution to ignore MacFie, he slanted a sidelong glance at the bastard. “A question,” he began, his voice scratchy from the threads of smoke wafting out of the pend’s archway and seeming deliberately to curl past his nose.
“Aye?” Gavin returned,
his
voice smooth as a fresh spring morn.
As casually as he could, Iain voiced his concern. “The ex-voto the postulant dropped . . . such offerings represent a body part in need of healing, do they not?”
Gavin eyed him strangely, but inclined his head. “So it is believed. Or else whate’er part of the body received a healing, in which case they are tokens of appreciation to the miracle-spending saint.”
“Can you think of any other use for such votives?” Iain pressed, his fool hand still affixed to his purse.
“Not in holy places,” came Gavin’s swift reply.
Iain nodded agreement. He couldn’t think of any other use either . . . not wholesome ones anyway.
He swiped at his smoke-stung eyes again, blew out an exasperated breath.
No matter how he turned it, neither of the most logical possibilities fit the lass. Naught on her indicated a troublesome leg. Far from it, the quick glimpse he’d caught of her trim ankles and lower calves as she’d hitched up her skirts to sprint away, bespoke legs of the shapeliest sort.
Lithe, well formed, and bonnie enough to haunt his waking dreams for days.
And make his nights pure torture.
Especially when he wondered if the nest of curls at the juncture of such succulent limbs would prove the same coppery-gold as the single lock of glossy, curling hair he’d seen tumble from beneath her head veil in the Cathedral.
At once, Iain’s mouth went bone-dry, a fusillade of lascivious images bombarding him.
Could her lower hair possibly gleam as bright as that one bouncing curl?
Or carry a scent as sweet as the light, heathery one that had teased his senses when she’d sped past him?
Would
those
curls be lush and plentiful? Soft and damp beneath a man’s questing fingers?
His
fingers—Iain thrust away the thought before it could expand into even more treacherous musings. His misery complete, he yanked his hand from the leather pouch with sheer brute force.
But any relief at winning that small victory proved short-lived when the still-receding lump on his forehead began throbbing with renewed vengeance . . . and in nettlesome rhythm with the continued pulsing in a much more bothersome part of his body.
The mood of the smelly, shabbily clad masses altered subtly as well, shifting to an affable, almost celebratory air.
Iain slanted another glance at Gavin, then loudly cleared his throat when the other failed to notice him.
“Did you not say St. Thenew’s Well was a less-frequented shrine?” He lifted his voice, the whole of his perturbation, every head-splitting throb at his temples coloring his tone. “It would seem she is a larger draw than her son, God rest his sacred bones.”