Lady Hargrave’s grip failed as a spasm overcame her, and the cup nearly tumbled away into the darkness as she coughed and choked against the slab, each breath sounding like a strained whistle.
As if she was dying.
“Milady!”
After what seemed an eternity, Caris straightened slightly over her and brought her pale, shaking hand to stroke the hair back from Iris’s forehead, her cheek, and she realized the drink had done more good than she’d expected; her throat was almost numb.
“Milady, hurry,” she rasped.
“I will…release you, Iris. Only…do be patient…a moment,” she chastised with a rasp. “Do.”
Iris stared up at her in confusion, her mind seeming to catch on something the woman said. And then she realized that Lady Hargrave had addressed her as Iris. Her face must have given it away, for the woman’s smile deepened knowingly.
“Yes, I know. It pains me…to admit that I did not realize the truth on my own, especially after…you spoke of your brother.” The woman’s words broke off as she struggled to catch her breath. “I was so enamored of you. So…trusting. Lady Paget was your undoing…after all.”
Caris gasped, and Iris didn’t know how any air at all was getting into the woman’s lungs at the tight whisper of sound. “There is no use…denying it. What happened to…Beryl? I must know.” She pulled a kerchief from her sleeve and held it to her mouth, and again Iris was struck by the strong smell of smoke.
It could not only be Satin’s recent presence that had brought on such difficulties for the woman.
Iris swallowed with some strain herself now, she realized. The numbness in her throat had increased.
“She died. After the birth of her child.”
Caris’s eyes narrowed over the kerchief.
“I had nothing to do with her death,” Iris breathed. “I swear. I did everything I could to help her. But I was desperate to gain Northumberland, and her death was the perfect opportunity to return.”
Lady Hargrave lowered the kerchief, gasping weakly. “To return…to me?”
Iris was confused. “To return to the land of my family. I didn’t yet know you, my lady.”
“You did,” Caris rebutted, her chest heaving pointlessly. “You…don’t remember.”
“Perhaps I don’t,” Iris acknowledged. “I find that I am muddled just now. I—my lady, I’ve only tried to protect you. But we must go.”
“Protect me from what…sweet Iris?”
“From Lord Hargrave,” Iris insisted, her voice sounding hollow and echoey. “I know about the people he’s murdered. The young girls he’s taken.”
Caris nodded weakly. “Do you? I’ve already told you…Lord Hargrave would never harm me.” She leaned close to Iris’s face, her breath bitter and faint against Iris’s mouth. The woman’s nose was running unchecked. “When your parents…died, I wanted to take you. Lucan. Mostly you. I have…fond weakness…orphans.”
Iris felt her mouth going slack, but it wasn’t from surprise; her entire face seemed to be going numb, creeping down her neck to the top of her chest.
The drink. The drink in Euphemia’s chamber.
A dead girl’s meal…
“My lord forbade it. Too suspect. I let you go…pretty child. All…dark hair.” Her forearm moved as though she were stroking Iris’s head again, but Iris couldn’t feel the woman’s touch as Caris seemed to collapse more heavily against the table. “Euphemia fled to…fire…at Castle Dare. To find…Thomas…she thought. She left me…for him.” The words ended on a wheeze. Caris paused, looking deep into Iris’s eyes as she struggled to draw breath. “Her father.”
“Iss true?” Iris slurred. “Cordelia?”
“Cordelia.” Her words were little more than breathy squeaks. Caris lifted the heavy-looking cup and drank from it, choking as she tried to swallow, spraying Iris’s face with a fine mist of the green-smelling liquid.
In a moment the woman could gasp again. “Cordelia didn’t… understand. She discovered…my husband’s interest in…the human body. She didn’t…understand. Wouldn’t…listen. He is brilliant. Lord Hargrave knows more…about…what a person can withstand and recover from…as do…the greatest surgeons…in the East. The organs…their functions. He should…been a master teacher. But he was chastised…hated…hunted for his work.”
Caris raised the cup once more, and this time managed to swallow whatever liquid remained in the cup. When she looked again at Iris, her eyes streamed, the circles beneath them purpling. She gulped each breath now, as a fish coming to the surface of a pond.
“We knew…Cordelia was pregnant, stupid girl. If she would have stayed…silent, she could have…married weak little Thomas. But no. No, Cordelia was going to…tell about the stupid servant girl. Many girls…but all one girl. All the same. All eager to… seduce the lord and gain…his favor. He let them think…they’d won him. Stolen him away to…a secret place. Here.” Her words ended on a screech of breath.
“Cordelia freed her,” Iris whispered as she herself realized.
Caris nodded and leaned even closer, kissing Iris gently on her slack lips. “But the girl…couldn’t run. Mercy. What happened to Cordelia was…an accident. She fell. I had to…stop her screaming. She would have…suffered. Then I realized…my responsibility. Take care of…my girls before…they ended up here. I don’t like it when…he touches them—they’re…never the same afterward. Pieces…missing.”
Iris’s voice was barely audible. “Cordelia’s baby?”
Caris coughed into Iris’s face, and her tongue darted out, trying in vain to wet her lips. “I’d forgotten. But…my lord…is a skilled surgeon.” She leaned even closer. “Life…emerged…from death-h-h.”
Iris moaned in horror, too weak to do anything more.
“I loved them,” Caris insisted, her voice nothing but a wheeze now, the sagging bodice of her gown revealing skin over heaving ribs, a living skeleton. “All my girls. And you. Could not…let them suffer so.”
Caris reached down to Iris’s hands, and she heard a faint rattling through the dizzy spinning of her head. Her forearms rocked free as the manacles around her wrists were released. Then her ankles.
“There,” Caris wheezed. “Go. Run.”
Iris tried to sit up as she swung her legs over the side of the table, but it was as though she no longer had command of her torso. The world spun as she tumbled to the cold stone floor, banging her suddenly heavy head and scraping her face on the supports as she fell. She strained to lift her head on her weak neck, looking at Lady Caris’s blurry slippers, tried to get her hands beneath her.
Her head jerked back and Caris squatted over her, grasping the top of her head by her hair. She saw the flash of the blade in the torchlight, but was thankful that she could not feel it against her throat.
“Just like them,” Caris wheezed. “You want to…leave me. I won’t let you…sweet Iris. You would…burn.”
Lady Caris suddenly wobbled on her feet, falling over to one elbow. Iris’s head jerked with the motion, and a white mass swept across her face.
Satin.
Lady Caris’s scream was a rusty puff. “Get it…away!” Her words were broken, rocky. She kicked out at Satin and he yowled pitifully as he skittered across the stones against Iris.
No! Iris’s mouth formed the word, but no sound came out. Her own lungs felt tight, frozen, in her chest.
“Away,” the woman gasped. “Can’t…” The blade rattled to the floor as Caris clawed at her throat, dragged her bodice down from her chest. Her mouth continued to move, but no sound at all issued forth.
Iris’s view was blocked as Satin walked between the women once more. He butted Iris’s cheekbone, her chin too, perhaps, then sat down. Iris saw the dark streak on his fur. Her blood.
Satin, she mouthed.
Her eyes were closing. And she was no lo
nger cold.
* * * *
Padraig knew he’d been right the deeper he descended through the bends of the dark stone passage. The steps were impossibly old, worn smooth and slanted beneath the soles of his boots, the walls jagged under his left palm as he stepped carefully, his sword in his right hand. The stairs curved to the left in a semiregular pattern, and after what seemed like a quarter hour of creeping over the stones, a faint glow flickered up the passage.
Light. Someone was down there.
It took all Padraig’s will not to shout for Iris. If she was there she was likely not alone, and for all Padraig knew there could be another way into the subterranean depths. And so he crept on, at last coming out of the narrow channel into a low-ceilinged, wide room, it’s damp-striped walls ringed with benches and shelves, each of which were laden with crockery of all sizes, corked bottles in varying colors, leather-wrapped jugs sealed with wax.
And where no containers stood, tools and utensils and implements of unknown and terrible purpose hung on tidy hooks, all the supplies fitted together so perfectly as to have created a mosaic of sorts. All the tools were dark, stained…
And Padraig noticed the old, wide-shafted boots resting on the floor near the seam of wall—boots discolored with thick, dark grime that could only be grisly in origin. And above the boots, a pair of long, leather aprons, perhaps one time of light color but now splashed with what appeared to be drying blood.
Padraig’s heart stuttered in his chest. Had Hargrave already solved the problem of Iris Montague?
Was Padraig—and Caris Hargrave—too late to save her?
Padraig forced himself on toward the torchlight beckoning from a turn of corridor beyond the iron gate that stood open at the far end of the gruesome supply room. There was still no sound of anything living in the dungeon, and Padraig wondered with anguish how anyone could survive down here for long under the terminal weight of dread emanating from the very stones.
Padraig crept forward, clenching his jaw against the emotion that prickled behind his eyes.
Please, God, spare her. Spare her for her kindness, even to those who doona deserve it. Spare her for her courageous heart. Spare her for her clever mind. The people of Northumberland will need her hope and her fortitude now more than ever.
Spare her also for me, so that I may spend the rest of my life caring for her, and seeking to be as good and honorable as she.
Padraig came around the corner, and for a moment his eyes couldn’t differentiate between the shadows beneath the tall, wide table and the shapes on the floor. But then the shape closest to him jerked, and a breathy squeal emanated from it.
It was Caris Hargrave, her face a terrible gray, her eyes bulged, her lips turned blue, as her own fingers dug into her throat like claws.
And beyond her, facedown, lay the still, crumpled shape of Iris, a white, fluffy pile near her dark hair. Satin.
The cat yowled pitifully.
“Nae.” Padraig sheathed his sword and stepped over the noblewoman to drop to one knee at Iris’s side.
“Iris,” he called. He lifted her upper body and turned her in his arms, holding her against his chest. “Iris, look at me, lass.”
Her eyes weren’t closed evenly, he noticed, and her lips were slack. Her dark hair was like an inky river around her pale face and he smoothed it back with a shaking hand to lean his ear close to her mouth. He cursed the pounding blood that roared in his head and drowned out any sound—he could neither hear nor feel breath.
“Nay. Nay.”
Padraig gathered her high up in his arms and then stood, stepping once more over the noblewoman. The cat mewed, and its lithe, fluffy limbs scissored past Padraig, sending him like a streak out of the chamber and toward the stairs.
Padraig carried Iris up the interminable spiral, feeling the heat increase, the choking smell of smoke thicken as they climbed, and he wondered that he wasn’t delivering them both into an inferno. He bumped his shoulder into the panel at the top of the black stairs, and the lamp he’d left on the table was only the tiniest twinkle of starlight in a black sky. The room was nearly filled with smoke, and so he knew that the passage beyond would be impassable to them.
Satin was nowhere to be seen, and he sent up a breath of prayer that Iris’s beloved pet would be spared.
He stood just beyond the door of the hidden passage, Iris still limp in his arms, struggling against the fear that wanted to overtake him. Their only two options were to retreat once more to the stone dungeon to pray that the burning keep did not collapse and smother them, or the window.
Padraig couldn’t imagine spending his final moments in that ancient den of torture, and so he strode through the ever-thickening smoke to the single, narrow window in one of the oldest chambers of Darlyrede. He lowered Iris to the floor and then rose up to push at the thick wooden frame. It rattled, bowed, but then Padraig stopped, coughing, his lungs already burning.
Once the window was open, the room would become like a chimney for smoke and flames—once begun, he could not hesitate.
Padraig dropped down to his knee and shook Iris.
“Iris,” he shouted. “Iris, you must wake up. Wake up! Iris!”
She gave a raspy moan in her throat—the slightest sound—but it was like a choir of angels to Padraig’s heart.
“Can you hear me, lass? You’ve got to stand on your feet—we have to go through the window.”
“Padraig,” she whispered. “My legs feel strange.” She began to cough.
Padraig pressed his lips together with a curt sigh.
Have faith.
“Listen to me, lass,” he said in a rush, his own throat raw with smoke. “I’m going to break out the window and lower you down. I doona know how far it is, you ken?”
“Lady Caris…”
“I couldna carry you both,” he said, guilt heavy on his heart. “I had to choose.”
“She poisoned me,” Iris whispered. “She killed Cordelia. She was going to kill me too.”
Padraig couldn’t let the shock of her words overtake him in the moment, and so he ignored the horrifying declaration. “Shh—you must try to stand, ken? Up you go.” He lifted her around her ribs and leaned her up against the wall near the window. Iris slid at first, but Padraig propped her higher, and her knees seemed to lock. “Hold just there. You must stay up, Iris. You must.”
He turned to the window once more, ripping down the long, heavy drape in two swift pulls, working by feel alone as the room was completely black now. Iris coughed and choked in the darkness; Padraig’s own eyes ran with tears.
He wrapped his hand in one end of the drapery and punched through the thick glazing. A breeze of hot air whooshed past his face as he swept at the sides of the frame, clearing away the jagged shards. He stuck his head out into the cold night and shouted with surprised relief—the narrow window was over the curtain wall, not three stories above the bailey as he’d feared, but perhaps only twelve feet above the stone wall walk. The fallen snow flickered against the reflected glow of the burning keep against the backdrop of night.
“Padraig?” Iris choked.
He ducked back inside, and where the room had before been black, a terrible heat now painted the absence of color, as if hell itself had bloomed around them. Padraig felt Iris grasping for him in their shared blindness. They had perhaps only moments left before the flames reached them.
“It’s the wall beneath you,” he rasped, his throat parched and raw as he looped the length of drapery around her back and beneath her arms. “Nae far. Bend your knees and roll when you drop.” Padraig turned her toward the window and lifted her to the sill, helped her to fit her legs through the opening. He held the ends of the drape in one of his hands and Iris’s wrist in the other while she slid through, the little sounds of scraping glass on stone beneath her causing him to wince. “Did you hear? Roll.”
&nb
sp; “Yes,” she choked. “Don’t leave me, Padraig.”
“Get far out of the way. Far as you can,” he said as he let her slide out further, stretching his arms, his back to their limits to retain his hold on her for as long as he could. He took firm hold of the ends of the drapery and raised up on his toes. “Go!”
Padraig thought he had never known such fear in his life as when he felt Iris’s sliding reverberate through the thick material, and then her short scream cut through the smoke boiling around him out the window. He thought he heard the soft, crumpling thud of her landing, but he couldn’t see the wall any more for the heavy billows climbing the keep from the lower levels. He let loose of the limp drapery and it was swallowed up by the black smoke.
“Stay back,” he choked as he gained the window ledge. He turned onto his stomach and slid over the edge, his sweaty, sooty fingers already slipping, the flesh of his palms scraping away as he fell free of the window.
He’d tried to keep his legs loose as he fell, so whether he had turned in the billowing smoke or instinctively reached out with his feet to meet solid ground, the end result was a sharp pain in his lower left leg before he fell onto his side on the stones with a cry.
But there was no time to concern himself with so slight an injury. Iris was at his shoulder then, her hands brushing over him. Iris, alive and speaking to him, urging him to his feet.
“Are you all right?” she asked as he pulled her aright. Her legs were still weak, for she sagged against him.
“Fine,” he said, turning to her and gathering her against him, wrapping both arms so completely around her shoulders that she was truly enveloped by his embrace. He would never let her go, he thought. But they both flinched and ducked as a pair of flaming window frames plummeted from the uppermost floor with a terrible explosion of glass and smoke.
“Let’s get away from here,” Padraig said and, limping, half-carried her to the edge of the wall.
A large crowd of people were looking up at the façade of Darlyrede House, the bright light flickering over them, indicating to Padraig that the fire was so much thicker on the front of the hold. Their faces were solemn, round with horror as they watched—soldier, servant, nobility alike. Padraig waved an arm and shouted.
The Scot's Oath Page 23