“Aye,” Jeames said. “I would like that as well. To pretend that, for one more night, we are strangers in a strange town.”
Beatrice smiled. “Exactly.”
Jeames got to his feet. “Well then,” he said, “I s’pose I should be findin’ ye a cloak.”
* * *
Beatrice and Jeames rode up along the road that led from Castle MacKenzie to Afondale under the light of a half moon. Both of them were shrouded in voluminous travelling cloaks. Beatrice sat behind Jeames, holding him tight around his middle.
“When I was a boy,” Jeames said to Beatrice over his shoulder. “Me mither always used tae tell me that the half moon was the most magical phase.”
Beatrice felt warm and content sitting behind the Highlander. He was a solid and reassuring presence in a world that, in no time at all, would be turned upside down.
“Is that right?” she asked. “Why is that?”
“She said that, when the moon is waxin’, that is the time to push things along that ye have been workin’ on. She said it was the time of change, when ye are most likely to be able to achieve that which ye have set out tae dae.”
Beatrice shifted, giving the Scotsman a squeeze around his waist in the process. “She sounded like a great woman, your mother. An interesting woman. I would have liked to know her.”
“Aye. I’m sure she would have liked tae get tae ken ye as well, lass,” Jeames said.
They reined in on the outskirts of Afondale after passing the rest of the ride in a thoughtful silence. Beatrice had sat, clutching Jeames and resting her head on his broad back. She had lost herself for a time in the rhythm of the horse’s hooves, the rush of the wind and the scents of the coniferous forests that the passed through.
Once again, I get that feeling that something calls to me here. That feeling of having returned home, even though I have spent less than three weeks in this country in my whole life.
It was evident, once Jeames had tied his horse up, that festivities in the town were well underway. They had tried to time it so that the crowds would be at their thickest, Jeames advising that the best way to go unnoticed was not to slink about in the background but be in the thick of the action.
They went completely unremarked upon in their hoods and cloaks. The nights in the Highlands could be cold, and whilst this was not the chilliest evening that one might expect at that time of year, there was still a bite in the air.
Beatrice noticed that many of the locals seemed to have dispensed with the idea of using clothes for warmth and, instead, were opting to fight off the chill with copious amounts of ale provided by the Laird.
After they had walked past the sixth group of people, raising tankards and toasting the health of Laird Abernathy, Beatrice asked Jeames whether or not his father would mind that he had slipped off with her.
“Oh, I daenae ken about that, lass,” he said, handing her a brimming tankard of ale, which had been passed to him by a helpful man who was sat atop a barrel in the street and was distributing tankards out to passing revelers.
“You don’t know? Didn’t he say?” she asked, sipping her foaming beverage.
“Nay, he did nae say anythin’ because I deigned tae tell him of me plans.”
Beatrice choked into her tankard, sending beer foam flying in all directions. A few people around them cheered.
“He doesn’t know that we are here?”
Jeames grinned a rascally grin. “Nay, he does nae. Which reminds me: if ye see any guardsmen walkin’ about the place lookin’ a wee bit cross, ye may want tae keep yer head down.”
He held out his tankard to Beatrice and said, “Slàinte mhath.”
“What?” Beatrice asked.
Jeames chuckled. “It’s our Scottish toast, lass! Come now, ye cannae leave Scotland without at least kenning a little of our Gaelic tongue.
I think I have ‘kenned’ more than a little of your Gaelic tongue.
The thought popped into her head before she could stop it.
“Um, but what did you say?” she asked.
Jeames repeated himself.
Beatrice laughed and shook her head. “You’re a terrible teacher,” she said. “Come now, tell me slowly.”
Jeames laughed, took another draught from his tankard and pronounced it slowly. “Slan-ge-var,” he said. “Now, just say it quickly and ye’ll have it.”
Beatrice raised her tankard and said, ““Slàinte mhath!”
Jeames laughed as a few of the more boisterous locals took up the cry and raised their own tankards up high. The words echoed down through the streets.
“Slàinte mhath!”
Much later, after more tankards of the Laird’s ale than was probably prudent, Jeames and Beatrice mounted his horse and headed for MacKenzie Castle.
As they cantered homewards, Beatrice tried to reassemble the night in her head, but it had all melded into one wonderful blur of color, music, laughing and dancing. All in all, though, she had been left with the impression that she had had a very good time.
The ride back to the castle seemed to take far less time than the ride to Afondale had taken. Happily, the cold late evening cut through the fog of beer that seemed to have enveloped her brain and cleared it. Unfortunately, though, along with this clarity came remembrance.
You have a job to do now, a role to play. Remember?
This realization acted as a bucket of iced water and sharp slap in the face might have done. The pleasant, drowsiness of the ale seemed to be dispelled upon the instance.
I wonder if, even now, William is waiting for most of the castle to fall asleep? I wonder how long it will be before I am opening up that parlor door and committing the betrayal from which there will be no turning back?
She snuggled into Jeames’s back, wrapping her arms tighter about his comforting form and tried to will him to just keep on riding, to leave all of this behind.
Beatrice did not have long to dwell on this rather disheartening question. It was only moments later, or so it felt, that Jeames had cantered into the stables that sat at the bottom of the hill on which MacKenzie Castle sat.
“I best wipe down the horse and put her tae bed,” Jeames said. “Ye just sit there a minute.”
Beatrice did as she was told, not having the energy to even try and help with the grooming of the horse.
The two of them trudged up the shallow ascent, Jeames humming a tune softly as he went. It was the song that the two of them had last danced to, Beatrice realized.
In an attempt not to give anything away or to let Jeames know that something was amiss, Beatrice asked, “Do you think that your father will be cross?”
“Cross? Cross at what?” the Scotsman asked.
They had almost reached the imposing oaken doors that fronted the castle. On their way, they had met only two lonely-looking guardsmen, both of them rugged up in their plaids and looking grumpy at having pulled the short straw to stand watch.
“Cross at you for missing the banquet, for not telling him where you and I were going this evening.”
Jeames, who had drunk just as enthusiastically as she had of his father’s ale, waved a dismissive hand. “He may well be a wee bit annoyed, lass. Tae be honest wi’ ye though, I shall nae care on the morrow.”
“Why’s that?”
Jeames lumbered around. His eyes were a touch glassier than usual, but he looked at her with the unapologetically honest gaze of the nicely inebriated.
“Because ye shall be gone tomorrow,” he said simply.
Beatrice looked at him, smiling sadly.
“Aye,” Jeames said, running a hand through his dark hair. “Ye shall be gone, and much else that used tae seem important will suddenly cease tae be. I fear I shall be hurtin’. Hurtin’ so that a few sharp words from me faither will affect me nae at all.”
And you do not know the worst of it yet. But you will.
The guilt and shame of what she was about to do almost tore a confession from her lips right then and there. Only he
r deep-seeded loyalty to William stopped her from throwing herself on Jeams’ mercy and coming out with the truth.
Instead though, she touched his cheek and said, in as caring a voice as she had ever uttered, “Time for us to sleep, Jeames.”
“Aye, that it is,” Jeames replied.
The two of them walked up the steps and through the front door of the castle. There were a few tapers burning in the hall, but the castle was mostly shrouded in darkness.
Jeames insisted on escorting Beatrice to her room, saying that the last thing that she probably would want was to break her leg in the dark and end up stuck in the castle for the rest of her days.
A broken leg would be a small price to pay.
At the threshold to her room, Beatrice turned. Jeames’s face was lit by the guttering beeswax taper, every line picked out in stark relief.
To my eye there could be no finer sight. No more perfect a face.
Beatrice could not find the words to say. Could not think of the words that would adequately sum up how she had come to think of Jeames, how he had made her feel over the past two weeks or so, how she could describe the new feelings that he had unlocked inside her.
What do you say to someone that you come to care so deeply for, and that you will, most likely, never see again?
With an aching heart, she stretched up and kissed him softly on the mouth. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything.”
25
Beatrice waited a goodly while before she snuck back down into the heart of the castle with a candle of her own. Her heart, which had been a lead weight inside of her chest after Jeames, who had been grinning like the most handsome fool she had ever seen, had stumped off to bed, was now beating wildly somewhere in the region of her throat.
Please, God, let Ables have had too much to drink this evening. Let none of the staff stumble out of bed and into William and the circus folk.
The castle was cold and deserted and seemed twice as enormous in the deep darkness of the middle night. Beatrice scurried like a mouse through the mostly unlit corridors. In her room, she had thought about going barefooted to keep the noise to a minimum, but a few steps outside on the hard, stone flags of the corridor had convinced her that boots would be necessary. The corridors of the castle were freezing.
She had dressed herself in her equestrienne outfit, the tight, body-hugging leather garments that she had worn most of her adult life. The clothes in which her body fitted like a glove and that she had been wearing when she had laid eyes on Jeames for the second time, picking him out in the crowd shortly before tumbling from that running horse.
It feels as if that happened to some other person in some other life. But, now, I return to it.
She turned a corner, her mind skipping through the memories of recent days spent with Jeames at MacKenzie Castle and riding over the surrounding countryside, when she was brought to an abrupt halt. She collided with something that was at once both very solid and slightly yielding.
A dull noise like, oof, came from out of the darkness. Thankfully Beatrice did not drop her candle, but she only had the fact that her hand had tightened into a death grip in her shock to thank for that. Icy fear flooded her.
And so, I am discovered and the game is up.
Strangely though, along with the fear, she found that she was relieved. She reasoned with herself, now that had been caught wondering about the castle like a thief in the night, she would no longer be able to play her part as traitor to the Abernathy’s.
I should not be ridiculous. What do I think that they will do when I have to explain to them why I was out of bed at this time?
With baited breath, Beatrice looked up and tried to see who she run into.
“Beatrice?”
It was Jeames’s disbelieving voice that emerged from out of the gloom. A moment later, his familiar face loomed up into the dim light of the taper that Beatrice carried in its brass holder.
“Beatrice,” he said again, although this time it was not a question.
“Jeames, what–what are you doing out here?” she asked him.
It was a silly question, but the only one that she could think to ask at that moment in time, as she knew it would be the next one to pass his lips.
Bizarrely, this question seemed to give the burly Scotsman pause. His eyes, definitely less glassy than when they had parted at Beatrice’s bedchamber door, went slightly shifty.
“I–ah…Well, the truth is…The thing is, Beatrice, is that I–I was on me way tae see ye…”
He looked down at the ground and scuffed his feet. He looked so much like a naughty boy that had just been caught with his hand in the jam pot that Beatrice almost laughed. She might well have done, if she had not felt so wretched herself.
“To see me? At this hour?” she asked, stalling for time.
“Um, well, aye, I was.”
“Why?”
Jeames cleared his throat once or twice in a meaningful fashion.
Then Beatrice, even in the midst of her own panic, understood.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I see.”
The two of them stood in a soup of guilty, awkward silence that Ables, had he stumbled across them right then and there, would have wondered to behold.
He was coming to see me so that we might take up where we left off at the swimming hole…God, how I wish that was what the future had had in store for me. Right now, I could be being woken up by a soft knocking at my bedchamber door…
“What in the devil are you doin’ out o’ bed?” Jeames asked, breaking into Beatrice’s hopeful musings. “And dressed in all yer old clothes?”
Beatrice didn’t know what to say to him. The thought of seeing the hurt on his kind and generous face if she confessed her betrayal to him would be far worse than any other punishment that his father might wish to impose on her.
“Jeames, I–I just need to do something. Something that I can’t tell you about. Something–I just have to go now. Will you let me go, please?” It was only when she got to the end of her sentence that Beatrice realized that her voice had risen into a pleading hiss.
For a moment, Jeames looked totally unable to think what to say to this bizarre statement. Then he took a step towards her, his eyes still running over her equestrienne outfit, and said, “Ye’re leavin’.”
It was not a question, but a statement.
Beatrice did not answer, but her eyes sought to communicate, somehow, to the Highlander that everything would be far easier for both of them if he was just to go back to bed.
“Please, Jeames, if you care for me, you’ll go back to bed and– and you will set a guard on your door.”
Jeames’s face contorted into a frown of confusion and astonishment at what he was hearing.
“Go back to me room? Put guards on me door? What in the world are ye talkin’ about, Beatrice?”
Beatrice was already in a state of extreme agitation, and the fact that it was becoming increasingly evident that Jeames was not going to do as she asked was only adding to it.
“Please, Jeames, she begged. “If you care for me at all you’ll leave me and go back to bed.”
“Dae ye nae see, lass?” Jeames said, taking her gently by the arms. “It is because I’ve come to care fer ye so much that I must have ye tell me what is goin’ on. By whatever means, I will help ye. If ye’re in trouble, we’ll face it side by side.”
Beatrice weighed her options. Looked up into the kind, open face of the tall Highlander, lit by the warm glow of the beeswax taper. The fight went out of her. She sagged against the wall, tears of shame and self-disgust prickling the corners of her eyes.
“Fine,” she said. “I shall tell you. I shall tell you everything.”
Jeames stood impassively next to her, whilst the taper burned lower and all that could be heard were the secret sounds of a castle moving and sighing in the night.
“Ballantine’s Circus is just a sham,” she said, unable to meet Jeames’s eye.
“
A–a sham?”
“Well, not just a sham. Obviously, we perform and are skilled in our own unique ways. What I mean is, the circus is the distraction; a convenient reason that people happily accept a whole bunch of strangers moving into their town or village. The real reason that we move around though, the real reason that William does put on his shows, is so that we can steal from the towns we visit.”
Jeames’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
Awakening His Highland Soul (Steamy Scottish Historical Romance) Page 24