by Hope Tarr
My Lord Jack
By Hope Tarr
Refreshed version, newly revised by author.
Former French courtesan Claudia Valemont can’t believe her life has come to this: standing in front of a Scottish judge, sentenced to death for stealing a horse. She fled France to find her father and escape the hangman’s noose. Now here she is, facing the same fate—alone, desperate and penniless.
“Hold! I will speak for her.”
Burly Scottish hangman Jack Campbell takes pride in his work: serving justice and giving the condemned a quick end to their sorry lives. Why he spoke for that pale, hollow-eyed Frenchwoman he’ll never know. But now he’s stuck with her—assigned to be her keeper for six months’ indenture.
Bound together by the rules of her sentence, Jack and Claudia learn to appreciate their differences. But as their wary affection turns to tender desire, secrets from the past appear and threaten to destroy their future…
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Contents
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
About the Author
Prologue
A Village Near Selkirk, The Scottish Border Country
September 1773
It was a fine day for a hanging.
The rolling green hillside was shot purple with heather and golden with gorse and the tart breeze of early autumn carried the peaty pungency of recently tilled crofts. That eve there would be a grand cèilidh with whiskey, food and fiddling. Who knew but if no English patrols were sighted perhaps a dirge or two on the outlawed pipes might be risked.
For sweet Margaret “Maggie” Campbell lay in the kirkyard beneath a makeshift wooden marker that likely wouldna last out the winter. Ten years before she’d done the unthinkable, spread her legs for a Sassenach dragoon. ’Twas only her swollen belly that had saved her from being tarred and feathered and set on display in the stocks. As matters stood, she was to count herself fortunate that Tam McBride, the blacksmith, had come forward to take her to wife even if he was old enough to be her da and had a taste for the whiskey. And if in the years that followed her fair face was more often than not marred by bruises and her honey-brown eyes dulled with weeping, there were those to shake their heads and note that ’twas no better nor worse than the wretched lass deserved.
But now that she was dead and buried, it was easy to remember that once she’d been bonny and sweet, a fine full figure of a woman with hair the rich red gold of a shiny new copper and a smile to warm a man in all the right places. Scant shame there seemed now in tipping back a dram in honor of her memory or swiping at an errant tear.
Or in turning out to give her murderer a proper Scottish sendoff.
Maggie had been slain by a thief on her way home from market and, according to those who’d found her puir battered body on the roadside he’d enjoyed her aplenty before striking the fatal blow. That her eldest boy, Jack, the child of her sinning, had escaped the blackguard’s notice by cowering in the mound of straw at the back of the dray was either a minor miracle or proof positive that the devil did indeed mind his own. Unnatural creature, the wean had yet to give up a tear or utter so much as a word on his murdered mother’s behalf, though a sennight had passed since the tragedy.
The “unnatural creature” stood still as a statue beside his stepfather, staring up at the scaffold with brown eyes the exact color and shape of his mother’s. His half-brother, five year-old Callum, hunkered down in the dirt by his da’s feet, too busy poking his stick into the mouth of the green glass jar containing the butterfly he’d captured that morning to take much note of the proceedings.
But Jack saw, smelled, heard—felt—everything. The tension of anticipation thickened the crisp fall air, stirring feet to shuffle and cutting tempers short. Even the earth beneath his own bare feet seemed to pulse with an eerie watchfulness, keeping time with the staccato pounding of his own heavy heart and the drumbeats guiding the grim processional from gaol to scaffold.
Da dum, da dum.
The crowd’s whispers quieted to a dull murmur as the prisoner, white-faced and quaking, approached the planked platform steps. Hands bound in front of him, he hesitated, starting up only after receiving the warder’s shove. Looking on, Jack swiped his own sweaty hands down the front of his breeches but kept his gaze fixed on the gallows where the functionaries were assembling.
Stepping onto the platform were the priest, Father Angus, the village apothecary whose job it would be to confirm death, and finally Seumas, the hangman. Once the sight of Seumas in black cape and hood would have sent Jack tearing off in the opposite direction. A week older and a lifetime wiser, he kent that it wasna spooks and goblins a boy need fear but the savagery of flesh-and-blood men. He now saw the hangman not as a bogeyman but as a dark prince, an avenging angel charged with upholding all that was good and pure and just.
Mam had been those things and more—sweet and kind and sad. Most of all she’d loved Jack with all her heart as he had her. Now, like the kitten his little brother had snatched from his arms and tossed down the well, she was lost to him. Never again would she come to his room to hear his prayers at night, scold him for not scrubbing behind his ears or croon words of comfort to take the sting from the taunts the other children cast along with their stones. Sassenach spawn, devil’s changeling, bastard.
Da dum, da dum.
Black cloak catching the wind like a sail, the hangman strode to the platform’s center. Amidst the priest’s droning of Latin prayers, he bowed to the crowd, then turned back to tend his prisoner. From where he stood, Jack saw that the latter’s legs quivered like jelly; positioning him beneath the beam, toes to the chalk line, couldn’t have been simple, but the hangman made it seem so. Taking hold of the rope, he slipped the loop over the prisoner’s head with almost loving care, murmuring words of encouragement even as he cinched it about the scrawny throat, making small adj
ustments until the metal eye was situated just so over the bobbing Adam’s apple.
Da dum, da dum.
Jack felt the prick of gooseflesh on his upper arms as the white cloth was dropped over the condemned man’s face, blocking out his last earthly view. Then the executioner stepped back to take his place by the pulley. The crowd, and Jack with it, held its collective breath, waiting for the single, swift stroke that would launch the killer of Maggie Campbell McBride into eternity.
A sudden heave of the rope hoisted the culprit heavenward, feet dancing on air, scarecrow’s body swiveling on the four winds like a weather vane. Later Jack would learn that nigh on forty minutes passed before the horn was sounded and the black flag raised. But for the small, unblinking boy, time froze into a single moment, with neither beginning nor end. Like an insect caught in the sticky resin that would harden into amber, the terrible, raw beauty of the struggle would be preserved in his memory for all time.
And though he’d years yet before he’d begin to fill out his long limbs and big clumsy hands and feet, though it had never once occurred to him to harm a living soul, from that day forward Jack knew what he would be when he was a man grown.
Jack Campbell was going to be a hangman.
Chapter One
Twenty Years Later, October 1793
“Imbécile! Voleur! Brigand!”
Shivering as much from outrage as from the pelting rain, her sodden cloak weighing down her aching shoulders like an anchor, Claudia seized on the sole reliable remedy for warding off the tears that threatened. She hauled back her foot and dealt the coach’s mired and broken rear wheel a sound kick. Unfortunately temper and the thin leather of her worn half boot proved to be scant shields against solid metal. Silver-tailed stars flashed amidst the sheeting of rain.
Blinking hard against the smarting of a stubbed but hopefully unbroken big toe, she lifted watery eyes to the mail coachman and shouted, “You take my money. You…you promise I will arrive in Edinburgh by nightfall, in Linlithgow by the morning next, and now you tell me that we must spend the night here. Here!”
Here was a squat, thatch-roofed structure that served as both coaching inn and local public house. That she, Claudia Valemont, should be forced to lodge in such a hovel was ample cause for humiliation. That she no longer possessed the funds to pay for bed and board was beyond humiliation. Beyond bearing.
The back of the driver’s broad, hatless head reappeared from the bowels of the coach boot. He twisted about to look back at her, a pained expression hanging on his ruddy, weather-beaten features. “Wheesht, there’s nay cause tae get yerself in a swivet o’er what canna be helped. ’Tis a mercy we made it ’ere afore that axle went.”
Whatever it was that passed for mercy in this barbarous country of Scotland, Claudia had experienced precious little of it since crossing the border the day before. If England was a nation of shopkeepers, surely Scotland was a land of savages. Shaggy brutes all—their manners were as coarse as their unappetizing peasant food, their thoughts as unfathomable as their vulgar, discordant dialect. Had she known when she landed in Dover that Linlithgow, not London, was to be her destination; that the bumpy Channel crossing was to be the forerunner to an even bumpier, more punishing journey north by coach; she might have sailed back to Paris and let the mob have her.
But now there would be no turning back. Determined to be heard above the wind’s howling and the battering of the rain, she yelled, “I tell you I will not stay in this despicable place.” No lie, that, for she’d surrendered the last of her Scotch pounds for coach fare to fund the final leg of her journey.
From the hollow of the boot the muffled reply echoed, “We’re tae bide ’ere and there’s no a blessed thing ye can do aboot it, so ye may as well go on inside wi’ t’others.”
In true British fashion, her five fellow passengers had collected their bags and filed across the muddy inn yard like so many sheep. No doubt they were even now ensconced before a roaring fire, quaffing their coarse ale and tearing into their beefsteak suppers. Claudia felt a pang of envy take root in the pit of her belly, the first thing to fill it since the single, miserable oatcake she had supped on the evening before. Petite bourgeoisie and peasants though her travel companions were, their unfashionable clothes looked sturdy and snug and their flesh well fed.
Chafing against her helplessness, she clenched the handle of the leather traveling bag. Small as it was, it contained the sum of her worldly riches: the mother-of-pearl comb; the precious vial of rose perfume, from which she doled out one daily dab behind each ear; and the sole proof of her paternity, the tartan brooch that once had belonged to her father.
Her father, Gearald Drummond, the earl of Aberdaire. In London she’d presented herself on the marble steps of his Berkeley Square townhouse only to discover that several weeks prior, His Lordship had decamped to his grouse moor near Linlithgow, five leagues or so west of Edinburgh. What he would say when his bastard daughter turned up at his door in Scotland was anyone’s guess, but the small, fragile part of her still capable of hope insisted that once he recovered from the shock he would be pleased and willing to keep her with him.
Peering around the edge of her cloak hood, she lifted her gaze heavenward. Père, please let him want me, for what will I do, where will I go, if he sends me away?
The boot hatch slammed closed, startling Claudia back to her immediate problem. The driver started down, a burlap sack slung over one shoulder. “Look, miss, I dinna ken how it is folk travel where ye come from, but ye’re in Scotland now. Even if the roads was dry as bone, we’d no get verra far wi’ only three workin’ wheels.”
Claudia’s command of Scots vernacular was imperfect at best, but sarcasm was easy enough to recognize in any tongue. Throat raw from raising her voice, she waited until his big feet met the spongy ground with a squishy thud before snapping back, “There is a forgeron, a blacksmith, in this misérable village, is there not? But of course there must be. You have only to call for him to repair the wheel and we can be on our way.”
“Ask Tam McBride tae come out in this weather!” He tossed back his great, grizzled head and guffawed, nearly unseating his burdens. “Like as no the auld sot’s inside, drunk as David’s sow and toastin’ his toes by the fire.” The flinty gaze tucked beneath the jutting brow lost its mirth as he added, “Where I’ve a mind tae be if ye’ll cease yer haverin’ and kindly step out o’ my way.”
But Claudia had only begun to “haver.” Hoisting her chin, she fixed him the stare that once had cowed a Parisian street mob bent on bloodletting. Transferring her luggage to her left hand, she held out her right palm up. “Alors, since you refuse to honor your word, I must insist you return my fare.”
Once the rain lightened, she would hire a hack from the stables and be on her way. Traveling alone would render her an easy mark for bandits or worse but she had a small knife tucked into her right boot; in Paris she had proven to herself that she could draw it if the need arose. Even so, images of her last weeks there, the remembered feel of rough hands dragging her toward the swinging noose amidst shouts of “À la lanterne!” drew a shudder that owed nothing to the biting wind.
“No a chance, unless…” He hesitated, running his tongue over wind-cracked lips, and Claudia’s heart leapt with hope. “Unless, that is, ye’re minded tae earn it. Let’s ’ave a look at ye.” He reached for her, knocking back her hood.
“Non!” The sudden dump of rainwater on her bared head was a shock, but a small one compared to the terror of seeing that large, thickly gloved paw coming toward her. With no conscious thought beyond her body’s instinct to preserve itself, she hauled back her curled hand and struck.
The blow clipped him below the chin. He blinked, surprise and the weight on his back sending him staggering backward.
Steadying himself, he shook a fist in her face. “Bloody Frog scut! Stay out ’ere all the bloody night if ye’ve a mind, only see ye steer clear o’ me.” With that, he turned and plodded across the inn yard.
Shaking with reaction, Claudia fixed her senses on the heavy slapping of his retreating footfalls and drew several calming breaths. Chaos gradually ebbed, leaving her aware of throbbing knuckles and the rivulets of icy rainwater streaking down her back.
Yanking the hood over her wet head, she vowed, “I will walk to Linlithgow if I must. Oui, if I must, then that is what I will do.”
But first she would have a word with the blacksmith. The one thing she had learned about this miserable island since her arrival was the fickleness of its weather. The skies could change from brilliant blue to deepest black and back again within a few short minutes. Despite the gray skies overhead, it was still light and the accursed coach was equipped with lanterns, after all. If she could find this Tam McBride and convince him to repair the wheel, then surely her fellow passengers, now fortified with food and drink, would join her in demanding their driver carry on? While he might ignore one havering woman, five disgruntled passengers, two of them men, would be considerably more difficult to dismiss.
Contemplating the coachman’s face when he realized that she’d raised his entire human cargo to mutiny, Claudia felt a small smile, her first in weeks, curve her lips. She took firm hold of her bag and started forward. Unfortunately her feet failed to follow. Falling headfirst, she let out a shriek, her free hand flailing for purchase on the nearest solid object, the coach door. Saved, she stared down. Merde. Only the very tops of her boots were visible, the laces encased in a sticky paste of mud and grass, the heels and soles sucked below the bog. Muttering one of the more elaborate curses that her former protector, Phillippe, had shouted when he was vexed at her, she yanked one foot free then the other, hiked her waterlogged skirts to midcalf, and slogged across the yard to the inn.