My Heart Stood Still

by Lynn Kurland

  He looked at the far corner tower. It was much larger than any of the others, and it was crumbling in a few places. Maybe that would be a good place to start work. The stones looked sound. Maybe all it would take was some carpentry work to make it habitable.

  To his right, the inner bailey stretched for some distance, based on what he could see from the walls and guard towers there. He suspected that in the past, such a space might have housed stables, a smithy, or other workaday buildings. A wall now separated him from that part of the castle, a wall taller than he, but there was an arched wooden gate there.

  He turned away from it. That could be explored later. He wanted to see the inside of the great hall and examine the damage time had wrought.

  He stepped inside the doorway and jumped in spite of himself. The place was packed with Scotsmen, even more numerous than the group he'd seen outside. There was no doubt in his mind that he was facing men who were no longer flesh and bone. They stood at attention, with their backs against the four walls of the great hall. Thomas gave up trying to convince himself he was having stress-induced hallucinations. He'd had a great night's sleep, a substantial breakfast, and a brisk walk up the way. The only thing he could surmise was that this kind of sight was something he'd inherited from his mother. It was certainly nothing he would have gotten from his father.

  Well, there was a decision to be made. He suspected that these unexpected fixtures in his house might be very reluctant to leave. For all he knew, they had been there for centuries. So, he supposed the best thing to do was pretend to ignore them. Maybe they would be just as busy ignoring him.

  He walked around the great hall, looking up at the roof— or lack thereof—and examining the fireplaces. There were two, one on either side of the hall. They were large enough that he could walk inside them. He did, then looked up and hoped to see sky. He heard the chatter of birds instead and saw nothing but black. Not good signs, but perhaps Thorpewold's village had a chimney sweep.

  He stepped back, then found himself face-to-face with a ghostly Scot. The man was huge. Thomas was tall, and he considered himself quite fit. But this guy was taller than he was and definitely broader. His sword had to be almost six feet long if it was an inch. Thomas was almost blinded by the brooch on the man's shoulder that held his plaid to his shirt. He was so startled by the complete picture of power and menace that he stared right into the man's eyes.

  The man blinked in surprise, then a scowl of formidable proportions came over his face.

  "So, ye can see me, can ye?" he growled.

  Thomas found himself without a single coherent thing to say.

  The man drew his sword with a flourish. Thomas stepped back instinctively.

  "To me!" the man roared. "Clan MacDougal!"

  Thomas waited to be assaulted, but only a handful of men drew their swords, and it was done with less enthusiasm than he would have suspected from that kind of bellow.

  "Ach, damnation," the man groused. "All right then, ye great bunch of women, to Herself! The MacLeod!"

  Thomas had several thoughts running through his mind as he found himself tripping backward over something he was sure hadn't been behind him moments before—or maybe he'd been so distracted he hadn't noticed it—and those thoughts came to him in no particular order.

  First, it was one thing to keep out of the way of one sword; it was quite another to try to avoid the flashing blades of three dozen angry Scots.

  Second, it was extremely embarrassing to go sprawling and land, sans his dignity, on his backside with his head still traveling at a velocity high enough to render him unconscious when that head apparently struck a rock.

  And as he surrendered to the blackness, actually quite grateful that he would be spared the humiliation of listening to said Scots laughing themselves sick over his poor performance, his final thought was perhaps the most disturbing.

  Were the swords real?

  At least he would be unconscious when he learned the truth.

  Chapter 6

  Iolanthe walked down the flat stone pathway between her roses, plucking off a diseased leaf here, removing a spent blossom there. She paused and looked down doubtfully at a rose she'd been just recently given, which bore the dubious name of some Colonial rock legend. The only king she knew of resided in London, or at least he had the last time she'd stirred herself to make note of him.

  She stood in the midst of her garden and breathed deeply, imagining how it would have smelled had she possessed a mortal nose to smell it with. Lavender, rose, mint; aye, they would have mingled with the aroma of sun-warmed earth and the hint of greenery from the forest.

  The sight at least was something she could enjoy. She looked over the plants that made up the large expanse of her unlife's work and named them all in her head. The majority of them had been gifts from a handful of ghostly monks who had happened upon her digging in her illusionary dirt in some century or other. They had brought her cuttings from their travels and taught her the names for things she'd never seen before. It was the single pleasure of her existence, her garden with its strange and marvelous collection of plants.

  Of course, they weren't plants from the physical world, but perhaps that was even better. In life, she had gardened for survival, to feed herself and her kin. In death, she had the luxury of growing what she pleased merely for the joy of seeing it all in glorious array around her. No pests, no weeds. Nothing but what she chose to see.

  "What a lovely garden, um, Patience?"

  Iolanthe gritted her teeth. Perhaps her garden had a pest after all, and it was surely the man who had just come up behind her. A pity she couldn't squash him under her heel like a bug. She turned and glared at him.

  "My name, you bejeweled peacock, is not Patience."

  She brushed past him and made for her bench near the wall.

  "Well," Roderick said, following hard on her heels, "if you won't give me your name freely, I suppose I must continue to try to guess it." He tidied up his immaculate suit of clothes, then sat next to her. "Let's see. We've eliminated the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and what doing that took!— so I suppose that leaves us turning to the sixteenth. Perhaps one of those charming Puritan names. Charity? Humility?"

  "I'm a Scot, you simpleton."

  "Tribulation? Mercy?"

  Ach, but she'd been through the former and had little enough of the latter.

  "Fly-fornication?"

  She glared at him. "Have you nothing better to do than trouble me?"

  He examined his perfectly tended fingernails, then looked at her and smiled. "I'm afraid not."

  "Why did you come to Thorpewold?" she demanded. "What foul fancy possessed you to come here?"

  "Well," he said with a smile, " 'tis quite a tale, and I'm more than happy to relate it. Now, after my untimely demise—"

  "At the hands of an angry, cuckolded husband, no doubt," she muttered.

  "Quite so, my dear. As I was saying, after my untimely demise, I was visiting my club, as one does you know, and I heard tell of a beauty in the north that was simply not to be missed."

  The Highlands. Aye, she could understand that. Iolanthe sighed in spite of herself. She rarely allowed herself to miss her homeland, but there were times that the longing rose up so sharply in her that she could scarce bear it. She turned her face away, lest the Victorian fool see her tears.

  "Then you stopped too soon," she said. "You missed your journey's end by many miles."

  "But, my dear, you were my journey's end."

  She had to look at him, she was so surprised by his words. "Me?"

  "Word does get 'round, you know," he said, digging into his waistcoat pocket. He produced his snuff case and began to lighten it of its contents.

  Iolanthe could hardly believe anyone would think her beautiful, much less take that tale all the way to London. She knew her limitations. She was too tall. She was too old. By the saints, she'd been almost a score and five when—

  She jerked her mind away from
the memory and glared at her companion.

  "You would be," she said sharply, "far more attractive if you did not poke that foul weed up your nose. I scarce know how your scores of women bore watching you do it."

  He stretched lazily. "I had other attributes that more than made up for any aversion to snuff a woman might have had."

  She had no desire to learn any more about his attributes. He was fair enough, she supposed, if you wanted a man who was more concerned about the length of his eyelashes than he was about whether or not he could wield a sword. But he was certainly not for her, especially with his incessant prying into things he was not entitled to know.

  "Would you care to examine my attributes ... Virtue?"

  Iolanthe would have sharpened her tongue on him, but just at the moment when she might have begun such a thing, Duncan came hurrying around the corner. He came to an abrupt halt in front of her.

  "Bit of a battle," he announced.

  Iolanthe was unsurprised. She thought she'd heard a goodly amount of noise a while back, but she'd certainly had no desire to interrupt it. Men were men, she had decided several hundred years ago, and were best left to their games when it suited them. Besides, the men of her keep were a more vigorous lot than most and had need of their exercise. Fighting passed the time most pleasantly.

  She waved her hand dismissively. "Ever they bicker amongst themselves, Duncan. No harm done."

  He shook his head. " 'Twould have been nothing of note had it been merely amongst themselves. They're trying to heave a man out of the hall—"

  Iolanthe was on her feet before she knew she intended to rise. "Him? The Yank?"

  "Oh, delightful," Roderick said, rubbing his hands together enthusiastically. "Let us go examine him, my dear. It seems decades since last I saw one."

  Iolanthe glared at him. " 'Twas but a pair of days ago, you fool. The lad and the lass ran screaming from the garden, or don't you remember?"

  He opened his mouth to no doubt spout some sort of foolishness she had no desire to listen to, so she turned and walked away, not caring if he followed or not. She couldn't spare Duncan to dispatch him at present.

  "How are the men?" she asked Duncan.

  "Debating how best to kill him," he said, striding alongside her.

  "Awfully unsporting of them," Roderick said, catching up on her other side.

  Duncan growled at him. "Shut up, ya frilly fool. We've no need of yer judgments."

  And Roderick, who had spent his share of time being heaved by Duncan off battlements and being run through by Duncan's great sword, apparently decided silence was more prudent than speech. He shut his mouth.

  "We cannot slay him," Iolanthe said firmly. "It will only bring his kin upon us, as well as no doubt the king's—"

  "Queen's," Roderick corrected.

  Iolanthe blinked in surprise. "Queen? Another one?"

  "Another Elizabeth," Roderick informed her with what she could only term a bit of smugness. "She's been on the throne for quite some time now."

  Iolanthe scowled. "Queen's men, then. Those we want even less banging on our gates."

  Aye, that was all she needed. She'd had freedom from the interventions of the outside world for, what had it been? Decades? Centuries? Visitors were one thing, either of the mortal or not-so-mortal kind. Those she could ignore readily enough. But trouble from the Crown? Nay, that she could not have.

  And then there was the man inside her gates to consider. If this Colonist was determined enough to give his hardearned gold for her keep, then he was likely not a man to be ignored.

  Perhaps it would have to be death for him after all.

  She walked through the inner bailey to find a gaggle of men clustered there. As she approached, she heard their spirited conversation.

  "Slit his throat," one offered.

  "Poke him repeatedly with a sword," offered another.

  "Put out his eyes," chortled yet another.

  "Nay," said another. "Heave him full into the ditch and let him drown. It'll rain soon enough and choke the life from him."

  Iolanthe tried to see over the men, but that was a futile exercise. She tried to politely make herself a path, but apparently the thought of a bloody battle had left the men quite unwilling to give up a good spot for watching any possible sport. Iolanthe was forced to push, shove, and make a nuisance of herself before she was grudgingly allowed a place at the front of the group. She glared at the men she had most recently displaced, then put her shoulders back and turned to see what the fuss was all about.

  She looked down.

  And her heart stood still.

  She remained there, mute and unmoving. She wondered, with what poor wits remained her, how the man lying before her had been rendered senseless. Had her garrison actually taken a blade to him, or had he struck his head fleeing from her great hall? He surely didn't look the part of a coward. She judged him to be rather taller than she, perhaps even almost as tall as Connor MacDougal, who wielded a six-foot broadsword that even he topped by a hand. A man so large wouldn't be intimidated by much.

  She considered his clothing. He was dressed in those denim long-legged trews that she occasionally saw mortals wearing. She had to admit that he did them justice. His shoulders were wide, but that apparently came from his build, not the excess fat that Roderick's pampered, corpulent visitors sported when they came to visit. She looked at his long fingers resting over his belly and wondered absently if they grasped a sword readily or if his were other kinds of tools.

  Hammers and saws most likely, damn him.

  His face was a wonder of planes and angles with a finely shaped nose, a handsome mouth, and attractive ears. His hair was dark, far darker than hers, and fell back from his face in pleasing waves.

  None of which truly mattered, she supposed. However he looked, whatever his business, it didn't change the fact that beyond all reason and logic stood the single fact that set the hairs on the back of her neck on end.

  It was him.

  The man she had dreamed about for centuries.

  She had dreamed of him while walking through the meadows, sitting under trees during the rain, snugly holed up in the warmth of the hay during the winter. She had dreamed of him in spring, hoped for him in fall. He'd first come to her heart during her tenth summer and never left it since.

  The man who would come to rescue her.

  She stared at him in silence for several minutes before another thought occurred to her.

  If he was the man who had been destined to rescue her, then where had he been? Where had he been six hundred years ago when he could have saved her life? Where had he been for the past six centuries?

  He was late. If his being that late wasn't reason enough to feed him to the wolves, she wasn't sure what was.

  "Damn the man," she muttered.

  "Aye," Connor said, rubbing his hands together purposefully, "let us slay him and send him to his foul rest."

  Iolanthe found the thought suddenly very appealing. As for recognizing the man, perhaps her wits were addled. She had likely seen him before, and that was what unsettled her so.

  But the only Colonists she'd seen in the past two hundred years had been tourists, and this one certainly hadn't been amongst them. She'd never seen a man so handsome. More was the pity that his face wasn't covered with pockmarks, that his nose wasn't broken from too many encounters with another man's sword hilt, that half his teeth weren't missing thanks to another's fist in his mouth.

  She knew the last because he was snoring with his mouth quite widely open.

  "Attractive," Roderick said, peering over her shoulder. "But not nearly as handsome as I—"

  Iolanthe elbowed him in the belly and he ceased speaking with a great whoosh of air and a tiny squeak. She turned her attentions back to the man lying just inside her hall. Recognize him she might, but that was beside the point. He had come too late. To her, he could only be a Yank bent on destroying her home. Perhaps 'twas best for all if he did just disappear.


  "Cut off his head and be done with him," a man behind her grumbled.

  "Och, and where's the sport in that? Open his belly and pull out his intestines. There's a goodly bit of entertainment in that for the afternoon."

  Iolanthe considered the last. 'Twas Connor MacDougal to suggest it, and she had to admit that he had a fine head for thinking when it came to meting out gruesome revenges. A pity that was his only redeeming quality.

  "Carry him to the woods, and let the beasties finish him," Duncan said. "Herself’ll be well rid of him, and no murder will be laid at our gates."

  Iolanthe listened to the men argue first over whether or not they could manage the feat of carrying a mortal such a far distance, then they began to discuss what could be done to make the man more palatable to whatever animal might be haunting the woods. Several ideas were fine ones, and when the men looked at her expectantly, she was fully prepared to agree and commend them on their resourcefulness. She opened her mouth to speak.

  "I'll parley with him," she heard herself say.

  "What!" thundered Connor MacDougal. "Have ye gone daft?"

  She was wondering that herself. "I—" she began.

  "Ye've no head for thinkin', ye silly twit! What need have we to surrender to some spineless coward from across the sea? Why, he couldn't even stand up to me blade, and that was naught but illusion!"

  Iolanthe agreed heartily, but apparently her mouth didn't.

  "I said I'll parley with him, and that's what I'll do," she said firmly.

  "Ye'll do nothing of the sort," the MacDougal snarled.

  Iolanthe glared at him. He was not her lord, and she had no intentions of having him wrest the chieftainship of her little clan from her. "Who's to stop me?" she asked haughtily.

  In answer, he drew his sword.

  She had to admit that it was a fearsome weapon indeed. Add to that the ferocious Highlander glaring down at her from his great height, and she found herself nigh onto intimidated.

  Until he spoke.

  "What think ye of that, girl?'

  That was truly more than she could bear. Not that she'd ever given her name to any of the men surrounding her. They mostly called her Herself or Lady MacLeod. No one called her girl.. It reminded her of all the times her father had done the same, uncaring that she had a name. Iolanthe folded her arms over her chest and looked stonily back at the MacDougal.