Nae, she was his should-have-been, his MacLean heart amended.
“Damnation,” he snarled, loud enough for any who cared to turn an ear his way.
He wanted nothing to do with a sticky-fingered lass, much less one facing nunhood. Bestirrings caused by such a wench were a greater nuisance than his aching throat, smarting eyes, and Glasgow’s jammed roads combined.
Equally perturbing – nae, 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.
“A question…” He glanced at MacFie, his voice scratchy from the threads of smoke wafting out of the gatehouse archway and seeming deliberately to curl past his nose.
“Aye?” Gavin edged his horse closer.
“The ex-voto the postulant dropped. Such offerings represent a body part in need of healing, do they not?”
Gavin eyed him strangely, but nodded. “So it is believed. Or else whate’er part of the body received a healing, in which case the offerings are tokens of appreciation to the miracle-spending saints.”
“Can you think of any other use for such votives?” Iain pressed, his hand still fast against his purse.
“Nae.”
“Nor can I.” Iain swiped at his smoke-stung eyes. “Why would a lass steal such a thing?”
Gavin shrugged. “The silver?”
“Women keen to nun themselves are no’ given to stealing.” Iain frowned, sure that was true. “She had a reason.”
“She surely did – her own.”
“You are a font of wisdom.”
“So some say.” Gavin had the gall to smile.
Iain scowled. “Fools, nae doubt.”
“It is all the same to me.”
“That I believe.” Iain surveyed the jammed roads. If the crowd didn’t soon disperse, they’d be here overnight.
They needed a fast way out of Glasgow’s congestion. If he couldn’t soon breathe clean hill-fresh air, he’d run mad. Perhaps he already had, for the postulant plagued him.
Neither of the most logical possibilities justified her thievery. Nothing about her indicated a troublesome leg. Far from it, the glimpse he’d caught of her ankles as she’d hitched her skirts to sprint away, suggested legs of the most appealing sort.
Sleek, well-formed, and tempting enough to haunt his dreams for days.
Nights would prove torturous.
He thrust away the thought before it could expand into dangerous territory. Then he used all his strength to yank his hand from the leather pouch.
But any relief at that small victory evaporated when the still-receding lump on his forehead began throbbing with renewed vengeance. The mood of the throng altered then as well, shifting to an almost celebratory air.
Iain glanced again at Gavin. “Did you no’ say St. Thenew’s Well was a less-frequented shrine?”
“Aye. Does it matter?”
“It might. For sure, she seems a larger draw than her son, God rest his sacred bones.”
Gavin looked out at the hurrying folk and smiled. “Some would deem it heartening for a little-known saint to attract such a crowd.”
“The pious perhaps,” Iain snapped, nonetheless praying for the pain in his head to lessen. “Odd to see nary a shred of charity walking with this mob of cutthroats.”
A shadow crossed the MacFie’s face, his patience clearly cracking. “The most are holy men and cure seekers. Also travelers, tradesmen and merchants, a few servants on errands. Why shouldn’t they seek a blessing?”
“They appear anything but devout.” Iain rose in his stirrups, made a sweeping gesture. “On their way to a market fair, is how they look,” he said, his gaze lighting on a tall stone cross by the roadside, its age-pitted face carved with Celtic symbols.
The souls MacFie called pious hurried past the ancient marker without a single reverent glance.
To Iain, the explanation was clear.
“They’re off to enjoy some form of jolly entertainment,” he said, sure of it. “These are no’ hair-shirted humblies hoping for a saint’s blessing.”
“Perhaps they are celebrating some new wonder worked by Thenew?” Gavin reached to scratch his horse’s ears. “A great miracle that has filled them with hope? It could be.”
“Say you?” Iain glanced about again, noting how the air almost quivered with the crowd’s excitement. “Shall we see what has them so stirred up?”
He turned back to Gavin. “A fair or piety?”
“Leave them be. Their business is no’ ours.”
“They are so many that the road out of here is thronged. We are delayed. That does concern us.”
Before Gavin could argue, Iain studied the passersby until he located the most shifty-looking soul within hearing range.
“Ho, good fellow!” he called to the man, ignoring how Gavin frowned at his choice.
The weasel-faced man froze, his darting glance filled with suspicion. “Aye?”
He was clearly a scoundrel. The sort who favored skulking in shadow and peddling useless tinctures at market stalls. Ointments and wonder tonics guaranteed to cure all the world’s maladies.
Iain resisted the urge to rub his hands together. He did smile. He could feel MacFie’s disapproval. He didn’t care. It felt good to needle the righteous bastard. To know he was about to set him on his gullible chin.
“What goes on here, my friend?” Iain leaned toward the man. “Why all the excitement? Is there a fair hereabouts? A grand lord’s wedding perhaps?”
“None of that,” the stranger supplied. “We’re off to a far greater entertainment.”
“Wait!” Iain yelled when the man turned to hurry on. “What kind of entertainment?”
“A burning,” the man tossed back, and was gone.
Iain’s stomach turned over. Something told him more than a chapel would taste the flames.
“Sweet holy saints.” Gavin blanched. “The burning of a living person? At a stake?”
“Aye, sir, but in a tar barrel,” a merry-eyed lass answered, flashing him a smile. “Though some say her hands are to be cut off,” she added, clearly excited. “She’s a thief. Caught stealing from the shrine of St. Thenew, and the worst of it” – she paused to cross herself – “they say she’s a-”
“Postulant,” Iain finished for her, his blood icing.
The lass nodded. “Have you e’er heard worse?” She shook her head. “Make haste, good sirs, for they may have already begun,” she urged, then spun about and darted away.
Iain stared after her, the girl’s words turning the noisy crowd into a blur of red until he saw nothing before him but the tomb thief’s large green eyes.
Wide-set eyes, somewhat slanting, but now filled with terror.
Eyes he wasn’t about to let glaze over with the sightless chill of death.
Somewhere deep inside him, a long-forgotten sense of purpose stirred and wakened. And unlike the other times bits of his old self had tried to surface, now he grabbed hold of the threads of his tarnished honor.
His vision clearing, his wits sharper than in months, he whirled about to face MacFie, determined to save the lass, consequences be damned.
And he would do so with or without the help of Gavin ne’er-tell-a-lie MacFie. Of course, it would be easier if the man agreed to his admittedly deceptive plan.
Either way…
His smile returned. At first just a wee tug at the edges of his lips, but heady enough to fill him with renewed vigor and lend a bit of sheen to his rusty valor.
Emboldened, he leaned toward Gavin, eager to share his ruse.
It would work, he was sure.
It had to.
~*~
A world away from Glasgow, amidst deep green woods, heather moorlands, and silver-glinting lochs, the proud strength of Abercairn Castle marked the edge of the Highlands, its curtained walls and turreted towers rising tall against the hills.
&nbs
p; Drifting sheets of thin, drizzly rain blew in from the west, occasional gusty winds tearing leaves off the trees and rattling shutters, while heavy, rain-swollen clouds descended ever lower, their gray-tinted gloom stealing the light from a landscape awash with color on fairer days.
But inside Abercairn’s impressive central keep, gloom of a different nature darkened the laird’s bedchamber and anteroom, the castle’s most sumptuously appointed quarters.
Tapestry-hung, warmed by a fine-smoldering peat fire, and occupied very much against the true laird’s will by Sir Bernhard Logie, a tall, rawboned usurper of middle years. Dark, hood-eyed, and, much to his dismay, possessed of a bald pate.
A staunch leader of the Disinheriteds, the Scots barons once exiled by the late Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, and now returned in Edward Balliol’s entourage, and with Edward of England’s support. Their purpose was to foist Balliol on the Scottish throne and so regain their lost lands.
Or in Silver Leg’s case, as Logie was commonly known, adding the lands and riches of others to his own less illustrious ex-holding.
He was a man of little virtue and many vices.
An outlaw in the eyes of everyone but himself and those who bowed to his whim.
And at the moment, his mood was thunderous. Narrowing a glare on the two men before him, he smashed his fist on the table. The impact jiggled the rich spread of victuals and wine he’d been feasting on. A few coins fell to the floor, slipping off the piles of Abercairn loot he’d gathered since seizing the stronghold.
Treasures he trusted nowhere but within a sword’s length of the place he laid his head at night.
Reaching across the table, he grabbed a jewel-encrusted candlestick before it could topple over. Righting it, he turned his wrath back on his men.
“Explain yourselves.” He leaned forward in the laird’s chair. “Tall as she is, and with hair so flaming red, she cannot have vanished into thin air. Someone must’ve seen her.”
The older of the two men fidgeted, his feet shuffling on the thick woolen rugs strewn across the floor. “By God’s own breath, my lord,” he owned, looking more miserable by the moment. “We’ve asked everywhere.”
“Persuade them to speak is the way of it.” He glowered, snatched up a handful of silver coins. “With a wee spot of artful assistance from Laird Drummond’s coffers.”
He glared at them until the first man, the older one, stepped forward, his hand outstretched.
“That ought to loosen a tongue or two.” Silver Leg slapped the coins into the man’s palm. “Scour every inch of the heather for hidey-holes if you must, search the most remote cottages, or trudge the length of every village in the land. I do not care how you find her, just bring Madeline Drummond to me, and alive.”
“Aye, sir,” the men chorused, bobbing their heads.
“We will get her.” The younger man’s uncomfortable gaze dropped to the watchful greyhound curled at Silver Leg’s feet.
“So you shall – if you value breathing.”
“Aye, sir,” they both repeated.
“Only she can tell me where her tight-lipped father hides the bulk of his treasure. The fool refuses to speak and may well perish of his own stubbornness before he comes to his senses,” Silver Leg said, visibly calming as his dog began licking the bared knee of his once-troublesome right leg. “Now be gone with you, and do not come before me again lest the lass is with you.”
Nodding, the two men backed from the room, nearly colliding with a set-faced serving woman just stepping through the opened door, a basket of freshly cut peat bricks clutched in her arms.
Ignoring the scuttling men, she placed the basket beside the hearth. But rather than leaving, she dusted her hands and eyed the great hound at Silver Leg’s feet. She then slid a look at the second beast, equally large, sprawled comfortably across Laird Drummond’s four-poster bed.
Sprawled there, and gnawing on a well-meated foreleg of roasted mutton. And that, atop the laird’s finest bed linens.
Following her disapproving stare, Silver Leg reached down and stroked the first dog’s rough-coated head. “Have you ne’er seen a dog, wench?” He held her gaze as a particularly loud crack of thunder rumbled to an end. “They will not harm you – lest I order them to do so.”
“Dogs make Laird Drummond cough and sneeze,” the woman said, not a sign of timidity in her voice or her straight-backed stance. “I vow we’d have enough of them running about otherwise. And I, Sir Bernhard, am far beyond the age of being called a wench.”
Silver Leg’s lip curled, but then his mood changed. “Perhaps so, but your bosom is as generous as the bawdiest wench e’er to grace my bed.” Lifting a hand, he toyed with the tips of his beard, his gaze sliding over the serving woman’s generous figure. “Are your legs as shapely?”
He leaned forward, filled a second chalice with wine. “Are you of a mind to show them to me? Your legs, and other sultry charms?” He slid the chalice toward her. “Is that why you haven’t yet fled my presence? Do you crave a man’s eyes upon you? Are you hungry for the touch of a skilled lover’s hand?”
“I am here because I would ask you to spare a clump of peat or two for the good laird,” she said, ignoring the wine, her voice as firm as her lifted chin. “He ails, see you. The chill of the dungeon will soon be the life of him.”
“The dungeon is cold, eh?”
“It is, sir. Unbearably so.”
Silver Leg said nothing but eyed the finely woven Drummond plaid the knee-licking hound lounged upon. So many of the beast’s hairs covered the once-proud tartan, it might’ve been gray.
“Well, then.” Silver Leg sat back in the heavily carved chair and allowed himself an indulgent smile. “If you fret for Drummond’s health, then help yourself to his plaid,” he suggested, flicking a hand at the dog-reeking length of wool. “If you are willing to warm me a bit…” He paused to glance at the bed. “After I’m satisfied, I’ll send you along with a mutton bone to fill the laird’s belly as well.”
“Dinnae trouble yourself.” Morven the serving woman pressed her lips together, sent a quick glance to the iron poker leaning against the hearth.
Silver Leg followed her gaze. “Enough, wench – away with you now. Be gone, lest you wish to feel an iron-hard poker of a wholly other sort deep, deep inside you.”
Her bravura besieged at last, Morven whirled about and hurried from the room, Silver Leg’s laughter chasing in her wake.
Chapter Nine
“Aye, in a blazing tar barrel!” A high-pitched female voice rose above the other cries, the woman’s glee joining the excitement of Madeline’s tormentors, their fired-up eagerness to see her burn whirling so quickly in her breast its wild spinning made her dizzy.
“That’ll teach her to steal from shrines,” another voice boomed from the crowd, a man’s this time.
“Thieving, and light-skirted, too, no doubt,” a thin-faced woman sniffed. “A brazen whore hiding in a nun’s trappings.”
The taunts came from all directions, as did Nella’s ceaseless shouts at their captors as she struggled to break away from the two burly men restraining her.
Terror closing her own throat, Madeline shut her eyes to the sea of leering faces. The jeers pounded so loudly in her head she feared it would burst before they even shoved her into the pitch-lined barrel.
Her eyes snapped open when rough hands yanked her arms behind her back, and a man’s large, callused fingers began tying her wrists together with a length of coarse rope.
Biting her lip until the coppery taste of blood filled her mouth, she kept reminding herself that Drummonds died with dignity, the men with a sword in their hands, the women without complaint.
She would not dishonor her people by being less bold.
So she kept her chin raised, her back straight, and prayed for a swift passing.
Blessedly, the increasing chaos in her head and the dizziness soon blocked out the taunts. As if by a wonder, the crowd, and even St. Thenew’s stone chapel and
well faded into a haze of soft, thick gray.
A cloaking mist that shielded her from all but the fierce hammering in her temples, the rumble of approaching thunder, and the odd roll of the earth. And it was then that she felt it…
The familiar fury, dark and livid, ferocious enough to sweep her length and banish every last shout of the scolding mob.
Her heart skittered, something inside her recognizing this man’s anger. The rage aimed not at her but those who’d do her harm.
Her eyes flickered open. The haze was beginning to thin, the trembling of the ground and low growl of thunder now identifiable as the drumming of horses’ hooves nearing at swiftest speed.
“Mercy!” the onion-breathed man tying her wrists gasped. “‘Tis the devil come to fetch his own!” he shrieked, shoving her from him with such force she slammed into the hard and rocky earth.
Sharp pain exploded inside her, her breath leaving her in a whoosh of air. The man nearly tripped over her as he scrabbled away, eager to be gone.
Stunned and windless, Madeline lay where she’d fallen, the ropes binding her wrists and ankles preventing any movement even if she’d had the breath to try.
“Enough!” his voice pierced the haze. “Touch her again and the lot of you shall dangle from a gibbet by nightfall,” her shadow man roared, plunging his horse into the crowd.
Scattering them, he reined up in a welter of fury and wild-eyed, shrieking horseflesh. The horse reared high, his lashing hooves a warning to any fool not fast enough to spring aside.
Neighing protest, the beast pawed the air. Madeline’s shadow man flung himself from the saddle before the horse’s hooves struck ground. His handsome face thunderous, he threw back his cloak and whipped out his steel, a gleaming sword he clearly knew how to wield.
He strode toward her, tearing off his pilgrim’s mantle as he came, his dark eyes raking those who hadn’t yet fled. “Tell me who ripped her gown for I’ve a need to relieve the bastard of his manhood,” he shouted, hurling his cloak across her bared breasts. “In the Scotland I know, women are no’ treated so savagely.
“Now I am feeling savage myself!” He lifted his sword, whipping it in a fast figure eight motion before swinging the tip toward her cloak-covered breasts. “So – who sullied her?”
Love Conquers All: Historical Romance Boxed Set Page 61