by Karen Ranney
An old woman stood leaning heavily on a whittled cane, unmoving as they approached. Her white hair was neatly braided, her dress tidy, the worn shawl she wore bearing the look of having been lovingly woven. She was painfully thin, her hands gnarled like the root of an old tree, her features drawn and pale. However, there was no fear on her face, only a simple acceptance of their presence.
He slowed his horse and dismounted. Behind him the column of soldiers halted. Walking down the path to where she stood, he bent and spoke to her.
“How can I help you, Mother?” he asked softly in Gaelic. He’d had time since returning to Scotland to refresh his memory of the language. In Inverness the ability to understand the prisoners’ conversation had proven disturbing rather than helpful, but this was the first time Gaelic had passed his lips since he was a child.
She didn’t look surprised at his knowledge of the language. Her eyes, a soft green and surprisingly young in her lined face, studied his, as if she could see beyond his appearance to the man beneath. Slowly, her gaze moved from his shoulders to his boots, but there was no disdain in her glance. Yet the absence of expression was as telling as anger would have been.
“I need nothing, English,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.
He had the thought, errant and unwelcome, that she was a ghost of this place, left behind to speak for all of them.
“Where are the others?”
“I have a few neighbors, English, but they are hiding from you. Fear makes them cautious.”
“But you’re not afraid?”
“I’m too old to be afraid,” she said, and unexpectedly smiled. The expression made her face younger, hinted at the beauty she had been in her youth and might have been in her old age had near-starvation not made her haggard.
“Have you any food?” he asked.
“I have dirt, English,” she said, her smile never fading. “A hill full of that.”
He dismissed the unwelcome thought that it might have come to that in the past year and motioned to Harrison. His adjutant dismounted and stepped forward.
“Bring my provisions,” Alec said. The loss of one meal would not harm him, but it might well mean the difference between life and death for this woman.
“Is that wise, sir?” Harrison asked, glancing over his shoulder at Sedgewick. He sat impassively waiting, his attention fixed on Alec.
Alec pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and wished his headache away. Harrison was right. Any act of charity would be construed as aiding the enemy. Information he suspected Sedgewick would not hesitate to use against him.
“I’ll not take your food, English,” the old woman interjected. She shook her head as if to accentuate her denial, then turned slowly and began to walk toward her cottage. She was so weak that she had to stop a number of times, leaning heavily on her cane. He approached her, held out his arm, and when she would not take it, took hers. A quick sideways frown from her only increased his irritation.
“You would die rather than take my food?” he asked.
“You have taken everything else from me, English. I’ll cherish my pride.”
“You cannot live on pride,” he said.
“Nor can you live without it,” she said simply, silencing him.
He walked with her, stood in the doorway of her cottage. He’d expected her to shut the door in his face, but she had no energy left for that. Instead she sat on a chair beside the door, gripping the cane tightly with white fingers and leaning her forehead against the backs of her hands.
The cottage was little more than a mud crofter’s hut, round, with a chimney hole cut in the roof. In the center of the earthen floor a small pit had been dug for a fire, both a source of warmth and a place to prepare meals. Now, however, it was cold, the ashes swept clean.
Against one wall were a small table and the mate to the chair in which she sat. On the opposite wall, cut into the stone of the hill, was a bed of sorts, piled high with animal skins. But the most surprising article of furniture in the hut was a loom.
He entered the cottage, ducking his head beneath the lintel. His fingers trailed along the wood of the frame.
“Do you weave?” he asked.
“I used to,” she said, her voice whispery thin in this silent place. “Before my hands grew too pained. My daughter took it up.”
He glanced at her. “Where is she?”
“Close enough,” she answered, her gaze intent on him. “Beneath the cairn stones.”
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
She smiled slightly. “I cannot blame you for that death, English. It was a hard birth, and neither she nor the child survived it.”
“Would you sell me your loom?” he suddenly asked.
“What would I do with your coin, English?” she asked, amused.
“Then trade,” he suggested. “Your loom for food.”
She studied him again silently. “Why would you want such a thing?”
“To right a wrong,” he said, offering her a truth.
She finally nodded, and he went to the door, motioned for Harrison. The trade was concluded when two men loaded the loom into a rough cart purchased from another villager.
Before they left, Harrison brought not only Alec’s provisions, but also his own, piling the food on the old woman’s table.
She glanced up at Alec, her smile gone.
“It’s a path you’ll take. Not an easy one,” she said enigmatically, “but one that your heart makes for you.”
“A fortune?” he asked kindly.
“A truth,” she said, smiling once more. She touched his arm in parting, a gesture that felt, strangely, almost like a benediction.
Chapter 11
L eitis sat in the cave, her back against the rock wall. The sunlight was softening, heralding nightfall. The domed ceiling of the cavern was black from fires lit by long-ago inhabitants. The slate floor, a dark purplish gray, was uneven and pocked. Shadows lingered in the cavities like tiny pools.
She drew up her knees and tucked her skirt around her ankles. It was a fey place, one in which she had sought sanctuary ever since she was a child. Here she had come in times of trouble or simply to escape her brothers.
There was a whisper of air against her cheek, the breeze sighing through the bushes that guarded the entrance.
It wasn’t memory that made her suddenly wish to weep, but the sheer beauty of the scene before her. Gilmuir sparkled in the distance like an ancient lady attired in her best jewels. The golden light of a fading day danced upon the fallen walls. Like a regal matriarch she sat with her tattered garments around her, studiously ignoring the upstart fort at her side.
Leitis could not see the clachan from here, a view that was almost prophetic. If she returned to the village she might bring danger to her clanspeople, since it would be the first place the Butcher would look.
She tipped her head back against the wall, tired in a way she’d rarely been. “What will I do?” she asked of the shadows, but they remained mute.
She couldn’t live here. Nor did she have any relatives other than Hamish who might take her in. She wouldn’t endanger her friends or the villagers, which meant that she was left with no alternatives.
It would be easy to hate the Butcher for her dilemma, but she knew only too well that Hamish had played his part. He had dared the Butcher of Inverness, and she suspected that the man was just as stubborn as her uncle. But the outcome of their confrontation was not in doubt. The colonel had more than a hundred men under his command, a formidable will, and the determination to carry it out.
For all the threat he posed to her clan and her country, she couldn’t quite forget that moment when he’d sighed against her, his lips pressing gently on her brow. He had seemed as lost as she felt at this moment.
The afternoon was well advanced by the time Alec led the way back to Fort William. The waning sun was kind to the ruined castle, bathing it in an amber haze.
When
they arrived, he gave the signal and the men behind him began to dismount.
“Have the cart moved to Gilmuir and unloaded,” Alec instructed Harrison. His adjutant nodded and began to give orders to the men.
“Welcome back, Colonel,” one of the sergeants said, taking the reins of his horse.
Alec dismounted and looked toward Gilmuir. “It was an uneventful day, I trust?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. “Should I inform the duty officer that you would like his report?”
“No,” Alec said. “It will wait until later.”
He strode toward Gilmuir, preceding the squeaking cart. From the poor state of the vehicle, it was a miracle it had made the journey back to the fort. It might as well be scrapped for firewood after it was emptied of its contents, he thought wryly. But it had served its purpose, that of conveying the loom to Leitis.
He pushed open the door of his chamber, his words thought out and mentally rehearsed on the way back. He would again apologize for his actions of the previous night before he presented the loom to Leitis.
The only person to greet him, however, was his aide. Donald stood at his entrance, his stance militarily precise. Arms back, shoulders squared, fingers together, thumbs aligned along the seam of his breeches, gaze fixed firmly on the horizon. All executed perfectly, but with such a disconsolate air that Alec instantly knew what happened.
“She escaped?” he asked, glancing around the room.
To his credit, Donald didn’t look away. “Yes, sir,” he said reluctantly. “I haven’t been able to find her, sir. But I did look. I took a few men with me, sir, and searched the village. I should have guarded her better, sir,” he added.
Alec smiled then, the only amusement he felt all day. “If Leitis MacRae wants to do something, Donald, not even God Himself can stop her.”
His aide looked surprised at that assessment, and well he might be. Not the words of a man who’d only known a woman for one night. But his knowledge of Leitis had been formed in his childhood. Held within him was an image of the girl she’d been, more alive than anyone he’d ever known, as well as the most stubborn creature on the face of the earth.
He knew, suddenly, where she was.
She’d given the three of them all a scolding one day for the sin of teasing her. A remark he’d made about her hair had been taken up and expanded upon by her brothers. With a look of contempt in her eyes, she’d stomped away, promising dire consequences if anyone followed her. They would have preferred to leave her alone, but Leitis’s mother set them to the task of finding her, a chore that had taken all afternoon and given Alec a thorough knowledge of the caverns around Gilmuir.
He left the room now without another word, destined for the stables. Once there, he ordered a fresh horse to be saddled.
“May I accompany you, sir?” Alec turned. Donald had followed him and now stood stiffly beside him, his face a picture of determination.
“No,” he said. “This particular mission is best accomplished alone.”
Donald nodded once, stiffly.
Alec rode west, past the glen and into the hills that gently rose behind the clachan. A series of caves, hidden by the thick forest, had been Leitis’s childhood sanctuary. He did not doubt that she was hiding in one of them now.
Soon the thick undergrowth made it impossible to continue. Dismounting, he tied the reins of his horse to a sapling, continuing the rest of the journey on foot.
The passage of time was erased with each step onto pine needles, each branch bent back to ease his way. As he climbed upward, he was no longer the colonel of the regiment, nor the Butcher of Inverness, but an eleven-year-old boy who felt only freedom in this wondrous place.
One of the Wild MacRaes.
“A strange man, your colonel.”
Harrison glanced toward the door. Major Sedgewick stood there surveying the room. He would find nothing amiss here. Harrison’s quarters were, as usual, impeccable. He hadn’t risen to the position of adjutant to the colonel of the regiment without adhering strictly to rules and regulations.
He finished unpacking the last of Colonel Landers’s maps before closing and locking the case. It had been a long day and he was tired, but Sedgewick outranked him. Therefore, this visit, and the curiosity that prompted it, would last as long as the major wished.
Sedgewick stepped into the room, nothing more than a small square box with a window high in the wall overlooking the courtyard. If Harrison stood on tiptoe, he could just glimpse the lake in the distance. But the fortress had been built to impress upon the Scots His Majesty’s position in the Highlands, not for the view.
Because of his position as the colonel’s adjutant, he was not required to share quarters with another officer. In other, not-so-hospitable surroundings, he and Donald and even Colonel Landers had been grateful for a roof over their heads or a tree or even a haystack, sharing their accommodations without regard to rank or position. But those had been battlefield conditions, and they’d all been used to hardship.
He glanced at Sedgewick. From what he’d seen of the man, the only privations he’d suffered had been here at Fort William. And although the duty could not have been comfortable, it was a damn sight easier than having bullets and cannon aiming for you.
“Is he? Why would you say so, sir?” Harrison asked pleasantly enough. But he did not, for all his surface affability, like the man.
“He takes a hostage then releases the piper, only to spend the day looking for him. Why would he do that?”
“You would have to ask that question of Colonel Landers, sir.”
Sedgewick’s smile was thin and feral. “Quite a sponsor to have, the Duke of Cumberland. Do you know him?”
Harrison had been in the background of numerous meetings between the colonel and the duke, but he shook his head.
“Pity,” Sedgewick said, tapping his foot against one of the colonel’s chests. “It might have helped your career as well.”
“Colonel Landers was promoted in Flanders for bravery, Major Sedgewick,” he said respectfully. “Before he ever made the acquaintance of the duke.”
Sedgewick stared at him, his eyes narrowed.
“Is that so? Still, I wonder if Cumberland realizes his predilection for helping the Scots?”
“In what way, sir?” Harrison said stiffly.
“When he arrived. Or do you not agree that he appeared almost as disturbed as the Scots by the village being burned?”
“I believe, sir,” Harrison said carefully, “that the colonel wishes no further enmity between the two countries.”
“How strange,” Sedgewick said mockingly. “I thought he was to subdue the Scots, not make friends of them. Today he gave food to an old woman. An act that interested him more than finding a seditious piper.”
Conversation of this sort always made Harrison wary. He’d learned to guard his comments over the years, especially when one of his fellow officers said anything critical about the colonel. Harrison would have followed the man anywhere, especially after Inverness.
“We are going on patrol again tomorrow, sir,” he said, bending to straighten the placement of his pillow. “He will find him, sir. Do not doubt that.”
Sedgewick nodded, fingering the blanket at the end of Harrison’s cot and testing the tightness of the sheet. He’d find nothing lacking there, Harrison thought.
“Protect yourself, Harrison,” the other man said unexpectedly. “There are those in command who would not think kindly of the colonel’s releasing the piper in the first place. Nor of his actions today. He brought a loom to his hostage. It is not wise to feel such compassion for the enemy.”
Sedgewick came closer, ran his fingers over the colonel’s dispatch case. “Perhaps you should give some thought to your own career. A transfer might be well timed.”
“I’m right where I wish to be, sir,” Harrison said coolly.
The major walked to the door, then turned and smiled at him. A toothy grin, what with all those point
ed teeth. A wolf might stare in a similar fashion at a lamb.
Harrison nodded, knowing that he had been warned. He wondered if Sedgewick realized that he would waste no time in repeating his words to the colonel. Or had that been his intent, to threaten his commander? If so, it had been a clumsy move on Sedgewick’s part and an unwise one. The colonel had dared Cumberland himself. This major was a puny foe.
Chapter 12
A rustle in front of the cave made Leitis turn her head. An animal? Or a bird swooping down to alight upon a branch? Another sound, that of a footstep, made her stand quickly, back braced against the rock wall.
The English could not have found the cave. It was too well hidden. Tucked among the trees and concealed by the overgrown bushes, it would be almost impossible to find.
She waited breathlessly, telling herself it was Hamish coming to find her. Or one of the villagers who knew the layout of the caves. But her palms were icy, her heart booming so loud it sounded like an English drum. When the bushes parted, she almost sighed in resignation.
The Butcher stood in the entrance to the cave.
Why should it not be him? He’d not done what she’d expected since arriving at Gilmuir.
Half his face was shadowed, the other lit by sunlight. She had the curious thought that he had two identities—the man she expected him to be and the man he truly was.
She’d lived around men all her life, and had become accustomed to her brothers’ bursts of temper and her father’s bellicose nature. This man, however, held his anger within, all the more powerful for not being voiced.
She would have, perhaps, been wiser to be afraid, to shelter her fears behind a stillness of her own. Instead, she took one step toward him, then another, until her shoes touched the toes of his boots. Tipping back her head, she stared at him.
“How did you find this place?” she asked.
“Perhaps one of your villagers divulged the secret,” he countered.