“Why?” Muira sighed, allowing Bridghe to help her with her corset, but she didn’t listen to the answer.
What difference did it make if she endured the morning alone or surrounded by people? You could feel alone in a crowded room-that was how Muira currently felt. Bridghe’s chatter, or the children’s squeals and shrieks should have distracted her, but it was as though she were standing outside of it all. The one think that seemed real was the ominous tick of the clock.
At six o’clock, that was when it would happen, on the first chime of the bells.
Somehow, some corner of Muira’s mind had never expected six o’clock to come. Time would stop, or skip forward, or something, it couldn’t really be going to happen, it was too awful, too unfathomable… and then it did, it had, and the castle shuddered with the tolling of the bells, and Muira jerked out of her seat and retched.
..ooOOoo..
He was going to remember the sight forever.
It wasn’t one of those things that would fade with time, or be forgotten as the years rolled by. It was as if it had been scorched and scarred onto the very rawest corner of his memory. Lachlan already knew that this imaged would stay with him for the rest of his life. When he closed his eyes he could still see it – Tavish MacEantach’s body twitching and writhing at the end of the hangman’s noose, looking like some grotesque parody of a worm on a hook – and when he opened his eyes again, it was still happening there in front of him.
“Poor bastard,” Ewan muttered quietly. Tavish’s neck clearly hadn’t been broken by the fall and he now had to endure the slow horrifying torture of asphyxiation. Often the crowd would force the guards to take pity in such a case and quicken the condemned’s demise… but not today. Today they were wickedly thirsty to see the man suffer.
Muira’s brother was standing with Donaid beside the new Laird, watching the spectacle with a surprising amount of dispassion, Lachlan thought. His own stomach was turning as he watched Tavish’s body gradual still as the life he had fought so frantically to cling to ebbed from him. A few moments before, as Tavish had been lead to the gallows, he has search the crowd and found Lachlan, Ewan and Donaid easily. The look he had shot them had been one of pure eternal hatred.
Lachlan wasn’t afraid of the dead, but he worried for the living. He didn’t know how Muira was going to cope, if she was going to cope. He didn’t know if he could help her, because he wasn’t sure how to help himself. And then he worried that some MacEantach relative would show up at Eilean Donan one day in the future and demand retribution for the lose of a favour uncle or nephew or son.
How many times had Lachlan wished that things had been different? That Graem, God rest his soul, had never extended an invitation to the Camerons? Lachlan had warned Muira against such fruitless practice, but he couldn’t manage it himself.
“His parents will want the body,” Donaid was said quietly. The young Cameron tanist looked rather pale. Lachlan began to shake his head. Prisoner’s bodies were not given back over to their relatives; they were not buried in consecrated ground. “Laird MacRae, the MacEantachs are a powerful family within my clan I-”
“Do not want them upset?” Lachlan finished smoothly. “I think it is rather too late for that, sir.” Donaid looked affronted, but Ewan laid a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “You can take his signet ring, and anything else of sentimental value, back to his mother, but I cannot let you have the body. You say the MacEantach family is powerful within your clan? Well my whole clan would revolt if I allowed the murderer of their friends, families and laird a proper Christian burial.”
“We understand,” Ewan said seriously.
Donaid still looked unhappy, but he nodded his agreement. Lachlan dipped in head in a bow in return, and then gave the order for Tavish’s lifeless body to be cut down.
The crowd had fallen eerily silent. They had been baying for blood ever since Tavish had been led out in front of them, but now… now it was all over, and they seemed not to know what to with themselves. They slowly dispersed, moved away from the erected gallows in a slow jumble of bodies. It was as though they had just woke from a dream and were still coming back to their selves.
“You’ll want to go and see Muira, no doubt?”
Lachlan turned in surprise to Ewan. He was looking very… brotherly and protective, and brotherly, for want of a better word. And Lachlan wasn’t actually sure that he did want to go and see Muira… He hated to seem cowardly, but he was worried about how she was going to react.
“I need-”
“I can deal with things here, sir,” Ross said quickly, and competently, and Lachlan didn’t really have a leg to stand on. Things were in order, to his quiet astonishment.
“All right, but I won’t be long,” Lachlan heard himself mutter as he headed back to the castle to speak to his wife – to tell her that her ex-fiancé was dead… executed… he may has well have been killed by Lachlan’s own hand. He’d passed the sentence, and signed the death warrant.
Lachlan could hear his nephew and niece long before he reached the chambers that he shared with his wife, (they hadn’t yet moved in to Graem’s old suite of rooms.) He thought this was because the two youngest were being their usual exuberant selves – this proved partly true, but it also proved true that they were out in the corridors playing.
“Uncle Lachlan! Uncle Lachlan!” the pair squealed in delight the moment that they laid eyes on the new Laird. They bounded up to him excitedly, apparently wholly unaffected by that morning gruesome events.
“What are you two doing out here?” he frowned, but he let Maeve clamber up his leg and into his arms, while Roan bounced around his feet, happily telling his uncle that they’d been playing a game. Roan had been the fearless knight and Maeve the helpless damsel, only Maeve pouted about this and insisted that she was in fact the dragon.
“You’re too pretty to be the dragon, petal.” Lachlan couldn’t help but smile at her upturned face. “But why are you playing out here and not in with your mother and Auntie Muria?”
“Auntie Muira’s sick,” Roan said simply.
Lachlan felt his heart clatter in his chest. “Sick?” he choked, but they’d already reached the door to his room, so he pushed that open hurriedly instead of waiting for further information.
Sure enough Muira was lying on the bed, Bridghe flitting around by her side looking worried. The moments she saw Lachlan she hurried over to his side.
“I-I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” she stammered nervously. “We heard the-the bell chime,” she said with emphasis, “and then Muria was violently sick before passing out. She-she hasn’t said anything since then,” Bridghe finished wretchedly.
“Take them,” Lachlan grunted, passing Bridghe her daughter. “Let me speak to her alone.”
“But I-”
“Go!” Lachlan commanded. In a voice his sister never usually would have obeyed, but this time she fled the room with her children.
Lachlan hurried over to the bed where Muira was lying. Lying and not moving, her eyes were glassy and unfocused, and she didn’t seem aware of her husband at all as he sat down on the mattress beside her. He reached for one of her hands and held it to his chest.
“Muira, love?” he whispered, stroking a tender finger over her cheek. Her eyelids fluttered and she finally seemed to notice him. She looked at Lachlan at any rate, but she didn’t try to speak. “Muira?” he murmured her name again. He didn’t want to ask her what was wrong; he already knew – Tavish.
“What happened?”
Lachlan almost jumped at the unexpected sound of his wife’s voice. He hadn’t really been prepared for her to respond so soon. Her eyes were on his face, and Lachlan’s heart shattered when he saw the haunted, broken look in their depths.
“Muira,” he sighed heavily. “You know what happened,” he said softly. He was not going to recount the whole horrible affair for his wife to hear! He really didn’t think that she would be able to cope with that.
“H
e’s really gone then?” she whimpered. “Somehow, I-I couldn’t quite believe that it would actually happen.”
Lachlan sighed again, and swept a few stray strands of hair off her face. “You know why it had to happen though, Muira? He couldn’t be allowed to go unpunished for what he’d done.”
“I know that,” she sniffed, and tried to roll onto her side, turning away from her husband, only Lachlan refused to let her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and held her still. “Lachlan!” Muira cried.
“You blame me, don’t you?” he asked, his voice truly agonised. “Muira, as much as I hated that man for what he did to you, do you honestly think that I enjoyed what happened here this morning?”
“What? No! Of course I don’t, Lachlan!” Muira gasped, and then she took her husband by surprise once again, by throwing herself into his arms. “I just-I can’t-seem to get my head around it all.”
“Tell me, talk to me,” Lachlan urged gently, although he was still rather reluctant to hear what his wife had to confess.
Muira licked her lips hesitantly, but then she nodded and whispered: “Sometimes I-I can’t help wondering if it would have been better for everyone concerned if I’d never ran away from Tavish, if I’d just let him have me.” Lachlan gave a small, stilted nod; he’d known that he wouldn’t like whatever she had to say! “But then-then I think about how, if that had been the case, I’d never have met you and become your wife, and I-I’m almost glad that things happened the way they did,” she sobbed. “Does that make me a horrible, wicked woman?”
“No,” Lachlan said quickly, but with an honest urgency. “Not unless it makes me a horrible, wicked man. I know that I’ll thank Tavish for the rest of my life for driving you to me,” he murmured softly, dabbing a kiss against Muira’s lips.
Muira gave her head a little nod, and then held onto her husband tighter. She burrowed against the hard wall of his chest, feeling so a little better just because he was here, holding her, loving her, and she suddenly knew that somehow things were going to be all right again. It might take a little while, but she still had the man she adored, her brother was well, and there was a little baby on its way.
“I love you,” Muira whispered, tucking her head under Lachlan’s chin. “I never thought I’d ever love a man as much as I love you,” she sighed, clinging to him tighter. She smiled when she felt his lips brush the crown of her head.
“I love you too,” Lachlan swore softly. “And I intend to spend the rest of my life proving to you how much.”
Epilogue
“I’m never going through this again,” Muira moaned, trying and failing to get comfortable. She was, in her opinion, the size of a small house, and all swollen and achy, and hot, and- “Don’t shut that window!” she snapped at her husband. Lachlan turned and shot her a puzzled glance. “It’s boiling!” she sighed, fanning herself with a hand.
Lachlan looked out again at the cool September evening and tried his hardest not to grin. Grinning around his heavy pregnant wife wasn’t the wisest of things to do he’d learnt over the past few weeks.
“If he doesn’t arrive soon, I don’t know what I’ll do,” Muira almost cried.
Or she, Lachlan was tempted to say, as he strolled over to the bed where his wife was lying, but Muira had some how convinced herself that she was having a son and wouldn’t hear a word to the contrary. Even the midwife agreed with her, saying something about the way Muira was carrying the baby, and Bridghe had promised her sister-in-law that her craving for sour food must mean that she was having a boy.
Lachlan smiled politely through it all, and still privately considered it in the hands of the gods.
“Any day now the midwife said,” Lachlan said soothingly. He didn’t imagine that Muira had forgotten this fact. He was just keen to do anything that might ease her discomfort. “Poor lass,” he murmured, sitting down on the bed beside her and kissing her cheek. “Can I get you anything?”
Muira shook her head miserably, expecting her husband to get back up and leave her; she knew that she wasn’t exactly a lot of use to him in her current state. It wasn’t even as though she could manage a civil conversation without snapping him. So she was surprised, but pleased, when he settled down beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and pulling her to his side.
When Muira twisted a little to look up into Lachlan’s face, she couldn’t mistake the look of love and devotion that was shining in his eyes. There was something else too. Pride, she thought? He had adored showing her off earlier in her pregnancy, before she had begun to show too much to be admitted in public circles. It should have irritated her, but it hadn’t, his fierce protective possession was one of the reasons that she loved him so well.
..ooOOoo..
It looked like rain. Lachlan gave his favourite horse a gentle kick and urged him on a little faster as they made their way back to Eilean Donan. He’d had some important business with a few of the men who lived out in some of the more distance farms, and consequently had been away from the castle since early morning. It was now approaching evening and Lachlan was eager to get back to his wife. He hadn’t liked leaving her for so long, but his business couldn’t be delayed and Muira had urged him to go. He smiled at the memory of his wife, promising him not to let anything happen while he was away…
“Laird MacRae! Laird MacRae!”
Lachlan pulled his great steed to a sudden, jarring stop at the sound of a boy’s voice yelling to him. He was just about within sight of the castle now, and one of Eithne’s older sons had apparently been waiting to ambush him.
“Uncle!” The boy continued, rushing closer.
“What is it Davie?” Lachlan demanded, starting worriedly at the child. But if something were really wrong surely his captains wouldn’t have sent a child…
“It’s Aunt Muira!” Davie panted, doubled over and holding a stitch in his side. “Mama says my cousin’s coming, and Aunt Bridghe told me to stay out here so that I could tell you as soon as you were in sight!”
Lachlan blinked. Once. Twice. And then the boy’s words fell into place, without actually saying a word the Laird leant over in his saddle, scooping the child up into his arms before kicking Fiadhaich on. Hard. The horse surged forwards in a bolt of muscle and power, galloping back to the castle as if the very fires of hell were chasing behind him.
His child was on the way. Maybe already in the world. And he was missing it. And Muira, what of her? Lachlan’s stomach clenched fearfully. So many women dying in childbirth… He’d forced that thought from his mind over the last few months, but it returned with a vengeance now.
“Uncle Lachlan?” Davie choked, clutching at his uncle as he struggled to keep his seat. “Can we slow down, Uncle?” the boy begged nervously, but his plea fell on deaf ears. Lachlan knew one thing only - that he had to reach Muira without wasting another second.
He jumped, still holding Davie, from Fiadhaich’s saddle before the horse had even stopped moving, setting his nephew on unsteady feet. Lachlan paused for just a moment to pat the young boy affectionately on the head, but then he ran inside the castle, spiriting towards the Laird’s chambers where he and his wife now lived.
He almost barrelled into Ross, but didn’t stop running. “Lachlan! Your wife-”
“I know!” he yelled over his shoulder, rounding a corner and crashing into one of his sisters. Given the frantic state of his mind, it took Lachlan a moment to work out which one.
“Well really!” Sorcha stammered, steadying herself as her brother grabbed her and stopped her from falling. “What’s got you in such a state?”
Lachlan stared at her as though there was some, greatly warranted, doubt as to her level of sanity.
“Davie said that Muira was in labour!” he exploded, and the scream that punctuated his own exclamation seemed to confirm this supposition. Lachlan started towards the door of his chambers immediately, but Sorcha stood in his way, blocking his entrance.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she
demanded.
“To see my wife,” Lachlan growled through clenched teeth.
“Oh no you’re not,” Sorcha shook her head emphatically. “You can go through and sit in the reception room I suppose, but you are not going through to the bedroom. Heavens! You’re a man!”
Lachlan clenched and unclenched his fists impotently. “But I need to see that she’s all right! That they’re both all right,” he begged.
“Muira’s fine, everything’s coming along nicely,” Sorcha said, patting her brother’s hand gently. “It might not even be much longer. She started over ten hours ago.”
“Ten hours?” Lachlan winced, although he had enough nephews and nieces to know that ten hours wasn’t an exceptionally long time, especially not for Muira’s first baby.
“Yes, and she’s doing marvellously,” Sorcha said breezily. “Now you can come in, but only if you promise not to storm into the bedroom, can you do that, little brother?” she added sweetly. To which Lachlan scowled and towered over his sister, he hated being reminded that he was the youngest of the family. “Can you do that?”
Lachlan grunted a yes, and was allowed to step into his own reception room-what had before been Graem’s chamber.
“Now, sit there,” Sorcha pointed to a chair, “I’ll see if anyone can be spared to fetch you some supper.”
“I don’t want-” Lachlan began, taking his seat like an obedient little boy, but his sentence was broken by another wail from the bedroom. “Can’t I just pop my head in and-”
“No!” Sorcha snapped. “She won’t thank you for it, in fact, you’ll be safer out here.”
“Safer?” Lachlan puzzled.
“Muira’s liable to do you some damage if you get within range,” Sorcha said bluntly. She watched her brother squirm uncomfortably with a smile of satisfaction. “Don’t worry, it’ll only last until she hold the wee bairn in her arms,” she added soothingly, giving him a sisterly pat on the back. “You, stay here,” she commanded, “I’m going to see if they need any help in there.”
A Beautiful Lie (The Camaraes) Page 38