by Karen Ranney
Moving to the trunk, she laid her medicine case down flat. The fitted case and the vials inside it had been a gift from Gordon, one of the last he’d given her.
“It’s a small thing I give you, Mary, in comparison to what you’ve brought to my life.” She felt tears mist her eyes at the thought of his kindness. He’d been such a dear man.
Gordon, a friend of her father, had offered aid and comfort when her aged parents had died within months of each other. When he’d asked her to marry him, she’d unhesitatingly agreed.
He’d been the most gallant of husbands. Those who knew his talent as a goldsmith often remarked that he could have made his fortune in Edinburgh. Gordon had only smiled and said that he’d made enough money for his needs and a little more, and wasn’t that enough?
Theirs had been exactly the kind of marriage she’d thought it might be, coupled with a few surprises. She’d expected him to treat her in a fatherly fashion, and he’d been both a guide and a teacher. Gordon’s passion for her, however, had been unforeseen, surprising the innocent she’d been. But he’d always been the first to encourage her in her interests. When she expressed an interest in medicine, he’d encouraged that as well.
She sat on the edge of the bed and slowly unfastened her braid. Every night as she did so, she thought of her husband. Gordon had liked to watch her brush her hair in the evening.
“It is, my love, a sight to warm even an old man’s bones.”
For a few moments, her smile was fond, remembering the love and affection he’d so effortlessly brought into her life. Then, just as she did each night, her thoughts slid a little, as she remembered the later years when Gordon changed and love didn’t seem to matter.
Sometimes, it wasn’t wise to recall the past.
After readying herself for bed, she tucked herself in, wedging the blanket around her. With her back against the wall, she sat and stared at the shadows around the trunk and the doorway, wishing that they didn’t look like crouching animals. How foolish she could be at times. But she was feeling absurdly lonely in this deserted castle and adrift as she hadn’t felt in months. Was it because she was away from Inverness, apart from her friends? The world felt like an unfriendly place at the moment, and her presence in it small and insignificant.
The moon was too pale to illuminate the room. As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she could see the archer’s slits around the curved walls, framing long, rectangular patches of dark gray sky.
Sitting alone in the blackness of night didn’t make her more comfortable with it. She raised her knees and wrapped her arms around them. How odd that she should be so tired and her mind still be active. She couldn’t help but think of Hamish MacRae, in the room two floors above her. His imprisonment might account for his aloofness now, but even former prisoners had friends, welcomed family. Why did Hamish shun even his brother?
He was tortured.
What had they done to him? And why wouldn’t he allow her to treat him?
She couldn’t make a person change his behavior simply because she wished it. She’d learned that lesson from Gordon well enough.
One day, on returning home from treating a sick child, she’d been greeted by Charles’s frowns and unspoken censure. “Gordon is ill.”
“Ill?” She’d hung up her cloak and stared at her husband’s apprentice.
“He often becomes ill, Mary, but he doesn’t want you to know.”
She’d rushed to Gordon’s side, sitting on the edge of her husband’s bed to feel his forehead. It had been clammy and pale, almost waxen, and his lips had been bluish.
“I promise I won’t leave you again, Gordon.” Guilt had prompted her vow.
He opened his eyes, his clear blue gaze looking distant, almost as if he had begun to physically leave her.
“You mustn’t say such things, Mary,” he said weakly. “Of course you’ll go. If they’re sick, they need you. I’m only one man, and the whole of Inverness could use your healing talents.”
“It’s not the whole of Inverness, my dearest,” she’d said, smiling a little. “Just a patient here and there.”
“Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll not stay home for my sake.” He gripped her hand tightly, and she’d been concerned at how cold his fingers felt.
She nodded, and it seemed to assuage him.
For two months he’d been ill, but refused to stay in his bed. Every night, she prepared a dose for him, something to settle his stomach, but it hadn’t made him well. Nothing she’d done had made any difference. When Gordon had died, the world she’d known, safe and secure, had sadly changed.
“What would you think of him, Gordon?” she asked, addressing the ceiling, and then wondering why she sought her husband’s counsel. Gordon had disapproved of adventure. He’d always said that a man was born to a role in life and should adhere to it.
He’d been a goldsmith, apprenticed, just as Charles had been, as a young man. He’d spent his life developing his talent for working in fine metals, and had been supremely content in his vocation. People from as far away as Edinburgh had come to their small shop to purchase Gordon’s works of art, goblets with rampant lions and gryphons etched along the rim, or small silver boxes adorned with embossed thistles.
Gordon had wanted Charles to take over the shop, but the two of them had never made the final legal arrangements. He’d left Charles some of his tools and inventory, but the rest of the contents of the shop belonged to Mary, along with Gordon’s lockbox of gold and silver ingots.
In short, she was wealthier than she’d ever dreamed of being, and alone for the first time in a dozen years. Alone and wakeful in a strange, deserted castle on the edge of the world.
Sleep was difficult for Hamish. Tonight, it was made doubly so with the addition of Brendan’s party to Aonaranach. Hamish found himself pacing his small round room, walking in circles like a tethered bear.
These last few weeks had been the first time in his life he’d been completely and totally alone. At first, he’d missed the sound of voices, so much that he had wandered through his new home talking to himself. Yet he was now nearly desperate to banish the first people he’d seen in almost a month.
Leaning against the edge of the window, he stared out into the cold night. A sliver of moon only occasionally viewed through rapidly moving clouds was the only illumination. The sea was a giant black creature licking at the shore and breathing heavily in gentle swells of waves. A night bird called in a lonely, plaintive cry, and was left unanswered.
He was no stranger to this view, having learned it well over the past weeks. Tonight, however, he could smell the cook fire, and the odor of ale from a cask, scents that hadn’t been there before and meant habitation, civilization, and strangers.
He couldn’t fault the meal he’d been served. That, at least, was a change from the past weeks.
Glancing at his cot, he made no move toward it. However much his body needed sleep, his mind counseled against attempting it. Tonight would no doubt be the same as it had been for weeks. He’d fall into a restless slumber, only to be awakened by strange, misshapen nightmares as if he were drugged on opium. Men he’d known all his life paraded before him, reciting their names as if he didn’t know them as well as his own. Samuel, Brian, Alex, William, twenty-seven of them in total.
Those who’d sailed with him had done so not because he was a MacRae or because he’d made a fortune for his crew three times over since first given command of his own ship. Men sailed with him because they believed he had the right mix of daring and wisdom. In short, men signed on with him because they respected his abilities.
One man was no match for a mob of fifty, and at least that many had swarmed over the side of his ship. He’d watched in numbed horror as they’d killed his crew and then set his ship ablaze until only a burned husk was left above the water line. Finally, it, too, tipped over and sank to the bottom of the ocean.
The nightmares followed the same litany each night. When the roll cal
l of his men was done, he was propelled back to the encampment at the hands of the Atavasi, his dreams mimicking the reality of his imprisonment. He was being dragged along from village to village, from waterfall to mountain, from valley to riverbank. Each scene was marked by another interlude of pain. Just when he’d begun to pray for an end, his captors had allowed him to regain some strength, the better to prolong their torture.
Hamish returned to the cot and sat on the edge to remove his boots. Standing, he stripped off his clothing and stood naked in the night air.
He knew his body well, acknowledged the tensile strength of each bone, the tolerance of each muscle and nerve. He’d been both captive within it and separated from it, part of himself and yet not. He felt about his body the way he had his ship, an extension of himself, simply a vessel in which he lived.
The Atavasi had done their best to make him a walking corpse. The fact that they’d not succeeded was due to his indefatigability, a quality he’d never known he possessed until India.
All during that time, his mind had refused to believe what was happening to him. He’d distanced himself from what they’d done to him by disappearing into his thoughts, transporting himself back in time with his memory or forward into wishes. He’d clung to a tiny vestige of hope that still remained despite the circumstances and the torture they’d inflicted on him.
Toward the end, he’d felt himself separate, as if the creature known as Hamish MacRae had to divide itself in order to survive. The physical body had been given up for lost; the mind controlled the pain by fleeing from it, his spiritual nature was muted by pain and a sense of horror.
Gradually, after his escape, he’d begun to heal as much as he could, given what they’d done to him. His mind was still troubled and would no doubt remain so for the rest of his life. Only lately had his soul emerged from its cocoon to announce its presence, just when he no longer needed God.
As he lay on his bed, staring off into the darkness, Hamish thought of Mary Gilly, the healer with the omnipotent touch. Unbidden, his thoughts shifted to the sight of her striding across the courtyard, her loose limbed gait hinting at long legs and curving hips. He’d not been with a woman for years, and his body was suddenly very aware of that fact.
Deliberately, he lay uncovered, allowing himself to be chilled by the night air. The blanket, the sheet would be too abrasive. He rested his good arm under his head, stared up at the ceiling, and felt himself harden at the thought of being healed. Not in the way she imagined, perhaps, but with the only touch he craved.
A widow. Was she as lonely as he? Or was that word even correct? Could he even be lonely anymore with the ghost that inhabited his thoughts?
He resolutely pushed that idea away and stood, knowing that sleep wouldn’t come tonight.
Mary cupped her hands around her elbows. The wind howling through the three archer’s slits sounded mournful and condemnatory. A gust blew out the candle on the bedside table, leaving her in total darkness.
Standing, Mary grabbed her dress from the peg by the door and donned it over her nightgown. Without her stays she wasn’t exactly proper, but she doubted anyone else was awake, as late as it was. She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and opened the door.
Gordon had had the most beautiful dressing gown made for her that last year, something he’d commissioned from the dressmaker as a surprise. Countless hours had gone into embroidering the yoke and shoulders of the beige silk with crimson thread, to form a trail of primroses. Each time she donned it, she ran her fingers over the tiny, delicate stitches. Gordon created masterpieces in gold, but these talented women had done the same with their needles. Because it was one of her most cherished articles of clothing, she hadn’t brought it on this journey. Now she missed its warmth as the wind swirled out the door, as if gleeful to escape.
Mary flattened herself against the curved wall of the tower and dared herself to go either up or down, anything but stand there frightened of the dark.
A sound from below captured her attention. Moving to the top of the stairs, she realized that deep shadows flickered along the wall. Someone had lit a fire on the main floor of the tower and was standing before it.
She would have liked to call it courage, but Mary was only too aware that it was her curiosity that propelled her down the staircase.
Halfway down, she saw him.
He turned at a sound, looking up at her. She stopped, a hand pressed flat against her chest to calm the sudden skipping beat of her heart.
Brendan should have warned her. Instead of telling her that his brother had a fearsome name or describing him as a boy, he should have stated that Hamish was arresting, that a woman’s heart might stutter when first viewing him. He should have told her that he was a tall man with broad shoulders, and possessed of a warrior’s body.
His face, however, drew her attention, his jaw jutting out pugnaciously at the world, his lips oddly squared. His cheekbones were high, and his nose was broad. A half dozen or so irregular circles marred his face, each pitted and dark as if long healed. They kept him from being called handsome, but they could not take away the impression of strength.
“Go back upstairs, Mrs. Gilly.” His voice was raspy, more than a whisper but less than a normal speaking voice.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, in defense of her curiosity.
He said nothing, only turned and stared at the fire, his arms folded in front of him. A pose of dismissal all the more potent for its silence.
She descended the stairs, wrapping the ends of the shawl around her hands. Now was not the time for reticence. She walked closer, moved to stand in front of him, and before losing her courage, reached up with one hand and placed her fingers against the worst of the scars on his face.
“What happened to you?”
Pain was etched on his face, and a flatness of expression she’d never seen before except in the old or terminally ill.
Gently, he pulled her hand away, his thumb and forefinger easily encompassing her wrist.
“I need no healer, Mrs. Gilly. Brendan exceeded his authority. I’m sorry for the loss of your time and for your trouble.”
She stood with his hand still around her wrist. She could have easily shaken free, but she remained where she was, bound by his restraint.
“Won’t you tell me what happened?”
Her question was left unanswered.
In the silence, she reached up with her other hand and placed it flat on his chest, surprised when he flinched. He dropped her hand and stepped back, putting a little distance between them.
He didn’t like her touching him. She tucked that information away. Before ever beginning to treat her patients, she studied them, getting to know as much as she could about the way they lived and their general condition.
Hamish MacRae might be surprised by what she’d already deduced.
“I suspect you’re not as healed as you wish me to think, Mr. MacRae. I also think, despite your words, that you do need me.”
“I’ve been without a woman for nearly two years, madam. That’s the only need I have.”
His crudeness was deliberate. There was a look in his eyes, however, that cautioned her to be wary. She took a deep breath and brazened it out.
“I’ve treated a number of male patients,” she said, not adding that they were mostly infants or the elderly. None of them had been remotely like Hamish MacRae. However, she continued with her bravado. “I’m used to the ways of men, as well as the workings of their bodies. Nothing you could do or say has the ability to shock me. Shall we not play that game between us?”
“I didn’t say what I did to distress you, Mrs. Gilly,” he said, “but to give you fair warning.”
“Most men in your condition would have other things on their minds.”
“In my condition?” One corner of his lip curved upward in a sardonic smile.
He stepped back, but she noted that he kept his fingers resting in the placket of his shirt, as if that was the only
way he could support his arm.
“Why can’t you move your arm, Mr. MacRae?”
“Go back to Inverness,” he said, and this time, his voice sounded as if it could cut glass.
“Your brother paid me to treat you, and treat you I will.”
“I will pay you to go back to where you came from.”
“I can’t do that,” she said, smiling gently at him.
“God save me from interfering women.”
She didn’t know quite how to answer that comment. Granted, she was not always welcome by the entire household when she was summoned to a patient’s bedside. Most of the time, however, the patient wanted her there.
“You need me,” she said, refusing to back down. “The sooner you agree to my treating you, the sooner I will be gone.”
“You’ll be gone in the morning.”
He turned and walked away. But she was not so easily dismissed.
Resolutely, she followed him to the stairs.
“At least let me see your arm.”
He turned and stared at her, the look on his face not at all friendly. “My brother says you’re a miracle worker of sorts. Do you intend to work your miracles on me, Angel?”
“Do not call me by that silly name,” she said crossly. “I have neither the temperament nor the holiness to be addressed as an inhabitant from heaven. I am only too human.”
“But you don’t deny that you have the power of miracles at your fingertips.”
“On the contrary,” she said, irritated. “I’m a student of Matthew Marshall’s, and have read everything he’s written on medicine. If there are any miracles in the work that I perform, it is because of his education and his discoveries.”
“A squirrel tail, severed at midnight? Rat’s whiskers added to three dashes of pepper from the Spice Islands?”