But Fate mocks intention.
Kate stirred suddenly, and he stilled when she lifted her head and peered drowsily around, rubbing the silk crown of her head against his jaw, still more asleep than awake. He stopped breathing altogether until her head dropped heavily to his chest once more, her lips against the base of his throat.
And he thanked God that he knew what was real and what wasn’t.
SEVEN
UPON AWAKING IN UNFAMILIAR SURROUNDINGS
“SO PRETTY, KIT. I ALMOST ENVY YOU.” The voice was no more than a murmur. Something cool and dry caressed the side of Kate’s neck, fluttered across her collarbone, and drifted lower… She shifted, rolling away from the familiarity, groggy with fever and exhaustion.
“But why envy you when I can take whatever I want of yours?” His breathing was light, too, excited. “Including your life.”
The phantom fingers hooked beneath the edge of her bodice, pulling it lower. She flinched against the unwelcome intimacy, struggling to wake. The phantom hand caressed her breast languidly. Something moved close to her face.
“Tell Kit to enjoy the roses.” A mouth touched hers—She gasped, bolting upright.
In the corner of the black room something shifted, a darker blot dissolving into the corner. A sound like a soft laugh—or was it the wind in the smoke hole?— trembled across the air.
She struggled to her feet, light-headed and disoriented. She shivered, looking about. There were still a few embers in the hearth. They hadn’t been there when she’d woken. Unless someone had been standing between her and the fire.
Fear jerked her into full wakefulness. She turned, stumbling over MacNeill’s regimental jacket. Where was MacNeill?
She spied a short flight of stairs and staggered up them on wobbly legs. “MacNeill!” she croaked. Her throat rasped painfully, and the effort made her dizzy. “MacNeill!”
No answer. She started down a long, dim corridor, a shaft of moonlight piercing its length. She limped forward, passing room after empty room. All dark. All silent. Like tombs awaiting their tenants.
Finally, she emerged into a huge entry filled with dim gray light. She looked up. Three stories overhead a huge gaping wound in the roof revealed a dark, bruised sky. Clouds drifted across the face of a half-gone moon, and a cold, bitter wind spiraled down from above, stirring the leaves at her feet and tossing her hair about her face.
“MacNeill!” The wind caught her feeble cry and carried it away.
No one answered.
Her worst fear taunted her with pricks of panic: He’d left her. Abandoned her.
Not again. Please. She blinked back tears, refusing to cry even though her thoughts kept unraveling like mist in the wind and her legs felt like jelly, and the cold was sucking the last bit of heat from her and… and she saw a faint flicker of light.
He hadn’t left her.
With a sob, she hobbled toward the lighted room, dizzy and disoriented, her heart pattering like a snared rabbit’s. MacNeill stood inside, his back to her, the burning brand he held lashing the room’s dark walls.
“MacNeill—” Her greeting died in her throat as she took in the scene. A massive oak table lay on its side, its surface scarred with deep cuts, as if an ax had been taken to it. What might have once been benches or chairs lay in splinters. Glass shards covered the floor like a jeweled carpet, and dinted pewter trays and cups lay twisted at the base of scarred and notched plaster walls.
“What happened in here?” she asked.
“It looks,” MacNeill said calmly, “as though someone was unhappy.” He raised the brand he carried and illuminated the walls higher up.
Kate recoiled. Three feet above them a dagger pinned the carcass of a rat to the wall. Twined around the desiccated creature’s neck was a quartet of flowers, dried and shriveled, but still identifiable as roses. Small yellow roses. She put a hand behind her, groping for the wall.
MacNeill lowered his torch and the gruesome little corpse disappeared. His gaze swept over the room, noting, discarding, missing nothing, searching.
“Who did that?” she whispered “Was it him?”
He turned his head, regarding her intently. “Who?”
“There was a man in the kitchen when I woke. He said… your name and then he said he could take anything of yours he wanted, including your life. Then—”
He swung around. “Then what?”
“He touched me.”
“The hell he did!” He strode toward her, a suddenly furious and formidable looking Celtic warrior. He grasped her upper arms, staring down into her face. “Are you hurt? Did he violate you?”
For a second she didn’t take his meaning. Of course she’d been violated. Then she understood. Her face burned. “No. No. He just touched me…” Her hand fluttered to her loosened bodice.
MacNeill growled savagely, releasing her and looking about.
“And said to tell you to enjoy the roses.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘Tell Kit to enjoy the roses.’ ”
Once more he swore. He reached out, gripping her shoulder and spinning her around, setting her world tilting.
“How dare you!” she protested, batting feebly at his arm, but his grip was like steel and he heeded her objections not at all. “You can’t—”
“I can.”
She set her heels, in her exhaustion and fear stumbling, and would have fallen to her knees but he was already sweeping her up against his broad chest, carrying her easily as he left the room and moved into the corridor, still managing to hold the torch.
“You must tell me,” she said. “You promised. You swore! What is going on?”
“Then by all means, be it as you wish, ma’am.” His laugh was bitter and short. “You saw the rat with the flower necklet?”
“Yes.” She searched through the haze clouding her thoughts for— “They’re the same roses you brought us in York.”
“Yes. The person who skewered that rat did not do so by way of a love token,” Kit went on grimly. “I don’t know who he is or what he wants, but I will warrant well I do not want you here when I find out.”
He stopped in the center of the hall, his eyes fiery and intent. Conflict marked his hard face. “Damnation,” he muttered. “Damn it to a bloody hell.
“He knows,” he finally said. “He knows I can’t take the time to look for him. He’s taunting me. There are a thousand places for him to hide and I don’t have the time. Not with you here. Not with you so weak and… Bloody, bloody hell!”
Frightened by the violence of his words and in his face, Kate shrank in his embrace and at once the fire in his eyes died away, the coolness returned to his expression. “It is time for us to leave. But first—hold this.”
He handed her the torch, and she took it. He strode to the far end of the narrow passage, her body rigid in his arms. He shouldered open a heavy oak door and peered down a steep flight of stairs into blackness.
“Beg pardon,” he said and with a slight grimace against her anticipated outrage, took the torch from her and tossed her over his shoulder, freeing his hands. She didn’t disappoint.
“You can’t— Ah!” Holding the burning brand aloft, he started downstairs, each of her remonstrations checked by the jolt of his step on a tread.
The cellar hadn’t changed. Cobwebs still hung in thick sheets from the low, damp stone arches, and the sound of scurrying things still echoed eerily in the darkness. The smell of mold and dampness still thickened the chill air.
He set Kate’s feet on the ground, then leaned her against the wall, handing her back the torch. “Hold this and wait here.”
She took the torch without a word, blinking rapidly as though trying to focus her gaze. She was ill—whether from lack of food, cold, sleeplessness, he could not say. He only knew he had to get her to St. Bride’s as soon as humanly possible. Nothing else mattered. Not even him, damn his soul, though the need to find him, to punish him for touching her, raged within Kit like a living
thing.
He turned back into the moldering cellar and, at the far wall, stopped and ran his hands across the pitted surface until he felt the raised edge of a masonry block. With a grunt, he pulled it free and thrust his hand into the revealed crevasse. From deep within, he withdrew a leather-wrapped parcel. He unwrapped it, exposing a long, heavy-looking blade.
“What are you doing, Kit?”
“Setting stores, Dand. You can’t be too sure when you’ll need a weapon.”
Dand laughed. “But here? Why? Ye fear the cattle might take up arms agin ye someday?”
“What is it?” Kate’s weak voice recalled him to the present.
“A claymore,” he said, lifting the cumbersome-looking thing as though it were its lighter cousin and eyeing its blunted edge with the eye of a connoisseur.
“Why do you insist on using that bludgeon, Kit, when you could use something with a bit of finesse?” Ramsey asked.
“Because a bludgeon gets yer point across a sight better than a hint.”
He lifted a leather scabbard from the same roll and strapped it on his back between his shoulder blades. With a hiss of steel, he slid the heavy blade into its sheath. “Now we leave.”
The intensity in his voice marshaled Kate’s scattered thoughts. She nodded, and this time when he scooped her up, she clung to him. Back in the kitchen, he gathered their belongings and took her outside. He left her next to an exterior wall, telling her to wait while he caught and harnessed Doran.
A faint thinning of darkness marked the eastern horizon. She stayed where he bade her, unpleasantly woozy, and felt the castle behind her, its oppressive weight and terrible patience. Uneasily, she turned and looked up and so for the first time saw the castle from without, its massive dimensions, the shorn roofline exposing the charred half walls of second-story rooms, the entire facade pockmarked with shadowed recesses and black, empty windows. High above, marsh grasses had seeded themselves amid the crumbling crenulations. The coarse stalks shifted in the wind, pale in the gloaming, like the spectral arms of little children beckoning to her to climb up to them, and behind that a dark figure—
“KATE!”
Startled, she wheeled. Too late, she heard the ominous rumble from above and then he was sweeping her up, driving her hard against the castle, his arms above their heads, pinning her to the wall as the sky rained rock down on them. She clung to him, her face pressed against the base of his throat, and felt his big body jar as pieces struck him. Not a shard touched her.
As abruptly as it had started, it ended. He pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
He released his breath, his eyes rising to the treacherous roofline above.
“Did you see something? Someone?”
“I don’t know. I thought…” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
He dipped down and caught her behind the knees, taking her to the carriage and depositing her as the gelding pawed the ground. He climbed in after her.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To where it all began,” he said. “To St. Bride’s.”
EIGHT
FORGETTING THE PAST: A USEFUL THOUGH OFTEN FUTILE ENDEAVOR
KIT TOUCHED THE WHIP lightly to Doran’s flanks, and the gelding extended his trot. He could feel the enmity following their flight. But no one could see them with the carraige hood raised. Even more important, they were not targets, though without conceit, he knew himself to be the only one capable of making such a shot.
“Are we safe?” Kate asked breathlessly.
“Aye.”
“But what if he follows? What if he’s waiting ahead of us?”
“Look around, Mrs. Blackburn. There’s no place to hide for miles. Besides, if he’d wanted to kill us, he could have done so while we slept.”
“Oh,” she murmured faintly, tipping slowly against him. He looked down at her and was once more struck by the pallor of her face and the dark smudges beneath her eyes and cheekbones.
“My God,” he said. “You look terrible.”
She struggled upright. Her chin trembled, then firmed into the imperious angle that was becoming so familiar. “You,” she declared, “are a boor.”
“I only meant that—”
“I know exactly what you meant,” she said. “Earlier you told me I am dirty—”
“What?” He reached out, disliking the way she was canting forward, and grasped her arm, but she yanked free of his grip. “I never—”
“Yes, you did. You implied it! At that inn! And now you tell me I look terrible. Are there any other overly familiar comments you’d like to make?”
“Jesus! You look ill, and I don’t have a bleeding clue what you mean about implying you’re dirty, but in point of fact, you are dirty.”
God help him, she sniffled.
He stared at her in horror. He had never been this close to a crying woman. Her breath broke on a fullfledged sob.
“I’m dirty, too!” he said frantically. “We’ve been traveling. You’ve been sleeping on the floor. You look… you look…” God, he couldn’t believe he was driving through a freezing moor, in possible danger, trying to frame a compliment! And that she was making him do so! What the hell had happened to him? “I cannot believe this.”
“What?” she sniffed.
“That you are offended that a man you can have no possible interest in might not find you attractive. Is there anything but vanity to you well-bred ladies? Well, for whatever it’s worth, I do find you attractive. But you still look like hell.”
Her face crumpled “I feel like hell!” She promptly buried her face in her hands.
“Kate.”
“No!” She gave herself a little shake and dashed the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “I promised myself I would act like a lady. I would endure with equanimity whatever this trip entailed. Or whoever. So I will. But”—she fixed him with a dark glare— “I want some answers. Who was that man?”
He did not want to have this conversation.
“You have to tell me. He …took liberties.”
“Don’t you think I am fully aware of that?” he grated out. “That I do not feel that outrage in my very bones? I assure you, madam, I do. I also assure you, he will pay dearly for that insult.”
“Your indignation isn’t any balm. I want the truth. I deserve to know.”
Her gaze scoured his face, seeking answers. Fear stamped her features, but she did not give in to it. “MacNeill.”
His gaze had returned to the road. His hands on the reins had tightened, the worn leather gloves stretching taut across the knuckles.
“There were four of us,” he began.
“The men who came with you to York and the one who died in prison?” she prompted.
“Yes.”
“How did you know one another?”
“We were orphans, collected like bits of wool from Highland thornbushes, gathered from the cities and the villages and brought to St. Bride’s, the last of the Catholic clans.”
“Who collected you?”
MacNeill shrugged. “The abbot. His monks.”
“And how did they find you? How did they know where you were? Why you in particular?”
“God, you are full of questions.” When he saw that she was not to be deterred, he sighed. “A letter, a rumor, a bit of gossip from an old drover, or the whispered word of a clandestine follower would be enough to send them harrying off to find us.”
“To what end?”
“I’m not certain. I can only guess.” He frowned. “When we were boys, they let us believe we were destined to be knights of the old order. We believed them. We even made up a vow of fidelity.” He smiled bitterly. “Later, even after we realized we wouldn’t be given any silver chargers, we still kept faith to that vow. Only the pledge of fidelity we made wasn’t to St. Bride’s, it was to one another.”
“That’s the vow you pledged me,” she said with slow-dawn
ing certainty.
“Yes.”
“But what has this to do with that ruined castle or the man hiding inside?”
“Someone broke that vow. And I believe it might be the man you saw.”
“I don’t understand.”
His brow furrowed in frustration and annoyance. “We weren’t being groomed to be knights, we were being groomed to be… warriors, I suppose. Our actions directed by and sanctioned by the church.”
“Like the Knights Templar?”
“Nothing so formalized. We were tools to be used in times of great upheaval and danger. Such as occurred in France during ’93. That September, in Paris alone, four hundred priests and over a thousand Catholic nobility were massacred.
“Some priests fled to England, one to St. Bride’s. Brother Toussaint. He had been a great soldier before seeking holy orders. He taught us his skills.
“Then, one day, a man came to the abbey. A Frenchman. I don’t know his real name—he called himself Duchesne, and he had obviously known Brother Toussaint in Paris. I suspect now that he was of French royal blood. At that time the royalists and the church had similar interests, that being to return the French monarchy to the throne and thus the Catholic Church to France.
“He had a plan. We were to go to France, posing as adventurers who traveled the world looking for unknown species of plants and animals, but most particularly roses. And as rose hunters we were to have come to present Josephine Bonaparte our discoveries.”
“Roses?” She must have sounded incredulous, for a touch of wry amusement crossed his face.
“Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife has accumulated the largest collection of roses in the world at her home, Malmaison. She is obsessed with roses, and Napoleon, as a fond husband, indulges her.
“Her gardens are legendary, and she has sent envoys across the world to find her new varieties. Diplomats, sycophants, ambassadors from any number of countries and principalities, are constantly arriving at her door with their offerings. You can well imagine what a fertile ground for intelligence gathering such a place must be. Certainly the possibilities have not been lost on the king’s advisers—or the Holy See’s.”
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