She would not have refused him this time.
Then Frang recalled hearing the jingle of coins placed into Glenna’s hand by the pushy stranger at the door, and his frustration dissipated like the smoke from an extinguished wick. He was a patient man. He’d waited all these years; another night would make little difference.
He walked to the door and let himself out, closing it carefully—soundlessly—behind him.
Chapter 3
Glenna’s arms strained with the effort of pulling the thick rope through the pulley suspended over the well until at last the bucket appeared from the depths of the dark hole set in the stone floor. She wrapped the rope in a figure eight around the stay, but before she could reach out to take hold of the bucket, the old woman from the entryway hobbled into the cellar and stepped to the edge of the well.
“Allow me, milady,” she said and removed the handle from the hook with a grunt, her thick arms taking the weighty bucket down with ease and without spilling so much as a drop.
Glenna had soaked her skirts each time she’d drawn water.
“Thank you,” she said stiffly.
“The set’s a bit high up for a wee thing such as yourself.”
“I don’t usually draw the water,” Glenna answered immediately and then regretted her words. Even though she’d taken her son’s pitiful payment readily enough, some strange manner of her pride didn’t wish the old woman to know that the few servants Roscraig once boasted were now all dead or had fled the hold. Her mind filled with the memory of the Tower’s gouged door, the pounding and shouting from beyond…
“Hmm” was Harriet Cameron’s only response. But the old woman seemed to be studying Glenna’s flushed face in the gloom of the cellar. “You look familiar to me, milady. Do you travel often to Edinburgh?”
“Nay.” This time it was Glenna’s turn to be noncommittal. “Thank you.” She reached out to take hold of the bucket, but the woman turned it just out of her reach.
“Milady, I couldna allow you—”
Glenna cut off the old woman’s protests by striding forward and seizing the bucket handle, pulling it away as she passed to the stairwell. “This way.”
The bucket was heavy—much heavier than when Glenna usually carried it. She tried to measure her breaths without obvious strain as they gained the first level and continued to climb up the spiral corridor.
“O’ course, you would know if you’d been to the town or nae, but I do vow I’ve seen you before.” They arrived at the upper level, and Glenna stopped before the chamber door nearest the stair to catch her breath and wait for Harriet Cameron to hobble toward her. “Forgive me, milady; the journey astride has fair crippled me. Biggar, perhaps?”
“What?” Glenna asked with a frown, the word still breathy, to her dismay, from the exertion.
“Perhaps I caught sight of you at the shearing in Biggar.”
“I’m afraid not,” Glenna replied and then turned to open the door as the clatter of boots on the stone steps beyond grew louder. She gestured through the doorway.
Glenna followed Harriet Cameron inside and set the bucket down inside the room, waiting with pounding heart for the two men to join them, berating herself for leaving her father’s sword in the cellar. She felt very vulnerable with such strangers in the house, one of whom had been able to talk his way inside before Glenna had even known she had decided to open the door, it seemed now.
Tavish Cameron entered without any trace of wariness, a pair of satchels slung across his wide, rain-wet shoulders, the Englishman garbed head-to-toe in black strolling at his heels. His gaze found Glenna at once, and she noticed that she caught hold of her breath in her chest as his blue eyes boldly took in her appearance.
“Ah, my…lady,” he said while reaching inside his short cloak to retrieve the parchment he’d shown her earlier that was tucked between his shirt and doublet. He was unrolling it even as he approached her, causing Glenna to bring a hand to her throat instinctively, her feet to carry her back farther against the door behind her.
“I understand that your father is refusing visitors, but if you will show him—”
Glenna scrabbled for the door handle at her back while she interrupted the large, frowning man. “I already told you; I don’t care what your decree says, and neither does my father.” Tavish Cameron stopped short, and his eyebrows raised as he once again pinned her with his bright gaze. Glenna swallowed and gathered her bravado for a final display.
“You’ll leave on the morrow. First light,” she reminded them, her eyes going to the black-clad Englishman, who seemed infinitely safer to look upon. She stepped through the doorway, pulling the door shut after her and then scrambling with her shaking hand to seize hold of the chain about her waist and fit the correct key into the lock before she could be challenged.
She stepped back from the door and waited, her chest heaving, cursing herself for a fool. What had she been thinking, granting them entry? Harriet Cameron seemed kindly enough, but it was clear that her son had ulterior motives. Glenna had little in the way of defense if he wished her harm or to rob her. Not that there was much to steal in the whole of the keep, save the few coins Tavish Cameron himself had given her.
She knew that Iain Douglas would have offered them his own bed had it been he who had greeted them.
The truth of it shamed her, and so, when no one rushed the door with pounding demands for release, Glenna turned and escaped down the stairs, wondering how one might manage to sleep after having imprisoned three people in one’s guest chamber.
* * * *
Tavish saw Lucan Montague’s movements freeze from the corner of his eye as he stood and stared at the now closed chamber door. The scraping of metal was unmistakable.
“Have we been incarcerated?” Montague hedged.
Tavish nodded. “Aye.”
The English knight came forward as a flare of light blossomed behind him—Mam had managed to ignite a stub of candle she’d found, bringing at least an illusion of warmth and brightness to the cold stone room.
Tavish held up a palm. “Wait,” he advised quietly.
“Wait?” Montague repeated. He began to rant in a stream of fiery French, but then seemed to realize that his efforts were wasted in a foreign tongue. “I’ll be damned if I shall acquiesce to being held against my—”
“Shh.” Tavish held up a finger before creeping toward the door and leaning his ear against it. After several moments, he straightened and began searching in his clothing and among his various pouches again. “You’ll not be held against your will anywhere. Especially”—he withdrew a ring of small iron rods of varying shapes and lengths and began to flip through the cluster—“not in a keep that belongs to me.”
Tavish crouched to one knee and inserted a likely candidate while Mam went about the chamber singing under her breath. She slid thick coverings from the conspicuously few furnishings in such a large chamber, sending up clouds of thick dust that made her swat the air and cough.
“Good heavens,” she gasped. “None’s slept here in an age, I reckon! Tav, there’s neither wood nor peat.”
Tavish withdrew the first rod and flipped through the ring again even while he glanced up and around the room. “A moment, pray, Mam.” He inserted a second, then a third. On the fourth rod, the mechanism inside the door scraped, and the door pulled inward of the jamb.
Tavish gained his feet and tucked his tools away before inching the door open and looking into the corridor. Both the stairwell and the passageway to the right were black, and not a sound could be heard above the crashing of the ocean waves and the roar of the wind beyond the stones. Tavish ducked back inside the room and pushed the door closed.
“There you are, Montague,” he said as he crossed the floor and went to a pair of small tables against the inner wall. “You may go where you please now, although I would recommend you wait until after
we’ve had our supper. Mam’s brought meat pies.” He bent and examined one of the dainty, round-topped tables, then picked it up by a leg and turned it this way and that.
“That I have,” Harriet confirmed. “Lamb.”
Lucan Montague brightened. “I do fancy lamb pie.”
Tavish took two table legs in hand and looked up at Montague with a wink. “As do I.” He swung the table against the stones of the hearth where it broke apart into tens of pieces with a crash. Tavish tossed the now dismembered legs atop the pile. “There you are, Mam.”
“Oh, you’re a dear,” Harriet said. “I’ll just warm them up a bit and they shall be quite lovely, I think.”
Tavish looked up to find Lucan Montague regarding him with raised eyebrows. “What?” he demanded. “’Twas my table. Now it shall heat my supper before I venture out to find out exactly who is running my house, regardless of what the Lady Douglas commands.”
“She’s lovely,” Mam offered as she laid the fire.
“Quite so,” Montague agreed, to Tavish’s surprise.
But Tavish kept his own counsel: She’s lovely, aye—and quite panicked, the stiff woman dressed like a maid who still managed to look down her nose at me.
While Mam unpacked the foodstuffs and built up a small fire, Tavish and Lucan Montague finished setting the chamber to rights. There was little to work with, and so it didn’t take long to determine that Mam would sleep atop the single bedstead in the large room, its mattress so thin and pitifully old that he worried his mother might fall through the rotten tick and stuffing. Tavish and Lucan would sleep on the bare, dusty floor.
The only other sizeable furnishing was a tall-backed chair, its thick wood carved in intricate, deep design and its back and seat upholstered in now rotting, threadbare, rose-colored fabric. Tavish didn’t count the other small table—a candle stand, really—for it would eventually be fed into the fire as surely as its twin. Perhaps the queer old chair would meet the same fate in the night.
He walked toward the hearth now as Mam was positioning the pies close to the fire and noticed another item draped in a dingy, time-singed cloth, hung upon the chimney stones. Tavish reached up and pulled a corner of the sheet, dragging the cloth free in a cloud of dusty years.
“Good heavens, Tav.” Mam choked and waved her hand. “Mind the supper!”
But Tavish had no reply as he stood and stared at the portrait that appeared through the swirling cloud. He heard Lucan Montague step to his left side; Mam gasped again, this time not from the choking dust, and rose to flank him on his right.
It was a painting of a family; a man and woman, their pale profiles facing an open window and a view of what was possibly the firth beyond the very walls that sheltered them. Before and between the couple stood a little boy, perhaps four or five years, with curling blond hair beneath a rounded red cap. The child was facing the artist, his blue eyes bright on the canvas, his bowed lips unsmiling and yet somehow still merry and mischievous, as if he had plucked the peacock feather gracing his cap himself. His mother’s hands curled over the boy’s shoulders, while his father held a hooded falcon atop his left fist. They were all three dressed richly, their jewelry and slit sleeves speaking volumes about their status.
Mam’s voice was hushed. “’Tis as if I’m lookin’ at you as a bairn.” He turned to look down at his mother in surprise, and she continued. “It must be Tommy.”
Tavish turned his eyes back to the portrait as a strange feeling sank into his stomach. “My hair is dark,” he protested lamely.
“Aye, but you were fair as a wee lad,” she answered, a smile in her voice. “Fair with curls, and your mouth set just so—as if you’d again stuck your finger into the honey when you thought I wasna watching.”
Tavish swallowed, his gaze going first to the pale woman with the pointed chin, her dark hair smoothed beneath an ornate headdress, and then the man whose jowls and coiffed hair bespoke his wealth and security.
“Who are they?” he asked with a jut of his chin. “Could they be my…grandparents?”
“They must be,” Mam answered. “I doona know their names—Tommy never told me.”
Tavish had all but forgotten the English knight still stood at his side until Lucan Montague spoke.
“Lord Tenred Annesley and his wife, Lady Myra.”
Tavish turned his face toward Montague in surprise. “How do you know?”
“There are other paintings of the family hung at Darlyrede House. I’ve become well familiar with the hold…over the course of my investigation,” he added anecdotally as he continued to study the portrait. “Roscraig was a gift to Lady Myra from her family upon her marriage. Lord Annesley moved the family here for approximately a year at his wife’s behest, so that young Lord Thomas could know of the land of his mother’s kin. The spring of 1413, I believe.”
Tavish looked back at the painting of the three, and his voice was unintentionally gruff. “’Tis a bit awkward that you seem to know more about my family than do I, Montague.”
“I daresay I’d better,” the knight quipped and then clapped his shoulder good-naturedly. “I’ve been studying them all my adult life; you only found out about them last week.”
Tavish thought the comment strange, but let it go as it elbowed for room in his brain with the idea that he was currently looking upon his blood kin—his noble kin—in his own castle. Tenred and Myra—my grandparents; Thomas, my father.
“Och, I’ve burnt the pies!” Mam cried from near the fire again. Tavish hadn’t noticed she’d left his side, so transfixed had he been.
Indeed, Lucan Montague had also taken his leave to recline on a blanket he’d spread before the small fire. Mam was already portioning the meal. Not knowing what else to do with himself, he joined them.
The food was delicious, as all of Mam’s offerings tended to be, and did much to dispel the storm’s chill. While the silence of the meal was not exactly tense, the cold, damp chamber had acquired an atmosphere of melancholy propagated from the painted images watching over the repast, from which Tavish was eager to shake free. He rose from the blanket with a stretch and a sigh.
“Well, I’m off,” he said, crossing the floor toward the door.
“Where’s off?” Mam called out warily.
“Glenna Douglas was not keen for giving me a tour,” he explained as he reached the door. “I’d know the lay of the land before tomorrow’s battle, so to speak.”
“What if you should encounter her?” Montague queried, although his tone conveyed little true worry. “Or her father? Either is likely to run you through.”
Tavish opened the door then patted his doublet atop where the decree of his inheritance rested. “I am well prepared to defend myself.” Then he stepped into the dark corridor, closing the door on Mam’s shaking head and Lucan Montague’s salute.
Tavish wished briefly for a torch; the uppermost passageway was pitch, save for the weak flashes of now distant lightning, but even that small contrast of light and dark was enough to render him nearly blind as he sought to familiarize himself with his surroundings. The west tower was wide, but the chamber he’d just departed was the only one at this uppermost level. Tavish felt his way to the top of the stairs and then began a careful descent.
There were several more chambers between the top of the tower and the main floor, and a quick duck inside the still and echoing rooms convinced Tavish that none boasted even a single stick of wood. A faint yellow glow from the doorway to the entry hall gave him pause, and he stood motionless on the step for what felt like hours, but he discerned neither movement nor sound and so he hesitantly stepped into the wide corridor.
There was a single torch held in a sconce along the wall, its wrapping and pitch nearly spent. Tavish pulled it from its holder and held it high as he turned around, causing shadows to bulge and dance wildly over the damp stones. The entrance door was not only chain
ed once more, but the long brace had been lowered across a trio of metal brackets; at the opposite end of the hall—toward the now hidden finger of land and the firth—the gate had been completely lowered. Tavish looked down as he walked toward the portcullis, noticing a set of small, damp footprints on the stones.
Had Glenna Douglas lowered the heavy barrier herself? Tavish must have only just missed her, considering the freshness of the prints, and he was thankful she’d left the torch behind.
He looked all around the dark seams where stone floor met stone walls and at last located the rods that locked the gate in its lowered position. He raised it slowly and with great caution, wincing in anticipation of a rusty squeal, but none came. When the portcullis was just high enough, he ducked beneath.
The air outside was bracing and salty fresh, with the faint shadow of a winter in fast retreat. He checked on the horses briefly and found all three sleeping contentedly, but he frowned as he realized theirs were the only mounts in the small barn.
Perhaps the Douglases kept their own animals in a separate shelter, so as not to be tainted by such common beasts.
The next low stone building was warmer inside, and as his eyes adjusted, Tavish noted the tiny red glow of a banked fire in a hearth so big he’d at first taken it for nothing more than an exterior wall. He looked around more closely now at the dusty, empty shelves lining the walls—there were a couple of overturned, rodent-chewed baskets, an empty cloth sack dangling forlornly from a peg. A table in the center of the room was laid with a small, dingy cloth and closer inspection revealed what was perhaps a crumb of gray crust—or a pebble. A wine jug stood at the edge of the cloth, and when Tavish picked it up by its neck and shook it he was rewarded with a watery rattle. He uncorked it with his teeth and sniffed the contents before turning it up and taking the two healthy swallows of wine eagerly. He returned the empty bottle to the tabletop and looked around again with a sigh.
Could this dismal place be the kitchen? Where were the leftover winter stores? The last of the gourds, the dried beans? Where were the barrels of now-weevily oats? The last scraps of a dried, carved haunch? Where was the ale?
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