Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  Faster than Selena could follow movement, he had the cord around her father’s neck and twisted it violently in the manner of the garrote. Selena saw her father’s face darken immediately as the blood was cut off and the pressure mounted. Mercifully, it would be quick. She sought words, found none, but then, with the last strength of ultimate desperation, Lord Seamus jerked free of his bonds, raised an arm halfway into the air, met her eyes one last time, and, before the cord bit into his windpipe, told her, chokingly:

  “Sel…ena…the…sky begins…here…”

  McGrover twisted the final measure then, and the spinal cord snapped, a thin, sharp crack in the room. Her father went limp, shuddered reflexively, and then lay still. McGrover pushed the body aside, and tossed a blanket on top of it.

  “Good riddance,” he said. “England is avenged.” He stood over Selena. “What did he mean, that business about the sky?”

  Selena was howling with grief; she could not speak. Minutes went by, and when she did not subside, McGrover got tired of it. Uncorking the whiskey, he yanked her hair back and poured a healthy dose of spirits into her mouth. She choked on it, coughed, gasped, swallowed some. Oddly, it helped. Her own situation came back to her, and she did not want to die, no more than she had in the village of Cargill, when Will Teviot had seized the knife at her breast.

  “I can’t enjoy ye when ye’re sniveling like a calf lost in a hailstorm, now, can I, lass?”

  Enjoy her? “What? What are you going to do?”

  “I expect to take you back with me,” he Said. “Tomorrow. If your brother is coming back, as you say.”

  Selena said nothing.

  “He is coming back, is he not?”

  T told you that.”

  “I know you did. But what of Teviot?”

  “I told you that, too. He’s left for America.”

  “Ah. And what were your plans?”

  “We…we had none. We expected to stay here.”

  “Here?” McGrover looked around the hut and laughed. “Here? You deserve it. I vow. We’ve prisons in London better than this, and you’ll be able to judge that, too, believe me. But, look, meaning no disrespect, your ladyship, I don’t believe you are telling me the truth.”

  He sat down next to her and moved his hawk’s face close down next to hers. “Have you heard of my opera house?” he asked, his voice gentle.

  Her answering look was a question.

  “Oh, no, not your usual opera house,” he laughed. “My own special one. Deep in the earth beneath London. The music I create there is not for the ears of the citizens who walk peacefully upon the streets. The music I create is of quite another kind. And I have many instruments to do it with. The rack. Thumbscrews. The boot. Strappado produces a fine kind of sound; the victim can barely breathe but must scream with pain, too. A very rare sound, that.”

  Suddenly, he lowered his hard face down to hers, kissed her brutally on the mouth. His voice was hard, too, when he spoke. “If I had you in my opera, performing, you would sing in minutes. Women such as you are made for pleasure, not for pain.” Abruptly, he stood up. “Is Will Teviot with your brother? Are the two of them together?”

  “No,” she cried. “I told you…”

  “And I don’t believe you,” McGrover said. Very slowly, with grave theatricality, he took the riding whip from his belt, flexed it, and gave it a few brisk, whistling cuts in the air.

  Oh, God, no. It’s coming now. Help, she thought.

  “It was…I did tell you the truth,” she said again, as evenly as she could.

  “That’s what you say. But, you see, you do not understand about the truth. It must not merely be stated, it must also be proven. My work is not merely the simple matter of taking from people the stories they had much rather keep hidden inside. No. It is more than that. It is to determine the truth of what they have already told me. And that is what we shall do here. But first, we do not wish to disturb the sleep of the good citizens of Kinlochbervie, do we?”

  Having thus warned her, he grabbed the burlap bag in which the heads had been wrapped, and tied it across her face, stuffing an end of it in her mouth. The fabric was harsh against her tongue, and she tried to breathe evenly, not to choke.

  “I will prepare you for a time,” he said, making the whip whistle again, “and when I remove your gag, I believe we will more readily be able to determine what is true and what is not. Then, after we have done so, my plans for the rest of the evening are more conventional. I daresay you may even enjoy them. If this exercise does not become excessively prolonged…”

  Then she heard the whip cut, hissing through the air, and felt a pain deeper than fire must be, more terrible than a brand, burning its way across the backs of her thighs. Even the heavy gag could not stop her scream, and her heart leaped against her bones, seeking escape from the pain of the blow. Unable to speak, her brain was already bargaining with McGrover. Tell me what it is you want to know. I’ll tell you that. Just tell me what it is you want to know…

  Then he struck her again.

  She twisted around as far as she could and saw his face, expression intent, lips thin and tight, concentrating on his work. He met her eyes and shook his head. “No, not yet. You may think you will tell me the truth now, but it is much too early. We will proceed.” Again he raised the riding whip, and she was about to close her eyes, to try and wriggle away, somehow, from the blow, when she saw the door of the hut fly open. McGrover, his arm back to strike, his eyes seeking a new target for pain—her shoulders, perhaps? or the sensitive lower back?—saw her eyes, too, but he was off balance, he was distracted, and had no time to turn or ready himself. Brian, face livid, lips drawn back in pure hatred, grabbed his wrist, twisted the whip from his hand, and in one smooth motion, yanked his entire body backward, spinning him in the air. There was a popping sound as McGrover’s shoulder left its joint, and he came down full-length, stunned and howling, on the dirt floor.

  Brian jumped, hung for an instant in midair, and came down, both knees landing on McGrover’s angled, beaklike face. Bones shattered like sticks, and McGrover did not move.

  Brian got up, started to cry. “He’s not dead yet,” he sobbed, looking at the unconscious McGrover, “but he’s bloody well going to wish he were.”

  Then he came to free her.

  “Are you all right? How bad was it?”

  She sat up, rubbed her wrists and ankles, and, more gingerly, the tracks of the whip.

  “Bad enough, but the worst part was…when he…Father…” but she could say no more for a time, nor could he, as they both wept, now holding each other, now pacing back and forth across the floor of the hut, bereft of all but life itself. McGrover lay unconscious on the floor, too—though Brian tied him securely—and his face swelled black and huge from the broken bones. Beneath his blanket, their father lay dead.

  “His horse is still outside,” Brian finally observed. “Did he come alone?”

  “I think so. Like an assassin. He wanted to reserve the pleasure for himself.”

  “All right. But he wouldn’t have ridden out here without telling others where he was bound. So we can’t wait. It’s only fortunate that I decided to push on from Durness, or else…” He left that thought unfinished. What had happened was bad enough; words of good fortune were misplaced.

  “We’ll leave tonight,” he said. “McGrover’s police would not expect him to get back for at least a day. If we can pass through these outer hills by darkness, we’ll be a step ahead of them…”

  “If only we were already in Liverpool.”

  “We will be,” he said. “We will be. Don’t think. There are simply things that we must do. So don’t think. Think later, when there’s time and everything’s done.”

  “But what will we do with…”Selena motioned to McGrover, their father’s body, the three severed heads, which formed a curious triangle in the dirt.

  “The poor lads,” Brian said, and gently placed them back in McGrover’s sack. “We’ll even
the score fer ye,” he murmured, almost tenderly.

  On the floor, McGrover stirred, and a long, low moan came from the blackened, blood-encrusted lips. He shifted his body slightly, felt his bonds, and lay still. Selena and Brian knelt down next to him.

  “You filthy swine!” Brian hissed. “You are going to pay a hundredfold for what you’ve done.”

  Selena could hardly bear to look at McGrover’s broken, hideous face, could scarcely stand to remain in the presence of this evil.

  McGrover made a strange gurgling sound in response to Brian’s words. It was a moment before they realized he was laughing.

  “I’ll make you laugh…” Brian cried, seizing the curved sword. Selena restrained him.

  “We have to know about the Highlands,” she whispered. “If he has men there.”

  Brian asked the question. McGrover made the gurgling noise again. Brian grabbed the man’s jaw and shook it. McGrover moaned, and then passed out.

  “The bloody fiend. Well, let’s be going. We haven’t much time.”

  They could not take their father’s body with them, and outside the hut, in the darkness, the earth was still frozen from the winter. “Couldna be dug more than a foot, before the frost line stopped me,” Brian told her. So he did the only thing he could do: Lord Seamus was buried, along with the heads of his faithful followers, right inside the stone hut. Working fast, Brian dug down into the dirt floor of the house, which, because of the fireplace and the enclosure, had remained unfrozen during winter, while Selena readied their clothing, saddlebags, and blankets for the trip. She watered the horses, and calmed them, so that the villagers should not be disturbed, and cut lengths of rope to tie McGrover to his mount. They would take him into the Highlands and…

  She could not think any further than that. In spite of what he had done to them, to their father, she did not want to face what it was that Brian would do to him. She was not ready to confront that yet, in spite of the devastation of the past months, nor did she want to face her own suspicion that the McGrovers of the world had an inherent advantage over the MacPhersons because they did not shrink from violence and bloodshed. To Selena, an admission of that kind seemed very much like defeat.

  Then the grave was complete, a long, surprisingly narrow trench in the earth. Carefully, weeping softly, Selena and Brian eased their father’s body over to the edge of the slit—his face, several hours after death, was in repose—and lowered him to his rest. Selena arranged over him the blanket in which he had slept during their stay here in the hut; it had become a garment, a flag, a shroud. And her brother placed the burlap sack at his feet, a symbolic gesture to the place that the dead had held in life. They stood beside the excavation, beside the mounds of earth on the floor of the hut, and said good-bye to the ominous, silent emptiness which held the body of the man who had been a part of their passage into life. And they knew, both of them, that they were on their own now. Mother and father were both dead, and all of their ancestors; they were adrift, alone, in time. But her hand sought his and he grasped it, and she understood, too, that they would never be separated from the past, nor even from Father, or what he had been, what he believed. It was a part of them both, like the blood in their veins, and they would carry it with them always.

  Selena tried to remember the good things, as her father would have wanted her to, and she was once again a little girl in the garden with him, as Brian muttered an ineffectual prayer. He broke it off, realizing the impotence of empty formulas.

  “We’ll see your dreams bear fruit in our lifetimes,” Brian vowed, telling their father good-bye.

  “Yes,” Selena affirmed, and a phrase kept running through her mind: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

  Brian cast down upon his father the first of the spadefuls of earth.

  On the floor, McGrover laughed suddenly, that same harsh, sarcastic sound, and words came from his broken mouth. “Pity. Such a nice hole. I thought that you’d dug it for me.”

  Brian made as if to send their tormentor to unconsciousness again, but Selena restrained him. McGrover would have to ride.

  Ride they did, just before dawn. There were four horses and three figures astride. If anyone in the village was awake at the early hour, he would have seen Brian in the lead, then a figure heavily cloaked and bent in the saddle, and Selena in the rear, with the fourth horse trailing by a harness strap attached to her saddle. And, looking from the small window of a fishing shack in the eerie, predawn light, the watcher would have thought, Aye, the MacPhersons be leavin’, strange as they appeared. An’ had ’em enou’ money fer a fourth ’orse, too, they did. I ought t’ ’ave charged ’em more fer f bread.

  After a little over an hour, the sun was up, and they were into the first of the high ring of hills overlooking Kinlochbervie, where the Highlands began. Selena felt the familiar, wild brace of the air, felt the wind against her face, and saw the sunlight soften the gloomy, mysterious penumbra of the hills. Below lay the village, and she could see the stone hut. Father’s grave and tombstone. He did not have the place below the wall at Coldstream, but she knew where he lay. Born at one end of Scotland, he had died at the other, and, in a sense, it was fitting.

  McGrover was in great pain, and Brian enjoyed it, now and then urging the horses into a gallop. McGrover cried out then, never for mercy, simply from pain, and it soon became obvious that he could not travel much farther without holding them back. Once, as they rested along the side of the trail, drinking cold tea that Selena had poured into a metal canteen, she asked Brian what he meant to do.

  “When he can’t take pain anymore, I’ll kill him.”

  She did not know what to say. She had seen death already, many times, and she had seen Brian kill, but what it did to the living, what it had done even to Brian as a boy, was not something good. It was almost as bad for the living as for their victims.

  “Ye’ve some doots, ’ave ye?” he said, in the broad accent. “Then ye think on Father.”

  “Brian, I’m not sure that’s…”

  “Necessary? Are ye daft, little sister? I’d o’ believed ye’d be beggin’ me t’ wield the blade yerself. ’Tis a fact. I’d thought it, after what McGrover’s done to us, an’ the Rob Roys. An’ ye.”

  Bent over the saddle horn to which he was tied, McGrover raised his head and smirked at them. The hard riding had opened his wounds again, and blood trickled down here and there from cuts on his ruined face. But he was unvanquished.

  “You haven’t the guts to kill me, traitor bastards,” he sneered.

  “Because I don’t want to be like you,” Selena replied, not sure of herself.

  “You think on it,” Brian whispered, so that McGrover could not hear. “We’ve a long way to Liverpool, an’ we can’t take the scum wi’ us. If he lives, we’re in double danger.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “To our lodge at Mount Foinaven. ’Tis deserted this time o’ year, an’ we can spend a night in peace.”

  Selena told him of her fears that some of McGrover’s men might be waiting for them at the family hunting lodge. He doubted it, and even McGrover laughed. “There’s nothing for you at Foinaven,” he said scornfully. “A little surprise at Liverpool, possibly. But other than that…”

  He broke into a maddening crackle of laughter, and they dismissed him with disgust. But they knew, soon enough, why he had said nothing awaited them at Foinaven. Because, as they rode down the well-remembered drive, covered by a tunnel of thick trees, and then out onto the flat, green meadow, at the end of which the lodge was situated, McGrover burst into his horrible, contemptuous laughter. Brian and Selena, crestfallen, saw the charred framework of rafters and beams, the burnt, charcoal-reeking debris.

  “Aye! We burnt it fer ye, scum,” he said. “T’ rid all Britain of the sign o’ ye!”

  Brian leaned over in his saddle, and knocked McGrover on the side of the face with a big fist. The torturer managed to bend away, an
d caught but a glancing blow.

  “And Coldstream?” Selena asked, steeling herself against the answer.

  “I was saving Coldstream for myself,” McGrover drawled. “His Majesty has promised it to me as a reward.”

  “Ye’ll get yer reward, all right,” Brian said. Grabbing the halter of McGrover’s horse, he led them at a gallop across the meadow to the ruin of the hunting lodge. Selena could not think clearly, because of the hostile emotions swooping at her. Their enemies had left them nothing, would leave them nothing. Not even life, if their luck was bad. Brian was right. They should kill McGrover. But…

  Brian pulled his horse to a halt where the wide porch had once been, cool in the summer, and from which you could look out over the Highlands at night and dream of life and all that was to be. Leaping down from the saddle, he unbound McGrover and yanked him onto the ground.

  “Say yer prayers, Britisher bastard.”

  McGrover gave as good as he got. “Ye’re not the lad fer this, ye Scottish puppy. Ye kill hungry peasants mayhap, but not a soldier o’ King George.”

  “Yer a soldier o’ nithin’ but death, ye piece o’ breathin’ offal, an’ I dona need t’ kill ye t’ show my contempt fer ye. My sister’ll do the killin’ well enough. Won’t ye, Selena?”

  Selena sat on her horse in the sun of spring, before their savaged home. Father. Coldstream. Scotland. Sean Bloodwell, far away. Her life uprooted. She nodded shakily. Brian was right. It had to be, both for vengeance and safety.

  McGrover moaned as Brian kicked and shoved him into the rubble of the lodge, and found one stout, upright beam. He tied McGrover to it, and stepped back.

  “So long, ye bastard, an’ gi’e Satan my best regards.”

  Darius laughed, but there was a little less spirit in it this time. For the first time since he had come into the hut, the man seemed to feel fear.

  “What I’ve a mind t’ do,” Brian told him, “is give ye some o’ the medicine ye’ve dispensed fer so many long years, t’ draw some blood t’ slake the thirst of those ye’ve wrung dry yerself, screamin’ in yer dungeons. But I’ve naught the time. Selena,” he called, “’ow shall it be? The pistol or the knife or the sword?”