The Scot's Oath

by Heather Grothaus

  Iris crossed the rug to the chest where the supply of beeswax tapers were kept. In her mind, she knew it was no longer necessary to keep a vigil for the girl who was in fact dead but was putting off that dreadful moment for just a bit longer, and Iris was glad for the reprieve. Her own heart needed some time to recover before dealing out the next blow.

  Tonight would be a memorial rather than a vigil; fifteen tiny flames for each year of Euphemia Hargrave’s young life.

  And Iris would never light them again.

  Once the room was golden and soft, the gray light through the window deepening to steel, Iris approached Lady Caris again.

  “You’ve heard what happened during the hunt today,” she said.

  Caris nodded up at her with a smile, and reached out to take Iris’s hand. “I have. And how you stood up to those awful criminals, for my sake.” She squeezed Iris’s fingers, but it was little more than a flinching pressure. “You were very brave to do so. Foolish, I must add.”

  Iris shook her head and went down to her knees before the woman. “Perhaps it was foolish, milady,” she allowed. “But I would do it again a hundred times over. For I gained the information you have been so desperate for.”

  A faint frown appeared between Caris’s fine brows.

  “The man I confronted,” she began and then then had to pause, swallow, take a breath. “He admitted it was he who met Euphemia the night she disappeared from Darlyrede House. She died at his hand.”

  Caris’s expression never changed, and save for the single blink of her eyes, it was as though she had become a marble statue.

  “Milady?” Iris asked softly. “Do you wish to lie down?”

  Lady Caris’s lips parted, but she did not speak.

  Iris edged closer, rubbing the woman’s upper arm. “Breathe, milady.”

  She heard the intake of air, swift and sudden, as if Caris had been held underwater these past moments, these past years. Perhaps she had felt as if she was drowning, Iris acknowledged.

  “She’s…dead,” Caris said quietly.

  Iris nodded. “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, milady.”

  Her eyes were wide but dry as she nodded absently again. “It’s over. At last.”

  Iris gathered the woman to her, embracing her gently through the shock. “Does Lord Hargrave know?” Caris asked as her head lay on Iris’s shoulder.

  “I’ve not told him,” she said. “But he is having the wood searched for the criminals now. If he finds them, I have little doubt what will be the outcome, even if he doesn’t yet know that one of them is Euphemia’s killer.”

  “He will leave no stone unturned.” Caris pulled away then, and something outside the window caught her eye and she turned her head nodding toward the wavy, bubbly glass. “There go two more searchers now.”

  Iris only gave the most cursory glance out the window; she didn’t care what Hargrave’s men-at-arms did to the monsters who inhabited the wood. “I’m sorry to be the one to have to deliver such news to you, my lady.”

  “Oh, Beryl, I’d have wished it from no other.” She looked with bittersweet longing to the twinkling lights about the room, the tray sitting on the bed, the foodstuffs and cup perfect, just as it had been every night since Iris had arrived at Darlyrede.

  Then she looked back into Iris’s eyes. “I wish you were she,” she said. “Forgive me.”

  Iris felt tears well in her eyes. “There is naught to forgive.”

  “Perhaps, just for tonight, we could pretend,” she said in a small, pleading voice. She reached out to smooth back Iris’s hair behind her ear. “Before my lord comes for me, let us drink and eat of the last meal I will ever have prepared for my sweet, lost Euphemia. And then, if the morrow comes, we shall decide what we shall do next.”

  Iris nodded, not willing to tell the woman that she planned for the morrow to find her without station in Darlyrede’s current incarnation; she would stand firmly, openly, on Padraig Boyd’s side, both before and after the king had passed his judgment, whatever it might be.

  That would be too much shock for the woman, and Iris would not betray her so.

  She gained her feet, and Caris took her hand once more as they walked together to the bed. The lady pushed the tray to the center of the perfectly arranged mattress, and the women sat upon its edge, facing each other. Caris reached out for the ewer and the cup with a peaceful smile and poured a generous portion before handing the cup to Iris. Then she broke off a piece of the thin loaf and held it out.

  “You must be famished, my dear, running about the wood all day like a peasant.” Her smile was indulgent, perhaps a mother speaking to her spirited daughter.

  “Thank you.” Iris took it and tried to keep a bright smile on her face, although she felt almost guilty participating in the farce. Perhaps it would help the lady achieve peace, but Iris had a sick feeling in her stomach as she bit into the soft bread and chewed.

  A dead girl’s meal, she couldn’t help hearing in her head.

  The bread was dry and difficult to swallow, so she lifted the cup and drank of the tepid milk, even as she heard the door in the next room open.

  “My lady?”

  Iris forced her throat to swallow as her eyes widened, and the noblewoman’s face lost all traces of contentment, to be replaced with blatant anxiety.

  “He was not to come so soon,” she whispered, as if in apologetic explanation.

  “Lady wife?” Lord Hargrave called again. “Are you in there?”

  “Stay here,” Caris whispered and pressed her arm before scrambling from the bed and walking around the chamber and through the doorway. “I’m here, my lord.” She pulled the door closed behind her.

  Iris put the bread back on the platter and stood with the cup, tiptoeing around the end of the bed toward the closed door. She could hear the muffled conversation through the thick slab, harsh and clipped. Iris felt her head start to swim and realized that she had been holding her breath. The deeper voice of Lord Hargrave seemed to be growing louder, closer to the door.

  She was suddenly very afraid, though she could not have said why, and turned to the door that opened into the corridor. Iris engaged the handle, yanked, but the door stayed firmly shut.

  She remembered her notes, the curious lock on the exterior of the door.

  Iris hurried back to sit on the side of the bed and then began to worry why Hargrave had chosen this night to visit Caris’s chamber. In all the months of Iris’s employment, he had never called upon his wife’s apartments during the twilight hours while Beryl was present.

  He was not to come so soon…

  She drank the last of the milk to soothe her parched throat and set down the empty cup, pushing the tray from her. She looked about the room, but she could see nothing to be used in defense of herself. Not a heavy bowl, nor an iron poker for the fire; not an eating knife on the tray—nothing heavy, hard, or sharp in the whole of the room.

  She stood up, not willing to be caught off her feet, but then another wave of dizziness overcame her and she sat again. Her nerves would be her ruin this day. She breathed in and out slowly through her nose.

  The chamber door opened, and Iris heard Lady Caris shout “No!” in a strangled voice as Lord Vaughn Hargrave walked into the room with a curious smile on his face.

  “Well, look who is here,” he said, his smile not warming the cold glint in his eyes.

  Iris’s head began to swim, and each of the fifteen tiny flames turned into little explosions of light, sparkling on the air like the sun glinting off water. She could no longer see clearly, but she heard his muffled footsteps drawing closer on the thick carpet, and so she held out a warding hand.

  “No,” she thought she managed to choke out, but the voice she heard sounded too far away, so perhaps it was Lady Hargrave who had spoken again.


  And then everything was black and silent.

  * * * *

  If Padraig had been sensible, he realized, he would have waited until morning to depart from Darlyrede instead of setting off with Searrach just as the sun was dipping below the far-off, rolling foothills, washing all the color from the landscape and replacing it with a gray chill that clouded his breath. The air was still and growing tighter, colder, as if the solid blanket of clouds overhead was stretched taut with the snow it held.

  But he could not stay there another night; nay, another hour. He couldn’t risk seeing Beryl’s face again. No—Iris’s face. The face of the woman he’d thought he loved. The face he’d thought he wanted to see every day for the rest of his life. She had hurt Padraig in a way that he hadn’t known it was possible for him to be hurt.

  And so now he headed north on the road that ran before Darlyrede as a failure, seeing the distant monoliths as dark, wide shadows on the moor around this side of the estate, a suspicious, perhaps unstable Scottish maid behind him. He thought of the stories he had heard today of his father’s escape from Darlyrede House, Kettering’s father’s gruesome end. Padraig looked around him, wondering what Tommy Boyd had suffered on this same road thirty years ago—and every day since, likely. Padraig himself was only a handful of years older than his father had been the night he’d fled, and the idea of it sobered Padraig. He’d pondered so many times since he’d learned of Darlyrede’s existence why Thomas Annesley had not fought for his home. But riding now through the cold, dark night without even a sliver of moon to light the way, after having had his life endangered these many weeks—Padraig was beginning to understand.

  He tried to imagine how he would feel if it had been Beryl killed today in the wood.

  Not Beryl, he reminded himself again. Iris.

  If it had been Iris and not Lord Paget, dead and bleeding on the forest floor. And Hargrave and all his money and his power and his reputation waiting, ready to destroy Padraig before the king.

  Thomas Annesley had been gravely injured that night years ago, more injured than Padraig now was. And yet he had managed to escape, to find his way eventually to Caedmaray and Jessie. Padraig thought longingly of the little cottage waiting for him on the island in the spring. He’d sell Hargrave’s horses in Thurso to pay for board and supplies to carry back when the boats started to run.

  He could be happy there again.

  Probably.

  But with Searrach? a voice inside his head asked him.

  He didn’t know why he had agreed to take her with him. He didn’t want her physically and he didn’t trust her. But the familiar sound of her accent, the remembrance of the scars on her wrists…perhaps it was nothing more than the idea that she had asked to go, and in that moment of weakness, giving his permission had made him feel in control of his future. Perhaps he had thought to soothe the sting of Iris and Lucan’s betrayal by departing Darlyrede House with a woman Padraig knew Iris was jealous of. Whatever the reason for it at the time, Padraig now regretted the hasty decision.

  He thought they had at last left Darlyrede lands as they neared the dark abyss of a stand of evergreen trees and the snow at last began to fall, fast and thick. They could not ride through a snowstorm in the dark—it was cruel to the horses, and Padraig wasn’t certain they wouldn’t lose their way if the already dim track became covered over. And so he turned his mount’s head toward the stand of fir, Searrach following unquestioningly behind him.

  She was already dismounted by the time Padraig’s own feet found the ground, and after looping the reins of her horse around a tree branch, she began searching beneath the spreading boughs for kindling and dry branches—she had obviously camped on the road before. Neither of the travelers spoke as Padraig broke off a portion of the lowest branches of a wide fir, sweeping away the needles at the base of the tree down to dry ground and then stacking the fresh boughs to afford some protection from the frozen dirt. Soon, a small fire crackled at the edge of their little evergreen cave, and Padraig and Searrach sat side by side, sharing the wine in his satchel and the food in hers. The snow fell around them, over them, quieting the world and seeming to grant them a little bubble of peace.

  “What’s your island called again?” she asked in a low voice, and the sound was so unexpected after the last hour of quiet that Padraig felt his heart stutter at the interruption.

  “Caedmaray.” He used one of the little bones from the chicken they’d eaten to pick at his teeth.

  “Caedmaray,” Searrach repeated. “Is it grand?”

  Padraig tossed the bone into the fire. “Nay.”

  “I’m sure it’s grand,” she said softly.

  The realization that Padraig had made a mistake in allowing Searrach to accompany him grew ever larger in his already burdened mind.

  “There’ll be no crossing until the spring.” When she didn’t comment, he offered, “What is your town?”

  “Town Blair,” she said, staring into the fire with wide eyes, and the reflection of the fire in their glassy depths gave him an uneasy feeling, as if Searrach’s mind burned and her eyes were windows to the raging furnace of her thoughts. “I know your brother. You could be his twin, but that your hair is lighter.”

  Padraig stilled. “My brother?”

  She nodded but didn’t look at him, still seemingly mesmerized by the fire that mirrored her secret musings. “Lach-lan-Blair. Lachlan. Lach-lan.” Her mouth turned down suddenly, and her next words were whispered. “Your eyes are just like his.”

  The color of them.

  Padraig too frowned, wondering at the truth of the woman’s ramblings. Indeed, Lucan Montague had reported that Padraig had a half brother named Lachlan Blair residing in the Highlands, but how had Searrach managed to make her way alone so far south to Darlyrede House? And why did the idea that this woman, so close to Vaughn Hargrave, had known Padraig’s brother cause the muscles along Padraig’s spine to stiffen?

  People seemed to appear and vanish at will, and everyone—everything—was connected in some grotesque fashion. Padraig’s thoughts went back to the portrait of Euphemia Hargrave in the entry hall.

  Lady Euphemia had become obsessed with the idea of Thomas Annesley and Cordelia Hargrave nearly to the point of madness…

  Thomas Annesley is accused of returning to Northumberland and setting the blaze that killed my parents and destroyed Castle Dare. The same night Euphemia Hargrave disappeared…

  Must be the English of you all. Your eyes…

  Searrach, Lucan, Iris, Hargrave, Castle Dare…everything—everything—seemed to be connected by gossamer threads that were invisible at first glance. The only outlier seemed to be Euphemia Hargrave, who had turned up at Darlyrede apparently from nowhere—a motherless infant who’d had no other to care for her in the world save for Lady Caris Hargrave—and then vanished fifteen years later.

  Padraig thought of the lambs he’d taken from their dying mother in the spring, and then he stilled.

  It was madness, the ideas that were circling in his mind then, like carrion birds waiting for the opportunity to swoop down and devour the carcass of Padraig’s reality.

  But Tommy Boyd was no liar. He was no murderer, and he was no liar.

  Could Euphemia Hargrave… have been Cordelia and Thomas’s baby? If it was true, the sad girl in the portrait had been Tommy’s firstborn child, and Padraig’s own sister.

  He could see nothing in his mind now but the eyes in the portrait in the entry hall—unhappy, hopeless, frightened.

  Even if the insane idea was true, there was no way Padraig could prove it. Euphemia Hargrave was dead, and Padraig knew too little of that long-ago time in Northumberland, had no facts, no station to call on to demand the truth.

  But Lucan Montague did. Iris did.

  The sudden touch of Searrach’s cold hand creeping around the back of his neck shook him from his reverie, and h
e realized that the woman had slunk closer to him, pressing against his arm, reaching up her face to nuzzle his hair.

  “Do you think me beautiful, Padraig?”

  “Searrach,” he began.

  Her lips tracked along his ear, his cheekbone. “Your skin is cold,” she whispered. “Let me keep you warm.”

  “Nay,” he said, half turning and placing his hands on her arms to halt her progress. “It’s not like that between us. It will never be like that.”

  “It will,” she countered easily. “You’re taking me to Caedmaray. I’ll be your woman there. I’ll take care of you.”

  “Nay,” he repeated, more firmly this time even as she struggled against his restraining touch to move closer to him. Padraig released her and stood, looking at her from over the fire. Her face was bright with yellow light, turning her already dark eyes black. “I’m going back to Darlyrede.”

  She stared at him with those black eyes for a long moment. “I canna go back there,” she said. “Nae even for you, Padraig. Lord Hargrave will kill me.”

  “Then doona,” Padraig said. “But I must.”

  “He’ll kill you,” Searrach insisted. “Are you so blind that you canna see what he’s been doing? He nearly succeeded while you were there.” She got up suddenly and walked toward him. “I’ve saved your life a dozen times already. And now you owe me mine, by taking me from here.”

  “What do you mean, you’ve saved my life?”

  “I made excuses. I took the punishment. Those scars you saw…” Her mind seemed to wander for the briefest instant, but then her brows lowered. “So now you will take me from here. Back to Scotland.”

  Padraig shook his head. “I’ll nae force you to return to Darlyrede. Take the horse, go on if you would. But if anyone else figures out what I think I have, people could be in great danger.”

  “Figures out what you have?” Searrach’s eyes narrowed and she fixed him with a derisive look. “You mean about your precious Beryl?”