Sleepless in Scotland

by May McGoldrick

  Maybe it was because she’d read so many novels in her youth, or because she herself had strong feelings for Captain Bell, but the thought had crossed Phoebe’s mind that perhaps Mrs. Young entertained a romantic interest toward her cousin. But meeting her in person now, she perceived no such attraction. Kind, reserved, and matter-of-fact, Ian’s cousin appeared to be a person grounded in the practicalities of life. And her attention was focused entirely on Mrs. Bell.

  “Did you and Sarah ever meet?” Millie asked the woman as they walked through the upper-floor gallery. Family portraits covered the high walls.

  “Sadly, I never had the chance. She was born in Fife, and I in Baltimore. We’re cousins through her father and my mother,” she explained. “I only knew her through our letters. But the way this house has been maintained, Sarah’s presence is—as Mrs. Bell mentioned at the table—undeniable.”

  Midday light spilling through the windows illuminated the handsome Persian rugs and the huge paintings of family members and stern-faced ancestors. Phoebe had walked through this gallery many times, and she now paused by one of her favorite portraits. Ian and Sarah. She was an adorable seven-year-old, and he was a fresh-faced version of the handsome man he was today. Dressed in his military uniform of the Coldstream Guards, the young man stared ahead with eagerness at the adventures lying before him. But Sarah’s eyes were on their joined hands. Small fingers held her brother’s larger ones. She wasn’t ready to let him go.

  Phoebe thought of her conversation with Ian about continually returning to the Vaults. Three years after Sarah was taken, he was not ready to let her go. And she understood the sentiment.

  They were waiting for her in the doorway at the end of the gallery, and she hurried to catch up.

  “I was told to put you in the room across from Sarah’s,” Mrs. Young said as they reached their destination. “I hope that suits you.”

  “It’s perfect,” Millie assured her. “We often stayed in this room when we visited Bellhorne.”

  As soon as Ian’s cousin left, Phoebe walked to the windows and pushed them open wide. From the first moment they’d arrived, her emotions had been working like a riptide, draining the sandy foundation from beneath her feet. Little by little, she was sinking deeper and becoming less secure. The timing of Ian’s interruption at lunch was perfect. She wouldn’t have been able to answer his mother’s question rationally.

  “What do you think is worse?” Millie asked softly. “To know your child is dead, or to believe she’s become estranged because of some injury you’ve inflicted but can’t recall?”

  Phoebe turned to her sister. Millie was not waiting for a maid. She already had their traveling trunk open and dresses laid out on the bed.

  “What makes you think Mrs. Bell believes Sarah’s absence is the result of something she did?”

  Millie shook her head. “During the luncheon, I know you weren’t paying attention to much of what was being said.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Mrs. Bell said twice that all the news of her daughter comes from her son,” Millie explained. “And just like a mother, she immediately made excuses about her eyesight and how Sarah knows she needs help to read or write her own letters. And how happy she is that the brother and sister are so close.”

  “None of what you say makes me think she blames herself for Sarah’s absence.”

  “Mothers always take the blame for their children’s actions,” her sister told her. “And for their bad temperaments and their sicknesses and their ill-conceived marriages and whatever else there is to take responsibility for.”

  Wrapping her arms around her middle, Phoebe considered her sister’s words and thought about their own mother. From what she recalled, every troubled day Millicent Pennington endured could be traced to some worry or some real catastrophe pertaining to her children.

  Motherhood. She knew next to nothing about it. She couldn’t even imagine what kind of mother she’d be herself.

  Phoebe hung their dresses in the wardrobe and wandered to the window as her thoughts drifted in another direction. To the same place they’d been since the night she’d met him again.

  Ian.

  At least it seemed she hadn’t lost his good opinion of her. Their conversation in the carriage drifted back to her. His attention, the words he’d spoken, every touch was cherished and etched in her mind.

  The kiss they’d shared in the garden at Baronsford felt as if it happened an eon ago, but it was still very alive in her memory. She touched her lips.

  Phoebe worried about him. About where he went and what danger he was putting himself in with his nocturnal trips into the city’s netherworld.

  Strength, confidence, and training where meaningless when a knife came out of the darkness. The man she’d fought with was committing murder. She’d escaped death, as had young Jock Rokeby. But thinking of Ian as a potential victim of this killer sent a shaft of hot steel straight into her heart.

  Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. Voices came at her. Faces. Sarah’s. Jock’s. A dark-cloaked man running through the passages of the Vaults.

  The greenery and the sunlight outside their window called to her. Phoebe turned toward the door. She needed room to move and air to breathe if she were ever going to clear her mind and be a tolerable companion to their host for the limited time they were visiting.

  “I’m going for a walk.”

  “Give me a few moments to arrange our things and I’ll come with you.”

  She couldn’t wait. She didn’t want company. She needed to think.

  “Look for me in the rose garden,” she told her sister, picking up her bonnet and going out.

  The hallway was empty, and Phoebe paused and stared at Sarah’s door. Ian’s words came to her of how the rooms had been kept ready for his sister’s imminent arrival. She couldn’t go in there. She needed no reminders. Her friend was already with her in spirit.

  “Sarah,” she whispered, pressing her palm against the door before hurrying down the corridor.

  Passing through the gallery, Phoebe felt the eyes of Ian’s predecessors staring down at her. Hurrying down the steps, she heard the ordinary sounds of the household, and it occurred to her that they should have been more comforting. But beyond the familiar, she felt a strange presence. She couldn’t identify it. A ghost, witnessing her every move. She paused on a step and looked up at the landing leading to the gallery. A shadow moved behind a column. She stood perfectly still for a dozen heartbeats, waiting, but there was nothing.

  She made her way down the great hall. Weapons arranged on the walls between tapestries gleamed dully. The uneasiness that had edged under her skin caused her to shiver as she walked, and then ran, and then walked again toward the sunshine outdoors.

  No one was in the rose garden, and that suited Phoebe perfectly. She moved along the row of roses, and the sweet scent filled her head. Ian and Sarah had both grown up here. This was as much home to them as Baronsford was to her.

  She touched a white flower on a rose bush. The petals shivered and fell at her feet.

  Sarah. Beautiful Sarah. Intelligent and wise Sarah, who complained about her brother’s rigidity, not knowing he’d never lost his confidence in her. Sarah, who for all her talk of rebellion, was the most cautious of people.

  Phoebe followed the well-trodden paths of the garden to the old wall. The smell of newly cut hay lying in the fields drenched her senses. She passed through a gate beneath an arch and kept walking, trying to empty her mind of sadness and recall the happier times at Bellhorne. Perhaps this was how Mrs. Bell had come to terms with her daughter’s absence.

  She followed the lane past the meadows, dotted with bundles of hay that had been gathered and stacked.

  She wandered on for a while, and suddenly she knew where her feet were taking her.

  Nobody from Bellhorne went there, Sarah said, but on summer days when Phoebe was visiting and the weather was particularly fine, the two of them would steal away past the high w
alls that contained Mrs. Bell’s beautiful gardens. Running through the fields and the empty nomads’ camp and along the burbling brook above the loch, they’d come to the Auld Grove, a wild forested park that Sarah loved dearly.

  Phoebe followed the path now, cutting across the fields until she reached the track that led along the bracken-lined brook. She knew this way so well, and soon the cool shade of the ancient grove enclosed her.

  A rustle of branches behind her drew Phoebe’s attention. Still carrying her hat, she shielded her eyes with her hand and looked back. She startled when a half-dozen birds took flight noisily a few yards away. She waited, expecting to find someone emerge from the undergrowth. But no one appeared. There were no more sounds.

  “Druids,” she whispered.

  Phoebe recalled exploring the woods and ruins of ancient buildings and the stone circle in the glen by the waterfall. Sarah told her the standing stones were still visited by witches and sorcerers who performed ancient rituals on moonlit nights, and they came from all over Scotland. Phoebe never saw any, but she believed her friend.

  She reached the waterfall and stopped on a grassy spot. Patches of bluebells nodded their heads in the breeze. One sunny day, the two of them sat right here amid the purple-blue flowers, looking up at the passing clouds, and Sarah told her she had a scandalous secret to share. One of the lads from the village had kissed her under the oak tree where her parents had agreed to marry. He was handsome and strong. He smelled of salt and sea winds, adding with her mischievous laugh, and herring.

  Phoebe smiled at the recollection. The family referred to the rose garden as Sarah’s, but this grove of wildflowers was the place her friend loved the most.

  The path soon brought her to another clearing. Phoebe recognized the ruins of several huts that were being overtaken by the encroaching woods.

  A summer afternoon, not much different from this one, edged into her memory. Sarah shared stories of Ian since he’d returned from war. She worried about her brother. He was hurting. And her friend told her that she knew Phoebe was carrying a torch for him.

  Phoebe moved through the high grass toward the crumbling buildings, and her throat tightened as she recalled all they’d talked about. Love. Marriage. Family. Her eyes burned with unshed tears. Things Sarah wanted but would never know. Never have.

  Pushing through a clump of bushes, Phoebe suddenly found herself standing at the edge of a well. She stared down into the black void and thought of the Vaults in Edinburgh.

  “Why did you go down there, Sarah? What happened to you?”

  Phoebe heard no footsteps, no warning that she wasn’t alone. But the hand that shoved her from behind belonged to no ghostly presence. And before she could turn, or grab for a branch, or even cry out, she was falling through the darkness, tumbling like a stone toward the center of the earth.

  * * *

  He stared down into the hole. Silence.

  She’d fallen for some time. That was good, though the dull, hard splash at the end surprised him. But no sound followed. Also, good. She was gone.

  Her hat lay like a downed wood pigeon in the tall grass. He picked it up and tossed it in the well.

  He’d stalked her from the moment she came down the stairs, looking for his chance. And she led him here. It was perfect. So isolated. So silent.

  This was his home. His lair. He’d never before hunted here. Bellhorne was his home. He hunted in the city. It was clean. The prey was plentiful. And it was safer.

  This one, though, this Phoebe Pennington, had come face-to-face with him. That was enough reason for her to die.

  But more, she’d struck him, attacked him. And in meddling, she’d caused him to lose his chosen prey. She started this blood feud, and she had to pay the price.

  And she had paid. If they ever found her body, they would never suspect foul play. He was a skilled hunter. Gifted. He’d made the clean kill.

  It was done. She would bear no witness against him.

  No one would hinder him now. No one would interfere with his pursuit of destiny. No one would stop him from doing what he was chosen to accomplish. He could hear the whispers beginning. The voices growing louder and more insistent. He’d feel their fingers scraping along his skin, and then pressing until, finally, they delved into his flesh and reached into his soul.

  The time was nearly upon him. A few days. A week. He knew the hour was almost here. He would go to Edinburgh. Destiny awaited. The power awaited. The reward awaited.

  Nothing was going to stop him.

  Chapter 11

  Time slowed to a near standstill, and Phoebe floated downward. Darkness enclosed her, and an endless void yawned below. Her arms and legs were not hers to command, and they flailed ineffectually around her. But when her hand struck a stone protruding from the wall, she felt the sharp pain in her shoulder and then spun like a top as she plummeted to the bottom. A scream formed in her throat but never emerged, for an instant later she hit water at the bottom and the impact knocked the air from her lungs.

  As Phoebe sank into the blackness, no sense of up or down existed. Suddenly the realization cut through to her stunned mind that she was about to drown. She fought off the paralyzing panic. The will to live took charge.

  She kicked her feet, one hand clawing at what felt like a wall of stone, and then her body began to move upward. She broke through the surface into air nearly as cold as the water, but still could not draw breath.

  No. No. No. You will not die.

  Trying to move her hands and feet to keep herself afloat, she found she had no feeling in her left shoulder. Her arm floated uselessly, as if it had become detached from her body. Her chest was locked in a painful spasm that would admit no air. She grabbed her arm and shoulder, and a sharp pain radiated across her back. She felt a jolt of air enter her lungs, and she tried to think.

  Another breath. She looked up. Stone walls stretched straight up for an ungodly distance. A well. She’d fallen into a well.

  The water was very cold, and her dress was weighing her down. Another breath seeped in. She looked up again and the distance to the top seemed to stretch even farther.

  She started to call for help but immediately stopped. Her hat came fluttering down the shaft.

  The memory returned. Fear formed a tight knot in her stomach. Someone had pushed her. And this same someone was standing at the top now.

  The hat landed on the water beside her.

  She tried to move her left arm again and the sharp pain caused her to stop kicking. Her chin dipped beneath the surface. Phoebe swallowed a mouthful of foul-tasting water and she gagged. Retching and gasping for air, she scratched at the wall, slippery with moss, desperate for something to hold onto. Her fingers found a narrow lip of stone.

  She looked up again once the retching subsided. Someone at Bellhorne wanted her dead.

  * * *

  “I’ll be going to Edinburgh myself next week,” Dr. Thornton said. “I’ll see to it that the doctor from the medical college comes back with me. Have no fear, Captain.”

  Ian wished he could remain as composed as the doctor. He’d been away from Bellhorne less than a week, and yet upon his return, his mother appeared even paler and weaker. Getting a specialist here to see her was beginning to feel critical, and he told the man his concern.

  “I understand your thinking,” the doctor agreed. “When I arrived earlier, I stopped up to see her before coming to your office. Whatever decline you’re seeing now may be temporary. But I must tell you the change may very well have been caused by the excitement of this unexpected company.”

  “She was quite happy to greet them.” The welcome his mother gave Phoebe had touched Ian the most. The way she took Phoebe into her arms brought back more memories of Sarah. She’d touch her daughter’s face and look into her eyes as if she could discern, with that simple gesture, everything that was right and wrong.

  The doctor shook his head. “It may have appeared so to you, but she thought the household wasn’t pre
pared to receive the daughters of an earl. The cook is all at sixes and sevens apparently, and the housekeeper is in a panic shuffling staff about to tend to these young ladies. I had to hear her every worry. If you care for her health, you’ll spare her this type of agitation.”

  Ian knew it was in the man’s character to speak his mind regardless of whom he was addressing, but he felt his temper rising. Most days, he would allow the doctor to say his peace and let it go. But making the suggestion that Phoebe should not be welcome at Bellhorne was exceeding the bounds of his position.

  “I do care for her health, Thornton,” he said sharply. “And I’ll address any confusion in the household, starting with Cook and Mrs. Hume. But to be clear, Lady Phoebe and her sister are welcome guests at Bellhorne, as they always have been and always will be. Once you meet them, you’ll realize their presence will have a positive impact on my mother’s . . .” A soft knock at the door stopped Ian momentarily. “ . . . on my mother’s health.”

  As Ian went to open the door, Dr. Thornton grumbled something under his breath and turned to the window. He’d half expected it to be Phoebe and was surprised to find Millie waiting outside. She looked pale and out of breath. He noticed bits of hay caught at the bottom of her skirts as if she’d been walking through the fields.

  “Lady Millie, what’s wrong?”

  “I am sorry to interrupt, Captain, but I was hoping you might know where my sister has disappeared to.”

  “What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” he asked, unease clenching his stomach in a tight grip.

  “She left our room soon after our luncheon with your mother. I was to meet her in the garden. But I’ve looked everywhere, and she’s nowhere to be found.”

  He reminded himself to stay calm despite his tendency these days to imagine the worst. Phoebe was a frequent visitor to Bellhorne while Millie joined her sister only on occasion. The older sister was more familiar with the castle and the grounds.