He studied her for a long while, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “Since ye dinnae respond to threats of violence, I gather ‘tis something ye expected from a barbarian such as myself, perhaps ye’ll respond tae reason. I am nae a simpleton, whatever ye think. I ken that ye’re nae unassuming Highland lass. Something happened out there… I cannae begin tae describe. But ye… ye showed no surprise. Ye kent what it was.”
His calm, forthright manner was oddly compelling. He seemed almost like a normal guy in that moment. An average 21st century guy with at least average intelligence and enthralling blue eyes. Al struggled against blurting it all out. Where she had come from and how. How would he take it?
“I’m asking ye plainly… nay, beggin ye,” he continued. “Tell me what has become of my cousin.”
Al closed her eyes in a silent plea for help. From anyone. From anywhere. The man who’d come through the portal wasn’t just a random acquaintance, he was his cousin? Could this whole situation get any worse?
“Please?” he added. “Hugh is as much a brother to me as my own kin.”
Apparently it could. She groaned, stifling the regrets that were not just for herself and her own fate any longer.
“I willnae…nay, cannae leave the reason for his disappearance a mystery. Not when there is any chance I might save him.”
There wasn’t, she knew. Could she be the bearer of such news? Wasn’t mystery better than the reality of what might actually be happening to the man who was like his brother right now? Surely telling him the truth wouldn’t make anything better for him?
Vacillating internally, Al maintained her silence, but as before, her refusal to answer sparked his unpredictable temper.
“Argh! Ye obstinate witch.” He stood, throwing back his chair in a sudden burst of violence. “Just tell me what I want tae know!”
“Please don’t yell at me. I hate being yelled at.” He stared at her with thinly leased violence, but rather than cower in fear or retreat into silence as she typically might, she continued, “My stepfather was an ugly drunk. He used to bellow like a rabid ape at me and my mom. It was invariably a precursor to something far more unpleasant. And I just can’t stand it anymore.”
“If ye dinnae want to witness my temper then put an end tae it,” he snapped, his burr all the thicker in his anger. It rumbled from deep within him. “Tell me. I beg of ye. Put me out of this misery uncertainty has born.”
“I wish I could. I want to.” She did, Al realized. The pain in his soulful eyes was so real, she wanted to give him the truth. To let him rest his head in her lap while she stroked his hair back from his broad forehead as she assuaged his fears.
Except she couldn’t do that.
It was as much a fantasy as thinking that anything she might say—even if he understood it all—would alleviate his anxiety.
How could she explain that to him?
“I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
Al chewed her lip. Where to begin in the summation of Quantum Physics for Idiots?
“Well, I…” No. “There’s…” No. “You see…”
“Lass…”
“Keir!”
A dark-haired young man banged open the cell door and ran in, chest heaving and a panicked expression on his face.
“Nae now, Oran!”
“It’s Frang and Father,” Oran panted, glancing between them.
“Ah, bluidy fookin’ hell!”
Chapter 6
Four days later
Storming into the library, Keir tossed his scabbard and sword on his desk. Four days and still his temper hadn’t been relieved. Nor his father found.
Nor his curiosity about his cousin satisfied.
No, all the past four days had brought him was misery. Tragedy. His brother Frang had been killed in the aftermath of the battle on the Drumossie Muir. Killed, not in the blood bath of the battle itself, but murdered.
According to the witnesses he could find, those fearful few running for their own lives but willing to talk, the Duke of Cumberland had ordered his redcoat army to kill every surviving clansman left on the field that day, be he injured terribly or only marginally. Some of the Highlanders had been buried alive in great pits. Frang among them.
His armies had then marched on toward Inverness, raiding homes, searching for other Jacobites fleeing the battle. Any person being suspected of being one of, or even supporting, the Jacobites had been killed by means of musket, bayonet, or left dangling at the end of an all-too-short rope. Their homes burned. Women, children. It seemed to be an issue of little importance to Cumberland, who had already been labeled ‘The Butcher’ around the region.
Who knew what other atrocities might be committed in the days to come?
Luckily, his family home east of Dingwall was too far afield, too remote to attract immediate visitation. Though it might very well in the days and weeks to come as the search spread.
Prince Charlie was fleeing to the west Highlands, he’d heard. Perhaps the Isles. The information was sketchy but available. From men still loyal to his cause, eager to salvage what hope they had left in his person and see their ‘rightful sovereign’ to safety. Nevertheless, for all the gossip and news he’d been privy to, there had been no news of his father’s death. Or imprisonment. Nothing.
That didn’t mean one or the other wasn’t true, however.
He had serious doubts his father would have discovered enough good sense to hide himself away, since most Jacobite supporters were after partaking in such a ludicrous affair to begin with. If he were hiding out, he was doing a bloody fine job of that but a horrible job as a father not to let them all know.
But that was nothing new.
Blast the man!
He could only hope that with the rank of Earl of Cairn, Camran MacCoinnich might have been spared the mass graves on the field of battle. Perhaps he’d been captured, imprisoned with the fifty or more prisoners taken to the Tolbooth gaol on the Canongate in Edinburgh.
He’d sent his cousin Mathilde to find out for certain. She was Hugh’s oldest sister but more importantly her husband, Alexander Kinnoull, Earl of Hawick, was of Clan Hay and a known patron of the Hanoverian King George, making her Keir’s best chance at finding out what had become of his sire.
She would come to his aid, he was certain. Though her worries were no doubt focused more on the fate of her brother.
Pouring himself a full tumbler of Scotch from the decanter on the sideboard, Keir dropped into a chair and stared morosely into the cold ashes of the fireplace.
Hugh Urquhart, the Duke of Ross.
Keir’s cousin, his brother-at-arms. His compatriot in deviltry throughout his life.
After Hugh’s parents died when he was but a boy, they’d been raised as brothers. Of an age, Keir had been closer to him than his own brothers. Fostered together at age eight to the MacDonnell at Glengarry. Reprimanded together for pulling pranks on the headmaster at the University of Edinburgh. Sent off together to sow their oats on their Grand Tour of the Continent.
And now they’d been called back to do their duty together, when Cairn commanded them to take up arms for Prince Charlie.
Keir had known Charlie for years in France. He wasn’t worth the effort. The death. Not his brother’s or even his father’s.
Certainly not Hugh’s.
He might not have disappeared directly because of the rebellion but he had been lost because of it. Because Cairn had demanded his presence on the field. Hugh had only been there to fall into that void because of Keir’s father and his ridiculous politics.
A fall that still made no sense.
It was time that it did.
Pushing himself from the chair, he grabbed a tasseled rope tucked between the bookshelves and gave it a firm tug. Reclining back in his chair, he downed his Scotch in a single swallow, wincing at the burn as it raked his throat and singed his gut. A sensation perhaps more pleasant than the confrontation to come. Ye
t come it must.
“Aye, laddie?” Archie, the man who’d come to answer his summons, asked, scratching absently at the side of his thigh beneath his kilt as he glowered out the far window.
Used to the quirks of his father’s longtime retainers, Keir instructed, “Hae my cousin—”
“Which—?”
“Maeve,” he snapped. Aye, he was too used to his father’s men. “Hae Maeve bring our guest to me.”
They were an impossible lot, all of them. Doddering fools and abstracted fossils. None who saw him as anything more than a wee lad in a long shirt. All who should have been retired years before.
“Our guest?” Archie scratched at his thigh again, transferring his frown to Keir.
“Aye, Archie.” Keir spoke slowly. “The wee lass I put in her charge ‘ere I left.”
“Ye left?”
Keir merely rolled his eyes, for such a response was nothing out of the unusual at Dingwall. “Just hae Maeve fetch the lass. I’m sure she’ll ken which one I mean.”
* * *
Al woke with a jolt when her leg fell from the narrow bench. With a sharp cry, she yanked it back up and curled her arms around both legs until not the tiniest bit of herself dangled over the edge.
There were rodents down there. She’d seen them skittering across the dim field of light cast by her candle. Heard them scampering in the darkness. Little squeaks and hungry chewing haunted her fitful bouts of sleep.
Her overactive imagination had been hijacked by pure absurdity. Fancifully, she’d determined the little rats were taking their revenge upon her for years of being used as laboratory experiments. She just knew it, no matter how many hundreds of years spanned between their times.
“It wasn’t me,” she’d whispered into the darkness. “I’m not that kind of scientist.”
She was pretty sure they knew it, but simply didn’t care.
Nonsense was all it was. Nonsense to fill endless days. She wasn’t certain how many had passed. Her fears moving from what her captor might do to her when he returned to what might become of her if he never did.
Would the remainder of her days be spent in that dungeon with nothing but conversation with rats and herself to occupy her?
There was no way to know.
She didn’t blame Hugh for any of this. He’d been trying to protect her, not throw her into the hole from which he’d come. A chivalrous man.
The same couldn’t be said of his cousin.
He’d left her there with nothing but a chair and a narrow bench to use as a bed. It wasn’t until hours later that someone had brought her a meal and another candle. Hours more until someone thought to toss her a threadbare blanket that was almost useless in combatting the constant chill of the cell.
And a bucket.
That might have been the kicker. Days without fresh air, without decent food, without a toothbrush, but that…?
The final straw for sending her over the edge.
He’d done this to her. It was proof of his barbarism for only a true beast would leave anyone – female or not – in such a place. Slowly transforming her into one of them.
Barbarian? Beast? It irked Al that she couldn’t even put a name to the brute so that she might curse him properly. Carr, the younger man had called him, with a rolling ‘R’ at the end. Was that his name? Or was it Kerr like Deborah Kerr? She wasn’t sure. Perhaps it wasn’t a name at all.
Presumably the young man who’d come in was his brother Oran. An assumption based on the reference of ‘Father.’ Sounded like it might have a capital F to it.
Carr or Kerr, it didn’t matter which, only that he’d just gone off and left her, obviously without a second thought. And in doing so had provided nothing greater to occupy her mind than such inane debates and conversation with rodents.
For all his fervent questioning, clearly his cousin’s fate placed a far second in importance behind his father. It made sense. Most people cared for their sires, though in her experience, she’d found little to appreciate about fathers. Or stepfathers for that matter.
Whatever the reason, he’d left her down in that dank, dark dungeon without much of a word about her to anyone. She might’ve become a veritable afterthought all around were it not for the ragged boy who showed up twice a day with a small plate of food but offered little in the way of conversation or information. He didn’t even seem to speak English, which Al found odd. Even though their accents were thick and often nearly unintelligible, her jailor had spoken English and Oran as well.
“Argh!” Al bit her lip, swallowing the scream of frustration at her tedious thoughts. Banging her head against the hard wood would be no more constructive this time than it had the last. She was just so freakin’ bored.
The only things she’d had on her person when she’d fallen into the portal were her phone, her lab coat, her Mark-Davis I.D. and a keycard to the inner lab. She diminished her phone battery straight away flipping sadly through pictures of Mr. Darcy, reading the rest of a novel on her ebook app, and using her flashlight app to light her cell between the burning out of one candle and the arrival of another.
Her I.D. and keycard had provided no entertainment whatsoever. Her lab coat. Well, it had been torn into pieces and sacrificed for a worthy cause.
How could he have left her to this?
Another squeak in the darkness and Al drew her knees even more tightly to her chest. God, she hated rodents of any sort. Now, more than ever.
A key turned with a heavy grind in the door and Al sat up, ready for her breakfast. Or would it be dinner? She’d forgo both for five seconds of conversation. Which was almost laughable, she’d rarely sought out company voluntarily in her life.
To her surprise it was a woman of perhaps forty or so, dressed in a simple brown dress with a long tartan draped around her shoulders. Unlike the dark blues and forest greens of her jailer’s kilt, hers was brightly colored with lively greens, reds and yellows. Her rich brown hair was pulled straight back from her forehead, laced with a few strands of silver that glittered in the candlelight.
As she came closer, Al could see the familiar blue she’d seen repetitively echoed in her eyes.
Damn, she was one of them.
Did that make her, too, one of the enemy?
The woman looked her up and down, taking in Al’s unwashed body and scraggly hair with what seemed like a gleam of pleasure lighting her eyes. One of Al’s verminous roommates skittered along the edge of her long skirts and though she squealed and leapt back, she seemed even more pleased. Her eyes glowed with inner glee as she met Al’s gaze.
“Compordach, tá muid?”
Al didn’t understand the language she spoke, but sarcasm was universal. The facetious drawl and malicious glee glowing in her eyes told her the woman was delighted by what she saw. Why? The eyes marked her as a close relative. Was she a sister? A cousin as happy as Al’s captor to see her suffer?
Producing a key, she unlocked the wrist shackles Al still wore around her wrists and turned back toward the door, motioning for Al to follow. “Tar liom.”
Wary of both the woman and what might await her beyond those doors, Al stayed put on the bench.
The woman paused at the door and gestured imperiously once more for Al to follow.
“Tar.”
Al held firm. As much as she wanted out of her prison, going anywhere with this woman seemed far more dangerous.
“Do ye nae speak Gaelic?” the woman asked with a frown. “I said come wi’ me. I am tae take ye tae see Keir.”
There is was again, though this time she could make out the burr of the vowels more clearly.
Keir.
Too quixotic a name for such a fierce man.
But it called her involuntarily to her feet, eager to confront him after days alone. She followed the woman down a long corridor punctuated with cell doors, guided only by the candle held aloft by the raggedy boy who led the way. Up they went, the worn stone of the winding stairs cool and smooth beneath her bare
feet.
Damn, she forgotten her shoes. There was no chance to retrieve them. A door opened at the top, letting in a blast of heat to warm her as well as a burst of sunlight to blind. Al squinted and glanced around, though it all appeared at first to look like nothing more than an overexposed photograph.
The light dimmed once more as they moved through another door, and leaving the young boy behind, the woman sailed regally through another stone passage. It was cooler again but not as cold as her dungeon. Her eyesight returning to normal, Al could see the improvement in these walls as compared to the ones she’d been staring at. The stonework was tighter. Neater.
Through a kitchen. Another wave of heat. Everyone stopped to stare at her and she returned the favor. It was like stepping into a living museum, reminding her of a trip she’d taken with her parents to Colonial Williamsburg when she was little. The huge fireplace with spits of meat and iron pots hanging over it. Wooden tables and women in caps and long aprons.
Her guide kept moving and Al followed, absorbing the change from rustic to tidy to elegant as they moved from room to room. Frowning, she scanned the space, trying in vain to absorb her surroundings. Grand halls, velvet drapery. Gilded art works?
It was cool, quiet, and calm. Rather like a museum.
The woman stopped in front of a set of doors and an ancient old man dressed splendidly in a neat kilt and blue coat bowed before opening them.
Stepping aside with a smirk, her guide gestured toward the door. “After ye.”
Chapter 7
Scratching bewilderedly at her matted hair, Al stepped through the doors and stared up in awe at the room within. It was a glorious library at least thirty feet long with towering bookshelves on both sides. Shelves filled from floor to ceiling with leather-bound books of varying thickness. Dazed, she walked slowly into the room, aware of the thick carpets beneath her bare feet and of the frescoed ceiling high above resplendent with cherubs.
Surely it wasn’t his. All those books, the elegance, just didn’t jive with what she’d seen of her captor. She wasn’t even confident he knew how to read.
Love in the Time of a Highland Laird (A Laird for All Time Book 3) Page 3
