Just in Time for a Highlander

by Gwyn Cready

  “Duncan.”

  A full moment had passed, and Duncan realized someone had been saying his name over and over.

  He dropped to his knees and crawled to Rosston.

  “Duncan.” The word was hoarse, remote. “Duncan, I’m nae dead.”

  “No.”

  “And nae are you.”

  Rosston’s wound was deep, but it was not in his heart.

  He heard voices in the distance. Many voices. “I have to find Abby. I’ll come for ye.”

  Duncan sprinted deeper into the woods, trying to push the image of the soldier from his head. He rounded the bend at a thick stand of pines and ran right into Abby, standing by the horse.

  “Oh, God, you’re alive.” He clutched her, and she him.

  Then she saw the blood on him and wavered. “Rosston…?”

  “No. The soldier who found him. Rosston’s alive, but we need to get him to a surgeon. Abby, I was a fool when I said—”

  “Aye, you were. We haven’t time for that. There’s a band of soldiers coming through. We are bound to be found. There will be a bloody war if they find a clansman and a dead soldier here.” She tugged the horse’s lead, and they hurried back to Rosston.

  Rosston smiled when he saw her. Abby looked at the soldier and turned to Duncan. “Your work?”

  He nodded. He didn’t even want to look at what he’d done.

  Getting Rosston onto the horse beside Archie was relatively easy—Rosston was still conscious and could help lift his weight—but getting the English soldier onto it was impossible.

  Duncan said, “Perhaps with a rope—”

  “No. We don’t have time. He has to stay.”

  The sound of the soldiers was growing closer. There were a lot of them.

  Abby said, “Give me your sword belt and plaid!”

  “Why?” Duncan said but was already loosening the leather.

  “Ye have to get Rosston to a surgeon and Archie to the agreed location.” She stripped off her cloak and replaced it with his bloody plaid. “Their dead colleague and I will be a bonny distraction. He attacked me, ye know.” She pulled the bloody sword out the soldier’s neck and began to blubber theatrically. “I had no choice.”

  The full realization of what she was planning hit Duncan. “Oh, no. I am nae leaving you to explain yourself to a band of English soldiers.”

  “Ye took an oath.”

  “I don’t bloody care.”

  “Ye took an oath,” she said, “and I command it.”

  Damn her. Damn them all. “Bugger this bloody, foucking clan.”

  Rosston, who was barely holding himself on the horse, let out a labored chuckle.

  “Go,” she commanded. “Go!”

  Duncan grabbed the horse’s lead and ran. A mile later, with Abby and her dead attacker having long disappeared behind them, Duncan slowed to a walk, wondering what on earth he had left her to.

  Rosston, as gray as the sky, said with a weak smile, “Ye look a wee bit like you’ve been attacked yourself, laddie, running through the woods in nae but your sark.”

  “Will she be all right?”

  Rosston sighed. “She has been as long as I’ve known her. I expect today will be nae exception. Turn west here. Ye’ll likely find my men just over the ridge. I think I am going to pass out.”

  Thirty-nine

  Abby looked down the barrel of the musket, as grim and forbidding as the eyes of the soldier holding it. While she had very little feeling for the dead soldier at her feet, replacing the image of his body with the imagined picture of her mother, splayed awkwardly on the ground under her horse, had been enough to thoroughly wet her cheeks. The holes she’d torn in her gown and bleeding lines she’d scratched across her cheek completed the tableau.

  “I told you I don’t know why,” she said, crying. “He asked me if I was alone…and then he…” She hung her head and made a low keen. Her experience of men was that crying unnerved them, and the more hopeless the tears, the more unnerved they found themselves.

  A dozen more soldiers arrived and encircled the body.

  “What happened?” one said.

  “She says Dunworth attacked her,” said the soldier with the musket. “When he turned his back, she grabbed her sword.”

  Abby cried harder.

  “Why were you carrying a sword?” asked an older soldier, who surveyed her skeptically.

  “My husband said I must. He said if I insisted on hunting badgers…I know I’m not supposed to hunt here, but the Elliotts are such a wealthy clan, and it has been so long since we had—”

  “This ain’t the Elliotts’ land,” the man with the musket said. “This land belongs to England.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh dear.”

  The older soldier frowned. “So you say he attacked you, and you were able to reach for your blade?”

  “I told him.” She waved her shaking arm in the direction of the first soldier.

  “Private Lynley. I’m Sergeant Rose,” the older man said.

  “I told Private Lynley that the man, Dunsmore, or whatever you said, couldn’t…do what he intended. His cock wasn’t ready. And he turned away from me so he could, well—”

  “I think we have the picture.” The older man flushed.

  Undoing the dead soldier’s breeks had been the final piece of prepping the scene. It was an act she did not wish to repeat—ever.

  For a long moment the soldiers said nothing. Abby swallowed her anxiety. This was the moment her future would be decided.

  Lynley gave Rose an interrogatory look.

  “Private Bigham,” Rose said, speaking to the man kneeling over his companion’s body, “would you escort—I’m sorry, have we gotten your name?” He gave Abby a smile that came no higher than his mouth.

  “Grant. Martha Grant.”

  “Would you escort Mrs. Grant back to the camp? I’d like to have someone write down her story. Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Grant. You’ll be free to go when we finish.”

  Abby rose unsteadily. “But my husband—”

  “You’ll be home before dark. We may even be able to throw in a badger.” He gave her a courteous bow.

  She bobbed a curtsy filled with regret and took Bingham’s arm.

  When the woman was out of earshot, Lynley said to Rose, “You couldn’t take her statement here?”

  “I could,” Rose said, “but then the colonel wouldn’t have a chance to talk to her. That’s no crofter, my boy. That’s the chief of Clan Kerr.”

  Forty

  Rosston’s men descended on them like a swarm of bees, and Duncan accepted being shoved out of the way as they cut their chief free and dragged him from the saddle. Duncan had had to tie Rosston’s hands around the horse’s neck to keep him from falling off.

  A minute later, Rosston’s earsplitting cry cut through the hum. The whiskey they were pouring on his shoulder seemed to have jolted him out of whatever rest he’d been getting, and one of the men was threading a hideously long needle. Stomach rising, Duncan turned to get on with his duties. He needed to deliver Archie to the agreed spot, which as best as Duncan could calculate was still an hour away.

  He tried to push the picture of Abby, abandoned and if not actually pregnant then as vulnerable as a woman who was, standing by a slaughtered English soldier out of his head. She had a given him an order. He would do it.

  He adjusted Archie’s plaid, which had become tangled in the process of transporting Rosston, and checked the hiding place in Archie’s sock.

  Duncan froze. His finger found nothing in the closely knit wool. He checked the other sock, in case he’d misremembered the side, but there was nothing in either of them. The silk and its message were gone.

  The snugness of the hidden pocket and the light weight of the silk, made it impossible for him to believe the message
had fallen out. He would have liked to believe Rosston had stolen it for a purpose Duncan could not imagine, but the truth was painfully obvious: Abby had taken it and intended to have the soldiers find it on her.

  He pushed through the circle of clansmen.

  “Watch yerself,” one said. “We’re working on him.”

  “I need to talk to him,” Duncan said. “Alone.”

  Rosston, who was half-awake, waved his men off. The man with the needle gave Duncan a sour look, laid his work on Rosston’s half-stitched shoulder, and rose. “’Twould be good to get him finished before he passes out again, ye ken?”

  “I ken.”

  The moment the men were out of earshot, Duncan knelt down beside the makeshift surgery space, which evidently was the cleanest of the blankets the men had with them. Rosston had lost a lot of blood and his face showed it. The gaping hole in his shoulder had been replaced with a curved line of ragged, bloody Xs.

  “The plans are gone.”

  Rosston groaned. “Christ, Abby.”

  “Why would she take it?” Duncan demanded, hoping Rosston had a different idea.

  “Because she was sure to get searched.”

  “Dammit! She ordered me to deliver the dead man—forced me to swear to it. Was that only to ensure I left her there on her own?”

  “And to get me to a surgeon.” Rosston turned his head in the direction they’d come. “Oh, Abby, ye headstrong girl.”

  “Where would they take her? I mean, if they searched her and found the note?”

  Rosston licked his lips. “Outside a burned out castle just over the border. ’Tis the army’s northern headquarters. Follow the vale till the firth. You’ll see the wall.”

  “But I took an oath to her, as head of the clan. I am pledged to do as she says. Tell me, Rosston, must I heed her command to deliver the body? She may very well have a plan she has not shared with me that my arrival would destroy. Do I do as she says or as I think?”

  Rosston closed his eyes, and for a moment Duncan thought he had slipped into unconsciousness again. Then the lips fluttered open. “In this case, as you might say, bugger the clan.”

  Duncan jumped to his feet.

  “Wait.”

  Duncan stopped.

  “I owe you my life,” Rosston said.

  “I was glad to help.”

  Rosston snorted but the motion made him wince. “You weren’t. And I wouldna have been glad to help you.” He shifted uncomfortably. His cheeks had already begun to shine with fever. “But as grateful as I am, I dinna intend to let you have her.”

  “Abby is not a woman one ‘lets’ do anything, ye ken, certainly not you or I.”

  “Ye saved my life, and I willna harm you. But I want your word ye will leave her alone.”

  “You’re wasting your breath,” Duncan said, impatient. “If she wants me, she’ll have me.” He stood.

  “Damn you.” Rosston grabbed his arm. “She’s mine.”

  “Ye have no power to possess or bequeath,” Duncan said, pulling himself free. “She is not a soup tureen or a crate of gold. If you would just realize that, you blistering fool, you might actually have a chance with her.”

  An unsettling confection of surprise and satisfaction appeared in Rosston’s glazed eyes and he smiled. “Could it be ye dinna know what transpired between us last night?”

  The words cut Duncan like a broadsword. Every particle of his being longed to know what Rosston dangled before him, but somewhere inside his chest a tiny ember of his trust in Abby flickered.

  “Go to hell.” Duncan turned for the horse.

  “She negotiated the terms of our marriage,” Rosston called and caused a number of men’s heads to turn, and Duncan hesitated. “Do ye not want to hear the ones that apply to you?”

  Forty-one

  “Missus, er, Grant, is it? I am exceedingly sorry for what happened.”

  Abby clutched the mug of warmed sherry that had been placed in her hand and nodded, taking care to keep her gaze downward. Soldiers, especially ones as vaunted as a colonel, did not care for women who showed neither deference nor fear.

  The man’s gleaming yellow hair was gathered in a resplendent queue, and a sizable gold ring sat on his right hand. His Lordship Colonel John Bridgewater of Her Majesty’s Northern Regiments had inherited his title and fortune upon the death of his father a short time earlier. What he hadn’t inherited was his father’s wisdom or rank. Bridgewater’s father had been commander of the Northern Regiments before him, but the late lord had been a general, and Abby knew from Undine, Colonel Bridgewater felt the slight keenly.

  “Sergeant Rose, will you take the lady’s plaid, please? We can provide you with a clean blanket, ma’am. I’m sure you have no desire to be wrapped in something soiled with the blood of your attacker.”

  “Actually, I—”

  “Sergeant, find her something clean,” Bridgewater said, slipping the sodden fabric from her shoulders. “’Tis the least we can do.” He handed it to Rose and dismissed him.

  She wondered for a moment if Duncan had been right, that she was being a fool to risk this. Of course, he didn’t know the full extent of the risk. It would have been just one more thing for him to get hotheaded about. The gates of York, indeed. Why were men free to indulge themselves with as many women as they chose, but women were to limit themselves to one? On the whole, Abby thought one at a time was a more than sufficient nod to propriety.

  “Please sit, Mrs. Grant.”

  An armchair upholstered in green damask stood near the colonel’s desk. She gave him an uncertain look and he nodded encouragingly. She hadn’t expected to be brought to Bridgewater, and would have strongly preferred for whatever story they needed to collect from her to be collected in the field. Murder in the defense of one’s own person was rarely investigated, and even though Dunworth was an English soldier and she a Scot, there was little question a pregnant woman lucky enough to have gained the upper hand with a rapist would be considered innocent by authorities. And if her husband had been English, killing his wife’s would-be rapist would have been his God-given right.

  When she was seated Bridgewater said, “I am told by Sergeant Rose that you were not, how shall I say it, breached? I apologize for the indelicacy,” he added hurriedly, “but it’s important to get the details correct.”

  “No,” she said, cheeks hot, “I was not.”

  “And the child…? It is unharmed, I trust?”

  “It is, thank the Lord.”

  Bridgewater sank into his equally opulent chair. “Private Dunworth had shown himself to be a man of questionable morals before this, I’m sorry to say, and while he had never to my knowledge attempted a transgression of this nature, your report is regrettably not a surprise.”

  The statement did not require a response, and she offered none. It was just like the English army, she thought, to employ ne’er-do-wells and rapists.

  “You say he came upon you in the woods?”

  “I’d been hunting.”

  “Aye, the bow. We found it.”

  She’d been careful to choose the plainest unmarked bow she owned before setting off. Nonetheless, it was a wonderfully responsive tool, and it irked her to think she might not get it back. The sword, though far more costly, meant little to her. “I didn’t realize I was on English land or I would not have trespassed.” She nearly choked on the phrase “English land.”

  “Which is to say, you were happy to be stealing so long as it was from the Elliotts not England.” He gave her a grim smile. “That is the truth, is it not?”

  “I am not proud of what I did, sir. But my husband and I need to eat.”

  He pursed his lips sadly, as if he understood what people unlike himself could be driven to. “Well, let us not dwell on that. Dunworth had been assigned the patrol in that area. I presume he found you aiming a
t some sort of animal or another?”

  “He did not. He came upon me in the woods. I had stopped to rest. I believe he intended to relieve himself. He was unbuttoning his breeks when he saw me.” Best to keep the story as close to the truth as possible. She took a small sip of the sherry for realism, though she knew she needed to stay as focused as possible.

  “And?”

  “And he asked if I was alone. I didn’t like the look in his eyes. I told him I didna want any trouble. I got up to leave. He grabbed me, and we struggled. He told me that he—” She took a deep breath, thinking of Duncan’s story about spanking to heighten the color on her cheeks. “Do you really need to hear this?”

  Bridgewater nodded apologetically.

  She said with a shaking voice, “He told me he had no interest in long-plucked Scottish beaver, and that I could suck his cock or die where I stood.”

  Bridgewater gazed out the room’s small window, the ugliness of the story reflected on his face. This was a hard thing to hear, she thought, even for a man like him.

  “And you’re certain of his intentions?” he said.

  “Colonel, I am a six-year married woman. I am quite able to recognize a man in the mind of fornication.”

  For an instant she saw something rise at the corner of his mouth, something that suggested he was imagining the breadth and depth of her marital experience.

  “I do not doubt you,” he said gravely.

  “If there is nothing more, can I assume you are done with me? You have been very kind, but ’tis a two-hour walk home.”

  “A few minutes more, madam. A few minutes more. Ah, here is Sergeant Rose with a cloak and a dish of quail. Would you care to join me? I’m starved.”

  Forty-two

  Duncan hadn’t had to go all the way to Bridgewater’s castle to find the colonel, nor even very far into the Debatable Lands. The tent in the distance topped by snapping red- and yellow-tailed pennants and surrounded by dozens of alert redcoats was the field headquarters of some army grandee. Even a number-crunching desk jockey could tell that.