by Julia London
She realized it was dark when the hatch opened and MacLean appeared, followed by Mathais. “We’re to bring up food,” MacLean said. His face was lined with fatigue, his clothing wet. Mathais was still filled with his youthful exuberance and was rummaging about the crates and boxes stored there. “I’m to bring whisky,” he said grandly.
“Whisky?” Lottie looked at MacLean. “Have we won, then?”
MacLean snorted. “No’ at all. They followed us into the firth. They lost a bit of ground, but they remain in the hunt, still matching us, move for move. Aye, but Mackenzie is the better captain, he is—he has sailed us through treacherous water without so much as a bump. When we round Cape Wrath, we’ll hug closer to the shore. The ship behind us is bigger and canna go in as close. Beaty says there is no’ a captain on the seas other than Mackenzie who can sail as close to shore without running aground.” He picked up the last of the sea biscuits. “We’ll lose them then. Come, then, Mats, let’s bring this up, aye?”
The two of them left.
Drustan made himself a place in straw and settled in to sleep. He didn’t seem to understand the danger they were in, which was a blessing, really. Lottie couldn’t even think of sleep. Every shudder and groan of the ship, every bit of footfall overhead startled her. She moved back and forth between the stairs and where Drustan was sleeping, waiting. Her imagination soared wildly with ideas and scenes that seemed to grow more deadly as the hours wore on.
She became so lost in thought that she didn’t at first realize she’d heard nothing above her for some time. She paused, listening. Not a single footfall, not a muffled voice. Her first thought was that pirates had snuck on board and murdered them all. Were she and Drustan destined to float along, forgotten or undiscovered here, until the ship capsized or they crashed into cliffs and drowned? Or was there an ambush waiting for them above?
She couldn’t stand about like a lamb—she had to know. She looked upon Drustan, who slept soundly, then made her way to the stairs and crept up toward the hatch. She slowly, carefully pushed it open, an inch at a time. It was quite dark, but it was not night—a thick gray, fog engulfed the ship.
Lottie pushed the hatch open a wee bit more, and poked her head out. She was suddenly and violently pushed down, and whoever had done it came crashing in behind her, forcing her down to the hold’s floor, and pulling the hatch shut very quietly. Lottie caught herself on a post and whirled around. “For the love of God, Duff, you scared me half to death!” she exclaimed.
He lifted a thick finger to his lips. “No’ a word, Lottie,” he whispered.
Her heart vaulted into her throat. “Have we been overrun by pirates?”
He shook his head. “They canna see us in the fog. But we can hear them. They are passing us, and we must be as quiet as the dead until they’ve gone,” he whispered.
Lottie brought her hands to cheeks, pressing her fingers hard against her skin to keep from screaming with the anxiety that was ratcheting up in her.
Duff turned his attention to the closed hatch door. Lottie dropped her hands and looked up, too. They stood together, staring up, both of them straining to hear something, both of them waiting for someone to open the hatch.
“What is it?” Duff hissed.
Lottie heard it then, too—a soft pattering overhead.
“Rain,” she whispered.
Duff frowned. “That means the fog will lift soon.”
The pattering was light at first, but suddenly the rain fell heavy, falling in a deluge on the deck.
“I’m going up,” Duff said.
“Lot? I canna see you!” Drustan cried.
“I’m here, Drustan,” she said. She watched Duff go up, desperately wanting to go up with him, but unable to leave Drustan. She could never leave Drustan. Hadn’t that been her mother’s favorite refrain? Donna leave Dru.
“I’m hungry,” he said when she came to his side. He was clutching his carving to his chest. A gull, she’d noticed, and a rather good one at that. “I’ll see what I can find, aye?” she said, and dug in the crate for anything to eat and finding nothing but sour ale.
Drustan drained the flagon. “But I’m hungry, Lottie.”
“Soon, Dru. You must be patient.”
He suddenly looked up. “What’s that, then?” he asked. “What’s that noise?”
It sounded as if someone were pumping water from a well. “The tide must be rising.” Or was it going out? Why did no one come for them? If the ship had passed, why were they still locked away? The rain began to leak through the planks above them, and they moved into the center of the hold.
All at once there was a lot of shouting overhead. Drustan wailed beside her, frightened by the shouting. Lottie made out the word heave, and suddenly the ship pitched right so violently that it caught Lottie and Drustan unawares. She grabbed her brother and a post, and had hardly righted herself when the ship suddenly and violently collided with something. The force of it knocked her and Drustan to the floor. Lottie’s hand landed in water, and when she turned around, she saw water rushing in from the stern.
Drustan cried out, groping for the post, hauling himself to his feet. Lottie managed to gain hers, too. There was a hole in the hull the size of a whisky cask. She shrieked with alarm and grabbed Drustan’s hand. “Come! We have to go!” she shouted.
“No!” he screamed, and wrapped his arms around the post.
She tugged frantically at his arms and tried to unlock his grip, but Drustan refused to let go. She was no match for him—he was far too strong and she could not move as much as one of his fingers. “Dru! If we stay below we drown!” she cried, and punched him in the arm. “You have to come!”
He responded with a roar and squeezed his eyes shut.
Lottie gasped with the understanding she would go down with this ship. Drustan would not leave the post he clung to, and she would not leave Drustan, which meant she would drown. Panic clawed at her throat and her belly, threatening to erupt in bile. “Please,” she begged her brother. “I donna want to die, Dru! You must trust me, aye? Fader would tell you to do as I say!”
At the mention of their father, Drustan cut her a look. “I’m scared!”
“Aye, so am I! But I donna want to sink to the bottom of the sea with no hope! At least above we have a chance of surviving. Fader would want us to fight!”
“I canna swim!” he shrieked, and tears as big as raindrops began to slide down his face.
“We’ll no’ swim,” she promised him, her voice shaking as she caressed his cheek. “There are boats above, Dru, remember? Boats!” She hoped to heaven that was true, that everyone else had not deserted them. She gripped one of his large hands and managed to peel it from the post as water inched over their boots.
Amazingly, she managed to tug her reluctant brother to the stairs. He kept grabbing at things, trying to find something to hold on to, but her determination was making her stronger than she had ever been in her life. When they reached the stairs, she pushed him in front of her, yelling at him to go up, to open the hatch. “I’m frightened!” he shouted.
Diah, what was she to do with him? Lottie shoved around him. She scrambled up the steps and threw open the hatch, then just as quickly went down again and made him step in front of her. “Duff and Mats are waiting for you,” she said breathlessly. It was a lie, but she had to do something to get him to move. She watched his hulking shape crawl hesitantly up the steps, then slowly disappear onto the deck. When she was certain he was out, she began to scramble up the stairs after him.
She was halfway up when the ship lurched and she fell off the stairs, landing on the floor of the hold on a knee. Wrenching pain shot up her spine, stunning her. She took several breaths to quell the nausea the sharp pain had caused her. Water had reached her fingertips, and through sheer will, she got on two hands and one knee and pushed herself to standing. She hopped to the steps and t
ried again. Her good leg onto a rung, followed by her bad. Then again, gasping with pain as she put weight on the bad to lift the good one up to the next rung.
She had made slow progress when a hand reached through the opening. “Give me your hand!” Aulay shouted.
Relief flooded her, and she grabbed his hand with both of hers. He yanked her up through the opening, pulling her out of the hold and setting her on her feet on the deck. Lottie’s knee buckled in pain. “Can you walk?” he demanded.
She shook her head.
Aulay immediately swept her up in his arms and strode to the port railing. They’d already lowered the jolly and the Reulag Balhaire’s larger boat. “Help her down!” Aulay shouted. “She’s injured!”
Everything was a blur from there. Lottie made it down the rope ladder with the help of two men, and was practically tossed into the jolly while the sea frothed around them and battered against the sinking ship. There were still men on deck as the jolly was pushed away and men began to row, straining to battle the waves. Lottie looked frantically about her, relieved to see Mathais and Drustan with her in the jolly, and behind them, Duff, too, who was helping two Mackenzie men row.
She twisted around to see the ship. It was listing horribly now, the main deck at a sharp angle. The ship looked close to capsizing. She couldn’t see where the other men were, not in the great sheets of rain that came down, and she couldn’t see what was happening on the deck. She went up on one knee to see, but the jolly rode up on a wave and came down so hard that she fell back and struck her head on the side of the boat.
“Hold her!” someone shouted, and a hand wrapped firmly around her wrist to keep her from tumbling into the water. Drustan.
When she tried to sit up, everything around her blurred. She couldn’t tell sky from sea, and the water was so rough and choppy that she was made quite ill. Everything began to spin away from her. She was reeling into oblivion, and she thought she would do anything to make it stop...including dying.
Her last conscious thought before she was spun into blackness was, where was Aulay?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BRINE FILLED AULAY’S MOUTH. He choked on it, sputtering it out of his mouth. Water was lapping around his body, getting in under his clothes, in his mouth and nose. He pushed up, his hands sinking into dark wet sand. He spit salt water from his mouth, and when he moved, he felt sand in every crease of his skin, rubbing against him.
Diah, but his head ached. A jib had come undone as the ship foundered and had hit him square in the side of the head.
He rolled onto his rump, gasping for air, and looked around him. The tide was coming in, pooling where he’d been lying. The bodies of men were scattered across the sand like so much seaweed, all of them utterly spent from a harrowing twenty-four hours. There was the giant, sitting up, his legs crossed beneath him, his face tilted up to a perfectly brilliant blue sky.
Aulay slowly came to his feet, unsteady at first, but finding his balance.
There was Mathais, on his back, gulping like a fish for air. The actor and MacLean, and the rest of the Livingstones, all accounted for. Iain the Red was leaning over his brother, who was retching. Beaty, shaking the water from his hat, which he’d somehow managed to keep on his head. Billy Botly with his arm in a splint, who looked no worse for the ordeal. Geordie Willis and even Jack Mackenzie with his injured leg, leaning up against a rock, speaking quietly.
And there was Lottie, lying on her side, her back to the water.
Aulay turned to face the sea. A different sort of pain squeezed at his heart. There was nothing there, no sign of his ship. The sea, calm now, looked as empty as one of his paintings. A few crates and whisky casks were being carried along by the tide onto shore, but his ship was gone, sunk a quarter of a mile off the coast.
He climbed onto a rock and stared blankly at the sea, unable to fully grasp his loss. As the last of them had rowed away, he’d watched it go down, disappearing into tumultuous waves. The man he’d become, his entire adult life, had been forged on that ship and now it was all gone. His paintings, his books, his French wine, gone. The small knife he’d won from a French pirate, the instruments of sailing, all gone. The cargo he’d carried, the sails, the rigging, the guns...gone.
That ship was everything he was, and he would never be the same again. He’d never sail again—how could he? The Mackenzies had scarcely afforded to sail this time, and now they’d have to make recompense to William Tremayne for his lost cargo. It would likely ruin them.
What Aulay dreaded most was his father’s disappointment. Arran Mackenzie had steered the clan through the best and worst of times in the Highlands, and they had weathered it all, better than most. Aulay did not want to be the one to destroy what his father had worked tirelessly to build, in the twilight of his father’s life. He’d seen gut-wrenching worry on his father’s face too often in the last decade, and could not forget how skeptical he’d been of Aulay’s plans to rebuild their trade. But when Aulay had set sail, his father had smiled more brightly than anyone. He’d seemed younger somehow, his features filled with hope and the excitement of a new beginning.
Arran had believed in his son.
The sea turns over on itself. Aye, Aulay’s own personal sea had turned over on him and washed him away. He was adrift.
And he was furious.
Fury was boiling in him as he stood on that rocky shore. It was a cauldron, near to the point of spilling over in hot, molten waves.
“What now, Captain?” Beaty asked, having come to his feet.
Aulay hadn’t noticed Beaty at his side. He glanced over his shoulder—all of his crew was on their feet, watching him warily, as if they expected him to swim out to where his ship had gone down and stay with it after all.
“Break up the casks and crates as they come in, aye? Hide the boats. We’ll walk over the hills to Balhaire. Let there be no sign of where we came ashore. Whoever followed us was quite determined, and I’d no’ be surprised if they return to search for us now that the storm has cleared.”
The effort to hide the evidence of their survival was particularly grueling under a hot sun and with no proper tools. Nothing was salvageable—the salted beef was ruined and thrown into the sea. The bales of wool absorbed so much water they sank on their own.
Two of his men had managed to flee the sinking ship with long guns, and these they strapped on their shoulders in the event a Livingstone or two thought to run. All camaraderie between the two clans had been lost when the Mackenzies lost their ship and their livelihood. Yet in spite of their vigilance, two Livingstones managed to slip away. None of the Mackenzies had the patience to go after them, and no more of the Livingstones had the strength to run.
When the detritus from the ship had been cleared from the beach and hidden away, the group began their trek over the hills. Aulay guessed they were twenty miles from Balhaire, perhaps a little farther. They were exhausted and hungry, and because of a few injuries, progress was slow. Aulay noticed that Lottie was also limping, but she was walking, and declined Beaty’s offer of a staff. She kept up to the pace of the men, save for a stumble here or there.
He kept his distance from her. He could not bear to look at her just now. Over the last several days, he had come to admire her, to even love her. But he could not ignore the fact that his ship, his life, was now completely lost to him because of her. The truth beat a steady drum with the ache in his head, throbbing with each step he took. How could he have thought any different? How could he have bedded the enemy?
They had walked for hours when they came to a small stream where Aulay and his brothers once fished as lads. It was a place to rest and drink.
On the bank of the stream, Beaty removed his hat, wiped his sleeve across his brow, and glanced sidelong at Aulay. “Have you an idea, then, where we are, Captain?”
How odd that he was captain no more. He pointed at the hill ris
ing up across the stream. “Balhaire is on the other side.”
“An deamhan thu ag ràdh,” Beaty said, and shook his head. “I’ve never known a man who had a sense of direction as keen as yours.” He bent down to drink, and Aulay wandered downstream a bit, to a rock that jutted into the stream. Beaty was right. As children, they’d explored the land around them, but even then, Aulay was the one they relied on to see them safely home. He always knew where he was because he always knew where the sea was.
He sat on the rock and tried to comb his hair with his fingers.
“Aulay.”
He closed his eyes and swallowed, then slowly turned his head to look at Lottie. She was utterly bedraggled and still, quite beautiful to him. It was that beauty that had sucked him in, had sent him into a tailspin that had ended with something that felt as close to death as he’d ever come. His heart began to beat with his outrage, and he turned his attention to the stream.
“I am so verra sorry, Aulay. For your loss. For everything. My heart is filled with so much regret.”
He said nothing. Bonny words from a bonny lass. He wished he could despise her, but that was impossible. He loved her, no matter the devastation she’d caused. But he hated her, too. He was so furious that he was blinded by it, couldn’t look at her without feeling his rage ratchet uncontrollably. He flinched when her hand touched his and he involuntarily yanked it away, and ignored the sharp intake of her breath at the slight, the slow release.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, her voice low. “Have I offended you? I meant only to convey my sincere gratitude. I think you are the best man I have ever known.” She smiled sheepishly.
He suddenly wondered why she would say that now? Was it her attempt to smooth things over with him? Because she cared for him? Or because she cared for her own wee neck? “Go,” he said, his voice belying the fury in his veins. “I donna want your damn flattery.”
