The Devil Wears Tartan

by Karen Ranney

  Marshall was beside her.

  They walked out into the courtyard, and every single one of the men from Ambrose began to cheer.

  Marshall stopped, stunned.

  “Is it the number of men that amazes you?” she asked, putting her hand on his sleeve. “Or is it their loyalty?”

  He turned to her. “You were prepared to go to war, weren’t you?”

  “I still am.”

  He frowned. “Against whom?”

  “First, Dominic Ahern. Now you, I think,” she said agreeably.

  She turned and placed both her hands flat against his chest.

  He looked intently at her face, as if he wanted to memorize it, keep it in his mind for all time. She was so beautiful and so fierce. Her loyalty made him feel humble in a way he’d never before felt.

  “Why me?”

  “I’m a very intelligent woman, Marshall, one blessed with a questioning mind. I knew that there were secrets that shamed you. You are, after all, not a god but a human man. A human man,” she repeated. “But does that mean that you’re unworthy to love?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “There may come a time in the future when I shame myself again, when I harm someone else, when I commit an act of extreme stupidity. I would hope that you’d forgive me, knowing that I’m fallible. Isn’t that what love is all about? Seeing the flaws of others and discounting them?”

  She was oblivious to the men of Ambrose watching them.

  “Do you love me?”

  He silently saluted her bravery. He didn’t know if he would have had the courage to ask that question.

  “I once thought love was for foolish boys. Those who think themselves immortal. Or those who have no sins for which to atone. I’ve believed that I’ve had too many sins to be worthy of love.”

  She grabbed his hands, holding them imprisoned between hers.

  “Why do you punish yourself so much? Why are you, of all people, subject to a different set of rules? Why do you have to be better than anyone else? Stronger? Braver?”

  He looked out at the landscape, focusing on it rather than her. Words came so much more easily when the object of them wasn’t standing right beside him.

  He didn’t care for the ache that resided somewhere in his chest, an indication that emotions too long buried had been reluctantly jarred open like a trunk with a rusty hinge.

  Davina didn’t move, but he could feel her tension, as if she drew herself up in a small ball to be less of a target.

  “I said that I once thought myself unworthy of love. But since you came into my life with your stubbornness—may I call it obstinacy?—I’ve become accustomed to the idea of it.”

  She stared down at her clenched hands, and if he could have, without revealing that his own hand trembled, he would have tilted her chin up so that he could stare into those luminous eyes of hers.

  “Come back to Ambrose with me. Come and live there and keep me sane. Come and love me, and I will love you with all the power and the strength of which I’m capable. To refuse you, to refuse love would be the true definition of madness, I think.”

  She stepped closer, lifted both his hands to her lips, cupping the backs of his hands within her palms as if in offering. Then she bent her head and kissed the center of his scarred palm, a kiss so soft and sweet that it speared his heart. It was not an act of passion as much as one of benediction.

  If they were in a different place, he would have pulled her into his arms and kissed her again. But the men of Ambrose surrounded him, dressed in kilts and holding spears, claymores, and dirks.

  “It’s a stirring sight to see us all outfitted for war. You’ve stripped Ambrose of its weapons.”

  She smiled and nodded.

  “I confess there’s a great deal missing from Ambrose. As well as Mrs. Murray,” she added. “She seems to have departed with some alacrity. Not that I mind. I’m rather happy about the event.”

  He stared down at her, a dozen pictures flashing into his mind. Mrs. Murray with the ubiquitous decanter of wine. Mrs. Murray with her soft-eyed glances, reminding him of earlier days. Mrs. Murray with her excessive servility.

  “It was the wine,” he said, all the pieces suddenly fitting into place.

  “The wine?”

  “Something was in the wine. I haven’t had any since I’ve been here, and I’ve no hallucinations of any kind.”

  The thought struck him as loud as thunder.

  Before his marriage, he’d taken to sitting in his library, musing upon his inability to sleep. A glass or two of wine was his habit. He’d never associated the wine with the visions he’d experienced, but then he’d never read his mother’s journal, either.

  “She used to give my mother her medicine. It would have been easy enough to do the same to me.”

  “Mrs. Murray? She’s Leanne?” Her eyebrow arched upward. “She was your mother’s companion?”

  He nodded.

  “Why did she become the housekeeper at Ambrose, Marshall? Because you felt guilty about seducing her?”

  There was enough truth in the accusation that he felt uncomfortable.

  “She didn’t want to go back to Edinburgh.”

  “Of course she didn’t,” Davina said. “She was in love with you.”

  He glanced at her. “I doubt that was the case.”

  “For a well-respected diplomat, you’re incredibly obtuse, Marshall.”

  He would have taken umbrage at that comment but for the fact that she had just brought an army to rescue him.

  “I never experienced the hallucinations around you,” he said slowly. “Only once, when I went back to my room and had a glass of wine. But I’d eaten prior to that, which is probably why the visions weren’t as bad.”

  Once he’d been married, he’d spent fewer nights in his library dreading sleep. Instead he’d been with Davina, allowing himself to be thoroughly charmed by her wit, mind, and passion. When Davina had returned to Edinburgh, he’d resorted to his previous habits. Only then had the ghosts returned in earnest, exhorting him to join them.

  He bloody well wasn’t going mad.

  She stared at him in wonder. “Why did we never think of that before?”

  “But you did,” he said, gently reminding her.

  “I think I would have said anything at the time,” she admitted. “I was desperate for answers. I didn’t want you to be mad.”

  “But why would Leanne do that?” At her look, he said, “So she poisoned me out of love? That hardly makes sense.”

  “What better way to keep you dependent on her than to render you insane?” She eyed him with an irritated glance. “Or she could have been poisoning you from spite. Did you ruin her, Marshall?”

  He hadn’t the slightest idea, but he wasn’t about to make that remark.

  “Why did she send me off to an asylum? Or was it her decision?”

  They shared a look.

  “I think it’s time to have a talk with my uncle as well,” he said.

  “Well, I sincerely hope that Mrs. Murray has gone a very long distance,” Davina said.

  “Or else you would be tempted to go after her?”

  “I’ve been deprived of a war,” she said. “But surely a small battle would not be amiss. And I would very much like to engage in battle with Mrs. Murray. Was she ever truly married, or did she simply take the title to become more respectable?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

  He held out his hand, and she took it without comment. But she was smiling, and her eyes were sparkling.

  He wanted to kiss her softly and tuck her under his arm and keep her there for the next millennium or so, just until he grew accustomed to her presence.

  He led her across the courtyard. A few men pushed their way to the front of the crowd. Marshall stopped and greeted the men individually. From time to time he’d clamp a man on his shoulder, expressing his thanks.

  One man, however, startled him so much that he could do nothin
g but stare.

  “Jacobs?”

  “Your Lordship.”

  His valet was attired in a kilt and gray shirt, and holding a dirk, all the world like a warlike chipmunk.

  “It’s good to see you, Jacobs.”

  Jacobs smiled. “And you, Your Lordship.” In the next second, he raised the dirk and rushed forward.

  Marshall threw up his arm to block the knife and felt the blade slice through his shirt and the skin beneath.

  He feinted left, and when his valet struck out in that direction, Marshall dove for Jacobs, his shoulder a battering ram into the man’s stomach. In seconds, Jacobs was on the ground, the knife skittering across the dirt.

  “What the hell is going on?” Marshall asked, pinning Jacobs to the ground. His arm was bleeding, but not badly. A little deeper, however, and Jacobs could have done real damage.

  “You killed him,” Jacobs said. “I know you did. I heard you.”

  There was no reason to ask the question. Marshall knew that the only person Jacobs would kill for was Daniel.

  “I sent him to China with you, and you killed him.”

  Marshall reared back and looked at the man he’d known all his life. “I didn’t kill him, Jacobs.”

  “You promised to keep him safe.”

  How many times had he made that banal comment? How many reassurances had he given, how many platitudes had he uttered in his life of diplomacy? Too many. Words always meant something, if not to the speaker, then to the listener. Jacobs had somehow believed that Marshall had the power of life and death, that being the Earl of Lorne also gave him the ability to spare Daniel from torture, and ultimately death.

  If he could have saved Daniel, Marshall would have.

  “I’m sorry, Jacobs. He was under my command, and I should have protected him. That I didn’t, that I couldn’t, will be a regret I shall have to live with all my days.”

  “I’m supposed to be content with that? Regret?” Jacobs stared up at him, his face twisted into a mask of hatred. “You should have died along with him,” Jacobs said.

  “And you tried to ensure I did, didn’t you?” He stood, looking down at the valet. “Leanne wasn’t the only one who knew my mother took Chinese herbs to help her pain, was she?”

  Jacobs looked up at him. Two men reached down and hauled the valet to his feet. “You should suffer for what you did.”

  “I have, even without your intervention, Jacobs.”

  Marshall turned and began to walk away, intent on reaching Davina. The look on her face, however, changed from concern to alarm as she stared behind him.

  “Marshall!”

  One moment the solid ground was beneath his feet, and the next, he was flying over the end of the promontory, the dizzying vista of the valley below him. The earth sloped just before it ended, and it was that fact that saved him. He fell, hard, began to slip, feet and hands clawing for something to hold on to. Davina’s screams echoed his own panic.

  A chunk of slate, chipped and broken from centuries of exposure to the elements, jutted from the promontory, and he gripped it like a lifeline, his feet swinging free.

  Evidently Jacobs had wrestled free of the men who’d held him, and pushed Marshall off the edge of the cliff. The momentum had carried Jacobs over as well, because he was only a few feet above Marshall, his arms around a boulder, his legs kicking at Marshall’s hands.

  Marshall heard his name, knew Davina was calling to him, but he could spare her only a glance. Her face was stark white, her beautiful eyes wide with terror.

  Not now. Not when he’d just begun to believe in the future. If death hadn’t taken him in China or in the last year, Marshall wasn’t about to die now. Not here. Not now.

  A rope was tossed in his direction, slapped against his face, and hung beside him. Marshall heard his men above him shouting encouragement, but above all he heard Davina’s voice.

  The earth began to move, a low creaking sound the only warning. The boulder Jacobs was using to hold on to started to pull free of the earth. Jacobs didn’t scream; he didn’t make a sound as he fell. He was simply gone, vanished into the air.

  Marshall looked up at the sea of faces above him. He gripped the rope with first one hand and then the other, and hooked a foot in the trailing length of it. The cut that Jacobs had inflicted was bleeding profusely, but Marshall shut out the pain, and the protests in the muscles in his arms and chest. An inch at a time, he made his way to the top. Arms reached out to pull him to safety. Seconds later, he was flat on his back on the ground, Davina holding him, rocking him back and forth with his face pressed into her bodice.

  Not an altogether unpleasant place to be.

  He lay there for a moment, and then sat up, wrapping his uninjured arm around her as he surveyed his rescuers.

  “It seems you’ve saved me not once but twice,” he said to the men of Ambrose.

  More than one man looked in Davina’s direction, and he knew what they didn’t say. He stood, his legs still a little shaky, and held out his hand to her.

  There were some things that should be marked on a summer day: the purity of morning light, the gentle breeze whirling among the rocks and weeds, the emerald green of leaves and grasses, the brown of the tree trunks, the brilliant blue of the sky, and white, fluffy clouds being pulled apart by upward winds.

  Davina could smell dust, and a hint of rain, and flowers as sweet as a child’s prayer. She felt the warmth of the sun on her face, and the usual discomfort of her shoes. The breeze tickled her nose and made her want to sneeze.

  Her footsteps were measured and calm. No one could tell that she could barely walk for the trembling in her legs. Her heart was racing frantically, and her hands still shook.

  She’d almost lost him again.

  Once they were in the carriage, however, she ceased being circumspect. She didn’t care if Nora or Jim witnessed her tears, or if they thought she was too demonstrative with Marshall. She simply didn’t care. The two of them would simply have to get used to the idea of her being excessively cordial around her husband. Her husband. Was there ever a better title for anyone? Love. Perhaps that was better.

  Well. Her aunt certainly wouldn’t like this. Her husband was sliding her onto his lap. Instead of correcting him, however, she wrapped her arms around his neck and wept against his neck.

  “Davina. It’s all right.”

  “I almost lost you again,” she said, clutching his shirt with both hands. When he flinched, she sat back and stared at his bloody shirt in horror. “Twice. I almost lost you twice.”

  “You’ll never lose me, I promise.”

  “Your arm needs treating,” she said.

  “You can be my physician once we reach Ambrose.”

  She nodded, separating the cloth to look at the wound more closely. Normally she didn’t mind the sight of blood, but his injury made her shiver as if it had been done to her. No, it was worse than if it had been done to her. He was hurt.

  He wrapped his uninjured arm around her, and held her close.

  “It’s all right, my love. Truly it is.”

  She nodded. “I know. You’ve suffered worse. You’ve endured so much more. But I don’t want you hurt,” she said fiercely. “You should never be hurt again.”

  She truly didn’t care that Nora and Jim were no doubt listening with great interest.

  “I shall promise to be very careful from this moment on,” he said, smiling.

  Before she could answer, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her head down for a series of very, very passionate kisses.

  All in front of the servants.

  Oh my.

  Epilogue

  “Are you very certain that Mrs. Murray isn’t guilty of something?” Davina asked, looking from Marshall to her aunt.

  Theresa looked amused, as did Marshall. She really should have been irritated at their response, but she was still basking in the relief that Marshall was alive and well.

  Two weeks had passed since the siege of
the Black Castle, and Marshall had been healthy ever since. They’d found a supply of a brownish-looking powder in Jacobs’s room and could only guess that it was the source of Marshall’s dreams and hallucinations.

  As to Mrs. Murray, she hadn’t disappeared entirely. She’d taken a coach to Edinburgh and from there a train to London.

  “Mrs. Murray’s only sin was in accepting a post from one of your wedding guests,” Theresa said. “Without giving proper notice.”

  “I still think we should count the silver,” Davina said, unconvinced.

  “However, if she hadn’t sent word to Garrow,” Theresa said, “there’s every possibility that Jacobs might have succeeded in poisoning Marshall. As it was, taking him away from Ambrose truly saved Marshall’s life.”

  Davina considered that for a moment. As much as she wanted to refute Theresa’s words, there was something in what she said.

  “Very well, she did something correct, but only accidentally.”

  Marshall reached out and squeezed her hand. They were seated in Theresa’s home, the parlor warm against the stormy day. She and Marshall sat on the sofa together, with Theresa opposite them.

  Her aunt looked tired, but then she’d just recently returned from London.

  Davina didn’t know quite what to say to the news she’d brought. Garrow obviously needed to be punished for the hideousness of his deeds, but he was still Marshall’s uncle.

  She glanced at him. In the last two weeks they’d truly become wed. She slept in his room every night, the mattresses having been taken from the walls. She’d learned that Marshall had a deliciously wicked sense of humor, an appreciation for the most aromatic of cheeses, and an intellectual curiosity that she could only admire.

  Marshall had arranged for Jacobs’s body to be returned to Ambrose, and the man was buried in the small churchyard in the neighboring village. They had attended the short service, and when it was done, Marshall had spoken with the cleric and paid for a grave marker to be erected.

  Not once had he commented on Jacobs’s actions. It was not until she had broached the subject that he spoke of his valet.