Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  “Someday!” she cried into the wind, and the tears that came were of conviction rather than sadness. “Someday Coldstream shall be mine again!”

  Lord Seamus seemed almost fully recovered by the end of March, and he was in good spirits as he and Selena shared a bowl of good stew prepared with an accommodating young rabbit Brian had shot in the hills. Most of the snow was gone now and the rabbit, slower than the season, had shown itself white and vulnerable against the brown rocks. Brian had been two days gone to Durness; they expected him to return with the horses in the morning.

  “How long will it take to reach Liverpool from here?” she wanted to know.

  He soaked a crust of bread in the rich gravy of the stew, and considered the distance. “Fifteen to twenty days of hard travel. We cannot afford to arrive later than the twentieth. Our ship…” he never spoke Royce Campbell’s name or that of his ship “…will depart no later than the twenty-fifth. The crossing itself may take as long as two months.”

  He saw her thinking of the long journey, smiled, and reassured her. “Don’t worry. You’re young. You’ll survive.”

  “Have we enough money?”

  “If we’re not robbed. And if Brian is able to get good horses to trade along the way. We can sell the last mounts in Liverpool, and buy our way onto the docks. Once aboard the…the ship, there’ll be none to touch us.”

  But the thought of such safety, purchased from a man like Campbell, caused him to fall silent. They ate the rest of the supper, not speaking, as darkness fell outside. Yet it was not so cold tonight; winter was gone, and it almost seemed as if hope itself had been reborn, too, perennial as the grass. As Selena was cleaning up the dishes and Lord Seamus was preparing to retire, it seemed to her that he, too, began to feel the change. Nothing had happened to explain it, but the dour, resigned, almost bitter mood of the past months fell away. He was tender and gay, hopeful, already far away from this place. It started with something rueful that he had to get off his mind.

  “Selena, I’m sorry about Sean Bloodwell. Both for him and for you. But there will be other men for you. I meant no ill in it, neither to destroy him, nor to make you unhappy. Never.”

  She looked toward him, wondering. He was sitting there against the wall, wrapped in his blankets. His face was extraordinarily benign. His eyes were shining oddly, and they began to glow fondly as he recalled things from the past.

  “Do you remember the time we were at Foinaven, when your mother refused to eat the grouse I shot, because of the grapeshot in them?”

  “Do you remember the time Brian went out on the North Sea in his new sailboat, and I had to go out and rescue him?”

  “I remember how you looked on your first communion day, in your white dress, with the lilies. I thought you were so beautiful that day.”

  “…and we were so proud of you, when you brought Grandma home that fall…”

  He spoke gently, reminiscing, not even looking at her. His eyes were burning now, as if they looked far away, upon a lost horizon. Even though she was standing with her back to the fire, a strange chill prickled her spine, a foreshadowing of something indefinite and inexplicable that was somehow with them in the hut. Then she listened as he remembered the past.

  “Do you know, Selena, that I remember my own great grandfather? Seamus. I was named for him. I remember, as a boy, he used to take me down to the castle wall, holding my hand, and show me the vaults in which our ancestors were buried. ‘Here’s mine,’ he’d say, laughing, pointing at a big empty one, ‘and I’d hate to be the man who tries to shove me in it.’ Lord, how I must have loved him, but I didn’t know it then…”

  “Father!” she cried, alarmed.

  He looked up, startled.

  “You frightened me,” she explained.

  He looked genuinely confused. “I was just sitting here and thinking about the future,” he said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  Thinking? About the future?

  “You’d best lie down now. We’ll all of us need our strength.”

  He complied, but there was one more question, for which he apologized even before he asked it.

  “Selena. That time on the…the ship. Did you feel it necessary to offer…to offer payment of your own?”

  He did not look at her.

  “No,” she answered. Truthfully. No payment had been involved. The transaction had been of an entirely different nature.

  He seized her arm with an urgency so unsettling that it made her afraid. “Good, Selena. Good. You have never brought me anything but pride. It is I who’ve failed the rest of you.”

  He seemed to be fighting back sobs. She pretended not to notice, pulling the blankets close around him, telling him good night. Then he subsided, and soon passed over into sleep. She sat before the fire, still content with her thoughts of the future, but feeling, now, vaguely disconsolate, too. She wished Brian were here. Father started muttering in his sleep not too long afterward, just before she was ready to go to bed herself, and she crept close to see if he was all right. He seemed to be—his breathing was steady and light—but the words, as clearly as she could understand them, chilled her with their anonymous, disembodied portent, as if Time itself were speaking through the dream-tossed visions of his sleeping brain. “Ian MacPherson,” he was saying, tongue thick with sleep, “sixteen fifteen, sixteen eighty-four. Seamus MacPherson, sixteen forty-four, seventeen thirty-three. Randall MacPherson, sixteen seventy, seventeen thirty-one. Gloucester MacPherson, seventeen two, seventeen sixty-four. Seamus MacPherson,” he was saying, and, too late, she pushed her hands against unwilling ears to shut the nightmare out, “Seamus MacPherson, seventeen twenty-three, seventeen seventy-five…”

  That was himself.

  Outside, the dark sky crouched, studded with stars, a vault of eternity, waiting. The lone stone hut was monument enough. Selena wanted to scream, fought off the impulse. Father’s lips were moving still, but she held her ears between her hands and did not hear him, and she closed her eyes and took herself away.

  There was a movement of air in the hut. Stars, for an instant, parted in a hush. The fire in the hearth rose, flaming, and in another instant subsided, burning on. She opened her eyes again. Father was sleeping quietly. She took her hands away.

  “Hello, Selena,” said the voice behind her.

  She whirled to face the man who etched the dates on countless tombstones with the chisel of his life.

  It was Darius McGrover.

  He had entered stealthily and closed the door behind him, and he stood now, implacable and predatory, bent slightly forward, almost as if bowing. His look, as he regarded the horrified Selena, was that of a man who has, against considerable odds, finally reached his destination. He wore high black riding boots, a short riding cape, a dark suit that looked wine-colored—or blood-colored—in the firelight, and a tricornered hat, once fashionable, now battered out of shape by wind and weather. At his belt hung two pistols, a dagger in a leather sheath, and a riding whip. In one hand he held a short curved sword, like a scimitar but not as broad, and in the other a burlap bag. Something was inside the bag, which trailed on the floor, but Selena did not have a chance to study it.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this, very dearly,” McGrover said quietly. He tightened his mouth into a thin line, the parody of a smile. “Aren’t you going to greet me?”

  He made one step forward, just one step, but it seemed that his hawklike face suddenly intruded upon her very soul, filled her entire field of vision. She opened her mouth to scream.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he said softly. “In the first place, I don’t think the villagers would cozen to a traitor. In the second, I’ll kill you if you scream.”

  Her brain worked slowly, buried in a sludge of fear. Did he mean he was not going to kill her? Was it Lord Seamus he wanted?

  She backed away from him, but saw that there was no chance to reach the door. He looked around the hut, and saw Lord Seamus sleeping among his blankets down
on one side of the fireplace.

  “So, the rebel leader at rest, eh?” His laugh was cold and mirthless. “We shan’t wake him, shall we? And…” he gestured indolently with a slow twist of his hand “…and your choice of lodgings leaves much to be desired. ’Tis hardly Coldstream, now, is it?”

  “What do you want?” she managed.

  “A number of things,” he said. “But I’m in no rush. Where is your peasant-murdering scum of a brother?”

  His eyes were on hers, galvanic, riveting. Selena realized that the interrogation had begun, wondered how many hapless people before herself had sensed that tone and silently called on God for help that never came. Darius McGrover, agent of the Crown, believed in his heart that he could do no wrong, that all his enemies were evil, that his mission alone was divine. He was efficient, and calm, and utterly ruthless. No sign of human weakness, or error, or confusion moved his heart to pity, and nothing could mitigate a violation of what he believed to be right, loyalty, duty. He was as beyond remorse as he was beyond pity. When those slitted eyes opened slightly, and when a slow, baleful light glowed therein, it was a sign that he knew all he needed to know, and his suffering victim could at last know peace. The peace was always death.

  “I said, where is your brother?” he asked again, taking one more step toward her.

  Selena did not know what to say. She swallowed, trying to think, and said nothing.

  “And where is Will Teviot?” McGrover wanted to know, his voice slightly colder now, but still soft. He glanced again at Selena’s father, to determine that he was still asleep.

  “Well,” he said, again with that tight, horizontal grimace, “I had heard that you noble Scottish lasses were eager conversationalists. I had hoped so. You will understand my disappointment…”

  He spoke slowly, even politely, and Selena began to relax just a bit, began again to measure the distance to the door. So she was off guard, which had been McGrover’s intent, and unprepared for his sudden, slippery lunge at her. Dropping the burlap sack, he leaped forward in one smooth, liquid motion, grabbed her around the waist, twisted her aside, and came up behind her, holding the edge of the cold blade against her throat.

  “I prefer close conversations,” he said. “Where is your brother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now, now.” The blade bit into her skin, just a touch. She felt the stinging, keen heat of the first cut. Motionless, her insides roiling, she remembered what Father had said in the coach on the way to Edinburgh, It’s best that she have something to confess.

  “Brian went to Durness,” she gasped, trying to bend her head back from the blade. She felt McGrover relax a little.

  “That’s right,” he said soothingly. “When do you expect him to return?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow morning, I think.”

  “Tomorrow morning. Isn’t that nice? And what about Teviot, the bearded bastard who killed so many of my good men in Cargill?”

  “He…he left.”

  “With your brother?”

  “No. He just…left. He was going to try and leave Scotland.”

  McGrover paused for a moment, putting the pieces together.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, “but no matter now. We will have a long night to converse about one thing or another. Now…”

  And with a brutal shove, he slammed her against the stone wall. Her skull struck it a glancing blow, and her head rang, spinning. Before she knew what was happening, he was upon her, pulling her arms together and twisting a thin cord wickedly into the flesh of her wrists. This done, he quickly tied her ankles together as well, and stood over her, surveying his handiwork. Then, showing teeth, he tied the ends of the cords at her wrists and ankles to one of the stools, so that her arms and legs were bent behind her. Now she could not move, or even roll around on the dirt floor.

  “Father,” she moaned, her head clearing. It was a mistake not to have screamed before. Together, the two of them might have had at least a chance.

  “Too late for that,” McGrover said. Her father stirred at her call, and McGrover stepped over and nudged the man with his foot, drawing a pistol as he did so, and training it on Lord Seamus’s head.

  “Don’t move, ye traitorous bastard,” he hissed. “’Tis I, and in the name of George the Third, by the grace of God King of England, I come to settle accounts with ye.”

  Lord Seamus braced himself on one elbow and saw what had happened.

  “I’m sorry,” Selena said, beginning to cry.

  “Don’t, Selena,” her father said.

  “Don’t, Selena,” McGrover mocked. “Sit up. There, that’s it. Now put your hands on your head.”

  Slowly, he did so. He was not afraid, as if he already knew what must happen now. “May I ask you one favor as a gentleman?”

  “You’re no gentleman,” McGrover said, watching the other man’s movements.

  “Take that as given, then. I am asking a favor of you, as the gentleman involved.”

  “What is not asked cannot be granted. So ask.”

  “There is no need to harm my daughter.”

  McGrover laughed.

  “Only a savage would injure a child.”

  “She’s no child. She’s a woman, and a fine, ripe one at that. But man, woman, child—I care not. To me there’s but those who are loyal and those who are not. And you two are not.”

  “Then you will not promise that you won’t harm her?”

  “You are a perceptive man,” McGrover said sarcastically.

  “God help us,” Lord Seamus prayed.

  “He won’t either,” said McGrover. “I’ve heard that plea often enough in my years with the Secret Offices. All you bloody traitors plot to overthrow your King, turn against your country like the heinous jackals that ye be, and when your just deserts are visited upon ye, aye, then ye’ll be a-screamin’ an’ a-pleadin’ to God, who listens less than McGrover. Ah!” he cried in disgust, and kicked Lord Seamus hard in the stomach. He doubled up, gasping in pain. Selena cried out.

  “Shut up, wench, or you’ll get it, too.”

  While Lord Seamus was helpless and out of breath, McGrover bound his hands behind his back and tied his hands to his ankles in such a manner that all he could do was kneel.

  “I had to come through the Highlands alone,” McGrover explained, relaxing now. He left for a moment and came back in with a saddlebag, from which he took a bottle of whiskey. The cork made a wet, popping sound as he jerked it out with his teeth, lifted the bottle first to her, then to her father, and drank. “Aye. I thought ye were well guarded by the last of the Rob Roys, but they had no staying power, did they, when the cause was lost?”

  He laughed, drank again, and set the bottle down. Lord Seamus, on his knees, watched him as a man watches a poisonous snake. Selena was almost too terrified to breathe. All she could do was try to control her fear of McGrover.

  “Would you like to see the last of your faithful men?” he asked insinuatingly.

  But McGrover laughed when they looked toward the door.

  “Ah, no,” he said. “I didna mean that. I meant that, in your final moments…” He let the words linger in the room. “…that in your final moments you might wish to gaze upon the rapt, loyal faces of your lieutenants.”

  And he bent to the burlap bag.

  Oh, God, no. Not Will Teviot, please, Selena said to herself, and luck was with her, at least in that particular. McGrover did not pull Will Teviot’s head from the bloody sack, but rather the severed heads of three other men, rough men, whom it would, not have been easy work to subdue. Their faces were frozen in the peculiar, twisted rictus of agony that is the companion of a terrible death, and their wide-open eyes were set on far horizons of despair. McGrover laughed, and set them in a neat row on the floor, about five feet in front of Lord Seamus.

  “It is the law that every execution must have witnesses,” he explained, “but nowhere does it say anything about the witnesses being alive.”

&
nbsp; Lord Seamus met his eyes at the word execution, but showed no emotion. Perhaps, earlier that evening, he had been given some kind of an insight, some private vision that even he did not fully understand. Now, in acceptance of his own death, he raised his head.

  “By whose authority?” he asked.

  “By the wish of my King,” McGrover answered ringingly.

  “You have authorization?”

  “In my heart,” McGrover said.

  “That will not suffice,” Lord Seamus argued calmly, with quiet assurance in the face of disaster. “There must be a document. It is the law of the Scottish Parliament.”

  “I serve the English King. I take no orders from what you call your Parliament. Moreover, the rights of traitors are self-abridged when they embark upon the course of treason.”

  “I have committed no crime,” Lord Seamus went on. “Unless free speech be a crime…”

  “Silence! Enough!” McGrover shouted, and his words bounced off the stone walls of the hut and reverberated around them. Outside, his startled horse whinnied and stamped.

  “I cannot take but one o’ ye back wi’ me,” he said, mocking the Scottish tongue, “an’ I wouldna risk ye’re gettin’ away, yer lordship, or rather yer ex-lordship, so by powers invested in me, we’ll have the execution now.”

  “No!” Selena cried, and burst into tears.

  Her father’s voice was almost harsh. “Selena, stop. Remember, as I told you once before. Think of the good things. There were many of them. If you live, through some stroke of fortune or the grace of God, take vengeance for this act which is about to occur. If not, it is as things must be, and we must accept that. And at least we are together at the end.”

  “A mystic,” spat McGrover, taking a long, thin cord from his saddlebag. Selena suppressed her sobs, but went on crying quietly. She could not stop.

  McGrover stepped over to her father. The eyes of the two men were locked upon each other. “The law says hanging,” McGrover pointed out, “but there are no beams here. So this will have to do…”