Just in Time for a Highlander (20 page)

“I’d like to talk to my father alone,” Abby said.

Molly, who had been smoothing his quilt, made a quick curtsy of acknowledgment. Abby’s opinion of the girl’s talents had not eroded since her hiring a few months ago, but her sense of the girl’s trustworthiness had. Though Abby could point to no missing flatware, no beau skulking in the woods beyond the castle walls, no sniggered impertinence, the sense was undeniable, and she had to force herself to return the girl’s smile.

Lachlan had had a particularly bad morning, howling about Moira and thrashing in his bedclothes until one would have thought the castle was being burned to the ground and his bed used as tinder. Her burliest footmen had tied him into place, and he had finally exhausted himself into the sweaty, vibrating quiet she found him in now.

“I want your blessing, Da.”

His eye, the one good one, searched her face. Did he see her? Did he understand what she was saying?

“I know you don’t think I listen to you enough,” she said. “But you always said a good chief must make decisions, and if the decisions are right, so much the better. Well, I have a made a couple of decisions. The first involves the clan. We canna go on the way we have been. The money is…well, it started going bad with the canal and hasn’t gotten any better since. And now the English want to have their way with us. We’ve concocted a plan that will put them off for long enough to secure a loan for the canal if it works. But the plan is risky. If we’re caught, the army will unleash itself upon us and the rest of the borderland clans. We will be held up to every clansman as an example of what happens to those who defy their English keepers. I will lose the support of my fellow chiefs, and the era of Kerr influence will be at an end.”

She tucked the thin brown cloak more tightly around her. “The plan is a good one, though. You’ve met the man who thought of it. MacHarg is his name. He is…” She gazed at the base of the nearest bedpost. “Well, he is not the man I first thought him to be. He may not be skilled in the way we think of it, but he is loyal and true—and sometimes foolish, that is certain—but he fights with the heart of a true Kerr.”

Her father jerked at his bindings hard enough to thump the bed forward.

“I’m no fool, Da. I had you for a father and Moira for a mother, after all. And I am beginning to trust the decisions I make. They may not be the decisions you’d make, but they work in the world in which I exist now. I’ve built a strong ally in Rosston. He is not the man I thought him to be either. We know the plan we are attempting is risky, and we have agreed that if one of us doesn’t make it, the other will take the leadership of both families. We have left letters stating as much, and, for my own part, I am prepared to do what it takes to make his men obey me if it comes to that.”

The tension in Lachlan’s shoulders seemed to relax but nothing emerged from his questing lips.

“As for the other decision, Da, it seems I am to be married. Soon, I think, though I dinna know to which groom. A wee bit strange, isn’t it, for a bride to stand so close to the altar she can smell the candles burning and still not know the name of her husband?”

She allowed herself to think of that long walk up the aisle, and how different she would feel in one case versus the other.

“I know my heart,” she continued, “and I know my responsibility. In this instance, they are not the same. Oh, I know if ye could, ye would tell me nothing is more important than my responsibility.” Her throat caught, and she pushed away the stinging in her eyes. “But I tell ye this,” she said, voice rising. “Ye loved my ma more than I’ve ever seen a man love a woman. So dinna tell me I have to give that up. ’Tis not fair.”

His face betrayed nothing. She didn’t know if he even heard her.
Och!
Why did she even bother? Every discussion with him made her feel like she was arguing with herself.

“I will make this decision when I have to, and for once it will be without reference to anyone’s desires but my own. If you can keep your own counsel, so can I.”

Then suddenly, it was the old Lachlan, dark eyes burning like peat fire, and he growled, “Then why are ye here?”

The tower had two windows. One looked fifty miles east along the border, across the lands of the Armstrongs, Elliotts, and Nixons, the clans who had joined with the Kerrs in repelling the English for nearly half a millennium. The other looked south, to England and the army whose breath she felt on her neck every moment of every day. She turned from one to the other, wondering where her fate lay.

“I’m prepared to make these decisions alone,” she said. “’Tis the first time I’ve been able to say that and mean it. But I love ye, Da. I have never known a better chief. Will ye not tell me that I have earned the right to lead this clan?”

He made a noise—disgust? agreement? imminent belch?—and closed his eyes. She waited. When he did not speak, she gave up and was nearly to the door when he said, “Come back.”

Abby found a place on the bedside stool. “What is it?”

He extended his bony hand, the hand that had once seemed so strong and large to her, and clasped her arm.

“Ye have my support,” he said, voice thick. “Ye always have. Whatever ye do, I’ll be standing at your side and so will the ghosts of every Kerr chief before ye.”

She had longed for the words since the day she took her oath, and air filled her lungs as if a crushing weight had been lifted from her chest. “Oh, Da.”

He leaned forward, and she met him halfway, her cheek against his forehead. She basked in his reassuring warmth.

“Now promise me whatever happens ye’ll take care of your ma and your sister,” he said. “You’re a braw lad, Bran. You’ll make a bonny chief.”

Duncan barely recognized the slim figure in the hooded cloak and white bonnet, standing alone among the trees. The Abby of his experience commanded attention in every situation—on horseback in battle, marching purposefully with her bow, certainly naked at Candle Pool. It wasn’t her beauty or captivating eyes or the way her breasts sat round and high that drew the eye, though all of those had left indelible marks in Duncan’s mind. But when she wore the mantle of her office, it was as if her gender melted away, leaving only the power, the determination, and the spirit.

But this Abby was foreign to him. It was as if someone had drained the sunshine out of one of Van Gogh’s fields, or the pink out of Cézanne’s peaches. Her natural luminescence had dimmed almost to the point of darkness. He hurried to her side.

“Abby, is everything all right?”

“Lady Kerr, if you please. Or Chieftess. You’re late. Where is Jock?”

“He wanted to finalize something before we set out. He said he’d be only a moment or two behind me.”

“A moment or two we don’t have. Do ye have the items for the man’s pockets?”

“Aye.”

“I have the orders. We are to travel two miles to the south, to where lightning felled two of the tallest oaks, then another mile to the southwest. That’s where Rosston and our body will be. That puts us in the heart of the Debatable Lands, and no more than a mile or two from the border.” She looked at the pistol tucked in his belt. “Ye ken ye cannot take that. You and I are on a leisurely hunt for deer,” she said, tapping her bow. “One does not shoot deer with a pistol.”

In the Scotland of Duncan’s day, one did not have the right to shoot deer on someone else’s property whether they used a bow or not. “Are we on Kerr land?” he asked cautiously.

“No. It seems we are not very well versed in the rules of hunting.”

Duncan knew what Scotsmen did to the men who stole their livestock. He did not care to discover if English soldiers on the Debatable Lands felt the same sense of proprietariness. “Oh.”

“All the more reason to stay as minimally armed as possible. If we are found, ’twould be nice to have the hunting story hold a ring of truth.”

“But, wait. They are hardly likely to believe the chief of Clan Kerr is unfamiliar with the local laws regarding hunting.”

She laughed, and while he never liked being laughed at, he was glad to see the lines around her eyes relax.

“While most of the soldiers in the regiment have glimpsed Lady Kerr once or twice—and have no doubt described her in vivid detail to their drinking companions, you overestimate an English soldier’s ability to overcome his lack of interest in a sickly, plump married woman.” She opened her cape and turned.

Duncan blinked. She had the baby bump of a last trimester mother-to-be. All in all, he thought he’d rather have the soldiers believe they were stealing deer. Between being engulfed by a large and fairly ridiculous sense of protectiveness and feeling that a pregnant woman offered an English soldier twice the potential for mischief, Duncan’s anxiety tripled.

“I…don’t…think…”

But his thoughts remained half-spoken when a musket shot blasted through the quiet of the afternoon.

“Run,” she said.

They headed deeper into the trees, hurtling over bushes and deadfall.

“Put down the pistol,” she cried. “Hunters dinna use them.”

“And pregnant women dinna long jump over fallen trees.”

The shot had been far enough to their rear that Duncan couldn’t be sure if the person firing had been aiming at them or shooting a turkey, a deer, or some other animal.

But if they were already in someone’s sights, he had no desire to see he and Abby separated from a key source of protection.

After a hazard-filled four-hundred-meter sprint, Abby signaled for them to stop.

Bent over, gasping for air, Duncan said, “I dinna hear anything.”

“No. If the shot was meant for me, I wonder how someone would know we were heading out now.”

“The shot may have been meant for me,” he said, bracing himself for the chortle.

But she didn’t laugh. He glanced up. Did she know something she wasn’t saying? “Someone shot an arrow at me this morning,” he said. “In the bailey. It wasn’t by any chance you, was it?”

“If I wanted to kill you, Duncan, I should hardly do it in public.”

He looked at the thick woods surrounding them and the hairs on his arm stood on end.

This time, she laughed. “Is that why you’re clinging to that pistol like a drowning man with a line?”

“Aye…well…maybe you’re not the only thing I need to protect myself from.”

“Apparently not. Well, it’s not clear either of us were targeted. What we heard could have just been a stray shot.”

She cocked her head, and he knew she, like he, was trying to sort through the rustle of leaves for the sound of footfall.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“Without Jock?”

“At this point, aye. We need to get to Rosston.”

Duncan nodded. If Abby wasn’t the person who’d shot at him, it moved another suspect to the top of his list: Abby’s would-be fiancé.

An hour later, they were reaching a place where the pines began to give way to scrub. Abby had been unnaturally silent, failing to laugh after she drew a small wedge of cheese from her pocket and he reminded her she was eating for two. He swore she walked differently with the cushion under her chemise, and it had taken all his willpower not to leap to her aid every time they climbed a ledge or forded a stream.

She stopped behind the last small copse of trees. “This is it,” she said, “where we are to meet Rosston.”

“Then this is the Debatable Lands?” Duncan found it hard to imagine this nondescript barren slope represented anything of value.

“Not here. Do ye see the raised wall there, past that outcropping?”

The “wall” was no more than a small hillock of earth a few feet high and barely discernible, covered like everything else here with patches of rock and grass. “Aye.”

“That’s where it begins. The moment we step into the open, we will be on disputed land. I must insist you lay down your pistol.”

With a distinct sense of regret, Duncan put the pistol at the base of one of the trees and covered it with needles. “I do wish,” he said as he stood, “we did not have to be quite so—” He froze. The rocky ledge above them to their west was intimately familiar to him. It was visible from his grand-da’s kitchen window, accessible via the park that was adjacent to his land. Duncan’s mouth moved wordlessly. He had played on this ledge hundreds of times in his childhood. They were standing more or less in the center of what would be, in three hundred years’ time, his grand-da’s garden. He felt slightly dizzy, as if the world had shifted under his feet, and the immediacy yet immense distance of the world he’d left behind took his breath away.

“Duncan, what is it?”

“This is my grand-da’s land. We’re standing on my grand-da’s land.”

“Your grand-da is Angus Eliot?”

He slumped against the tree trunk and sat, head in hands. “No.”

“But—” She stopped, and realization washed over her face. “Oh.”

She crouched down beside him, a trick with her rugby ball–sized belly, and touched his arm. “Duncan, we’ve never talked about this, mostly, I think because I’ve been afraid to ask, but—”

“I come from the twenty-first century. More than three hundred years from now.”

The crouch devolved to a hard plop on the ground. She made a quiet whistle. “I thought, well, I thought a few years, perhaps a decade. I had no idea… I dinna think you should tell anyone.”

“Undine knows.”

“What has she done? What have
I
done?”

“I suspect we all have a hand in it, somehow. In any case, I should never wish for it not to have happened. Not now.”

But rather than the smile he’d hoped for, her face took on a pained look. “I need to talk to you about Rosston.”

A vise gripped his heart. “What?”

“For better or worse, I am quite in love with you, Duncan. But my responsibilities—”

“I told you I’d help you.”

She took his hand and squeezed. “I should like nothing more. But I must pay the estate taxes this week. ’Tis possible that with the canal loan from Sir Alan, I can negotiate a delay. You told me you need more time to figure out how to get back, and if you and Undine believe that that could happen soon, I would wait. Will it work? Oh, Duncan, I dinna like to put so much on ye, but will ye be able to help us?”

He hated to douse the hope in those eyes. He hated that he was powerless here, that neither his brains, nor his wealth, nor his determination brought him any closer to being able to help her. He was quite confident that with time and access, he could convince Sir Alan to make the loan. But was it fair to let her believe he might be able to help her with a gift of money when in fact the only help he could offer was by convincing Sir Alan to make a loan, an outcome he could not guarantee?

“Duncan?”

He gazed at the delicate bones of her hand. “I canna give you money. I talked to Undine. Nothing of concentrated wealth can travel through time.”

Her eyes turned a forlorn blue. “Oh.”

“But I can convince Sir Alan,” he said hurriedly. “I
promise
you. It’s what I do.”

“Duncan, you know I canna risk the fate of my clan. If it were just me—”

“Only till Friday,” he said urgently. “Believe in me. Please.”

“You know there’s another way, and you and I have to accept that if—”

“No! Dinna talk to me of Rosston and his gold. Will ye sell yourself for money?”

She looked at him as if he’d slapped her, and in his heart he knew slapping would have wounded her less.

“Yes,” she said, eyes glistening, “I will. And you know it, ye two-faced rogue. Ye were happy enough to buy me when it was your turn. And I will sell myself again if I have to. Whatever it takes to save Clan Kerr.”

“Every man between here and the gates of York?” The words were out of his mouth before he knew what he was saying.

The sting of her slap was not punishment enough. He wished she’d kill him.

“I’m here,” a voice said. “I’m sorry.”

Rosston. Standing twenty feet away, holding his horse’s lead, and looking as if he, too, wished he were dead.

Rosston was wise. He stayed where he was, held his tongue, made no move to punish Duncan for his unpardonable transgression. Why should he? Abby wouldn’t have liked it, and in any case, Duncan had administered his own coup de grâce, saving Rosston the trouble of getting his hands dirty.

“I should go,” Duncan said.

“Not till we’re done,” Abby said, as cool as steel. “We’ll need three sets of hands for the body.”

“I can do his part,” Rosston said wryly, and blind with self-loathing, Duncan flew at him.

This time Rosston was better prepared. He twisted away at the last second and Duncan landed hard on a stretch of sunbaked earth.

No one said anything. Abby didn’t even reach for an arrow. She turned, gestured to Rosston, and walked swiftly to the horse.

Rosston looked at Duncan, shook his head, and followed his fellow chief.

You
idiot.

He was the most unworthy man in five hundred miles. But he wasn’t a coward and he wasn’t a quitter. He climbed to his feet, dusted off his plaid, and began toward the two people having a quiet discussion over a dead body.