Just in Time for a Highlander (21 page)

Archie was not nearly as dashing as Duncan had imagined. His drawn face was gray and rubbery, and his mouth slack enough to show a mouthful of brown and missing teeth. He had died of pneumonia or something like it—Rosston referred to it as “the cough”—though one of Rosston’s men had thoughtfully put a pistol ball through the man’s heart and poured a jug of pig’s blood over the clothes they’d dressed him in so it looked like he’d been crossed by a brigand on the road.

Duncan had already stuffed Archie’s pockets and sporran with the bits of humanity he and Jock had gathered. Abby clutched the message about the attack and was debating with Rosston where on the body the paper should be hidden. That job was too important to be entrusted to Duncan, apparently, even though the plan had been his. Abby had not said a single word to him since his shameful remark. He felt about as worthy of her notice as Archie. Archie at least was beyond the reach of regret.

Rosston appeared beside him holding the plans. At Duncan’s instruction, the note had been written on silk. “Silk is silent,” he’d explained, “and when it is hidden in clothing, it canna be heard the way parchment can.” It was another lesson he’d learned from World War II novels.

Rosston held the note delicately between his thumb and forefinger, as if it were a lady’s lace handkerchief, which gave him the look of a thuggish Cyrano. He waited expectantly. Duncan sighed and stepped aside, giving him access to the body. Rosston lifted one of Archie’s unbooted feet and, with the precision of a surgeon, ran his hand carefully over the sock, stopping suddenly, triumphant.

“There’s a secret pocket that runs the circumference of the sock,” he said to Duncan. “If ye fold a piece of paper or banknote carefully when ye put it in, ye canna see anything. You’re not the only one with ways to trick the enemy, ye ken.”

Duncan resisted the urge to blacken Rosston’s other eye and said with only slightly forced enthusiasm, “Well done.”

The silk disappeared inside.

Rosston said, “I understand you will say you were hunting deer if you’re found.”

Duncan nodded. “It’s the least I can do after getting her with child, don’t you think?”

Rosston’s dark eyes briefly registered the blow. “’Tis all the more remarkable, then, since she’s the only one capable of using a bow.”

“Well, it is a woman’s sport, after all. Speaking of that, I hear you’re quite the archer as well. Tell me, have you had a chance to shoot much lately?”

“Fouck you.”

“We ought to wad up the silk,” Duncan called to Abby, who had been adjusting the laces on her boot. “To make the hiding place more noticeable. I have my doubts about the general canniness of English soldiers.”

She didn’t register even the hint of a smile.

“I’m afraid your naïveté is showing,” Rosston said. “There’s not a man in the army who doesn’t pick through every scrap on a dead man. They practically use a sieve. If he had a shard of copper under his fingernail, they’d find it and sell it.”

The sound of someone singing in the distance ended the discussion.

“Rosston, take the body and get as far into the trees as you can,” Abby said.

Duncan took a place behind a thick pine. Abby did the same. The singing drew nearer.

“Pastime with good company. I love and shall until I die…”

The man was definitely a soldier. The red coat was quite apparent, as were his pistol, sword, and musket. He was possessed of an exquisite tenor voice. The notes, pure and whole, filled the afternoon air.

“Grudge who lust but none deny…”

Abby met Duncan’s eyes, but not long enough for him to communicate his regret. He wished he could beg her forgiveness. This might be the last time they were together for a very long time. But the soldier was nearly upon them.

“So God be pleased thus live will I…”

Up the slight rise of the clearing he went, scanning the edge of the woods as he walked.

The singing stopped, mid-line.

Electricity surged through Duncan’s body. Abby withdrew an arrow and held it, nocked, at her side. From his vantage point Duncan could see the soldier look both ways then head into the woods a stone’s throw beyond them. Had he heard a noise? Then, through the branches, Duncan saw the man loosen the tie on his breeks.

“He’s taking a piss,” Duncan whispered.

Abby nodded, still on high alert.

The woods were too thick to see him once he left the clearing. Duncan padded quietly from tree to tree, hoping for a glimpse.

“What do you see?” Abby whispered.

“Not a goddamned thing.”

“I’m going closer.”

“No.”

“I am hunting a deer, Duncan. ’Twill be all right.” She pelted east, hoping, he supposed, to maintain a safe radius from the soldier, who had been traveling northeast.

He wanted to throttle her. What had happened to the plan of staying together? He listened and looked, but without the knowledge that Abby was safe, he was too distracted to think.

The
hell
with
standing.
He’d rather die on the offense than the defense.

He ran in the direction she’d taken, listening for her footsteps, but she’d disappeared, like a doe in a thicket. The woods of Scotland were, after all, her element.

A shot rang out, and he burst into a dead run. Over fallen limbs, under drooping branches, he raked the tree-filled space around him for signs of movement. He dared not yell, for fear he’d bring the soldier
to
them, not away. For all he knew, the man was shooting a grouse for his dinner. He had to find Abby. He had to know if she was— He heard grunts and the hard thump of a body and headed straight for it.

The soldier had the barrel of his musket against Rosston’s neck, pressing Rosston as hard as he could against a tree. Rosston had his hands on the barrel, pushing it away. His shirt was bathed in blood, and his eyes were practically bulging out of his head. Something flashed in a ray of sunlight. Duncan realized it was the blade of the soldier’s bayonet lodged somewhere near Rosston’s heart.

Where’s Abby? Was she the one who’d been shot?

The horse and Archie were nowhere to be seen. Somewhere, Abby screamed. The soldier bellowed, “Enemy! Help!” Duncan’s heart fired in his chest like a line of cannons. He had a short sword and no more. In a few seconds, Rosston’s throat would be crushed. But he might be bleeding to death anyway.

Should he try to save the man? Or should he let him die?

Duncan drew his sword and charged. At the same instant, the soldier released his grip, and Rosston crumpled slowly to the ground. The soldier pulled the bayonet point out of Rosston, who let out a horrifying wheeze. The soldier turned, saw Duncan. He fumbled, trying to slip the bayonet back on the end of the musket. Duncan was ten strides away. He lifted the sword. The bayonet clicked into place. The soldier grabbed the barrel to raise it, but it was too late. Duncan closed his eyes and swung.

He connected with meat and bone, and his eyes flew open. The man’s arm was half cut off at the shoulder, and blood was spraying everywhere. He would die from that wound. Duncan had killed a living man. The man took a step, and another, then dropped his musket.

“Fuck you,” he growled, clutching the source of the spurting crimson. He screamed, “Clansmen!” Rosston made a faint, high-pitched moan.

“Clansmen!”

Die! Die!
But the man kept screaming. Duncan’s sword was covered in blood and gleaming bits of bone and tissue. He shook so hard, he couldn’t focus. He held the point of the sword over the man’s neck and drove it into the ground beneath him. For an instant, the man’s mouth opened wide, as if one more scream would come out, then the light disappeared from his eyes.

“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.”

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.”

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?”