Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] (6 page)

Each hapless soul, worthy or unworthy, crept, crawled, or limped forward, a motley gathering of cure seekers eager to perform devotions at the saint’s tomb.
All hoping for a miracle.
Or a dole.
An old man hobbling along on one leg blundered past him, a dark swarm of humming flies buzzing about open sores on the unfortunate’s arms and neck. Bile rising in his throat, Iain leapt out of the man’s way only to find himself jostled by filth-encrusted children and a gaggle of witless women. Mumbling disjointed prayers and nonsense, they trailed after a young lass with a withered arm and a face cruelly marred by the pox.
Half-afraid of losing what scant victuals he’d imbibed that morn, he scanned the full-packed closes and wynds opening off the crowded High Street, desperately searching for a swift escape route and finding none.
Lest he wished to scale the well-guarded walls of the nearby canons’ manses and risk a wild dash through their sequestered gardens. Frowning, Iain cast aside the notion as quickly as it had come.
Any such action would only give MacFie a new scandal to report to his brother.
Nay, flight would not prove easy.
Still, a fierce instinct for self-preservation drove him to dig in his heels and keep looking. Sadly, to his great regret, he saw only chaos.
Monks and friars milled about, selflessly lending what aid they could to the lame and the needy, their well-meant efforts repeatedly hindered by scamps and charlatans faking the direst ailments in hopes of an obol.
Some of these latter even writhed on the cobbled pavement, the bubbling foam on their lips smelling more like sharp-scented soap than the froth of the truly diseased.
Iain pressed the back of his hand against his mouth and nostrils. Very soon,
he
would be diseased—sorely afflicted of stark, raving madness—if he didn’t find an immediate way to procure himself out of this stinking sea of calamities and cutthroats.
“Nay, nay, nay. A thousand times nay.” Bracing his legs in a defiant posture, he folded his arms and leveled his most resolute stare—one of firm refusal—at Gavin MacFie. “A score of mean-tempered, whip-wielding fishwives couldn’t persuade me to take another step. And I care not a merry whit what you report to Donall, nor how blessed the good St. Kenti—”
“Your brother laid particular worth on your paying proper homage to St. Kentigern,” Gavin cut him off, his voice infuriatingly smooth. With a show of determination every bit as hard-bitten as Iain’s, he slanted a telling glance at the second young seaman . . . the one guarding the two sumpter beasts and their precious cargo.
The one who, though a mite lack-witted, stood a few inches taller than the good-sized MacFie himself—and packed more muscled might in his wee finger than Iain’s, Donall’s, and Gavin’s irrefutable brawn combined.
“The choice is yours, my friend.” Gavin watched him, his usually sunny face set in solemn lines.
Slowly stretching his arms above his head, he cracked his knuckles . . . and had the poor taste to appear as at ease as if they stood in the middle of the sweetest spring meadow, and not elbow to elbow with the unwashed, unkempt, and diseased. “Go peaceably as befits your station and your purpose here, or . . .” He lifted broad-set shoulders, the simple gesture more eloquent than any further threats.
Spoken or unspoken.
Iain glowered at him, then slid a furious look at the seaman, secretly suspecting MacFie of feeding the mucker sweetmeats or mayhap wide-legged lasses just so the oversized lout would e’er do his bidding.
And do it unquestioningly.
Too vexed to concede—yet—Iain squared
his
wide-set shoulders and drew himself to his full height . . . an imposing tallness all but a scant hairbreadth short of Gavin’s own. “I am your laird’s brother,” he declared, trying to lay authority into the words. “Save Amicia, his closest kin.”
“You are doing penance,” Gavin returned with an all but imperceptible nod at the well-muscled giant.
The young seaman stepped closer.
Heat inching up the back of his neck, Iain ignored the implied threat and narrowed his eyes at his unsmiling companion.
His gaoler.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
Silence answered him.
“You would.”
Gavin cocked an impervious brow. “If you leave me no other choice, aye.”
For a long tension-filled moment, Iain pressed his lips together, frustration, hot and seething, coursing through his veins. “Then lead on,” he ground out at last, with a quick upward glance at the impossibly blue sky. “
If
you can plow a way inside.”
Looking confident enough to forge a path through a wall of granite if need be, Gavin MacFie strode off for the cathedral steps, every pilgrim, pious or otherwise, springing out of his way. Like lemmings fleeing a rat catcher.
Iain stared after him, opening and closing his fists in mute objection before he grudgingly forced himself to follow. “Drones and parasites,” he muttered beneath his breath of the jostling mob. “Ply your wares elsewhere,” he snapped at a greasy-haired bawd who’d loomed up from nowhere to block his path and rub her breasts against his arm. “I’ve no interest.”
Biting back a harsher rebuttal, he jerked free of her clinging hands, readjusted the fall of the woolen pilgrim’s cloak slung loosely about his shoulders . . . and wished the almost-gone knot on his forehead hadn’t chosen that moment to start aching again.
His vexation now complete, he searched for, but caught no glimpse of Gavin MacFie’s shaggy-maned head. Iain frowned. Without doubt, the long-strided varlet was already on his knees before the shrine.
Very likely praying for new and inspiring ways to bedevil one Iain MacLean.
Eager to have done with the whole sordid business, he started forward again, but each step proved a gruel. For his ill ease mounted in alarming degrees the nearer he came to the cathedral’s great arched entrance.
’Twas the most unpleasant of sensations, and one that had naught to do with his splitting head, his wrath at MacFie, or his patent dislike of smelly places.
Something was staring at him again.
And might St. Kentigern and his host of holy cohorts preserve him, for the strange tingles were upon him, too . . . descending with a vengeance to whirl all through him, and igniting a firestorm of most unwelcome bestirrings in his vitals.
The same odd pricklings that had beset him so oft of late. Heated, and not entirely unpleasant . . . just undesired.
And whate’er unleashed them waited for him inside the hallowed depths of Glasgow Cathedral.
That he knew.
The queer tightening in his chest and the fierce pounding of his heart told him so.
For the third time since entering Glasgow Cathedral that same morning, Madeline Drummond tried her best to examine the jumble of exvotos, crutches, and other assorted paraphernalia of the sick and needy adorning the elaborate metal gates enclosing the raised sepulcher of St. Kentigern.
Countless lit tapers threw flickering golden light across richly carved reredos panels and into the shrine itself, but the brightly painted columns supporting the tomb’s vaulted canopy cast inky bands of shadows across the votive-hung gates, making many of the offerings indiscernible.
More frustrating still, and again for the third time, a sharp-eyed sacrist thwarted her attempt to slip out of the slow-moving line of pilgrims and edge nearer to the tomb’s well-guarded enclosure.
“Ho, sisters, keep to the prescribed processional route,” he admonished, just as she and Nella of the Marsh completed yet another tedious round of pilgrimage stations and reapproached the feretory bay behind the high altar.
Particularly harried-looking, the pallid young man trailed after her, shooing her along with his pasty white hands. “Good maid, might I suggest you return in winter—on St. Kentigern’s feast day when we open the shrine—if you are so desirous of a closer look?”
Agitation beginning to heat her cheeks, Madeline resisted the urge to argue with him. The sacrist’s haughty tone made her sorely regret her postulant garb and the limitations it put on her tongue.
Casting her gaze to the stone-flagged floor as a true sister-in-waiting would have done, she swallowed her annoyance and moved on with naught but a humble nod. “Faith, but I weary of this,” she bemoaned to Nella as, a short distance from the tomb, they paused to genuflect before a side altar. “Pinched-face stick of a man!
He
shall be remembered without charity.”
“Shhhh . . .” Nella reached for her hand, squeezed it. “The postulant’s robe will fool no one if they hear you brandishing the peppered end of your tongue. He doesn’t ken your true purpose and only sought to—”
“I don’t care a toad’s behind what his intent was, how many saints’ bones he can produce, and even less when they are to be put on display. I only—” She quickly snapped shut her mouth and assumed a suitably devout expression as a pult of psalm-chanting monks hushed past. “’Tis Silver Leg’s wee trinkets I seek and naught else,” she blurted the instant the cowled brethren slipped from hearing range. “That, and to see my stomach cease churning.”
“Your stomach?
“Nay, the freckles on my nose.”
Nella shot her a reproachful look. Leaning close, she whispered, “I believe I may have glimpsed one of Sir Bernhard’s little silver leg votives the last time we passed the shrine. I—”
“Are you certain?” Madeline almost forgot the discomfort roiling through her belly. “Where was it?”
“Hanging from the gate enclosure on the east side of the shrine, fairly close to the floor. I spotted it just when the sacrist made us move on. I cannot say for a surety, though. It was half-hidden behind the larger cast of a reallooking foot.”
Excitement shot through Madeline, joining the tumult of strange emotions whirling inside her ever since they’d left the last side altar. “Why did you not tell me sooner?”
“Because I did not want to disappoint you, my lady.” Nella’s brow creased as she peered at Madeline. “I wanted to wait until I’d seen it again, and was certain.”
Wrapping her arms around her waist, Madeline dug her fingers into the rough-spun wool of her borrowed cloak. Someone else’s revulsion, anger, and boundless frustration filled her breast to such a degree she could scarce breathe, much less continue upright down the crowded side aisle.
She swallowed hard, fighting to ignore the sensations. “Can you find it again?” she managed, straining to keep her voice steady.
Ever attuned to Madeline’s moods, Nella’s gaze turned sharp, but she nodded.
“Then let us make haste,” Madeline urged her friend, barely able to get out the words, for her own heart had begun to thunder out of control.
Hurrying, she stumbled on an uneven flag in the stone flooring, barely catching herself before the roaring pulse in her ears welled to epic proportions . . . as did the wealth of love swelling the stranger’s heart.
Nay,
his heart
—her shadow man’s—and the sudden recognition nearly brought her to her knees, for his emotions no longer came to her from a great distance.
He was here.
Within the cathedral walls.
And nearing her by the minute.
His heart pounding ever stronger, hers skittering wildly out of beat. Forcing herself to keep placing one foot before the other, she moved onward. Praise be they’d almost reached the shrine again.
It was one thing to wax romantic about a man’s depth of feeling—his capacity to love—and send him light and warmth in her dreams, and something else entirely to stand before him.
To face him.
In especial,
now,
when she’d committed herself to an undertaking the successful outcome of which condemned her to ruin and a life of piety behind cloistered walls.
A rush of heat suddenly pricking the backs of her eyes, she grabbed Nella’s hand. “Come, let us look for the exvoto and be gone from here,” she implored, already pushing forward, dragging her friend through the crowd.
In as much a miracle as those wrought by sacred relics, the little band of hawk-eyed sacrists had all hands full assisting a pilgrim who’d fallen into a state of writhing blessedness on the far side of the feretory.
Seizing the opportunity, Madeline hurried to the spot Nella indicated, dropping to her knees in front of the tomb enclosure before propriety or watchful sacrists could stop her. Near-crazed by the intensity of the emotions spinning in her breast, she thrust her hands into the cluster of offerings hanging from the metal-wrought gates.
And the instant her fingers curled around the little silver-cast leg,
his voice
joined the chaos, filling her head and heart as surely as he would have filled her ears had he truly spoken the words.
A beggary votive thief! A postulant and a cutpurse.
Madeline shot to her feet, the swift movement, or mayhap her shame, shattering his hold on her, the wild racing of her heart now truly hers alone, the panic inside her no one’s but her own.
Forgetting Nella, the sacrists, and the wee silver leg pressing icy-cold against her dampening palm, she hitched up her skirts with her free hand and searched for the surest place to push through the solid-packed, prayer-murmuring throng.
Half-afraid her knees would buckle before she could get away, she tried to block her shadow man’s voice, but it slid through her, its rich timbre every bit as deep, husky, and beautiful as she’d known it would be.
Unbearably seductive and maddeningly distracting, it imprinted itself on the very fabric of her heart, doing the strangest things to her senses, and fully muddling her ability to think.
Beggary. A cutpurse.
Her breath came fast and shallow and she scarce heard the words . . . only the golden warmth of his mellifluous voice.
“A sticky-fingered postulant.” The words slipped from Iain’s lips, though how they had, he scarce knew, for his jaw had to be brushing the cold stone of the cathedral floor.
His astonishment complete, he stared at the plainfrocked, travel-stained lass—the very one he’d just identified as
it
—as
she.
The source of his weeks of discomfiture.
The reason every fiber of his being had inexplicably tightened, his loins all afire and setting like stone, the nearer he’d come to the cathedral.
To her.
A would-be nun and votive thief!
Iain stared at her, too stunned by the unlikelihood of his discovery, the immeasurable intensity of his heart-pounding reaction to her proximity, to draw breath, much less step forward and challenge her to hand over the wee whate’er-it-was he’d just witnessed her pluck from a cluster of ex-voto offerings affixed to the gates of St. Kentigern’s shrine.
Nay, stricken as he was by his unaccountable reaction, he stood wholly flummoxed—in truth, fully