The Laird (Captive Hearts) (29 page)

“I had the money with me, right with me, and when we stopped at the inn in Aboyne, my cousins wanted to linger over another pint. I was impatient and wanted to get home so I could brag on my accomplishments.”

She managed that last with more sadness than bitterness, an accomplishment in itself.

“Go on.” Michael’s embrace had not changed, and his words were merely pleasant, like the kiss he dropped on her nape.

“I was set upon by a half-dozen thieves. All wearing kerchiefs over their faces and hats pulled low. They knew exactly what to take, including my horse. The horse was eventually found wandering near Hugh’s land, still in its bridle and saddle.”

“But your reputation had been sent galloping straight into the sea,” Michael said. “Were the thieves caught?”

“By the time my cousins got me back here to report what happened, there was no point wasting time searching. Aboyne is miles away, and night was falling.”

“Tracks don’t sleep,” Michael said, arms tightening around her. “When the welfare of an entire village is at stake, somebody should have at least asked questions and alerted the authorities.”

“Angus took care of that. He suspected the merchants were responsible, that they’d given me a good price because they knew they’d only be paying it temporarily.”

In the ensuing silence, Brenna wished she’d been brave enough to face Michael as she told her tale, for then she might have had a clue as to his reaction.

“What aren’t you telling me, Brenna? This isn’t all of it.”

His tone bore a hint of commanding officer, or exasperated husband. Because she could not—could never—tell him
all
of
it
, Brenna scraped together one more handful of courage.

“Angus put his theory forth only after the villagers had concluded I’d taken the money myself. Hugh, Neil, and Dantry couldn’t vouch for me, because they’d seen nothing. Without witnesses, I could not be tried.”

“And neither could you be exonerated,” Michael concluded. “Then you produced funds sufficient to send half the youth of the shire across the ocean.”

How clever he was.

“Stupid of me.” She was so tired of feeling stupid.

“Stupid, indeed. Why should you confirm their verdict with generosity you might have squandered on your own finery? Far better to hoard up your wealth while our people starved. They were so willing to convict you without evidence, they deserved to starve.”

He’d been angry before; he was furious now. Brenna could feel the heat coming off of him, feel the tension thrumming through him. Because he was enraged, she could let her own anger go and acknowledge the weary sorrow beneath it.

“If I protest my innocence, I’ll only make it worse,” Brenna said. “I understand that, and it was a long time ago. We manage. They may not like me, but at least when you’re about, they’ll respect me.”

Michael heaved a great sigh against Brenna’s back. “I haven’t been about, though, not for years. Would you feel any better if I told you your sacrifice indirectly contributed to vanquishing the Corsican?”

Brenna did roll over then, only because Michael allowed it. If he’d chosen to pin her to the mattress, he had many times the strength to do it.

“I could not have been a proper wife to you nine years ago, Michael. It’s enough for me that you had a hand in vanquishing the Corsican. Let the past go, and I’ll do likewise.”

The hair behind his left ear stuck up at a funny angle. Brenna smoothed it down, then added a few more caresses now that she could pet him as much as she liked.

Because they were married, and because she’d asked him to take a vow of sorts with her.

“I’ll let the past go when the people you’ve spent nine years looking after let it go.”

Not the answer she’d needed, but pure Michael.

He shifted over her, right directly over her.

“If we’re careful, do you suppose we might bring each other pleasure again? This talk of robbery and judgment inspires me to seek closeness with my wife.”

She let him change the subject, because she had no choice. “Or maybe the sight of my breasts does that?”

His smile was slow and precious, full of possession, admiration, and pleasure. “Possibly. Show them to me again, and we’ll find out.”

***

“The people in the village resent me for being gone so long.” Michael offered this observation by way of apology to St. Clair, who studied the countryside from the parapets.

While Michael studied his wife in the bailey below, picking flowers for the bouquets in a great hall nobody used.

“The people in the village didn’t insult you, Michael, they insulted your wife.” St. Clair was too good a friend—and too careful a commanding officer—to trade a half-truth for a platitude. He at least had the courtesy to stare out across the loch while he delivered his verdict.

“How could you tell?”

St. Clair was observant, which was what had made him such an effective and feared interrogator. He was also kind, a secret the baroness had apparently unearthed all on her own.

“Resentment is in the eyes, mostly, in the silences, and the postures that speak of defeated anger that won’t die. The average crofter has been nursing a grudge handed down to him by his grandfather since the ’45, and your wife is begrudged the very air she breathes.”

“Not quite that.” But for some in the village—the tavern keeper, the biddies, the shopgirl selling hair ribbons—it was a near thing.

“The minister mentioned that were it not for the generosity of ‘the castle,’ there’d be nothing in the poor box.” St. Clair offered this casual observation while studying the loch, which was quiet today. A perfect, flat mirror of sky and clouds.

“The selfsame minister who’d best be preaching about forgiveness, reconciliation, and Christian charity,” Michael said. Above them, the pennant whipped against the flagpole, and in an hour, this vantage point would be chilly. For now, it was beautiful, and a good place to plan a strategy.

“You’ll take up the cause of your lady’s popularity?”

“I’m to blame for the disrespect shown her,” Michael said, something he ought to have told Brenna, though she would have argued with him. “If I’d been here, she would not have been robbed of a year’s worth of wool proceeds.”

St. Clair hiked himself up to sit on the stone parapet, as if a drop of several stories weren’t at his back. “My dear wife mentioned something about this.”

Interrogators were supposed to be brute animals, torturers without souls, but St. Clair approached his calling differently. He arranged matters so one was motivated to confide in him. Michael had seen him do it time and again, and each time, had felt a sense of sympathy for the poor bastard unburdening himself of his secrets.

Among whom, he would now number, and be grateful for the privilege.

“While I was scampering around the mountains of southern France, playing nursemaid to a lot of French recruits, Brenna was trying to establish her authority here. She bargained with the merchants down in Aberdeen for the year’s wool harvest, and was robbed of the proceeds on her journey home. Every crofter who ever raised a sheep has reason to resent her endlessly.”

“For a Scot does hold his coin very dear,” St. Clair murmured.

“And his children dearer,” Michael added, because to all appearances, Brenna had used that money to send young people away from their parents. “Would you please get the hell down from there? Your baroness would take it amiss if you were to slip.”

“Somebody climbs higher than this to get yonder pennant waving in the breeze,” St. Clair said, hopping down.

“I used to climb up there,” Michael said, eyeing the flagpole. “The view is magnificent, but the slates are slick as ice when it rains. Rather like French mountainsides when a winter storm blows through. I’m off to talk to Elspeth.”

Down in the bailey, Brenna stuck the pad of her thumb in her mouth, as if she’d pricked it on a thorn. Even at this distance, the sight did things to Michael’s composure.

“What has the fair Elspeth to say to things, other than that Hugh MacLogan is a doomed man?” St. Clair asked.

“Noticed that?” St. Clair noticed much and had probably noticed Michael ogling Brenna from four stories up.

“She watches him the way I watch my Milly and you watch your Brenna. What will this conversation accomplish?”

“Elspeth likes Brenna. I want to know why, and then I want the rest of the village to know why.” Elspeth was in a position to drop hints, make casual observations, and otherwise counter a steady tide of judgment and scorn.

“Hard to invade an enemy camp with only one foot soldier,” St. Clair said. “Good God, those fools are going swimming in that lake.”

“It’s a loch, and they aren’t fools, they’re single Highland gentlemen in want of wives.”

Down past the woods surrounding the castle’s hill, Dantry and Hugh peeled out of their kilts and shirts, leaving their clothes in a heap on the stony beach.

“You’d think they’d take their boots off first,” St. Clair said.

“You’d think that if you were married. I’ll talk to those two, as well.” But not to Neil if he could help it.

St. Clair turned to rest his elbows on the stones behind them, while Michael remained facing the bailey. “Why question your in-laws?”

“They were with Brenna when she was robbed, or they should have been. Nobody called in the authorities. Nobody did a systematic investigation. Nobody followed tracks. Nobody did anything except blame my wife for being the victim of a crime.”

First Hugh, then his younger brother, dove headfirst into the frigid waters.

“Makes my stones shrivel just to watch them,” St. Clair muttered.

While Michael wanted to make somebody else’s balls shrivel for what had been done to Brenna—but whose?

“How is your baroness?” Michael asked, because Brenna had told him, as they’d drowsed in each other’s arms after a second, thorough, sweet loving, that Milly St. Clair had suffered some ill effects from her journey.

The closeness of that confidence, the intimacy of it, brought a pleasure related to, but different from, the loving.

“My lady is in need of rest,” St. Clair said, shoving away from the stone wall, turning, and climbing back up to resume his seat. “If you think you’ll be sending us on our way anytime soon, I am bound by concern for my lady to disappoint you.”

Well, of course. Michael had stuck by St. Clair against all odds, and now the favor was being returned.

“I could not have the Baroness St. Clair’s welfare on my conscience,” Michael said. “My wife’s situation is burden enough. Matters here could get messy.”

“So what will you do?”

“Two things. First, I will enlist what allies Brenna has—Elspeth, the parson, the MacLogans, a few others—to restore her standing in the community.”

St. Clair rose and traversed the parapets until he reached the conical roof over the staircase. “And second?”

Michael looked away, because the damned fool was about to scramble up on the roof until he could touch the flagpole, as Michael had many times in his boyhood—his foolish boyhood. The very top of the roof was a flat space maybe two feet across, the flagpole anchored in its center.

“Second, I’m going to do what my uncle should have done years ago and move heaven and earth to clear Brenna’s name.”

In a half-dozen nimble steps, St. Clair was up to the flagpole. “The view is unbelievable,” he said. “You are a wealthy man, Baron Strathdee, if you are lord of this vista.”

All Michael wanted was to be lord of his own castle and of his lady’s heart. “I am a wealthy man, and you are not a mountain goat. Getting down is trickier than getting up.”

St. Clair traversed the slope of the roof, arms outstretched like a circus performer. He’d trod a similar path in France, disaster on all sides and no margin for error, and as in France, he came to a safe landing and made it look easy.

“One is left with a question, my friend,” St. Clair said, his cadence ever so slightly French.

“I know,” Michael said. “I bloody goddamned know: Why didn’t Angus make any effort at all to bring to justice those who stole from my wife, and from the entire village?”

Hugh and Dantry had apparently had enough of the frigid pleasures of the loch, for they both climbed onto the shore and used their shirts for towels.

“You suspect Angus?”

“I’m supposed to suspect her cousins,” Michael said. “They had motive and opportunity. They were the ones who allowed her to be unescorted on a road not always well traveled. The horse she was riding was found near their holding, and they made no defense of her either.”

“Complicated,” St. Clair said, a wealth of pity in a few syllables. “Perhaps your uncle conducted no investigation because he did not want to deprive Brenna of her only close family.”

“Or perhaps he did.” Because Brenna had counted six armed brigands after her money, surely enough to overpower her, as well as Neil and Hugh.

St. Clair’s eyebrows rose in an eloquent reconfiguration of the available facts. “You suspect Angus of stealing from the entire village and maligning his niece-by-marriage into the bargain? Of casting suspicion on her cousins too? For what purpose? He has no need of coin, he has a Scotsman’s loyalty to clan, and he’s
your
only close family.”