The Scot and I (7 page)

All he’d trapped was a young woman who had attempted to kill him or the man behind him. If she had written the letter, why didn’t she own up to it?

He had more than his identity as a Scot working for him now. He was a seer of Grampian with gifts neither his superiors nor Demos could possibly imagine.

That thought prompted him to dig in his pocket and pull out the blond wig. He crushed it between his hands. It still sang for him, but its energy was fading. He needed something more recent, something the girl had handled when her emotions were running high.

He reached in his boot and retrieved her little dagger. When he held it loosely in his hands, he felt nothing at all, not even a hint of emotion. He remembered how her hand shook when she waved the dirk under his nose. He hadn’t felt the least bit threatened. It wasn’t that he trusted her, but he didn’t believe she was a killer. She lied convincingly, but any ordinary person with a modicum of intuition would have sensed that her story had glaring holes in it. Any agent worth his salt would have been pressing her for answers. All the same, he could not bring himself to hand her over to less squeamish agents than himself. He had no desire to have another death on his conscience.

He was boxing himself into a corner. If he wasn’t going to take her back to Balmoral, what was he going to do with her?

He was thinking too much.

He grasped the dirk firmly in his right hand and opened his senses. This was more like it. A mist formed behind his eyes. When the mist cleared, he saw two figures, a man and a woman. Though the figures were indistinct, he knew that the woman in the bed, sleeping like a babe, was the woman in his vision.

Gradually, the scene came into focus. They were by a waterfall beside a bubbling stream. The man held the dirk in his hand, offering it to the woman. She touched it—reverently? reluctantly?—and sank to her knees. “Demos,” she whispered.

Alex didn’t know what broke his connection to his vision, his own shock at hearing that hateful word, or the emotion that emanated from the woman. Demos. So he was right. She was in this up to her neck!

He was incensed, now, that he’d allowed himself to soften toward her. History was repeating itself. It wasn’t the woman’s death he should be worried about but the death of the men who worked with him.

It seemed that nothing had changed. He could still be duped by a pretty face and a woman’s winning ways. He’d even given her the bed and made do with a cramped chair to allay her virginal fears.

What a chump he was!

Well, Master Thomas Gordon—he refused to call her “Margaret,” knowing that she had lied about that, too—was in for a rude awakening. He’d have her up at the crack of dawn and back in Balmoral before the birds were up.

Meanwhile—

He stripped out of his clothes till he was down to his trousers, dropped her little dagger into one of his boots, and climbed into bed. Asleep or waking, there was nothing this treacherous little bitch could do to seduce him from his purpose. And if she didn’t want to share the bed, he’d tie her to the chair, but he’d be damned if she slept in comfort while he ached with cramped muscles from head to toe.

She didn’t waken. She rolled into him, and her warm breath tickled his armpit. He wasn’t going to turn his back on her, just in case she tried to brain him, so he anchored her with one arm around her waist. She nestled closer, all warm woman brushing against his bare skin. His breathing became labored. Lust and anger churned inside him, bat tling for supremacy. He shoved himself out of the bed and stood there quivering, ready to take her or ready to beat her, he couldn’t tell which.

What he needed was a breath of cleansing, mountain air. After donning his shirt, coat, and boots, he left the room and locked the door from the outside. A few steps took him to the kitchen. He froze when he felt a cold draft of air. He wasn’t alone. Someone had entered the kitchen through a window. He could hear quick, shallow breaths and smell the unmistakable reek of tobacco.

A smuggler wouldn’t be sneaking around the house at this time of night.

Alex tensed himself to spring. Suddenly, his head seemed to shatter into a thousand shards, and he sank to the floor in a heap.

Five

The professor spoke slowly and without inflection, a sure sign that he was adding things up in that razor-sharp mind of his, calculating, making connections. “I’m missing something,” he said, “something important. Take me through it again, Ramsey, from the moment you were shot to the point where you stabbed the queen’s chief of security and made your escape.”

He turned from the window that overlooked the approach to the house and took the chair facing Ramsey’s. He was a tall man, loose-limbed, with fair hair turning to silver and intelligent gray eyes in a remarkably handsome face. He’d had a varied career, first as a soldier in the Crimean War, then as a professor at Edinburgh University. He looked like a typical professor—relaxed, thoughtful, prone to long silences—but as Ramsey knew well, he was a soldier for all that.

The professor smiled. “Relax. Murray wouldn’t go to bed if he were worried. Besides, if you’d been followed, the soldiers would be here already.”

Ramsey made a visible effort to relax. Murray was the third member of their team, not a member of Demos but an associate whose services came at a price. It was Murray who had put him on a horse and seen him safely home.

“Go on,” the professor said. “Tell me what happened tonight.”

Ramsey nodded and huddled into the comfortable wing chair, careful not to jog the arm that was in a sling. He wasn’t deceived by the professor’s easygoing manner. He knew that he was reporting to his commanding officer. Their headquarters was this large Jacobean mansion on the north side of the river, near Gairnshiel. It had been a long ride home from the castle, or so it seemed to him in his weakened condition.

That was many hours ago. He was ready for his bed but knew that there would be no rest for him until the professor was satisfied that he’d been told every small, inconsequential detail of the debacle at Balmoral.

It weighed heavily on him. He’d made a muck of things and deserved a dressing-down, but that was not the professor’s way. A word, a look, a change of inflection in his voice was enough to make a man squirm. He’d used the same tactics at the University of Edinburgh. That was where their paths had first crossed. Ramsey was a student then, and out of sheer curiosity, he’d taken a class with the charismatic professor who stood history on its head and questioned every cherished myth that the Establishment held dear. Military history was his subject. Every commander, every general, every battle had to be dissected until the truth was laid bare. His students used to joke among themselves that after one of the professor’s lectures, they felt as though he’d taken their brains out, rearranged them in their proper order, and shoved them back into their heads.

The professor added gently, “Things may occur to me that may not occur to you. That’s why we’re going through this again.”

Ramsey nodded and started over. “I had a clear shot at the queen and was bringing up my revolver when out of the blue, a woman shot me. I wasn’t expecting it, wasn’t prepared for it.”

“What did the woman look like?”

Ramsey shook his head. “I told you, I didn’t see her. My eyes were on the queen, but one of the men who helped me said that she was a blond. There’s something else I should mention. There were more guards than you said there would be. I was beginning to suspect even then . . .”

“Yes?”

“That they were expecting trouble.”

“You see? You’ve told me something new. It may mean something, or it may mean nothing at all. Then what happened?”

“Right after that, another shot went off, and everyone panicked.” Ramsey shifted his position and grimaced in pain. “Two very helpful gentlemen came to my assistance. One went after the woman with blond hair, and the other stayed by my side.”

“You said before that these men were brothers?”

“Hepburn was their name. Gavin Hepburn was the younger of the two, and he took me to see the doctor. There was nothing I could do. Streams of people were running in every direction, and guards were going after them.”

There was a silence as the professor digested this. “Could the woman have been one of the agents assigned to guard the queen?”

“I don’t think so. If she had been one of them, she wouldn’t have run away.”

“What about the Hepburn brothers?”

Ramsey thought for a moment. “Yes. That’s more likely. They didn’t panic, and they didn’t run.”

“You’re beginning to tire. Let’s move on. Tell me again about your revolver.”

Ramsey hesitated. Finally, he said, “In the confusion, I managed to retrieve it and slip it into my pocket. I thought I might have to use it to shoot my way out. I didn’t expect to be searched.”

“You didn’t expect to be searched?” There was a trace of amusement in the professor’s voice. “A gun went off at the queen’s reception. You were shot, and you didn’t think you’d come under suspicion?”

Faint color ran under Ramsey’s skin. “No, sir. I was the victim. It never occurred to me that I would be searched. It was a stupid blunder on my part.”

“You’re too hard on yourself. It’s too bad you fell into Dickens’s hands, though. He is . . . was . . . as thorough as they come. You won’t have been the only one they searched tonight. So, he searched you and found the gun. Then what?”

“I told him that the person who shot me dropped it and, in the panic, I picked it up to defend myself.”

“And when Dickens examined the gun, he found you out in a lie.”

“Yes, sir. It hadn’t been fired, so the person who shot me could not have dropped it. Dickens knew it must be my gun.”

“Don’t look so stricken. It can happen to the best of us. And you redeemed yourself at the end.”

The professor got up and paced to the sideboard against the wall. After a moment or two, he returned with a glass of whiskey. “You’ve earned this,” he said, handing the glass to Ramsey. “Drink it slowly.”

Ramsey appreciated the gesture. It reminded him of the good old days, when the professor would invite a few select students to his rooms, and they would argue politics well into the night. He’d been a boy then. His father had already had a career mapped out for him, so when he graduated, against the professor’s persuasions, he’d accepted a commission in the British Army.

And he had eventually found himself fighting the Zulus in Southern Africa. That was when he learned that the professor knew what he was talking about. The army was commanded by a pack of blue-blooded buffoons who owed their seniority to family connections or friends in high places.

He learned something else. The professor’s only son had served there, too, but had lost his life in his first engagement. The professor never talked about his loss, but there was a hard edge to him that had been absent before his son died. Now he was in deadly earnest. By fair means or foul, Scottish patriots would break free of the shackles that bound them to England.

To be a part of such an enterprise made his own heart swell with pride.

“So,” said the professor, “you were found out in a lie. What happened then?”

“Dickens suddenly got up and told me that he didn’t believe a word I’d said, that he believed I was part of the plot to assassinate the queen. He went to the door. I could see what he meant to do. He’d call for soldiers, and I’d be arrested.”

He stopped to take a sip of whiskey, then another. “I didn’t panic. It was his reference to a plot to assassinate the queen that shocked me. How could he have known about the plot, unless someone had betrayed us?”

“He may have been fishing, you know, trying to trick you.”

Ramsey edged forward in his chair. “He knew something, sir. I’m sure of it. If someone had betrayed us, it would explain why there were so many men guarding the queen.”

“You may have something there. Tell me what happened next.”

“I couldn’t allow him to leave that room alive. I’d told him a pack of lies that he could easily disprove.”

The professor cut in, “Who else did you talk to before Dickens questioned you?”

“The doctor and Gavin Hepburn, but I told them nothing of any use.”

“Did you lie to them?”

“No. For the most part, I pretended to be in too much pain to answer their questions.”

“Well-done. Go on.”

Ramsey continued, “I didn’t have time to debate the point, so I picked up a letter opener that was on the desk and drove it into his neck. Then I slipped through the window and made for the rendezvous. Murray was waiting for me.”

“What happened to the letter opener?”

“I left it where it had fallen on the floor. But I took my revolver with me.”

After a long, reflective silence, the professor got up and began to pace. “This is what we are going to do,” he said. “Tomorrow, we’re going to return to the castle.” He held up his hand when Ramsey tried to interrupt him. “We’ll ask to speak to Dickens. We’ll be shocked when we hear that he has been murdered. You’ll say that he let you go last night because you were in shock and unable to answer his questions coherently but promised to return the next day. Someone will ask you the same questions Dickens asked, and you’ll tell them the truth, that you’re a former student of mine and we’re making up a party to explore the historic sites in the area.”