White Regency 03 - White Knight (32 page)

The soldier hesitated, weighing her words.
He turned to his companion, “Hoy, Owen, I’m for leaving’!”

Owen merely said “Aye,” and the
two of them turned and trotted off for the hills.

The fire was now blazing, tossing bits of
burning thatch all about them as the wind suddenly picked up. The air was thick
with the smell of the fire. “Liza, come, help me find the widow!”

Inside, the cottage was filled with a
heavy veil of smoke that immediately stung their eyes to tears. Grace coughed
against the burning it brought to her throat and quickly tugged the kerchief
from her hair, placing it over her mouth and nose so that she might breathe
easier. She urged Liza to do the same and together they searched, stumbling
over the furnishings inside the darkness of the cottage.

“Micheil!” Grace called to the
outside, “ask the boy where his grannam is! I cannot find her!”

The two boys came into the cottage then,
snaking
through
the smoke, flitting toward the back of the dwelling.

“Micheil, no!”

“It is all right, my lady. She is
here!” Grace and Liza shuffled their way toward where Micheil had called
to them. In the shadowed corner, they found a crude box bed. Inside lay the
figure of a woman too weak to utter more than a struggling cry.

“Liza, help me to carry her
outside!” Grace reached under the widow’s frail shoulders, speaking very
softly to her in Gaelic, assuring her that they were there-to help her. The
widow moaned when they lifted her from the bed and slowly, carefully, they
carried her from the cottage as burning chunks of thatch rained down upon them
from overhead.

They bore her across the yard to the pony
cart where Micheil took up a blanket and spread it upon the ground for her to
lie upon. Grace turned and started to retrace their steps, hoping to save some
of the widow’s belongings from the fire, but within seconds, the roof had
collapsed inside the cottage. She was left to stand, unable to do anything more
than watch as the flames roiled out of control, the smoke billowing angrily
across the horizon.

“The captain!” Micheil shouted.
“He is gone!”

Grace turned from the burning cottage.
“Let us get the widow and her grandson into the cart and leave before the
soldiers return. We will bring them back to Skynegal with us.”

A small pallet was quickly prepared for
the widow, made of soft sedge grass and bracken strewn under the blanket in the
back of the cart.

“Come, Liza, help me lift her.”

But as Grace stooped to take the woman
under her shoulders, she felt a sudden rush of liquid warmth between her legs.
Her focus blurred and she stumbled back against the pony cart before falling to
the ground. She lay there as the darkness closed in, the voices around her fast
growing dim.

“My lady!”

“Has she fainted?”

“Oh my God, there is blood!”

“The babe…”

Flowers.

Grace sat in an open field that was filled
with flowers
—
aspodel and primrose of every
imaginable hue, brilliant red and orange, pale yellow and pink. The colors were
more vivid than she could ever imagine. The wind was blowing in off the loch,
whispering through the tall grass that grew along the embankment. The sun was
shining. Cliodna’s birds in the tower were calling and soaring. Somewhere,
everywhere she heard laughter, children,
happiness
.
She stood and the hem of her tartan gown ruffled in the breeze. She laughed.
Away in the distance she searched for Christian. He was to return to her
today…

A shadow fell suddenly across the sun,
darkening the sky and blotting out its light from overhead. The wind quickened,
pulling at the fragile blossoms around her ankles, hissing snakelike through
the grass. The laughter she heard no longer sounded childlike, but instead was
wicked and ugly. She frowned at the sudden and unwelcome change and called to
the sun to return, but it did not heed her. Instead the wind blew faster and
she turned at the sound of someone approaching behind her, smiling for she knew
it was Christian. He had come for her, to chase away the clouds, and she put
her hand back for him, reaching…

A terrible force struck her, throwing her
forward. She fell into the flowers, but they were no longer primroses, instead
barbed thorns that bit into her hands. She struggled to regain her feet and a
blackness came for her, billowing like smoky fingers reaching out to take her.
She could not lift her hands to push them away. She could only watch as the
darkness drew nearer and nearer…

A glimmer then that shone for but a
moment’s time in the terrible darkness. It sparkled like a guardian star in the
midnight sky, a symbol of hope… but then the smoky fingers took hold of it,
pulling it away. The laughter grew, louder, more frightening, echoing now,
thundering
above her, threatening her… suddenly, softly
through the roar, she heard him. He was calling for her. It was her knight and
he had come back to save her, just as she had always known he would…

“Grace?”

Slowly her eyes flickered open. She stared
a moment, waiting for her vision to focus, trying to decide where she was. The
field and the flowers were no longer there. Gone was the laughter and singing.
Instead she was in her chamber at Skynegal, lying on her bed. Daylight broke
inside the windows, casting tiny halos of light about the room, giving it an
ethereal air. It was very quiet, not even the sound of the birds outside. Odd,
she thought fleetingly, why have Cliodna’s birds gone silent?

“Grace, can you hear me?”

She turned her head, wincing when it felt
weighted somehow. Christian was there, just as she had known in her dream, but
he wasn’t her brilliant shining knight. His eyes were shot with red and
shadowed underneath. His face was darkened with the beginnings of a beard, his
hair mussed about his head. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. Grace
lifted her hand and touched it to his roughened cheek as she smiled softly to
him. The dream, the darkness, none of it mattered. Christian was there with her
now. Everything would be safe and good.

“You came back,” she whispered
to him, wondering why her voice sounded so foreign to her ears.

His brow furrowed and the muscle in his
jaw worked as if he were fighting hard against some unknown emotion. He did not
smile. He did not speak. Instead his eyes were darkened with torment.

“Christian, what is it? What is
wrong.
Has something happened? Did you find Eleanor?”

Christian shook his head and clasped her
hand, bringing it to his lips and kissing it as he closed his eyes. A single
tear fell down his cheek. “She has not been found.”

“You are so troubled. But it is not
Eleanor, is it? What is wrong?”

Grace thought for a moment.
Remember…

A boy. A wagon bumping along a cart path.
She recalled a fire, Liza shouting with fear, the soldier’s wicked laughter.
“The widow,” she said softly. Tears stung at the back of her eyes.

“The soldiers responsible for the
fire have been arrested and charged, under direct order of Lord and Lady
Sunterglen, who have just returned from London and profess to have known
nothing of the tactics of their factor, Mr. Starke. I have their every
assurance that the people involved, including Mr. Starke, will be made an
example of.”

She looked to Christian. “What of
Micheil? Liza? The others?”

“They are well. Liza was a bit shaken
by it all, but she was unharmed. The widow is convalescing and her family has
arrived to be with her. Micheil is very worried about you.”

In that same second, Dubhar came to rest
his muzzle on the edge of the bed.

Grace smiled. She closed her eyes a
moment, collecting her strength. She was so very tired. She looked to Christian
again. An image then, a memory of falling to the ground, weakness, a hot and
sticky wetness against her legs. There had been a pain deep in her belly and
blood, very red, so much blood…

Grace felt her breath leave her as the
mental images grew clearer. Tears fell over her cheeks and her throat tightened
convulsively against the words she feared speaking but could not ignore.
“Christian… what of the babe?”

Christian bit down on his lip, his eyes
filling as he squeezed her hand tightly in his.

Grace swallowed. Why wasn’t he answering
her? Why wasn’t he assuring her the babe was well? “Christian, please…
tell me the babe is unharmed.”

Christian stared into her eyes and
silently shook his head, his expression utterly hopeless. “You lost the
babe, Grace. There was nothing anyone could do.”

Oh, God, no…

Grace shook her head against his words,
wailing out against a pulling in her chest that she knew had to be the rending
of her heart.
No, please, no, not the babe… please let him be wrong…

“It cannot be … no … no …”

Christian drew Grace up brokenly against
him, muffling her anguished cries against his shoulder as she confronted the
terrible reality of his words. He held her there tightly, taking her sobs into
himself, until finally his fragile resistance gave way and he lost himself to
his own weeping.

Christian stood just inside the doorway
leading out to the castle courtyard, watching where Grace sat alone amid the
lengthening twilight shadows. He frowned. It had been three weeks since she had
lost the babe, three weeks of watching her sit at that same spot, staring off
at nobody-knew-what while the rest of the world went on living around her.

She had grown markedly thin, eating barely
enough to sustain her each day. She no longer saw to or even cared about the
happenings of the estate. She had abandoned all society, shunning the company
of others, keeping to her bedchamber by day, only emerging at this time of the
night when everyone else was off eating their supper and preparing for bed.

It was just that morning that Christian
had come to the very real conclusion that slowly, deliberately, she was killing
herself. And he wasn’t about to stand by and watch her do it.

Christian stepped out onto the courtyard,
watching for Grace to notice his approach while knowing she would not. It was
the same every night. He would come and sit beside her. He would talk to her,
tell her of the events of the day, read to her the letters she had received
from the Highlanders who had immigrated to America, until the moon rose high in
the evening sky. She never responded. She never gave the slightest indication
she had heard him. She just sat on that rock bench, staring off at the
nothingness, willing herself to die.

“Good evening, Grace,” he said
as he lowered onto the bench beside her.

She blinked, but it was all the response
she gave him. Christian removed a letter he had received earlier that day from
his coat pocket, unfolding it. “I thought you might be interested to know
we have received a letter from Eleanor.” He glanced at her. Nothing.
“She sold my horse so that she would have some money. She wanted me to
know she does not blame me for telling her the truth. In fact, she thanks me
for it. She writes only that we should not come looking for her, that she has
gone to a place where we will never find her. She doesn’t know when she is
coming back or if she ever will.”

Christian made to hand Eleanor’s letter to
Grace as if to allow her to read it. She did not move to take it, but continued
to stare vacantly forward. He quietly refolded the page, placing it back in his
coat pocket. When he next glanced at Grace, he was startled to see that she no
longer stared at the nothingness of the night. She was staring at him. Even
though her eyes were dark and lifeless, it was a change. “Grace?”

“Why do you do this?” Her voice
was sharp, not at all her own. “Why do you come here night after night and
tell me all these things?”

He stared at her, uncertain how he should
respond. “I come to remind you that there is still a world around you, Grace,
a world that keeps moving on from day to night to day again. I come because
there is still life.”

Grace stood without making a response and
started walking away from him, arms crossed tightly over herself, dismissing
him for the safety of her indifference and self-pity.

Suddenly the despair he had felt over his
inability to do anything for her, for Eleanor, overtook him. Christian stood
and crossed the courtyard after her, taking her by the arm and forcing her
around to face him. “Let me go, Christian!”

“You are going to listen to me for
once instead of blindly ignoring my existence! I have sat by and watched you
deliberately destroy yourself over this as if you were the only one to have
lost that child. I lost a child, too, Grace, and I feel the pain of it every
bit as terribly as
you do. Sometimes I feel
it even worse because to live with the guilt that I feel, knowing if I had been
here with you instead of running off to repair the mistakes of my family’s
past, my child would yet be growing inside of you.”

Christian paused a moment to rein in his
raging emotions. When he spoke again, his voice was markedly calmer. “I am
your husband, Grace. It is my duty to protect you and our children. But I
failed in that duty, just as I failed Eleanor. If you want to blame anyone for
the pain you are feeling right now, if you want to blame anyone for taking our
child away, then blame me. I did this, Grace. Not you. Take that hatred you
have for yourself and direct it on me. But for God’s sake, stop torturing yourself!”

Grace simply stared through him.

Defeated, Christian released her and
turned, heading for the castle, unable to stand the suffering any longer. As he
approached the door, he saw Deirdre watching him. He didn’t speak to her, just
shot her a look as he strode past.

“What you did was good,” she
said, bringing him up short at the door. “You have brought her to thinking
again.”

Christian took in a slow and deep breath.
“What good will it do, Deirdre?”

Deirdre smiled at him, taking his arm and
walking with him inside the castle. “Wait and see, my lord. Wait and
see.”

Two mornings later, Grace sat at her
bedchamber window, wondering why there wasn’t anyone in the courtyard below. At
this hour, the estate was normally bustling with people seeing to the day’s tasks,
yet not a single person appeared. Everywhere she looked—the stables, even the
fields—all was deserted. Where had everybody gone?

She stood and walked across the room to
the door, opening it slightly to peek onto the hallway outside. It was
Wednesday, when they always would strip the bed linens for washing and take up
the carpets for beating, yet neither Flora nor Deirdre were anywhere in sight.
Neither was Liza, she suddenly realized. She hadn’t
come with Grace’s
morning tea and oatcake for breakfast.

A niggling of uneasiness began to prick at
her inside and Grace slipped silently into the hallway, walking slowly to the
stairs. She listened a moment below. Silence. No muffled voices, no clatter
from the kitchen. Nothing. She went halfway down the steps and still she could
hear nothing but the silence.

When she reached the bottom step, Grace
looked on to the vast emptiness of the great hall and knew something had to be
terribly wrong. How could dozens of people suddenly vanish without her having
noticed? It was almost as if she were walking in a dream.

As she headed down the stair for the
service rooms, she thought she heard a sound, a faint keen that seemed to have
come from the direction of the kitchen. She looked to the doorway and again
heard the sound, slightly louder. Concerned now, she started toward it,
entering a room that was normally warm and welcoming and filled with the smells
of baking, where a basket of oatcakes was always waiting on the center table,
where a kettle for tea could always be found on the fire. But there was no
teakettle, no fire in the hearth. Every dish and cup had been tucked away in
its cupboard.

Another keen, and Grace turned to where
the cradle stood at its place beside the hearth. She felt a tightness seize her
deep inside her chest, felt her knees tremble slightly. Cautiously she
approached, looking inside to where little Iain MacLean lay on his back, his
tiny legs kicking as he stretched and worked his growing limbs.