One Man's Love (11 page)

L
eitis sat in the cave, her back against the rock wall. The sunlight was softening, heralding nightfall. The domed ceiling of the cavern was black from fires lit by long-ago inhabitants. The slate floor, a dark purplish gray, was uneven and pocked. Shadows lingered in the cavities like tiny pools.

She drew up her knees and tucked her skirt around her ankles. It was a fey place, one in which she had sought sanctuary ever since she was a child. Here she had come in times of trouble or simply to escape her brothers.

There was a whisper of air against her cheek, the breeze sighing through the bushes that guarded the entrance.

It wasn’t memory that made her suddenly wish
to weep, but the sheer beauty of the scene before her. Gilmuir sparkled in the distance like an ancient lady attired in her best jewels. The golden light of a fading day danced upon the fallen walls. Like a regal matriarch she sat with her tattered garments around her, studiously ignoring the upstart fort at her side.

Leitis could not see the clachan from here, a view that was almost prophetic. If she returned to the village she might bring danger to her clanspeople, since it would be the first place the Butcher would look.

She tipped her head back against the wall, tired in a way she’d rarely been. “What will I do?” she asked of the shadows, but they remained mute.

She couldn’t live here. Nor did she have any relatives other than Hamish who might take her in. She wouldn’t endanger her friends or the villagers, which meant that she was left with no alternatives.

It would be easy to hate the Butcher for her dilemma, but she knew only too well that Hamish had played his part. He had dared the Butcher of Inverness, and she suspected that the man was just as stubborn as her uncle. But the outcome of their confrontation was not in doubt. The colonel had more than a hundred men under his command, a formidable will, and the determination to carry it out.

For all the threat he posed to her clan and her country, she couldn’t quite forget that moment when he’d sighed against her, his lips pressing gently on her brow. He had seemed as lost as she felt at this moment.

The afternoon was well advanced by the time Alec led the way back to Fort William. The waning sun was kind to the ruined castle, bathing it in an amber haze.

When they arrived, he gave the signal and the men behind him began to dismount.

“Have the cart moved to Gilmuir and unloaded,” Alec instructed Harrison. His adjutant nodded and began to give orders to the men.

“Welcome back, Colonel,” one of the sergeants said, taking the reins of his horse.

Alec dismounted and looked toward Gilmuir. “It was an uneventful day, I trust?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. “Should I inform the duty officer that you would like his report?”

“No,” Alec said. “It will wait until later.”

He strode toward Gilmuir, preceding the squeaking cart. From the poor state of the vehicle, it was a miracle it had made the journey back to the fort. It might as well be scrapped for firewood after it was emptied of its contents, he thought wryly. But it had served its purpose, that of conveying the loom to Leitis.

He pushed open the door of his chamber, his words thought out and mentally rehearsed on the way back. He would again apologize for his actions of the previous night before he presented the loom to Leitis.

The only person to greet him, however, was his aide. Donald stood at his entrance, his stance militarily precise. Arms back, shoulders squared, fingers together, thumbs aligned along the seam of his breeches, gaze fixed firmly on the horizon. All executed perfectly, but with such a disconsolate air that Alec instantly knew what happened.

“She escaped?” he asked, glancing around the room.

To his credit, Donald didn’t look away. “Yes, sir,” he said reluctantly. “I haven’t been able to find her, sir.
But I did look. I took a few men with me, sir, and searched the village. I should have guarded her better, sir,” he added.

Alec smiled then, the only amusement he felt all day. “If Leitis MacRae wants to do something, Donald, not even God Himself can stop her.”

His aide looked surprised at that assessment, and well he might be. Not the words of a man who’d only known a woman for one night. But his knowledge of Leitis had been formed in his childhood. Held within him was an image of the girl she’d been, more alive than anyone he’d ever known, as well as the most stubborn creature on the face of the earth.

He knew, suddenly, where she was.

She’d given the three of them all a scolding one day for the sin of teasing her. A remark he’d made about her hair had been taken up and expanded upon by her brothers. With a look of contempt in her eyes, she’d stomped away, promising dire consequences if anyone followed her. They would have preferred to leave her alone, but Leitis’s mother set them to the task of finding her, a chore that had taken all afternoon and given Alec a thorough knowledge of the caverns around Gilmuir.

He left the room now without another word, destined for the stables. Once there, he ordered a fresh horse to be saddled.

“May I accompany you, sir?” Alec turned. Donald had followed him and now stood stiffly beside him, his face a picture of determination.

“No,” he said. “This particular mission is best accomplished alone.”

Donald nodded once, stiffly.

Alec rode west, past the glen and into the hills that gently rose behind the clachan. A series of caves, hid
den by the thick forest, had been Leitis’s childhood sanctuary. He did not doubt that she was hiding in one of them now.

Soon the thick undergrowth made it impossible to continue. Dismounting, he tied the reins of his horse to a sapling, continuing the rest of the journey on foot.

The passage of time was erased with each step onto pine needles, each branch bent back to ease his way. As he climbed upward, he was no longer the colonel of the regiment, nor the Butcher of Inverness, but an eleven-year-old boy who felt only freedom in this wondrous place.

One of the Wild MacRaes.

“A strange man, your colonel.”

Harrison glanced toward the door. Major Sedgewick stood there surveying the room. He would find nothing amiss here. Harrison’s quarters were, as usual, impeccable. He hadn’t risen to the position of adjutant to the colonel of the regiment without adhering strictly to rules and regulations.

He finished unpacking the last of Colonel Landers’s maps before closing and locking the case. It had been a long day and he was tired, but Sedgewick outranked him. Therefore, this visit, and the curiosity that prompted it, would last as long as the major wished.

Sedgewick stepped into the room, nothing more than a small square box with a window high in the wall overlooking the courtyard. If Harrison stood on tiptoe, he could just glimpse the lake in the distance. But the fortress had been built to impress upon the Scots His Majesty’s position in the Highlands, not for the view.

Because of his position as the colonel’s adjutant, he was not required to share quarters with another offi
cer. In other, not-so-hospitable surroundings, he and Donald and even Colonel Landers had been grateful for a roof over their heads or a tree or even a haystack, sharing their accommodations without regard to rank or position. But those had been battlefield conditions, and they’d all been used to hardship.

He glanced at Sedgewick. From what he’d seen of the man, the only privations he’d suffered had been here at Fort William. And although the duty could not have been comfortable, it was a damn sight easier than having bullets and cannon aiming for you.

“Is he? Why would you say so, sir?” Harrison asked pleasantly enough. But he did not, for all his surface affability, like the man.

“He takes a hostage then releases the piper, only to spend the day looking for him. Why would he do that?”

“You would have to ask that question of Colonel Landers, sir.”

Sedgewick’s smile was thin and feral. “Quite a sponsor to have, the Duke of Cumberland. Do you know him?”

Harrison had been in the background of numerous meetings between the colonel and the duke, but he shook his head.

“Pity,” Sedgewick said, tapping his foot against one of the colonel’s chests. “It might have helped your career as well.”

“Colonel Landers was promoted in Flanders for bravery, Major Sedgewick,” he said respectfully. “Before he ever made the acquaintance of the duke.”

Sedgewick stared at him, his eyes narrowed.

“Is that so? Still, I wonder if Cumberland realizes his predilection for helping the Scots?”

“In what way, sir?” Harrison said stiffly.

“When he arrived. Or do you not agree that he ap
peared almost as disturbed as the Scots by the village being burned?”

“I believe, sir,” Harrison said carefully, “that the colonel wishes no further enmity between the two countries.”

“How strange,” Sedgewick said mockingly. “I thought he was to subdue the Scots, not make friends of them. Today he gave food to an old woman. An act that interested him more than finding a seditious piper.”

Conversation of this sort always made Harrison wary. He’d learned to guard his comments over the years, especially when one of his fellow officers said anything critical about the colonel. Harrison would have followed the man anywhere, especially after Inverness.

“We are going on patrol again tomorrow, sir,” he said, bending to straighten the placement of his pillow. “He will find him, sir. Do not doubt that.”

Sedgewick nodded, fingering the blanket at the end of Harrison’s cot and testing the tightness of the sheet. He’d find nothing lacking there, Harrison thought.

“Protect yourself, Harrison,” the other man said unexpectedly. “There are those in command who would not think kindly of the colonel’s releasing the piper in the first place. Nor of his actions today. He brought a loom to his hostage. It is not wise to feel such compassion for the enemy.”

Sedgewick came closer, ran his fingers over the colonel’s dispatch case. “Perhaps you should give some thought to your own career. A transfer might be well timed.”

“I’m right where I wish to be, sir,” Harrison said coolly.

The major walked to the door, then turned and
smiled at him. A toothy grin, what with all those pointed teeth. A wolf might stare in a similar fashion at a lamb.

Harrison nodded, knowing that he had been warned. He wondered if Sedgewick realized that he would waste no time in repeating his words to the colonel. Or had that been his intent, to threaten his commander? If so, it had been a clumsy move on Sedgewick’s part and an unwise one. The colonel had dared Cumberland himself. This major was a puny foe.

A
rustle in front of the cave made Leitis turn her head. An animal? Or a bird swooping down to alight upon a branch? Another sound, that of a footstep, made her stand quickly, back braced against the rock wall.

The English could not have found the cave. It was too well hidden. Tucked among the trees and concealed by the overgrown bushes, it would be almost impossible to find.

She waited breathlessly, telling herself it was Hamish coming to find her. Or one of the villagers who knew the layout of the caves. But her palms were icy, her heart booming so loud it sounded like an English drum. When the bushes parted, she almost sighed in resignation.

The Butcher stood in the entrance to the cave.

Why should it not be him? He’d not done what she’d expected since arriving at Gilmuir.

Half his face was shadowed, the other lit by sunlight. She had the curious thought that he had two identities—the man she expected him to be and the man he truly was.

She’d lived around men all her life, and had become accustomed to her brothers’ bursts of temper and her father’s bellicose nature. This man, however, held his anger within, all the more powerful for not being voiced.

She would have, perhaps, been wiser to be afraid, to shelter her fears behind a stillness of her own. Instead, she took one step toward him, then another, until her shoes touched the toes of his boots. Tipping back her head, she stared at him.

“How did you find this place?” she asked.

“Perhaps one of your villagers divulged the secret,” he countered.

“They would not. Especially not to an Englishman.”

“You are defiant and courageous, Leitis, almost dangerously so,” he said softly. “Did you treat Sedgewick with such disdain?”

“No,” she admitted. She had always tried to avoid notice, the appearance of meekness safer to assume. Sedgewick’s cruelty could never be predicted. Yet, for all his fearsome reputation, she felt safer with the Butcher of Inverness than she did with the major. Surely that knowledge should disturb her more than it did?

“How did you leave Fort William?” he asked. “I stationed a sentry on the land bridge, but he never saw you pass.”

She smiled. “Another question you cannot expect me to answer.”

“It’s a matter of curiosity on my part,” he said, glancing around the cave. His gaze fell on the shelf in the rear of the cave where something metallic glinted in the waning rays of the sun.

His boot heels clicked loudly on the slate floor as he moved to the back. He stood there silently, picking up first one dirk, then another, passing his hand over the remaining sets of pipes. A few pieces of silver, the weapons that had not been confiscated by the English, and the few objects the villagers had been able to salvage from Gilmuir were all hidden there.

“How do you propose we come to an amicable conclusion to our difficulties, Leitis?” he asked casually, as if he had not just discovered a reason to arrest every one of the people of Gilmuir.

He returned to her side, his face bathed in an errant beam of sunlight. His smile, devoid of mockery or cruelty, startled her. It seemed almost a boyish expression, as if he were genuinely amused by what he’d found. Sedgewick would not have hesitated to round up the villagers, would have been pleased for the excuse to imprison them. But then, Sedgewick had never hidden his true nature, while the more she learned of this man, the less she discovered.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

His shrug irritated her. So, too, the fact that he seemed to command the space around him. It was uncomfortable to realize that his authority came less from his strength or his role as colonel than from the force of his character.

“Why are you here?” she asked, placing her arms behind her and gripping her hands tightly. “You don’t need a hostage now, not when you’re going to arrest my uncle. Or do you deny that you’ve been looking for him all day?”

“Why should I deny the truth?” he said easily.

“And when you find him, you’ll hang him.”

“It was his choice to disobey the terms of our bargain, Leitis.”

“He’s an old man with nothing left but dreams of glory. Can you feel no pity for him?”

“Yes, enough to offer you a bargain. Come back with me and I’ll spare your uncle.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “How? He disobeyed your laws.”

“I’ll pardon him,” he said easily. “Or give out that he’s a demented old fool who thinks the world is as it was fifty years ago. No one at Fort William would execute a doddering old man.”

“I’ve no reason to trust your word,” she said tightly. “And I’ve had my share of your hospitality, Colonel. I’ll decline.”

“Even if it means saving your uncle?”

“Go away, Butcher.”

“My name is Alec,” he said calmly. “Or Colonel, if you object to that.”

“Your name is Englishman,” she said, angrily. “Sassenach. Burner of villages. Slaughterer of sheep and cows. You trample crops and accost women. Butcher is a perfect name for you.”

His smile nudged her temper up higher.

“Do I amuse you?” she asked testily.

“Yes,” he said surprisingly. “It’s not often that I’ve been dressed down as thoroughly.

“Come back with me to the fort, Leitis,” he said coaxingly. “If you do, I’ll not look for your uncle.”

“As your hostage? Or your whore?” she said, stepping away from him.

Not only had she to contend with the very real difficulties of survival this past year, but the loss of those
she loved. She and the people he’d seen today were defiant in a way that summoned his admiration.

Even now she glared at him, an expression she’d given him often enough as a child.

His gesture of pardoning Hamish might very well be looked on as aiding the enemy. In addition, the ruse that Hamish was not a crafty, devious, and surly old man would not be easily accepted. But he didn’t tell her that, only strode toward her, reached out and stroked the softness of her cheek with the backs of her fingers. He traced the line of her eyebrow, then pressed his thumb gently against her throat to measure the beat of her blood. Her heart felt like a struggling bird.

Swear on all that’s holy to the MacRaes that you’ll not tell anyone what we’re about to show you.
He could almost see Fergus’s merry face in the fading light, pick out the freckles that dotted the bridge of his nose. Had he grown out of them? And James, serious and somber, with more responsibility than his carefree brother, what had he been like as a man?

Fergus had cut too deep; Alec still had the scar, faint and white on his palm. Beneath the leather of his glove it throbbed now, as it had not in all the intervening years.

“I swear on all that’s holy to protect you,” he said somberly. The ghosts of his childhood companions nodded, satisfied.

He said nothing to hurry her, knowing that she must come to trust him in this matter of her own accord. It was not a decision that would come with persuasion or force.

“Why won’t you leave me alone?” she said finally.

“Because it would be intolerable if anything happened to you,” he said honestly.

She looked surprised. “There are other women in the glen, Butcher, who have as much to fear.”

But they had not played with him in the forest, nor run a race with him. Not one of them had laughed with him so hard that her face grew red with it, or had brothers he had counted as his truest friends.

Pink clouds, streaking across the sky like claw marks, signaled the final moments of the sunset. A moment of farewell, as if the sun regretted its descent. And still she studied him as if to weigh the truth of his words.

“Why should I bother escaping, only to return with you a few hours later?”

“To protect Hamish,” he said simply. “Because if you do not, I’ll have to continue looking for him. I’ll have no choice but to arrest your uncle and have him hanged,” he said softly.

There were so many reasons other than that, but it would, perhaps, be better if he didn’t try to explain those to her. He wanted to keep her safe because of the guilt he felt for his actions of the night before, and because Sedgewick made no pretense of disguising his intentions. And there were the specters of his childhood friends, demanding that he guard her. The boy he had been, innocent and trusting, in glorious and youthful love, stood within him, insisting upon her protection.

“And if he plays the pipes again?” she asked, the words so soft they sounded as if they choked her.

“You have little faith in your uncle’s honor,” he said, threading his fingers through the hair at her temple. She jerked away and stepped back. He smiled as he moved to close the distance between them once again.

“I have the greatest faith in his,” she said softly, “but none in yours.”

“I wish,” he said somberly, “that your uncle cared as much for you, Leitis. He allowed you to be exchanged for him and not once looked back.”

Her expression softened almost into a smile. “He’s my family,” she said quietly. “Whatever his faults, Butcher, he is kin.”

“Will you come back with me of your own accord, then?”

“You will not touch me?”

He shook his head and held out his gloved hand for her.

Finally, she nodded once. She didn’t take his hand. Instead, she pushed past him, leaving the cave. He followed her and they walked together down the hill. They retrieved his horse, but he didn’t mount, content to walk with her the rest of the way to Gilmuir in silence.

At the land bridge, Alec nodded to the sentry on duty.

“Is he here to keep the English at Gilmuir, or keep the Scots from Fort William?” Leitis asked dryly.

“Perhaps his duty is to keep you from running away,” he said, turning to her with a smile. “But then I doubt one sentry can keep you somewhere you do not wish to be, Leitis,” he said.

She looked irritated at his affable mood.

Donald stood at attention in front of the closed door of the laird’s chamber, his expression shadowed by the darkness. At Alec’s appearance he snapped rigidly to attention.

“I have placed your meal in your quarters, sir,” Donald said stiffly, careful not to look in Leitis’s direction before leaving.

“He’s still angry over your escape,” he said.

“Did you punish him for it?” she asked, glancing at the closed door.

“Does he look punished?” he asked crisply. “Beaten, perhaps? Tortured?”

“There are punishments other than physical ones,” she said.

“I can assure you, Leitis, that Donald’s own castigation was far greater than anything I could do to him. He has a well-developed sense of duty and felt as if he’d failed me. Even the English are capable of honor, Leitis,” he said, irritated.

She said nothing, only walked slowly past him. He realized, then, that her attention was directed to the loom that had been moved into the room during his absence. Harrison had placed it where he would have, near the window so that the light could aid Leitis in her work.

“Where did you get this?” she asked faintly, her hands reaching out but hesitating only inches from the wood. The loom was ugly, constructed to be functional, not attractive. Crossbars of thick, planed wood acted as legs, while the frame was an open square, with pegs pounded into the sides to hold the threads. He didn’t presume to understand how it worked.

“I neither stole it nor killed for it,” he said sardonically. It had been a foolish impulse to obtain the loom for her, but one that he could not, even now, regret.

He knew little about the skill, only that Leitis’s mother could often be found sitting at the loom while she hummed to herself. Her fingers would fly over the two frames as she worked, creating a pattern where there had only been an incomprehensible collection of threads.

It was the only occupation that could coax Leitis inside on a summer day. Sometimes, when he went to fetch Fergus and James, she’d be sitting on the bench nodding earnestly as her mother taught her in a soft
and lulling voice, using words he hadn’t understood such as
weft
and
warp
and
heddle.

Leitis said nothing now, trapped in a silence that was alien to her. She wiped her hands on her skirt before placing her fingers gently on the thick frame. The loom was old and there were places where generations of hands must have rested, darkening the wood.

“I’ve no wool to weave,” she said faintly.

An oversight on his part, he realized, and one he’d have to rectify.

“Why did you do this?”

It was easier to speak to her when her voice was filled with derision, not soft wonder. It made him wish to take her into his arms and hold her close, whisper that he would keep her safe.

He had believed that the reasons for bringing her here were complex, rooted in his past and an obligation to a boyhood friendship. But Alec abruptly realized that it was less for Fergus and James than it was for her. He wanted to protect not the child Leitis, but the woman who looked at him with stormy eyes.

Pride was an emotion of the Highlanders, and one she had in abundance. Courage, stubbornness, loyalty, she possessed all those traits that helped these people persevere when others would have been crushed.

The answer he gave her was simplistic, not hinting at the truth beneath.

“For the loss of your home,” he said easily.

“Were you at Culloden?” she asked suddenly, her attention riveted on the loom.

“Yes,” he admitted, determined to tell her the truth when he could. “Why did you want to know?” he asked when she turned.

Her glance rested on his waistcoat, on the badge he wore more out of protection than pride.

“Because,” she said softly, “I cannot ever forget who you are, and what you’ve done.” Her gaze rose to meet his, her eyes deep and unfathomable, as if she wept, but did not allow the tears to fall. “Even if you’re capable of an act of kindness.”

“Consider it bribery, if you wish,” he said. “An incentive to remain here.”

“You have my uncle for that,” she said quietly.

He nodded.

“Who are you,” she asked suddenly, “that you would do such a thing yet threaten to hang Hamish?”

“I’m a soldier,” he said simply. “Whatever pity I feel for Hamish will never prevent me from performing my duty.”