One Man's Love (5 page)

His troops could be fighting in mire that day, but before they bedded down, time would be spent cleaning their weapons, polishing their brass, and shining their boots. He had discovered years ago that discipline in the details made for better soldiers. Consequently, the men in his command were more concerned about passing morning inspection than in worrying whether or not they would survive the next battle.

“Lice?” Sedgewick asked, an answer couched in the question.

“Have them bathe in vinegar and water,” Alec said. “Beginning immediately.”

Sedgewick frowned but did not respond.

“I want to meet with your commanders tomorrow morning after inspection,” Alec said as they walked down the narrow hallway leading to the front wall.

“Commanders, sir?”

“What is your objection now, Sedgewick?” he asked impatiently, glancing over his shoulder.

“I have had no need to delegate, sir,” Sedgewick said rigidly. “I oversee the details of this command myself.”

“Not an adequate way to manage a great many men, Major,” Alec said sharply.

He turned to Harrison, quietly following them. “I want a staff meeting in the morning,” he said.

His adjutant nodded.

“Let’s see about these cannon, Major,” Alec said, anxious to finish the inspection and rid himself of the other man’s company.

An hour later he left Sedgewick nursing his own petulance and gratefully returned to the chamber in Gilmuir. Removing his coat, he hung it carefully on the peg beside the door. There was no armoire in this room, nothing of the studied comfort of his home in England. But then, there hadn’t been for many years. Strange, how coming to Scotland had initiated in him a longing for all those things he had once set aside with such ease. Or perhaps it was not so much Scotland as it was the fact that he was weary of war and campaigning.

He hadn’t realized how tired he was until this last year.

He went to the fire, stood staring down at the remnants of cold ashes. How long had they been here? Years?

His aide, Donald, had already made his presence known. In addition to moving Alec’s dispatch case in here, along with a small round table and two chairs, the rubble that had littered the floor had been brushed away. The counterpane had been removed along with the mattress. In addition, Donald had placed two lanterns and a variety of stubby candles on the mantel and a thick candle in the middle of the table. Signs of progress, then, and habitation.

He sat at the table, opened his case, and retrieved his maps. His adult mind sketched in details his memory of childhood had forgotten. He divided his
territory into quadrants and assigned a schedule of patrols. Beginning tomorrow, he would begin to ascertain the degree of rebellion in this section of Scotland. He doubted, frankly, that the Highlanders would ever challenge England again, so thoroughly had they been defeated.

The schedule finished, he began his report to General Wescott, his immediate superior. He carefully worded his overall impressions, along with his proposed changes in command. But he did not mention the fire or his opinion that Major Sedgewick was unfit for any type of command. Criticism of the man after only one day of observation would be seen as impulsive and rash.

But he had struck Leitis, an act Alec could not forgive.

He leaned back in his chair and surrendered to memory only hours old. Her coloring was too vibrant for her to be considered attractive in England, where a pallid appearance was all the rage. But she fit this land of sharp cliffs and rolling glens. She was taller than he had thought she would be, and too slender.

What had life been like for her since that day when the carriage had taken him home to England? Improvident thoughts, almost childish ones, as if his boyish self had escaped from the box where he’d been carefully stored all these years.

I am Ian
. Words he could not speak to her.
I am the boy you knew so long ago.
Time had changed both of them.

He concentrated on his letter again, pushing Leitis’s face from his mind with difficulty.

He sealed the dispatch and left it on the table for Donald to take to the messenger. A nicety of his rank, a courier when he wished it. As a lowly lieutenant he
had not been so fortunate. Even so, his correspondence to his family had dwindled and finally stopped years ago. He couldn’t remember why, now. It had simply become a habit not to write. An attrition of caring, perhaps, aided by the fact that he had not seen any of them for years.

His father had never been the same after his mother had died. Gone was the Earl of Sherbourne who had once laughed with abandon, who rode with his son and showed him the best fishing places along the River Brye. The man who’d taken his place was somber and stern, and had little time for the pursuit of pleasure just for the sake of it.

He’d married again, to a woman who had been sweet and kind to him. Patricia, Alec remembered, had sided with him when he had wanted to purchase his commission.

There had been, after all, few options open to the son of an earl. Either fritter his time away waiting for his father to conveniently die, or manage the properties soon to be left him. His nature despised indolence and his father’s factors left the earl well informed and ably served. Alec had never regretted his choice to serve in the military.

What would the earl say to see his current accommodations? Or even better, he thought wryly, to witness his pleasure at such Spartan conditions?

He surprised himself by pulling another piece of paper closer, dipping his quill in the inkwell, and beginning a letter to his father.

The only residual signs of the storm were the puddles in the gravel and the slow drip from the water barrels. The air was clear, as it was after a storm, but it still tasted sourly of smoke.

The journey across the land bridge was slow out of deference to the age of two of her companions.

Leitis had not been to Gilmuir since the day the English came. That afternoon she had stood upon a high hill and watched as the castle was systematically destroyed. The cannon had sounded like thunder; the fist of God knocking the old fortress to the ground, brick by brick. It had taken two days for it to finally crumble, and she had watched the destruction of the MacRae stronghold in a bitter kind of joy.

A shameful admission, but at the time she had been grieving for Marcus and for her family. It had seemed a right and proper thing that Gilmuir should be razed. She had been so filled with rage and pain that she had wanted others to suffer as well. It appeared as if she had gotten her wish after all. All of Scotland now wept.

Fort William loomed like a squat monster on the landscape. A stark red from the distance, it appeared even uglier up close.

She gathered her courage into little parcels, tying it together with a net made of sheer bluster. She didn’t pretend that their errand would be easily accomplished. But Hamish did not deserve to die for his foolishness.

She pulled down on her sleeves, a nervous gesture, but no amount of tugging would make them come below her elbows. Of pale blue, this was the least favorite and the most ill-fitting of her four dresses. Now it was the only garment she owned.

“There’s no door,” Ada said, staring at the front of the fort. “Only those windows.”

“They’re for cannon,” Malcolm said, squinting at the wall.

“How do we get in?” Mary asked.

“Perhaps we should walk around to the rear,” Leitis suggested.

“They have no guards about,” Malcolm said.

“We don’t pose much of a threat,” Leitis replied.

“Still and all, I’m not in a mood to be shot because I’m skulking around an English fort.”

Leitis frowned at him, led the way down the end of one long wall, only to find a courtyard, one filled with soldiers and animals. For a moment Leitis could only blink in amazement at the scene.

In the corner a man was stirring a huge wooden wash pot with a long-handled pole. And in another corner men bathed in what looked like troughs, splashing each other and yelling as an odor reminiscent of brine wafted in the air, vying with the animal smells.

“Dear Saint Columba,” Mary whispered, “they’re all naked as the day they were born.”

“Not quite,” Ada said with a chuckle. “They’re a bit larger than bairns.”

Malcolm sent Ada a fierce look, but she only wiggled her eyebrows back at him.

“We’ve come at wash day,” Leitis said, startled.

“And not simply sheeting and clothes, either,” Mary said.

“You’d think the lot of you had never seen a naked man before,” Malcolm muttered.

“I’ve never seen an Englishman,” Mary said, moving closer to Leitis. The four of them huddled in the corner, pressed together so tightly that they could feel each other breathe.

“What do we do now?” Ada asked.

“Find the colonel,” Malcolm offered. “Unless he’s bathing, too.”

“Do you suppose it’s some sort of English ritual?” Mary asked, peering over Leitis’s shoulder.

“If it is,” Leitis said, “I doubt it’s repeated in winter.”

“They’d freeze their…” After a quick look at Malcolm’s frown, Ada’s words stuttered to a halt.

“Well, we have to do something,” Leitis said. “We can’t simply stand here gaping.”

“I’d rethink my words, lass,” Malcolm said, frowning. “It’s the three of you who are acting all ninny-like.”

Leitis squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, stepped forward before she could lose her nerve. A man walking across the courtyard halted and stared at her. He approached her slowly, as if he feared she was only a vision.

“I need to speak with the colonel,” she said resolutely. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her, her chin tilted up.

“You want to see the Butcher?” His accent was difficult for her to understand; the look in his eyes was not.

He had a thin, almost wolfish face, his grin revealing childlike nubbins of teeth and gums that were red and inflamed. His white shirt was stained and gaped open to reveal a hairy chest. It was evident he had not yet taken advantage of the bath.

“The Butcher?” she asked faintly.

“The Butcher of Inverness. The new commander.”

“No, the colonel,” she said, shaking her head. The man who saved the village could not be the Butcher of Inverness.

“That’s the one,” he said, nodding. He looked, she thought dully, pleased at her shock.

The Butcher of Inverness. They had all heard tales of the man. Those Scots who had escaped the slaughter of Culloden had been imprisoned at Inverness,
only to be sent to their deaths on a whim. It was said that the Butcher would spare a prisoner because it amused him, or send him to the gallows because of the look in a man’s eye.

The Butcher of Inverness? Her stomach clenched, and Leitis felt as if she might be ill.

The knock on the door was not unexpected, nor was Donald’s face. His words, however, were a surprise.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but we’ve got trouble.”

Donald had been with him ever since Flanders, having joined the army filled with dreams of grandeur and far-off battles. At first his light blond hair, rosy cheeks, and eagerness to please had marked him as barely out of boyhood. But in the past year Donald had been promoted to sergeant and lost the last of his innocence. There were times when his smile was a bit too forced and his laughter had an edge to it. The effect of Inverness, no doubt.

“What is it?” Alec asked.

Donald stepped inside the room. “Sir, there’s a group of Scots in the courtyard, and there are women among them. It’s almost a riot.”

By the time Donald had finished his sentence, Alec was putting on his coat and out the door.

Four Scots stood surrounded by at least thirty men in various stages of undress. One elderly woman was holding her hands clenched to her chest and one old man looked ready for a fight. But it was the younger women the crowd was concentrating on, and one of those women was Leitis.

She took a few steps back to avoid one man’s touch, only to bump into another man behind her. The man laughed as he pulled both her arms backward.

“Please,” she said, “let us go.”

“Give me a kiss and maybe I will,” the man in front of her said.

“Evidently you have a great deal of time on your hands, Sergeant,” Alec said curtly. “However, I can think of a number of tasks to occupy your time, none of which includes terrorizing women.”

The soldiers surrounding Leitis and the other woman stepped back quickly when they realized that they had been overheard.

“Begging your pardon, Colonel,” the sergeant said. “But she’s a Scot.”

It had been a long day; he had been in the saddle since dawn. Surely that was the only reason for the anger that nearly overpowered him then. It was too much like the emotion he felt on the battlefield, a visceral rage that masked his will to survive.

“What exactly does that mean, Sergeant, that she’s a Scot?” he asked carefully, expunging from his voice any hint of emotion.

“Well, you know how they are, sir,” the man said. “They’d do anything for a bit of bread and such.” He grinned at Alec, an expression no doubt meant to convey masculine understanding. It had the effect of making Alec wish he were wearing his sword.

Leitis turned and faced him. Her face was pale, except for the mark of Sedgewick’s blow darkening her skin. He frowned at it, suddenly irritated by her foolishness.

“The men stationed here haven’t seen a woman for months,” he said sharply. “Did you give no thought to your safety?”

She didn’t answer his question, only asked one of her own. “Are you the new commander of Fort William?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper. “The Butcher of Inverness?”

He nodded once.

She took a deep breath. “I am Leitis MacRae,” she said. “You have my uncle here,” she said. “I have come to ask for his release.”

“Have you?”

She still possessed the devil’s own arrogance. Who else would demand of him concessions when a hundred men surrounded her and her puny group of rescuers?

He spun around and led the way through Gilmuir, more in an effort to organize his thoughts than a wish to have privacy for their meeting.