Gerald looked as if he’d been slapped. “I followed you, of course. How stupid do you think I am?”
“How long ago?” Nathaniel asked.
“A couple of years ago,” Gerald said, drawing himself up and puffing out his chest. “It wasn’t hard. Neither was learning the language, but I went to Yale, not Columbia.”
“So you did,” Nathaniel agreed. “Well done, you.”
Gerald wasn’t finished, apparently. “I befriended the laird, promised him details, got him details, and waited for when I could put you where you are now.”
“Where you’ll let me rot.”
“That’s the plan.” He smirked, then dropped Nathaniel’s dagger again into the muck. “Grandfather will have no choice but to make me his heir once he resigns himself to your being dead. Let that thought keep you warm on your way to hell.”
Nathaniel would have shrugged negligently, but he was too tired to. He watched his cousin crawl up the ladder, watched the ladder be pulled out of the pit, then didn’t bother to watch the grate be put back in place.
He hadn’t thought his life would end with such little fanfare, but perhaps it was what he deserved. Recluse in life, anonymous in death.
He stared at his dagger glinting faintly across the dungeon from him, then closed his eyes. He would die surrounded not by those he loved but by cold, damp, and vermin.
The only thing he could hope for was that Gerald would be satisfied with all that money and forget about other things. He couldn’t bear to think about what the man might do if he found Emma in a darkened alley—
Nay, that wouldn’t happen. She would be safe. The MacLeod men would understand what had happened to him, someone would nose out Gerald as having been responsible, and they would take care of her.
He wasn’t sure he could contemplate anything else.
Chapter 29
Emmastood in front of the wall in her cottage, almost blind with weariness, and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. She’d been looking at the same thing off and on for almost a week with no appreciable change in her thinking. She rubbed her eyes, then looked again, because she had to find something that made sense while she still could.
Nathaniel had been gone a week.
A week in a dungeon, if that’s where he was, was too long.
She rubbed her eyes and looked again at what was in front of her. She’d been doing the same thing whenever she’d had a chance, mostly after an interminable day spent with Patrick MacLeod, learning how to be a medieval ghost.
That’s what they’d eventually taken to calling what she was going to have to be, because no other persona had a hope of getting her in and out of 1387 with herself and Nathaniel both alive and moving. Her plan was to sneak in, find him, and get them out with as little damage as possible. If she got into trouble, she was going to pose as a journeyman blacksmith and try to buy herself time that way.
It was too bad Patrick MacLeod wasn’t in a position to go back and take care of things for her. He and Nathaniel looked so much alike, that fact alone probably would have scared Simon Fergusson into coughing up the guy in his dungeon.
She knew exactly how Patrick MacLeod looked, because she’d spent a week working with him on those medieval ghost skills that Bertie Wordsworth would have salivated to call hisown. It had come to the point where she’d asked him to stop being so careful. Jamie and Ian had turned their backs and put their fingers in their ears. She’d earned a bruise or two, but unfortunately that medieval chivalry had been too much for Patrick to get past. She had the feeling he definitely wasn’t so gentle with the men he trained.
She envied their wives, she had to admit, if those were the sort of men they had guarding their doors and their children, not to mention their own selves.
She had the feeling her life might look a bit like that, if she could get Nathaniel out of the dungeon and leave him free to possibly ask her for some sort of permanent arrangement.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried to get back to 1387. She had, every day. She was almost tired of basing her dinner takeout orders down at the pub on whatever would add up to that amount so she would get either a bill for it or change back from it. That Keith MacLeod had just looked at her blandly when she’d been standing at his bar every night, calculating furiously, was a mixed blessing. He was helpful, but she suspected he thought she was crazy. She couldn’t blame him.
She was beginning to wonder about that herself.
Or she would have, if she hadn’t had the wall in front of her to keep her company every night after she’d failed to get back to where she needed to go.
But today was going to be different. She’d begun early that morning simply because she hadn’t slept well the night before. Dreams of haggis and change and a nagging feeling that she was missing something had woken her at dawn and left her pacing, unable to find any relief. She was scheduled to go foraging with Patrick at noon, so she’d taken the opportunity to spend some time with her board. She had added several pages to what was there, but all she could see was how much Nathaniel looked like Patrick.
It occurred to her with a startling flash of something that felt like Fate clunking her over the head... What if Nathaniel was actually related to Patrick, and not with eight hundred years separating them?
Was it possible Nathaniel was one of Malcolm’s bastard sons in truth?
She leaned over her coffee table and sorted through papersthere until she found the things Alex Smith had sent Nathaniel. She wasn’t so much concerned with Malcolm’s genealogy as she was—
