Somehow, Kendra didn’t think it applied in this case.
“Are you sure you don’t want the master’s chamber?” Niall asked.
Trick shook his head. “I wouldn’t dream of moving your father. There must be a spare bed here somewhere.”
And that was how Trick and Kendra came to follow Niall up what seemed like miles of winding stone stairs, until at last they stepped into a huge, deserted chamber.
Their footfalls echoed off the wooden floor as they entered. A few torches on the walls did little in the way of brightening the place, and the room gave off a musty scent that spoke of long disuse.
Kendra stared up at the gloomy vaulted stone ceiling. “It’s spooky.”
Niall gave her a wan smile. “Cromwell garrisoned his soldiers in here when he commandeered the castle during the war. A hundred of them, lying foot-to-head on the floor, with a second hundred on another level that rested on those posts you see protruding from the wall.” He pressed a key into Trick’s hand. “Your staff has moved your things up here already. Shall I have them sent up to attend you? You’ve a valet, do you not, and a ladies’ maid?”
“Aye, my man goes by Cavanaugh, and Jane sees to her grace.” Trick’s gaze met Kendra’s. “But I think we can fend for ourselves tonight.”
Though she didn’t know if he’d intended to remind her, Kendra’s skin prickled as she recalled what she’d promised would happen this evening. Then he looked away, pensively moving off, and she knew that he was no more thinking of such things than she had been.
After all the upheaval today, last night seemed so very long ago.
“Good night, then,” Niall said.
“Good night,” she returned softly.
Listening to the young man’s footsteps fade, she shivered. The candle in her hand wavered, throwing shadows on the gray stone walls. “I dislike to think of Cromwell visiting this place, let alone using it as a headquarters.” Oliver Cromwell had been indirectly responsible for the deaths of her parents and her own exile that followed.
“It was against my father’s wishes, to say the least. He was a Royalist, through and through.” When Trick wandered to one of the deep-set windows, his voice echoed back out from it. “My mother talked him into leaving.”
“Did she, really?” Squeezing into the niche, Kendra joined him at the window. In the small space he felt warm and near, yet cold and distant, too. By moonlight, she could barely make out the village below, surrounded by acres of wild pasture and tended fields. “This was her family’s ancestral home, wasn’t it? Why would she willingly surrender it?”
“She was a Covenanter,” he said shortly, stepping back into the room. “Come, our chamber is this way.”
He ducked through an arch in the wall and pushed open a thick oak door. On her way inside, she shot one last look at the empty vaulted chamber. The garrison. She wondered if it was haunted by ghosts of dead soldiers.
Not that she believed in anything like that.
The bedchamber was enormous. A four-poster bed in its center looked dwarfed, and after the din of the wake below, the room seemed deathly quiet.
She moved to set the candle on a bedside table, the dull wooden floor sounding gritty beneath her shoes. A fire burned on the hearth, and she wondered who had built it. Jane or Cavanaugh? One of Duncraven’s servants? “Are we the only ones up here?”
“Aye. The towers are mirror images. One great room and one bedchamber on each top level.” With a rueful smile, he locked the door behind them. “As a child, I was terrified to come up here alone.”
“I’m rather terrified now,” Kendra admitted. She sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. “After you left the place to Cromwell, how long was it before you returned?”
“Until now.” Trick shrugged out of his surcoat, folding it over the back of a chair that sat before an immense carved oak desk. “My father settled my mother with relations and spirited me away to France. I was ten.” Abruptly he dropped to the chair. “I never saw my mother again.” His voice cracked. “And now I never will.”
Kendra rose to wind her arms around his neck from behind. “Surely she knows that you cared, that you came for her.”
“Maybe.” Sighing, he absently slid open the top desk drawer and riffled through some papers. Dust flew out, tickling her nose. She felt him stiffen. “Sweet Mary, would you look at this.”
She straightened. “What is it?”
“A letter. From Oliver Cromwell himself.”
A chill ran up her spine. “We were just talking about him. How odd.” Irrationally afraid to touch the evil man’s writings, she kept her distance while Trick scanned the page. “When was it written?”
“Eighteenth November, 1650.”
“So long ago. Nearly eighteen years.”
