“You sought to stop these dark deeds,” she said, proving it.
“I did.” Marmaduke nodded. “I refused to take part in such villainy, especially against women. My peers’ chivalry toward the fairer sex did not extend across the border, or the classes.”
“What happened?”
Marmaduke’s gut twisted. “Terrible things. Soul-chilling, irreversible acts.”
Cold fingers traced his scar.
Loving fingers.
Ethereal ones meant to encourage when he may have faltered.
Lady Caterine dipped her strong, warm fingers into the salve-pot again, smoothed more of the unguent onto his ribs. “Did you wheel your horse about, gallop away across the moors, so ending your days as belted knight of England?”
“Nay,” he told her, though he knew such a cowardly escape might have been wiser. “I took up my sword against my own men. Men I now think of as black-hearted sons of Satan for the wickedness they displayed that day. I would have cut down every last one of them, but these were amongst the best knights in the realm and I was one facing many.”
“God’s mercy,” she breathed, her compassion melding the two pairs of tender hands into one.
And with Arabella’s blessing came the strength to confront his other ghosts.
The English ones.
Ripping open old wounds forced him to relive every biting lash of the whip that had scored his back.
“You needn’t tell me more if it distresses you.”
Marmaduke blinked. “Nay, I do not mind, for it is how I came to meet my late wife. Further, I believe that good comes of all our trials and hardships, even if we must sometimes search far and long to see the truth of it.”
Even so, a bitter taste filled his mouth. So many years later, he could still feel the corded flails shredding his flesh.
The worst pain of all had been knowing that English hands wielded the whip, for each time the lashes cut into his back, another of his youthful ideals had withered and died.
Until none remained.
Even his burning love of his homeland had been wrested from him that day.
“I was stripped and beaten,” he finally told her, sparing her ears the vilest of the grisly deeds they’d rained upon him. “Flogged and left for dead by my own men.”
“Duncan MacKenzie found you?”
“His father,” Marmaduke amended. “That good man took me to his hall where his womenfolk nursed me to health. Every man, woman, and child beneath his roof welcomed me into their midst and refused to let me die. They tended my wounds, inside and out, and it’s been my greatest honor to serve them ever since.”
Glancing away, he stared at the slow-burning peat fire, once more seeing other flames, friendly ones this time. As were the faces evoked by recalling the massive hearth in Eilean Creag’s great hall.
Then a strong gust of sea wind rattled the window shutters and the flames and the faces faded.
The memories remained.
“I am beginning to understand.” Caterine trailed her fingertips along his collarbone, down his sides and then away. “Arabella was one of the women who tended you?”
“Nay, she was but a slip of a girl at the time.” The images that had once made him throw back his head with laughter, now flooded him with pain. “She was ruled by her passions even then, a spitfire and hellion. She made faces at me and called me names some knights I’m acquainted with wouldn’t know the meaning of.”
“But she grew into a beautiful woman and stole your heart.”
“That she did, my lady.” Marmaduke couldn’t lie. “And for all her devilry when I first arrived at Eilean Creag, not a night of our marriage passed that she didn’t massage my blighted back.”
“Do you think she’d mind if I lent you such comfort now?” The words came so soft they could’ve been a rustling of the wind.
