It couldn’t be so.
“Please tell me it isn’t so!” she demanded, and began to cry. He couldn’t be dead.
But he was.
Tomas noticed her first and came striding toward her, the look in his eyes dark and frightening, but she wasn’t afraid. He wouldn’t dare touch her in front of so many people.
“Elizabet!” he called out, sounding relieved to see her. “Dear God, where have you been?”
She ran past him, pushing his arms away from her as she stumbled through the crowd, meeting Seana’s familiar gaze. The woman’s expression was filled with pity, and Elizabet cried out in grief at what she was beginning to comprehend.
Tears blurred her vision.
Faces began to melt before her eyes.
“Elizabet!” shouted one of her father’s men. She recognized his voice but didn’t see his face.
She stumbled to her knees beside the gaping hole in the ground. Beside her, some man stood frozen at his task, dirt piled high upon his shovel, ready to throw it down into the open grave. Blind anger surged up from the depths of her, and she shoved him away.
“John!” she sobbed, staring down into the black hole. He was already half covered with soil.
Someone came forward and tried to comfort her. Someone else came and dragged her to her feet.
She felt suddenly dizzy. Everything faded as though it were naught but a terrible dream.
The last thing she remembered before blackness fell over her was Broc’s face as he came toward her.
CHAPTER 25
Elizabet sat weeping at Montgomerie’s table.
Seana and Meghan stood at her back, both trying to soothe her.
“If she wishes to go home, ’tis her right,” Tomas said in her defense.
Piers remained unyielding. “Her father sent her to me, and I’ll not turn her about and send her home in her time of distress!”
Piers sat across from her, watching Tomas pace angrily before the table, but she was weeping too hard to express her wishes.
What a fool she had been!
How could she have believed in Broc? What was wrong with her that she would throw herself at the first man who showed her any affection.
Colin and his brothers had dragged Broc away, shouting and cursing at them to let him go. They’d had to pin him down and speak to him in low tones. Elizabet was told that he had agreed to leave, only if Piers promised that Elizabet would not be left alone in Tomas’s care.
But it wasn’t his right to request such a thing. She repudiated him as her husband. Their vows had not been spoken before God.
It didn’t matter that in her heart she had felt every last word. She would always bear the painful memory of their brief time together. She had wanted so very much to believe in him.
“You don’t believe that idiot Scot!” Tomas shouted in anger.
“I don’t know what to believe,” Piers said.
Tomas must have stamped his foot in protest.
Elizabet glanced up to find his face mottled with anger.
“You have two witnesses who swear they saw that damned savage kill John before their very eyes. Will you call them both liars, Montgomerie?”
