Maren wrung her hands together over and over. ‘It seems our fates are the same, Angel’s and mine. I am at the mercy of scoundrels, and have I not also been sold?’
‘This outrage does not suit you, Maren,’ said Bryce. ‘You can protest all you like, but you will not deflect me. You were looking for something when I came in, and I demand to know what it was.’
‘I suspected you were playing me false, so I wanted to….’
‘Come, come. Surely you can do better than that. Who are you working with? Who set you to do this?’
‘I cannot say.’
‘Cannot, or will not?’ Bryce grabbed hold of Maren and shook her. ‘Stop lying. I cannot help you if you lie to me.’
‘It takes a liar to know a liar. And you cannot help me, nor can anyone.’
‘By God, Maren. Have we become strangers now, after what we shared?’
‘All we have shared is a bed and a lie, and all because you brought a whore home as a wife in contempt of your father. So what do you expect - true love and loyalty?’
Bryce hung his head, his blonde hair flopping over his eyes. Shame and disappointment mingled with his anger to make a bitter brew. ‘I bear only love for my father, and you are no whore, so do not paint yourself as one to push me away,’
‘Oh, have I redeemed myself somehow in your eyes?’ she said with a bitter smile.
‘I suspect you far too clever for a whore, and far too clever to fall into that life. I think you are something far more dangerous,’ said Bryce. ‘You are a spy, Maren.’
It was barely visible, the change in her face from angry to guarded, from attack to defence, and Maren’s smile hardly faltered. In fact, it broadened in a heartbeat. But Bryce had learned to read her, and he knew his accusation had hit home.
‘What nonsense,’ she scoffed. ‘First, I am a whore, and now, a spy? What a low opinion you do have of me.’
‘On the contrary, I rather admire your grit, lass. But I happened to talk to a fellow at the dock in Balloch. That ship, the Jezebel, she sails back and forth to France regularly, and her captain, a fellow called Lawson, is reputed to have no love of the English. Were you passing information to men in the pay of our exiled Stuart King?’
‘What nonsense you speak.’
‘And how valiantly you lie when cornered, my love. And then there’s you, skewering a redcoat. So I would venture you have a common cause with the Jacobites. The fellow also told me there were comings and goings on board the Jezebel. Rough men visited, villains he called them, and he looked like one himself, so they must have been bad. One man he particularly recalls – red-haired and scarred. He described a fellow, not unlike the corpse we found, which you claimed to know nothing of. Apparently, this villain and the captain had a very loud disagreement.’
An icy hand reached into Maren’s throat and squeezed. Could it have been Sawney visiting Lawson? Drayton had said he knew all her dirty little secrets. But why would Sawney make himself known to Lawson if he was spying on him? She tried to keep her voice steady as she said, ‘There are many red-haired men in the Highlands. In fact, we are famous for them.’
‘Aye, but the scar, lass. It was most distinctive - a starburst at the temple. A misfire, most likely. It is possible the wretch tried to take his life once. It would have been a kinder end than the one he met in Balnakiel Woods.’
Maren felt bile rise in her throat as the implications sank in, but she swallowed her fear. ‘Are you going to renounce me, Bryce? Will you have me paraded on a cart to be spat at and hounded by common folk? Will you have me strung up for treason, to kick away my last breath in front of a baying crowd?’
‘I would never give you up to that fate, and you know it.’
‘Nor I, you, and that is why I was searching for secrets. Oh, you will never understand. How could you?’
‘Try me.’
‘I would not waste my breath. You rich folk shape the world to suit yourselves. I might have been one of you had my mother not fallen for a bad man and thrown away her birthright on a bad marriage. But she did, and I ended up poor and at the mercy of men like you. All the power in the land is concentrated in the hands of you few lairds, who ruled like petty, bickering kings over the Highlands while the rest of us grub about in the dirt trying to survive on a pauper’s rations. You grow fat while we bury our children. My father called you maggots – fat, pale wriggling wretches, feeding on the corpses of others, he said.’
‘He sounds delightful.’
‘Oh, he is anything but that. He is a villain of the highest order, making me a villain’s daughter.’
‘Maren, just because your father was a villain does not mean you have to lead that kind of life.’
‘Oh, he was no villain to start with.’
‘Then who was he, lass?’
‘Why should I tell you?’ she spat.
