“You have me interested in different figures,” he returned. “You’re a conundrum.”
“Because I brought ye trousers and I tried to kill ye in a bog? Ye’re a madman.”
Nowthatamused him. “I don’t mean to insult you, but people far more skilled than you have attempted to murder me, and in far more lethal ways.”
“Aye? What ways?” This time a twinkle danced in her black eyes.
Almost before his mind could grasp the fact that she’d just jested with him, Gabriel stepped forward, nudging her back against the rough cottage wall directly behind her, and held her there with his forearm across her chest. He took her mouth, warm and soft and tasting of tea. And this time he was certain she kissed him back. “You seem more lethal already,” he murmured, teasing at her lips again, then stepping back before she could shove him away. Strategy.
Her gaze remained focused on his mouth, until finally she cleared her throat, looked up, and poked a finger into his chest. “Enough nonsense, Sassenach. Ye wanted to follow me, and here we are. Do ye mean to go inside with me?”
Putting aside the way she’d just accused him of nonsense—a word he’d never heard associated with himself before this moment, he glanced toward the small cottage’s door. “Yes, I do,” he decided. Not many people—none, in fact—made a habit of poking him, either. For a woman who barely came to his chin to do so was oddly arousing. Of course he found everything about her arousing, even if that was counter to every considerable bit of common sense he possessed. She’d called him a madman; perhaps he was.
She nodded. “Through this door, this isnae aboot ye. Or me. Ye keep yer mouth shut, or ye wait ootside.”
Gabriel lifted an eyebrow at the orders, but she’d intrigued him again, damn it all. In a matter of two days she’d proven she wasn’t like any other woman of his experience, and she continued to do so almost by the minute. “Agreed.”
With a last warning look at him, she moved sideways to rap on the simple oak door, put a smile on her face, and pushed it open without waiting for an answer. Gabriel gave her a second, then followed her inside and closed the door behind them.
The first thing he noticed was the dark; it overwhelmed everything. The cottage had no windows at all, with the only light coming from a small fire in a tiny fireplace. His well-honed instinct for survival kept him with his back to the door while he waited for his vision to adjust to the dimness.
Then the smell touched him; dead, rotting flesh combined with an odd mix of tea and herbs. He recognized it immediately from his years in the army—gangrene, which someone was trying to treat with poultices. Fiona had moved across the tiny space to sit in a chair by its single bed. As she produced a thick slice of bread from the small sack she carried, she began speaking softly in Gaelic.
Gabriel didn’t understand a word of it, but the roll and lilt of her voice mesmerized him. The smell, the cottage, the world itself faded away on the soft rise of her words. He wanted to move closer, but this time sternly resisted the impulse. She’d made it clear that this wasn’t about him, and he had no wish to disturb any of it.
As she spoke, she tore off small pieces of the bread, dipped them in a cup of water, and fed them to the withered figure on the bed. A woman, he decided, only because of the length of the gray hair piled about her head.
A second figure stirred from right beside him. It took every ounce of his training not to jump. Eyes that reflected the firelight stared at him as she scurried over to the bed. Pulling the thin blanket aside, she removed the heavy bandage on the old woman’s left foot, washed the wound, and put on fresh wrappings.
When Fiona stood to put her arms beneath the old woman’s shoulders, clearly meaning to lift the figure off the bed, he stepped forward. Putting a hand on Fiona’s hip, he nudged her aside and slid his arms beneath the invalid’s shoulders and knees, then lifted.
It was like lifting a doll, he imagined, though he’d never had occasion to hold one. The old woman seemed more dust and cloth than flesh, and he held her as carefully as he could. In front of him Fiona and the other woman stripped the blanket from the bed, carried out the top layer of straw beneath it, and brought in armloads of fresh, sweet-smelling stuff to replace it.
Once they’d put down a blanket and secured it over the straw, he laid the old woman down again and stepped back. Fiona tucked her in, still talking quietly, then kissed the woman on the forehead and backed away. She gestured at Gabriel, and he pulled open the door and followed her back outside into the sunlight.
“That woman needs light and fresh air,” he said with a scowl as soon as he closed the door behind them. “And maggots to clean out the corruption. The damp in there will finish her off more quickly than the gangrene.”
“Aye,” Fiona answered, walking back to the edge of the stream, where she knelt and washed off her hands and arms.
“You have a castle with fifty rooms sitting a mile away. Why haven’t you—”
“Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed, straightening again. “Why didnae I ever think of that? Thank heaven ye came along when ye did!”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes, and declined to offer her an arm as they made their way back to the path. “And yet despite your sarcasm, she’s still lying there in the dark.”
Fiona bent to pick up a fallen shovel and set it back against a cottage’s stone wall. “A hundred years ago, yer castle was the seat of Laird MacKittrick, a clan Maxwell chieftain. This corner of the clan gathered there every year to arrange marriages and feast and celebrate. Then Laird MacKittrick stood up fer the Jacobites and against the Crown. He lost his head, and the Crown gave his estate to a Sassenach duke.”
“Lattimer,” he finished, wondering what in the world this had to do with an old woman suffering from an infected foot. “I’ve heard the story.”
“It’s nae a story,” she retorted. “It’s true history. And it means yers is a Sassenach hoose now, whether the Duke of Lattimer resides here or nae. And Mrs. Ailios Eylar willnae set foot in it. And before ye suggest we carry her to Lattimer whether she likes it or nae, I’ll tell ye she’d rather die in her own wee cottage than leave it fer an English castle. Because taking her inside Lattimer would be akin to dragging her oot of the Highlands.”
He’d encountered that level of hatred before, though previously it had been on the battlefield, over the point of a weapon, or as he and his men marched through a village that might have preferred not to be liberated. The idea that the frail woman he’d lifted in his arms hated him because some dead king had given a gift to some ancestor whose name he didn’t even know, unsettled him. He’d never had a lineage to even speak of before now. And he’d apparently inherited its burdens, as well. “That’s why you told me to be silent, then. So she wouldn’t know I was English.”
“Aye.”
By now word of his presence had obviously spread through the village, because everywhere he turned Gabriel caught glimpses of faces—peering at him from around corners, from behind wagons, out of half-closed doorways and through shop windows. Did they know he was the Duke of Lattimer? Or did his simply being English make him a feared curiosity?
“The old duke,” he said aloud, stopping while Fiona untied her black mare from the hitching post. “Was he a cruel man? Or did you just hate him for being English?”
