Chapter Eleven
Derek sat in his chamber, his face lit only by the single candle on the table in front of him. A rivulet of wax was running slowly downward from the flickering flame. He watched its progress, his eyes narrowed, his fingers neatly folded under his chin.
The fire had gone out. He didn’t care. He didn’t notice how cold the room had become. All he wanted to think about was the candle. Nothing else. Not until word came back that it was done.
He was going to be responsible for a laird’s death. It was a big risk he was taking and he could only pray it would work out.
He took slow steady breaths, in and out, trying to keep calm. Soon he would need to appear shocked and he wanted it to seem as natural as possible. How best to be surprised?
“The laird’s been kidnapped? Oh no, how awful.”
“Dead you say?”
“I can’t believe it. How?”
He tried to twist his face into despair, doing his best to make himself cry. No tears came. It wasn’t easy acting shocked when he didn’t know if the plan would work or not.
He looked at the quill pen laid on the table beside the candle. Such a simple little thing, he thought, picking it up and examining the drop of ink still left at the tip. He could use it to send another letter to his father, only to have it ignored once again. Or he could use the same pen to hire a bunch of mercenaries to kidnap a laird. Many things could be achieved by the sweep of a quill upon parchment.
It was all Andrew’s fault. Not least because he’d taught Derek to read and write. If he hadn’t, Derek would have been unable to write the letter. The thought was amusing in many ways.
The letter had gone out a few days earlier to those he’d hired to burn the hall. It made clear that it would be in their interest to be at the clearing near the stone circle twelve miles north-west of MacLeish castle. Derek had ridden out early, hoping that Andrew wouldn’t return before he got back. That would ruin his carefully thought out plans.
Burning him in the old hall had not worked. How was he to know Rory would call Andrew back to the castle at the last minute?
This time he hoped things would work out better. The candle began to splutter. Still he did not move. He kept staring and breathing slowly, waiting to hear one way or another.
The rest of the castle had been too busy working on Beth’s building scheme to notice when he went to the stone circle.
She was part of the reason he had written the letter in the first place. All the careful attention he had paid to the castle’s flaws ready for the assault and she was merrily fixing them all. That fact had forced his hand before he was ready.
When Andrew had refused to be inside the old hall to burn to death his first thought was a full frontal assault. He had suggested as much to his father but had been told in no uncertain terms that the truce would not be broken unless they could guarantee an easy victory.
At first he thought the flaws in the defenses would be enough but then he thought about Andrew’s routine, how he always went swimming after a long ride. That was when he thought just how his father would be able to guarantee the easy victory he wanted.
Derek met the mercenaries in the clearing. At their front was their leader, Rufus Longshanks, a scarred immensely tall villain who would sell his own grandmother to the Normans if the purse was heavy enough to make it worth his while.
“You offer me half a pound of silver for this?” he said when Derek arrived, waving his letter back at him. “It’s not enough. You have yet to pay us for the fire. I want a pound.”
“You would have got a pound if he’d died in the fire like he was supposed to but you didn’t think to check first, did you?”
“How were we to know he wasn’t in the building? You swore he’d be there. We did everything you asked of us.”
“I didn’t ask you to burn the houses. Why did you do that?”
Rufus shrugged. “He showed no sign of coming after us. Why didn’t he chase us so we could kill him out of sight like you said?”
Derek felt his temper rising but he managed to bite down on it. “I was sure he’d chase the MacLeish tartan into that trap,” he snapped. “That was not my fault.”
“We sat in that wood waiting for him, swords and rope ready, like you said.”
“Look, forget about that. How much did you make last year?” he asked, walking over to the altar and lifting himself onto it, sitting facing the men.
“A quarter of a pound almost. Why?”
“Because if you’d done your job you’ve have had half a pound by now.”
“We did our job.”
