17
Margaret had only seen the dungeons once before.
It was a week after she had arrived at the castle to be a servant girl, and she had been called upon to bring water and buckets of table scraps down to the prisoners. The woman who usually tended to this abysmal chore had fallen down some stone steps and injured her leg, and so Elspeth sent Margaret to do it, “to toughen her up,” Elspeth had said.
Margaret had not felt especially “tougher” after her trip down to that hellish place. If anything, what she saw down there had frightened her so horribly that she had nightmares about it to this day.
Tonight, those nightmares had become a gruesome reality for her.
The air reeked of mold and raw waste. The stone walls were damp and filthy, engraved with the names and puns and prayers of a hundred prisoners who had been down there previously, almost all of whom had perished, no doubt, either from disease and neglect or at the hands of the clan’s executioner.
The heavy, rusty shackles around her wrists chafed and dug into her flesh, and her blood mingled with the dried and crusted blood of those who had occupied them before her. There was only one torch alight in the entire cavernous place, and so most of it was cloaked in deep shadows, where the rats and centipedes skittered freely through the straw of her bedding and over her arms and legs, no matter how many times she shrieked and brushed them away. She was sure she could feel them moving in her hair, no matter how frantically she scratched at her scalp.
There were wails of pain and fear from the darkness surrounding her. She heard cries, curses, pleading, and protestations of innocence. She was certain some of her fellow prisoners were being tortured, though she did not know how. The images her mind conjured up were grisly indeed.
Would they torture her as well?
The guards delighted in making her believe so. They leered and sneered, looking like hideous ogres in the flickering light of the torch as they guaranteed her a thousand different forms of violence and degradation. Half of them insisted that Seamus had “personally promised” her to them before the others and listed the many colorful ways in which they intended to abuse such a privilege.
Margaret desperately wished she could believe that their threats were idle. But try as she might, she could not think of any reason why a brute such as Seamus would have any reason to keep her alive and unharmed once Brodie and Isla were married and had relocated to the MacKenzie castle. He could invent any excuse for them to never see her again—that she had run away, or been banished, or perhaps had contracted some illness and died suddenly.
The bride and groom would be saddened, surely. But there would be nothing left for them to do but accept it.
Which will it be, then?Margaret asked herself, frenzied with sheer panic.Seamus will not simply cast me out for fear that I would seek out Brodie and Isla and tell them of my captivity. Will he allow me to rot down here? To die of starvation or thirst, or as a result of a chill caught from the cold and damp? Will he order me hanged or beheaded in some deep and private chamber within this dungeon? Will he have me brutalized first for having displeased him so?
Each new question surfaced in her mind like bloated corpses rising to the surface of a black and bottomless lake, frightening her out of her wits.
There was no hope for her now. Only darkness and torment.
Please Lord, she begged,I shall not pray to You for my deliverance, as I know I have no hope of it. I have done my best to live a righteous life, and I have faith that when my time comes, I will be welcomed into Your kingdom.
I only humbly ask that you hold Isla and Brodie in your embrace for all the rest of their days. This has been so awfully unfair to them, and I would not wish any more ill events to befall them during what will already be a difficult marriage for them both. Please make sure they both know how much I cared for them, and try to make sure they do not forget me.
Thank you, Lord. Amen.
As she offered up this prayer to the ceiling, she had no idea that just above her, Morna was scurrying through a narrow hidden passage in the walls of the castle. She moved toward her destination without hesitation or even a moment’s confusion.
She knew exactly where she had to go and what she would have to do when she got there.
It had been so many years, yet she still knew her way around as though it had been yesterday. A left turn, then two rights, followed by a short series of perilously shallow steps. A short trip through a long-abandoned section of the servants’ quarters, then a few cautious steps across an empty sitting room to a secret door behind a heavy tapestry.
One final threshold to cross, and she was there, at last, standing in the chambers of Laird Malcolm MacLeod, who sat by the fire with his back to her. Whether he was reading, napping, or simply lost in thought, she could not tell.
“It has been far too long since I have stood in these rooms,” she spoke up with a smile.
Malcolm stirred and turned to look at the source of the voice. When he saw who it belonged to, his eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Morna! Good heavens, woman, is it really you?!”
“None other, Laird,” she confirmed.
He laughed, crossing the room to embrace her warmly. “I could never get used to you calling me ‘Laird,’ you know,” he told her. “Not when we once knew each other so…”
“Intimately?” she finished for him with a wink. “Those were good times indeed. I have missed them greatly.”
“As have I.” He looked at her closely, a shadow passing over his face. “I was…saddened that after Kenna’s passing, you chose not to return to the castle. I could have greatly benefited from your support and your counsel during those dark days.”
“I thought that you would not wish to look upon me,” she confessed sorrowfully. “Since my ministrations that night failed to yield a happy outcome.”
Malcolm touched her face gently. “I know that you did all you could for my family, Morna.”
