Had he meant to make it sound like he was escorting her to the gallows? Rose thought some moments later after they had left her chambers.
The stone corridor was damp and cold beneath her thin leather soles. Though the sun slanted through tall arched windows at intervals. Rivulets of rain streaked down the dirty glass. Outside the cloud-laden sky was a dark gray. To Rose, it felt like night. She had been ensconced in a windowless room since yesterday, trapped by the thick stone walls. Yet, in spite of the cold, she felt hot and her temples throbbed. Earlier, she had blamed the tightness in her throat on the smoke from the brazier heating the room, but she knew now it was a lie.
“You are not Scots?” she asked Mr. Colum, concentrating on the scent of rain in the air, the sound of their steps on stone in the empty corridor.
“No, my lady. I am English. My family hails from York.”
“You are a gentleman,” she said, noting his cultured voice.
He pressed a hand to his chest. “My family would wholeheartedly disagree.”
He suddenly stopped as they reached a fork in the hallway. She heard voices coming from a room at the end of the corridor.
“I am instructed to tell you that Lord Hereford hasbeen directed not to approach you, and that you should only speak to the questions put to you. When it is done I am to take you back to your chambers. Then tomorrow morning, I am to take you from Jedburgh, where we will await instruction. Hereford has agreed to Ruark’s terms to see you safely escorted from Scotland to a place of your choosing. You will be free, my lady.”
Her hand went to her chest. Ruark had done that for her?
“You will not be in the room long,” he said.
Noting the sword hanging from a sling at his waist, she looked around the empty corridor. “Is Lord Roxburghe afraid of my father’s men or his own?”
“He is watchful of all men, especially today.”
Rose recognized the same ominous undertone she had heard in Friar Tucker’s voice. “Is Lord Roxburghe in danger from his own men?”
“Pity the man who tests him, my lady. He is well able to take care of himself.” Turning slightly, he offered a hand down the three steps.
She saw now why he had stopped. Where was her mind that she had missed seeing the stairs? Her hands were trembling.
The noise in the hall rose as two pages pushed open the heavy oak doors in front of her and Rose stepped into a tall, cavernous hall with wooden beams that stretched across the ceiling. Shock stopped her cold on the threshold.
Three or four dozen battle-hardened men, bristling with weaponry, filled the hall. Sitting around the long table and standing against the walls, all turned as the doors swung wide.
Her escort motioned for her to proceed. “My lady.”
The heavy air reeked of wood smoke and unwashed bodies.
No friendly face looked back at her from among the sea of bearded faces. Somehow, more afraid of showing fear in front of this group than she was of what awaited her, she continued to move her feet forward.
Mr. Colum stopped, and the only noise that followed was the scrape of leather soles against stone as a path opened in front of her.
Then she saw the man sitting at the head of the room. Flanked by two of his own guard, he made a single abrupt movement of his hand as if silencing those around him, like an ax that severs the head from a body. And at that moment, her courage deserted her.
She could go no farther.
He wore a cut jacket with an embossed silver waistcoat, breeches tied just below his knees, the civilized refinement a stark contrast to his reputation. She could not tell the color of his hair beneath a powdered wig queued at the nape, but his brows were blond and flecked with gray.
There was no tenderness in his gray eyes as he sat back and perched his chin upon his steepled fingers with the casual indolence one might use when studying a problem that required too much thought and one wished only to be done with it.
Rose lifted her chin in a manner that told him she cared little if he found her lacking.
But it was a lie.
Perhaps something of him was buried deep inside her after all.
For she did not understand the intensity of her emotions.
And as if reading the thought in her eyes, Richard Jerome Lancaster, the fourth earl of Hereford, the English warden and former captain in the Royal Navy smiled. It was contrary to her one memory of him those yearsago when he had put her on her first pony and told her she would one day ride like the wind. For ’twas not a kind smile. Yet one that asserted itself in his voice as he spoke.
