“Aye, I did. Maybe I still do, for many things, but I think I may be able to forgive. After what she did for you… For both of us.”
Catherine closed her eyes for a moment as all the events of her life over the past five years shifted the foundation of her existence. There was so much she had not known, but she could see it now. She understood. She remembered.
“Can there ever be anus?” she tentatively asked. “I am not sure you will think so, after I tell you everything.” She regarded him in the dancing light from all the candles in the room. “I know where I was before. I know what happened to me, where I went, and what I did. I am afraid to tell you.”
He kissed her hand. “Nothing will ever change what I feel for you, lass. You can tell me anything.”
“Are you certain? Because there are things… I was very young, Lachlan. Very foolish.” She paused and swallowed hard. Her throat was painfully dry.
He seemed to read every thought that materialized in her head and crossed to the washstand to pour a glass of water.
“Drink this.” He returned to the bed and helped her sit up. He held the glass to her lips.
Catherine devoured it greedily, then lay back down on the soft feather pillows.
“The doctor has prescribed laudanum for the pain,” Lachlan said. “You must tell me if you need it.”
“Later perhaps, but not now.”
He climbed onto the bed beside her and gathered her close in his arms. His warmth was like a blanket from heaven, and she did not want to let go.
“Tell me everything,” he said. “I’m listening.”
She buried her face in the soft wool of his tartan. “You know that my father died six years ago?”
“Aye.”
“Well, nothing was the same after that. He hadn’t even been dead a year when my grandmother pushed me to marry someone. Someone I did not love. He was too old.”
“Love is important,” Lachlan said.
She nodded wearily. “I always thought so. So I ran off. I ran away with a handsome young English officer I met at a political assembly, hosted here at Drumloch. All the guests were Hanoverians, because of John’s political opinions, which differed from mine. But there was one young man who had Jacobite sympathies. His name was Jack. We snuck off and talked all night, and I believed him to be a great hero for the cause.”
“Was he not what you believed?”
Catherine shook her head. “No, but I didn’t know that until it was too late. He was good to me at first, you see. We ran away together to France and were married in secret.”
She glanced up at Lachlan carefully, not sure what he was thinking, but he gave almost no reaction, so she continued.
“I didn’t tell anyone where I was going,” she explained. “I hated my grandmother, and I barely knew John. All I knew was that he had taken my father’s title and possession of this house, which was my home. I felt he had no right to be here.”
“He was your father’s heir,” Lachlan gently said.
“I understand that now,” she confessed. “I knew it then, I suppose, but I was so grief stricken over the loss of my father. I resented John. I wanted my old life back.”
“What happened after that?” Lachlan asked. “After you married this Englishman?”
She lifted her gaze. “He used me and my father’s friendship with King James to gain entry to the Stuart court in Rome. That was his intention all along, I believe. He made the acquaintance of many powerful people, but he was a spy for the Hanoverians, and when the prince was born he tried to convince me to…”
Lachlan’s face became a glowering mask of fury. “He wanted you to do his heinous work for him? To kill the prince?”
“Yes,” she replied. “But I refused. I told him I would expose his plot, and that’s when he tried to kill me. He wrapped his hands around my neck and he choked me.” Tears spilled from her eyes, and she took a moment to gather her composure. “I lost consciousness, and when I woke, he was burying me in the yard.”
Catherine couldn’t describe any more of the hellish nightmare. She turned her face into Lachlan’s tartan and wept openly.
“Don’t cry, lass,” he whispered, stroking her hair away from her face and kissing her forehead. “I’m here now, and you’re safe. It’s all in the past. No one will ever hurt you again.”
“He was my husband, and he tried to bury me alive.”
