CHAPTER THREE
Kinlochleven, Glen Coe Highlands
Blair gathered herwoolen skirts, slid off the bed, and shook the wide iron door handle again.
Nothing. The door hadn’t moved all day, not since the nervous kitchen maid had crept in like a timid church mouse, dumped the silver platter on her rickety table, and departed as if the hounds of hell were chasing her. Blair had sat on her bed and watched the lass’s antics from under hooded lids.
She might be stuck in this room, a locked-up prisoner, but she’d not let on to anyone that it irritated her. Not even a lowly kitchen maid.
The iron bolt didn’t budge as she wiggled it, and not for the first time, or the second, she cursed her dead husband for his asinine behavior and foolish decisions. His choice to walk the fine line between the Campbells and the MacDonalds got him killed, and her imprisoned.
At least it was the MacDonalds who detained her. She shuddered under her tattered plaid wrap at what might have happened if she’d fallen into the same hands as her husband, that of John Campbell the 1st, the Earl of Breadalbane and the symbol of King William in the Highlands who had sworn his alliance to William of Orange. In doing so, John fell in with the King’s agent in the Highlands, the snobby Secretary of State, John Dalrymple, 1st Earl of Stair, and between the two of them, they preyed upon the MacDonalds and their allied clans.
And upon anyone they believed to be traitors, like her dead husband.
Though the clans were required to agree to the royal proclamation by the sunset of this year, the Earl of Breadalbane and the Earl of Stair had their own agenda against those aligned with Lochaber, Chief and Laird of Clan MacDonald entire.
Blair had warned her fool of a husband, but as usual he ignored her, claiming the mind of a woman wasn’t worth that of a dog. Rather he continued to play both sides, and it had gotten him drawn and quartered by the Campbells. Locked in this room, her innards were still intact, and Blair considered herself fortunate. The MacDonalds hadn’t decided her fate yet, so that was a token in her favor.
Unlike her traitorous husband, she might get out of this fiasco alive.
Those thoughts brought back the memory of that dismal day when she was called into the small salon of the decaying Gordon manse. Her husband had been absent for days, claiming work, but she knew that his work oft involved visits to the loose women at Mary MacMunn’s house of ill repute near Inverness. He needn’t have lied to her. In truth, she relished those days of peace and quiet, where she didn’t have to hear his grating, drunken voice or be the sounding box for his strange ideas. Or worse, when he was in his cups, suffer the indignities of his pathetic cock and heavy hands.
She rubbed her arms where the bruises of their last interlude yet remained. And the footprint-sized one on her back from where he’d kicked her to the floor? That one would be black for a fortnight, and God himself only knew when it would heal. She had loosened her stays so they wouldn’t press against the irritated wound.
Yet days when he was gone, those were days she spent drinking spiced red wine by the hearth with a beloved book in her hand, of wearing her burnished, oak-brown hair waves loose, and sewing in the dappled morning light that settled through the windows in her salon and provided the perfect place to sew her tapestries or gowns with her ladies.
Blair’s hand few to her neck. Her ladies! What had happened to them? Oh, she prayed the MacDonalds were more civilized than the blasted Campbells, who had sent her husband’s head, with his tongue cut out to her wrapped in a dark blue Campbell plaid, stained vermilion with his blood. She had screamed and dropped the barbarous gift as her mind spun and her knees went weak. Her maids had caught her, and one of them told her a tenant farmer ran to Hughie Lamont for aid.
Lamont was a Cameron, and the Camerons were staunch Jacobite allies of the MacDonalds, hence her present imprisonment at Kinlochleven keep.
She turned her back on the oak and iron reinforced door, leaned against the barrier to freedom, and slid down, landing hard on her backside. She didn’t cry easily – Blair had learned to bite back her tears early in her marriage as they only brought her husband’s hand down harder – but now the tears flowed freely, dripping from her cheeks and whetting her skirts.
Blair had thought her marriage to Mungo Gordon was hell, but what if he was the start of the journey? What if the MacDonalds believed her to be as much of a spy as her husband, just as the Campbells had?
She gripped her sour stomach that threatened to eject what little she had eaten that day.
Would her captors be any kinder to her than her kin?
Blair trudged overto the bed and flopped onto the uncomfortable bedding. She stared at the rafters in the ceiling, retelling herself an old tale of ancient Highland goddesses to pass the time. Worry had done naught for her but cause her to waste away so much that her waist of her gown hung on her frame, making her stained shift bunch up when she moved.
She’d been locked in this chamber for three days and, as she had for the past three days, wondered why. What, or rather who, were they waiting for? And what import did she, wee Blair Hamilton Gordon, have at all? Especially for the MacDonalds. Why had they come for her, and not the Campbells?
A pounding at the door followed by it crashing open jerked her from her thoughts and she bolted upright. She scrambled backward, trying to hide under plaid arasaid, but ‘twas a poor shield against the three Highlanders that bounded her room, dwarfing it under their enormous presence.
What manner of men, or monsters, were they?
Nay more a monster than your husband, a small voice spoke up in her head. Blair pushed it away to stare up at the men.
Their muted red and black plaids fell around their waists, and their tunics were stained and wet under the arms and around their necklines. They must have ridden hard to get to the Gordon keep.
Trying to beat someone else to her chambers, perchance?
