Devil Black (25 page)

Isobel gasped. “You never went there?”

“No.” Catherine shook her head, looked helplessly at her husband who stood silent, and then, in wonder, at Dougal. “These men stopped us on the road—they seemed to recognize me. They questioned us and said you lived here. I did not know what to think, but they proved insistent, so we came with them.”

“Thank heaven,” Isobel breathed. She turned to the guards, with Rab at their head. “I am grateful to you all.”

“We are after stopping everyone, Lady,” Rab told her, “since your father’s arrival.”

Catherine looked confused. “Father? But he is not here—he is at home. We went there first. He flew into a rage at the sight of us, and sent us off again.” Her face crumpled. “And we have nowhere in the world to go.”

Isobel looked a question at Dougal, beseeching. “This man, Dougal MacRae, is my husband. He will stand you shelter, Sister.”

And Dougal replied without hesitation, “To be sure. Consider this your home for so long as you need.”

Some time later the four of them—Meg and Lachlan having tactfully excused themselves—sat by the fire in the solar, the two sisters with linked hands, words flying between them. Dougal had said little beyond telling Rab and his men they had done well, and so far Thomas had barely spoken. But he held his hands out to the warmth of the fire like a man frozen to the bone, and his face appeared so drawn and grim, he barely looked like the handsome lad with whom Catherine had fallen in love.

“Explain how you came here,” Catherine begged her sister, with a doubtful look at Dougal. “When we parted, the plan was for you to take my place in wedding with Bertram MacNab.”

“Yes, well,” Isobel cast her eyes down, “that plan changed. MacNab, as it proved, is not the man Father thought him. Rather, he is a villain and a brute, virtually at war with my husband. Dougal...intercepted me on the road to MacNab’s keep and most fortuitously redirected me here.”

Catherine cast a doubtful look at Dougal, who sat watchful, his grey eyes hooded. “Intercepted?”

“You need not put too fine a point on it, Wife,” Dougal said. “Lady Catherine, I abducted her on the road—took her by force.”

Thomas came to his feet. “That is an abomination! A crime!”

Dougal barely stirred in response. “To be sure, it is. But this is not Yorkshire. Do not be a fool, man. Sit down.”

Thomas’s fair skin flushed. For a moment it appeared he might quarrel further. Then the fight went out of him. “The world,” he stated, “is a mad place. I cannot account for it.”

“Well said.” Dougal reached to pour more whisky into Thomas’s cup. “Never mind. This will warm you.”

Isobel, watching the emotions travel across her sister’s face, asked, “What of you? You were set for Bristol, and Thomas’s new employment. How come you here?”

“The place I was promised fell through,” Thomas admitted gloomily. “When he heard our tale, my father’s cousin, who originally offered the situation, decided he would not risk offending your father by taking me on, since my own father yet hoped to win back his old place as Bailiff. And other places proved deuced hard to find.”

“We have been roaming and traveling,” Catherine confessed, “sometimes sleeping rough, once in a ditch. When we were robbed of what little money we had, we knew we must turn for home and face Father’s anger. I never dreamed he should turn us away after coming so far through that vile weather.”

Isobel looked at Thomas. “Could you not apply to your father?”

“I could, but your father has dismissed him for my role in stealing Catherine away. Father has not yet managed to win back his place on your father’s estate, and will not if he is found helping me.”

“So unfair!” Tears flooded Catherine’s eyes. “What did we do that was so wrong, except love?”

“I am sorry,” Isobel murmured, heartfelt. She could scarcely believe the plans she and Catherine had hatched together so innocently had caused such devastation.

“Your father is a bailiff?” Dougal asked Thomas. “And, what work can you do?”

Thomas shrugged. “I was promised a place in Bristol as a clerk. I and my two older brothers were taught to read and write, but Father also brought us up learning to run the estate.”

“Fine, that, and I can use you. It is as my wife says, however. We are at war with a neighbor. MacNab is a treacherous bastard who has captured the ear of the King and speaks poison of me. I should like naught better than to see both Randal and Bertram MacNab dead. I mean to achieve it if I can. I am known in the district as the Devil Black MacRae.” He paused to drink from his cup. “If any of that daunts you, then, aye, you had better take a day’s rest and be on your way. For things here are ugly now, and bound to grow still uglier.”

Thomas’s face, usually so open and sunny, looked guarded. The bailiff’s lad, Isobel thought, had changed; a man appeared to have emerged in his stead. He said, “I shall be glad of the place. And I shall fight whomever necessary to keep my wife safe.”

Dougal did not smile, but he did extend a hand. “Then, man, we are of exactly one mind.”

Later, in the privacy of Isobel’s bedchamber, the two sisters exchanged whispers and further confidences. Isobel knew Dougal was out riding his borders. She had no idea where Thomas might be—perhaps finding remedy for his exhaustion in sleep. She knew her own healing, as so often in the past, lay in confessing her thoughts to her sister and trading accounts of hardships. Sleepless, they spoke long into the night, and Isobel was hard put to tell which of them had the harsher tale. Catherine clung to Isobel and wept over the account of her sister’s miscarriage, and shuddered at her depictions of Bertram MacNab.

“To think what I so narrowly escaped! And, you, also! But, your husband—is he in grave trouble over this business with the King?”

“I hope not. Losing his lands would kill him. And should I lose him,” Isobel added simply, “it will kill me.”

“You love him!” Catherine spoke in wonder. “Yet he is nothing like the lads of whom we dreamed as girls.”

“What did I know then?”

“There seems a darkness in him,” Catherine proposed, “a ruthlessness.”

Isobel conceded, “They do not call him Devil Black for naught. Yet he has claimed my heart.” The next words came harder. “My sorrow lies in the fact that he can never love me. His heart will always belong to another.” She told Catherine briefly, in a whisper, of the woman who had died in MacNab’s hands, and the grief that yet rode Dougal MacRae.

“It is a grief that time has not put right,” she concluded. “I cannot put it right, either. I fear nothing can.”

“Except your love for him,” said Catherine, almost with her old innocence. “I know love can overcome anything. You must believe!”

“I wish I could,” Isobel said sadly. “My heart is not the hopeful thing it was, when we were girls. But oh, Catherine, I never dreamed it could love so strong. If I follow it, I will follow him anywhere—through any difficulty, storm or fire—if only he will let me.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

“You must allow me to accompany you,” Isobel beseeched her husband, not for the first time. “As your wife, it is my right to be there and speak on your behalf. It may make a difference. I have much to say to the King, and you shall not face him alone.”

And, Isobel thought to herself, she refused to watch Dougal ride from her, not knowing if she would ever see him again. The summons from the King had come three days ago, and since then she had been sick over it, and desperate to persuade Dougal round to her thinking.

She could beg the King for her husband’s life if necessary, and promise anything in return for mercy. But Dougal shook his head, a closed look coming to his face—just like every other time she asked him.

“Stay here,” he bade, “where you are safe.”

“What good is my safety, if I lose you?” They stood in the bedchamber they now once more shared. “If you do not return to me?” Isobel felt perilously close to tears—they threatened to blind and choke her. “I could not bear it!”

Dougal caught her shoulders between his hands and stared into her eyes, and she found herself unable to hide anything from him. All her love and longing must be visible, for he lowered his voice and his tone became unusually gentle.

“Do not worry, Wife, I will return. Do I not take your brother-in-law, the erstwhile Thomas, with me to speak as to the situation, and MacNab’s part in it? The King shall hear how events transpired, and that MacNab is not blameless.”

“Oh, Thomas!” Isobel exclaimed with some disparagement. She found herself unimpressed with Catherine’s husband, who now seemed almost staid and lacking in fire. “Why should the King listen to him?”

“He can give the truth of it, how Bertram MacNab’s betrothed was actually the woman who became his wife, not mine, and how the switch came about.”

“And I can tell the King the truth about MacNab—how he abducted me from my own garden—”

“As I abducted you on the road?”

“—and what he meant to do to me, had I not escaped.”

“Wife, I ken fine you are afraid—”

“You know nothing of it. Can you imagine how it will be for me waiting, not knowing how you fare? Surely I will be safer, even traveling, in your company.”

Some emotion moved in the stormy grey eyes: caution, perhaps. “Nay, but I would not have you possibly return from Stirling alone—”

“Alone?”

“Should I be taken into custody.”

Isobel’s heart dropped sickeningly. “You say that will not happen.”

His lips tightened in an ironic smile. “It should not. Still, if happen it did, you would be vulnerable.”

“I would be with the erstwhile Thomas, would I not?”

That made Dougal grimace. “Stay here under guard, please, with your sister and Meg. Do this for me.”

Since he asked it so, Isobel could not refuse—she would deny him nothing. But her head came up and she met his eyes in challenge. “I will, Husband, but only if you will do something for me in return, before you go.” At the question in his eyes, she began to unfasten his tunic, and tug free the shirt beneath. “Lie with me now. If I am to be left without you, I would at least have your child.”

The mist in his eyes ignited and transformed into fire. He would not deny her this, Isobel thought, and she would savor every kiss, every touch. For this memory might have to last her a lifetime.

****

“For the love of all that is holy, will you not sit down?” Meg begged impatiently. “You have been pacing for hours; you will drive me round the twist.”

The three women shared the solar, on a day turned vicious and cold. Outside, the wind once more tore at the stones of the keep, shrieking like a woman in mourning.

The fire in the hearth barely succeeded in fighting back the pervasive chill, which seemed to have penetrated clear to Isobel’s heart.

“I cannot help it,” she said. “I am unable to settle. They will be in Stirling by now, yes? Do you think he has seen the King?”

Meg shrugged. “The King is capricious and lives by his own rules. He may not have arrived as expected. The weather may have kept him.”

“I will go mad with not knowing!”

“And you will drag us with you.” Meg sounded truly exasperated. She shot a look at Catherine. “Can you not reason with your sister?”

Somewhat to Isobel’s surprise, her sister and sister-in-law got on amazingly well. At the moment, they definitely stood united.

“Sit down, pray, Isobel,” Catherine bade. “Give us all some rest.” In an aside to Meg, she went on, “Isobel has always been headstrong which, indeed, began all this trouble.”

“Me? And I suppose you have naught to do with it? No matter,” Isobel exclaimed bitterly, “recount my past sins if you will. I care for but one thing.”

“You should care for your own well-being,” Meg said. “Lachlan tells me MacNab has sent out raiding parties these two nights past—when Lachy and our warriors rode out, they saw the tracks in the snow.”

“I am concerned with my own safety.” Isobel knew full well MacNab wished to get his hands on her again, his sole purpose, now, revenge. MacNab could have no way of knowing Catherine—Bertram’s true intended—was now here at MacRae’s keep, nor that she had also become another man’s wife. He wanted to cause pain, distress, and fear.

“Then behave accordingly,” Catherine said. “Sit down and sew.”

“I cannot possibly!” But Isobel did pause in her pacing to eye Catherine’s needlework. She labored at embroidering a tiny white gown for her baby, a lovely thing that evoked pleasant images. Fleetingly, Isobel wondered if her seduction of her husband, the morning he left for Stirling, had good effect. He had certainly been thorough in his pursuit of the task...

“Since when do you sew?” she demanded of Catherine.

“Motherhood requires patience,” Catherine told her implacably, placing one hand on her expanded belly. “As you may one day learn.”

Isobel, spared from answering that ridiculous statement, swung round as the chamber door opened and Lachlan came in. She did not miss the way Meg’s face lit at the sight of him.

Lachlan, clad for the outdoors and wearing his sword, looked unusually grim. He beckoned to Meg, who rose and went to him. They held a whispered conversation.

“It is rude, that,” Isobel protested, “keeping secrets in front of others.”

The couple parted and looked at her. Lachlan spoke, “I am saying only that I will be out riding with a troop of men. I have doubled the guard—”

“Why?” Isobel demanded. “Because you saw tracks in the snow?”

Lachlan exchanged looks with Meg, who shrugged.

“Aye,” Lachlan spoke directly to Isobel. “I swore to Dougal I would keep you safe while he was away. I would sooner perish than fail in that.”

“You believe we are in danger?”

Lachlan scowled. “I do. The weather is vile, and I am thinking raiders from MacNab’s keep could use that as cover for creeping in close. I mean to ride the borders, even if I freeze myself through.”