Chapter 8 #2
“I thought ye might have a mind to know, I found some of your mam’s older clothes for Lady Roselyn,” Mary said with disapproval in her voice, clearly blaming him for their guest’s disheveled state upon her arrival.
Ruark rose to his feet and yanked the loosely knotted cloth from around his neck. “You know enough of a woman’s needs to see to hers, Mary.”
“ ’Tis not as if she has an abundance of appropriate clothes.”
“Then bring a dressmaker out here,” Ruark said. “You have never needed my permission to do what you see fit.”
“She has refused to eat.”
Ruark did not take Rose for being nonsensical, and perhaps he was too exhausted to worry over her starving herself. Hunger was an ugly, violent thing with which to contend. “She will eat when she is hungry enough.”
“Aye, mayhap, she will. Mayhap she won’t.
She is convinced someone will poison her.
I do no’ blame her either, seein’ as how she was treated last night.
She has no’ spoken except to ask that we leave her alone.
Last night she put a chair to the door only to remove it long enough this morning for me to arrange a tub be delivered. The child is frightened.”
Ruark doubted it, but who was he to tell Mary that Rose was no child.
The scent of apple blossoms filled the bathing chamber as steam from a hot bath dissipated in the air.
There was one window in the room, high on the wall that was now Rose’s prison.
She could see a bright patch of blue sky beyond, yet the glittering morning held nothing familiar to her that spoke of home.
She sat on the rim of a beautiful porcelain tub that had been delivered to her room earlier. She had never bathed in anything larger than a wooden hip tub before. With her calves submerged, she dribbled droplets from a sponge across her arms and breasts, careful of the wound on her outer thigh.
Last night, she had fallen exhausted into bed, curled into a ball, and slept.
She had not cried, and she did not cry now. She sat in the liquid warmth, thinking about her mornings at the abbey and the settled peace and safety of all that she had left behind.
She wanted to slide beneath the surface and experience the sensation of hot water enveloping her. But for her injury, perhaps she would have.
Already she regretted sending supper and breakfast away. With the exception of the bread Rose had taken off the supper tray last night, she’d had very little to eat or drink in days. But there was nothing to be done for it. She had seen the hate in Lady Roxburghe’s and Duncan Kerr’s eyes.
Knowing something of medicinal herbs, Rose knew of a hundred ways a person could make another suffer without actually killing.
She had never been the object of hatred before.
Last night, standing in the dining hall, the object of aversion and scorn, she had hated Roxburghe for bringing her to this point and putting her in a position to feel such wretched shame, when he was the very devil himself all the way up to his silver earring.
As she scrubbed her arms and rinsed the sweet-smelling soap from her limbs, she swore she would not think about the other woman downstairs who said she knew Rose’s mother.
Or the way Roxburghe had held her in his arms and why, despite her scrubbing, she could still feel his touch on her body.
She dug her blunted fingernails into the sponge, remembering she had dug them into Roxburghe’s back that dark, stormy night in the glade as passion had consumed her.
Had she left her mark on him? Would he remember her after she had gone from here?
She could not change anything now no matter how she wanted to forget it.
No doubt ’twill prove a grave dishonor to the noble Lancaster name when people learn the warden’s daughter was ravished by a barbaric Scotsman.
The terrible words came back to swallow her now in her wretched despair as she struggled to buoy her thoughts and make sense of the last few days.
For she could not deny that Roxburghe had seen something of her heart when she had not. She could not deny that she had known about her inheritance years ago while looking for a book in Friar Tucker’s library. Or that there were even darker forces inside her that she did not understand.
Something that was her own brand of vengeance against her father, a man whose actions had sent her mother to a cold, icy grave, and who now drove the passions of those here at Stonehaven.
But whatever her reasons for giving Roxburghe her innocence, he had been perfectly at ease with ravishing her.
In her defense, his skillful kisses and hands had wrought the passion she had given him, and she believed that no sane woman could have resisted him.
So perhaps, in the end, they had each taken from the other what they wanted, and it did not matter the reasons.
When Rose finished washing, she pulled a fresh-scented linen towel off the stool and stepped out of the tub.
Last night she had combed the snarls out of her hair and plaited its length.
It fell over her shoulder in a thick rope as she propped a foot on the tub and dried off in front of the stove.
The injury had bled much and she was upset that she had somehow managed to tear one of the stitches.
She felt dizzy and weak, partially from lack of food.
The wound needed light and dry air to heal and so she left it unwrapped as she slid a nightdress over her head and felt it float down her body in a whisper of air.
Rose had met Stonehaven’s stout housekeeper only briefly this morning when the footmen had delivered the tub. She had remained long enough to give the servants instructions and promise to find something suitable for her to wear, then Rose had asked them all to go away and leave her alone.
Turning from the tub, she caught her own reflection in the long cheval looking glass as she tied the laces.
The garment Mrs. Duff had brought her barely covered the soft swell of her breasts, though it must have belonged to someone else tall, for it reached her ankles and wrists with a brush of white lace.
Her pale skin in contrast to the bright green fabric held a beckoning luminosity in the light and Rose ran her palm absently down the smooth, shiny cloth.
She had never seen fabric that could catch the firelight yet feel like cool water against her skin.
She had not known that something so simple could make her look so astonishingly beautiful, and as she looked at herself in the glass, it was almost an affront to her that she should not look worn and despoiled from the trauma of her abduction and ravishment.
Intent upon the unhappy discourse of her thoughts, she did not at first see that there was someone else in the looking glass with her.
Roxburghe leaned his shoulder against the door connecting the bathing chambers to her bedroom, and she spun around, her first instinct to snatch back the towel, but it lay across the tub.
Even with his face half bathed in the shadows cast by the firelight in the other room, she had the vague impression he had been watching her for some time.
He wore the red-and-green plaid she’d seen on his family coat of arms. With a day’s growth of beard shadowing his jaw and his silver earing glinting in the light, he looked as disreputable as if he had been up all night plotting and planning murder and mayhem.
He folded his arms. “So you believe my household wishes to poison you.”
Freeing herself from his gaze, she tried to step around him only to find his arm blocking her path. “I believe I consider these quarters sacrosanct from your intrusion, my lord.”
A corner of his mouth lifted, but his eyes were as somber as night. “Little is sacrosanct at Stonehaven, especially what goes on in these chambers.”
Rose attempted to push past him, but it was like trying to move stone. “Move aside.”
“Or what?” he said, tilting her face into the light. “You haven’t the strength to swat a fly. Have you suddenly decided to surrender the fight? You shock me, love.”
“Surrender should make your task easier, should it not?”
He laughed. Hers was a silly remark and she winced at her melodrama, suddenly feeling like some overwrought heroine in the worst sort of book.
“I did not take you for being nonsensical, Rose. Wouldn’t killing you rather defeat our purpose for bringing you here?”
A knock sounded on the door. Without moving, he called, “Enter.”
The young girl who had helped plait Rose’s hair last night pushed a heavily laden trundle cart into the room.
Roxburghe directed her to set the tray on the table nearest the hearth.
The maid removed the silver domed lid covering the plate, revealing fruit and cheese and warm bread still steaming, then arranged two cups next to a silver carafe on the trundle cart.
She lifted an inquiring gaze to her laird.
With a subtle tip of his chin, he nodded and dismissed her.
After the maid left, Rose pressed her thumb to her temple and told his lordship to go away and leave her alone. “You are wasting your time.”
But he paid her no heed as he swung her into his arms. “I am not my servants, Rose.”
He carried her across the room to the table. She didn’t bother protesting as he set her in a chair and then made himself comfortable across from her. She narrowed her eyes. “You cannot force me to eat your food.”
He looked offended as he took up the fork and began eating. “Why would I force you to eat? What woman does not wish to have a smaller waist? Though I have seen you. All of you. And I think you look rather . . . fine.”
It seemed incongruous to her that after everything he had put her through, here he was teasing her while she was half-dressed in her private chambers, and they should be bantering as if they were a married couple sharing intimacies and ways to murder the other.