Chapter Thirty-One
“It is unsatisfactory!” Dougal declared viciously. “I will not rest until I have brought that bastard to his knees. I do not care what it takes.”
Meg looked at her brother impatiently and then, once more, at the letter in her hands.
It had arrived by courier from a woman she knew in Stirling, named Elizabeth Carstairs, whose husband held a place close to the King.
Elizabeth had written not out of any sense of finer feeling but from spite, to inform Meg the King had Dougal MacRae in his sights.
“Do you not hear what I say?” she asked. “MacNab has once more complained to the King about you, and it seems this time the King means to act. He is due to arrive in Stirling within the fortnight and means to summon you thence.”
Dougal remained unmoved by the news. “MacNab needs settling,” he reiterated. “I will declare as much to the King or anyone else.”
A week had passed since the night Isobel took him back into her bed, which seemed to prove a turning point of sorts.
Isobel’s health at last improved; Meg told him she now took her meals without protest and last night—miracle of miracles—his wife had allowed him to make love to her.
It had been gentle, careful, nothing like their old couplings, yet it had shaken him to the core.
His foolish heart had begun to hope they might build a future together after all, and now came this accursed missive, once more promising MacNab the upper hand. It enraged him.
Still perusing the letter, Meg went on, “MacNab tells the King you steal his cattle, torch his outbuildings and withhold from him his son’s betrothed.”
“She is my wife! Did not the King, himself, command me to marry?”
Meg grimaced. “What shall you do?”
Dougal considered it, scowling. “I shall tell the King, and fairly, there is no proof I have stolen MacNab’s cattle—”
“They roam your hills.”
“Strayed there. Is it my fault MacNab proves a careless landsman? Nor can he prove who burnt down his outbuildings and slaughtered the guards he posted. It might have been anyone. I assure you, Sister, we have been careful with our back trail.”
Meg did not look content.
“As for Isobel’s abduction... I would like the King to learn what goes on in MacNab’s keep. Perhaps ’tis time justice was sued.”
“You will not ask Isobel to go to Stirling! I doubt she would stand it.”
“Surely I can speak on my wife’s behalf.”
“And if her father also appears before the King and tells a different story?”
That, Dougal had to admit, would not be to his advantage. Yet he would die before he allowed Isobel to be harmed again. “We must determine whether Maitland has returned to Yorkshire.”
The door to the great hall where they stood flew open, and one of Dougal’s guards thrust his head inside. “Riders, Laird. Two of them—escorted by our own outriders.”
Dougal’s heart clenched. What now? “Can you tell who they are?”
“Laird, ’tis snowing too hard to tell.”
Dougal followed the man to the forecourt just in time to see that, indeed, two riders—well-wrapped against the cold—approached along with a band of his own men, through snow blowing almost horizontally. One of his warriors broke away and came forward at a trot.
“Laird MacRae, the lady there says she is sister to your lady wife—one Catherine Hewett by name—and she requests shelter.”
Dougal blinked in astonishment. “By all means, Rab, show them in.”
****
Isobel sat combing out her hair beside the fire when the message came. She still felt weak most days and unwilling to venture out of her chamber, but when a breathless Meg delivered the news, she abandoned her comb and ran, quite fleetly indeed.
“Catherine? Here?” she asked Meg in disbelief. “Are you certain?”
“Aye, so she says. And she looks enough like you to be your twin.”
Thus prepared, Isobel burst into the hall to find an impossible sight: Catherine, as out of place as a delicate flower in a byre, looking tired and worn, and beside her the tall figure of Thomas, with whom she had eloped nearly two months ago.
Catherine turned toward her, and Isobel saw she was no longer so slim as before. Her pregnancy now showed clearly, and lines of strain marked her pretty face.
They flew into one another’s arms. At the feel of her sister against her heart, Isobel’s tears rose in a storm. She clutched Catherine tightly and said in a choked voice, “Oh, God, I thought I would never see you again! But, how come you here? How did you find me?”
“The worst of ways!” Catherine released Isobel and looked into her face. “We have had a terrible time of it, Thomas and I, since we left home—naught but struggle, hard travel, and disappointment. In desperation, I thought to come to you at MacNab’s—”
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.”