Chapter 32
In the middle of the night, Clara opened her eyes and saw Caelan standing by her bedside. She blinked—and he was gone when her eyes opened again. The dream was so eerie.
Only then did she realize that despite the moonlight pouring through the bedroom windows, she could hear urgent voices and booted feet downstairs. She stared at the rose-painted walls in confusion before her mind steadied, and she remembered where she was. She swung back her covers and got out of bed; the voices sounded serious, and she could hear Mrs. Gillan above the rest.
A robe had been left for her on a chair. She tied it around her waist and padded down the stairs in her bare feet, walking into the sitting room. Two men stood with their backs to Clara, bringing with them the smell of fresh rain.
Her hosts were next to the window, Mrs. Gillan clutching her husband’s arm with one hand.
Clara hesitated, but after all, she was the laird’s wife. “Is something wrong?”
All four looked to her, their faces pinched and fearful. A beat of dread shot through Clara’s body. “What is it?”
she demanded.
“It’s the laird,”
one of the men said. “His carriage.”
“What happened to his carriage?”
Mrs. Gillan moaned, the sound so loud that her husband started.
“It’s down the ravine,”
the other man said, his Scottish burr making it sound as if he was making a fateful statement. Which would imply . . .
“No!”
The sound broke directly from Clara’s chest.
“This is the lady of CaerLaven,”
Mr. Gillan said, his voice sharp. “Lady MacCrae, the laird’s wife.”
“Apologies, my lady,”
the first man said. “I’d no idea. We came to tell Gillan here, as he heads up the local burgh council. The road’s out. We’ve closed it just past the village.”
“Could be that the laird survived the fall,”
the second added hesitantly. “He’s a strong man.”
“My husband cannot have been in the carriage,”
Clara stated. “He told me that the pass was too dangerous in a storm. He wouldn’t have risked it.”
“I told him to come!”
Mrs. Gillan cried, her voice breaking. “I told him you had a fever! He came because of my message.”
Clara stared at her white face without seeing it, thoughts whirling like a blinding snowstorm.
“A fever like Isla’s,”
Mrs. Gillan added. “I thought he’d come in the morning. But I never imagined—”
“I wish to be taken there now,”
Clara ordered, cutting her off and turning to the men.
One mouth fell open. “In the morning, perhaps—”
“Now.”
She spoke with every bit of arrogance she’d inherited from generations of English ancestors ordering people around. “I will dress with expedience, and you will take me to the pass.”
The men turned to Mr. Gillan.
“Take her!”
Mrs. Gillan said shrilly. “You take her,” she said to her husband. “On horseback; it’ll be faster since they’ve closed the road. The Clydesdale can bear the weight of you both.”
Clara whirled and ran back up the stairs. She threw her damp pelisse over her nightgown and buttoned it with shaking fingers. She couldn’t get one garter to tie, so she left a stocking on the floor and pushed a bare foot into her boot. She was back down the steps in three minutes, finding Mr. Gillan shrugging on a topcoat.
In years after, Clara never forgot the horror of that ride. The rain had stopped, but the road was sodden and thick with mud that slid sluggishly under the horse’s hooves. The drumbeat of hooves splashing into muck drowned out every sound but the frantic thumping of her heart.
As they left the village, branches arched over the road, shaking rainwater down their necks. Clara was soon shivering, her pelisse soaked once again. She kept leaning forward, as if she could push the sturdy beast to go faster. Her breath was ragged, and her chest hurt.
It was impossible. Impossible.
Caelan had told her . . .
He had told her that the pass was dangerous. So it must have been someone else in his carriage. Someone had stolen the carriage and driven it from the castle. Her mind rejected that as foolish; who would do such a thing?
Perhaps one of the crofters’ wives was having difficulty giving birth. She and Caelan had met all of them in the days after the wedding, and two were quite advanced in their pregnancies. Caelan wouldn’t have accompanied the man and his wife. He would be safe at home.
At length they emerged onto the main road, skirted the barrier, and followed the road along the mountain. It trailed alongside the rocky cliff, moonlight making the chasm to their right look like the depths of hell.
Clara turned her head away, her body trembling. Single pine trees clung to the side of the ravine until they clustered into a forest at its bottom. Moonlight reflected off a thick cloud of fog far below that swirled amidst the tops of trees. Clara found herself thinking the fog could be the murky water around a drowned man’s fingers. She forced herself to stare at the horse’s mane.
As they rounded another corner, she abruptly saw torches and heard men’s voices shouting. Her mind was still spinning tales, insisting that Caelan would never set out in the rain to cross the pass. He wouldn’t, not even if he were afraid she was dying, like his wife.
The other wife. The real wife.
She was the second wife. He didn’t care enough. Therefore, he was safe.
He had to be safe, because otherwise the world would break in two. Not her heart, because that wasn’t big enough. The whole of everything had to go if the most intelligent, thoughtful, affectionate—
Why on earth had she cared if Caelan mourned his first wife as long as he lived? Was she mad? He had been in her bed, and she loved him. That was enough. As long as he was safe—
He had to be safe.
Pushing her fear away again, she concentrated on the plodding steps of the horse carrying them along the road. They drew slowly closer to the torch burning golden against the drenched and dripping pines that spilled down into the ravine.
They turned one final bend and caught sight of a mound of mud lying across the road. Clara flung herself off the horse, barely hearing Mr. Gillan’s startled exclamation. She landed with a jolt that rattled her teeth and ran forward, ignoring the way mud sucked at her boots. Her heart hammered in her chest. She broke into the circle of light and—
Saw.
The carriage was far below, barely visible. It was lying on its side, ghostly in the pale light of the moon. It must have gone with the mudslide, skating on top but falling at a steep pitch, crashing between trees and somehow arriving at the bottom in one piece.
It wasn’t Caelan’s burial place; it wasn’t, because she refused to believe it.
Trees stood upright all the way down, some of them bent but still holding against the brown slurry of mud that had flowed around them.
The men were clustered together, their backs to her, thick ropes looped over their shoulders. She felt a bolt of anger at them for chattering when they could be climbing down the slope. What if Caelan was breathing his last right now?
What if he was desperately injured and lying there cold and alone, with only a few minutes left?
Clara flung herself at the edge. It was the work of a moment to grab a tree that had been pushed sideways and begin to climb down the hill, moving from that tree to grasp a root sticking out from the mud. She dropped from the root to another tree, feeling strong and invincible. Let the men chatter, trying to figure out an easier way to descend into the ravine.
She was going to find Caelan. She would always go to him.
Above her, Mr. Gillan had sounded the alarm, since rough male voices began bawling down at her, sounding so Scottish that she couldn’t understand anything they said. Her hands were freezing, brown mud slicking along her palms. She was feeling along a tree root, moving to her right where she could see another tree that would take her down several feet.
Men were shouting, but she ignored them. They were cowards.
“Clara!”
And then, stronger, a roar, “Clara! Clara, you little fool, don’t move!”
Her heart gave one enormous thump and then steadied. She tilted her head back, but all she could see were black forms against flickering torches. That voice sounded like . . . It couldn’t be.
Yet she stilled, clinging to a wet piece of root. Suddenly she felt how stiff, almost frozen her hands had become, barring the warm blood that dripped down her sleeve. One of her palms had been torn by a rough twig. Her wet skirts were wrapped around her ankles.
“Clara, do you hear me?”
Caelan bellowed.
She tried to piece it together in her mind. Her lips moved. “You’re alive?”
It came out a breath, surely inaudible above.
She could see men running around with ropes.
A slick of heat swept over her body, a glow of humiliation that chased away the chill. She had been a fool. He was there, safe, and she’d idiotically thrown herself over the edge like . . . like Juliet, and she’d always thought that girl was the stupidest of Shakespeare’s heroines.
She didn’t have the excuse of being thirteen. Now everyone up above would know that she loved a man famous for his devotion to his first wife. Her breath sounded harsh in her ears.
With another sickening jolt, she realized that Caelan would know too. There was no way he wouldn’t guess how she felt about him.
All the same, she’d happily accept humiliation over his death.
“Don’t move,”
he called down, gentler now. “For the love of God, Clara, don’t move a finger, or you’ll bring the rest of the hillside down on your head.”
She stopped looking up, because it occurred to her that perhaps the weight of her head tipped backward would encourage the root she was clutching to give way.
Up above, they argued for a moment until Caelan cut through the noise by barking an order. “Draw the two of us up!”
Peeping from below while trying to keep her neck straight, Clara made out that he had tied a rope around his waist and slung the end over a stout tree branch.
One of the men protested.
“Don’t you understand, you bawbag, she’s mine,”
Caelan snarled. “I’m going after her now.”
Clara stared at the muddy slope before her face. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, and he was hers too. He could mourn Isla as much as he wished. She would never whine about it, even to herself. She would help him tend the flowers on Isla’s grave.
She dared to peep up again and saw Caelan swing out from the road. The rope snapped taut and then swung him back to the cliff, his boots slapping into the earth as he swung away again. Mud splattered her face, and the root flexed under her fingers.
“Lower!”
he shouted.
An arm whipped around her waist, and a voice growled, “I have you.”
He kicked off again just as the mud before her eyes began to flow slowly down, like dirty water but thicker.
Clara let out a stifled cry, turned her head away, and clung to him with all her might.
“Up,”
Caelan bawled. And to her, “I have you, Clara. I have you.” His arms were like steel bars encircling her, and her head nestled into a dip in his shoulder that felt like hers. At the edge of the pass, men were grunting in unison as they pulled them up, like deckhands hauling on a sail.
“I thought you were dying,”
she whispered, her voice cracking.
“I would have been dead,”
Caelan replied, sounding exasperated. “It’s a long way down.”
“What if you hadn’t? What if you had a few minutes left? I couldn’t let you die alone.”
She was shaking again. “I want . . .”
“I know what you want,”
Caelan said, a ghost of a chuckle in his voice. “Lord knows we have enough rainwater for a week of baths.”
“No.”
She cleared her throat. “I thought you were dead, Caelan. I want a kiss.”
“Oh, you’ll have those.”
He sounded faintly amused, damn him. They were above the lip of the crevasse now. She could make out the sweaty faces of men straining at the rope, and then Caelan’s coachman lunged forward, grabbed his master’s legs, and hauled him onto the road.
When they landed on the ground, Clara’s knees crumpled, but Caelan held her up. The men burst out in Gaelic. He thanked them, and then laughed, and for a moment she hated him, truly hated him. He could have died. Her stupidity could have killed the two of them, even if he hadn’t been in the carriage.
“Aye, you’re all right,”
he said. “We’re an excellent pair. I threw myself on a grave, and she threw herself down a ravine.”
The comparison was painful—and so sudden—that she flinched. His arms tightened. Behind them, the second landslide must have gained speed; a tree gave way with a splintering crash.
“That’s your carriage gone, laird,”
a man standing at the edge shouted.
“Thank God we had time to free the horses,”
Caelan said.
Clara turned about, still in his embrace, and forced herself to smile at their rescuers. “I can’t thank you enough for saving my life. I was . . . I was extremely foolish and lucky that you were there.”
They didn’t seem scornful; they were beaming, which eased her humiliation.
“I’ll be taking my wife home now,”
Caelan said, his arms still clamping her to his chest.
Mr. Gillan offered up his horse, and someone else spoke in a burr that Clara’s exhausted brain couldn’t unravel. Her husband laughed again and swept her up in his arms.
“Good enough?”
he demanded.
The men were applauding and shouting as he turned and began tramping back across the mud to where Mr. Gillan’s patient horse waited, reins looped on his neck. Caelan hoisted her up and then swung behind, pulling her body back against his.
Tears began to slide down Clara’s face because he was alive. Warm and alive.
“I would stop and kiss the living daylights out of you, but they’re all watching,”
Caelan said, his voice rough, not laughing. “I thought my bloody heart would stop when I saw you down there, Clara.” His arms tightened, and he buried his face in her hair, which had unraveled from her braids and was floating free around her head and shoulders.
“Where shall we go now?”
she asked, keeping her voice steady because she didn’t want him to know she was crying.
“Home,”
he said, picking up the reins with one hand. “Through the forest. It’ll take us two or three hours, but I’ll be damned if we have the conversation we need to have in one of Gillan’s beds.”
“Mrs. Gillan shouldn’t have sent you that message,”
Clara said. “I don’t have a fever. I’m not dying like Isla.”
“When her man showed up, it crossed my mind to go through the woods, but instead I flung myself into the carriage so I could bring you home or to a doctor—and honestly, get to you quicker,”
he said wryly. His left arm tightened around her waist, and he murmured something about irrationality into her hair.
“How did you escape before the mudslide?”
“I was riding on the box. The coachman and I didn’t like the look of the slope up above. We tried backing up, but the horses were terrified, pitching and rearing. We barely got them out of the traces when the mud gave way. After the carriage went over, we took the horses back to the castle to get men and ropes for towing, which is why the villagers thought we’d gone over. We had just returned when you threw yourself over the edge.”
Clara had been trembling, but now she was visibly shaking.
“What happened to your stocking?”
Caelan asked.
She glanced down at her ankle, ghostlike in the moonlight. “I was in a hurry, and I couldn’t tie one of my garters.”
She felt another stab of embarrassment. The men must think her utterly mad. Idiotic.
“Is your ankle cold?”
She considered that. Parts of her body—her heart—still felt as if they weren’t hers. Her palm stung. Her ankle was the least of it. “I’m fine.”
“We’re quite a couple,”
Caelan said, pushing back some of her hair to kiss her on the temple. “The difference being that I tripped on a chicken, whereas you threw yourself down a ravine. I am honored, Clara.”
Humiliation felt like a black chasm as big as the ravine, one that she might fall into and never get out of. This was even worse than when Lady Jersey informed Prince George that his vulgar singing had upset Clara.
Caelan knew. He was honored by the fact she . . .
“It’s all right,”
she said, steadying her voice. “I do love you. I’m somewhat—no, desperately in love with you. I couldn’t help it. I know you don’t feel the same. You told me as much, and I wish you didn’t know how I feel, in case it makes you feel guilty. But now you do.” Her voice wound down like a children’s toy.
He had his face buried in her hair again, the horse ambling along on his own. “I can’t talk about it without seeing your eyes.”
“Could we please not make a fuss?”
Her voice wavered, and she steadied it. “I’ll be a nine days’ wonder in the village.”
“Far beyond,”
Caelan said. “This’ll reach Glasgow. Scotsmen love a story more than anything, and this one has love and death.”
“Wonderful,”
she muttered. Exhaustion had set in now, along with the wet and cold. Her body was starting to ache: her arms, her palm, even her stomach as she’d apparently scraped over a tree. She turned her head against her husband’s chest and took in Caelan’s blissfully sweaty, spicy smell. “Do you mind if I have a nap?”
He kissed her forehead again. “Would you prefer to return to the village? This horse has to be the slowest I’ve ever ridden, but I wouldn’t like to kick it to a trot with two of us on his back. We have several hours to go.”
“No, I want to be at home,”
Clara said. “Please.”
“If it’s a home, Isla made it—”
“I don’t want to talk about Isla,”
Clara interrupted. “You told me not to speak her name to you. Now I’m saying the same to you.” She’d straightened so she could see his face, but he tugged her back against him.
“We have to talk about Isla,”
he stated. “We should have done so earlier.”
“We already did.”
Clara closed her eyes. How could she be so irrational and contrary? Only an hour ago, she’d sworn that if Caelan lived, she would help tend the flowers on Isla’s grave. Now anger was burning in her belly again.
It wasn’t all at her husband. She was so tired, not merely bone-weary but soul-weary as well, because although Caelan would be horrified at the comparison, their relationship wasn’t terribly different from hers with her mother.
She could never catch up, never be the best. Isla made a home.
“I tried to make the castle a home,”
she whispered, but so quietly that he couldn’t hear her over the clopping of the horse’s hooves. “I tried.”