Chapter Twenty-One #2
Lisle slid through to his antechamber, caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and groaned.
Then she was taking out what pins were left as she walked until she had a handful of them and nowhere to put them.
There wasn’t anyone in the hall, although she could hear voices below from Mabel Beamans’s crew of housemaids, and the smell of breakfast meats was wafting through from the kitchens.
Lisle didn’t know the first place to look, and had to duck into a hallway as a grouping of seamstresses passed by.
The maze of halls was still an impossibility to learn, and then luck had her spotting Langston in a passing window, racing his black stallion across the lawn, before they were both disappearing just outside of her range of view.
Lisle pressed her nose to glass that hadn’t one disguising diamond cut into it, and fogged her own view.
She still couldn’t see him. She made up her mind.
She was marching to the stables. She was going to tell anyone stupid enough to get in her way that she was the lady of the house, and she was doing inspections of some kind, and they had better not try to stop her.
No one stopped her. It wasn’t that she was brave enough to test her plan.
It was because she didn’t give them a chance.
If she heard anyone, she ducked into a room and waited until they passed.
It took so long, she was hopelessly lost amid yet another series of halls before she found her egress.
It was a set of large, French-inspired doors opening onto a vista of garden that would shame many a landlord.
Lisle stepped down the rounded series of steps that zigzagged their way into the blooms and shrubs and trees and benches that had to make up the castle gardens.
At least she was outside. That was part of her agenda, although she didn’t know in which direction the stables lay, or even if she would have to swim the loch before she reached it.
Lisle giggled. The dew was wetting the bottom of her skirt, hampering her movements as it slapped against her ankles, and she told herself that Mary MacGreggor was probably into her smelling salts right about this time due to her mistress’s absence.
The garden ended at more of the yellow-cast wall, and she raced along it until it ended in another abutment. The one contained the same three hundred or so long, low steps. It wasn’t empty, however. There were men on horseback from a point halfway up the wall, and farther along it as well.
Lisle ducked back around the wall, going into a small ball while she waited for her heart to continue to support her life and not thud its way right out of her chest with the surprise.
He’d crafted those long steps for horses to traverse.
It was so simple, she felt stupid for not realizing it before.
Such a stairway was also necessary for moving cannon up it, and whatever else he had a use for up on the walls.
Lisle caught her breath, stood, and walked in a crouched-over hunch of a walk, back the way she’d come.
The gardens might have another exit. She’d look for that.
If she didn’t hurry, she’d probably miss Langston entirely, and then she really would feel like a complete fool for not having the smarts to climb up onto a window ledge in his room and simply wait for his reappearance.
The gardens had another exit, but to find it she had to follow two meandering pathways through groves of trees and gardenias and roses, and all sorts of ferns and bushes and shrubs that she didn’t know existed.
Her hands were trembling, her lungs were burning, and her belly wasn’t too fond of her either as she pushed, with too much emphasis, on a wooden door.
Since it was as oiled and well maintained as everything else at Monteith Castle, it swung open swiftly and rapidly.
Lisle fell headlong into the stableyard.
Her abrupt entry into the muddy enclosure went unnoticed, but not due to anything other than the melee of horses all getting saddled and groomed, and pawing restlessly while an army of groomsmen worked on them.
There was also the fact that she’d chosen a dark blue dress, she was now coated with mud, and there wasn’t any activity happening at the side where she’d entered.
There was also the bit of luck that there was a bench right next to her that she crawled beneath the moment she had her breath back.
From that vantage point, it was impossible to pick out Langston.
It was impossible to do more than watch horse legs, trouser-clad legs, and at the far end what looked to be three black coaches.
There was a loud whistle given. That must have meant to mount up, because they were forming columns and riding out, emptying the yard within moments, without one word spoken between any of them.
That was exactly what she would have expected of a well-trained army that was sending horses over to Captain Barton. Lisle watched and listened, and beyond the sounds of hooves and coach wheels turning, there wasn’t any other sound. There was silence.
And then there was the sound of sobbing.
Lisle crawled from beneath the bench and went to the same hunched-over walk as she circled the stableyard, keeping to the wall and using what trees there were for covering.
Her dress was beyond repair. She’d never be able to explain it.
The seamstresses would probably be in fits of gossipy whispers over the extent of damage done to her ballgown anyway.
First, her clothing was ripped off of her, and now she was plowing through stable mud with this one.
They probably should use less costly materials.
Monteith’s stables were dank, and dark, and smelled of musk and horseflesh and a thousand other interesting things that she didn’t know enough about to name.
The heartrending sound of loss pulled at her, drawing her past row upon row of stalls, some vacant, some holding one horse, until there was only one left.
Lisle approached it with a stealth she didn’t know she possessed.
The sound of sobs had since ended, although there were still rustling noises coming from the stall that had to have held a very special horse.
Lisle couldn’t read the strange symbol that was etched into the nameplate on the door.
She dropped to her knees to peek through the bottom bar, and then she was peering in and shoving her own hand into her mouth to stop the cry.
Langston was hunched into a ball of misery about a saddle that she instinctively knew belonged to the stallion Saladin, and he was covered in muck, and blood, and turf.
He was rocking in a version of abject misery that made her own eyes fill until she couldn’t see through the blur of moisture.
This was the hidden Langston no one ever got to see.
This was the man who’d been hated by his own father to the extent he’d been tossed out.
This was the man who was trying to build a future for his country, and having to fight the very people he was working for.
Here was the man who was vilified, hated, and detested by foe and friend alike, and here was the man who had just given away something he loved very much… because he had to.
Lisle crawled backward, disturbing the straw enough that he lifted his head and looked her way.
She prayed for the cover of obscurity in the black ranks of the stable floor as she had never winged a prayer before, and it must have been heard, because Langston bowed his head and turned back to the saddle.
His shoulders started heaving again with misery and loss and pain.
Lisle clapped a hand to her mouth, scuttled as far away from him as she could before she dared risk it, and then started running.
God was with her the entire flight. He gave her feet wings, and her body stealth, and her mind direction. She was on her knees thanking Him the moment she reached her unlocked chamber and stumbled over to the bed. Langston wasn’t ever going to hear of this from her. No one was…ever.
She was still on her knees when Mary MacGreggor came back, clucking her tongue over Lisle’s attire, and her ballgown, and then she was ordering another bath and making everyone else leave.
There wasn’t a hint of salts poured into this water to send any fragrance into the air, or make the water silken-smooth to the touch.
It wouldn’t have changed anything. It was still flavored with tears.