Chapter Two
It was dark, no light filtering through the iron bars set high above, so it must still be night or very early morning.
Something scrabbled in the corner, and Lowri shuddered and shrank into herself.
Her mind had begun to play tricks on her, and sometimes she imagined a corpse lurked there, shuffling ever closer in the suffocating blackness, intent on dragging her to Hell.
Or was she the corpse – still breathing but settling into her coffin?
The punishment for reiving was hanging.
She deserved it for what she had done, that reckless folly which now had her chained to a damp wall with just the relentless drip of water and the rustling of the rats for company.
The shuffling came closer, and a scream clawed up the back of Lowri’s throat.
But then her ears caught a sweet sound. Birdsong.
A starling or a sparrow, darting among the trees outside, shaking off sleep and fluffing its feathers out to greet the new day.
The image soothed her harried nerves. There was still life around her, still hope. Wasn’t there?
Soon after, thin light streamed in, illuminating the yellow-green ribbon of slime where water ran down the opposite wall.
Lowri reached and rubbed her leg where it chafed on the ankle chain.
There was nothing to do but give in to the misery – the mouldy smell of old hay strewn all about, the drip, drip, drip of water, and the growling of her empty stomach folding in on itself.
Memories of that night crept back in - the cold wind over the hills, Donnan’s eagerness, Rory’s pale and frightened face.
Tears stung Lowri’s eyes and ran hot down her cheeks, but the clomp of boots heralded the arrival of her gaolers, so she brushed them away.
Pray God, they came with food. But Lowri’s heart sank as the door swung open and Laird Griffin Macaulay sauntered in with another, younger man.
The Laird narrowed his eyes to see her in the gloom, sniffed the air like a rodent and grimaced.
‘Bit foul in here. How do you fare today, lass?’ he said, cruelty all over his pinched face.
‘Worse for seeing you,’ Lowri replied.
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘Say your piece and go.’ Lowri’s words stuck in her throat like sand. They came out weak, tainted with fear. Her gaze darted to Griffin’s companion and fixed there.
Griffin sighed. ‘We are not the best of friends, are we, lass? How are you enjoying Macaulay hospitality?
‘About as much as I am enjoying looking at your gargoyle’s face, Laird Macaulay.’
‘Hah, how you wound me. Alas, we cannot all be blessed with beauty like you. Much good it will do you.’
Lowri turned aside. She would not be baited by his threats.
‘Are you not curious as to your fate, Lowri Strachan?’ said Griffin.
‘Do your worst, but please, I beg you, spare me the tedium of your company.’
‘Not too keen on me, eh? What about Allard? Like him any better?’ said Griffin with a leering grin, pushing forward the burly man at his side.
Allard’s surly, black-bearded face was as unwelcome as it was familiar. Since her imprisonment, he had come several times a day to stand before her, saying nothing, just staring. Then he would leave with one word – ‘soon’.
If he meant to intimidate her, it was working, for Lowri’s heart thudded in her chest whenever she heard footsteps outside her prison.
Griffin leant down before her, just beyond striking distance. ‘What a bonnie lass you are, under all that dirt, though it pains me to admit that anything of Strachan blood could be appealing.’
‘Aye, but she takes after her brother in her character, as nasty a bitch as ever I’ve seen,’ said the Allard fellow. It was the most she had ever heard him utter. His lip curled as he looked her over. ‘She needs a good beating to bring her to heel.’
‘Ah, but that would be such a waste. Why spoil those looks with bruises?’ Griffin snarled.
‘Your brother should have leapt at the chance to marry a Macaulay lass and make an alliance with me. I brought the bonniest ones to Fellscarp for his pleasure, but he looked down his nose at them and strung them along, and all the while he was already wed to that blonde slut, Cecily.’
‘You paraded your daughters and nieces before him like cattle at market, as he told it. How can you have so little shame?’
‘Shame! Think of his shame, when his sister is hanged for reiving. Think of his shame, when they haul you up in the town square before a baying crowd, feet kicking, eyes popping.’
‘Peyton will kill you for this, if it takes his last breath,’ hissed Lowri.
‘Aye, he can try. Or maybe, we will despatch you quietly, so that he never knows your fate and spends the rest of his life wondering – was it kind and painless, your ending, or hideous and slow? That might be a better payment for his humiliating me.’
‘You humiliate yourself,’ spat Lowri. ‘And if you think you can hurt my brother through me, in this cowardly way, you are mistaken.’
‘And hurt him, I will. Your brother played me as a fool, stringing me along.’
‘Peyton goes his own way, and he wed Cecily because he loves her. And you are a fool to think he would take a Macaulay as a wife. My brother would die before he joined with one of you miserable, belly-crawling rats.’
‘Well, let’s see if you feel the same, shall we? A few more days down here with real Macaulay rats will make you see sense.’
‘Do your worst, and get it over with,’ snapped Lowri.
‘You insolent bitch,’ snarled Allard, coming forward with his hand raised to slap her, but Griffin held him back.
‘Hold, my son. Plenty of time to play with your little toy when I have what I want.’
So, the hulking Allard was Griffin’s son. Of course. He had the same small-eyed, rodent features.
‘And what do you want – to ransom me, hold threats over Peyton’s head until he pays up?’ said Lowri.
‘No. Coin is not what I am after.’
‘You think to ambush Peyton when he comes for me. He would not be so foolish as to walk into a Macaulay trap.’
‘Come for you? Why would he do that, when he doesn’t know I have you? Peyton Strachan is not banging on my door because he doesn’t know you went reiving that night, lass. Those two whelps you were with told me everything. You raided against your brother’s orders. The three of you came alone.’
‘They would never say…’
‘Amazing how slack that Donnan’s tongue got when I put his brother under torture.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘I would, and I did. Those lads are in a bad way. They haven’t much time.’
‘You lie.’
‘Do you want to trust in that? Are your friends of so little value that you would sacrifice them for your pride? Their fate now depends on you, lass.’
Lowri sprang forward, jarring her ankle on the chains. ‘Where are they? What have you done with Donnan and Rory?’
‘They are a lot less comfortable than you,’ sneered Griffin.
‘Aye, the young one is crying for his mother,’ said Allard, with the glee of a child pulling the wings off a fly.
Desperation blunted Lowri’s pride. ‘Please. Let them go. They had nothing to do with this.’
‘They were reiving my cattle. Caught red-handed,’ sniffed Griffin.
‘Hang them high for all to see, I say,’ snarled the hateful Allard.
‘Too quick. Too merciful. We must make an example of these villains.’
She had to stop this. ‘It was my plan and mine alone. Laird Macaulay, you cannot hurt them. Please.’
‘So it’s Laird Macaulay now. Well, lass, I will think on it. In the meantime, you may reflect on your folly in crossing me. Think of a way to make it up to me, or their end will be slow and painful.’
‘How? How can I make it up to you?’
‘I am sure we can think of something,’ said Allard.
‘Aye, something that satisfies everyone,’ said Griffin, with a grin in his son’s direction.
They exchanged a chilling look. Were they going to take her out into a cold dawn and murder her?
No one knew where she was, and Griffin Macaulay was capable of it.
Or did they have something worse in mind, something carnal?
The leer on Allard’s face made Lowri’s stomach turn.
Griffin leaned in and put his palm to her cheek. ‘Aye, you are a bonnie little thing. Yet you will not sway the magistrate towards mercy after what you’ve done.’
‘Magistrate?’
‘Aye, lass. You need to answer for your crimes, and it just so happens he is a distant cousin of mine.’
‘Very distant, I hope,’ said Lowri, with defiance she did not feel.
‘Aye, but close enough that I have him in my pocket. He has taken a shine to my niece, Catherine, the bonnie one your brother turned his nose up at. If the verdict goes my way, he can have her in marriage, and we can all watch you get strung up as a wedding present.’
Lowri turned away lest Griffin see her horror. She had little faith in the decency of men, so if the magistrate’s lust stood between her and a noose, she was already dead.
With this parting cruelty, Griffin took his leave, but Allard lingered, his eyes roaming over her from head to toe.
‘Soon,’ he said with a smirk, and then left her to her thoughts – a far worse torture than their barbs.
Her friends’ plight was all her fault. She had talked Donnan and Rory into raiding Macaulay cattle.
She had laid the plan, which had gone horribly wrong, and got them all captured.
Lowri squeezed her eyes tightly shut to banish the memory, but it demanded to be let in.
A moonlit night at Bluff Point. The Macaulays, complacent and arrogant, thinking no one would dare steal from them.
Even now, she could still feel the sense of righteousness burning through her veins.
Griffin Macaulay had grievously insulted her brother after he had refused to take a Macaulay bride for the sake of an alliance.
And why should he? He was in love with the beautiful Cecily MacCreadie, and she with him.
Oh, it was painful to think of them now, happy and unaware of her fate.
And how could they know, when she was always going her own way, wandering off for weeks every time the walls of Fellscarp, and the bleakness of her life, started to close in?
The Macaulays had come out of nowhere and surrounded them before they could flee.
Donnan had tried to fight them off, and so had she, but then Rory had been knocked off his horse, and when she had tried to go to his aid, she had been taken.
She hadn’t seen either of them again in the confusion, and she hadn’t told anyone where they were going that night.
Peyton would have stopped her if he’d known.
‘Don’t raise Macaulay’s ire. Stop and think before you act,’ he had said many times.
But she had been arrogant, foolhardy, and selfish, and now her misguided attempt to champion her brother’s cause and avenge the insult to the Strachan name had led to her doom.
Griffin Macaulay must want something from her, and if she didn’t figure out what that was soon, Donnan and Rory would die.
The punishment for reiving was hanging.
Lowri let the tears come.