Chapter 22
James McGregor sipped brandy, enjoying the comfort of the Queen Anne chair before the fire, his legs stretched out on the footstool before it. The flames warmed his face, and he offered Shawna a smile that managed to make his ugly little face somehow beautiful.
But though he’d accepted her invitation for a brandy, and though he sat so comfortably in the chair, he looked at her and said, “You know, Lady MacGinnis, I cannot tell you a thing. Not a single thing. It isn’t my place.”
Across from him, Shawna frowned. “Not even where he has had the wee lad taken?”
James leaned forward. “I swear, he’s quite safe—will that help you?”
“‘It will help. But what that tyrant has asked of you is quite cruel, you know.”
James smiled, swirling his brandy in his glass. “The lad is healthy, well-tended, and in fine health.”
“How do you know?”
He glanced at her, startled. “Why…I was a physician, my lady. In a different life. The lad is well, and your Sabrina will be fine as well. I could have tended her tonight, but you wanted your friend here.”
“It was important to me. Edwina practices witchcraft, but she is not among these awful people. I know it.”
“So, it’s good that she came tonight,” he agreed and shrugged. “I met Laird Douglas upon a ship that was taking us both away for a lifetime of servitude. I only escaped my fate because of Laird Douglas, and therefore, though I do not consider him a tyrant, I do his bidding and gladly.”
“I don’t know where my child is, so his bidding is wrong,” Shawna said.
James leaned toward her, swirling his brandy, enjoying the amber color. “You cannot imagine how fine it seems to sit in comfort and drink something of such quality,” he told her, and smiled.
“You are paying me no heed, Mr. McGregor.”
“Ah, but I am. I have been quite anxious to meet you, of course. In the very first moment, when Laird Douglas awoke to find himself called a murderer, he thought that you had been killed. And I think that he would have torn out the throats of captain, mate, and crew—before dying himself, of course—if he had not quickly realized that you were alive and well—he was the dead man.”
“So, he has spoken of me.”
“Indeed.”
“What he has said cannot have been kind.”
“We lived together, my lady, in the cruelest of conditions. In London, good Queen Victoria has created a reign of chastity and propriety, but in her search for goodness, she overlooks the horror of the tenements, of the poor—and once a man is condemned, by fair means or foul, his fate is hell on earth. You are aware, I imagine, that David was taken aboard a ship and sent to hard labor camps. I have fought rigging with him in the fiercest storms. I have broken rock at his side. I have seen him do the labor for others to keep whips of sadistic guards off their backs—in fact, my lady, it was in fighting for me that he finally won our freedom. I was very nearly killed. I don’t think that David intended to kill the guard.
In the fighting, the guard’s neck was broken.
We freed ourselves and a number of the others and escaped.
I tell you this just in case you don’t understand what his past five years have been.
“You must bear in mind that obviously, over such an amount of time, a man would brood. And his anger would fester hard within his soul.”
“But I’m not guilty of all that he thinks,” Shawna protested. “Surely, he knows that now. I don’t know exactly what he’s told you, but I only meant to save my cousin—’’
“Ah, well, lass, the best of intentions do not always serve us well!”
Shawna pulled up her legs, resting her chin upon her knees.
She knew what had happened, aye. David didn’t speak much of it.
Maybe there wasn’t much to tell. He had served a convict’s hard time.
In chains. She understood that. She thought she understood that.
But she couldn’t know what it had been like for him, day after day, days becoming months, months becoming years.
All of that time.
Waiting to come back.
The thought of revenge a life force like air to breathe.
She shivered. She still wanted to see Danny. To hold him. To keep him safe. To make up for all the lost years.
She couldn’t begin to imagine anything as cruel as what David was doing to her now. Telling her that her son lived and then taking him away. Maybe she couldn’t clearly imagine or understand all that David had been through.
But he couldn’t imagine or understand what it had been like for her.
Awaking to find herself alive, yet next to a corpse she believed to be the man she had loved.
Then discovering that she was going to have a child.
The months of living, of dreaming, of waiting, planning, not knowing what to do, knowing only that the child would be some small precious memory of him…
The hours of labor only to be given a pathetically misshapen bundle that was dead.
Danny had been special from the time she had first seen him. Oh god, if she had only realized…
What had gone on in the past?
Would it ever matter? He’d wanted the boy taken away from anyone with the name MacGinnis. What did he intend? Surely, he could not mean to keep the child from her forever.
If they were to live long enough to have a forever.
How had the Andersons ever come into possession of her son?
She had to know. She leaped up suddenly. “I—have to go out.”
McGregor arched a brow to her.
“I cannot let you go anywhere.”
“But I must!” she exclaimed, staring at him. It was incredible. He would stop her. Whatever it took, he would stop her.
Unless she could devise a means of escape. She had to escape this room, no matter how rude or cruel a ruse she must devise.
“Why, you ugly, wretched little bastard!” she cried to him, wincing inwardly as she did so. He had been kind to her. No matter what David had said regarding her, he had been kind to her.
But she had no choice now. She had to get out—and demand the truth from the Andersons. Somewhere, there had to be a defense for her.
“Lady MacGinnis—”
“Oh, I don’t expect you to understand!” she cried to him. “But I can’t bear your presence a moment longer. Keep me prisoner—but get away from me while you obey your master’s bidding.”
James rose with dignity and walked across the room without a word. At the doorway, he paused. “Call him what you will, my lady. I would die for David Douglas, so if you plan on getting by me, you will have to kill me.”
James exited her room. Shawna stared after him. “I’m so sorry!” she whispered.
She dressed quickly.
There was one benefit now to the fact that David had been slipping into and out of her room at night at will.
She wasn’t exactly sure where the secret panel was.
But it existed.
And she was going to find it.
“I’d been duly chastised,” Alistair said, “and I was, you may believe me or not, wretchedly sorry for what I had done. I told Father that I should go straight to you, but he was uneasy. He wasn’t certain that you would take matters into your own hands without going to the law.
Anyway, my father knew you would have the contracts under which I had fraudulently managed to get myself paid in either your office or the master’s chambers.
All he needed was time. We needed to have you diverted. And actually…”
“Aye?” David said coldly.
Alistair stared at the fire. “I don’t think that Shawna wanted to deceive you. But she was readily willing to lure you from your room.”
“What you’re telling me so far, I’ve basically deduced. How did I wind up on that ship?”
Alistair exhaled. “You were supposed to do no more than pass out in the stables. That was the family plan. I was the cause of it, but I wasn’t even a part of it.
I had gone down to the village of Wickshire to gamble and drink—and drown my sorrows.
I was a black sheep then, you know. Blacker than ebony, as you can imagine.
I had tarnished the name of the clan. Anyway, a group of constables was going through the village, looking for a fellow who’d escaped his guards and run north from Glasgow.
He was bound for hard labor for the murder of a young lass—well, you know the history of the man.
I gambled with a few of the constables and heard the time they were having searching for the fellow—he knew the Highlands, and they did not.
When I left the tavern, I was attacked in the woods just beyond Castle Rock.
The fellow was tough. He put up one hell of a fight.
I was very nearly killed myself, but just when he was about to slit my throat, I wrenched my dirk from the sheath at my calf and caught him almost directly in the heart with my blade.
Just at this same time, I saw the stables on fire.
I came riding here as fast as I could. When I went into the stables, I found Shawna and you.
One of the beams had crashed down on you. ”
“A beam? I was knocked out by a beam?”
“Wait—a beam wielded by a cloaked figure. You see, I got Shawna out first. Then, when I went back for you, that was when I first saw them.”
“Saw who?”
Alistair shook his head.