Chapter 18
KEIR FELT ELEANOR’S forehead against his back.? Her arms were wrapped around him and her chest was tight against him.
He cocked his head toward his left shoulder, whispering the words, “I swear I couldn’t love you more than I do right now, and yet I know I will tomorrow.”
Copper stopped trotting and there was no longer the bouncing-rubbing friction between the riders.
Keir waited for her response, afraid maybe he’d said too much.
They were a good thirty feet ahead of Mary and Colin and the pack horse was between them on the narrow lane they’d turned down.
The spring sunshine cast faultless light on their faces on this clear, unblemished afternoon.
Had she heard him? The seconds seemed like molasses, sticky and slow-moving.
Her voice was soft, tentative.
“I’ve made few choices in my life.
This feeling I have for you … came upon me when I first saw you.
I didn’t choose to … to love you … but I do … and now I’d choose you over … anything.”
He pressed one hand over the two of hers that were clasped at his waist.
Her words were like lyrics.
He couldn’t stop smiling, staring straight ahead at Copper’s ears.
He appreciated the effort she was making to tell him this.
It couldn’t have been easy, and perhaps impossible if they’d been face to face.
She chose him.
It was utterly remarkable.
He could imagine that Anabel, or any lass in Scotland for that matter, would not choose him over the chance to be a princess.
But Eleanor did.
Behind them Colin’s voice rang out.
“Me mum is feelin’ peely wally.
Can we stop and rest a bit?”
Keir pulled on Copper’s reins.
“Aye, we can.”
A hint of laughter in his voice.
“’Tis a spot good enough if we tie the horses over there.”
The smile was still planted on his lips.
He was glad for the opportunity to get down.
As nice as it was having Eleanor pressed so close to him, he looked forward to a chance to kiss her again, perhaps with Copper shielding them from Colin and Mary’s eyes.
Mary croaked, “I’m sorry.
I nivver rode much a’fore.”
“Och,”
Keir groaned, his face falling as he glanced back.
“Yer mum is gonnae whitey.”
Colin slipped off the horse’s rump and held his spindly arms up to help his mother.
She landed on the ground, put her hands on her knees, and lowered her head.
Colin took the horse and led it toward Keir and Eleanor.
“Let me help her.”
Eleanor withdrew her arms, but Keir caught her left one and held on as she mimicked Colin’s dismount.
With Keir’s help she landed steady next to his leg.
She ran to her mother.
***
ELEANOR’S STOMACH WAS as upset as her mother’s, but for a different reason.
She’d been straddling the horse, holding close to Keir, and thinking about a real marriage.
And more specifically, about the marriage bed.
She’d answered Keir truthfully; she did love him and she knew she would always love him, choice or not.
She couldn’t stop this emotion if she tried.
She was rather proud of herself for voicing her feelings.
She reached her mother and put a hand on her back.
“I’ll be a’right,”
Mary said.
“I dinnae want tuh lose me mornin’s porridge.”
She dropped most of the learned accent and whispered, “I hope we’re not making a mistake.
I feel we can trust this McKelvey heir.”
“Heir? I’ve met his father.
It’ll be a long while till Keir inherits anything.
Laird McKelvey is not as old-looking as Lord Edgeworth.”
Her mother spat on the ground and straightened up.
“Clive Edgeworth.
That monster.”
Her tongue tangled, and she went back to her old language quirks, smacking the air with an unlikely English oath.
“He stole away me older sister, paid me widowed mum off, then turned his back on her and me.”
They walked together toward a clump of bushes and rounded to the other side to put a screen of green between them and the men.
Mary went on with her rant.
“And he demanded money of yer father when we came to hide our marriage from—”
Mary gave a startled squeak and jumped. “Snakes.”
At first Eleanor thought it was a commentary on the royal family, then she saw two serpents slithering beneath the greenery.
She broke off a brittle branch and stabbed one, then the other.
“Well,”
Mary proclaimed, “’twas an action Colin woulda done fer me.”
She looked with greater care at Eleanor, put a hand to Eleanor’s hair and patted her.
“Daughter, ye be a stranger to me, but I’m verra glad to … to finally know you.”
Eleanor shrugged her shoulders.
The warmth from the sun seemed to dissipate and she heard a sound she didn’t expect.
Faint hoof beats.
She looked over the bushes and saw their horses tied a good hundred feet from where she stood.
Keir and Colin were out of sight.
They must have walked a little farther to do their business.
But she still heard the thumps. She turned. Someone was trotting up the path.
“Stay down, mum.”
She crouched with Mary and put a foot on the snake to hold its lifeless body against the dirt as she pulled the stake out.
A sharp stick was the only weapon she had if she was to defend herself and her mother against a lone rider.
She hoped there wasn’t more than one.
***
CAPTAIN BERNARD LUXBURY, devoid of the proper uniform and personal weapons, decided to rely on his own cunning and the training he had in England, as well as the filthy and oily pistol he took from the drunken Scot.
He spied his chance and took it.
The women were separated from the boy and the Highlander.
He planned to swoop in, snatch Eleanor, and gallop away.
He might even shoot at the horses, marksman that he was, and if he didn’t kill them, they would certainly scatter.
He came off the trail, hid his horse, and crept up close.
Now he needed to creep back, mount, and charge.
He reached the nag and was about to put foot in stirrup when a disturbing sound reached his ears.
Loud as a mail coach on a bumpy road, came a carriage preceded by a horse and rider.
The rider passed him without a nod from his dark-haired noggin, and headed straight for where he was sure to cross paths with Eleanor if not the Highlander.
The coach came next; the driver nodded, cocked his head at Luxbury and slowed his horses.
As well as he could tell, only two women sat inside the coach.
Luxbury gasped.
He recognized one of them and quickly pulled his hat down.
Then a head popped up from the back of the coach and hollered to the carriage driver.
“Take care between the trees.
The lane’ll open in a wee bit.
We’re almost there.”
Bernard switched his attention to this last Scotsman and swore beneath his breath.
He figured it out.
He knew exactly who these five were, and their connection to Eleanor and to that blasted Highlander who thought he’d married a princess.
Ha! They’d all be bound for Castle Caladh, but he still had a chance to capture Eleanor.
He mounted up and wove his way through the brush and trees, trotting where he could, and smacking branches out of his way, sniffing the air like a hound tracking a wounded fox.
***
ELEANOR DROPPED THE stick when she realized it was Jack who was trotting up the lane, looking so much like Keir.
She touched her mother’s arm.
“It’s Keir’s youngest brother.”
She looked behind him and added, “And that’s Hubert driving the carriage.
Oh, Fenella must be inside.
And there’s his other brother, Logan, hanging off the back.”
Mother and daughter stood watching, unaware of a different sound coming up behind them until a horse whinnied, Mary was knocked down, and a strong arm reached for Eleanor, grabbed her around her waist, and hefted her up and across the saddle.
The breath was pushed from her lungs before she could cry out.
She bounced along, feeling the pressure of someone’s chest against her back and the stiff leather of a saddle under her stomach, her lungs still empty.
One of her arms was trapped under her torso, but the other one that the kidnapper had wrenched, hung limply, bobbing next to his leg.
That’s what she saw, what she registered: a leg in dirty breeches, a rather expensive boot, the ground passing beneath her in jarring spasms, and her useless arm.
At last, her lungs filled.
She cried out, lifted her head in time to see the stopped carriage, now far away, and several wide eyes staring her way.
Hannah! Hannah was in the carriage.
And then she saw nothing.
***
KEIR JUMPED LOGS and twisted his way around trees to run to where the shouting was.
He caught his foot on a root but managed to stay on his feet, dodged a tree and leaped over a mossy stone.
He saw his brothers and Hubert first, then Hannah and his sister Fenella stepped out of the carriage that he recognized as one of the Beldorney coaches.
Colin raced past him, shouting something to his mother.
He followed the boy’s trajectory and saw Mary on the ground beyond the carriage.
Where was El? Something caught his eye and he looked toward the horizon.
A horse and rider were galloping off, the rider bent low over some kind of cargo—or dead body?—that flopped behind the horse’s neck.
Everyone shouted at once.
“He took her!”
“Keir! Go after them!”
“Who’s the woman? Where’d that lad come from?”
“Keir, what’s going on?”
He scanned for Eleanor, didn’t see her, and understood the crazy pieces of nonsense the shouted words meant.
“Luxbury!”
he snarled.
He whistled for Copper.
The horse jolted hard enough to pull the reins from around the branch he’d been tied to.
***
ELEANOR WOKE SORE and aching.
She could move both arms, but one sharply pained her.
She lifted her head and might have screamed if she was anyone but who she was.
This was a startlingly obvious graveyard.
The sun had set and shadows cast about her in eerie shapes.
She’d played among the headstones behind the church Lady Beth and Lord Edgeworth attended when it suited them.
She and Hannah used to trace the letters with their fingers before she learned to decipher the names and dates.
This place wouldn’t frighten her, but where …?
She sat up and remembered.
Hannah.
She’d seen her in the carriage.
Then … what happened?
She rubbed the back of her head.
There was something wet.
Blood? She looked down where her head had been.
A stone marker. M c C a …
“Ah, you’re awake.
I thought I might have dropped you to your death at first.”
The chuckle was humorless.
The voice not one she expected to hear.
If there were ghosts in this kirkyard, the one approaching her seemed vaguely familiar as well as talkative.
“Bernard?”
She smelled the inescapable scent of spilled ale on his clothes as he reached her.
“Where am I? What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
She squinted at him and slowly moved her head side to side.
He sat down on the ground next to her and took her hand.
“My dear, you were kidnapped.
It was most fortunate that I came along when I did.”
“What?”
She tried to listen as he explained.
It didn’t make much sense to her.
“I was with my mother, her son, and Keir McKelvey.
How was I kidnapped?”
Now her head began to throb and she started shivering.
“Come,”
Luxbury got to his feet and coaxed her up, “I found the door to the kirk unlocked.
We can rest inside.”
Unsteadily, she allowed him to lead her toward the small building, past a snorting horse tied to an iron hitching post.
The church reminded her of the kirk in which she’d almost married Keir, only this one was somehow much less pleasant.
Two candles up on the altar gave a minimum of light to the small space.
They sat together on a pew and Bernard put a smelly horse blanket over her shoulders.
Eleanor continued to frown.
“Where’s Keir?”
“I suppose he’s hunting for you, my dear.
I can’t imagine what happened.
Highwaymen, perhaps? It’s not the first time you or I have been attacked.”
Eleanor held her hand out and concentrated on the smear of blood across her palm “I think … I think I’m hurt.
My head …”
“I can go look for the vicar, if you’d like, or a neighbor.
Perhaps there’s communion wine …”
He got up and scavenged through two low cupboards at the side of the church.
Eleanor peered at him in the dim light.
“Where’s your uniform?”
“You’re not the only one to be abducted, my princess.
I made it to Auld Reekie and was arrested, stripped of my uniform, and sentenced to serve a term on a ship bound for the West Indies, but I emancipated myself.
Unfortunately, I had to dress as a tatterdemalion to avoid recapture.”
He came back to her with a goblet and a bottle.
He poured a few inches and held it out to her.
She took a couple sips and handed it back.
There was something about his tone; the man was lying.
The urge to vomit suddenly overcame her.
She leaned forward and splattered the wine on his boots.
She recognized the boots.
***
KEIR HOLLERED FOR Logan to grab the other horse and follow him.
He expected that Fenella, Jack, and Hubert, along with Colin and Pascoe, or rather Hannah, would tend to Mary and take her to Castle Caladh.
He didn’t need any other help besides Logan to track down the miscreant who’d made off with Eleanor.
But as the sun set and the trails grew darker between the forests and the hills, he worried that they’d taken a wrong turn.
Logan had ridden in silence, well aware of his brother’s feelings.
This was a crisis.
He did his best to watch for signs of hoof prints or obscure trails.
When they neared a village, Logan spoke.
“The clan MacLeod lives near aboot.
Could ye see yerself askin’ fer their help?”