Taken by Angeline Fortin (great books of all time TXT) 📗

“The simple answer is that I don’t know.”

“How can ye no’ ken such a thing?” Rhys pressed.  “If ye were no’ ill, delirious…  What other explanation is there?”

Scarlett only shook her head.  Her lack of information was as maddening to James today as her silence had been the previous day, and given the manner in which she gnawed nervously at her lip, James got the impression she was giving an unusual amount of consideration to her answers.  More consideration than was necessary when honesty might have served her best.  “None that would make any more sense to you than it does to me.”

“And yer claim that ye ken the Queen of England?”

“I lied,” she said quickly.  “I was just trying to get away.”

“And go where?” he persisted.  “Where do ye want to go?  ‘Tis my inclination, wi’ the battle looming ahead, to send ye back to yer people and forgo a ransom.  Tell me true from whence ye came and I will see ye safely home.”

James started at the unexpected offer and Scarlett looked just as surprised.  “You’re letting me go?”

“Ye wanted away before.  Do ye nae longer?” Rhys asked.  Aye, he was a sly one.  “Ye made no attempts to escape before.  Not one since our arrival here.  I’m getting the sense that yer right where ye want to be.  Why is that?”

Scarlett’s eyes were drawn down the table to Laird.  Despite Rhys’ distracting conversation, she had been all too aware of his brooding presence throughout the entire meal.  Aware that he was watching her every move.  Listening to her every word.

What would become of her if they sent her away?  Alone and hungry in the middle of sixteenth century Scotland?  Her stomach growled in protest, reminding her that she still hadn’t filled it.  Or perhaps protesting such a future as well.

It was becoming quite clear as her stay in the sixteenth century continued, that she needed these people to feed her, cloth her and keep her sane.

Part of that sanity was maintained by the belief that she would be going home soon. If she had any hope of making her way back to her own time – thus sparing her from insanity - Scarlett needed to be where Laird was.  Somehow, his sword was the key to it all.  He was the key and she needed to stay close.

While she had already determined there was a ‘too close’, by contrast, there was also a ‘too far away’.

“Nay, Rhys,” Laird protested before she could.  “Before the lass leaves us, I will hae a satisfactory explanation for her presence at Dunskirk.  If she cannae provide it ere our departure to Ellemford, she will join us on our progress and we will find her clansmen or return to Dunskirk when this is over.”

Scarlett closed her eyes, exhaling a long sigh of relief.

“Is this acceptable to ye, lass?” Rhys asked, his eyes once again twinkling as if he were somehow pleased by Laird’s command.  “’Twill be a long journey, fraught wi’ danger… and horses.”

She grimaced but nodded.  “I think I can survive it.”

Why was she beginning to think that she was now right where he wanted her to be?

“Now that that is settled we can make merry once more.”  Rhys slouched back in his chair, propping his heels up on the table and crossing his feet at the ankles.  “Come, Scarlett, tell me more aboot yerself.  I confess, I find ye far more diverting than talk of bloodshed. Yer mother?  A female on the stage?  Tis unheard of at any theater I’ve attended.  Even at court, all the players are men.”

Scarlett bit her lip, thinking quickly.  “Where I’m from, many women act.  It’s nothing unusual.”

“And your parents?  Are their names as outlandish as yours?”

It was a not so subtle interrogation but friendlier than the rapid fire questions Laird had battered her with the previous day.  Scarlett rolled her shoulders, forcing the tension away.  She had gotten what she wanted, a place by Laird’s side and that sword.  Would it hurt now to provide some truth to ease their suspicions?  “Not really.  My father’s name is Wesley Thomas and my mother is Olivia Harrington.”  Rhys waved her on encouragingly.  “Of course those are just their stage names.  My mother was once simply Thelma Lou Ellis from Memphis, Tennessee and my father was actually born Vasili Trofim Korchinskaiia.”

“Ye’re Russian?”

Scarlett picked her way through the bread once more with a shrug.  “What’s wrong with being Russian?”  Other than Lenin, Stalin, Communism, Khrushchev, the Berlin Wall, Bay of Pigs and the Cold War and McCarthyism, the American government had never had reason to hate them.  Scarlett grimaced.  She supposed being Russian in 1950s United States was a lot like being Englishman in Scotland just now.

Suspicion and distrust were everywhere.  Wars, Cold and old, seemed to have that in common as well.  She’d probably have about as much luck gaining the trust of these men as Stalin would JFK.

“Why would they change their names and deny their people?” Rhys was asking.

“Actors do it all the time to be more marketable, but as for my father, there was another reason entirely,” she explained as she continued her meal, thankfully moving on from the bread to the tatties and smoked salmon his brother nudged toward her.  “His father had been an actor too but back in the fifties and sixties.  Back then, even a hint of Russia clinging to you could get you black-listed so he used a stage name but never legally changed it.  My father did that when he was in his twenties.  Vasili Trofim in English is Wesley Thomas, you see.”

“I dinnae ken this ‘black-listed’.”

“Umm,” she paused, considering.  “Blackballed?  Boycotted?  Ostracized?”

James shook his head in confusion as he listened to Scarlett prattle on.  The woman did love to talk once she started.  First she was Egyptian, now she was Russian?  Och, it must be