The Devil’s Due by Boucher, Rita (free reads txt) 📗

She stared silently into the rippling water. How could she dare to put faith in tomorrow when yesterday would pursue her always? “Hope?” she asked, putting her bitterness into words. “What license have I to reach for expectations beyond today? I am responsible for what happened to Anne. Due to my carelessness, she may be injured beyond repair. So spare me the platitudes, if you please, milord. Surely you know that there is always a penance to be paid?” And you are part of that retribution, she added silently. To be near you, to want you, to be bound to you forever though I must leave this place. You shall be my perpetual purgatory, Duncan MacLean and the hell of what might have been, my living damnation. “I have no future,” she declared.

“Aye, you fancy yourself a martyr, do you?” Duncan said, his tone crisp as a slap on the cheek. He understood only too well that feeling of helplessness, the almost unbearable burden of responsibility. “What do you accomplish, Kate, with your eternal guilt. Do you think that it helps Anne to know that you have mounted the cross for her? Does it bring your brother-in-law any closer to justice?”

How dared he? What right had he to judge? To tell her what she ought to do, to feel? “You are a great one to talk, Laird of the MacLeans,” Kate retorted. “You with all your ranting about destiny and doom. You hold Charlie’s curse to your bosom and bemoan your fate. But it seems no more than a bloody excuse to me, a pretext for neglecting your obligations, your people. And were that not sufficient to absolve you from harsh reality, you nurse your wounds in the darkness, as if a marred face somehow makes you less of a man. How is it that you have the audacity to chide me, as if I do not thirst for justice?”

Drawing a choked breath, she turned to look at him, her nails digging deep into her palms as she fought to control her rage. “But can any man know what it is to be powerless, to know that your life turns upon another’s whim? I burn for justice, sir, want it so much that sometimes I feel as if that desire will consume me, but vengeance is a luxury whose cost I cannot presently afford. And I will allow no one to pay that price for me, Duncan. It is my obligation, my burden, but I doubt that you can understand that.”

“Aye,” Duncan said with quiet vehemence. “I can, Kate. I know that thirst, for I, too, have a blood debt to settle. My men, all but Fred, were murdered; deliberately manipulated by a greedy villain in the hopes of destroying the only man who had evidence against him. Myself.” He paced in agitation, his fingers nervously rifling through the mane of his hair.

“Those who were lucky were slaughtered on the field, but those of us who survived received the worst of the bargain. It was in prison I lost my eye, but I have since found that to be the least of my injuries.” He paused, struggling to articulate something that he was only barely beginning to comprehend.

“Those are the visible wounds, but I begin to think that there may be worse injuries that are beyond sight. I would hear my men’s voices, Kate. Their hants rose even in the light of day to point fingers and accuse me. And they would scream in the night demanding retribution. Sometimes, I thought that I was going mad.” He forced himself to continue although he could not read her reaction. “Though you condemn yourself for what happened to Anne, the fault was not yours. Unlike you, I was the architect of my own downfall.”

Kate shook her head. “I do not understand.”

“My men and I were deliberately sent into the arms of the enemy in the expectation that I would die. The reinforcements and artillery support that I was told to expect never came.” He shook his head at her confused expression. “Inadvertently, I had stumbled upon a scheme, you see. At first, it seemed a simple whiff of fraud, the kind that happens all the time in the army. But as I investigated further, the stench of corruption was undeniable. A swindle of massive proportions was occurring, thousands of pounds worth of materiel and supplies were being diverted.” Duncan looked toward the loch, shamed at his own stupidity. “My nose led me to one man and it was with him that I made my error. I thought him to be a mere dupe, a basically decent man who had become innocently befouled in a vast scheme. He was the kin of a dear friend. Since I feared that the scandal would taint by association, I gave him the chance to redeem himself, to give himself up and avoid besmirching the family name, arrogant ass that I was. I now believe that he was the mastermind behind this treason. Naysay though you will, it was the MacLean conceit implicit in Charlie’s bane which caused good men to die.” His lip twisted in a mocking smile, but there was no humor in his gaze. “There are times when men too, can be as powerless as babes in swaddling.”

Guiltily, Kate recalled that Duncan had been more of a prisoner than she had ever been. More than anyone else, he truly could understand what it was to be without hope, without choice. But the accusations that he had made set her mind awhirl. A chill fear invaded, creeping with questions, suspicions, as she frantically tried to recall the little that she knew about the circumstances of MacLean’s “death.” But Marcus had always discouraged her queries about his command, deriding them as evidence of her unorthodox upbringing. Although there were above a dozen questions hovering on her tongue’s tip, she could not inquire