Love in the Time of a Highland Laird (A Laird for All Time Book 3) by Angeline Fortin (whitelam books .TXT) 📗

what hope they had left in his person and see their ‘rightful sovereign’ to safety. Nevertheless, for all the gossip and news he’d been privy to, there had been no news of his father’s death. Or imprisonment. Nothing.

That didn’t mean one or the other wasn’t true, however.

He had serious doubts his father would have discovered enough good sense to hide himself away, since most Jacobite supporters were after partaking in such a ludicrous affair to begin with. If he were hiding out, he was doing a bloody fine job of that but a horrible job as a father not to let them all know.

But that was nothing new.

Blast the man!

He could only hope that with the rank of Earl of Cairn, Camran MacCoinnich might have been spared the mass graves on the field of battle. Perhaps he’d been captured, imprisoned with the fifty or more prisoners taken to the Tolbooth gaol on the Canongate in Edinburgh.

He’d sent his cousin Mathilde to find out for certain. She was Hugh’s oldest sister but more importantly her husband, Alexander Kinnoull, Earl of Hawick, was of Clan Hay and a known patron of the Hanoverian King George, making her Keir’s best chance at finding out what had become of his sire.

She would come to his aid, he was certain. Though her worries were no doubt focused more on the fate of her brother.

Pouring himself a full tumbler of Scotch from the decanter on the sideboard, Keir dropped into a chair and stared morosely into the cold ashes of the fireplace.

Hugh Urquhart, the Duke of Ross.

Keir’s cousin, his brother-at-arms. His compatriot in deviltry throughout his life.

After Hugh’s parents died when he was but a boy, they’d been raised as brothers. Of an age, Keir had been closer to him than his own brothers. Fostered together at age eight to the MacDonnell at Glengarry. Reprimanded together for pulling pranks on the headmaster at the University of Edinburgh. Sent off together to sow their oats on their Grand Tour of the Continent.

And now they’d been called back to do their duty together, when Cairn commanded them to take up arms for Prince Charlie.

Keir had known Charlie for years in France. He wasn’t worth the effort. The death. Not his brother’s or even his father’s.

Certainly not Hugh’s.

He might not have disappeared directly because of the rebellion but he had been lost because of it. Because Cairn had demanded his presence on the field. Hugh had only been there to fall into that void because of Keir’s father and his ridiculous politics.

A fall that still made no sense.

It was time that it did.

Pushing himself from the chair, he grabbed a tasseled rope tucked between the bookshelves and gave it a firm tug. Reclining back in his chair, he downed his Scotch in a single swallow, wincing at the burn as it raked his throat and singed his gut. A sensation perhaps more pleasant than the confrontation to come. Yet come it must.

“Aye, laddie?” Archie, the man who’d come to answer his summons, asked, scratching absently at the side of his thigh beneath his kilt as he glowered out the far window.

Used to the quirks of his father’s longtime retainers, Keir instructed, “Hae my cousin—”

“Which—?”

“Maeve,” he snapped. Aye, he was too used to his father’s men. “Hae Maeve bring our guest to me.”

They were an impossible lot, all of them. Doddering fools and abstracted fossils. None who saw him as anything more than a wee lad in a long shirt. All who should have been retired years before.

“Our guest?” Archie scratched at his thigh again, transferring his frown to Keir.

“Aye, Archie.” Keir spoke slowly. “The wee lass I put in her charge ‘ere I left.”

“Ye left?”

Keir merely rolled his eyes, for such a response was nothing out of the unusual at Dingwall. “Just hae Maeve fetch the lass. I’m sure she’ll ken which one I mean.”

*

Al woke with a jolt when her leg fell from the narrow bench. With a sharp cry, she yanked it back up and curled her arms around both legs until not the tiniest bit of herself dangled over the edge.

There were rodents down there. She’d seen them skittering across the dim field of light cast by her candle. Heard them scampering in the darkness. Little squeaks and hungry chewing haunted her fitful bouts of sleep.

Her overactive imagination had been hijacked by pure absurdity. Fancifully, she’d determined the little rats were taking their revenge upon her for years of being used as laboratory experiments. She just knew it, no matter how many hundreds of years spanned between their times.

“It wasn’t me,” she’d whispered into the darkness. “I’m not that kind of scientist.”

She was pretty sure they knew it, but simply didn’t care.

Nonsense was all it was. Nonsense to fill endless days. She wasn’t certain how many had passed. Her fears moving from what her captor might do to her when he returned to what might become of her if he never did.

Would the remainder of her days be spent in that dungeon with nothing but conversation with rats and herself to occupy her?

There was no way to know.

She didn’t blame Hugh for any of this. He’d been trying to protect her, not throw her into the hole from which he’d come. A chivalrous man.

The same couldn’t be said of his cousin.

He’d left her there with nothing but a chair and a narrow bench to use as a bed. It wasn’t until hours later that someone had brought her a meal and another candle. Hours more until someone thought to toss her a threadbare blanket that was almost useless in combatting the constant chill of the cell.

And a bucket.

That might have been the kicker. Days without fresh air, without decent food, without a toothbrush, but that…?

The final straw for sending her over the edge.

He’d done this to her. It was proof of his barbarism for only a true beast would leave anyone – female or not – in such a place. Slowly transforming