HARCOURT,” COLONEL WELLMAN said, “I want you to find my daughter’s… I hate to say it, her fiancé. The damned fool got himself kidnapped by the Indians.”
“Which ones?” Angus asked.
“Which ones what?” the colonel snapped.
“Which tribe of Indians?”
“How the hell would I know? The savages are your job, not mine. All I know is that the idiot boy has disappeared, and my daughter is crying herself to sleep every night. Tell me, Harcourt, do you understand women?”
“Not in the least,” Angus said honestly.
“I offered my daughter a man, but she’d rather have a worthless boy like Matthew Aldredge. When I heard that the coach he was on had been attacked, I was tempted to tell her the boy was dead. But she was there when I heard, so she knew the truth.”
Angus didn’t reply to what the colonel was saying. He’d learned early on that it was better to never give his opinion to anyone in the army, and especially not to an arrogant blowhard like Colonel Wellman. But since Angus wasn’t in the army, Wellman felt he could talk to him freely. This consisted of hours of Angus having to listen to Wellman’s lectures on everything from food to horse care to how everyone should run his own life.
Wellman’s only weakness was his pretty young daughter, Betsy. According to him, she was virtuous, demure, and needed constant protection. The truth was that she was a self-centered little hussy who used her father’s rank to threaten any man who tried to say no to her. Twice she’d come on to Angus. The first time he was polite, but the second time he said he’d take her to the captain and tell him the truth. After that, she left him alone.
The men who took her up on her offers lived in fear of being found out by her father. In the three years that Angus had been at the fort, Betsy had tearfully accused two young men of having made inappropriate advances to her. The truth was that she’d made the men’s lives hell. At first, they’d loved the insatiable desires of the girl, but when she began to make them late for drills, when she would crawl into the barrack’s window at 3 A.M. and cry that he didn’t love her anymore, the men tried to break it off. The girl then told her father a pack of lies, and the young men were sent off on some dangerous mission. Neither of them had returned alive.
But that was all before Captain Austin came to the fort. He was short, stocky, ugly, and mean, and he didn’t believe in mercy or leniency. He was fresh from England, descended from generations of soldiers, and to him there was only one way to do things: his way. But after Austin caught Betsy slipping about the post in the wee hours of the night, he put a stop to it. He told her father that his daughter was so beautiful he feared that she’d have her virtue taken by one of the Americans. Iron bars were put over her bedroom window. When Betsy started making eyes at a handsome young soldier newly arrived from North Carolina, Austin saw to it that the man was transferred.
The whole escapade greatly amused both the soldiers and the Watchers, as the four men who served as guides for the fort were called.
But it was a shock to all of them when Colonel Wellman told someone that he wanted his daughter to marry Captain Austin. As for Betsy, she told anyone who’d stand still that she’d rather marry the devil.
Now, Angus was hearing that young Betsy had an English fiancé. Angus’s first thought was “poor man.”
“He’s worthless!” Colonel Wellman said. “Utterly without value. He’s the youngest son of a rich man, but he’ll receive nothing. Not a dime. And, he plans to become a clergyman. Can you imagine my daughter as the wife of a minister?”
Angus thought it was better not to answer that question. As always, Wellman had on his full uniform, red jacket and all. It was joked that the uniform was his skin. “Like a tattoo” was the consensus.
As for Angus, he was wearing the gear of a frontiersman. It was all deerskin, light, supple, and it protected him from the elements, as he spent most of his time out of doors. His job as a Watcher was to see that the borders were respected. The greedy American settlers weren’t to encroach on the territory the government said belonged to the Indians, and the Indians weren’t to destroy the property or the lives of the settlers. And too, there were a few angry Frenchmen still hanging around. The French and Indian War had ended eight years before, but there were still Frenchmen who believed that the land west of the Allegheny Mountains belonged to them.
“You want me to find her fiancé?” Angus asked.
“Yes. No. She wants him, but I don’t. Why would a spunky girl like my Betsy want an effeminate, worthless, cowardly-?” He waved his hand. “Captain Austin said he’d been taken west of here, so find the boy. Or, better yet, bring back his body. Take some men and go get whatever you can find that’s left of him. Men like him don’t survive long out here.”
“Mac, Connor, and Welsch,” Angus said quickly. Most of the soldiers were English, but Mac was from the Highlands of Scotland, while Connor and Welsch had been born in America. Mac-Alexander McDowell-at thirty-six, was the oldest enlisted man. He’d been promoted for valor many times, but he’d been demoted for insolence an equal number of times. Right now he was down to corporal, and from the way Austin had been eyeing him, he’d soon be a private. T. C. Connor and Naphtali Welsch were young, new, and handsome. And they were already being targeted by Betsy, which meant that, without help, their lives wouldn’t last long.
At the names, Wellman gave Angus a sharp look. “Sure you don’t want to take some more experienced men than those last two?”
“Sure of it,” Angus said but didn’t explain further.
Wellman gave Angus a hard look, as though trying to figure out what was in his mind, but then he turned away. Angus wasn’t a soldier and he wasn’t English so, to Wellman’s mind, there was no possibility of understanding him.
Angus waited patiently for the man to say he was dismissed. He well knew that the colonel was a stickler for obeying orders, and Angus did the best he could to stay out of trouble. Most of the time, taking orders stuck in his throat, but he didn’t want to cause anyone to look into his background and find out about an Angus McTern who was wanted for kidnapping and theft.
“What are you waiting for?” Wellman said, as though Angus were standing around from idleness.
Angus grit his teeth and turned away before the man could see the anger that flashed across his face. He knew he’d have to put up with this man and this job for another year or two, then George Mercer, a representative of the Ohio Company, would return from England with a grant from the king, and Angus would be one of the men who was given a thousand acres in the new territory. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut and obey the rules the English made and he’d be set for life. It wasn’t what he truly wanted-nothing without Edilean was-but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.
He left the colonel’s office to step into the warm spring sunshine and saw that Mac, with young Connor and Welsch, was waiting for him. Angus looked into the shadows near the barracks and saw Captain Austin give a little smile before he disappeared inside the building. The man had known what the colonel was giving Angus to do, and he knew who Angus would choose to go with him. Damn him! Angus thought. He hated being known. If Jackknife Austin knew that much about Angus, then he probably knew he was hiding from someone.
“You want us?” Mac asked. Everyone complained that Mac’s accent was so thick that they couldn’t understand him, but to Angus’s ear it sounded good. It reminded him of the cool hills of Scotland, and of his family. He’d never asked, but Angus had an idea that Mac also had a lot of secrets.
“I’ll tell you everything on the way there,” Angus said to Mac.
Welsch and Connor were so new at being soldiers that they looked to Mac to tell them what to do. He gestured with his head that they were to get their horses and ride out.
An hour later, the four of them were heading deep into the forest of what was basically uncharted land. All of it had been traveled by people for centuries, but little of it had been mapped. To Angus and Mac, used to the wild hills of Scotland, it was glorious country, but Connor and Welsch kept looking about them apprehensively.
“What’s Wellman up to now?” Mac asked as he glanced back at the young men close behind them. They looked as though they expected a war party of Indians to jump out at any moment, or maybe a grizzly bear would attack. They’d all heard the trappers who came to the fort to sell their furs tell exciting stories about their encounters with wild animals and wilder people.
Angus dropped the English accent he used when around the soldiers and easily lapsed into his native Scots. “Betsy.”
Mac groaned. “What is it now? She get some boy with child?”
Angus laughed. “If it could be done, she’d do it. No, it seems that she’s engaged to a clergyman.”
“May the saints save us!” Mac said. “Her married to a churchman! The Lord will send down a bolt of lightning.”
“I’m more concerned that Austin will use his knife on him.” Austin’s nickname of “Jackknife” had preceded him as some of the soldiers had served under him in the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years War, as the English called it. The soldiers had seen what Austin could do with a knife to the bodies of the prisoners.
“I don’t envy the man being engaged to someone Jackknife wants.”
“Me either,” Angus said, and told Mac about the kidnapping of her fiancé. “If he’s still alive, I want to warn him of what to expect.”
“About Austin or Betsy?”
“Either. Both,” Angus said. “But if he’s in love with her, whatever I say won’t make a difference.”
“Know that from experience, do you?” Mac asked. He was teasing, but when Angus didn’t answer, he looked at him and saw that a curtain had come down over his face. Everyone knew that Angus Harcourt didn’t gossip with the other men, didn’t tell about his past, not even where he’d grown up. Mac knew that Harcourt wasn’t his name, but no amount of hinting had made Angus reveal anything private about himself.
Angus nodded toward the young men behind them. “Austin knew I’d choose those two because Betsy’s been eyeing them.”
“And they’ve been looking at her.” Mac turned in his saddle to look at the two men. T. C. Connor was tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome. He was a quiet man, watchful of everything that went on around him, and mostly kept to himself.
Naphtali Welsch wasn’t as handsome, but with his red hair and flashing blue eyes, he made everyone want to be near him. He laughed and sang rowdy songs and made the men laugh no matter what Jackknife Austin had done to them. One day the men were nursing their blistered feet after Austin had taken them on a twenty-five-mile march. They were cursing the bad food, the heat, and talking about deserting, but “Naps,” as he was called, started a game of seeing who could come up with the worst punishment for Austin. In the end, it had been T.C. who won when he made up an elaborate story that involved a plant that was found only in the far reaches of the new country. It ate people. When he finished spinning his yarn, their sore feet were forgotten and their moods had improved.
After that, the newcomers had become quite popular, Naps for his humor and T.C. for his stories-when he could be persuaded to tell one. They were rare and always involved plants of such magnificence that they left the men speechless.
“And he knew you’d choose me,” Mac said. “Now, I wonder why?” He was being facetious.
“Maybe because he hates you?”
“Aye, that he does,” Mac said with amusement. “I know more about the army than he does, and I get more respect from the men.”
“And you can throw a knife better than he can,” Angus added. “He doesn’t like anyone to best him at anything.”
“Including that little flirt that he’s decided he wants.”
“She’s more than a flirt,” Angus said.
Mac shook his head. “I don’t know why she hasn’t come up with child.”
“If she did, her father would kill the man.”
“Make him marry her, then kill him,” Mac said.
“Do either of you know where we’re going?” Naps asked from behind them.
“Kids!” Mac muttered, then said over his shoulder, “We’ll let you know when we get there. Until then, keep your yap shut!”
“Did you understand what he said?” Naps asked T.C.
“My guess is that he told you to be quiet and wait to find out where you’re supposed to die.”
“You’re a gloomy one.”
“I’d like to come out here by myself and take some cuttings from these plants.”
Naps groaned. “Please! No more plants. You have the things everywhere. What are you planning to do with them?”
T.C. shrugged. “I don’t know. Open a museum maybe. I’d like to learn to paint so I could record them on paper. The dried specimens lose a lot as the color disappears.”
“Don’t you want something besides plants in your bed? Something warm and feisty like that little Betsy Wellman.”
“I think that Miss Wellman is part of the reason you and I have been sent on this mission, whatever it is.”
“Betsy? But what’s she got to do with anything? You know, she and I have been talking about marriage. It would be nice to marry a colonel’s daughter.”
T.C. pulled a few leaves off a bush they passed. “Do you think that the colonel is going to let his daughter marry the son of a farmer from the north of England?”
“Are you jealous?”
“Since Miss Wellman has also talked to me about marriage, I can’t very well be jealous, now can I?”
“You!” Naps said, and his usually happy face changed. “Look here! Betsy Wellman is my girl, not yours! And if you-”
“Shut up, the both of you,” Mac growled at them. “Betsy Wellman talks about marriage to every good-looking young soldier. The only thing she wants to marry is what’s in your trousers.”
When Mac turned back around, Naps whispered, “What did he say?”
“That it was a beautiful day and he loved hearing us argue.”
Naps blinked a few times at T.C., then laughed. “You’re all right. You’re a bit too bookish for a girl like Betsy, but you’ll do. You have a girl back home?”
“Did have; don’t now,” T.C. said, and his tone told that he wasn’t going to say any more on the subject.
“Heaven help me, but they’re fighting over the tramp,” Mac said to Angus. “I think that when we stop for the night you should tell them the truth.”
“Me?” Angus asked. “What makes you think I’m qualified to tell anyone about women?”
“All right, I’ll tell you what to say and you tell them. They can understand you.”
Angus gave a bit of a smile. “That makes more sense.” For a while they rode in silence and Angus thought about what he knew of Austin and how he’d had the men waiting for him. Austin knew that Angus would take the men Betsy Wellman was after and that would get them out of her grasp for a few days.
“So we’re to find this preacher Betsy Wellman wants to marry and take him back to her? Austin won’t like that!” Mac said.
As soon as he heard the words, Angus knew what Austin was doing. “We’re going the wrong way,” he said as he turned his horse around. “We have to go to the payroll wagon.”
Mac followed Angus, but he didn’t understand what was going on. “Payroll wagon? But I thought Indians had kidnapped the boy.”
“That’s what Wellman thinks. But how did the boy get from the east of us to the west? Why didn’t we hear of it?”
“Maybe one of Connor’s plants carried him,” Mac shouted as Angus rode ahead of them, but he wasn’t listening. He was riding hard toward a trail that he knew would take them to the far side of the fort. Once a month the heavily guarded payroll wagon came in, and it was time for it. If Betsy’s fiancé was to arrive it would make sense that he’d come in with the payroll. If the boy had been taken, it was from that wagon. Angus wasn’t sure, but he felt that he’d been sent on a wild goose chase-and it wasn’t hard to guess who had sent him and why.
He led the men hard. There were places where the trail was so narrow their horses could hardly move, but Angus didn’t slow down. He didn’t know what Austin had planned, but Angus was sure that he wasn’t going to allow someone else to marry the woman he wanted.
Angus glanced back now and then and saw that Mac was easily keeping up with him, but the two young soldiers were hanging on for dear life. They weren’t used to riding and certainly not accustomed to trails that were used mostly by animals.
An hour after sundown, he took pity on the boys and called a halt. Mac shook his head in disgust as the young men tumbled out of their saddles, sore and stiff and tired. Muttering that the young ones were weaklings, Mac gathered firewood while Angus slipped into the bushes and returned with three rabbits, which Mac put on spits over the fire.
“I’ll never be able to walk again,” Naps said. His red hair gleamed in the firelight.
“Good!” Angus said in an accent they could understand. “Maybe it’ll keep you away from Betsy Wellman.”
“Another jealous man,” Naps said, grimacing as he tried to sit down.
Angus looked at T.C., who was quiet, but his face showed that he was in just as much pain. “What about you? You think Betsy is the love of your life?”
“I like a woman who can read,” T.C. said as he held his hands out to the fire.
“Not all of us can spend our lives in a schoolroom,” Angus said in his thickest burr, his teeth held together.
“What he means,” Mac said slowly, so the young men could understand him, “is that if you want to stay alive, you’ll stay away from the colonel’s daughter.”
“But-” Naps began.
“Austin will have you killed,” Mac said.
“Like in the Bible,” T.C. said. They all looked at him, as though they hoped he’d tell one of his stories. But T.C. just shrugged. “King David wanted Bathsheba, so he sent her husband to the front of the war, where he was killed.”
When he said no more, the others were disappointed, and Angus looked at the young man hard. He’d been told that the reason Thomas Canon “T. C.” Connor had joined the army was because he’d been in love with a young woman in Williamsburg, but her father had married her off to a rich old man. T.C. had been roaming the new country since then, collecting plant specimens wherever he went. Angus didn’t know if the story was true or just gossip-and T.C. answered no question about his past.
“I think we need to get some rest,” Angus said. “I’ll take the first watch, then you.” He nodded at T.C. “Naps, then Mac, you take the last watch. At first light we’ll leave.”
“Could you tell us where we’re going?” Naps asked.
Angus hesitated, but then relented. “I think that Austin has arranged for Miss Wellman’s fiancé to be killed.”
Naps didn’t seem to hear anything but “fiancé.” “She’s engaged to someone else?”
Angus shook his head at the young man and gave Mac a glance to say that the boy would never learn. “Turn in, all of you. I’ll wake you when your time to watch comes.” He glared at Naps. “And let me tell you that your life won’t be worth much if you fall asleep on watch.”
Naps looked out into the darkness and shivered. “You don’t have to worry about me. This place scares me so much that I won’t be able to sleep at all.” Ten minutes later, he was snoring so loudly that Mac kicked him.
The next morning, before the sun was fully up, the four men rode out and Angus set a hard pace for them.
“Can this man take care of himself?” Mac asked when they stopped to rest the horses.
“No,” Angus said. “Wellman called him ‘effeminate.’ ”
“What does that mean?” Naps asked.
“Like a girl,” T.C. answered.
“Then Betsy won’t have any trouble choosing the right man,” Naps said, yet again turning everything back around to her.
Angus started to say something about the girl but didn’t. “Let’s go. I know where it’s most likely that the payroll wagon was ambushed.”
Minutes later, they were riding again, and when Angus saw smoke, he kicked his tired horse forward. “We may be too late,” he said over his shoulder.
When they were at the top of a ridge, Angus held up his hand for them to halt, and he slid off his horse to crouch down among the trees. Behind him, Mac made hand gestures to the young soldiers that they were to get down and be silent. Mac went to squat next to Angus.
Below them was what was left of the payroll wagon. It had been burned, and near it were the bodies of two soldiers.
“Where are the other guards?” Mac whispered.
“I’m not sure, but it’s my guess that Austin ordered the wagon to have only two guards.”
“An open invitation to thieves,” Mac said.
“Thieves and murder.”
“Do you think the preacher’s body is on the other side?”
“I don’t see it,” Angus said, “but I’m sure it’s nearby, and I’d lay money on it that he’s been scalped. Austin would want people to believe that the Indians did it.”
Mac didn’t let his face show his shock at what Angus was saying. “Something like this could cause a war. The payroll is from the government. Do you think Austin would risk that just for a common girl like Betsy?”
“I think he likes to win whatever he wants and he’ll use whatever methods he can,” Angus said. “I’ll take Welsch and go that way, you take Connor and come in from the south. Be careful and make as little noise as possible. The killers have probably taken the money and run, but maybe they’re still around. Take no chances.”
Mac nodded, then went back to tell the men, who were standing behind them rubbing their sore legs.
Angus went down the hill quietly, concealing his body in the bushes that grew along the way. Twice, Welsch skidded on the loose gravel, and both times Angus scowled at him.
When they reached the bottom of the hill, Angus motioned for Welsch to stay there and wait, and he looked relieved. Angus stealthily made his way around the burned wagon, glancing quickly at the two men on the ground to see if they were dead. His guess was that they’d been there for at least a day and a half, and he hoped he was wrong about the boy. Maybe the robbers took the payroll, killed the guards, and kidnapped the boy. If that was so then they were in the wrong place. By now the boy-if he was still alive-was many miles to the west, just as Wellman had said.
Angus hid behind some trees and looked about him. If the men had been dead for over a day, then the wagon had only recently been set on fire. That meant that someone had been there since the murders.
When he saw or heard no one, Angus stepped out of hiding and began to look around the wagon. There were faint footprints leading south, where he knew there was a river.
Quietly, his moccasins making no sound, Angus went back to Welsch, who was still sitting under the trees and waiting. “No one’s here but I don’t trust this place,” he said softly. “Get the others and I’ll meet you over there. See that big oak tree?”
“I don’t know an oak from a daisy,” Welsch said.
“Ask Connor. Go there and wait for me, and stay out of sight.”
“Gladly,” Welsch said as he stood up on his stiff legs.
It was thirty minutes before Angus met the other men in the shade of the oak tree.
Mac handed him a hardtack biscuit. “See anything?”
“Someone got away. There were four men who attacked the wagon, and they were all white. Indians walk lighter. There’s a bloody place where a wounded man lay for a while and it’s possible they thought he was dead.”
“Maybe he dragged himself off into the bushes.”
“I think so. You two ready to go?” Angus asked Welsch and Connor.
They nodded and minutes later the four of them were on horseback again, with Angus in the front. He was leaning over the saddle so far the other men didn’t see why he wasn’t unseated. He was looking at the ground, following the trail the wounded man had left behind.
“He’s going to the river,” Angus told them, and put his finger to his lips for them to remain silent. He dismounted, took his horse’s reins, and began to walk over the rocky path. In the distance, they could hear the water rushing.
In the next minute, Angus stepped out of the bushes, and what he saw so astounded him that he just stood there and stared. Curious, the other three moved to stand beside him.
Sitting on a big rock beside a small river was a tall blond young man. His face and shoulders were hideously covered with blood and he looked to be sewing his scalp back together.
Angus tied his horse to a bush and went to the man. “Need any help with that?”
“No. I’m fine,” he said, glancing at the other men who were close behind Angus. “I meant to go on and try to get to the fort, but my head wouldn’t stop bleeding and the blood got in my eyes so bad I couldn’t see.”
With every stitch the young man made, the others winced. His fingers were long and moved easily as he held the ridges of his scalp together and sewed.
“Have you done that often, lad?” Mac asked.
“Not to myself,” the man said with a bit of a grin, but since his face was so bloody he looked more horrible than pleasant.
“So what happened?” Angus asked as he sat down across from the young man. “And who are you?”
“Matthew Aldredge.” He held out his hand to shake, but it was covered with blood. “Sorry. I’ll clean up when this is done.”
“I could-” Angus began.
“No!” Matthew said. “Really. I’d rather do it myself. Did you see the wagon?”
“Yes,” T.C. said. “And the dead bodies.”
“Poor men,” Matthew said. “They were killed right away.”
“Who did it?” Angus asked.
Matthew made a couple of stitches in his head, then put his hands down to rest them. The needle and thread dangled by his right eye, making him even more grotesque-looking. “I assume I was supposed to think they were Indians, but unless they’ve started speaking French, the men were in disguise. I take it the wagon I was on usually carries gold?”
“There wasn’t any on it?” Angus asked.
“None that the murderers could find,” Matthew said as he got up and went to the river. Bending, he washed his hands in the cool water. “They were angry and they killed all of us.”
At that, T.C. and Naps looked at him with wide eyes.
“You mean that they shot you in the head and thought you were dead,” Angus said.
“Yes. That’s it exactly. I don’t know how long I lay there with my head split open, but it was most of a day. The only thing I can think of to explain why I didn’t bleed to death is that my blood seems to coagulate rapidly.”
“They shot all three of you, then set the wagon on fire?” Mac asked.
“Actually, I was the one who set the wagon on fire. I figured a rescue party was looking for me so I thought I’d send out a signal.”
“You took a big chance,” Angus said.
Matthew sat down and again started sewing his head. “This is easier to do on a cow than on myself.”
The four men gave him a weak smile. He really was quite hideous-looking. How could anyone lose that much blood and still be alive?
“Are you a doctor?” Naps asked.
“No, just a farmer.”
“And you’re here to marry Betsy,” Naps said, anger in his voice.
“Actually, I came here to tell her that I won’t marry her. I thought that was a lot kinder than writing her a letter.”
“But she’s expecting to get married,” Naps said, sounding like he was ready to fight for Betsy’s honor.
“I know,” Matthew said. “It was the oddest thing. When I was with her, she was all I could think about, but after she left, I could barely remember her. We corresponded and… Well, when you read letters written by someone and when you’re not distracted by a pretty face, you see things that you didn’t see before.”
“Like that she’s as dumb as a fence post?” Mac said.
“Exactly!” Matthew answered.
“What did he say?” Naps whispered to T.C.
“That he’s not good enough for a girl like Betsy,” T.C. answered quickly.
“Anyway,” Matthew said, “when I woke up, the sun was much lower in the sky, so I knew it’d been hours since we were attacked. I’d seen that one of the horses eluded capture, so I hoped to find him, but I’m afraid that I lost consciousness. That was yesterday. Today, I managed to set the wagon on fire, then I came here to the river.”
“You don’t know where the men who robbed you went, do you?” Angus asked.
“My French isn’t very good, but does the phrase ‘three pretty daughters’ mean anything to you?”
“McNalty,” Angus and Mac said in unison.
Angus looked at Matthew. “Can you ride?”
“Of course,” Matthew said. “If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll wash this blood off.”
“We can’t take the time,” Angus said.
“Besides, I like it,” Mac said, grinning at the young man. “I bet that under there, you’re a pretty boy.”
Matthew grinned, showing bloodstained teeth. “Ugly as mud.”
As Mac mounted his horse, he looked at the other men. “In fact, I’d say that, except for me, the best-looking men at the fort are right here.”
Angus paused for a moment with his foot in the stirrup, then glanced at Mac. “And you’re the man Austin hates the most.”
“Who’s Austin?” Matt asked as he got on the horse behind T.C.
“Think of the worst man you’ve ever met,” T.C. said. “Now triple it and you haven’t come close to Austin.”
Angus wasn’t sure what was going on, but he knew that it was bad. And with every second he was more sure that Austin was behind it. The fact that he, Angus, had been sent to find the fiancé seemed to be part of the plot.
If Angus had been alone, he would have headed east and gone back to civilization, the army be damned, but he had three soldiers and a man who looked more dead than alive with him, so he couldn’t leave. He thought maybe the whole thing about the “three pretty daughters” was part of the trap, but he couldn’t be sure. He hated having to leave the two dead soldiers who’d inadvertently become part of Austin’s treachery, unburied, but they needed to get to the McNalty cabin as quickly as possible.
“Where the hell are you taking us?” Mac asked as he tried to keep up with Angus.
“A shortcut,” Angus said over his shoulder, and looked back at the men behind him. He was surprised but pleased to see that Connor and Aldredge had traded places and the blood-smeared young man was now holding the reins to the horse, while Connor held on for dear life. Angus saw at once that Matthew Aldredge knew a great deal about horses.
“Like a girl, is he?” Angus said to Mac as he nodded toward the young man as he led his horse across a stream full of slippery, moss-covered rocks. Poor Welsch was scared to death.
“I’ll switch them,” Mac said, reading Angus’s thoughts. “You go on, we’ll catch up with you.”
“I’ll leave a trail,” Angus said, and in the next moment he was gone.
Mac had Connor and Welsch trade places so Naps could have a break. After he mounted, Naps threw his arms around Aldredge’s waist, put his head against his back, and said, “You’re second only to Betsy,” which made them all laugh.
Mac led them quick and hard as he tried to catch up with Angus. He knew where the McNalty cabin was, but he also knew that Angus was a great deal more familiar with the country than he was.
He tried to follow the trail that Angus left, but he was having trouble seeing the broken branches. The bushes all looked alike to him-but not to T.C.
“There!” T.C. called ahead. “On that Kalmia.”
Mac gave him a look that could have set his hair on fire.
“That shrub on your right,” T.C. said meekly.
Mac motioned for him to come forward, and T.C., alone on a horse that he could barely ride, was made the leader. It was easy for him to see what was wrong with a plant and where Angus had left a trail. And he surprised even himself when he so quickly adjusted to his new role of authority. When Naps, still holding on to Matt, reached out to touch a plant, T.C. ordered him to stop. “That’s poisonous!” he said. “Don’t touch anything unless I tell you to.”
Naps looked surprised, as it seemed that in an instant T.C. had gone from being his equal to his commander.
By sundown they’d traveled over fifteen miles, and Mac knew they were close to the McNalty cabin, but he wasn’t going anywhere without Angus. Besides, there was a swift-moving river nearby, and he didn’t want to cross that in the dark. “We’ll camp here and wait.”
“But what about the McNalty family?” T.C. asked, but Mac had had enough of the young man’s being the leader. It took only one look before T.C. was silently removing the saddle from his horse and helping to set up camp.
They had just unloaded the horses when Angus appeared out of the darkness.
“What did you see?” Mac asked him.
Angus was looking at Matt. His face was covered in blood that had dried to a dark brown and he looked scary. “You have any soap?”
“Sure,” Mac said with a half grin to emphasize his sarcasm. “What you want it scented with? Roses?”
Angus looked at T.C. “Can you find something that he can clean himself with?”
T.C. couldn’t conceal his pride in being asked to help. Quietly, he left the camp to go into the darkness.
Angus sat down beside Mac. “I went to their cabin. I didn’t go inside or let them know I was there, but I watched. I didn’t see anyone, but I did see a lot of footprints around the place. Something isn’t right, but I don’t know what it is.” He lowered his voice, and nodded toward Matt. “To tell you the truth, I’m afraid to deliver him to the fort. He can tell Wellman’s daughter that he doesn’t want her, but I don’t trust Austin not to decide he wants to hurt the boy anyway.”
Mac was just starting a fire but he put it out. “I think we should have a cold camp tonight. And tomorrow-”
“I’m going to take Aldredge back east. I don’t think he’s safe here. You take the soldiers back to the fort.”
“And let Austin have them?”
“I leave it to you to make them understand that if they want to live, they’ll have to stay away from Betsy Wellman.”
“And how will they understand me?” Mac asked, only half joking.
“Make them understand you. I’m going up there to sleep.” Angus looked up at a hill well above them. “I wish this were over. I’d rather-”
“I know,” Mac said, “fight the Campbells.”
Smiling, Angus stood up and slipped away into the darkness.
A few minutes later, T.C. returned with big leaves filled with an almost white clay still wet from where he’d dug it up at the side of a stream. His pockets were filled with long green leaves. “Put this clay all over your face, and when it’s dry, we’ll go down to the stream to wash it off.”
“Are those plants poisonous?” Naps asked, a bit jealous that T.C. was no longer as useless as he felt.
“They’ll help heal your wounds,” T.C. told Matt as he handed him the clay. They had only moonlight to see by, but the clay almost glowed, and T.C. made sure that Matt covered all his blood-encrusted skin. When he was done, T.C. led him down the hill to the stream to help him wash it off. When he was clean, T.C. twisted the comfrey leaves and gently applied them to the deep cut on Matt’s head. Together, they went back up the hill to where Mac and Naps were waiting for them. After arranging the order of the watch, Mac settled down to sleep.
About an hour before dawn, Angus woke him, his finger to his lips to be quiet. T.C. was standing to one side, a rifle over his shoulder. Angus made gestures to tell Mac to pack and get out of there, then he woke the other two. Matt awoke easily, but Angus had to put his hand over Naps’s mouth to keep him silent. Within minutes, they had their horses saddled and were ready to leave the camp.
As Angus put his foot in the stirrup, the first shot rang out, and it was followed by a volley of gunfire that echoed through the woods.
Before the sounds cleared, Naps had fallen. Angus grabbed the young man before he hit the ground, but he couldn’t keep the frightened horse from running away.
Shots began to come at lightning speed. Angus pulled Naps to safety behind some trees while Mac tried to get the horses. Only Angus’s horse remained steadfast amid the whizzing bullets.
“Down!” Angus shouted to T.C. and Matt. “Get down on the ground and stay there.”
Angus’s only thought was that he had to get the men under his care to safety. He glanced down at Naps. Blood was seeping out of his shoulder and his eyes were closed, but Angus didn’t think the injury was life threatening. “Don’t move a muscle,” he said to the boy.
Naps didn’t open his eyes, just grimaced against the pain and nodded.
Crouching and running at the same time, Angus made his way to Mac, who was standing behind a tree, his rifle ready to shoot.
“You see anyone?” Angus asked over the gunfire.
“Not a person, but the shots are coming from three places.”
Angus was glad that Mac had kept calm enough that he hadn’t run into the open firing. Three of the horses had run away, and that meant they were low on ammunition. If this was to be a long battle, they’d need all that they had.
“Good man,” Angus said as he put his hand on Mac’s shoulder. “I know this area, so give me a minute with the boys, then we’ll get out of here.”
Mac didn’t answer but raised his rifle, took careful aim and fired. In the distance there was a cry. Mac had shot one of them-but that made the bullets come at them faster.
Still crouching, Angus went through the bushes to where T.C. and Matt were hiding behind a rock. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” T.C. said as he fired a shot.
“No new injuries,” Matt said as he reloaded.
With the growing light, Angus could at last see Matthew Aldredge’s clean face. He was indeed a handsome young man, with blue eyes and a strong jaw. Angus could see the huge cut in his scalp and thought about how Matt had sewn it together by himself. He’s a much better man than Betsy Wellman deserves, he thought.
Angus looked at T.C. “Do you know what a cardinal sounds like?”
“Yes.”
“When I give the whistle, I want you two to come immediately. Do you understand me? Stop shooting and come to me.”
Both young men nodded, then Angus made his way back to where Naps lay on the ground, looking up at him. “I’m going to take you to a place that’s safer than here. Can you walk?”
“Sure,” Naps said, which made Angus frown. He recognized false bravery when he heard it. Naps might have several injuries but he’d rather die than let the others know he was badly wounded.
Angus looked down at him and saw a dark spot on his trousers. When he touched it, Naps gave a muffled cry of pain. It looked as though the boy had been shot in at least two places. “I’m going to carry you.”
“I can walk,” Naps said. “Just tell me where to go and I’ll get there.”
“Shut up,” Angus said, “and don’t give me any trouble.” Bending, he lifted Naps and slung him over his shoulder, then started walking north. It wasn’t easy to move quickly with the sturdy young man weighing him down, but Angus did it. He’d camped in that area a few times and knew that nearby was a small cave. It was up a steep hill and difficult to get to, but it had once sheltered him from a ferocious storm.
As Angus climbed, he tried to plan what he was going to do. If he could get all the men into the cave, they would be protected on three sides. Based on the number of gunshots he was hearing behind him, there were at least four gunmen. When he heard a sound to his left, he stopped and listened, but it was an animal, so he kept moving.
The struggle to get up the hill with Naps’s body across his shoulder gave Angus something to think about other than that he’d been an idiot. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out that Captain Austin was behind the whole thing, but Angus still hadn’t taken the necessary precautions. He’d been so concerned that Austin would harm the McNalty family that Angus hadn’t looked after the men under his care. Austin might not know the countryside very well, but with the traders coming into the fort often, he’d had access to men who did. Several of the French traders were ruthless and still bitter that they’d lost the American territory to the English.
If the men who’d dressed as Indians and killed the soldiers on the pay wagon were trappers, then they knew the countryside even better than Angus did. Some of them had lived there most of their lives. They would know the trails that Angus would use to get to the McNalty cabin. And if they knew he was going there, that meant they knew that Aldredge wasn’t dead. It was Angus’s guess that when they’d all sat there, watching Matt sew his head back together, they’d been watched. Had it been soldiers in the woods around them, Angus would have heard them, but trappers? No. They were as good in the forests as Angus was.
By the time Angus reached the cave, he wondered if they’d ever get out alive. There was water trickling down the back of the cave wall, but they had no food and little ammunition, and, worse, they had a wounded man. How would they escape from men who could walk across dry leaves and not make a sound? How would they elude men whose clothes matched the forest? Many times, Angus had stood ten feet from Wellman’s soldiers and they’d not seen him, so he knew what true frontiersmen could do.
When Angus reached the cave, he put Naps down gently, but the boy still groaned in pain. The right half of his body was covered in blood from the two wounds.
“I have to go get the others,” Angus said, wondering if he’d ever again see the young man alive. He well remembered that when he’d used the cave there was a stack of dry firewood in the corner. It was an unwritten rule of woodsmen that they replace what they’d used. At least they could have a fire.
“Damnation!” Angus muttered as he started down the hill. That no one shot at him let him know exactly what was going on. The men shooting at them knew one of them was wounded and they knew where Angus was taking him. But the cave was their only choice at the moment. With Welsch being wounded and with Connor, both of them hardly being able stay on a horse, it would be impossible to get them all out alive. No, what Angus had to do was get them all into the cave, then he’d have to leave them under Mac’s protection while he, Angus, went for help.
T.C., Matt, and Mac were where he’d left them, but the younger men were out of ammunition.
“They shoot like they have a keg of powder,” Mac grumbled.
“We need to get the men up that hill. There’s a cave up there, and I put Welsch in it.”
“How bad is he?”
“I don’t know, but if I were to guess, I’d say he’s losing too much blood to make it.”
Mac nodded toward T.C. and Matt. “Put those two on him. Sewing and plants. They’re good at those.”
Nodding in agreement, Angus turned toward the hill, Mac behind him. When he silently passed the young men, he gave the distinctive whistle of the red cardinal, and T.C. told Matt they had to go.
It took nearly an hour to get to the cave because they had to wait behind trees when the gunfire got too heavy. They watched Angus, waiting for him to tell them what to do. He’d stand and fire while Connor ran, then he’d reload and let Aldredge go. Mac was always last and always reluctant to leave Angus holding the gunmen off.
When they finally reached the cave, Matt immediately went to Naps. He used the knife he wore at his waist to cut away Naps’s clothes so he could look at the wounds. After he’d examined him, he went to the others standing in the center of the cave.
“The bullets have to be removed,” Matt said. “They’re lead, and if they stay in there very long they’ll poison him. Even as it is, I’m not sure…” He trailed off, glancing back at Naps, who was lying on the cold floor and trying to breathe through the pain.
“Then do it,” Angus said. “Get the bullets out and wrap him up as best you can. I’m going to try to find the horses and get us out of here.”
“Me?” Matt began, but one look from Angus stopped him. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll do what I can.”
Angus looked at T.C., who was studying something that was growing from the wall of the cave. “Help him. Do whatever needs to be done.”
Angus moved close to the mouth of the cave, where he could see out but not be seen; Mac was right beside him.
“You know what’s going on, don’t you, lad?”
“I think Austin’s hired some trappers and I think they mean to kill us.”
“All over a girl as worthless as Betsy Wellman.”
“There are women you fight for and women who don’t deserve it,” Angus said under his breath, but Mac heard him.
“Sounds like you wish you’d done more fighting.”
“There are some things that a man can’t fight.” Angus moved away from the wall and went to where Matt was hovering over Naps. His eyes asked whether the boy was going to be all right, but Matt shrugged that he didn’t know.
“I’m going down,” Angus said. He looked at the four men and hated leaving them. Mac knew how to take care of himself, but the others were young and inexperienced. “My horse will come when I call and I’ll ride for the fort. It’s not that far away, and I’ll bring help back.”
T.C. and Matt nodded at this, and Naps gave a faint smile, as though he now knew that he’d be saved, but Mac looked at Angus with serious eyes. Mac was going to be left alone with three neophytes, little ammunition, and heaven only knew how many men surrounding them.
“It’s the only way,” Angus said. “None of you would make it through them.”
“Aye, lad, I know,” Mac said softly, and his eyes said that he knew that when Angus returned-if he did-they wouldn’t be alive.
“I have to go now,” Angus said. “I can’t wait until dark.”
“I know,” Mac said. “Go on, then. Tell the colonel hello for us. And if you see Austin you might hit him for me.”
Angus put his hand on Mac’s shoulder. “If anything happens to you or the lads, I’ll kill him.”
“Fair enough,” Mac said, then, after one more glance at the three young men, Angus slipped out of the cave and into the sunlight.
He stayed behind trees and rocks and moved as silently as he could, but he still felt that he was being watched. Whoever was shooting at them had allowed them to get into the cave, but he doubted if they were going to let Angus get to his horse and ride to the fort.
It was slow progress going down the hill. Angus would take two steps then wait. It’s what he’d learned how to do when he was a boy, moving about the heather on his belly, looking for any sign of the rustlers.
When he got within fifty feet of where they’d camped the night before, he gave the low whistle that he’d trained his horse to come to, but the animal didn’t show up. He wasn’t sure but he thought he heard a laugh in the distance. If the men were trappers and lived their lives alone in the woods, then they knew a bird whistle from a man’s.
As Angus walked along the edge of the riverbank, he tried to calculate how long it would take him to run the distance to the fort. Three days, he thought, but if he could get a horse from one of the trappers…
Slowly, stealthily, he made his way toward where the gunmen were hiding. He thought he was nearly there when he heard the unmistakable whiz of an arrow. Ducking, he swerved and missed the arrow, but his foot slipped on the wet grass and he lost his balance. He grabbed at a tree but couldn’t reach it. In the next second he felt himself falling down the cliff and heading for the river. As he tried to curl himself into a ball, his hands covering his head in protection, he knew he was going to die because he was sure he heard bagpipes.
Angus hit the water hard, but he came up to the surface quickly, and for a moment the current carried him. As he passed a tall rock, he grabbed it and held on. With water in his face, he looked at the bank, trying to see if a gunman was standing there. Or a man with a bow. Instead, he thought he saw Shamus-and he was smiling at him in delight.
Angus shook his head to clear it, then looked back at the bank, but who or what he’d seen was gone. There were just trees and grasses.
Angus looked at the rushing water and thought about how to get himself out. He knew of a place to cross the river, but it was nearly a mile upstream. He needed to get back to the nearest bank and try to find his horse.
He moved from rock to rock, using his arms and legs to hold himself against the current. When he again thought he heard bagpipes, he was sure that when he went under he must have hit his head. When he got to the bank he was weak from the exertion, but he didn’t stop. He still had to climb up the embankment.
He grabbed a tree root and hauled himself up, using the roots as a rope. When he got to the top, a hand appeared before his face. Angus was so startled that he almost fell backward, but the hand stayed where it was and a familiar voice said, “Give me your hand, lad, and I’ll help you up.”
Angus looked up to see his uncle Malcolm lying on his belly, his hand extended. He wore a set of bagpipes on his back.
All Angus could do was stand there, his feet on the side of the steep, muddy bank, his hands holding on to a tree root, and stare, his mouth open in astonishment. “Am I dead?” he at last said.
In a sweet tone, Malcolm said, “Aye, you are, lad, and I’m here to welcome you into Heaven. Take my hand so we can go meet the Lord.”
Angus’s eyes were wide but then he heard a guffaw that he’d heard since he was a child. Turning, he saw Shamus standing there, laughing at him in a derogatory way.
Angus looked back at Malcolm. “Now I know you’re lying. Shamus will never be allowed into Heaven.” Taking Malcolm’s hand, he hauled himself upward. When he was again standing, dripping wet, he still could do nothing but stare at Malcolm and Shamus. “What…?” he began. “How…?”
“We came to visit you,” Malcolm said.
“And we ended up saving your life!” Shamus said, smirking. “If it hadn’t been for us, you’d be dead now. Why couldn’t you get away from them? There were only six of them.”
“And it took the both of you to get rid of them?” Angus asked, still in shock at seeing them.
“Naw,” Malcolm said. “I went after you, and Tam went up to the cave where you hid those others. Shamus dealt with the Frenchmen. A Scot’s worth more than a dozen Frenchmen.”
Shamus was looking at Angus with a half grin that said it was clear to see who the superior man was.
“Tam is here?” Angus asked.
“Aye. Seeing to the others,” Malcolm said. “Do you give us no greeting?”
“Malcolm, I…” Angus began, but then stopped. “I don’t know how…”
“Ah, lad,” Malcolm said, embarrassed. “I didna mean to make you weep. A drink of good whiskey will do to thank me.”
“I’ll buy you a bottle,” Angus said as he put his arm around Malcolm’s broad shoulders and held on. All that had happened since he’d last seen the man went through his head in a series of visions. It seemed so long ago, and he’d been such an innocent back then. He remembered trying to save Edilean from a forced marriage and how he’d ended up on a ship with her and heading to another country. And he’d fallen in love with her so hard that every day without her was an ache inside him. He saw her face every hour of every day, longed for her, wondered where she was and what she was doing.
“Lad!” Malcolm said. “We thought you’d be glad to see us.”
“I am,” Angus said, but his voice caught in his throat, and he could say no more.
“Where’s the girl?” Shamus asked.
“What girl?”
“The one you ran off with. The one you stole the gold from.”
“I did not-” Angus began but Malcolm cut him off.
“Could you boys wait a while before fighting? I think we need to get to the others, and Tam wants to see you.”
“Aye, Tam,” Angus said, grinning, his arm still so tight around Malcolm’s strong shoulders that he was causing the man pain, but Malcolm didn’t complain. “You got them all?” Angus asked, looking at Shamus as though he doubted that he really could take down six men.
“Hmph!” Shamus snorted. “Didn’t take me but a minute. They were standing in plain sight. Anyone could have seen them.”
Angus couldn’t help grinning at Shamus’s arrogance. He looked at Malcolm. “So what do you think of this new country?”
“Too hot,” Malcolm said. “Give me the coolness of Scotland. And their whiskey is bad.”
“And they think we’re English,” Shamus said, as though that was the final insult.
“With your accent?” Angus said happily. “Can they understand you?”
“Not many can,” Shamus said, and for a moment his eyes told Angus that he was glad to see him.
“Up there,” Angus said, nodding toward the path to the cave. Shamus went up, but Angus stood where he was, with his arm firmly around Malcolm’s shoulders.
“You must let me go, lad,” Malcolm said gently. “I’m not a ghost and I’m here to stay.”
“Ghost,” Angus said, smiling. “You didn’t come here in a coffin full of sawdust, did you?”
“No,” Malcolm said slowly, “but why would you ask that? Is that how you sneaked into this country?”
“No,” Angus said, his smile widening. “I came here as an English gentleman.”
“I want to hear every word of this story,” Malcolm said.
“I’ll be glad to tell it to you.”
NO, NO, NO, no!” Angus said, his words echoing off the cave walls. “I will not do it. I refuse. And that’s the last time I’m saying it.”
Last night, a fire had made the cave almost homelike. Mac had taken Angus’s horse and was on his way back to the fort to get help, while T.C., Matt, and Naps had stayed with Angus. Thanks to Matt’s surgery and the plants that T.C. had found, Naps was resting comfortably, passing drowsily in and out of consciousness from the brew that T.C. had given him.
Tam, Shamus, Malcolm, and Angus sat around the fire and talked in the Scottish burr that the other men couldn’t quite make out.
They’d spent hours exchanging stories. Angus made them all laugh uproariously with his account of how he got rooked into helping Edilean escape her uncle’s treacherous plan. The first time he said her name, his breath caught and he didn’t know if he could go on, but the second time was easier. By the time he was well into his story, he was smiling and remembering it all fondly.
He started telling the men about James Harcourt’s wife’s ugliness and how she’d tried to get him to stay in bed with her, but Malcolm cut him off by sending a burning branch flying. When they got it cleaned up, Malcolm asked about James, so Angus told of hitting James on the head with a candlestick. “And Edilean shaved me,” he said in an almost dreamy voice.
“She shaved your beard off?” Shamus said. “I knew there was something different about you.”
Throughout the story, Shamus kept shaking his head and muttering, “A wagonload of gold. The trunks were full of gold.” He sounded as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing-and what he’d lost.
Angus told of dressing in James’s clothes and boarding the ship. For a few moments he was silent as he let himself remember the time with Edilean on the ship. He thought of tying her corset, of teasing her, of making her laugh. He could see it all so clearly that it was almost as though he could touch her.
“Angus!” Tam said, bringing him back to where he was.
Angus smiled, even though he hardly recognized him. Tam had grown until he was as tall as Angus. He was no longer the boy who trailed after his bigger, older cousin. In the four years that they’d been separated, Tam had become a man, and Angus regretted that he’d not been there to see him grow and change. But then, Angus wondered if his going was the reason that Tam had grown up so quickly. With Angus gone, Tam was now the one to inherit… What? Angus thought. There was nothing left of the McTern clan to inherit but the responsibility.
“I’ve entertained you enough,” Angus said at last. “You didn’t come all the way across the ocean just to hear my stories. What have you come for?”
“We-” Shamus began, but when Malcolm gave him a hard look he closed his mouth.
“Kenna thanks you for the silk dress you sent her,” Tam said.
“And how is she?” Angus tried to keep his voice steady as he thought about the sister who’d once been so close to him. “How many children does she have now?”
“Six,” Malcolm said. “She liked that the dress you sent her had…” He didn’t quite know what to say.
“An expandable front,” Angus said.
“Ah, so that’s what she meant,” Malcolm said, then sipped his coffee and was silent.
“What are the lot of you up to?” Angus asked suspiciously. “How did you even find me?”
“That was easy enough,” Shamus said. “What with your picture everywhere, there were a lot of people with information about you.”
Angus grimaced.
“That’s true,” Malcolm said slowly. “But it’s also true that we wanted to see you.” He glanced at the leather clothes Angus had on. “This country suits you.”
“When you can stay alive,” Shamus said.
“Out with it!” Angus said loudly, making the men on the far side of the cave jump. Even Naps stirred in his sleep.
“Miss Edilean’s uncle died,” Tam said.
“Did he?” Angus said and couldn’t help a bit of a smile. It was one less person who was after him.
“And he left all his property to Miss Edilean.”
“Good,” Angus said, looking from one to the other of them, but they were silent. “You want to buy the place from her, don’t you?”
“For a peppercorn a year,” Malcolm said quickly.
“I think she’d agree to that.”
“She don’t need the money,” Shamus said, “not with all those slave girls of hers.”
“Slaves?” Angus said. “I can’t imagine that Edilean would own a slave.”
“That’s not what he meant,” Malcolm said, glaring at Shamus to keep his mouth shut. “Miss Edilean has… Well, it’s…” He looked at Tam for help.
“She started a business in Boston called ‘Bound Girl.’ ”
Angus looked at him in astonishment. “Are you saying that she opened a… a house of…?”
“Did this new country put your mind in the gutter?” Malcolm snapped. “Miss Edilean is a lady. Mind what you say about her, boy!”
“Or you’ll turn me over your knee?” Angus asked, smiling at the familiarity of it all.
Tam leaned forward. “She sells the best and the most vegetables and fruit in Boston. She has a company that she owns and runs with the help of women who used to be indentured servants.”
“I like her handbill,” Shamus said, grinning.
“What’s he talking about?” Angus asked.
“Well,” Tam said slowly, “Miss Edilean does have a rather, uh, enticing sign for her business.”
“A girl,” Shamus said, “big and healthy, with her sleeves rolled up. Good muscles on her, and she’s got-” He made a gesture to show a large bosom. “Damn handsome woman!”
They all looked at Shamus for a moment, then turned back to Angus. “Is this true? Edilean runs a business?”
“From what we were told, she has over a hundred employees, all women, and she owns half a dozen farms,” Malcolm said. “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”
“Four years, three months, and twenty-two days,” Angus said quickly, then looked embarrassed. “I think. It’s just a guess.”
“You always were good at guessing,” Malcolm said but lowered his head to hide his smile.
“So Edilean started a business,” Angus said in wonder. “And it’s doing well?”
“Very well,” Malcolm said. “She earns a lot of money, and she’s used it to set up a couple of houses for women without husbands, widows and such. She helps a lot of women.”
“There were nine bound women on the ship when we came over,” Angus said, staring at the fire, remembering. “But Edilean didn’t like them. She hired one of them to do some sewing for her, but I could tell that she had no intention of keeping her on after the voyage. Funny how you think you know someone but don’t. I can’t imagine Edilean running a business and certainly not hiring women like them.”
When his head came up, he was smiling. “She got into a fight-a bloody fistfight-with one of the prisoners named Tabitha. Edilean-”
“Big girl? Pretty?” Tam asked.
“Yes,” Angus said. “You didn’t meet her, did you?”
“If she’s the Tabitha we heard about, she’s Miss Edilean’s farm manager,” Tam said. “She runs all the farms and she doesn’t take any guff off anyone.”
Angus’s mouth dropped open. “Edilean and Tabitha work together?”
“What did they fight about?” Shamus asked, his eyes alight at the thought.
“Diamonds,” Angus said, and looked back at Malcolm and Tam. “Edilean and Tabitha together. What a world this is! Tell me, is Edilean still living with Harriet Harcourt?”
“Oh, yes,” Tam said. “Harriet takes care of the money for all of the business.”
Angus narrowed his eyes at them. “How long have you three been in this country?”
“A while,” Malcolm said.
“Over three months,” Shamus said. “It took some time to find you. It wasn’t hard, mind you, but it took time. Did you know that we could turn you in for a thousand pounds?”
When Angus started to say something, Tam interrupted. “Don’t worry, James Harcourt is taken care of. His sister Harriet pays him to stay away from Miss Edilean.”
“She does what?”
“Pays him to stay away,” Shamus said loudly, as though Angus were deaf. “Gives him a remittance. It’s common enough.”
“Are you telling me that the lot of you have spent three months snooping into Edilean’s private affairs?”
Malcolm looked at Tam who looked at Shamus, then they all looked back at Angus. “Yes,” Malcolm said. “That’s just what we’ve been doing.”
“And what does Edilean know of this?”
“Nothing,” Tam said. “We were careful to stay out of her sight. And that wasn’t easy, as she runs around in her little carriage constantly. I remember one morning I was walking down the street and there she was. I was sure she’d recognize me, but she was having it out with some man about some fruit-she doesn’t like for it to be bruised-so she didn’t see me.”
The story was so like Edilean that it caused a pain in Angus’s chest. “Has she-? I mean, are there…?”
“Men?” Shamus asked, then when the others glared at him, he threw up his hands. “What’s the problem with all of you? I think you should get on with it and tell him.”
“Tell me what?” Angus asked.
“We worked with a lawyer,” Malcolm said, and turned to Tam. “You tell him.”
“We thought that since Miss Edilean is so rich, what with the gold and the business, we might persuade her to give the McTern estate back to us. We don’t think she wants it. It means nothing to her.”
“You told me that, and I said that you won’t have any trouble. Edilean has a very generous nature. I’m sure she’ll give you the rotting old place even without the peppercorn. Don’t tell me you’re afraid to ask her.”
“It’s not that…” Tam said, looking at Malcolm.
Angus turned to Shamus. “Would you tell me what they can’t seem to get out?”
Shamus opened his mouth to speak, but Malcolm blurted out the truth. “You’re wanted for kidnapping her, so she has to swear before a judge that she ran off with you of her own free will. Once you’re cleared, she can give the place to you because you’re the laird, then you can give it to Tam, as he’s next in line.”
“I see,” Angus said. He sat still for a moment, then got up and walked to the back of the cave. Naps was asleep, but T.C. and Matt looked wide awake as they listened to what the Scotsmen were saying. Angus didn’t know how much they could understand, but from the looks on their faces, they were getting the gist of what was going on. Angus thought of the words kidnapping and wanted that were being bandied about.
He looked back at Malcolm. “You’re saying that you want me to go to Edilean and ask her to tell a judge that I didn’t kidnap her, and that she went with me of her own free will.”
“Exactly,” Malcolm said brightly. “She could give the place directly to Tam, but he’s not the laird. It has to go down the line, all in proper order.”
“And the problem with that is that I’m thought to be a criminal.”
“Lawler was the only one who had any right to want you dead,” Tam said.
“That’s because it was his niece and his gold that you stole,” Shamus said.
“I didn’t-” Angus began, but then stopped. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do what you want.”
“Why not?” Tam asked, his face showing his anger. “You want to keep being the laird even though you live here?”
“Of course not!” Angus said, but he thought about Tam’s words. To give up his birthright? Could he do that? He’d spent most of his life trying to give honor back to the name that his grandfather had almost destroyed, so could he just walk away from it?
“He won’t do it,” Tam said to Malcolm. “I told you he wouldn’t.”
“Do you want to go back to Scotland?” Malcolm asked softly, looking at Angus. “Is that what you want, lad?”
Angus glanced at them and knew he couldn’t say what was in his mind. They were so fresh off the boat from the old country that they still smelled of heather, but Angus had been in America for years, and he liked the feeling that a man could do or be anything. Right now, if he waited long enough, he’d get a thousand acres. The land would be his own, and he could do with it whatever he wanted. In Scotland, nothing had belonged to him, and what he did was always overseen by others. Even now, if he were given charge of the McTern lands, he’d still be expected to look out for hundreds of people. No, he didn’t want to go back. “No,” he said at last. “I want to stay here.”
Tam’s face lost its angry look and he seemed a bit ashamed of the way he’d nearly attacked his cousin.
“So then you will go back with us to see Miss Edilean,” Malcolm said, smiling in relief.
“Sorry,” Angus said, “but I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Tam asked. “You don’t like her?”
Angus gave a little guffaw at that absurdity. “She doesn’t like me,” he said.
“You had a spat,” Malcolm said. “That’s understandable. Is that why you’re here and she’s there?”
“Are you two married or not?” Shamus asked. “And why are you called Harcourt?”
“It’s a long story,” Angus said.
“I got time,” Shamus said, “and I like a good lie if it’s well told.”
“It’s all true and I’m telling you that I cannot go to Edilean and ask anything of her. She… Well, the truth is that she hates me.”
“From what the captain of the Mary Elizabeth told us, that’s not true,” Tam said.
“He said you two were together every minute.” The familiar smirk was back on Shamus’s face. “Did you-” He made a vulgar gesture.
Angus got to his feet, his fists clenched, but before Shamus could get up, Malcolm called them down. “Sit!” he ordered Angus. “And you stay where you are.” He ran his hand over his face. “You two have been fighting since you were born.”
“You jealous, old man?” Shamus said, still with his fists clenched and ready to take on Angus.
“Old man,” Malcolm said under his breath, then raised his head. “I’m young enough to deal with you two.” He looked at Angus. “You have to go to Miss Edilean and ask her to do this.”
“You’re not understanding the problem,” Angus said. “I’m more than willing to ask her, but if I went to her, she’d say no just to get me back.”
“For what?” Tam and Shamus said in unison.
“Nothing that I plan to talk about.”
Malcolm took a deep breath. “We all have our problems with women, but they can be made up.”
“Have the papers drawn up and I’ll sign whatever you want,” Angus said.
“No. We were told that a judge must see you with Miss Edilean to make sure that you’re both telling the truth.”
“That won’t work,” Angus said firmly. “Edilean will tell them to arrest me.”
“Maybe if you tell us what happened, we can do something about it,” Malcolm said, his voice full of exaggerated patience. All of them, even the two men sitting against the far wall, looked at Angus.
Angus thought about how he’d made love to Edilean, then left her there. He remembered the horrible things he’d said to her servant-which, no doubt, he’d told Edilean. Yes, Angus had had a reason for everything he did, but still, the result was not something that a woman would forgive.
“No,” Angus said. “I’m not telling anyone anything. You’re going to have to figure out a different way to get what you want. I’ll sign whatever you need, but I am not going to confront Edilean and ask her to do this.”
That was last night, and this morning they were still after him. At least Tam and Malcolm were. Shamus stood in the background, looking at Angus with an expression that said he thought Angus was a coward who couldn’t even stand up to a girl.
“No,” Angus repeated. “I will not do this and you can stop asking me.”
After the sun had been up for a couple of hours, Mac returned with a wagon and half a dozen soldiers. Angus stepped away from the Scotsmen to talk to him.
“I didn’t tell them anything at the fort,” Mac said. “I didn’t figure anyone would believe me if I said we thought Austin had done all this. The colonel was angry that Aldredge was still alive. When I told him that the boy was coming here to break up with Betsy, the old man got even more angry. It’s my advice that Aldredge go back east.”
“I agree,” Angus said.
Mac was looking at the Scotsmen who were standing at the mouth of the cave and watching the soldiers carry Naps down to the wagon. Thanks to Matt and T.C., Naps was much better this morning.
Mac lowered his voice. “If I were you, I wouldn’t return to the fort either. Austin didn’t say much but his face was beet red. He’s very angry that you didn’t let us get killed.”
Angus’s heart plummeted. If he left the employ of the army, when Mercer returned from England with his petition signed by the king, Angus would no longer be on the list to get a thousand acres of land.
“Where’d they come from?” Mac asked, nodding toward the three Scotsmen standing apart from the others.
“Home,” Angus said. “Scotland.”
Mac raised an eyebrow. “As if I didn’t know that. Mind if I talk to them? I’d like to be around someone who can understand me.”
Angus shrugged, glad to have some time alone to think. For a moment he considered cursing all the women of the world. His life had been fine until women entered it. First there was Edilean, who he’d tried to help and ended by getting himself wanted for kidnapping and theft. Then there’d been Tabitha, who’d made Edilean so jealous that it caused a rift between them. And now, here was little Betsy Wellman, who might cause him to lose his future.
Angus was allowed about five minutes’ peace before Malcolm came to him.
“Good lad, that one,” he said, nodding toward Mac. “He talks like an American, but I can’t hold that against him. He told me that if you go back to the fort some man might see to it that you get killed.”
“I can take care of myself,” Angus snapped.
“Seems to me that the only thing that interests you is yourself,” Malcolm said, and went back to the others.
For a moment Angus thought about grabbing his rifle and heading out. He’d become a trader who lived on what he took from the woodlands. He’d sleep on the ground. He’d spend his time alone, never seeing anyone but the animals. He’d-
He knew what he was going to do. He was going to go to Edilean and get that straightened out. Maybe by now, after four long years, she had forgiven him at least somewhat. Maybe she’d found out, or figured out, why he’d done what he had. It was possible that she’d seen that the handbills were again being distributed, so she’d know why Angus had had to leave her.
And maybe if he sent word back to Colonel Wellman that he was going into the wilderness to look for the killer of the soldiers that would hold his place open so he’d still get his land. Maybe-
He looked across the opening of the cave and Malcolm was watching him, a question on his face. Angus gave a small, quick nod, and Malcolm’s eyes softened.
Angus thought of Edilean’s wrath when she saw him again, and murmured, “May the Lord have mercy on me.”
ANGUS KNEW HE’D never been so nervous in his life. He fidgeted at the cravat around his neck and wondered if he’d tied it properly. Maybe he’d ask Edilean for her help with the neckcloth. But then, maybe she’d tighten it and strangle him.
Beside him in the coach sat Tam, with Shamus and Malcolm across from them. They all seemed to be a bit in awe of Angus in his gentleman’s clothes. They were from James Harcourt and had been stored in a trunk in the back of the tavern where Angus used to work.
Dolly was glad to see him and wanted him to stay. “It’s been horrible since you left. We can’t keep the place goin’.”
“I can’t stay,” Angus said in the English accent he used with her. Behind him, Malcolm, Tam, and Shamus stood back and watched.
When Angus emerged from the back room wearing Harcourt’s clothes, they’d stood there and stared at him.
“You look English,” Malcolm said, shock in his voice.
“Sounds it too,” Shamus said. “If we have a war, which side will you be on?”
“The only war is going to come when Edilean sees me again.”
Tam looked down at his own clothes, which were rough to begin with and were now dusty and frayed. “She won’t like us.”
Angus shook his head. “Her quarrel is with me. You’ll be all right. Shall we go and get this over with?”
“Yes, we shall,” Shamus said in his version of an imitation of Angus’s accent, but it came out sounding like a foreign dialect-and it made the four of them laugh.
“Come on, lad,” Malcolm said. “It can’t be as bad as you think it will be. My guess is that by now she’s forgotten all about whatever it was that made her angry in the first place.”
“Perhaps,” Angus said, but he didn’t think that was true.
They piled into a hired carriage and went to the town house where Edilean lived with Harriet Harcourt. At the last moment, Angus felt his knees weaken, but Shamus delighted in pushing him out of the carriage so hard that Angus almost hit the ground. He recovered himself, but his nerves were such that he didn’t even reprimand Shamus.
The three Scotsmen surrounded Angus so he couldn’t escape, and they moved forward up the steps to the front door. As Malcolm pulled the cord for the bell, he put his hand on the small of Angus’s back to steady him.
A pretty maid answered the door.
“We’re here to see Miss Edilean,” Malcolm said, but she just stared at him in consternation.
“Miss Edilean,” Angus said in his English accent.
“Is she expecting you?” the young woman asked, blocking the double doorway.
“We have some fruit to sell her,” Shamus said, then louder. “Fruit, girl! Apples.”
“Ah, yes, fruit. Won’t you come in and I’ll get her.”
She led them into a large, sunlit room with a marble fireplace in one wall. Before it were two high-backed chairs on one side and a settee covered in yellow silk on the other. On the floor was a large carpet with wildflowers woven into the border. It was a truly beautiful room, and the three Scotsmen stood in the doorway staring at it but not entering.
“Come on,” Angus said impatiently. “She won’t want to meet us in the hallway.”
Shamus and Malcolm sat down on the settee and looked about them nervously, while Tam and Angus took the chairs.
“You’ve changed,” Tam said, looking across a little table at Angus.
“Fancy clothes don’t change who a man is inside,” Angus said.
“Then maybe you were like this before you got the clothes.”
“Like what?” Angus asked, frowning.
“Like this room. Like this house. You fit in here.” Tam raised his hand. “And it isn’t just the clothes and that way you can talk. It’s something else.”
Angus wasn’t sure what Tam meant, but he didn’t think that now was the time to ask him more, for he heard Edilean’s voice in the hallway.
“You didn’t ask them who they were?” they heard Edilean say.
“No, ma’am, I forgot.”
“From now on, Lissie, don’t let people into my house unless you know them. Oh, heavens! Don’t look like I’m going to beat you! Go to the kitchen and let Harriet talk to you.”
As they heard the girl’s footsteps retreat, they looked toward the doorway in expectation.
As for Angus, he sank back against the chair, letting the high sides of it hide him from the doorway. He hadn’t been prepared for what the sound of her voice would do to him. It was all he could do to keep from running to her and gathering her in his arms. He didn’t realize how very much he’d missed her! Just plain, old-fashioned missed her. Her humor, her no-nonsense approach to life, her strong likes and dislikes. He remembered how she’d won the battle that he was going to America with her. And she’d been right. If he’d stayed in Scotland he was sure that by now he’d be in prison.
“And how may I help you on this-?”
He heard Edilean’s voice but couldn’t see her for the wing on the chair, but he knew she’d stopped when she saw Malcolm, Shamus, and Tam.
“Oh!” she said, and there was delight in her voice. “Oh, how lovely! I never thought I’d ever see you again. I-”
She broke off when she saw Angus in the far chair.
Slowly, he bent forward and looked at her. She was as beautiful as ever, maybe more so. She had on a long linen smock over her dress, and her hair was disarranged so that wispy tendrils hung about her face. He wanted to hold her, kiss her.
“You!” Edilean said, then she turned and ran from the room.
With a groan, Angus started to get out of the chair.
“Sit!” Malcolm said. “You said you’d do this and you’re going to.”
“She hates me.”
“I didn’t hear that in her voice,” Malcolm said. “Did you, Tam?”
He was starry-eyed, looking as young as he had when Angus last saw him. “She’s prettier than I remembered. How could you do anything to hurt her?” Tam glared at Angus.
“I didn’t hurt her on purpose!” Angus said. “I hurt her to save her from something worse.”
“And what would that be?” Tam asked, his voice hostile.
Before Angus could answer, they heard the scurry of feet in the hallway.
“She’s coming back,” Tam said and he sat up straighter.
It wasn’t Edilean who entered the room, but three serving girls carrying huge trays. They set one on a table in the center of the room, then pulled two other tables beside it and put the other trays on them. It was a lavish tea, with huge blue and white china pots full of steaming hot tea, and dishes covered with little sandwiches, scones, cookies, and cakes with colored icing.
As soon as the girls had set the trays down, they left the room, shutting the doors behind them.
Malcolm was the first to recover his astonishment. “Don’t look like she’s mad at you at all. Come on, lads, let’s have something to eat.” He picked up a teapot and filled four cups.
Shamus and Tam eagerly took plates and began to fill them, but Angus held back.
Tam ate three little tea sandwiches in rapid succession, then turned to look at Angus in admiration. “Whatever you did to her, it couldn’t have been too bad. Look at this food.”
Angus was still frowning, but part of him was beginning to relax. Maybe Edilean had seen the handbills. Maybe she’d realized why Angus left. Perhaps she even thought more of him for having given up so much to protect her.
Malcolm held out a cup of tea to Angus. “Come on, lad, drink it while it’s hot.”
Angus reached for the cup but halted when he heard a thud outside the parlor door. It sounded as though something heavy had been dropped on the floor.
“Unless I miss my guess,” Malcolm said, “that was a piece of baggage. Looks like this time she doesn’t mean to let you leave alone.”
Angus took the cup of tea and downed it in one gulp as two more thuds came.
“She’s certainly planning something,” Tam said, now looking at Angus as though he were the epitome of manhood. “What did you do to make her… well, to want you.”
“I ain’t so sure it’s baggage,” Shamus said, his mouth full. “These cakes are good.”
“It’s all good,” Malcolm said as he settled back, cup in hand, a full plate on his lap. “I can see why you’d want to stay here, lad. She sets a good table.”
Angus put the teacup down and went to stand in front of the fireplace. Another thump came. “I don’t like this. I want to know what she’s doing.” He took a step toward the door, but both of the doors flew open, and there stood Edilean-with a rifle in her hands. Two women stood behind her, and on the floor was an arsenal of firearms. The only thing missing was a cannon.
Angus’s mouth dropped open in surprise, but he’d had too many years of dodging bullets to stand still when a rifle was aimed at him. “Get down!” he yelled while he dove for cover behind a chair. Tam hit the floor, but Malcolm and Shamus sat where they were, not hesitating in their eating.
The bullet missed Angus by inches, hitting the chair and sending stuffing flying. “Edilean!” he said from behind the chair. “We can talk about this.”
“I never plan to speak to you again,” she said as she hoisted a second long, heavy rifle and fired it at him. The bullet tore through the chair arm. He moved his legs a second before he would have been hit.
Angus peeked around the destroyed chair. Edilean was standing in the doorway, and the two young women flanking her glowed with good health-and humor. As one loaded the rifle Edilean had just fired, the other one handed her a pistol. Both girls looked very happy, as though they’d wanted to do this all their lives.
“Edilean, please,” Angus said. As he spoke, he motioned to Tam, who was hiding behind the other chair, to make a run for the window. It was closed, but nearby there was a heavy silver candlestick on a tall cabinet. Angus pantomimed that Tam should use that to break the window and get out.
Edilean cocked a pistol, aimed, and fired directly at Angus, but he rolled away and the shot went into the floor, tearing a hole in the pretty rug. In the next second, Tam threw the candlestick at the window, it broke and he started out. But there were two young women standing outside, and they were holding loaded pistols aimed at him. He paused with his foot on the windowsill.
“I’m not the one you want,” Tam said.
One of the girls cocked her pistol. “We can’t be sure of that, now can we?”
“But I don’t even look like him!” Tam said.
“We were told that he’s big and beautiful,” the second girl said, raising her pistol toward Tam’s head.
“Well, I guess there is a similarity between us,” Tam said, smiling, and he started out the window. But the first girl pulled the trigger, missing Tam by little more than an inch.
He went back in and crouched on the floor by Angus, who gave him a look of disgust.
“Ever hear of clan loyalty?” Angus asked.
Tam shrugged. “This is your personal fight.”
Angus grimaced as he looked around the chair and saw Edilean aiming another pistol at him. “For God’s sake, Malcolm. Help us in this.”
“Ain’t my way to interfere in love,” Malcolm said as he licked jam from his fingers.
“This is love?” Angus rolled away from another near-miss shot. “Then give me hate.”
Malcolm said, “I do indeed like these biscuits.”
Shamus looked at Edilean standing in the doorway, holding a rifle longer than she was, and at the two young women beside her, pistols in their hands. “I think I like everything about this country.”
Angus said, “Edilean, if you’d just give me a moment to explain I could clear this up. It really is just a misunderstanding.” As he spoke, he half rolled, half ran to the other side of the room and crouched down behind the settee. He figured she wouldn’t shoot at him if Malcolm was between them.
“Malcolm,” Edilean said as she took another pistol, “would you please move to the left?” She shot through the settee, but the bullet went through Malcolm’s shirt, grazing his upper arm. “Oh, I am so sorry,” Edilean said. “I meant my left, not yours.”
Malcolm glanced at the wound, and continued eating. “That’s all right, lass, it’s a common enough mistake.”
“Did I hurt you?” Edilean asked.
“No, not at all,” Malcolm said. “These little raspberry tarts sure are good.”
Angus, behind the settee, rolled his eyes, then stood up and said firmly, “Edilean, this is ridiculous! You’re going to hurt someone.”
She took a pistol from one of the women. “I mean to kill you,” she said, her jaw clenched. She looked at Malcolm and said sweetly, “Harriet made those. I’ll have her give you some.”
“Edilean,” Angus said, “if you kill me they’ll hang you.”
She gave him a cold look. “Not after I tell them what you did to me.” She looked back at Shamus. “It’s good to see you again. Have you been well?”
“Well enough,” Shamus said. “Was that really gold in the back of that wagon I was supposed to drive for you?”
Edilean blinked at him. She’d been away from Scotland so long that she didn’t understand what he’d said.
Angus, still standing behind the settee, which now had a huge hole in the center of it, translated.
“Yes, it was gold,” Edilean said.
“Damn!” Shamus said.
“He said-” Angus began.
“I could understand that!” Edilean said angrily. “You have always thought that I’m incompetent and worthless.”
“I’ve never thought any such thing!” Angus said. “If you’ll stop this lunacy and give me time to explain, I could tell you-”
“Edilean,” said a woman who came to the doorway, “whatever are you doing?”
“Tabitha?” Angus asked. “Is that you?”
Edilean looked from one to the other, at the way Angus’s face was breaking into a smile, and she fired again.
Angus just had time to dive under the settee, his head between Shamus’s and Malcolm’s feet.
In the next second a woman came running from the back of the house and Angus recognized her as Harriet Harcourt.
“Edilean!” Harriet said. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Hand me a loaded pistol,” Edilean said to the woman behind Harriet.
Harriet pushed the girl’s hand away. “This is absurd! You can’t shoot at people and you cannot destroy the furniture again!”
Angus backed out from under the settee and stood up, his face showing his relief. “That’s just what I’ve been telling her.”
Harriet looked at Angus and her face turned to anger. “You! Give me that pistol!” She snatched the pistol from the girl and fired at Angus, who went back down under the settee.
Tam, still on the other side of the room, hiding behind a chair, said, “What the hell did you do to these women?”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” Angus said from under the couch.
It was Malcolm who stopped it all. Suddenly, he stood up and was staring at Harriet.
Shamus looked up at him. “What’s wrong with you? If you don’t sit down, you’ll make all this stop.”
Edilean looked from Malcolm to Harriet, then back again. “Harriet,” she said softly, “why don’t you take Malcolm into the kitchen, patch up his wound, and get him some more of those little tarts you made?”
Harriet and Malcolm just stood there, staring at each other.
Edilean turned to Tabitha, who was watching everything with a wide grin on her face. “Would you please help those two into the kitchen?”
Angus nodded across the room to Tam, who pushed the chair over. In the confusion of the noise, Angus quickly slipped out of the room and put himself between Edilean and the weapons, but he didn’t touch her. “Are you over your hissy fit now?”
Edilean’s face showed her rage; her fists were clenched at her side. “If I had a knife I’d cut your throat. I want you to get out of my house and never return.”
“Tam has something he wants to say to you.”
“Tam may stay. In fact, all the rest of you may spend the night. But you”-she glared at Angus-“you must go.”
“Edilean, I know you hate me and maybe you have a right to, but-”
“Maybe?” she said, her voice nearly a screech.
“All right, you do have every right to hate me, but please listen to what they have to say. And please know that I’ll do anything to help them.”
Before she could say anything else, he took the few steps toward the door. Tabitha was looking at him in amusement, while Harriet’s eyes blazed hatred. Angus bent toward Harriet and said softly, “How is your brother? Living well?”
In a second, Harriet’s face went from anger to fear, and she glanced at Edilean, as though terrified that she’d heard him.
Angus left the house, the door was slammed behind him, and he hurried down the stairs. There was a crowd of people outside, all of them having heard the shots.
“What’s going on in there?” a man asked.
“Gun cleaning,” Angus said as he made his way through them. He hitched a ride on a milk wagon and went back to the tavern where he’d once worked. He knew that Malcolm would want to know where he was staying, so it would be better to be somewhere known. Besides, Dolly kept her ears open and she’d know as much as anyone, and Angus wanted some information.
When Malcolm had told him that Harriet was paying her brother James to stay away from Edilean, Angus had been so concerned about having to confront Edilean that he’d not thought about it much. But now it was taking over his mind. He’d only mentioned the matter to Harriet as an afterthought. He hadn’t liked the way she’d been looking at Malcolm. What was the woman after by throwing herself at his uncle?
But when Angus had mentioned James, Harriet’s anger had changed to fear. So, he thought, Edilean didn’t know anything about the payments going to Harcourt. If Harriet was taking care of Edilean’s money as Tam had said she was, did that mean she was embezzling from Edilean?
If Edilean knew nothing about Harriet’s treachery, then how did Malcolm know? When it came to that, exactly what had they been doing in America for three whole months? And who had paid their passage across the ocean, and their room and board once they got here?
Angus knew that there was a great deal more to why Malcolm, Tam, and Shamus were in this country than just signing some papers-and Angus meant to find out what they weren’t telling him.
HARRIET WAS MOVING quickly around the dining room, putting out the best china, polishing the silver with her apron, checking the glasses for smudges.
Edilean was sitting at the end of the table, reading the newspaper, and finishing her tea. “Harriet, will you please stop fidgeting? I’ve seen where those men live, and I can assure you that they don’t know Wedgwood from Limoges. They’d be happy if you dumped all the food on a slab of bread.”
“There is such a thing as lineage, and even though the men have no money, their bloodline still tells.”
“Bloodline? Whatever are you talking about?”
“Tam is to be the laird of the McTern clan,” Harriet said. “Didn’t you know that? When Angus relinquishes the title, it will belong to young Tam.”
“And if anything happens to Tam, it goes to Malcolm,” Edilean said softly. “Are you thinking of being the laird’s wife?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Harriet said as she turned away, but not before Edilean saw the blush that rose in her cheeks.
“I hope a bloodline doesn’t mean as much to you as it does to your brother.”
“Why would you mention him?” Harriet said, turning back to look at Edilean. “Have you heard anything from him?”
“No,” Edilean said. “I merely mentioned him because your love of bloodline reminded me that he chose an earl’s daughter over me. Are you interested in Malcolm because of his ancestry?”
“Interested in him? I have no idea what you mean,” Harriet said haughtily.
“You-” Edilean began but stopped herself. Harriet was so mad about Malcolm that they caused giggles wherever they went. All the girls who worked for Edilean’s company saw it and tittered behind their hands. Harriet was what one thought of when an old maid was mentioned. She had a look about her of someone who had dried up inside. But since she’d met Malcolm three weeks before, she’d begun to blossom. She was like a plant that hadn’t been watered in forty years, but at the first drops of rain it was coming back to life.
Harriet had always been stern with the girls who worked for them, but they’d found that under her harsh-seeming ways she had a good heart. In public she might berate one of them for not keeping a good account of her expenses, but they knew that in private she often slipped them a pound or two when one was in desperate need.
And it was Miss Harriet who met the ships and bought the contracts of the young women who arrived in America. Some were frightened, some looking forward to adventure, but some were hardened criminals looking out for what they could get. Miss Harriet had a good eye as to which ones to employ and which to leave to their own fates. She took care of the women, arranging where they were to live and often overseeing their health. Sometimes the conditions on board the ships were so bad that they arrived barely alive. Harriet saw to it that they were given good food and a clean room. When they were well, they went to work on the farms.
Because of her kindness to them, they were happy for her to have found Malcolm. They loved to see her nearly skipping with happiness, and they smiled when they saw Malcolm pick a flower and hand it to her.
As for Edilean, she’d only returned last night. After that day when she’d thrown Angus out of her house, she and Malcolm had spent hours together, and he told her about her uncle dying and their plan of making Tam the laird. Edilean had readily agreed to return the property her uncle had stolen from them, but she felt sick at the idea of appearing before a judge and saying nice things about Angus. She’d have to say that she willingly ran off with him, that he’d treated her well, and that he’d never used any force on her. Malcolm said she’d probably be asked to embellish the story so it sounded as though Angus had done her a good deed, that he was the best of men, and deserved to be released from an unfair accusation.
It all made sense, but Edilean still hated the idea of spending any time with Angus. They’d have to rehearse their story before going to the judge to make sure they said the same things, so that meant hours together.
After Malcolm finished telling what they wanted of her, Edilean mumbled that she needed time to think about it all. But she couldn’t bear thinking about it. That evening, she tossed a few clothes into a case, called for the big green carriage with the crest on the door and Cuddy as her driver, and headed south to the colony of Connecticut. She’d heard of a farm for sale there that had acres in fruit, and she wanted to look at it. Originally, she’d decided that it was too far away from Boston to be of interest to her, but after seeing Angus, after trying to kill him, she wanted to get away.
Harriet, who so loved overseeing every aspect of Edilean’s life, hadn’t protested her leaving. Harriet had, in an instant, turned all her motherly affections to Malcolm. She hovered over him in the kitchen and had four girls running up and down the stairs as she had a room prepared for him.
Harriet’s quick desertion of Edilean was yet another blow to her on a day that reeked with them. In fact, Harriet hardly noticed when Edilean left.
When Edilean returned yesterday, she saw that her house had become “theirs.” Malcolm and Harriet were a couple in everything but legality and bedding. There was new furniture in the parlor, new linens on the beds-and Harriet was sleeping in Edilean’s room. She’d given Malcolm her room with the excuse that she had no idea when or even if Edilean was going to return.
“Why wouldn’t I return to my own house?” Edilean snapped. “Where else was I going to live?”
“Now, girls,” Malcolm said, “we can solve this all if the lads and I move out.”
“No!” Harriet half screamed, and glared at Edilean.
“No, of course you can’t leave,” Edilean said and had to bite her tongue from making a sarcastic reply about guests who stayed for three whole weeks.
At dinner she felt like the outsider as Tam, Shamus, Malcolm, and Harriet had become great friends and talked as though they’d known one another all their lives. Harriet played the hostess with perfection.
Edilean sat at the end of the table and watched it all with feelings of jealousy, but also with a sense of being an unneeded and unwanted visitor. She had become the one who didn’t belong in her own house.
The truth was that she’d felt more at home in the three weeks she’d spent in Connecticut. Right away, she’d seen that the farm was a place she wanted to buy. It had been well kept, and the fruit was going to be abundant. The man who owned it had died unexpectedly and left behind a wife and two young daughters. Edilean made an excuse by saying she wanted to stay with the woman while she readied herself to leave the farm, but the truth was that Edilean wanted to do anything rather than return to the house where she’d last seen Angus. She still hadn’t recovered from the violence of her emotions when she first saw him. Every moment they’d spent together, both private and public, had run through her mind. But the prominent memory was of how he’d just walked away from her. Left her there in his bed. He didn’t even stay long enough to tell her to her face that he’d had what he wanted from her and was done with her. No, he’d told that to Cuddy.
It had taken nearly two days to get Cuddy to tell the full truth of what Angus had said, but she’d done it. Calmly, the young man had said, “Would you like me to kill him for you?” Edilean had been tempted to say yes, but she didn’t. But as a result of Cuddy’s loyalty he was one of only three men she’d kept in her employ when she started Bound Girl. The other two men were too old to discharge.
After Angus had so coldly left her, Edilean had borne her heart ache without a tear, and she’d never told Harriet what had happened. To compensate, Edilean had started Bound Girl and buried herself in as much work as she could humanly manage.
It had all gone well until she walked into her own parlor and there he was. He sat there looking at her as though he’d just seen her last week and now he wanted to put his arms around her. And then what? Take her to bed, have a night of ecstasy, then leave her for another four years? Is that what he thought of her?
Just as had happened before, Edilean’s mind left her. She ran from the room and told the girls who were in the back loading boxes of fruit that she needed them. She knew that they were so grateful to her for saving them that they’d do anything she wanted. If she’d told them to take the guns and shoot Angus, they would have done it and damn the consequences!
But Edilean had wanted the pleasure of seeing him suffer. She wanted to see him lying dead at her feet-or that’s what she told herself.
After it was over, after the weapons had been taken from her, she couldn’t bear to stay in that house. She didn’t want to see any of them. She didn’t want to see the three Scotsmen, who reminded her of Angus, didn’t want to see Harriet simpering over Malcolm. She didn’t even want to see the girls, who reminded her of the company she’d started because of what Angus had done to her.
When she got into the carriage she wasn’t sure where she was going. It wasn’t until she was an hour away that she remembered the handbill Harriet had shown her about the farm for sale in Connecticut. It took days to get there, but when she’d arrived, the widow, Abigail Prentiss, had welcomed her, and by the next evening they’d formed a friendship. Abigail was her age, and she’d been born in England into the same class. They even knew some of the same people.
When she was just seventeen, Abby had fallen in love with an older man who owned a farm in America. Her family protested that she couldn’t go that far away, but Abby had made up her mind. They married three months after they met, and Abby was expecting a baby a week later. Now, with two daughters, aged four and three, to support, she didn’t know how she was going to do it alone.
“I can help you with that,” Edilean said, and gave a great sigh.
From there it went to Abigail listening to Edilean’s problems; she told her about Angus. While it was true that Abby had been in love with John Prentiss when she married him, she admitted to Edilean that it had not been a match made in Heaven.
“I think I wanted to get away from my mother as much as I wanted anything else, and there was John, such a very nice man, who owned a big farm in America, and I saw a way to leave my mother. He was a lovely man.”
“But not one you’d want to kill if he betrayed you.”
Abby laughed. “I don’t think I could feel that way about any man.”
“Good,” Edilean said. “It’s awful. I can’t decide if I love him or hate him.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
They were in her orchard, many of the trees were in bloom, and the bees were buzzing all around them. Her little girls, blonde and beautiful, were chasing butterflies. Edilean knew that she envied Abby. She’d had a “correct” life, marrying a man, then having children. Edilean felt that her own life had been topsy-turvy, everything always backward to what it should be. She’d had no parents to speak of and no marriage-but she’d had a wedding night.
“What will you do now?” Abby asked.
“Go back to Boston and…” She gave another sigh. “I guess I’ll run Bound Girl, although I think Tabitha and Harriet could manage quite well without me. I was needed to make them believe they could start such a company, but now they do all the work. I…” She trailed off. While it was true that she worked all day long and ran everything, it seemed that lately her heart wasn’t in it. She was to turn twenty-two this year, and she wasn’t married or even being courted by a man. There were still many men trying for her hand, but they seemed to get older every year. A woman who was extremely successful in a business was not something a younger man wanted to take on. Whereas they loved the idea of marrying a rich heiress, a woman who was taking over the produce market through intelligence and shrewd decisions was not their idea of a good wife.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Edilean said, and she had a vision of herself looking like Harriet, of being forty-plus, with no husband, no family. If she owned all the orchards in all thirteen colonies she’d still be alone. “What about you?” Edilean asked. “After I buy your farm, where will you go?”
“Williamsburg,” Abby said firmly. “I went there once with John and I loved the place. It’s a city, but it has the atmosphere of an English village. And Virginia is beautiful.”
“With a lot of eligible bachelors?” Edilean asked, and they looked at each other and laughed.
Edilean meant to stay in Connecticut for only a few days, but she ended up staying at Abby’s farm for three weeks. She left because she feared that Bound Girl might need her. If Harriet was still enamored of Malcolm she wouldn’t be paying attention to the business, and if Tabitha wasn’t constantly supervised, who knew what she’d do? Reluctantly, Edilean left the farm and her new friend, and went back to Boston.
But no one paid much attention to her arrival. There were no crises that only she could handle. In just a few weeks, her household had changed so much that she felt she didn’t know it. Harriet’s every sentence seemed to start with, “Malcolm says-”
As for Tabitha, she’d taken the opportunity to buy some new wagons and have the company’s Bound Girl symbol painted on them. Edilean thought they were hideously garish and said so. “But they sell more,” was Tabitha’s reply.
Now, Edilean was watching Harriet dither about as she set the table as though the king were coming when it was just Malcolm, Tam, and Shamus. As far as Edilean knew, Shamus still ate all his food with a spoon.
She left the table, unable to sit there and-She hated to think that she was such a shallow person, but it was difficult not to feel jealous and envious of the happiness that everyone in her household seemed to have found.
She went to the big warehouse where the produce from the farms came in. Usually, she was so busy that she could think of nothing else, but today she was distracted. She kept remembering Abigail and her beautiful young daughters.
When Tabitha said something to Edilean, she just stared at her.
“You comin’ down with somethin’?” Tabitha asked her.
“Yes. No,” Edilean said as she looked at two young women who were bent over boxes of cherries and saw that they were watching her and laughing. No doubt all of Boston knew about her shooting at some man. And they could easily guess why.
Edilean grabbed her skirts and fled the warehouse. All in all, she thought, it would have been better to have killed Angus and now be sitting in a jail cell.
She wandered about Boston for a while, looking at what the stores had to offer, and listening to men complain about England. Edilean didn’t understand what the problem was. If the men thought King George was bad, they should read the history books and look at past kings. What did the Americans think they were going to do? Start a new country without a king? Really! Sometimes she didn’t understand Americans at all.
It was dusk by the time she got back to the house, and she hadn’t eaten all day. She asked to have a tray taken to her room. She ate little of the food, then undressed down to her chemise and went to bed. She fell asleep instantly.
She was awakened by a shot and angry shouts coming from downstairs. “Now what?” Edilean muttered as she slipped her arms into a dressing gown and went out her door. She had to wait her turn to go down the stairs as the three men and Harriet were ahead of her.
When Edilean got to the parlor, the others were blocking her view. They were standing there and staring, transfixed into immobility by whatever they were seeing. “Would you mind!” she said angrily as she pushed through them. When she got to the front, she also stood still and stared. Two candles were lit in the room, and her good silver candlesticks were sticking out of a bag on the floor. Beside the bag was the body of James Harcourt, and he had a bullet hole smack in the middle of his forehead. He was staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
Over him stood a large woman with her back to them, but they could see the pistol in her hand. “That’s what you get for stealing my life from me,” the woman said. “You bastard. I hope you’re already in hell. I wish you were alive so I could kill you again.”
The woman drew back her foot and proceeded to kick James’s inert body. Suddenly, in a fury, she began to kick him over and over, her feet moving so fast they were a whirl of motion. “I hate you! Do you hear me? I hate you. Hate you!”
Shamus pushed past the others, went to the woman, and grabbed her arm, but she fought him off. She turned her anger onto Shamus and began to hit him with her fists and kick at his shins with her hard-soled shoes.
“There now,” Shamus said, pulling her close so her arms were pinned between his body and hers. She was a large, strong woman, and Shamus was the only one who could have held her still. When he got her arms to stop pounding him, he pushed her head down to his shoulder and turned her face to the others, who were still standing in the doorway.
It took all Edilean’s self-discipline to keep from gasping, for the woman was extraordinarily ugly. Her nose was huge and curved down so it overshadowed her sharp chin.
Harriet said, “Prudence.”
Edilean didn’t know the name, but she knew who had the most reason to kill James Harcourt, and she’d heard about his wife’s unfortunate looks. “James’s wife,” she said.
Edilean came out of her lackluster mood. “Harriet!” she said sharply, then had to repeat herself. “Harriet! Listen to me! I want you to get her upstairs and give her some of that laudanum your brother loves… loved so much. Are you listening to me?” When Harriet didn’t respond, just kept staring at her brother’s body on the floor, Edilean looked at Malcolm for help.
“It’s over,” he said softly, and took Harriet into his arms. “It’s all over now. He won’t be bothering you anymore.”
“When has James bothered her?” Edilean asked.
“He’s been blackmailing Harriet for years.”
“You knew?” Harriet asked as she raised her head from his shoulder to look at him.
“Yes, we knew, and we’ve been waiting for him to return. Come now, and we’ll get you back to bed. Shamus! Take Miss Prudence upstairs. We’ll put the women in the same bed and give them that…” He looked at Edilean.
“Laudanum,” she said, blinking at him. Blackmail. She couldn’t help wondering how Harriet had paid the blackmail. James wouldn’t be cheap.
“What you’re thinking is right,” Malcolm said, glaring at her, anger in his voice. “It was your company’s money that paid the blackmail, but Harriet was protecting you. If you plan to try to put her in prison, I tell you now that you’ll have to go through me first.” With that, he helped Harriet up the stairs; Shamus with Prudence was right behind him.
Edilean was left standing in the parlor door, with James’s dead body on the floor not ten feet from her. But she was in much more shock from what Malcolm had just said than she was at James’s death. What had she done to make him or anyone else think that she’d prosecute Harriet? Harriet had taken care of her for years. Harriet had-
Edilean refused to think any more about what had been said to her. Right now, the most important question was what to do about the dead man lying in her parlor. She slowly walked into the room and looked down at him. The light was dim, but she could see that James wasn’t nearly as handsome as he used to be. Or was it that she had become used to American men, who spent their lives out of doors and worked hard in their lives? By comparison, James looked pale and weak.
Whatever it was, she wondered what she’d ever seen in him.
“Miss Edilean?”
She turned to see Malcolm standing in the doorway, and she couldn’t help her cold expression when she looked at him. “Is Harriet all right?”
“Much better, thank you,” Malcolm said, his voice contrite. “I said some things to you that were uncalled for. It was in the heat of the moment, and I want to apologize. I know that Harriet has been nearly driven insane by that… that man.” He sneered at James’s body sprawled on the floor.
“I understand,” Edilean said, but she was lying. She was hurt that he could even think she would prosecute Harriet. “I would never do anything bad to her.”
“I know that, but she worries so.”
“But now she has you to take care of her.” Edilean raised her hand when he started to speak. “I think that all this can be hashed out later. Right now we need to do something about this man’s body.”
“You mean to call the sheriff?”
“So he can give Prudence a medal?”
Malcolm blinked a couple of times, then smiled. “That’s the way we all feel, but I wondered, since you once…” He shrugged.
“Loved him? Maybe I did. But I was a schoolgirl and he was beautiful. I can be forgiven that idiocy, can’t I?”
“I think you should be forgiven everything.”
“Now that that’s settled, what do we do with him? My floor is going to be ruined.”
Malcolm laughed. “Between shots fired into it and now blood on it, I think you might have to have this floor replaced. Unless there are more men in your life and we should expect cannon fire at any moment.”
Edilean laughed too, and plopped down onto a chair. “What are we going to do with this body?”
“You have to ask Angus.”
Edilean thought he was making a joke. “So he can dress it up as an Indian and blame them for this? I tell you that these Americans blame the poor Indians for everything. Only last week-” She broke off when she looked at Malcolm’s face. He wasn’t joking.
“All right,” she said at last. “Go get him. And while you’re gone, I’ll pack and get out of here. I may move to that farm in Connecticut permanently.”
“No,” Malcolm said, moving to stand on the other side of James’s body. “You have to go get him.”
“Me? Did you forget that I’m the one who tried to kill him in this very room just three weeks ago? If you can’t go, send Tam. Angus adores his young cousin.”
“Angus is, well… He’s a bit angry at us right now and won’t speak to us.”
“What did you do to him? No, on second thought, don’t tell me.”
“We didn’t tell him all of the truth about why we came to America.”
“There’s more than about my uncle dying?”
“It was Miss Prudence who paid our way here, and she hired us to find her husband.”
Edilean stared at him for a moment. “I don’t know the law that well, but I think you three could be considered an accessory to murder.”
Malcolm shrugged.
“So Angus is angry at your participation in this? Since when did he become a champion of James Harcourt?”
Malcolm glanced at the window. “You know, lass, I don’t mean to rush you on this, but I think you should go right away. It’s hours before daylight, but we may need all that time of darkness. I don’t think that in the morning the maid will keep quiet at the sight of a dead body on the floor of the parlor.”
“Would that be the maid who was transported for grave robbing, or the one who was sentenced because she used a whip on her stepfather?”
Malcolm shook his head at her. “Oh, lass, if only I were younger. But you must go get Angus. He knows this country but we don’t. He’ll know what to do and how to hide a dead man. We’d go, but he said he’d have nothing to do with us until we tell him the whole truth, but we swore to Miss Prudence that we wouldn’t.”
“And Angus has a soft spot for her.”
“Please tell me that’s a jest,” Malcolm said seriously. “Shamus is quite taken with the woman and she with him. If Angus also wants her it will cause great problems. They’ll-”
“How do I know what he wants?” Edilean half shouted, then glanced at the ceiling when she heard what sounded like a muffled cry.
“I must go!” Malcolm said. “And so must you. Angus is at the tavern where he used to work.” He rushed from the room.
“Of course he is,” Edilean said. “Where else would he be? In that same room, asleep in that same bed.” She wanted to run upstairs and tell the men that she could not do this. She would do anything but go see Angus, but then she looked down at the body on her floor and thought about poor Prudence being hanged for shooting someone who so very much deserved killing, and Edilean headed for the doorway. But she turned back and gave James’s rib cage a good swift kick. “That’s from me,” she said, and left the room.
ANGUS!” EDILEAN SAID as she stared down at him in bed. He was lying on that bed, the one that held so many memories for her, and he was smiling. She had no doubt that he was dreaming something good. And why not? He got everything he ever wanted, didn’t he? In the four years that she’d heard nothing from him he must had bedded a hundred women. Maybe a thousand.
She resisted the urge to turn around and leave the room, but Tam was waiting outside the barn, and she figured he’d send her back in. Malcolm had been shocked when Edilean said she’d go to Angus alone.
“Brigands!” he said under his breath.
“We don’t have them in America,” Edilean said, her eyes wide in innocence.
Malcolm had looked at her in shock, but Tam laughed. “She has no intention of going to Angus.”
Edilean gave him a sharp look because that was exactly her plan.
“I’ll go with you and protect you,” Tam said, “even though this new country has no idea what crime is.”
When he said he’d meet her in back of the house with the horses saddled, she’d reluctantly agreed. She went upstairs to dress, and on impulse, she went into Tam’s room and opened the chest at the foot of his bed. At nineteen, he was a foot taller than she was, but he was very slim, so his clothes might come close to fitting her. If she was going to have to sneak through the night, she couldn’t do it wearing thirty-five yards of silk.
Everyone was in the bedroom with Prudence and Harriet, so no one saw Edilean hurry past wearing a large white shirt, a vest that was big enough to hide her breasts, knee britches, and white stockings. She had on her own work shoes, which were plain black leather with big silver buckles. She’d tied her hair at the nape of her neck and let it hang down her back.
When she got outside where Tam was impatiently waiting for her, his eyes widened at the sight of her, but she gave him a look that dared him to say anything. But when she swung up into the saddle by herself, he said, “Good boy!” and rode out of the courtyard ahead of her.
It took them over an hour to get to the tavern where Angus lived, and they found that the barn that held his room was bolted from the inside. It was Edilean who told Tam that he had to hoist her up to the second floor so she could climb into the loft. He managed to stand on his horse and lift Edilean up until she caught the rope that hung down from the pulley over the loft door. She was sure there was a great deal more touching of her backside than was quite necessary, but she said nothing to Tam.
She grabbed the rope, and managed to shinny up it to reach the bottom of the open door. She had to swing forward on the rope, and below her, she heard Tam’s quick intake of breath, but she made it inside, landing on the wooden floor and rolling almost to the ladder down to the floor below. “You’re not worth this,” she muttered as she dusted herself off.
When she stuck her leg out to shake off the hay, she rather liked not having on a corset and not being encumbered with a full, long skirt. With a glance about to make sure no one was looking, she did a bit of a dance on the wooden floor, lifting her knees up to almost her waist.
“Edilean!” came Tam’s loud whisper from outside. “Whatever are you doing? I can hear you jumping!”
With a grimace, she stopped dancing and thought about the days when Tam was so enamored of her that he’d stared at her in fascination. Now he told her to hurry up.
Sighing, she turned and went down the ladder to the ground floor and tiptoed to Angus’s door. When all the horses moved to the front of their stalls to look at her, she was tempted to stay with them, and she’d tell Tam that Angus wasn’t there. She’d say that he was probably with another woman. Maybe she’d tell him that-
The memory of James Harcourt lying on her parlor floor brought her back to reality. Angus’s door was closed and she thought about knocking, but she was afraid someone might hear. They hadn’t heard the many noises she and Angus had made on the night they’d made love in that room, but maybe he’d arranged that.
She tried the latch, it opened, she went inside, and a moment later she was looking down at his sleeping face. Quickly, she lit a candle, and the fact that she knew where it and the flint were made her more angry.
“Angus!” she said. “You have to wake up!” When he didn’t stir, she went closer to him-and he reached out one of his long arms and pulled her on top of him. Before she could stop him, he tried to kiss her, but she pushed away. “I don’t have time for this!” she said into his ear. “There’s a dead body in my front parlor.”
“It’s probably mine,” he said, his eyes closed, “because I’m in Heaven now.”
She pushed at him harder, but his arms still held her on top of him. “Will you stop it! I’m serious. James Harcourt is in my house and he’s dead.”
Angus opened his eyes and looked at her. “Harcourt?”
“Oh, so you can hear me.”
“I heard you leaping about upstairs. Edilean, it’s one thing to shoot at me while, of course, being careful to miss, but it’s something altogether different to actually kill someone.”
“You idiot!” she said as she gave a major push that got her off of him so she was standing by the bed. “I didn’t kill him.”
He rose up on his elbows. “But you seem to enjoy shooting at people. All right,” he said at her look. “Who did kill him?”
Edilean put her hands on her hips. “What do you mean, that I was careful to miss you? I tried to hit you but you kept leaping around. You’re worse than our goats!”
“Goats?” Angus ran his hand over his face. “Edilean, what in the world are you talking about?”
“I’m trying to make you listen to me. It’s never happened before, but I’m still trying. James Harcourt is dead, and he’s bleeding on my parlor floor. We have to get rid of the body and Malcolm sent me to get you. He said that you know how to do every underhanded, lying, sneaking, illegal thing there is, so you’d know what to do to keep Prudence from being hanged.”
After staring at her in silence for a few seconds, Angus threw back the blanket, got out of bed, and began to dress. “Prudence? Is she one of your slave girls?”
“They’re bound girls, not slaves. But no, she’s not in my employment. You should know who she is, as you tussled with her in bed.”
Angus groaned as he pulled on his breeches. “Not your jealousy again!”
“Jealousy?!” Edilean’s fists clenched at her sides. “I have never been jealous of you, no matter how many women you’ve had.”
“Oh? Then why did you hire Tabitha if not to keep her away from me?”
“Why you vain, arrogant-” She started to kick his shin, but he moved back.
Angus smiled. “You won’t catch me like that again.”
Edilean put her hands over her face as though she were crying. “Oh, Angus, I’m so very frightened. James was… It was awful.” The minute Angus stepped near her, she kicked him in the shin, and he yelped in pain.
“I’m tempted to turn you over my knee for that.”
“Try it,” she said.
“It would be too easy.” For a moment they glared at each other. “Who is Prudence?!” he said at last.
“James’s wife.”
“His wife?” Angus looked puzzled for a moment, then understood. “Oh, yes, his wife.”
Edilean gave him a cold little smile. “So you do remember her. I remember that you wouldn’t let me see her, but you let me believe she was so beautiful that you envied James.”
“I did not!”
She glared at him.
Angus tried to suppress a smile. “Perhaps I did. Would you like to kick my other shin? It’s not bleeding.”
“You’re not going to get ’round me, Angus… What is your name now?”
“Harcourt.” He shrugged. “It was easier than thinking up a new name. Shall we go? Or do you want to stay here and argue some more?”
“I don’t want to do anything with you.”
Angus opened the door to his room and let Edilean leave ahead of him. In the close quarters of the room he’d not been able to see her clearly. “What in the world are you wearing?” he asked, his voice showing his shock.
“Tam’s clothes.”
“Ah,” Angus said coldly. “Tam. Is he still staying with you?”
“As if you don’t know everything there is to know about my life,” Edilean said as Angus lifted the latch on the barn door. Tam was just outside, mounted, and holding the reins to Edilean’s horse.
Angus looked at Tam. “If I do this, I want to be told everything.”
“We made a vow to Miss Prudence, but I think it’s gone past that now.”
Edilean put her foot up to the stirrup of her horse, but Angus picked her up by the waist and set her aside. “What do you-?” she began but cut off when Angus swung up into the saddle, and offered his hand down to her. “I’d rather ride with Tam,” she said.
Angus started to get off the horse.
Edilean muttered a curse word under her breath, and put her hand up to his, and he pulled her onto the saddle in front of him. It wasn’t two seconds after they started moving that he began talking to her, his mouth close to her ear.
“I left you that morning because James showed up at the tavern. He hung up handbills of me. I didn’t want you to love a man who was to be executed.”
“Is that supposed to make me forgive you?” Edilean was trying to sit up straight and stay away from his big, warm body. She had on only a cotton shirt and a vest, and it was cold out.
“I did think that if you knew my reason for leaving you that night you might feel more kindly toward me.”
His breath was warm against her face, and she well remembered the sweet smell of it. “I’m to feel good that you decided my entire future in a second? Without asking me what I wanted to do? You had your way with me, then you left me there to rot! Tabitha walked the streets, and she was never treated so badly.”
Angus leaned away from her, his back stiff. “You told her about me?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You told Tabitha, one of your bound girls, about you and me?” His voice showed his disbelief.
Smiling, Edilean said, “Every word. And for your information, Tabitha and I have become good friends. I have to bail her out of jail now and then, and I’ve had to dock her more than a year’s wages to repay the people she steals from, but when you overlook that quirk about her, she can be pleasurable company. She knows everything about snaky men.”
“Snaky? Oh. As in snakes.”
“Lying, cheating-”
Angus sighed. “I get the idea. So tell me what happened about James-if you can drag yourself away from reciting all my faults, that is.”
“It will be difficult, but then I’ve had years and years and years to think on your faults.”
“That would be six, but I was away only four.”
“Six what?” she asked.
“Years. One ‘years’ plus another ‘years’ plus-” He stopped when she twisted in the saddle to look at him. “Sorry. You were about to tell me about Harcourt and his wife. I don’t know anything about them together.”
“Except that she killed him.”
“Yes, I do know that, but why did she kill him?”
Edilean turned to give him a look.
“Oh, right. I see your point. He deserved it. I’m afraid I have to agree with her. Where is she now?”
“With Shamus.”
“With…?” Angus’s face showed his horror. “You left that frightened woman with Shamus?”
“After Prudence shot James she began to kick him, and Shamus was the only one big enough to hold her. But then I guess you know all about the size and shape of her, being as you spent so much time in bed with her.”
“And lived to tell of it,” Angus said under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m just trying to think how I’m going to dispose of a body in a town the size of Boston. Where did she shoot him?”
“I told you. In my parlor.”
“No! Where on his body?”
“In his head. Dead center. A perfect shot.”
“I’m glad she wasn’t shooting at me,” Angus mumbled.
“Does that mean you think she’s a better shot than I am?”
“No, dear, I’d never think that. Edilean, why did you leave that poor, distraught woman with a ruffian like Shamus?”
“You know, as far as I can tell, you’re the only person who thinks Shamus is bad. So what happened? Did he thrash you when you were children?”
She was too close to the truth, and as they were approaching the house, he didn’t answer her.
THE FIRST THING they heard when they opened the door was laughter. Under the circumstances, it was an incongruous sound, and Angus looked at Edilean in question.
She shrugged. “I think it’s love. It seems to be everywhere around me, not for me, but around me. Surrounding me. Like a disease that I can’t catch.”
Angus rolled his eyes, and went to the room where just three weeks before Edilean had come close to shooting him. When she started toward the kitchen where the laughter was coming from, he grabbed her hand.
“I don’t want to see… him again.”
“If you want my help, you have to stay with me.”
“And why is that?”
“Because if James Harcourt is dead, then I plan to do my best to get you to forgive me for every bad thing I’ve ever done to you.”
His words nearly took her breath away, but she would have died before she told him that. “I’ll never forgive you,” she said.
Angus smiled. “Funny how your words say one thing but your eyes another.” He pulled her into the sitting room.
Lying on the floor was indeed James Harcourt, and he had a bullet wound in his forehead. Under his head was a big, green wax-covered canvas.
“Harriet must have done that,” Edilean said, smiling fondly. “I complained about my floor, so she protected it.”
“I think you should have a little respect for the dead,” Angus said, looking down at the man.
“Not for him. I guess you knew that James was blackmailing Harriet.”
“I was told only recently, and I can assure you that I wasn’t told much.” Angus bent down to look at the body. “I tried to find out-” He was interrupted by a loud burst of laughter from the kitchen. “Who’s in there?”
“I’m not sure, but I assume it’s Malcolm and Harriet, and Shamus and Prudence.”
For a moment, Angus’s mouth opened and closed. “They’ve paired off like that?”
“Why not?” Edilean said. “It’s a normal thing to do. In fact, I just met a young widow who I think would be a perfect match for Tam. She’s a few years older than he is, but I think they’ll like each other. I’m going to invite her here. I know Tam’s going back to Scotland to be the laird, but maybe she’ll want to go with him.”
“And live in that old keep? Without glass windows? Will she want to have to look after over two hundred people who are of the McTern clan?”
“I don’t know,” Edilean said. “That sounds more like something Harriet would like to do. She mothers all the bound girls. She-” Her eyes widened.
Angus gave a smile, for he’d read her mind. “You say that Malcolm likes Harriet?”
“You were there when they met, so you saw how they looked at each other.”
“You mean the day you were shooting at me? I beg your pardon for being otherwise occupied and not realizing Harriet’s glares at my uncle were a love interest.”
She ignored his complaint. “Harriet and Malcolm are inseparable. She’d follow him if he said he was going to set up house on the moon.”
“I think that describes the McTern keep rather well.”
He stood up again and looked down at James. “First, we have to get rid of this body and make sure that Mrs. Harcourt isn’t charged with murder. After that’s done, we can plan other things.”
“Like sending Malcolm and Harriet back to Scotland and keeping Tam here?”
“Our minds work exactly alike,” Angus said, smiling at her, love in his eyes.
“Our minds are nothing alike,” she said. “And now that I think about it, it’s a very bad idea. Malcolm and Harriet are too old to have children, so who would inherit?”
They looked at each other and said, “Kenna,” in unison.
“It’s good to see that the two of you have made up,” Malcolm said from the door.
Edilean glanced at Angus as though to ask how much Malcolm had heard.
“We can make up anything,” Angus said, “but I can’t forgive you. This has come about because you didn’t tell me the whole of why the lot of you were in this country. If you’d told me, I could have stopped this before it happened.”
“And how would you have done that?” Malcolm asked, unperturbed. He had a large pewter mug of beer in his hand, and he looked as though he’d drunk several of them.
“By getting Mrs. Harcourt out of the country, that’s how,” Angus said.
“But she didn’t want to leave until she’d done what she came here to do.”
“Are you saying that you helped her kill him?”
Malcolm shrugged. “She didn’t plan on doing that, but if she had, I could see why. You should get her to tell you the whole story. You and Miss Edilean left Scotland and had a laugh at having stopped Harcourt’s treachery, but you left poor Miss Prudence to bear the brunt of his rage. He didn’t like being crossed. Now, lad, what are you going to do with that body to get rid of it?”
“Hack it into pieces and take it out bit by bit.”
Edilean gasped, her hands to her throat, but Malcolm laughed. “I’ll get my saw.”
“Tell Tam to get the large carriage ready.” He looked at Edilean. “Do you still have the heavy trunks that the gold was transported in?”
She nodded. “They’re in the attic.”
“Then have Shamus get one of them down here.” He looked at Malcolm. “Is Prudence fit to travel and to talk? Or have you made her so drunk that she’s incoherent?”
Glancing toward the kitchen, Malcolm lowered his voice. “You don’t know her, do you, lad? She can outdrink Shamus.”
Angus lifted his eyebrows so high they nearly disappeared in his hair.
“I guess now you wish you’d married her,” Edilean muttered as she started to follow Malcolm out of the room.
But Angus caught her arm and pulled her close to him as his mouth came down on hers and he kissed her with all the pent-up emotion and longing that he’d felt for the last four years. When he stopped, her feet were off the floor and she was completely in his arms.
“I want to get something straight between us,” he said. “I’ve been in love with you for what seems to be my entire life. From the first moment I saw you I’ve not been able to stay away from you. In Glasgow I couldn’t bear to leave you.
“Edilean,” he whispered, his lips on her neck. “I’m sorry that I left you after our one night together, but I had to. There were demands for my arrest. If I’d remained with you, I would have been caught, then what would you have done?”
“Stayed by your side,” she whispered, her arms around his neck, her eyes closed at his kisses.
“Exactly,” he said. “You would have watched while I was dragged away to prison-or to the gallows. Then you would have-”
“Could you two do this later?” Tam asked from the doorway.
“You’re just angry because you have no woman of your own,” Angus said, his eyes still on Edilean’s.
“If I did have one, I’d want to protect her from the sun rising and being caught with a dead man on her floor.”
Angus gave one more kiss to Edilean and set her down. “Go!” he said to her. “Get Shamus to bring that trunk down.” He looked at Tam, who was frowning. “Is the carriage ready?”
“It has been ready for about an hour,” Tam said, exaggerating.
“Good, then get the women into it.”
“I don’t think-” Tam began, but Angus cut him off.
“As far as I know, I’m still the laird and I didn’t ask what you think. Get all the women into the carriage and do it quickly.”
Tam hesitated for only a second before hurrying back to the kitchen.
When Angus was alone in the room, he looked down at the body of James Harcourt on the floor. With his death and that of Edilean’s uncle, the fear that Angus had lived under for so long was gone. There would be no one else who would testify that Angus had stolen the gold-and Edilean.
It seemed to Angus that most of his life he’d been on the run and in hiding. It wasn’t true, but it certainly felt so. Now he was free, and he and Edilean could at last be together-if she’d have him, that is. At that thought, he smiled. Her mind might still be angry at him, but he’d just proved that her body wasn’t.
It took forty-five minutes to get James into the trunk and the heavy box on the back of the carriage. Malcolm and Shamus rode on the top front, guiding the four horses, with Tam on the back, and Angus inside with Edilean beside him, Harriet and Prudence across from him. When Angus had told Malcolm the name and address of where they were going, Malcolm smiled. “The lad whose life you saved?” he asked.
“Yes,” Angus answered. “Matthew Aldredge. He’s in Boston now and going to school here.”
“To become a doctor?” Malcolm asked.
Angus nodded. “He’ll know what to do with a dead body.” Angus got inside the carriage beside Edilean.
There’d been a brief scrimmage inside the carriage when Harriet said that it was impossible for Edilean to go out in public wearing the clothes of a man. “Your… your limbs are exposed!” she said.
“Yes, they are.” Edilean extended a leg and looked at it in the breeches that were much too big. “But they feel wonderful. I’m thinking of cutting my hair and dressing as a boy all the time.”
“You’re much too pretty,” Prudence said. “It won’t work.” The solemnity of her voice brought them all back to the present.
“Edilean can stay in the carriage so no one will see her,” Angus said as they pulled out of the courtyard between the house and the carriage shed. He settled back against the seat, looked at Prudence in the dim light, and said, “I want to hear every word of your story.”
She began by apologizing to Angus for her behavior on the night she first met him. “I was unhappy about my marriage and I thought you were one of James’s many creditors.”
Angus shrugged in dismissal and ignored the look Edilean was giving him. This would be something else he’d have to explain, he thought with a grimace.
He still wasn’t used to the look of Prudence. She was a large, mannish-looking woman, with big hands and wide shoulders. The only thing feminine about her was her thick auburn hair.
Harriet reached out and squeezed Prudence’s big hand, and Angus realized that they were sisters-in-law, and it looked as though they were friends as well. “I think I should start,” Harriet said as she looked at Edilean. “Remember about four years ago when you returned from your meeting with Tabitha?”
“Meeting?” Edilean asked. “You mean when I fought her nearly to the death, then spent the night-” She glanced at Angus. “I do believe that I remember that night. After that you were so nervous you jumped at every sound.”
“That’s because James had shown up the day before with papers saying you were his wife.”
“His what?” Edilean asked. “I never married him!”
“I know, but he had marriage papers with your name on them. He told me that he was going to a lawyer to make a case that you and he were married in England, but you’d used his name and his gold to run off with your lover to America.”
“He couldn’t have got away with it,” Edilean said.
“He also had a sworn statement from the captain of the ship you two sailed on that you traveled as Mr. and Mrs. Harcourt. You still used the name Harcourt.”
“But-” Edilean began.
“He had your uncle’s backing,” Prudence said. “I didn’t see it, but I was told that there was a letter from your uncle certifying that you were the wife of James Harcourt.”
Edilean fell back against the cushioned seat. She couldn’t comprehend such outright lies.
Angus took her hand in his and held it. “And what about you?” he asked Prudence. “What happened to you after that night you and I uh… met?”
“I went back to my father’s house, and I’m glad to say that he was happy to see me. Without me there, the few servants we had were running the place, and my father couldn’t even get a decent meal out of them. I put it all back in order and we never spoke of my husband or what happened.”
Angus looked at Harriet. “And you paid James off.”
“It was the only thing I could think to do.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Edilean asked. “I could have handled James.”
“You were so unhappy about whatever had happened that night.” Harriet cut her eyes at Angus. “I couldn’t bear to add to your misery. And you were overwhelmed with the business you were just starting. I couldn’t put more burdens onto you.”
“So you paid him off instead,” Edilean said. “How did you do it?”
Angus squeezed Edilean’s hand, but she didn’t stop looking at Harriet.
“I made a few adjustments in the accounting books. It wasn’t so difficult to do.”
“How much did you give him?” Edilean asked. “Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be enough for James, since he thought he was entitled to all of it.”
“We can talk about numbers later,” Angus said as he looked at Prudence. “What I want to know is how you got back into this and how my family became involved.”
“James killed me,” Prudence said.
Both Angus and Edilean stared at her.
Harriet’s eyes filled with tears as she held Prudence’s hand with both of hers. “It was all my fault.” She looked at Edilean. “You’re right about the money. James kept wanting more and more. I… you paid the rent on a town house in New York and you bought him clothes. You paid his liquor bills. You-”
“For how long?” Edilean asked.
“Until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Three years.”
“I don’t even want to think about how much it totaled,” Edilean said. “Is James the reason our profits were down in the third year of the business?”
“Yes,” Harriet said as tears began to roll down her cheeks. “Edilean, I’m so sorry. You trusted me completely, but I betrayed that trust. I-”
“You saved her,” Angus said impatiently. “How did James-?” He looked at Prudence and softened his voice. “How did he ‘kill’ you? And why? If you were in England, what harm did you do him?”
“When I stopped paying James,” Harriet said, “as you can imagine, he went wild with anger. We had a terrible fight and he swore that he would get me back. He said he was going to go to Edilean’s uncle and get him to help. Remember that Edilean was still under her uncle’s guardianship when she ran off with you.”
“Did he go?” Angus asked.
“Yes,” Prudence said. “I don’t know the full details of that meeting, but I think Lawler laughed at him.”
“That sounds like the man,” Angus said.
“What I do know,” Prudence said, looking at Edilean, “is that your uncle told James that there was nothing he could do because he was married to me.”
“Show them,” Harriet said, looking at Prudence.
After a slight hesitation, she untied the scarf at her bodice and pulled it away. Edilean gasped at the sight of the scar on her throat. It was deep and red and seemed to encircle her entire neck.
“I had just been to the home farm that day,” Prudence said, “as we had a new calf born during the night. I was walking back and two men on horseback came thundering along the road. I stepped to the side, out of their way, but they came so close that I fell backward onto the verge. When I heard one of them dismount, I shouted at him to watch where he was going.”
Harriet held Prudence’s hand tighter.
“The man was large, bigger even than my Shamus.”
At the endearment, Angus tightened his grip on Edilean’s hand but gave no outward sign that he’d heard.
“He… He…” Prudence stopped talking and turned her head away.
“The man put a knotted garrote around her neck and proceeded to strangle her,” Harriet said. “He twisted and pulled until Pru passed out and he thought she was dead.” Harriet took a breath. “While my brother sat on his horse and watched.”
Edilean gasped. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Prudence. “This is all my fault. I was fascinated with James because he wasn’t like the others. He was the only man who didn’t pursue me. If I hadn’t-”
“I’m not going to let you blame yourself,” Harriet said. “Even as a child, my brother was horribly spoiled. Our mother used him against our father.” She waved her hand. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“You recovered,” Angus said to Prudence.
“I did, but only by accident. I’d forgotten the cake the farmer’s wife had baked for my father, and she came hurrying down the road in her little pony trap, trying to catch me. I think she’s why James and his hired killer didn’t stay to make sure I was dead. They must have heard her because by the time she saw me lying by the road, they were gone.” She took a breath. “For three months afterward I could drink only liquids. Everything had to be mashed up for me, and it was nearly a year before I had full use of my voice.”
Harriet looked at Angus. “The strain of it all caused her father’s heart to give out.”
“After he died,” Prudence said, “I had to sell everything to pay off the debts. The house, the home farm, all of it was sold. It’s where my family had lived for four hundred years, but it’s gone now.”
“So you came to America to find James,” Angus said.
“No. First, I went to your uncle,” she said to Edilean.
“But why? You couldn’t have thought that he’d help you. He wasn’t a man who believed in justice.”
When Prudence didn’t answer the question, Angus asked, “How did you know of him?”
“That day,” Prudence said, shaking her head. “That day when everything changed.” She glanced at Angus with a look that almost made him smile, but Edilean was watching him intently, so he didn’t. Prudence meant the day when Angus and Edilean had foiled James in his attempt to escape to America with the gold. “I slept all that day and only woke when James came into the room. He was staggering about from the drug, but he was lucid enough to be in a rage. He had on only his underclothes.” Prudence put her hand to her mouth, as though to stifle a giggle. “The only clothes he had were what he had on; the rest of them were on the ship-and on you.”
Prudence looked at Angus’s waistcoat. “I believe that one was James’s favorite.”
“Was it?” Edilean said. “I like it the best too. But then, I always did like James’s taste.”
“He charged everything to you,” Prudence said.
“I know, I saw the bills. But I didn’t have to pay them,” she said, smiling.
“What did he do after he found out the ship had sailed?” Angus asked.
“Went insane with rage. He’d planned it all so carefully.”
“He told you about what he’d done?” Angus asked.
“Not straight out, not as though he was talking to me.” Prudence tightened her mouth so that what lips she had couldn’t be seen, and her pointed chin almost came up to touch the tip of her nose. “He raged about how he’d married something like me to get the gold of the beautiful one, but that you”-she glanced at Angus-“you stole everything. James said I was-”
“I think we can all guess what James said,” Edilean said loudly. “Did you leave him that day?”
“Yes,” Prudence said. “I took the public coach to my father’s house, and I didn’t see or hear from James again until three years later when I was being strangled-and he was sitting on a horse looking down at me and smiling.”
“But when you healed, you went to see Lawler,” Angus said.
“I wanted to know if he knew where you were,” she said to Edilean.
“Me?” she asked and moved back in the carriage. She may have been able to fight off Tabitha, but Edilean knew that if this woman attacked her, she wouldn’t win.
Angus gave Edilean’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “It’s my guess that you were looking for something that Edilean had.”
“Yes,” Prudence said, looking hard into Angus’s eyes.
Edilean said nothing, but she sat up straighter in the carriage. The parure. That’s what Prudence was after. But that was long gone. Angus had taken it with him on the night he’d left Edilean.
“What you want is safely in a bank vault here in Boston,” Angus said.
“What?” Edilean said. “I gave those to you. Are you telling me that after all I went through to get those back from Tabitha’s thieving hands that you put them in a bank and didn’t sell them?”
“They were never mine,” Angus said. “How could I take such things?”
“Would you mind telling me what you’re talking about?” Harriet asked.
“The whole set is safe?” Prudence asked, and when Angus nodded, she started crying loudly. “It hasn’t been sold? Didn’t go to James to pay his gambling debts? You still have it?”
From above them, Shamus looked through the window to the inside of the carriage and glared directly at Angus. “You make her cry and I’ll tear you into pieces.”
“It’s all right, Shamus, dear heart,” Prudence said, sniffing, and blowing her nose loudly into the handkerchief that Harriet handed her. “It’s fine. I’ll tell you everything later.”
After another look of warning at Angus, Shamus sat back up on the driver’s seat.
Angus reached between the two women and slid the window shut. Prudence grabbed his hand. “You are a good man.”
“Sometimes,” Edilean murmured.
“I would really like to be told what everyone is talking about,” Harriet said, so Edilean told her.
“A parure? An entire set of jewelry?”
“Diamonds,” Edilean said.
Prudence nodded. “My father told me about them just before he died. I didn’t know he still had them, and neither did the bank. He told me that he’d kept them for his daughter’s wedding and that’s what they were for.” She blew her nose again. “He could have sold them and paid off a lot of debts but he didn’t. He saved them for me and had them secretly placed in my trunk. He didn’t let me see them before the wedding, for fear that James would steal them. He rightly guessed that James would never look inside my trunk. We didn’t have a marriage of intimacy.”
“When we get this done, I’ll give you the entire set,” Angus said. “An earring is missing, and some bracelets but-”
“I have all the pieces,” Edilean said, and they all looked at her. “My footman found them after the man who stole the diamonds from Tabitha sold them.”
“And why did you want the rest of the set?” Angus asked. “I’d think that if you hated me, you’d want nothing to do with any of it.”
Edilean kept her eyes on Prudence and didn’t answer him. “I guess you met Malcolm when you went to my uncle.”
“Yes,” Prudence said, and her face softened. “And it was there that I met Shamus. He knew a great deal about you, about where you’d gone, and who you went with, and about the wagon full of trunks of gold. Oh!” she said.
“What is it?” Harriet asked.
“The trunks of gold. James talked of little else when he found out that you’d sailed without him and now… Now…”
“He’s inside one of the trunks,” Angus said, and whispered, “be careful what you wish for.”
“You got Malcolm, Shamus, and Tam to help you,” Edilean said.
“Yes,” Prudence answered. “I had some money from the sale of my family’s estate, so I paid our way to America.”
“So you were on the ship with Shamus?” Edilean asked.
“I was,” Prudence said, and her entire face took on a glow.
“How lovely,” Edilean said.
“How strange,” Angus muttered, then moved his leg away from Edilean before she could kick him.
“He’s such a kind man, but he’s been ill treated all his life. Shamus wants to start over, where people don’t judge him by what his father did.”
“Like loosening the cinch on a girl’s saddle?” Angus muttered.
“He would never do such a thing! He’s a kind, thoughtful man.” Prudence gave Angus a look that let him know what Shamus had told her of him.
Angus glanced at Edilean as though for sympathy, but she’d always liked Shamus. Angus moved aside the leather curtain over the window and glanced outside. “We’re almost there.” He looked back at Prudence. “I want you to tell me how you came to shoot James.”
Everyone in the coach was quiet, their eyes fixed on Prudence.
“I didn’t mean to,” she began. “I was… Shamus and I were…”
“In Cuddy’s room over the carriage house,” Harriet said impatiently. “We all know that, and, by the way, I think you paid Cuddy much too much for the use of his room.” Harriet looked at Edilean. “Ever since he helped you that night when you and-” She broke off for a moment. “Anyway, I think Cuthbert takes too much liberty on himself.”
“Did he embezzle half the year’s profits?” Edilean shot back at her.
“I did that because-” Harriet began but Angus cut her off.
“You two can settle this later. I make it a rule to never argue when there’s a dead body in the same carriage with me. Now, Mrs. Harcourt, you were saying?”
“Please don’t call me that,” Prudence said. “I can’t bear the name. I will be glad to take Shamus’s name of Frazier. We-”
Angus gave her a hard look.
“Yes, right, back to the shooting. I looked out and saw a light in the kitchen of the house, and I thought it was Harriet and that something was wrong, so I went inside. But when I got there, the light had moved to the parlor. There was James, filling a bag with the silver candlesticks. I guess I made a sound because he turned around and he had a pistol in his hand.
“He said, ‘But you’re dead.’
“I tried to think quickly and I said, ‘Yes, I am and I’ve come to take you to the grave with me.’
“He said, ‘Like hell you will,’ and he aimed the pistol at me. I leaped, we tussled, the gun went off, and he fell to the floor. Dead. I believe I screamed.”
For a moment the others were silent as they looked at her. Each of them knew that her story was a fabrication, but no one said anything. A wrestling match with a pistol does not leave one person with a bullet hole squarely in the middle of his forehead. In his midsection perhaps, but not in his head. Besides, they all knew that the pistol Prudence had used belonged to Cuddy.
Harriet and Edilean looked at Angus to see what he would say.
“It’s as I thought,” he said. “It was self-defense.”
“Yes, clearly,” Harriet said, and looked at Edilean, who said, “It couldn’t be anything else.”
No one looked at the other for fear their doubts would show.
Angus was glad when the carriage halted. “We’re here. I think it would be better if I went in and talked to the young man alone. He and I know each other, but not all that well, and I’m afraid this might be a shock for him. I’ll sort it out, then we can all go home. All right?”
The three women nodded and sat there while Angus got out of the coach. When they were alone, Edilean looked at the others and said, “Who’s going to get out first?” Since by the time she finished the sentence, she was half outside, it was a rhetorical question. Prudence, by sheer size, was second, and Harriet came last, smoothing her hair and trying her best to look as though she were on a mission that was nothing like what they were actually doing.
Harriet glared at Edilean in her masculine clothing and started to speak, but Edilean gave her a look that made her close her mouth.
The three women went into the house of Matthew Aldredge, the three Scotsmen behind them.
TWO WEEKS, EDILEAN thought. Two entire, whole weeks since she’d seen Angus. After that night when they’d gone to Matthew Aldredge’s house, and after what happened to poor James’s body, Angus said he wouldn’t be returning to the house with them.
It wasn’t until that moment that Edilean realized she’d been looking forward to the coming fight they’d have. Angus would tell her how sorry he was for having left her, she’d tell him that she’d never forgive him, then-And then they’d end up with him on his knees begging her to marry him. She would, of course, finally say yes, but she’d take her time, and she planned to make him suffer.
Edilean had even imagined how she’d work with Harriet and Prudence to plan their triple wedding in the largest church in Boston. They’d all get married together, but afterward, they’d separate to go on their bridal tours. Edilean felt dizzy with the romance of it all.
But as with everything with Angus, nothing went as she’d planned. Angus stayed behind with Matthew while the others went back to Edilean’s house. For two days she’d smiled, anticipating that Angus would come to the front door with his arms full of roses and apologies on his lips. While the other couples around her snuggled and cooed at each other, Edilean kept smiling as she imagined what would happen when she next saw Angus. Would he have a ring for her?
But the days went by, and he didn’t show up. On the fifth day, Shamus volunteered to go find him. “And I’ll tell him what I think of him for treating you this way, Miss.”
“Oh, Shamus,” Prudence said, her voice full of love. “You’d hurt him.”
“It’s what I mean to do,” Shamus said in a voice that was deeper than normal.
Edilean could almost see Angus rolling his eyes and telling Shamus that he was ready to take him on anytime, anywhere. But Angus wasn’t there, and no one knew where he was.
Just as she knew they would, the others had paired off permanently. Malcolm asked Harriet to marry him and go back to Scotland to live. She hadn’t hesitated in saying yes, and at the end of the summer they were to be wed. Since then, they’d not stopped talking about all the things they were going to do in their new, old country. Malcolm told her in detail about every person of the McTern clan, so Harriet felt as though she already knew them. Edilean heard Harriet going over the names of the children.
“And Kenna has six children, five boys and one girl. Her daughter’s name is… No! Don’t tell me, I’ll remember.”
Edilean couldn’t bear to hear such happiness.
As for Shamus and Prudence, they seemed to care about only one thing, and that was the physical part of their lives. After one afternoon when she and Harriet and Malcolm had returned to the house to hear some enthusiastic pounding from upstairs, Malcolm gave Shamus a piece of his mind, and their wedding was also to be at the end of the summer.
There was one unexpected development, though. To Edilean’s horror, Tam started making eyes at Tabitha-and Edilean let Tabitha know what she thought of the situation. “He’s a boy!” she half yelled at Tabitha. “Just a boy and you’re-”
Tabitha was unperturbed by Edilean’s anger. “I’m what can teach him all he needs to know.” She looked Edilean up and down. “So did he leave you again?”
“No!” Edilean shouted. “He did not ‘leave’ me. Angus-” She broke off because she had no idea where Angus was or what he was doing. The day after they’d gone to Matthew Aldredge’s house, Malcolm had insisted that Edilean sit with him in the parlor so he could talk to her at length about Angus’s fine qualities.
“Lass,” Malcolm said, “he’d never do to you what you think he has. When he left you before, he did it for your own good.” Malcolm went on to tell Edilean in detail what Angus had done after James again put up the handbills for Angus’s arrest. Years later, it had taken Malcolm, Shamus, and Tam a lot of time to find Angus. They’d told him that it’d been easy to find him, but it hadn’t been. It was as though Angus had disappeared off the face of the earth, and they began to think that James Harcourt had found him and had him killed.
For weeks the three Scotsmen went from city to city, searching for him. The problem was that they had no picture of Angus without his beard, and they had no idea what name he was using.
It was Shamus, drinking in a tavern in Charleston, who heard about a man named Angus Harcourt who worked with the army in the far west. “Slips around in the dark like he can see in it as well as in sunlight,” the former soldier said.
“What’s he look like?” Shamus asked.
“Big man.”
“As big as me?” Shamus shot at him.
“I’ve seen mountains smaller than you,” the man said, making Shamus smile. “No, Angus is a big man but he’s also pretty.”
“Pretty?” Shamus asked in disbelief. “You mean like a girl?”
“No, more like a…” The man waved his hand. “The girls like him, but I heard he’s been havin’ trouble with the fort commander’s daughter.”
“Ah.” Shamus gave a half smile. “Think he’ll marry her?”
The man laughed. “Not if Captain Austin has anything to do with it, he won’t. He’s a nasty piece of work. Downright scary.”
“So where is this Angus Harcourt?” Shamus asked.
“I can’t tell you but I could draw a map.”
“So,” Edilean said to Malcolm, “Angus was at some fort with another woman.”
“No, lass,” Malcolm said, frustrated. “He was not with her. As far as we could find, he’s not been with a woman since he left you.”
“I don’t believe that. I think he’s had hundreds, thousands of women. I think-”
“He left you because he had to!” Malcolm said loudly. “Canna you see that the man is daft about you and always has been? Why do you think we laughed so hard that first time he saw you? We all knew he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. And when he threw you in the horse trough! Ah, now, that was proof that-”
“That he hated me,” Edilean said gloomily.
“It showed he was fightin’ what he felt for you,” Malcolm said as he reached out and took her hands in his, and lowered his voice. “In a way, Angus had been the laird since his father died. It was my father who cheated the McTerns out of what was theirs, but the lairdship goes down through the oldest sons. Our clan is an old one, and they looked to the eldest son of the eldest son even though he was just a boy.”
“I understand,” she said. “Like the divinity of kings.”
“I guess so. But even as a boy, Angus tried to make up to all of us for what his grandfather did. Angus had no life of his own until he saw you, none at all.”
Standing up, Edilean looked down at Malcolm, her face cold. “I’m sick unto death of hearing about how wonderful Angus McTern is. Sick of it! Do you hear me? If he’s so in love with me, where is he? Why isn’t he here? Why aren’t I planning my wedding as Harriet and Prudence are? Why isn’t some man sneaking kisses with me when he thinks no one is looking? Why-?” She couldn’t say any more but turned and ran up the stairs to her room.
“I don’t know,” Malcolm whispered as he sat alone in the room. Surely Angus couldn’t have run off again, he thought. Surely the lad couldn’t have abandoned Edilean. It wasn’t possible.
It was when Shamus gave her a look of pity that Edilean changed her mind about Angus and began to defend him. Every time she entered a room, the engaged couples would break apart and look guilty.
“That’s it!” Edilean said at dinner one night as she stood up and threw her napkin down. “Maybe none of you believe in him, but I do! I don’t know what Angus is doing, but I know that when he’s finished, he’ll come for me.”
The others’ faces didn’t change. Harriet tried to look as though she believed Edilean, but the others looked at her with sympathy.
“I’m sure he will,” Tam said, but there was no enthusiasm in his voice.
After that night, Edilean decided to quit waiting and to go about her business. The first thing she took care of was Tam and Tabitha. Knowing that Tam had a kind heart, she asked if he’d please help her with a task that she couldn’t handle by herself. What she needed was for him to journey all the way down to Williamsburg to get Mrs. Abigail Prentiss to sign the final papers that transferred her farm to the Bound Girl company. Edilean held her breath as she handed the papers to Tam because she was staking everything on her belief that he couldn’t read. She gave him a sheaf of documents that dealt with a farm she’d bought three years before. “Oh! And take this,” she said, handing him a bolt of yellow silk. “Abby said she’d make it into a dress for me. She’s an excellent dressmaker.” Edilean didn’t know if Abby could sew or not. “You won’t come back without the dress, will you? Even if you have to wait for her to finish it?”
Tam looked about for a reason to get out of the long trip. “Maybe your coachman, Cuddy, would be better at this.”
“Than you?” Edilean asked, batting her lashes. “How can you say that? I couldn’t trust him with these papers, now could I? But if you think that you can’t do it…”
“No,” Tam said with a sigh, “I’ll do it. But maybe she could send the dress later.”
“Perhaps,” Edilean said, “but she’s a recent widow and she might like someone to talk to. If you’re going to be the laird of the clan, then perhaps you should get some practice in comforting widows.”
Tam straightened his shoulders a bit and took the leather portfolio she handed him. “It might be good for me to see more of this new country.”
“I think that’s a splendid idea,” Edilean said.
The next day after Tam left, she told Tabitha, who laughed and shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get Harriet to take me back to Scotland with her and I’ll get a man there.”
“Isn’t there a law saying you can never return to England?”
Tabitha shrugged. “I guess I’ll have her send me a man then. By the way, how often have you seen your man in the last five years?”
In the past, Tabitha’s innuendos had made Edilean angry, but not now. “It takes a man time to recover from a night with me,” she said, and turned and left. Tabitha’s laughter echoed behind her.
By the fourth week of Angus’s absence, the others seemed to have accepted that he was never returning. Even Malcolm had lost his faith that Angus was going to come back to them.
One day Edilean overheard him talking to Harriet and saying that he was disappointed in Angus, that he’d misjudged the boy. It was all Edilean could do to keep from giving him a piece of her mind, but she didn’t. They’d see, she thought. If Angus was alive, he was going to come back to her.
It was at the end of the sixth week, while Edilean was at the market inspecting the produce stands that had made her company so prosperous, that a closed carriage stopped near her. It was an ordinary carriage, black, worn along the footings, obviously hired, but when she moved, it moved. When she stopped, it stopped. The fifth time it halted, she knew Angus was inside the carriage.
“Excuse me,” she said to three women who worked for her and were overseeing the big produce cart. “Would you tell Harriet that I might not be home for dinner but not to worry about me?”
“Of course,” the young woman said. She’d been transported for stealing a silver bowl from the earl who owned the house where she’d worked since she was nine. That the man had been raping her since she was thirteen meant nothing to the court.
As Edilean started walking toward the carriage, the girl called out, “Where shall I tell her you’ve gone?”
“To paradise,” Edilean said over her shoulder just as the door opened. It was dark inside, but she could see Angus, and he was wearing the tartan he’d had on the first time she saw him.
He leaned forward just enough that his hand was at the door. She took it, stepped into the carriage, and shut the door behind her, and they started moving. She took the seat across from him and stared at him, almost afraid to speak for fear that he’d disappear and it would all be a dream.
“I guess you thought I’d left you again,” he said at last, looking at her in the dim light, his eyes devouring her.
“I did for the first two weeks, but not after that.” Her heart was beating hard in her throat and her fingertips seemed to vibrate with wanting to touch him. Was his skin as warm as she remembered?
Angus gave a little smile. “You knew that I’d come back for you?”
“Certainly.”
His smile broadened. “You trusted me?”
“As far as I can throw you,” she said.
Angus laughed, and for a moment their eyes locked, and in the next second, she propelled herself into his arms. His mouth took hers and kissed her with longing and hunger. “I missed you,” he said, his lips on her neck. “I thought of you every second of every day.”
“I never thought of you once,” she said, her eyes closed, her neck arched. When his mouth moved down her neck to her shoulders, she leaned farther back, letting his strong arms hold her. He pulled the neck kerchief away with his teeth, and moved downward to her breast.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“Do you care?” His hand was moving up her skirt.
“No, I don’t,” she said, her hands moving over his body. “Angus! You have on nothing beneath your skirt.”
“Kilt. Move your hand to the side. No, the other side.”
“Oh,” she said as she put her hand around the part of him that showed how much he wanted her.
With a groan, Angus put his head back against the seat. “You are better than I remembered.”
Abruptly, the coach halted and there was a knocking on the roof. “Sir!” a man’s voice said. “We have arrived.”
“Kill him for me,” Angus whispered.
When Edilean felt the movement of the carriage that meant the driver was getting down, she removed her hand from under Angus’s garment, sat up, and picked her scarf off the seat. “He’s going to open the door.”
“Let me die now,” Angus said, his eyes still closed.
She pulled his kilt down so the bottom half of him was covered and smoothed her hair. When the driver opened the door, they were sitting on opposite sides of the carriage and looking quite proper.
Edilean looked outside and saw that they were at Boston Harbor. “Why have you taken me here?” she asked Angus. “I think we should go home and-”
She broke off and stared ahead of her. There in the harbor was the Mary Elizabeth, the ship she and Angus had traveled to America on. She looked back at him. “What…? How…?”
Angus recovered himself enough to breathe again. “I had some business to do and I happened to hear that Captain Inges was making a trip back to Glasgow, so I thought we might go with him.”
“Back to Scotland?” she asked. “Oh. To see your clan.” It looked as though he’d changed his mind about remaining as the laird. She had a vision of the derelict old keep and all the people who looked up to Angus-and how she’d be the lady of the castle. Would she ever see America again? This new country was where she’d shown everyone, including herself, that she was worth something.
“No, you don’t see,” Angus said as he got out of the carriage and helped her down. “You don’t see at all. I need to go back home to pass the clan on to Tam. We have to do it legally.”
He held out his arm to her, and she took it. Angus, in his old-fashioned kilt with his knees bare, was causing a bit of a stir. Both men and women were staring at him, but it was the women whose eyes sparkled.
When he led her toward the ship, Edilean pulled back. “Did everyone else know about this? You told them and not me? Is everything packed and on board?”
Angus halted. “If by ‘them’ you mean Malcolm and Tam and-”
“And Harriet and Prudence and Shamus.”
“Yes, the entire lot of them. Might as well have the whole clan here. The answer is no, I didn’t tell any of them anything. They know nothing.”
“Which is exactly as much as I know.” Edilean put her heels down firmly on the ground and looked at him. “I want to know what’s going on. Where have you been?”
Angus looked as though he was contemplating picking her up and carrying her up the gangplank to the ship, but then seemed to think better of it. “If you must know-not that I wasn’t going to tell you, just not here in public-I went back to the fort.”
“But that’s-”
“A long way away,” Angus said. “I gave up sleep and food, but I did it. I sold my shares in the Ohio Company to Captain Austin.”
“Oh, yes, the man who’s in love with a girl you wanted.”
Angus gave her a look.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m only repeating what I was told.”
“I do wish you’d stop listening to gossip.”
“When you stop running off and leaving me to deal with it alone, I will.”
Angus gave a smile, took her by the shoulders, and looked as though he was going to kiss her, but then he glanced at the people around them and didn’t. “I promise that I’ll tell you everything when we’re on board, but in private.”
“Angus,” Edilean said, “you really can’t expect me to board a ship sailing for Scotland without any preparation. I need clothes and books and gifts. I can’t visit your family empty-handed. And did you forget about my business? Who can run it without me? I know you think I’m worthless, but I have many people to look after, and they-”
“Captain Inges said that this time we couldn’t travel with him unless we were properly married, so he’s waiting with his Bible to perform the ceremony.”
She blinked at him.
“At last I’ve said something that you can make no reply to,” Angus said in wonder. “Now, do you want to go on board and get married, or do you want to go back to that house of yours and gloat to those people who think I’ve abandoned you and sign papers for that business of yours?”
For a moment all Edilean could do was open and close her mouth a few times. At last she said, “You have a ring?”
“Solid gold.” Reaching out, he touched her blonde hair. “Not that I need any gold, for this is worth more than all the gold in the world.”
She leaned her cheek against his hand for a moment, then she grabbed her skirt, lifted it, and began to run up the gangplank. “Come on!” she called to him. “Do you think I have all day?”
Chuckling, Angus ran up the gangplank after her.