Seven
WHEN THE MAN fell, he took Daria with him. She landed half on top of him, half off, and had to work her arm out from beneath his shoulder. She put her hand beneath his nose. She felt the warmth of his breath and a rush of relief went through her.
She lay there for a moment or two, that sliver of a thought skipping through her mind of how—no, why—she was here. She’d scarcely gained her feet when she heard pounding on the cottage door. “Off with you, you mangy dog!” Mamie shouted. That was followed by the sound of more banging.
“Now you’ve done it,” Daria whispered to the man lying on the floor.
She hurried to the door and slid the bolt open. Mamie swept in, slamming the door shut on the dog. “Did you bandage him?”
“I did—” Daria started, but Mamie was already striding to the back room. Daria ran to catch up.
Mamie cried out when she saw the man on the floor. “What in heaven’s name has happened?” she demanded as Daria entered the room behind her.
“He wanted to test the strength of his leg,” Daria said. “One moment he seemed fine, and the next, he . . . he just fell.”
“Well, of course he did. The salve had something in it to help him sleep,” Mamie said, and knelt to press the back of her hand against the stubble on his cheek. “He’s not feverish.”
Daria stared at Mamie. “You put something in the salve? That’s a rather dark shade of deceit, is it not?”
Mamie clucked and gave Daria a dismissive wave of her hand.
“Honestly, Mamie, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you put something in the salve because you know he doesn’t want it, and then gave it to me to administer so he’d not suspect it,” Daria said accusingly.
“What an imagination you have!” Mamie said, but the color in her cheeks was rising. “Help me, darling. We must return him to his bed.”
The man sprawled on the floor weighed fifteen stone if he weighed one. “We can’t possibly lift him. We’ll have to leave him on the floor until he comes to.”
“We can’t very well leave him on the floor!”
Daria stood up and stalked to the bed, grabbing up a pair of pillows. “Then perhaps the Brodie lads might finally appear to help you.”
Mamie gave her a dark look but did not give her the satisfaction of a reply.
Daria knelt down, lifted the man’s head, and slid the pillow underneath him. His head lolled to one side.
“He’ll catch his death here,” Mamie said.
The fleeting thought that if he were to die, then Mamie would have succeeded swept through Daria’s mind. She quickly forced it out. “Pray that he’ll not sleep as long as that,” she said crisply, and stood again to retrieve a blanket from the bed, which she draped over his body.
She paused, staring down at him. For a potential criminal, he looked handsome in his sleep, really. There was the dark growth of beard on his face, and his hair was matted from lying in bed, but there was a softness in his features that she did not see when he was awake. He didn’t look as hard or as angry.
“Come, Daria,” Mamie said, and Daria reached down to help her as she clumsily gained her feet. Her grandmother paused, her hands to her back, bending backward, then walked out of the room.
Daria followed her. “Did you find help?” she asked when they were in the kitchen.
“Hmm?” Mamie said, as if she’d momentarily forgotten what she’d gone out to do. “Unfortunately, not as yet. The Brodie lads were not to be found.”
The mysterious Brodie lads were never quite where anyone needed them, were they? But why in God’s name would Mamie lie about this? What possible reason could she have to keep this man sedated in her house?
The question of what to do plagued Daria well into the night. She tossed and turned in the freezing third bedroom, wrapped in a wool shawl and huddled beneath the coverlet. There was no hearth in this room, and it was cold as ice. She burrowed down and closed her eyes, but could see only a pair of hazel eyes, a square chin covered with dark stubble, a jagged wound in a man’s thigh.
She’d never been so challenged. A life of tea and dancing and gossip had left her woefully ill-prepared for these obstacles. But if Mamie would not seek help, Daria would have to. The only thing she knew to do was to walk the ten miles or so to Nairn.
All right then, she would have to plan for it. First, there was the issue of shoes. Perhaps Mamie had some boots she might borrow. She would need to pack a bit of food, wouldn’t she? And then . . . then she would follow the road. It couldn’t be that difficult, could it? Follow the road to Nairn, where she would send a letter to Charity and ask her to come straightaway. And then she would prevail on any authority there to help her. All very easy!
She had to believe it was easy because she had no other hope. If she was successful, Daria couldn’t even guess what it might mean for Mamie. She feared for her grandmother. But she feared more for the stranger’s life.
Morning came quite early after such a sleepless night. Daria pulled on a woolen robe Mamie had given her and combed her hair, letting it fall loose down her back. She padded down the little hallway to the main living area. She could smell ham, and found the one Mamie had buried beneath the hot coals at the hearth last night. She dug it out and removed it from the covered cast iron skillet, placed it on a platter, and put that in the middle of the table. Funny, she thought sleepily, that after only a matter of days, she was quite comfortable pulling hams from glowing embers. As she stirred the embers she heard a door open. She expected to hear footsteps, but the heavy, lurching step and dragging foot were decidedly not Mamie’s.
Daria quickly stood and wrapped the robe tightly around her. The stranger came into view, dragging his injured leg. He was wrapped in his plaid, belted precariously with a soiled bandage. His matted hair stood on end, his beard had thickened, and dear God, how his eyes were blazing. Not with fever. With anger. He glared at Daria as he wordlessly passed her and roughly pulled a wooden chair from the table, landing on it with a grunt and then laboriously arranging his leg beneath the table. He saw the ham and instantly leaned forward, his hand reaching—
“I’ll carve some for you,” she said quickly, and picked up the knife that she’d used to protect herself from him the day before.
He responded with a menacing look, but he shifted back, his hand sliding down the table and into his lap.
She sliced off a thick slab of ham, put it on a plate along with some of Mamie’s bread, and slid it across the table to him.
He ate as if he were starved. “More?” she asked when he’d devoured the food. He nodded curtly. Daria sliced off more of the ham and bread. He’d eaten almost all of it when Mamie scurried into their midst, coming to an abrupt halt when she saw him sitting there, eating ravenously. She was still clothed in the gown she’d worn yesterday, her graying hair half up on her head and half down. She looked exhausted and half-crazed. “Oh dear,” she said anxiously. “No, Daria, you shouldn’t give him so much food. I’ve made a broth—”
“Enough of your broth,” he said through a mouthful of ham.
Mamie pushed her hair back and looked wildly at Daria, then at him. “Please come back to your bed, sir. Allow yourself to heal properly—it’s been only three days.”
“I’ll no’ return to that bloody bed,” he said firmly, and dragged the back of his hand across his mouth.
“I only want to help you—”
“You’ve a peculiar way of helping.”
“Mamie,” Daria said, coming around to put her hand on her grandmother’s arm. “Sit, please. Clearly he prefers to recuperate on his own terms. And it would be in your best interests to find another occupation than nursemaid to a stranger, don’t you agree?”
“Aye, she’s right.”
Mamie cast him a glare that would have frozen the North Sea, which was met with an equally chilling look from him. The tension between them was palpable. Lord, there was so much unspoken in this room! Daria felt as if she were in the parlor at Rochfeld, the Horncastle estate, trying to sort out one of the infernal riddles Lord Horncastle was so fond of forcing onto everyone.
“I’ve come to the end of my patience with the two of you,” she snapped. “It is quite obvious to me that we’d all benefit if one of you would kindly own to what has happened here!”
“I don’t see how he can own to anything,” Mamie said pertly. “He can’t recall how he came to be here.” She stood abruptly before anyone might posit a different theory and went to the hearth to toss another log on the fire.
“You, sir, know more about what happened to you than you have admitted,” Daria said, pointing at him. “And you, Mamie, can’t seem to find anyone in all of Scotland to help you! Yet you have a ham and chopped wood—someone has helped you.”
“All from Nairn,” Mamie said with a flick of her wrist.
“I find that impossible to believe. So please stop being untruthful about what happened here!”
The stranger snorted as if that amused him.
Daria’s anger soared just as high as if he had laughed outright at her. “And you, sir,” she said, turning on him. “You claim not to recall what happened to you, and yet you can recall what you were wearing at the time you were filled with lead. Furthermore, you were not the least bit surprised that someone was looking for you, which suggests to me that you know why you were shot. And I think you know your name!”
His smile faded and he looked at Mamie. “Aye,” he said with a shrug.
“Aye?” Daria echoed, surprised by his agreement.
“Aye,” he repeated and turned his hazel eyes to Daria. “But I’ve no’ even a wee idea why I was shot.” He arched a dark brow in Mamie’s direction.
Mamie clamped her mouth shut. She hung the kettle over the fire with such force that it swung and hit the stone wall at the back of the hearth.
Daria didn’t relish the idea of walking to Nairn, but she was determined to find the answers to what had happened here if it killed her. “Very well,” she said irritably. “I should like to borrow some boots, Mamie. I am to Nairn.”
The stranger’s brow arched high, and one corner of his mouth lifted as he took her in. “I canna have you walk to Nairn, lass. It’s too far for an English rose, aye? So I shall tell you the truth as I know it.”
Mamie turned so quickly that she almost collided with Daria. “Don’t listen to anything he says. He knows nothing. How could he? He has been wounded in the head—he will remember nothing useful, I assure you.”
Daria ignored her grandmother. She braced her hands against the table and leaned across, glaring at him. “Tell me.”
A slight shadow of a smile lit his eyes as he shifted forward with some effort. “I am Jamie Campbell, Laird of Dundavie.”
“As if that has any bearing on anything,” Mamie muttered.
“What does ‘laird’ mean?” Daria asked, sinking into a chair beside him.
“It is something akin to a lord,” Mamie sniffed. “But not a lord. A decided step down from that.”
Daria waved her grandmother off. “Go on,” she urged him.
“The truth, lass, is that your Mamie is the one who shot me.”
Daria reared back and slapped a hand on the table. As opposed to his face, as was her instinct. “Do you take me for a fool?”
A slow smile appeared on his lips, and he shook his head. “No’ even a wee bit, leannan.”
The way he said that word, whatever it meant, sent a shiver down Daria’s spine. What wretched game was he playing with her? She looked to Mamie for help, but Mamie had sunk down onto a chair, looking suddenly much older than her sixty-some-odd years. And something in her expression made Daria’s belly knot.
“That’s ridiculous,” Daria said angrily, appealing to her grandmother to correct the record, to offer a reasonable explanation, any explanation.
But Mamie seemed only to sink lower into her chair, her lips pressed together into an intractable line.
Daria’s belly began to churn and she pressed the flat of her hand to her abdomen. “Mamie, please, I am begging you—the truth.”
Mamie sighed. She pushed her hair back from her forehead and lifted her gaze to Daria. “Is a woman not permitted to defend herself?”
Daria’s heart sank as Jamie Campbell erupted.
“Defend yourself! Madam, I was unarmed!”
“I didn’t mean to shoot you,” Mamie said to him, and to Daria, “I had the gun for protection, naturally. I am here alone, and a strange man had come to my door. It . . . it went off—”
“When my back was turned,” Mr. Campbell said. “Ach, woman, you dissemble yet!”
“Did you announce yourself?” Daria demanded of him. “You must admit that you are intimidating in your appearance, especially to a woman who resides alone.”
He looked very surprised by that. “Intimidating? In what way?”
“Well, your size, for one.” And his hair, hanging to his shoulders. Broad, barely clothed shoulders. “And your . . . dress,” she added carefully.
His brows dipped into a dark frown. “My dress? Buckskins? A linen shirt? A coat and a plaid for warmth? These are intimidating? What, must a man wear lace to quell the fears of an English rose?”
“I am not an English rose! I mean that you might appear, at first glance, perhaps a bit . . .” She shifted in her seat. “Savage.”
“Savage!” he bellowed. “I will have you know that I’ve been welcomed into ballrooms across London and was no’ thought a savage!”
“I don’t mean that you are a savage, but only that to a woman’s eye, there might be a moment of consternation if one is not acquainted. That’s all.”
He was not appeased. He shifted forward again, propping his good arm against the table so that he could pierce her with his dangerously dark eyes. “Allow me to tell you why your grandmamma shot an unarmed man,” he said, his voice dangerously low. “I didna intimidate her. I scarcely had opportunity, aye? She met me at the door with a gun. I announced myself. I told her I had come to inquire why she unlawfully divested my addlepated uncle of one thousand pounds. Her response was to shoot me. Now—have you any whisky? I find all this more than a wee bit trying.”
Daria was appalled. “Now you accuse Mamie of not only shooting you with your back turned, but stealing as well? I think you are as mad as she!”
“I beg your pardon, I am not mad.” Mamie stood, reached up to the top shelf, and brought down a green bottle. She took down three small glasses as well, and put them all down with a loud clap before Jamie Campbell.
Daria did not generally imbibe. But in this extraordinary circumstance, she eyed that bottle of whisky. So did Jamie Campbell. He reached for it, filling the three glasses, then making quick work of one. As he poured another tot of whisky for himself, Daria moaned, laid her arms on the table, and rested her forehead against them, her eyes closed, trying to absorb another impossible turn of events.
“Oh, Daria, dearest,” Mamie said sweetly, and Daria felt her grandmother’s hand on the back of her head, stroking her. “I am so very sorry for the trouble I’ve caused you.”
Daria was beyond apologies. She was wildly alarmed. She had no idea what she was to do, and Daria always, always knew what to do. When Mr. Anders, a bachelor with thinning hair and bony fingers, had pursued her quite ardently last year, she’d known precisely what to do. When Mrs. Morton had confided in her that Daria’s good friend Lady Ashwood was rumored to have contributed in a nefarious way to the death of her first husband, Lord Carey, Daria had known precisely how to scotch the rumors. But God help her if she knew what to do in this little cottage with these two.
“Go on, then. Tell her,” Jamie Campbell rumbled. “Tell your granddaughter why you robbed my uncle of one thousand pounds, aye?”
“I didn’t rob him of a thousand pounds!” Mamie said angrily, causing Daria to lift her head. “Do I look as if I have even five pounds to my name? If you must know, Daria has come to Scotland to deliver a banknote—” She stopped herself and closed her eyes a moment, her fingers wrapping around one of the glasses of whisky. “Never mind that. The point, Mr. Campbell, is that I shot you quite by accident and I have endeavored to repair the harm and save your life in the process.”
“Diah,” he muttered, throwing up a hand in frustration.
Mamie pushed a tot of whisky across the table to Daria. “Drink it. For your nerves. It’s Irish, superior to anything you will find here.”
Jamie Campbell slammed his fist on the table at that remark.
Daria ignored the whisky. “I don’t quite understand, Mamie. Were you defending yourself, or was it an accident? And how does one shoot a man by accident? That is to say, why were you pointing a gun at him? If he announced who he was, if he stated his business, would you not have lowered your gun?”
Mamie tossed back the whisky as if she were quite practiced at it.
“I think your grandmamma does no’ care to be questioned,” Campbell scoffed.
“My name, Mr. Campbell, is Mrs. Frances Moss,” Mamie said sternly.
“Will you still deny, Mrs. Moss, that you have made Hamish Campbell’s acquaintance, then?”
“She has admitted shooting you by mistake—must you badger her about this ridiculous accusation of stealing?” Daria asked angrily.
But Jamie Campbell ignored her, keeping his gaze steady on Mamie.
“Well . . .” Mamie’s voice trailed off as if she had more to say.
Daria’s heart began to pound. She couldn’t have possibly taken one thousand pounds. “Well? Well what?”
“It is possible that I have made his acquaintance,” Mamie said uncertainly.
“Aha!” Mr. Campbell said triumphantly, jabbing his arm in the air and instantly grimacing in pain, doubling over his injured side.
“You know him?” Daria cried.
“I wouldn’t say that I know him, no,” Mamie said. “But I might have met him. At the pony races, perhaps. But more to the point, I most certainly did not swindle one thousand pounds from him.” She snorted as if that were preposterous, apparently missing the irony that since she had been untruthful about everything else, it was impossible to believe her now.
Daria dared not look at Campbell as she rose up from her chair. She drew Mamie up from hers, held her by the arms, and looked into her blue eyes. “Have you received any money from him, Mamie?”
Mamie gave Campbell a sidelong glance, but Daria gave her a gentle shake. “Mamie? Have you accepted any money from Mr. Hamish?”
“Mr. Campbell. Hamish Campbell,” Jamie Campbell said behind her.
Mamie’s lashes fluttered and she looked down. “He might have given me a gift—”
“Bloody hell!” Jamie Campbell exploded, and brought his fist down on the table again, rattling the bottle and the whisky glasses. “Woman, I am of a mind to drag you to Edinburra on a charge of thievery!”
Daria’s hands fell from her grandmother’s arms. She couldn’t think, her mind suddenly a blank slate. She couldn’t breathe. She put her hand to her throat; fear was welling up in her, choking her. Something was horribly wrong with her grandmother. Mamie had heretofore been scrupulously honest. How could it have come to this? And what of her parents? How would she ever explain this to them?
Daria instinctively stepped back, away from the woman she had loved with all her heart, her mind racing. She looked at Jamie Campbell, who, to his credit, looked at her with a bit of sympathy. Her only hope for Mamie was to appeal to him for forgiveness, for help. But if Mamie had stolen one thousand pounds . . . the amount stunned her. What hope did she have that she would not be caught and prosecuted for thievery, just as Jamie Campbell had said?
Daria desperately tried to think.
“Where is my horse?” Jamie Campbell asked quietly.
“Quite safe,” Mamie said. “I’ve a paddock nearby, and he’s been properly fed.”
“My dog as well?”
Mamie frowned. “He has a ham bone as large as he is. I think he has fared well enough.”
That was his dog? Daria suddenly marched to the door and threw it open. The dog was sitting patiently beside the door. “Come,” she said, gesturing inside. The dog cocked his head to one side.
“Trobhad!” Campbell called, and the dog rushed inside, his tail wagging furiously, his nose sniffing his master and his wounds.
Jamie Campbell put his hand on the dog, stroking his head, and turned a cold gaze to Mamie. “I will no’ allow you to walk free from this, Mrs. Moss.”
“Whatever she has taken, we will repay,” Daria said quickly. Campbell looked as if he were prepared to argue. “Mamie,” Daria said quickly, and put her hands on Mamie’s shoulders. “Will you please go and dress?”
Mamie’s eyes widened with surprise. “But I—”
“Please, darling,” Daria pleaded with her. “You’re wearing yesterday’s gown.”
Mamie glanced down. She pressed a hand to her hair and frowned at the feel of it. “Yes, all right; perhaps I ought.” She walked out of the little kitchen, looking defeated.
Daria waited until she heard the door of Mamie’s room open and close, then whirled toward Jamie Campbell.
“Donna even try,” he said. “I do no’ give quarter to thieves and liars.”
This was clearly going to be a tussle.