Chapter Eight
The long, sustained creak that invaded her dream exploded with a loud crack just before a swirling gust of rain drenched her.
“Oh my Lord!” Elizabeth sat up, groggy and unfocused. The portion of thatched roof above her was gone and the rain was pouring down. As she skittered to the side, she realized she was alone. “Alexander?”
There was no answer. He was gone. But he couldn’t be. He dove into a raging flood to save her. He’d never leave her alone like this. Where was he?
“Shite, shite, shite.”
Awake now and fighting back panic, she looked around the sheepcote. He couldn’t have left without her.
Grey daylight filled the open wall of the hovel. Staring out at the storm, she had no idea what time of day it was. She glanced up as the wind buffeted her and then wrenched away another section of roof. The place was coming apart with each gust of the wind. Where was the Highlander?
“Please don’t let this be happening.”
Elizabeth tried to remember to breathe as she jumped to her feet. Last night, they’d exchanged words. Each of them had insulted the other when they should have held their tongues. She couldn’t have offended him so much that he’d clear out without so much as a word.
He was made of the hardier stock than that. He delivered verbal punches as easily as he took them. He wouldn’t desert her unless something had gone wrong. Or perhaps he’d gone for help. But why not wake her, tell her?
“Damnation.”
She was cold. Her cloak was in a protected corner, dangling from a rudely fashioned hook. She didn’t recall hanging it up. She poked at it, making sure no vermin had taken possession, before pulling it down.
She was still wet—or wet again from the wake-up drenching—but at least she’d slept. The storm howled around them all night. But every time she stirred, the warmth behind her had lulled her back to sleep.
She paused, trying to decide if the warmth was a dream or real. She recalled snuggling into it, unable to get close enough.
Wind, saturated with rain, swept through the hut, and Elizabeth threw the cloak around her shoulders. Pulling up the hood, she fastened the ties and went out. Her heart sank.
“Disaster,” she murmured.
A chill clutched at her insides. The flood had risen overnight. It was now a few yards below the sheepcote. The surface of the moving waters was littered with trees and shrubs and half-submerged timber from bridges and farms and Lord knows where.
She didn’t want to think or imagine that something could have happened to him. What happened if he tried to swim through this to get help? What if he drowned?
This was all her fault. She shouldn’t have bought into Queen Margaret and Clare’s plan to begin with. But it was her fault. The stupid notion of playing games. Her cowardice in not meeting with him and telling him the truth. Life was not a few steps in a dance or a promenade in a masque. She’d endangered a man’s life. Tears welled up in her eyes. She couldn’t live with herself if something happened to him.
Worry for Alexander wrenched her gut as she turned to go around the building. The wind whipped her hood over her face, and she banged directly into a broad, muscular chest.
Her heart leapt with joy. She looked up, overwhelmed with relief. Her fists struck him on the chest to make sure he was real.
“You came back for me.”
He looked down at her and smiled. “I didn’t go anywhere.”
Whatever words were said in the heat of the moment last night, they meant nothing to her now. He was safe. He was here. Her eyes took in the wet shirt clinging to his chest. Her fists opened, and she let herself feel the strong beat of his heart. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him. He was safe. Safe.
He reached out and laid a warm palm on her forehead.
“Are you unwell?” he asked. “Feeling feverish?”
Elizabeth realized she was smiling like a fool. “Nay, I’m perfectly well. How is that wound on your head?”
“It was barely a scratch.”
Elizabeth insides quivered and began to melt as he peeled a wet twist of hair off her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. His fingers traced her sensitive lobe, the line of her jaw, trailing down her throat before they slowly fell away. His touch played havoc with her senses.
The memories of last night rushed back. Following their quarrel, Elizabeth had curled up in the dirt with the smell of dampness and animals around her. The tense silence had been as chill as the wind, but she’d finally fallen, shivering and exhausted, into a restless half sleep. Looking at him now, she knew the source of that enveloping warmth. It was no dream. Alexander lying down behind her, his powerful arm drawing her in against him. His thumb ever so often softly caressing a band of exposed skin beneath her breasts. Dream or no dream, she’d made no objection. In fact, she’d wanted more. She’d wanted him to move his hand and touch the tips of her aching breasts.
Rain continued to pelt down on them, but neither moved. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounded madly against her ribs. Elizabeth couldn’t understand what was happening to her. She wondered if he remembered last night, too.
She lifted her gaze. He truly was a beautiful man. In this strange light, his eyes were the darkest shade of blue. They were the color of the morning sky at dawn. Strands of his long hair had escaped the tie and hung about his sculpted face. She almost reached up and tucked the locks behind his ear, but she didn’t trust herself. Even now her palms tingled from the feel of his chest.
A sharp gust of the wind blasted them, and the building groaned precariously.
“We have to go,” he said.
She was relieved and disappointed that the spell was broken. Elizabeth followed him as he turned and walked around toward the rear of the building.
“We need to move north, away from the river,” he said over the wind. “To that line of forests.”
Alexander was all business now. The gentle hand that had just caressed her face was pointing at the vague blotchy line of black in the distance.
“There’s no easy way to get there,” he told her. “It’s all flooded.”
Her stomach clenched with worry. Their situation was grimmer than she could have possibly imagined. They were at the top of a brae that would soon be inundated. She stared at the moving sea that two days ago had been meadow and farmland.
“We can’t stay here,” he added. “The water will get deeper the longer we tarry.”
She recalled her struggles in the river, thinking every breath would be her last. Helpless, drowning, her body sinking like a millstone no matter what her arms tried to do. She felt her heart racing. She really didn’t want to go back in that water.
“How deep do you think it is?”
He shrugged. “These lands along the river are fairly flat, but there are bound to be some gullies.”
Deep breaths would not ease the sour taste of calamity rising in her throat. But she had to do it. They had no choice. Elizabeth started down the hill. With each step she took, her feet sank into the saturated ground, and her dress and cloak gained extra layers of muck. Before they were half way to the water, her progress abruptly halted when one foot wouldn’t come out.
“Is this your first time wandering down a hillside in inclement weather?” his voice teased.
He was beside her, and Elizabeth had a feeling he was entertained by her misery. So they were going to play this game again. She forced her attention from the watery fate lying ahead to the man beside her. She wasn’t alone. He would help her, save her.
“You call this inclement, Highlander?” she scoffed, hoping the tremor in her voice didn’t betray her anxiety. “I do this every Monday and Friday. And sometimes on Wednesdays, as long as it rains.”
Pulling her foot out, she nearly went headlong down the rest of the slope, but he caught her. He was with her. Alexander was with her. She kept repeating the words in her mind as they continued on. At the bottom of the hill, he stopped and pointed downriver.
“We’ll go in that direction. The bogs that I remember are mostly to the west of where we came ashore.”
“Bogs?” She took a step back from the water, bumping into him. Not just drowning. Disappearing. Getting swallowed up by the earth. How many more things could go wrong?
“We’ll need to be careful, but we’ll come through this.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. She knew it was meant to be a comforting gesture, but she would rather have faced a hundred snakes than this. You can run from a snake; you can’t run from a drowning.
Elizabeth recalled what he’d said last night. In his eyes, she was weak, “unsuitable.” Maybe she was . . . in this situation. She’d never been trapped in a flood before. But she wasn’t about to complain. He was with her. He knew what to do.
“This will be a wee bit arduous for you, I know.”
“I’ll be fine.”
He looked at her gently for a moment. His hand cupped the side of her face, his blue eyes locking with hers. “I’ll be there with you.”
Her silent chants had reached his mind. She trusted him. But fear had too strong a hold on her limbs. She looked at the brown, swirling water. Two dozen steps in the shallows before she reached the waiting disaster. But she had to do it. This was a matter of honor. Courage, she told herself.
“And I’ll be with you,” she said. “Never forget that oar, Highlander.”
He chuckled as she lifted her dress and cloak to her knees and stepped into the water. It was colder today than yesterday.
Alexander held out his hand to her. Not yet, she thought. The branches of a tree spread out on the surface not too far away. It couldn’t be too deep.
“I can manage,” she told him.
The next step put Elizabeth in up to her chest. Panic flooded through her as the current carried her off her feet. Her body responded as she expected. But she was not a millstone—she was the entire mill. Her head went under. Her hands touched the slimy bottom. She opened her mouth to scream, and briny water filled her mouth. Suddenly, he was right there, taking hold of her by the waist and bringing her to surface.
She gagged and coughed up a gallon of water.
“Breathe.”
She clutched at his arm, gasping for breath. He was swimming out into the current and taking her with him.
“Breathe.”
“I am breathing!” she screamed into the wind once she found her voice. She felt for the bottom with her feet, but there was nothing there. Nothing to stand on. She was going to drown. They’d never reach higher ground.
She clawed at his arm, trying to hold on tighter. But it wasn’t enough. Fearing he would lose his grip on her, she struggled to turn around and hold onto his neck.
“Nay, lass. That won’t do. Unless you want to drown us both.” He continued to work his way along, sometimes swimming, sometimes wading.
Breathe. Breathe, she told herself. Close your eyes so you don’t see the Grim Reaper coming for you. But she couldn’t.
“Float beside me. Let your feet come up. I have you.”
Easier said than done. She tried to float, but her feet immediately sank and her face went under. This time, he pulled her out before she could gulp down another mouthful. She tried again to float, but it was impossible.
He pulled her back in against his chest, and she clung to his arm with both hands. “The current is nowhere as strong as what we faced yesterday.”
Easy for him to say. For Elizabeth, drowning was the same—whether it happened in a river, a pond, or a baptismal font.
But drowning wasn’t the worst way to die. She thought about the bogs Alexander mentioned. Even in the castle, she’d heard tales of animals and people wandering into them unawares and dying a horrible death. She’d once heard of a donkey sucked all the way to Hell before you could cross yourself.
He stepped on something and the water reached his chest. Elizabeth felt for the bottom with her feet. Nothing. Hot claws of panic continued to scratch at her. What happened if she lost her hold and they were separated? What if they were crossing a bog and the mud reached up to grab him? What if she had to save him?
She pressed herself closer to him. Moving his arm so he had a better hold on her, one palm ended up cupping her breast. It would figure, the day she was to drown or get swallowed up by a bog, a man touches her breast. And what was her reaction? Hold on tight. Please don’t let me die.
“Regardless of where you’ve lived, lass, you’re still a Scot.” He was talking. She was quivering in terror, and he was talking like they were taking a stroll in the gardens.
“What do you mean by that?” She looked over her shoulder at him.
“How is it you never learned to swim?”
Swim? Swim? He was being critical of her now? “I didn’t have time for it.”
“Too busy with all the court revelry, I suppose? Too much time primping and dressing and dancing, and no time for learning anything useful?”
“If you call knowing one snake from another useful, you’re correct.”
How wrong could he be? She’d never learned to swim because she’d had no one to teach her. And as she grew older, she’d been busy caring for her father, who in turn was always busy with his building projects. It was a fortunate thing that Ambrose Hay was constantly sought after for working on palaces and castles. It was only when she wasn’t at his side that she learned polite manners by emulating the women she came in contact with.
“Probably couldn’t tell a rock cod from a raspberry, unless it was served up for you.”
Eager to respond, she tried to turn and gulped down a mouthful of muddy water for her trouble. Coughing and gagging and sputtering, she grabbed for him. He drew her closer, holding her against him. “Breathe.”
“I am breathing,” she snapped, angry that he would find a moment like this to be disparaging of her education. “Let me ask you this: Can you identify an ogival arch?”
“Aye, I know the man well. Archibald Ogilvie, bishop of Glasgow.”
“Not Ogilvie . . . ogival! Ogives are the intersecting transverse ribs that make the surface of a vault. It is a pointed arch.”
“I’m not so sure about that, lass. Archie has a pointed head, but I don’t think he’d be caught dead intersecting anyone’s ribs.”
“Ha!” she laughed. “So there are a few things you don’t know. I don’t suppose you could tell a chevette from a narthex.”
“Are they a kind of a song? Nay, I’ve got it. They’re dances.” He was teasing her. She could hear it in his tone. The nerve of the man!
“And I doubt you could tell me how many columns it takes to support a domed roof. Or how many flying buttresses were needed for the cathedral at Chartres.”
“Useful survival knowledge to have. I am quite impressed.”
He wasn’t.
“I didn’t think you’d know,” she concluded triumphantly. “For your information, I spent most of my time at my father’s side as he built some of the most important palaces in Europe. If I didn’t have time to learn to swim, it was because I was busy. So if you have something else to say . . .”
“Well, I was just going to say, I’ll be happy to carry you all the way to Stirling. But I thought you might want to walk a wee bit.”
Elizabeth looked around her. The rain and wind were still beating down on them, but he was standing on a strip of ground a dozen paces from the water. A pine forest rose up on one side of them, and the flood they’d just emerged from stretched out on the other.
“Put me down,” she said.
“As you wish, m’lady.”
“How did we get here?”
“A miracle, I think.”
“You held me through it all?”
“Actually, with all the talk, I thought you and your father would construct a bridge for us, but alas it was not to be.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“I am.”
She realized now what he’d been doing. Distracting her, making her talk to take her mind off her fears. She gazed out at the watery expanse. It was behind them. She was alive.
Alexander was striding along the water following the line of woods.
“Where are you going?” she asked. “Isn’t Stirling the other way?”
“We won’t make it going that way. Not until this blasted storm stops and the waters recede. We’ll head for Dunfermline and maybe find a place to dry out.”
She hurried to keep up with him. “Thank you for . . .”
The Highlander stopped short and she ran into his back. “And just to be clear on things, a chevette is a wee chapel in a church and the narthex is the entrance. I’d need to know the height and diameter of a dome to tell you how many pillars would be needed to hold the bloody thing up. And I’ve never counted the buttresses at Chartres, but I’m guessing twenty-six. Am I close?”
Without waiting for an answer, Alexander turned on his heel and started off again, leaving her speechless.
Elizabeth couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw him hiding a grin as he strode away.
Devil take him, the man was marvelous.