Хелен Диксон – Traitor or Temptress (страница 3)

Unable to lie to his father even if he wanted to, Duncan stuck out his chest boldly. ‘Aye. She found a wounded man—one of the raiders—in the glen and hid him in the cave.’

‘Then we’d best take care of him ourselves, eh?’

When they were alone Rory turned angry, accusing eyes on his brother. ‘He isn’t a raider and you said you wouldn’t tell,’ he said fiercely, close to tears. ‘You promised Lorne. You promised,’ he cried wretchedly, wanting to pound his brother with his bare fists.

Duncan jumped down from the horse, glaring at Rory. ‘I promised no such thing. You did.’ Haughtily he strutted up the hill after his father and brothers, trying to look bold, but unable quell the feeling of unease of having betrayed Lorne’s trust quivering inside him.

Unbeknown to Ewan Galbraith or Lorne McBryde, who was running along the road to the south to await the arrival of David’s brother, hidden in a thicket high up across the glen crouched the lone figure of John Ferguson. With his eight companions murdered by the men of Kinlochalen and Drumgow, he had come down from the moor to search for the injured David.

John was no stranger to these parts, having been born and raised not far from Drumgow before going south. He knew Ewan Galbraith and Edgar McBryde, lairds of Kinlochalen and Drumgow respectively. Two of the most troublesome, incorrigible families in the Highlands, they were of a warring nature. Having been kept apart from the rest of the world within the Grampian mountains for centuries, these men considered themselves to be true Highlanders—the original possessors of Scotland—and harboured a smouldering resentment for all Lowlanders.

The Galbraiths and the McBrydes were a curse. Their names were frequently brought before the Privy Council in Edinburgh, on charges of robbery and fire raising, and they were ordered to appear before the Justices, but the order—when someone was brave enough to convey it to them—was always ignored. What might appear as criminal behaviour to the more civilised men in Edinburgh and the Lowlands, was, to the Highlanders, who were reluctant to acknowledge any authority but their own, the settlement of an affair of honour.

John had observed Lorne McBryde emerge from the small cave and scramble down the steep incline. Her bright golden hair shining like a beacon in the night made it easy to identify her. He had watched her speak to Ewan Galbraith and when she had gone that same man had immediately climbed up to the cave with his sons and dragged David down the glen to Kinlochalen. Unable to help the youth, John silently cursed Lorne McBryde, fully believing that she had betrayed David’s hiding place to the Galbraiths.

Darkness was creeping over the hills when Lorne tore her gaze away from the road to the south and dejectedly made her way back to David Monroe. She was disappointed and saddened that his brother had failed to appear and didn’t know what she could do to help the injured youth. The glen was quiet, uneasily so. With a dart of terror she climbed up to the cave. David wasn’t there. With an awful constriction of her heart Lorne knew her trust in Duncan had brought about this horror. That was the moment she began to hate him.

As she scrambled back down to the glen she saw nothing, heard nothing. Running with every nerve at full stretch, her heart and soul in her feet, she approached the village, one picture of what the Galbraiths and her own kin would do to David—might already have done to him—burnt on her brain in agony. Death stalked the quiet streets of Kinlochalen. She was too late.

A burning curiosity to see the prisoner who had been brought down from the glen had induced the citizens out of doors. They were silent, huddled in groups, but Lorne saw only David’s wretched corpse where it lay in the square by the Mercat Cross, a place where witches and adulterers were scourged. His face was upturned to the sky, as fair and perfect in death as it had been in life.

There was silence in Kinlochalen for a small space of time as the people and her father and brothers watched the small girl fall to her knees beside the youth and tenderly place her hand on his frozen cheek, her heart seized by a terrible anguish. Tears of hopelessness traced their way down her face, which she raised, fastening her accusing eyes on her father and brothers, noticing that none of the Galbraiths were present.

‘Daughter—get up off your knees,’ Edgar McBryde demanded, looking at her with bitterness and contempt.

Lorne saw the murderous gleam in his eyes, clearly angry at the compassion she showed so unashamedly for this Lowlander, but it did not frighten her. She had gone beyond that. Her small chin jutted courageously upwards and her flashing eyes met his.

‘Why? Why did you do this?’ she cried. ‘He was not one of the raiders.’

‘The lad was dead when Ewan brought him down from the glen,’ her brother James told her gently, having sensed from what Ewan had said before going home to mourn his son that Lorne had tried to befriend the youth. Once young Rory had told them the young man’s name, a name familiar to them all, they knew that as a consequence of his death, they could expect no mercy from the powerful Monroes in the south.

Galloping hooves broke the silence. Lorne scrambled to her feet and stood back when a party of about twenty men rode into the square. They stopped, their contemptuous gazes passing over the band of tough, unpolished warriors before finally coming to rest on David. Slowly the man at the head of the rest—a man accustomed to instant attention—rode forward and dismounted, going down on one knee and bowing his head over the dead youth, remaining silent for a moment as in prayer.

Without looking at those around him, he lifted the boy up into his arms and carried him to his horse. No one attempted to stop him. The implacable authority in Iain Monroe’s manner and bearing caused the Highlanders to fall back. Assisted by one of his friends, he gently placed his brother over his horse’s back and swung himself up into the saddle behind him.

Lorne moved forward, a small, slight figure in the midst of so many men. Averting her eyes from the youth whose life she had so valiantly and ardently tried to save, she looked into the face of his brother, Iain Monroe. At twenty years old, with his towering build and well-muscled chest, his hair and beard as black as jet, his brilliant silver eyes blazing with hellfire and damnation, some might say he had the face of Satan himself. Yet Lorne refused to lower her eyes or step away. It was important to her that this man should know she had meant his brother no harm and that she had tried to help him.

‘Please—wait,’ she begged him, unconsciously speaking in English and moving to the side of his horse. Her emerald eyes were awash with tears, her gaze riveted on the glittering violence in his own.

Looking down, Iain saw a child. His eyes raked her stricken face. Without taking his eyes off her he listened as one of his companions—John Ferguson, who had met him on the road and directed him to the village—leaned towards him and said something in his ear. But recalling John’s description of the girl who had revealed his brother’s hiding place to Ewan Galbraith, the gold of her hair had already told Iain who she was. Lorne watched in agony as his eyes, refusing to relinquish their hold on her own, registered his hatred, a hatred so intense that all the muscles in his face tightened in a mask.

To Iain Monroe, these Highlanders were a different species from his own, whose force of nature threatened the law-abiding civilisation of Scotland. In their tribal ignorance they conformed to no patterns of behaviour but their own. Their disdain of the rest of the world, their habits and manners, prejudices and superstitions, made them peculiar, and Iain cursed the whole lot of them to eternal damnation. But he would not be beaten by the likes of Edgar McBryde and Ewan Galbraith, Highlanders who would stick their murderous knives in your back as soon as look at you, men he vowed to see hanging from a rope’s end before he was done.

‘Stay where you are,’ he ordered, speaking with a cultured English accent, his words halting Lorne’s steps, his teeth, when he spoke, showing white and even in the midst of his black beard. He inspected her as if she were some repulsive creature crawling in the dirt.

‘I curse you, Lorne McBryde—I curse you all,’ he shouted, letting his cold eyes sweep the frozen faces of the onlookers, dwelling at length on Edgar McBryde, probing deep into his eyes, as if seeking something to weigh and to judge. His voice was awful and piercing deep, clutching the heart of every man, woman and child. Even the mighty Edgar McBryde and his sons bristled and stepped back before his icy wrath. ‘I shall make you pay for this day’s work, McBryde. You—and yours—will pay dearly. You slew my brother out of hand, unarmed as he was. Waging war on a defenceless lad is the work of mindless savages.’

Iain was right. Edgar McBryde and the men gathered around him did resemble savages. Some had thrown off their plaids and stood half-naked, bristling with arms, a wildness in their eyes, their hands and bodies bloodied from the affray up on the moor.