Ashamed, she watched as MacHarg blinked, owl-like, and lifted his gaze from her father’s face, now contorted in pain, to hers.
“Your father?”
“Aye.” The familiar heat crawled up her neck and cheeks. It happened every time she had to bring someone new into the particular sort of madhouse that existed within these walls. The new nurse had been the last, and she found herself wondering if Duncan thought less of her for having such a man as a father.
Lachlan’s groans slowed and he opened his eyes. She hoped Duncan was holding his arms tightly. “He gets like this sometimes. I dinna ken why.”
She watched Duncan take in the ropes on the bedposts and the relative obscurity of the location. “Does no one know he’s here, then?” he asked cautiously.
Her father took a deep breath and let out a howl that filled the room and nearly split her head in two.
Duncan jammed a hand over the struggling man’s mouth. “I withdraw the question.”
MacHarg had had to gather her father’s wrists in a single hand in order to stopper the man’s mouth with the other, and she watched as he shifted his weight to keep his quarry contained. There was something about the way his orange-blond hair caught the firelight as he moved that made Abby think of a ginger cat with a mouse.
“Then he’s not a…prisoner?” Duncan readjusted a slipping foot.
A prisoner? Ha. If she could release him, she would have done it gladly. “Of his mind and body. Nothing more.”
Lachlan relaxed and Duncan freed his mouth.
“Does he…speak to you that way often?” Duncan asked.
“Moira, Moira, forgive me,” Lachlan wailed. Grendel, who had taken an uneasy post in the corner, whined with him.
“Da, it’s nothing,” she said softly. “You have to stop struggling. He doesn’t mean it,” she said to Duncan, “not all of it, at least. Moira is my mother. After the apoplexy, he couldn’t speak at all for the longest time. When his tongue came back, his memory was gone. Then the nonsense began—just a little at first—he’d left his pony at his gran’s, we needed to secure the portcullis, the dead king was coming to visit—and then it got so ye were just as likely to get nonsense as anything else. Betimes he’s violent. Others, he’s like a block of wood, unhearing and unseeing.” She gestured to the bed. “We need to get him tied up again, though. At least until he settles.”
With Duncan doing the lifting and restraining, Abby was able to resecure the ropes with no more than two kicks and a mild scratch to thank her for her effort.
Her father quieted, emitting only an occasional mournful sigh. The lax, unmoving side of his face drooped like a candle that had been held too close to the fire, while the other half twitched as if it were being struck by tiny bolts of lightning. The best thing now would be to get some food in him and get him to sleep. His untouched dinner sat on the table next to the bed.
“I can take care of him now,” she said. “The nurse should be here shortly. I thank ye for your help.”
“Ye goddamned besom!” Lachlan jerked the ropes so hard the bedposts shook.
Duncan frowned. “I think I will stay awhile, if ye dinna mind.”
Or even if she did, Abby thought, for the readiness of his stance said he would be planted in place until he deemed it safe to leave her unattended.
“I—I—What I mean to say is it is not necessary for you—”
Molly, the new nurse, bounded up the stairs, breathless. “My deepest apologies, milady. His lordship had been crying half the morning for his mother to make him a bit of spun sugar for his birthday.” She cast her eyes to the floor. “I know I shouldn’t leave him, but I thought how nice it would be if Cook could make him something to ease his mind. Please dinna dismiss me. I willna do it again.”
“Dinna trouble yourself,” Abby said. “’Twas just a matter of getting him back into bed. I’m sure my father appreciates your efforts on his behalf. I know I do.” Abby had had enough trouble finding a girl patient and skilled enough to stay with her father. She was hardly going to dismiss her over a bit of spun sugar.
Undine and Robby, her burliest footman, clattered up the steps. Abby held up her hands to signal the time for panic had passed.
“Thank you, everyone. My father is settling down. Molly, you’re tired. Have a rest. Get the cook to give you a nice bowl of soup. We’ll be fine here.” She found herself looking to MacHarg for confirmation, which he gave with a small nod.
Undine, Molly, and the footman descended the stairs, leaving Abby to negotiate the odd but not entirely unpleasant sense that MacHarg was her partner in this.
Her eyes went to Lachlan’s dinner. MacHarg wouldn’t be a partner in this, she thought. No one should have to be. She found a cloth near the ewer and wet it to wipe down her father’s bloody lip. When he was clean, she sat down and took the plate on her lap. The soup would stay where it was. She couldn’t bear for MacHarg to witness that debacle, and it was likely cold now anyway. Spearing a morsel of chicken, she adjusted the stool so that MacHarg would be directly behind her, blocked from view.
“My da had Alzheimer’s,” he said quietly.
Abby stroked the corner of her father’s mouth, encouraging him to open it. “What is Alzheimer’s?”
“Oh, sorry.” MacHarg coughed, flustered. “Well, ’tis something like what your da has. He lost his memory and then his manners—not that he had many to begin with.”
“How long did it take him to recover?”
MacHarg hesitated, and she felt her heart fall. “I didna expect you to say he had. I just…hoped, I guess. For both our sakes.” She put the morsel in her father’s mouth and gently pressed his lifeless lips together to form a seal as he chewed. “You told me you grew up without your da.”
“I did. But I knew where he was.”
“And you attended him when he fell ill?”
“I wouldna call it attending. I am not as kindhearted as you.”
“I am hardly kindhearted.” She gave her father another piece. “I treated you quite cruelly down there.”
“I failed you.”
“Aye, ye did. But it didna follow that I must add to your burden. No man comes to killing an expert. I was wrong to have expected that of you.”
Lachlan’s vacant eyes turned suddenly dark, and Abby, as always, started at the change.
“Who failed me?” he asked coldly, though the “me” came out as “eel” through his half-functioning lips.
“He failed me, Da. Not you. Quiet yourself.”
Lachlan wrenched himself upright to see the man who’d done the failing. “Is this your husband? Your husband has hair like a raven.”
“I dinna have a husband with raven hair or otherwise. Lay back.”
“Who is he?”
“His name is Duncan. He’s a MacHarg.”
MacHarg stepped into the fire’s light and made a hesitant bow.
“A MacHarg, is it? Decent enough farmers, though they drink too much and have a verra dangerous streak of stubbornness in them.”
Abby snorted. “Scotsmen who are stubborn and drink? I canna imagine it.”
“Are you one of Ainsley MacHarg’s men?”
Abby watched MacHarg’s face, curious herself.
“Er, no,” he said.
“Who is your chief then?”
MacHarg licked the corner of his mouth. “My grand-da. Gordon MacHarg.”
There was no chief named Gordon MacHarg in the Lowlands, nor, did she suspect, in the Highlands, the Arrans, the Grampians, or the Western Isles, either.
“I dinna know him.” Lachlan narrowed his eyes. “Who is your father?”
MacHarg stiffened. “He’s dead.”
“Drunkard?” Lachlan asked.
“Da!”
“Aye,” MacHarg said. “And a thief.”
Lachlan settled back on a pillow. “Well, we never mind a wee bit of reiving. Untie me, lass. And get your mother.”
Abby’s heart clenched. “Ma is gone. Visiting Auntie Ialach in Tayside. Will you promise to be still?” She untied the closest rope.
“Did she take the new gelding? Braw beast, that one is. Worth every shilling. But there’s something I don’t like about him.” He squeezed his eyes shut, struggling to remember.
“He bolts,” she said and felt MacHarg, who had ventured to the farside of the bed to untie the ropes there, pause.
“Aye, that’s it! We can fix that, nae bother. Donnie’s a gem with horses. Take him to Donnie, lass.”
“I will, Da. In the morning.”
Lachlan ran a hand through his thick, white hair and gave his visitor a long look. “MacHarg, I know you have come to the Kerr for a reason. What is it? I dinna lend money, but I can put you to work.”
“He’s been put to work,” Abby said. “He is my strong arm.”
“A strong arm who canna kill?” Her father turned his sharp gaze to her. “What other changes have ye made? Who were ye intending to kill?”
“Harry,” she said, steeling herself. “He took his sons to carry out a raid against the soldiers in Cumbria against my orders.”
“Your orders! Ye dinna order men! You’re a lass!”
“I am the Kerr now,” she said carefully, “as you are unfit for it. And Harry defied me.”
“Where is Rosston? What does he say?”
“Rosston is not the chief. I am.”
“Harry is my strong arm. A real strong arm.”
“And ye poisoned him against me.” She was intensely embarrassed that MacHarg had to witness this and struggled to hold on to her temper. “When the deal was struck, he took his oath, but he never accepted me. Ye told me yourself, no man can defy an order and live.”
“Apparently one can when you’re leading the clan. MacHarg, I see you drape yourself in the Kerr plaid. Have you abandoned your own clan, or are your father’s thieving ways in your blood too?”
“Enough.” She put the plate down hard and stood. Her father was one step from lunacy. How did he still possess the power to reduce her to a shrieking child?
MacHarg unfolded himself to full height, and Abby felt rather than saw the tension vibrating in him. “I have taken an oath to the Kerr,” he said. “My Kerr. The Kerr of Clan Kerr. I failed to kill Harry, but I will not fail again. I will kill any man who tries to harm your daughter, and if you are the father I think you are, you will thank me for it.”
Lachlan ran a tongue over the gaps in his lower teeth and laughed. “My daughter can tack a man’s balls to his horse at thirty yards. She dinna need protection, MacHarg. She needs a man men will follow.”
“Both of you are wrong,” Abby said hotly. “I need no man at all.”