JENNIE’S first reaction was a jolt of purely sensual joy as her body remembered him in its most intimate places; almost instantly that was killed by the new response that had become hideously familiar in the last forty-eight hours. Her heart began to beat in a jumpy, irregular rhythm, causing nausea and breathlessness; the symptoms were stronger now than ever, and she wondered with a resigned acceptance if she were about to drop dead.
She did not. Nigel rode down the small slope, and Dora welcomed Adam again, while the garron watched with good-humored curiosity. Alick sat motionless. Coming to the bum, the gray wanted to drink, and Nigel allowed it. All the while he kept his eyes on Jennie. His face was very flushed again.
“You lied to me,” he said loudly.
“I didn’t lie.” Her answer was quiet; considering the way she felt, it couldn’t be otherwise. “I told you I was not going there, and I didn’t.”
“You will oblige me by returning home at once.”
“I am not in the mood for obliging you, Nigel,” she said equably. “When I am ready, I shall go back.”
The flush darkened. “You will mount now and ride with me.”
It was dreadful, a boy’s pompous imitation of an autocrat. She felt an exasperated pity, which annoyed her as much as he did. “When I ride back to that house, I will ride alone. Don’t command me, Nigel. I shall follow you in good time.”
“Have you an assignation with this man?” he shouted, and stabbed his crop toward Alick like a sword. Alick observed him without moving.
“Oh, Nigel!” Jennie exclaimed. “That’s too much, even from you!”
“Too much, after your shameless behavior the day before yesterday? Going to this man’s house?” His voice climbed, and broke like an adolescent’s. He made an effort to calm himself. “That episode can be overlooked; none of us have been quite ourselves for several days. But today there is no excuse for this.” Again the thrust with the crop.
“We have all been very much ourselves, I think. The last two days have knocked down all the pretty illusions.”
“You natter on like a damned bluestocking, but I can put up with that.” He forced a hearty laugh. “Come along now! We forget the past and go forward. We get on with life.” He jerked his head sidewise toward Alick. “Bring the mare here.”
Alick didn’t get up. “Even if I were your ghillie, that tone would not put the leap on me,” he said.
Nigel’s mouth worked as if he were cursing in whispers; he dismounted, threw the reins over the gray’s head, and walked through the heather toward the mare. She tossed her head coquettishly and stepped out of reach behind the garron, which didn’t move but gave him a long, mild look. Nigel swore aloud and cut at the pony with his crop.
“If you please,” Alick said courteously, standing up, “do not be striking my garron.”
Nigel whirled to face him, the crop raised. “I’ll strike you, then! There are ways of ridding this place of you. If one doesn’t work, another will. Do you know what the penalty is for seduction?”
“Nigel,” Jennie said, “go home before you disgrace yourself.” Walking toward him, she smelled the wine; he must have begun to drink as soon as she’d left him.
“I’m already disgraced. You’ve disgraced me! I will swear to seduction if I have to. It’s a gentleman’s word over the rabble, every time.”
“And will the lady’s word be no good at all?” she asked. She felt as if she were taking part in a dream.
“Lady!” He spewed the word at her like vomit. “A slut who runs with the lowest of the low! Like calls to like. Secret meetings. Conspiring with this—this—”
“Cousin?” Alick suggested softly. “Though I have no great pride in the connection.”
Nigel looked wounded and confused. Jennie said, “I’ll ride with you, Nigel. We’ll go now. Come, Dora, love.”
She took a step to go past him to the mare, and he swung out a long arm and swept her out of the way and off her feet as he had struck Morag. He brought the crop down across Alick’s face, threw it from him, and seized the smaller man by the throat with both hands and began to throttle him.
Jennie had fallen backward and sprawled full length. She scrambled up, tangling in her skirts, fought free of them, and grabbed Nigel’s arm with both hands. She shook it with all her strength, but he was strong, his muscles iron-hard, and he was possessed with a lunatic fury. Alick’s face was growing blue. She snatched up the crop and began beating Nigel around the head and shoulders.
“You’ll hang, you fool!” she shouted at him. “Gentleman or not!”
With a sudden whooping intake of breath he released Alick and bent double, moaning, his arms folded over his lower belly. Alick staggered backward, his hands to his throat. As the pounding slowed in her head, she heard Nigel’s groans. Then Alick dropped his right hand, and with a surge that seemed to come from his toes he struck Nigel on the jaw with an undercut, Nigel’s head snapped up and back and he dropped.
“There,” Alick said. His voice was strained, hardly more than a whisper. “He’ll sleep for a bit and be all the better for it.” He was rubbing his throat. The mark of the crop showed in a raised red welt across one cheek and the bridge of his nose.
“You can get yourself quickly home now. That was a dirty trick to do to a man, but he was killing me.” He swallowed, and it was obviously painful. “He may have to walk it and be slow at that. But it will do him no harm. He will be quiet when he comes home, and clearer in the head, to be sure.”
Nigel’s face, tilted blindly to the light, was vacant. Unlived-in was the phrase that sprang to mind. And he had never looked so young to her before. He seemed as defenseless as a sleeping child, yet he had come within a breath of being a murderer.
“I brought this on you both,” she said in a stammering rush. “I—I am truly sorry.” It sounded inane enough to make her blush. “If he b-brings charges, I will testify that he attacked you.”
“He will not bring charges.” Alick kept looking at Nigel while still rubbing his throat. “No man likes to admit that this was done to him, what I did.”
“But your life can be made miserable.” She was more composed now, dealing with bleak truth.
Alick made a dismissive gesture and went after the mare. The disturbed animals had run off a little way. She watched him anxiously. Without going to court, without the matter’s ever passing the borders of the estate, Nigel could harass Alick in every way possible; knowing what he and the gamekeeper and their men were capable of, she could visualize murder made to appear an accident or the work of tinkers or gypsies. They might even produce a man to hang for it.
It was her fault, and she would watch, and know, and be powerless. The garron had intercepted Alick and was affectionately bumping his forehead against the man’s shoulder. Perhaps she could make a sort of peace with Nigel as a bribe for his leaving Alick alone. It would give her present life some useful purpose and assuage the guilt that was scalding her now.
She looked over at Nigel again, already planning to bathe his head with cold water from the burn, letting him wake up to her concern. And remorse? She set her teeth on that one, then thought: I do feel remorse, but he needn’t know for just what. I am truly sorry to see him hurt, but sorrier for the reasons.
“Alick,” she said. The sound of his first name from her mouth startled him into looking around. “Ride back to your house, and put compresses on your throat. I don’t know if they should be hot or cold,” she said. “Whatever feels best.” Pain in her fingers told her she was wringing her hands; she stopped that. “I’ll stay with him and see him home. Are you sure he’ll be able to walk?”
“Och, yes,” Alick said. “But I will wait a wee bit with you.” He glanced down the slope at Nigel and, like Jennie earlier, seemed hardly able to look away. He took off his bonnet and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, still watching Nigel.
The defenseless, empty face. The arms flung wide, the hands lying loose, open, palms upward. Legs sprawling, booted feet oddly awkward, as if they had never walked or fitted in stirrups. The only moving thing about him was a lock of his hair, stirring slightly in a little breeze that came down into the hollow.
Sweat was pouring down her back. She blurted out, “He looks—” Sunlight burned her eyes, and blackness flickered and menaced around the arc of her vision. She blinked frantically, but still the dark came on, until she remembered to bend over double and let the blood go to her head. She straightened up, feeling sick, but the blackness was gone. She went and knelt beside Nigel and lifted one of the flaccid hands, but the only pulse she could feel was her own; her whole body beat with it.
A shadow moved across her, and she looked up. Alick was black against the blue and white sky like a burn mark on pastel silk. He knelt opposite her and put his fingers on the side of Nigel’s throat. His hand was shaking; she saw his dark skin take on an ugly pallor, and the crop mark stood out like a bloody wound. He had to make several attempts to speak.
“I am a hanged man,” he said. He stood up carefully and walked away down the slope toward the burn. She could not believe that Nigel was dead, but she could no longer look into his face. A bee lit on his nose and walked the length of it, between his fair eyebrows, across his forehead to his hair. Her held breath erupted in a harsh gasp; she sprang up and stumbled down to where Alick was. The water purled along at their feet, making its own sound.
Alick was shaking violently as if with chills. She spoke fast. “I will swear for you. You have the marks on your face and your throat. Surely the sheriff will see them if you go to him before they fade. I will go with you.”
Gazing down at the bubbling brown water, he said tonelessly, “The sheriff is the landlords’ man. I will go into jail to wait for the trial, and the marks will be gone by then. But there will be plenty to swear to the marks on him.”
He turned to her. “Your husband came upon us in adultery, and I killed him. That is what they will be saying.”
“Archie will believe me!” she cried.
“Archie is an amadan, a fool, and she will pay people to lie about what they have seen between us. We will both be gotten rid of. You in disgrace, and me to the gallows.” He couldn’t stop shaking. “My neck is already in the noose.”
“No!”
He said with soft courtesy, “It is not your fault.”
“It is, it is!”
The larks upwinging were birds singing in hell. She was half-wild with terror for them both, ready to sink down where she stood and will herself to a swift death.
Alick said suddenly, “Ride back. Say you found him like this, alone. Can you lie?”
“Yes.” She was surprised by the strength of her voice. “To save a life.” If I can keep from feeling the truth is written on my forehead, she thought. “I’ll be distraught, beside myself. I’ll need soothing drafts, laudanum to make me sleep. They can’t keep at me then. And he could have been thrown! If I am to lie, I could say I saw it happen.”
“No. You will be playing into their hands, you see.” His painful throat made his voice husky. “There will be bruises on him from my knee and my fist, and they will think as they please, but you will not be a part of it if you say you found him like this. By the time they come for him with a cart I will be lost in the mountains.” He felt inside his jacket and brought out his purse. “Here is your money, and Davie’s. Iain will know how to get it to Hamish.” They were walking toward the horses. “You must lead his horse back. The beast shouldn’t be left alone out here.”
In the dark entrance to the Pict’s House, something moved. Alick leaped forward, Jennie’s legs gave out this time, and she collapsed to the turf, wishing that the earlier blackness would return and shelter her.
A sibilant spate of Gaelic flowed down the rise. She lifted her head from her arms and saw Alick coming with a bent, frail, elderly man who hobbled along with the help of a staff.
“This is Parlan, from Coire na Broc,” Alick said. “He says he will live like a rabbit on the moor rather than leave it, and I tell him it is like a rabbit they will snare him.... He was sleeping, and the loud voices woke him.”
Parlan took off his bonnet. “Good day, Mistress,” he said as if they had merely met upon the road. “The Captain looks as if his neck is broken. How could that be, with only one blow?”
“He saw it all!” Jennie exclaimed. “He can be our witness!”
“He is worse than no witness at all. He will be torn to pieces in the High Court like a hare by dogs.” The picture, one of the horrors of her childhood, sickened her, but Parlan listened with bright interest, his bald head cocked, his watery blue eyes moving from one face to the other.
“On his own moor he is one man. Carry him away from here, and he will be old and confused and very frightened. They will be twisting his confusion to make the story they want. He has already told us what that will be.” He jerked his head backward toward Nigel.
“What can we do then? Can you swear him never to tell anyone that he was here at all? If he could just erase it from his mind, hide it as if it were a whisky still. You would be safe in the mountains, and I—” The impetus ran out. How intolerable would it be to live in suspense, waking each morning to wonder if this was the day when Parlan rambled in his wits and forgot his oath? Among his own folk the story of the factor’s death, and her presence at it, should be safe enough. But who could know what rumors might reach what ears?
She saw herself summoned to appear before the High Court to assist in an inquiry into the death of Nigel Gilchrist, questioned without mercy by clever men who had already condemned her as an adulteress and accessory to her husband’s murder. She would be the animal thrown to the hounds: the exhausted fox, the hare paralyzed by terror.
Her chest constricted so she could hardly breathe; she gasped for air. An arm went strongly around her and kept her from falling. Life coursed powerfully through her, a rage that innocence should be violated.
“I’m not going to swoon,” she said proudly. Alick released her. “Tell me this. You need not name names, but you have a place in mind, have you not? You are not simply going to live out the rest of your life as a fugitive in a mountain cave.”
“I have a place, yes.” He was wary. “I know where I am going.”
“Could I reach England from there?”
“In time, yes.”
“Then I am going with you. I have no other choice.” A crowded rectory in Northumberland looked like very heaven. “I have a family who will believe me, no matter what Christabel says. Then I can go to the Continent and find employment and be safely out of reach of Linnmore House.”
She watched the dark gray eyes change from wariness to obstinate refusal, then shift away from her, absently contemplating space, then return in dour acceptance. He had no more choice than she had.
He spoke to Parlan, whose answers came quickly back. She watched the expression on first one face and then the other, tried to guess what each intonation meant, vaguely understood gestures, nods, a fist softly thumped into a palm, and then the interlocked grip of four hands, tears standing in the old man’s eyes as he spoke what was clearly an oath.
She felt as if she had been standing in this hot bright hollow for at least half her lifetime, and to look anywhere else but at the two men would mean seeing Nigel, and she couldn’t do that. He dominated them all as it was, just by lying there dead.
Finally Alick came back to her. “He will do better with one simple lie than attempting to tell them a truth which they will not accept. And he will hold fast to this lie as if it is his life.” Parlan nodded vehemently.
“The lie is that he has seen nobody. He has been walking across the moor from Coire na Broc since the evictions, lying up by day and traveling by night, to shelter in the Pict's House until he is driven out. He came upon the two horses and the garron, and the Captain lying so. He rides the garron to Linnmore House, leading the horses, and tells what he has found. A cart will be sent; men will search. I have gone; you do not come home. We will be deep in the mountains by then because Parlan will not go to them until the sun drops behind Ben Cheathaich. Are you still sure?”
She said with a bitter smile, “Yes.”
“Then, if ever we are caught, remember I took you captive by force. You are my hostage.”
“This is no time for chivalry. If ever we are caught, I will defend you. This is all my fault, and I’ll crawl to my uncle if I must, to hire the finest lawyers, and I will sign over my inheritance to him to pay for them.”
“If you don’t say that you were taken, you will be damned for running away with me,” he warned.
“I will say I was afraid you would be tried and hanged before you could be properly defended, and that I would be unjustly accused if I spoke for you. We were on our way to find someone who would believe the truth. Someone has to believe the truth!” she cried passionately at the two faces, and burst into tears.
She sat on the ground and wept into her hands. No one came near her. In the streaming red-shot darkness she saw Nigel lying dead a little way from her, she saw her whole life lying dead, and it had all happened so fast. How could it have happened like that? she cried piteously inside her head.
After a time she lifted her face and looked around her with bleary eyes. She expected to find herself alone except for the two horses and Nigel; the Highlanders would have taken the chance to slip away.
But they were up by the Piet’s House. Alick was hanging a leather satchel over his shoulder by a strap. She went down to the burn and washed her face and drank. Alick came to her there.
“Parlan has given us what stores he has. He can take what he needs from my house, and he has the money to put in the hands of Iain Innes. He will do it; he swore to it.” He hesitated. “I kept out something. I will need it for what I intend to do.”
“Give it all to him, Alick. Remember, I still have money, and they need all they can get.” He nodded and went back to Parlan.
It was a relief to feel completely free of any emotion now. She knew that she was doing the only thing possible for her. When she got up from her knees, she felt surprisingly strong. She walked over to the horses and took Dora’s head in her arms and kissed her nose; she reached out a hand and stroked Adam’s neck. Alick whistled to the garron, who trotted to him.
“Why don’t you take him?” she asked.
“Because I will not take him away from his home. It’s enough that I have to go. Parlan will leave him with the Elliots. They grow a few kind hearts in Ayrshire.”
When he held the pony’s head between his hands, she looked away toward the mountains in the south. By sunset how deep would they be in the foothills? How far still from those mountains whose transitions from one pastel tint to another, as clouds passed over the sun, belied their brutality? She wanted only to be there, no matter what lay within those folds; anything to be away from the hollow.
“Are you still sure?” Alick asked behind her.
“Yes.” Parlan was with him, and she surprised an expression of loving sadness on his toothless old face. She put out her hand, and he closed his gnarled fingers over it.
“Thank you, Parlan.”
“It’s a safe journey I wish you, Mistress, and peace at the end of it. You have a true heart. You could be one of ours.” He put out his other hand to Alick. With wet eyes he spoke in Gaelic; then he and Alick embraced, and it was over.
Jennie and Alick crossed the brook and went up to the opposite rim of the hollow; the way south lay before them. Alick walked ahead of her through the whin and bracken, with a swift but easy stride, and she kept up without difficulty. She’d have gladly run if it had been possible.
They went out around a stony mound, and some distance before them a deep, forested crease appeared between two hills. She guessed that they were heading for it. Instinctively she looked back. Already a mile or so of uneven terrain had hidden the general location of the hollow, but now the loch had disappeared, though she thought she could still see the osprey hanging over it. Far away across the billows of moor that brightened and darkened under sun and cloud, there was the line of the great old pines against the sky.
She filled her eyes with them to imprint them for always on her memory. Then she turned and hurried to catch up with Alick.