Sophia James: Lady with the Devil's Scar

He slept fitfully, curled into the blanket like a child, waking only as the moon waned against the coming dawn. Isobel Dalceann sat upright against the trunk of a tree. Her hair now was bunched under a hat so that the raindrops fell off the wide edge to dribble down the grey worsted wool of her overcoat. One hand played with the beads of an ebony rosary, glass sparking in the fire-flames and the way her lips moved soundlessly suggested an age-old chant. He could not take his eyes away from a woman whose knife lay across her knees, ready to take a life after spending the whole of an evening trying to save one.

‘I know you are awake.’

He couldn’t help but be amused. ‘Hard to sleep with the possibility of losing my arm on the morrow.’

‘How do you feel now?’

‘Sore.’

‘But not sick?’

He shook his head.

‘Then I should imagine you will get to keep it, after all.’

‘Your bedside manner lacks a certain tenderness.’

She smiled. ‘Ian hoped you might be dead by now. We placed the other man back into the outgoing tide and he’d like to do the same with you.’

‘Unshackle us and we will walk away in any direction you choose.’

‘The problem with that is you have the way of our names and our faces, and there are many who would hurt us here in the ancient hunting grounds of the Dalceann clan.’

‘If we gave our word of honour to maintain only silence …?’

‘Words of honour have the unfortunate tendency to become surplus to survival once safety is reached.’

‘Then why did you swim out to us in the first place?’

Her eyes flickered to the empty skin at his wrist.

‘The gold?’ He pushed himself up to a sitting position. Streaks of red-hot pain snaked into his shoulder. ‘You could not have known that we were adorned with such before you reached us.’

He caught the white line of her teeth. ‘But we could hope.’

‘Only that?’

She remained a shadow amongst the trees, her legs against her chest with a blanket around her shoulders. ‘A boat left the Ceann Gronna keep two weeks ago bound south with a dozen of our men aboard and Ian, Angus and I came from the keep to see if we could see any sign of its return. We thought it might be the vessel that had foundered.’ Her hand stilled for a moment on the count of the beads and she switched languages with barely an inflection of change. ‘You spoke with your friend today of a physic at court. Which one do you hail from?’ He was astonished.

‘You speak French?’

‘Fluently. My mother was from Antwerp.’

‘It might have been wiser to keep that to yourself.’

‘As a weapon?’ Deep dimples graced each cheek as she placed her fingers across her mouth. For the first time since he had been in her company he saw the coquette she might have played so very well in any other lifetime. ‘Why would I have need of one? Your friend can hardly walk with his bruising and your arm is bound and useless. Are you right-handed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then let us hope you have had practice with your other arm to fend off the enemy.’

‘Why? Are they close?’

‘You are looking straight at one, monsieur . As close as breath.’ No humour at all lingered.

‘A woman who has saved me twice can hardly be classed as an enemy.’

‘The most cunning of foes are those you know and trust.’

He knew she spoke from her own experience but, with a little chink of goodwill settling between them, did not wish to mention it and ruin the discourse.

Besides, here in the night with the moon upon them and the quiet call of birds that did not sleep, either, there was a sense of camaraderie he had never felt before with any woman.

‘What is your name?’ Her question came after many moments of silence and he hesitated. How much should he tell her? He opted for caution.

‘James.’

She turned it on her tongue twice. ‘I had a brother of the same name.’

He noted the past tense.

‘My mother took him with her when she left my father. I was six. He was three. The boat they used to escape foundered off Kincraig Point and they were both drowned.’

Her head tipped up and he saw her eyes watching him in the moonlight. Why had her mother not taken her? He did not like to ask the question, but she answered it for him anyway.

‘Enemies can operate under the guise of love just as easily as they can do hate, and it is my experience that all parents have their favourites.’

‘God.’ His expletive was filled with all the anger she must have felt as a six-year-old.

‘Were there other siblings?’

‘You ask too many questions,’ she said and stood, stretching. The outline of one breast was easily seen against her tunic where the material had slipped to allow the soft abundance an escape.

Mon Dieu , he was turning into a man he did not recognise.

Was it the light-headedness after the doctoring that had him ogling a woman who might still be tossing him back into an outgoing tide come the morrow?

But there was something about her, with her long dark hair and her prickliness, a female set apart from others and fierce. He could not think of even one man of his acquaintance who would have braved such a cold and angry sea.

He also wondered how long she had lived rough like this, lost from society and the discourse of other women.

Her travelling companions lay over the other side of the clearing, their snores mingling with Simon’s, a whisky pouch beside them, and an array of knives and crossbows against a rock at the ready.

Enemies. Everywhere.

The day pressed upon him with all its unexpected turnings. Guy lost, Simon saved and his arm sewn up by a woman who looked like a battered angel. With a sigh he closed his eyes and drifted into sleep.

She could hear him breathing, evenly, slumber taking over from pain.

He lay with his good arm tucked under his head as a cushion against the hardness of the ground, the drizzle sitting on his hair like small jewels. He was a puzzle, this James, with his careful green eyes and his golden bracelet and his way of making certain that all those about him were safe. She had heard the boatman and the one called Simon talk of the way he had rescued them from the trappings of rope and sail as the boat had foundered, clawing his way back to find whoever was left. The marks of bruises all over him told her that the task had not been easy, either, and his vigilance and guardedness here even in the face of pain was unrelenting.

Swearing beneath her breath, she balled her fists and listened to him take breath, quiet in the night and comforting. It was this comfort that had led her to speak of her mother, a subject she had not shared with one other person in all of her life. All twenty-three years of it. Lord, it seemed like so much more.

James. He didn’t suit the name, she thought. Too proper for a man who looked as he did. Too very orthodox and prim. She wished he might wake up so that they could talk again out here in the night alone with the rain to shelter their words from the others, but the day had exhausted him and she was glad that he lay in the arms of rest.

She couldn’t sleep because there were too many thoughts in her head, too many memories dredged up: her mother’s sadness and her father’s fury when he realised that his wife had escaped through one of the sea caves under Ceann Gronna. He had ranted and raved on the high battlements for all of the hours of the storm and when Isobel had gone to him to try to help he had pushed her away, screaming his hatred. Such recollections made her melancholy, a small child blamed for all the self-absorption and egotism of her parents.

She needed some space away from this stranger with all his questions inciting unwanted confidences she had never told another soul. Ian would not hurt them unduly for she had made sure he had understood the consequences should he fail to protect them.