Page 52 of Tangled in a Highland Conspiracy
“You said she was on our side,” Moira whispered to her son.
“I thought she was,” Larry admitted grimly, suddenly realising how thoroughly he had been deceived. He felt utterly foolish and humiliated to think that Ailsa had been laughing up her sleeve at him while he had been proposing marriage.
“You fool!” Moira hissed at him. “She has used you.”
Ailsa looked at Larry and smiled, and was not surprised when he answered with a fierce scowl. “It all started with a letter,” she began. “Two letters, actually.” She held one out to Laird MacLellan who read it impassively and made no comment as he handed it back to her. “We were lured to the edge of the Braeburn, but when we realised that we had been tricked, we were about to turn back, but a moment later the arrow came out of nowhere and pierced John through the heart.”
She looked at Laird Ormond. “He died instantly, M’Laird, in my arms. He did not suffer, and he did not die alone.” This was a lie because it had taken John a little while to die, but she did not wish to make the old man’s suffering any worse. In fact, the Laird gave a ghost of a smile and nodded his head as if to say,thank god.
“Ramsay, unknown to me, had been following us,” she went on. “He had been doing so because he had seen the letter that John received and was suspicious, but could not persuade his brother not to go, so he followed him to give him protection.”
Larry laughed cynically. “He did not do a very good job, did he?”
“Master Jamieson, one more interruption, and I will have you escorted out.” Laird MacLellan’s voice was calm but threaded with anger.
Larry sat down, and Moira bent over to whisper something in his ear while Ailsa watched out of the corner of her eye. Then they both looked up and stared at her malevolently.
“Ramsay followed the attacker and fought with him,” Ailsa went on, “but he did not manage to prevent him from escaping. However, during the fight, he wounded the attacker on the right leg, so he should have a cut here—a big one.” She indicated the position on her own leg.
Then she took Molly’s letters out of her pocket. “These letters contain evidence of a conspiracy between Larry Jamieson and my maid, Molly Sinclair.” She gave one of the letters to Laird MacLellan and began to read one out to the assembled company.
It was a particularly incriminating one, where Larry told Molly his plan to write the fake invitations, and with every word that came out of Ailsa’s mouth, Larry became more and more enraged until he could not contain it anymore. He gave an almighty roar and leaped out of his chair to rush towards Ailsa, his hands outstretched to clasp around her neck.
However, he was unable to touch her, as Ramsay, reacting on instinct, fought free of his guards and rushed to intercept Larry. His hands were still bound with heavy chains but instead of being a hindrance, they became a weapon as he raised them above Larry’s head and brought them down with enormous force.
Larry went down like a felled tree and landed on the stone flags in a heap. Moira screamed and rushed to his side as blood began to ooze from the wound the chains had made.
Meanwhile, Ailsa stepped forward and raised the hem of Larry’s kilt a few inches above his knee to unveil a long, deep cut about four inches long. It had been crudely stitched by someone who was obviously not a trained healer and would leave an ugly scar when it healed. She pointed to it, and a number of the assembled men came forward to see what they were looking at.
“See?” Ailsa asked, looking around them all. “The letters, the wound, the conspiracy with my maid… Do you need any more evidence?”
She looked around the faces clustered around her and saw Laird Ormond moving towards them. Again he had left the frail old man behind. He was once again Laird Broderick Ormond, in command of hundreds of guards, servants, tenants, and family.
He motioned to a guard to haul Larry to his feet, then stared into his fear-filled eyes for a moment. “I am not going to strike you,” he told him, his voice throbbing with rage, “although god knows, you deserve it. You deserve to be horsewhipped, and I am seriously considering that, but I will restrain myself because your mother is here and she loves you.”
He looked up at the guards and jerked his head sideways towards the stairs to the dungeons. “Take him downstairs,” he instructed. “Put him in the cell at the end, where there is no sunlight.” He lifted Larry’s chin so that he was looking into his nephew’s terrified blue-grey eyes. “You can say goodbye to any chance you ever thought you had of inheriting this estate. Words cannot express my hatred for you!”
Moira jumped to her feet and clutched her brother’s hands desperately. “Broderick, you cannot do this!” Her voice was trembling and panic-stricken. “He is your flesh and blood!”
Broderick Ormond turned to his sister with menace in his eyes. “And John was not?” he asked.
“Uncle Broderick,” Larry begged. “You cannot do this. I have done wrong and I am sorry, but I deserve a second chance!” His voice was plaintive, almost a whine.
Broderick Ormond saw red. “How dare you?” he roared. “You murdered my son for your own sick ends, and now you are asking for mercy? Bring John back from the dead then I might consider it!” He stepped up to his nephew and his deep brown eyes darkened until they were almost black. “You are no longer my nephew. I am casting you out of this family.”
22
There was a deafening silence, then Moira spoke up.
“John was your flesh and blood,” she said harshly. “Of course he was, Broderick, and I know how much you loved him. You loved him to the extent of ignoring everyone and everything else around you. You hardly saw Larry, and your other son, Ramsay, was invisible to you, but he was never worth bothering about anyway.” She cast Ramsay a scathing glance, which he ignored. However, Ailsa did not.
“Ramsay is just as much a son to the Laird as John was!” she yelled as she rushed forward to confront Moira. “And since when has Larry ever done anything to merit the Laird’s attention or consideration? Show me one thing of value he has ever done to deserve the Laird’s attention or love. Has he trained as a guard? Helped with the accounts? Visited the tenants? No, he has gone out hunting with his friends, flirted with any young lady of wealth and substance he can find, and spent a lot of his time gambling. How much money has he lost—or have you been filling up his coffers again, Lady Moira?”
Moira was speechless, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water as she gazed at Ailsa in disbelief. She had never known the young McBain woman well, but she had always judged Ailsa to be the kind of polite young woman who never let her emotions rule her. Now, however, she looked like a force of nature, a thunderstorm in human form.
“Maybe,” Ailsa went on, “you should have stopped mollycoddling him and letting him have everything he wanted. Perhaps he would not have felt so entitled to Balmuir that he decided to steal it by taking John’s life.”
She put her hands on her hips and took a step back. The two women stood glaring at each other, and the air almost crackled with animosity.
