Page 9 of Romancing the Scot
“Where . . . am I?”
Hugh drew back and looked into the blue eyes trying to bring him into focus.
“Scotland,” he said. “You’re safe.”
She lifted a hand, moved stiffly, and tried to rise. But her limbs hadn’t the strength, and her head sank back onto the pillow.
The eyes began to drift shut, but she started to whisper again.
He stared at her lips and moved closer.
“Send me back.”
Chapter 3
Grace had no idea how long she’d been wandering in the fog. She didn’t know what lay ahead. Tall trees looming overhead shut out all light. Tangled undergrowth dragged at her shackled feet. Eyes of predators fixed on her from the shadows. Too exhausted to care, she sank to the ground. The smell of earth and pine filled her senses.
Confusion took hold of her. Her stomach clenched as the green world around her began to spin. Voices echoed from a distance. Around her, the forest dissolved, falling away like a painted canvas. She was not in a forest, but rather a bedchamber. The words became distinct.
“Her lungs have been affected, m’lord. But from what you tell me, that’s only to be expected.”
Grace peered at the man sitting on the bed beside her. Thick spectacles sat in a bed of bushy white brows atop a red, pock-marked nose. The ruddy face bore the deeply etched lines of advanced years.
She tried to draw a breath but couldn’t. Why didn’t they move the rock that was sitting on her chest?
She was dying. She’d been imprisoned in that basket. Sealed up alive in that tomb of wicker and wood. Lowered into the grave of some ship’s hold. Her cries had gone unanswered until finally she had no more will to call out, no more strength to fight against the feelings of desperation and anguish. The hatches were sealed, the darkness was complete, and time lost all meaning. How many days or weeks she’d lain in that basket, she didn’t know. Thirst and hunger tore at her insides for a while, but those afflictions too disappeared, only to be replaced by a vague desire for the end to come.
But that silent release was still far off, and painful thoughts of her dear father came back over and over. Finally, to combat the madness that she was certain would come, her mind conjured another world. Pages of books lit the darkness. Lines of poems and ballads appeared before her eyes. Everything she’d ever read came back to her now.
Her father called it her “talent.” Grace remembered everything: names, faces, numbers, and more. Her friends saw it as entertainment. They tested her and laughed as she recited chapters of books she’d read through only once. She could name the position of any card after having the deck displayed for only a moment. Some who knew of her talent referred to her as an oddity. A French scholar had once insisted on studying her. But her father would not allow it, and she was grateful for his intervention.
On that ship, locked in what she assumed would be her coffin, Grace had begun to recite aloud the words locked in her memory. Line after line, poem after poem, Irish ballad and French, text book and novel—each one reminding her that she was still alive.
But her voice had eventually grown quieter until only the pounding sound of the sea remained, the creaking of wood, and the sloshing of water below. Finally, even those sounds disappeared and silence claimed the darkness.
“I’d be sorely remiss in offering any words of optimism,” the old man said. His face moved out of her line of sight. “I can bleed her, m’lord, but I don’t know what good it’ll do her.”
No blood. Grace had seen too much of it in Antwerp. The blackening pool around the valet. The deep red stain on her father’s chest. While she’d been confined in the crate, her mind had returned to those moments. Awake or asleep, it didn’t make a difference. She kept seeing the dead. Even now Grace’s eyes burned, but she doubted she had a tear left to shed.
“No,” another man replied. “No letting of her blood. She’s not strong enough.”
She’d heard that voice before. The same deep and commanding tone. The man who’d lifted her out of that wicker tomb and carried her through the rain. She’d recited an Irish ballad for him, confused him with her words.
Safe,he’d said so confidently, placing her in the bed.
If he only knew how wrong he was.
Grace tried to focus on the tall, dark-haired blur hovering in the distance. Broad shoulders encased in a black coat dominated the wall beyond. She could hardly make out his features, but she heard the concern in his tone.
She tried to breathe again and struggled. Coughing wracked her body, and a searing pain ripped through her chest. Where was death now? Where was her release? Hadn’t she suffered enough?
When the spasms subsided a little, someone lifted her head from the pillow and spooned bitter medicine between her lips. Grace choked on it, and her body responded violently. She gasped in vain for air, and then the room went black around her once again.
* * *
Hugh had seen enough death. He didn’t want to witness it now.
Watching this woman gasp for breath brought back again the haunting memories of his loved ones, dying so far from home. She’d been murmuring lines from a ballad. He didn’t know the work, but it sounded like the farewell of a soldier dying on the battlefield.
