Page 88 of Highlander's Sinless Nymph
“I’m...I’m...” he said, weakly.
“I know, Father,” Charlotte sobbed. “So am I.”
Captain Bolton sighed. His eyes rolled up into his head. Charlotte winced and gasped, as Edward pulled the sword out of her father’s back with a soft noise that set her teeth on edge and made bile rise on her throat.
Captain Adair Bolton, despised scourge of the Scottish Highlands and most hated enemy of the MacQuarrie clan, keeled over sideways and lay dead in the mud. The sapphire blue eyes stared up into the high, clear Scottish sky.
At peace, for the first time since I can remember.
Now that her father’s body was out of the way and lay unceremoniously in the mud next to her, Charlotte found that she was face-to-face with Edward.
Even in the middle of that battle—in middle of the screams of rage and agony, the blood and gore, the deafening noise of metal and flesh and leather and wood all meeting—Charlotte and Edward still took their time in looking at one another.
Words failed Charlotte, and it seemed that Edward was in the same boat.
“Edward—” she began, not knowing what word would come next.
Edward pulled her to him in a fierce hug. His muscular arms enfolded her like some sort of warm, comforting armor. Everything else ceased to be, ceased to matter.
“Dinnae say anythin’, Sassenach,” his reassuring bass voice rumbled. “Let’s get ye out o’ here first. This is nay place fer a lady.”
Despite the emotions coursing through every fiber of her being, and the grief and confusion and bone-weariness that threatened to drag her into unconsciousness, Charlotte let loose a small, choked laugh.
“I fear,” she said, breathing the Highlander in, “that I am no lady, Edward.”
“That’s grand,” the Scotsman replied, “fer, as I told another fellow just before, I am nay gentleman.”
* * *
Despondency takes to an army like fire does to dry bracken.
Even as Edward helped Charlotte to her feet, being careful to turn her away from the grizzly sight of her dead father and his blood that soaked the grass around him, he was aware that a change had come over the English that were still fighting.
Like the fire in the dry undergrowth; all it had taken to ignite the disquiet in the hearts of the red-coats was a spark—and in this case, there had been two. Those men who had seen their most feared and accomplished tracker, Hirst, so easily dealt with by the huge Highland hero were shaken enough, but the blow that the death of their famed Captain and leader dealt to the morale of the English was the lethal one.
“Come on now, lads, harry ‘em!” Edward cried, even as he half dragged, half carried Charlotte through the press of men, back towards the rear of the Highlander lines. “MacQuarries, see ‘em to the borders, lads!”
Word spread from man to man, even in the heat of battle. Panic began to spread.
“Bolton is dead!”
“The Captain is gone! Slain!”
“Who leads? Wholeads,damn it?”
“Shit on this! It’s every man for ‘imself!”
Like so many hundreds of rats on board a ship that is doomed to sink or burn, the English red-coats began to break away in clumps and flee across the country.
Edward, near the back of the Highland lines, found old Dunnet tending to his father. The mustachioed Scotsman was holding a bloody cloth to the side of the Laird’s head and clucking over him like an old hen.
“Dunnet!” Edward called, moving aside two Highland warriors who raised their weapons at him in greeting. “Dunnet, I need ye to look after Miss Bolton a while fer me.”
Dunnet raised one of his caterpillar-like eyebrows at Edward. “Is that right, young Edward? And where might ye be a goin’ to, eh?”
Edward eased Charlotte down onto a mound of supplies that had been brought out from Castle MacQuarrie. Looking at the white-faced lass, his heart was torn in two. All he wished to do was get her back to the castle, have a bath run for her and push a mug of mulled cider into her hand. However, his duties as acting Laird meant that he must first take care of the immediate situation.
“The English are routed,” he told Dunnet.
