Highlander Protected: A Scottish Time Travel Romance (Highlander In Time Book 3) Read online

  Sort your own story out first, Marianne, she scolded herself, nearly stepping on the toes of her dance partner.

  The dance went on for hours. Marianne, eventually exhausted, extricated herself hours later and stepped into the hall for some cooler air, feeling exhausted but happy. It had caught her a little by surprise, how easily she’d settled in here. She kept waiting for the pangs of homesickness to catch up with her, but the more she waited, the less it seemed likely. The only people she really missed were her family – but it felt strange, to miss them, when they hadn’t even been born yet. It must have been the wee hours of the morning before Marianne found her way up the stairs to bed – where there was a fire still smoldering in the grate and a fresh torch lighting her way to her cot. Grateful for Dolores – whose sleeping form was just visible in her bed in the other room – Marianne undressed, careful not to make too much noise. With the sheer volume of food that had been produced for the feast, Dolores must have had a long day.

  She slid into her cot with a sigh of relief, stretching her sore feet under the covers as her body heat quickly banished the chill. It wasn’t long before she drifted off into a deep sleep.

  A series of seemingly unconnected images floated through her thoughts. First a village, covered in snow. People staring through windows, avoiding her eyes, as she was escorted – or was she dragged? —down the main street. A room with a bed and a chair in it and a door that she somehow knew locked from the outside, not the inside. Comfortable, but as surely a prison as anything she’d seen. Then the open sky again, the grey Scottish sky she’d played and grown under her whole life, but something was terribly wrong. Fire. Snow, hissing on logs. The terrible sensation of being bound, restrained, and tethered to something she couldn’t reach or tear down, something out of sight. Her body thrashing wildly against the restraints, throat swollen by the desperate force of her screams.

  There were people standing beyond the terrified field of her vision, but nobody she could see clearly, nobody she could bring herself to focus on. Everything was shrunk down to the single hideous pinpoint of her imprisonment, of the flames beginning to climb higher and higher, of the single, awful, undeniable fact that she was at the center of a bonfire that was going to claim her as surely as it had claimed its kindling.

  Higher and higher the flames crept, and higher and higher her voice rose, as the tattered white dress that flapped around her ankles caught flame. She watched it curl and blacken then hurled her head back and screamed until she tasted blood, screamed until she thought the sky would fall and extinguish the flames. But it didn’t. There was just cold grey Scottish sky, and the rising smoke, and now the scent of burning meat —

  The screams yanked Marianne out of her sleep, whiplash-fast, rocketing upright in bed and staring wildly around the room with her heart pounding before realizing that it was her that had screamed, was still screaming, in fact, the sound bouncing horribly off the stone walls and reverberating through the room.

  Gods, she’d wake Dolores, she thought muzzily, better stop screaming, better stop screaming just as soon as she possibly could —

  A sharp and immediate shock of pain stopped her voice cold in her throat. When her eyes focused, she saw Dolores, crouched beside her bed, her hand raised – and realized with a start that the woman had struck her full in the face. The aftershock of the slap was still stinging on her cheek. She raised a hand, still shell-shocked not only by the dream, but by the blow, then surprised herself and Dolores with a burst of completely unexpected laughter.

  What a theatrical moment! She’d never been slapped out of hysteria before. Scotland really is a world of new experiences, she thought dizzily, then felt the laughter pulling at her the same way the screaming had. That way madness lay. She tried to focus on Dolores – and as she did, realized that the woman had been speaking to her this entire time, her voice setting a rapid, soothing rhythm.

  “Just a dream, just a dream, just a dream, just a bad dream, just a bad dream, my sweet, just a bad, terrible dream, it wasn’t real, my darling, nothing real there, only your mind playing tricks and it’s all done, now, it’s over and done and you’re back with me, you’re home safe with me, my darling, home safe in this room —”

  “Dolores,” she stammered out. “Sorry. Sorry to wake you —”

  “I have bad dreams too,” Dolores said rapidly, her tone hardly shifting from the singsong soothing she’d been doing. “Oh yes, my dear, it runs in the family, I suppose, bad dreams, ever since I was young, I was dropped on my head and that’s what caused it, they always told me, well I don’t know about that, I don’t remember any bad dreams before he came along, fits and fainting spells but never bad dreams —”

  “Dolores, I’m alright.”

  “Good.” The woman stroked her cheek, a surprising gesture from someone who in Marianne’s experience tended to flinch away from physical contact.

  She made a mental note to try and remember some of what she’d just said – there were some clues there, surely. Gods, she couldn’t think straight and there was so much to work out – but the memory of her body being destroyed by fire was impossible to think around —

  “I dreamed I was burned alive,” she said, surprised by the way her voice shook. Surprised again, by the way Dolores shut her eyes and uttered a low, hoarse cry.

  “I knew it,” she murmured, breathless. “I knew you were connected. Nobody could look the way you do and not be connected to her… oh, my girl, my sweet girl, I couldn’t protect you, I couldn’t do anything at all for you, useless creature I was and am —”

  “You’re not useless,” Marianne said firmly. “But Dolores, you have to tell me what’s going on. I’ve never had a dream – never dreamed anything like that, anything that vivid. It wasn’t a hallucination, it was a memory. Dolores, that was a vision. You know more than you’ve told me, and I need you to fill me in. Please. Be brave. If not for me —” and here it came, her trump card — “Do it for Elena.”

  Dolores shut her eyes for a moment and her whole body was rigid as a drum. When she looked at Marianne again, she was resolved.

  “Alright. But we’ll need tea.”

  Chapter 11

  Marianne and Dolores moved through the still, quiet castle together without speaking. It was freezing cold in the castle, and most of the torches had burnt out – Marianne reckoned it must be after four in the morning, though it was impossible to tell without clocks. The impulse to grab her phone out of her back pocket to check just would not die, no matter how hard she tried to tell her muscle memory that she would never have anything like a phone again. Maybe she needed to carve “GET A BRAIN” into a phone-shaped piece of rock and keep that in her back pocket, she thought – and nearly laughed aloud.

  Strange, how the tension and trauma of the situation was manifesting as an urge to laugh. She’d take it, honestly. Laughter was easier to suppress into silence than screams were, at least. And less painful for her throat, which didn’t feel especially good at the moment. Yelling over the music all night hadn’t helped, but neither had waking from a terrible nightmare hysterical with fear. Small blessings from whatever god, goddess or unnamed power was watching over her – nobody seemed to have been awakened by her screaming.

  The castle halls were silent, and though she knew every room in the place was full to bursting with guests, they had all clearly tired themselves out with dancing, drink and that tremendous feast – nobody was in the halls except her and Dolores. They slipped into the kitchen, which was surprisingly well-ordered given the huge amount of food it had produced that evening – only a few telltale signs remained to remind an onlooker of the work that had been done. Chief among them were the leftovers – piled high on every available surface.

  Dolores set about boiling water for tea, and Marianne grabbed a plate and loaded it with some of the leftover delicacies she remembered especially enjoying the night before. She didn’t feel hungry at all, but she thought Dolores might appreciate a snack – who knew how
much of a chance the kitchen staff had had to eat the night before? And at any rate, a bit of comfort food might help get them through the serious conversation Marianne knew was ahead.

  By the time she’d laid out a suitable spread, Dolores had a pot of tea and two mugs in hand. The women had worked in silence, not a word passing between them – it felt strangely comfortable, Marianne realized, smiling a little despite the tense situation. She made an ‘after you’ gesture toward the door and Dolores set off back to their shared quarters, deftly handling the teapot and cups in one hand and the torch she’d brought with them in the other. Marianne restrained herself to the rather overloaded platter of leftovers, quietly grateful for the number of cafe jobs she’d worked in her time and the balance they had taught her.

  “Right,” Marianne said finally.

  They had settled into the two comfortable chairs on either side of a little table in Dolores’s quarter, the platter of leftovers set up between them and the tea gently steaming from their mugs; plenty left in the pot, too – Marianne had checked.

  “Where do we start?”

  Dolores took a deep breath, then sipped her tea as though drawing strength from the steam. Marianne was a powerful believer in the magic of tea.

  “Please, Dolores – take your time.”

  “Elena was my daughter,” Dolores started, and Marianne waited patiently. Sometimes people needed to start with the obvious to ease their way into the harder-to-cover topics. “She was born in the village just down the street. I was young. I was very young. I lost any friends I had, when I had Elena – they called me a whore. Didn’t know – didn’t know what had happened. Wouldn’t listen to me. Not that I could tell them the truth.”

  “Dolores?” Marianne reached across the table and squeezed the woman’s hand – she flinched away from the contact, but paused in what was rapidly becoming an unintelligible rant.

  “Sorry. Let me —” She took a deep breath again, exhaled, then took a piece of roast meat from the plate and devoured it. “Right then. Maybe I should start with me. I’ve never quite been right in the head. I know what people say about me, know what they think, and I know what they whisper in the street. They think I’m touched, or simple, or addled. Maybe I am. Or maybe I think different. I never can tell. Any rate, everyone’s always thought I was stupid. Even my mother – I didn’t say a word until I was six-years-old, and by that time my mam had made up her mind that I was hardly worth feeding. Waste of space, she said to my father, once – thought I wasn’t listening. Or maybe she knew and didn’t care, I don’t know.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Marianne murmured, her eyes filling with tears as she put her tea back down on the table. “That was unforgivably cruel of her. And it goes without saying that she was wrong.”

  Dolores shrugged. Nothing about this part of the story seemed to be a problem for her. “We were a big family, at least. My mother pinned her hopes on my brothers and sisters and ignored me. I was happy enough. Always did love cooking, though she wouldn’t teach me – just made me do the lion’s share of the cleaning. Good habit to be in, I suppose. We —” and now the first sign of hesitation crept into her eyes. “We were good Catholics, all of us. It was a small village – the local priest knew us all, knew every name, every face, every detail of all of us. He died when I was ten, and a new priest came. A young one, straight from Rome, the rumor went. When I first saw his face I thought that it was cruel. That was my first thought.”

  Marianne, quietly reflecting on the fact that her gut instinct about men was right nine times out of ten, waited with bated breath for Dolores to continue. The women chewed meditatively on a piece of meat, clearly trying to decide how to tell the rest of the story.

  “He wasn’t at all like Father Giacomo, this new priest. He was so – fanatical. Father Giacomo spoke about love, and caring for your neighbor, and the importance of fellowship and family. This new priest, he talked about sin, and evil, and the Devil. He spoke about witchcraft. How it was everywhere, how we had a duty to root it out if we even suspected it. How ignoring any sign of witchcraft was just as bad as performing witchcraft yourself. He wanted to be a witch hunter, the rumors went, he didn’t want to be stuck as a priest in a village his whole life.”

  Dolores seemed to be warming up to her story. Her voice, usually so strange and jerky in its qualities, seemed to be smoothing out the more she spoke without interruption – the more she realized that Marianne was an open and receptive audience, perhaps. It occurred to Marianne how unused Dolores must be to people listening to her – what reason would anyone have to hear the stories of a kitchen servant, plain and frumpy, and – if what Dolores reported of her reputation among the villagers and even the people of the castle was true – touched in the head. Addled. But she spoke well enough, told a coherent story. She was kind, and clever, and attentive, and incredibly caring, clearly possessed of a warm and loving heart – which surely was all that should matter. What were other people missing about Dolores? Was the power that had brought Marianne here also adjusting Dolores’s speech – making her clearer, easier to understand, making her strangeness a little less pronounced? Or was Marianne simply used to being around people who didn’t exactly fit in?

  Witchcraft drew its fair share of people who didn’t fit the mold. Marianne knew women who’d make Dolores seem like the most stock-standard person on the planet.

  “He was young, like I said. And when I was older – when I had become a woman, as my mother said, like she was angry about it – he took an interest in me.”

  Marianne felt a chill run down her spine.

  “I thought he wanted to be my friend. That he wanted to help me know more about God, about the Church. That he wanted to help. Lord forgive me, I loved the attention. My whole life people had ignored me, or made fun of me, threw rocks at me, called me stupid and stunted, a waste of space. He was kind. And then —”

  Dolores took a deep breath again and Marianne could see that there were tears in her eyes – tears, and an awful blankness that told her that the woman was doing everything in her power to suppress the power of the memory so that she could recount it unscathed, even as it threatened to overwhelm her. “He had his way with me. I wept, and wept, and wept — and he told me that nobody would believe me. He said that if I told anyone, they’d cast me out, throw stones at me, call me a slut and a no-good whore. So I tried to forget it. Tried to forget him, though I had to see him every Sunday. But soon enough, I couldn’t forget. Because of Elena.”

  Marianne had almost been holding her breath, frozen with horror at the story – but the smile that broke out across Dolores’s face when she said her daughter’s name was as beautiful as a sunrise.

  “I was pregnant. My mother figured it out first. God bless her, I thought she was going to scream, but she didn’t even raise her voice. Told me I’d go and live with family in Scotland until the baby was born and that would be the end of it. I think she knew. I think she knew I’d been – forced. She couldn’t ask me, but I think she knew anyway. My father wanted to give me to the nuns.” Her face was bleak. “They’d have taken my Elena away from me, and I’d have been lost. But perhaps she’d have found a safe and happy life somewhere.” Her face twisted. “I try not to think about that. I try—” She took a deep breath, and then a draft of her tea. “We had family in the village. My sister often visited with her family, so I went along with them, just like that, packed my things and left. And sure enough, Elena was born, right here in the village. She was so beautiful.” That smile again. “Even screaming and crying, she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I knew what I’d been put on the Earth to do, then. I was Elena’s mother – and everything I did, I’d do it for her. And I’d stay, in the village. There was nothing for us back home, not anymore.”

  “What happened then?” Marianne asked gently after a few minutes of silence.

  Dolores sighed. “She grew up. She was ten when he came visiting for the first time. He was older, of course, more than ten yea
rs older with grey in his hair, but when I recognized him it felt like someone had walked over my grave. He saw me, too. He hadn’t forgotten. He was with the Inquisition, I found out – one of their witch hunters, investigating. They tried to pretend it was a coincidence he’d come here, but I knew better. I knew he’d come looking for me. I managed to keep him from seeing Elena, that first time – but he came back again, and again, and again. He met her when she was fourteen, and God help me, the resemblance…he saw it then, I knew it. But he waited. He visited every year. I should’ve packed us both up and left…but she was so happy here. She loved this place, truly she did. Her whole life was here. Her friends – she had so many friends, everyone loved her so… I just couldn’t bring myself to tear her away from all that. So I told myself that he was her father, and he had a right to see her, so long as he didn’t harm her.”

  Dolores was silent for a long time, staring into her lukewarm tea. Marianne waited, gave her the space she needed.

  “She looked too much like his sister,” Dolores said bleakly, emotion stripped out of her voice. “That’s what I heard him saying to one of the Inquisition men he brought with him. God knows if he told them the truth about his fathering her, but he decided that it was too dangerous, her being out there. Just in case it led back to him. Damaged his standing in the Church.”

  She spoke so simply, as though nothing she was saying had any importance at all – but Marianne could see what she was holding back, and sat in awe of the control she was exerting, the simple power of that.

  “So just after she turned twenty-two, he rode into town. Accused her of witchcraft. Held her, in one of the rooms in the tavern, while they did her so-called trial – nobody quite knew what to do about it. We couldn’t believe that it was really happening. I went to see her and she begged me to come here, to the MacClarans, to seek safety until it all blew over, so I did. God forgive me, I thought she’d talk her way out of it. She was so clever…always so clever, so good with words, so good with people. My beautiful girl.” Her voice broke.