Page 41 of Outlaw Ever After (Highland Handfasts #3)
Be damned, he wanted to hate Seamus, and yet, Joslyn’s words came back to him, about Seamus’s mother gentling him. The nearly affectionate way she’d spoken of Seamus’s grief. And the odd distrust he felt wafting off of Seamus.
“All I ever wanted was for the outlaw to be brought in for questioning,” Seamus said darkly. “And when I found out that cottage was in fact owned—by another clan, mind ye—I realized yer sire and my aunt had been wrong to try and take it.”
What?
“If we act now and apprehend him ye can have yer wish,” MacGregor said, pounding his fist into his palm.
Still, Seamus stood in eerie composure, staring at MacGregor as if lost in some other thought. “Peigi has begged me to stand down.”
“Peigi kens nay the devil she allowed into her heart. Ye must act in her best interest, man. Ye should have married her to me at Lughnasadh.”
“My sister begged nay.”
MacGregor’s jaw ticked at that.
“She was adamant she did nay wish to marry yet,” Seamus clarified, but Alex knew: she’d been waiting to elope with a man who didn’t come in time. “Jitters.”
“Why did she change her mind about this tournament?”
“Circumstances changed.” Peigi had found out she was with child. At what point had she miscarried and needed the care of the nunnery? All alone, shouldering the shame, his quiet songbird. Guilt gnawed. “She wrote to me that she would agree.”
“Why nay write to me and simply betroth her? Why this fanfare?”
Seamus cleared his throat. “She, eh, wasna sure ye’d be interested, considering how she rejected ye.”
A diplomatic lie if Alex had ever heard one. Peigi didn’t want MacGregor. That much was growing clear.
“Never ye worry.” MacGregor seemed to recover.
“With Bale working for Arran, I dare say in light of this discovery about Scotland’s deputy comptroller, it behooves ye to have my royal connection.
If ye help me win it, we can send for reinforcements from Arran, reveal to him the outlaw the archbishop has employed, and then finally have our justice. ”
“Are ye suggesting I throw this tourney in yer favor?”
“What others nay ken will nay hurt them.” MacGregor shrugged. “All these opportunistic men salivating over the prize when what they really want is this strategic estate.”
“Careful I nay accuse ye of the same thing, man.” Seamus jested, but Alex could hear an undercurrent of strain, see a tick to Seamus’s thick jaw.
“Except I’ve kenned Peigi since she was a babe. I’ve waited all these years. I’ve been there for her on her darkest day when the outlaw now vying for her, orphaned her.”
“I need irrefutable evidence that it’s him. Mayhap hear Bale’s witness statement again.”
Bale’s witness statement? The Laird of Lyon Tower in Glen Lyon? If MacGregor’s brother had been there, he would have seen the true killer, like Alex had.
“Jesu, man.” MacGregor fumed, then pointed. “’Tis nay just about yer sire. Mine died, too, and just when he was about to see himself reestablished in the peerage with his marriage. Such might have given me
rank, too, after his folly before my birth that saw him stripped of it. I also deserve justice.”
“Should we ensure we have the right man or just punish someone to satisfy our bloodlust?”
MacGregor shook his head. “Fine. Proof is what I shall find.” He stormed out of the solar.
Seamus stood for some moments staring at the door. “Might have given him rank…” he repeated to himself.
He looked down at Alex’s missive to Peigi, still clenched in his fist, before discarding it on the desk, then looked straight at the sideboard in which Alex hid.
Seamus landed his stride. Walking toward it, brow riveted, Alex’s blood ran cold. He tallied his rib slitters and sgian dubh in his right boot, achlais beneath his left pit, iron crow wedged beneath his elbow…
The fabric atop the sideboard was brushed aside. A creaking sound as the top…lifted up?
He held his breath as his blood pumped for a fight. Shuffling of parchment rustled over his head. So close, he could hear Seamus’s shifting weight, the soft scouring of his stubble beneath his palm, and his gravelly murmur, “I’ll be goddamned…”
Moments later, the wood above him slammed shut—shite! The door to the cupboard creaked open an inch. Seamus, stepping away, stopped. Silence.
Fok! Had he been discovered?
The door to the cupboard jammed shut. Alex winced, his shoulder wound jarred, crowbar slipping… He pinched his arm tight to hold it!
Seamus’s footsteps thudding away. Crow still slipping… Damnation! The solar door opened. Slipping, Jesu—closed. The crow clunked loose at the moment the lock clanked.
Alex’s heart thundered. Revelations echoed through him like a cannon blast as he held his position for good measure.
Finally, when Seamus’s footfalls dissipated, he unfolded himself and pushed open the cupboard door, the bar clanking onto the floor. Seamus had forgotten the waning taper on the desk.
He snatched it up and turned back to the sideboard. He folded back the runner, hoisted the lid open, revealing a ledger and a portfolio inside.
He picked up the ledger and flipped it open, fanning the pages.
Castle wages going back years? To Jossy? Aulay? Francine and Alpin were included, too, as well as all the folk who kept the castle afloat. Leafing through the pages, it seemed as if Seamus had…
paid
them to continue their posts? They weren’t bonded here?
With what money when the Grants had been broke?
Somehow, Seamus had paid Jossy a small annual salary of one pound, two crowns and three shillings.
How much had Francine made? One pound a year until she’d reached six and ten? And then it had been increased. He totaled Alpin’s, Aulay’s, and the remainder of the staff mentioned until he came to…
sixty pounds
over the course of the last four and ten years.
Though the salaries had been a pittance a piece, it was still a handsome sum in total. He furrowed his brow. Where had Seamus come by so much?
Could it be…the fourth disbursement of royal loans that have no corresponding renovation reported?
It had to be. Seamus had been cagey about that fourth disbursement, mentioning miscellaneous odds and ends and poor recordkeeping he needed to organize.
Was the fact he’d paid them, even when he had naught, why his folk seemed to harbor begrudging tolerance of him? It was…
honorable
that Seamus had tended to them.
Fok, Alex wanted to keep hating Seamus, but he wasn’t exactly a shite man, just a hardened one, and a worried brother. He seemed to be handling the contest punctiliously. He’d seemed irritated by MacGregor’s suggestion to throw it.
But what had Seamus just read that had made him goddamned?
He shut the ledger and opened the portfolio to find Seamus’s requests for royal loans. A page jutted irregularly from the middle of the stack. Was this what Seamus had just read? He pulled it from beneath the list of disbursements and saw—
Wanted! Caleb Comyn! By order of His Lord the Earl of Morriston, Laird Seamus Grant of Urquhart Castle—
Christ, Alex was unprepared to see the damning flyer from so long ago. He dared to look at the image Uncle Niall had once refused to show him when Alex had found him furiously ripping them off tavern walls and signposts on the high roads.
Should the Outlaw Comyn wish to honor his sire in a burial, he will submit to interrogation in three moons’ time to Laird Seamus Grant and Laird Bale MacGregor—
Bale? Why him?
—at Urquhart Castle’s gates. If he so ignores this demand, his sire’s skull will forever be buried in the holding of Castle Freuchie, never to be found again, and Castle Freuchie will pass to the Grants in perpetuity.
He traced his thumb over the etching of a skull, now faded and creased.
Was it only a myth, that his skull still existed? Mayhap it had been discarded long ago and the rumors had grown strong over the years as rumors often did.
Buried in the holding somewhere…
Where the hell are ye, Da?
His eyes narrowed on the obvious conclusion: MacGregor
, nay Seamus, had something at stake in this. Upon MacGregor
, nay the Grant, was where Alex should focus his scrutiny…
Seamus…what to think about Seamus… The man had been bent on rallying MacGregor’s support at first, but if Alex wasn’t mistaken, something had shifted in Seamus tonight, the moment he’d realized MacGregor had lied about Alex’s stolen missive and the lashings, and MacGregor’s lust for death when Seamus had only vied to capture him for questioning…