Page 6 of To Love a Scottish Lord (Highland Lords #4)

B rendan grabbed her valise and a candle, leaving Mary to follow.

She gripped her medicine case with her left hand, flattening her right against the wall for added support as she mounted the steps.

If she were careful not to look to her left or above her, she’d be free of that strange disorientation she always experienced when climbing stairs.

How easy it was to identify her flaws. She wished it were as simple to eliminate them. She had an intense dislike of heights and darkness.

And death.

Perhaps that’s why she waged a war so single-mindedly against illness and disease.

Death had seemed to be a constant presence in her life, perching on her shoulder and cackling wildly when she was happy or carefree.

In addition to her husband, death had taken her three-year-old brother after he had contracted measles, and her sister at age nine from influenza, the same disease that had taken her parents a few months apart, not long after her seventeenth birthday.

At the landing, she looked around her. To her right, the stairs continued upward. To the left was an opened door.

Mary realized that remaining in this desolate castle might be a trial, indeed. But no act was completely wasted. Being forced to climb the stairs might make it easier for her to continue to do so.

Brendan entered the room, and she followed, unsurprised to find that the chamber was nearly empty.

A small brazier sat in one corner, along with a large trunk and a few empty crates.

The only furniture, besides the cot Brendan and Micah had brought in earlier, was a chair, similar in style to the two below.

Brendan put the candle on the chair and placed her valise on the floor next to it.

“I’m sorry it doesn’t look better,” he said, looking around the room.

A broom had not been taken to this floor for years, it seemed. Dust filtered through the air so thickly that she could reach out her hand and grab it.

She waved away his apologies. “It’s better than some accommodations I’ve been offered,” she said.

“Then I’ll leave you,” he said awkwardly. “Unless you need something else?”

She shook her head, and then smiled. “I’m fine, truly.”

When he was gone, she placed her medicine case on the lid of the trunk and readied her small chamber as well as she could, making the bed, unpacking her valise, hanging her clothing on the pegs beside the door.

Standing in front of one of the archer slits, she wished she had something to close the opening.

The Highland wind carried a bite to it although it was only autumn.

The sky presaged snow, and both the loch and the sea seemed silvery in the dusk. She shivered, turning back to the room.

She was considered a wealthy widow, but she’d never appreciated Gordon’s fortune as much as now, as she lit one of the thick beeswax candles she’d brought with her from Inverness.

Money accomplished little in life other than to purchase comfort.

It didn’t bring her happiness or an end to the loneliness she felt in the long hours between dusk and dawn.

But neither would she choose to be destitute.

She’d seen, firsthand, what poverty could do to a person.

Cupping her fingers around the flickering flame, she wondered how the inhabitants of Castle Gloom had managed to survive the winters. Perhaps they did so wearing furs and wool, or they simply had become used to the blustery wind.

Above her was the sound of footsteps on the wooden floor, and she wondered if Brendan was settling down in his tiny chamber.

She looked around the room again and wondered what Gordon would think of her presence there.

He would have counseled against it, but then he’d never known of her secret yearnings.

How could she confess to her husband that she’d dreamed of faraway places?

Or that she always felt that something was missing in her life?

Those were not thoughts to be confided to anyone, let alone a husband, and certainly not to Gordon in those final years.

Moving to the trunk, she laid her medicine case down flat. The fitted case and the vials inside it had been a gift from Gordon, one of the last he’d given her.

“It’s a small thing I give you, Mary, in comparison to what you’ve brought to my life.” She felt tears mist her eyes at the thought of his kindness. He’d been such a dear man.

Gordon, a friend of her father, had offered aid and comfort when her aged parents had died within months of each other. When he’d asked her to marry him, she’d unhesitatingly agreed.

He’d been the most gallant of husbands. Those who knew his talent as a goldsmith often remarked that he could have made his fortune in Edinburgh. Gordon had only smiled and said that he’d made enough money for his needs and a little more, and wasn’t that enough?

Theirs had been exactly the kind of marriage she’d thought it might be, coupled with a few surprises.

She’d expected him to treat her in a fatherly fashion, and he’d been both a guide and a teacher.

Gordon’s passion for her, however, had been unforeseen, surprising the innocent she’d been.

But he’d always been the first to encourage her in her interests.

When she expressed an interest in medicine, he’d encouraged that as well.

She sat on the edge of the bed and slowly unfastened her braid. Every night as she did so, she thought of her husband. Gordon had liked to watch her brush her hair in the evening.

“It is, my love, a sight to warm even an old man’s bones.”

For a few moments, her smile was fond, remembering the love and affection he’d so effortlessly brought into her life. Then, just as she did each night, her thoughts slid a little, as she remembered the later years when Gordon changed and love didn’t seem to matter.

Sometimes, it wasn’t wise to recall the past.

After readying herself for bed, she tucked herself in, wedging the blanket around her.

With her back against the wall, she sat and stared at the shadows around the trunk and the doorway, wishing that they didn’t look like crouching animals.

How foolish she could be at times. But she was feeling absurdly lonely in this deserted castle and adrift as she hadn’t felt in months.

Was it because she was away from Inverness, apart from her friends?

The world felt like an unfriendly place at the moment, and her presence in it small and insignificant.

The moon was too pale to illuminate the room. As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she could see the archer’s slits around the curved walls, framing long, rectangular patches of dark gray sky.

Sitting alone in the blackness of night didn’t make her more comfortable with it.

She raised her knees and wrapped her arms around them.

How odd that she should be so tired and her mind still be active.

She couldn’t help but think of Hamish MacRae, in the room two floors above her.

His imprisonment might account for his aloofness now, but even former prisoners had friends, welcomed family. Why did Hamish shun even his brother?

He was tortured.

What had they done to him? And why wouldn’t he allow her to treat him?

She couldn’t make a person change his behavior simply because she wished it. She’d learned that lesson from Gordon well enough.

One day, on returning home from treating a sick child, she’d been greeted by Charles’s frowns and unspoken censure. “Gordon is ill.”

“Ill?” She’d hung up her cloak and stared at her husband’s apprentice.

“He often becomes ill, Mary, but he doesn’t want you to know.”

She’d rushed to Gordon’s side, sitting on the edge of her husband’s bed to feel his forehead. It had been clammy and pale, almost waxen, and his lips had been bluish.

“I promise I won’t leave you again, Gordon.” Guilt had prompted her vow.

He opened his eyes, his clear blue gaze looking distant, almost as if he had begun to physically leave her.

“You mustn’t say such things, Mary,” he said weakly. “Of course you’ll go. If they’re sick, they need you. I’m only one man, and the whole of Inverness could use your healing talents.”

“It’s not the whole of Inverness, my dearest,” she’d said, smiling a little. “Just a patient here and there.”

“Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll not stay home for my sake.” He gripped her hand tightly, and she’d been concerned at how cold his fingers felt.

She nodded, and it seemed to assuage him.

For two months he’d been ill, but refused to stay in his bed. Every night, she prepared a dose for him, something to settle his stomach, but it hadn’t made him well. Nothing she’d done had made any difference. When Gordon had died, the world she’d known, safe and secure, had sadly changed.

“What would you think of him, Gordon?” she asked, addressing the ceiling, and then wondering why she sought her husband’s counsel. Gordon had disapproved of adventure. He’d always said that a man was born to a role in life and should adhere to it.

He’d been a goldsmith, apprenticed, just as Charles had been, as a young man.

He’d spent his life developing his talent for working in fine metals, and had been supremely content in his vocation.

People from as far away as Edinburgh had come to their small shop to purchase Gordon’s works of art, goblets with rampant lions and gryphons etched along the rim, or small silver boxes adorned with embossed thistles.

Gordon had wanted Charles to take over the shop, but the two of them had never made the final legal arrangements. He’d left Charles some of his tools and inventory, but the rest of the contents of the shop belonged to Mary, along with Gordon’s lockbox of gold and silver ingots.

In short, she was wealthier than she’d ever dreamed of being, and alone for the first time in a dozen years. Alone and wakeful in a strange, deserted castle on the edge of the world.