Glenna scrabbled for the door handle at her back while she interrupted the large, frowning man. “I already told you; I don’t care what your decree says, and neither does my father.” Tavish Cameron stopped short, and his eyebrows raised as he once again pinned her with his bright gaze. Glenna swallowed and gathered her bravado for a final display.
“You’ll leave on the morrow. First light,” she reminded them, her eyes going to the black-clad Englishman, who seemed infinitely safer to look upon. She stepped through the doorway, pulling the door shut after her and then scrambling with her shaking hand to seize hold of the chain about her waist and fit the correct key into the lock before she could be challenged.
She stepped back from the door and waited, her chest heaving, cursing herself for a fool. What had she been thinking, granting them entry? Harriet Cameron seemed kindly enough, but it was clear that her son had ulterior motives. Glenna had little in the way of defense if he wished her harm or to rob her. Not that there was much to steal in the whole of the keep, save the few coins Tavish Cameron himself had given her.
She knew that Iain Douglas would have offered them his own bed had it been he who had greeted them.
The truth of it shamed her, and so, when no one rushed the door with pounding demands for release, Glenna turned and escaped down the stairs, wondering how one might manage to sleep after having imprisoned three people in one’s guest chamber.
* * * *
Tavish saw Lucan Montague’s movements freeze from the corner of his eye as he stood and stared at the now closed chamber door. The scraping of metal was unmistakable.
“Have we been incarcerated?” Montague hedged.
Tavish nodded. “Aye.”
The English knight came forward as a flare of light blossomed behind him—Mam had managed to ignite a stub of candle she’d found, bringing at least an illusion of warmth and brightness to the cold stone room.
Tavish held up a palm. “Wait,” he advised quietly.
“Wait?” Montague repeated. He began to rant in a stream of fiery French, but then seemed to realize that his efforts were wasted in a foreign tongue. “I’ll be damned if I shall acquiesce to being held against my—”
“Shh.” Tavish held up a finger before creeping toward the door and leaning his ear against it. After several moments, he straightened and began searching in his clothing and among his various pouches again. “You’ll not be held against your will anywhere. Especially”—he withdrew a ring of small iron rods of varying shapes and lengths and began to flip through the cluster—“not in a keep that belongs to me.”
Tavish crouched to one knee and inserted a likely candidate while Mam went about the chamber singing under her breath. She slid thick coverings from the conspicuously few furnishings in such a large chamber, sending up clouds of thick dust that made her swat the air and cough.
“Good heavens,” she gasped. “None’s slept here in an age, I reckon! Tav, there’s neither wood nor peat.”
Tavish withdrew the first rod and flipped through the ring again even while he glanced up and around the room. “A moment, pray, Mam.” He inserted a second, then a third. On the fourth rod, the mechanism inside the door scraped, and the door pulled inward of the jamb.
Tavish gained his feet and tucked his tools away before inching the door open and looking into the corridor. Both the stairwell and the passageway to the right were black, and not a sound could be heard above the crashing of the ocean waves and the roar of the wind beyond the stones. Tavish ducked back inside the room and pushed the door closed.
“There you are, Montague,” he said as he crossed the floor and went to a pair of small tables against the inner wall. “You may go where you please now, although I would recommend you wait until after we’ve had our supper. Mam’s brought meat pies.” He bent and examined one of the dainty, round-topped tables, then picked it up by a leg and turned it this way and that.
“That I have,” Harriet confirmed. “Lamb.”
Lucan Montague brightened. “I do fancy lamb pie.”
Tavish took two table legs in hand and looked up at Montague with a wink. “As do I.” He swung the table against the stones of the hearth where it broke apart into tens of pieces with a crash. Tavish tossed the now dismembered legs atop the pile. “There you are, Mam.”
“Oh, you’re a dear,” Harriet said. “I’ll just warm them up a bit and they shall be quite lovely, I think.”
Tavish looked up to find Lucan Montague regarding him with raised eyebrows. “What?” he demanded. “’Twas my table. Now it shall heat my supper before I venture out to find out exactly who is running my house, regardless of what the Lady Douglas commands.”
“She’slovely,” Mam offered as she laid the fire.
“Quite so,” Montague agreed, to Tavish’s surprise.
But Tavish kept his own counsel:She’s lovely, aye—and quite panicked, the stiff woman dressed like a maid who still managed to look down her nose at me.
While Mam unpacked the foodstuffs and built up a small fire, Tavish and Lucan Montague finished setting the chamber to rights. There was little to work with, and so it didn’t take long to determine that Mam would sleep atop the single bedstead in the large room, its mattress so thin and pitifully old that he worried his mother might fall through the rotten tick and stuffing. Tavish and Lucan would sleep on the bare, dusty floor.
The only other sizeable furnishing was a tall-backed chair, its thick wood carved in intricate, deep design and its back and seat upholstered in now rotting, threadbare, rose-colored fabric. Tavish didn’t count the other small table—a candle stand, really—for it would eventually be fed into the fire as surely as its twin. Perhaps the queer old chair would meet the same fate in the night.
He walked toward the hearth now as Mam was positioning the pies close to the fire and noticed another item draped in a dingy, time-singed cloth, hung upon the chimney stones. Tavish reached up and pulled a corner of the sheet, dragging the cloth free in a cloud of dusty years.
“Good heavens, Tav.” Mam choked and waved her hand. “Mind the supper!”
