Chapter One
Stirling, Scotland
The Year of Our Lord, 1681
Miss Elspeth Woodburnopened the door from inside her room and peeked into the short corridor. No one was out there.
Holding a basin of water with a rag floating inside, she stepped out of her room with her long, pale blonde braid swinging behind her.
She’d waited two hours after midnight, until she was sure the sleeping dwale she had mixed into the keep’s water supply had taken effect. Her father, the Baron of Dunley, Lord William Woodburn, might never forgive her. Her friends, the guardsmen of Dunley Keep, might not either, but she had to get into the dungeon.
She had first laid eyes on her father’s prisoner this morning, when he was being dragged into the keep, no doubt to the dungeon. She could not tell his age, if he was young or old, or if he would live until nightfall. Covered in blood, his face was barely recognizable as a human man. She could tell from her position on top of the stairs along the outside wall of the keep, however, that his left eye was swollen shut. Blood dried in his hair, darkened his plaid and stained his boots. Most alarming, though, was the blood that still flowed from a wound in the upper left region of his chest.
Who was he? Would he die in her home? Why had he been brought here? Who had beaten him until he was unrecognizable? Surely nothing he had done was deserving of such punishment.
Admittedly, she didn’t know much about the politics of the country, save that Protestants, as was her father, were against the king having supreme authority in religious affairs. The king’s people, or Royalists, as they were called, were their enemies. She knew things were growing more serious, with Presbyterian Covenanters disappearing and later showing up dead. But her father had not picked up a sword against any of the king’s men. Was her father’s prisoner a Royalist? Or a simple thief?
Her older brother, Roderick hadn’t known when she had gone to ask him that afternoon.
“I must help him.”
“Father will have ye whipped,” he had warned.
“He will punish me, indeed,” she’d acknowledged.
“And this prisoner is worth it?”
“I wish to help anyone in such terrible distress. No matter who they are.”
She remembered Roddy’s chuckle, but he’d agreed to tell her what to do.
She crept silently past Kenneth, a guard who was passed out cold on the floor. Kenneth was always positioned at the end of the corridor. She wasn’t sure if her father stationed him there or if it was Kenneth’s personal desire to protect her.
“Fergive me, Kenneth,” she pleaded, leaving him.
The guards would not sleep long. She just needed time to get into the prisoner’s cell, tend to his wounds, and then leave.
She hurried down the stairs and then stepped into the shadows on the first landing, careful not to be seen by any of the keep’s inhabitants. Only silence met her ears.
Staying close to the dark stone wall, she made her way down two more corridors, passed two more sleeping guards, and then hurried to the stairs descending to the keep’s dungeon.
She had to help the stranger. It was what she loved best—helping others. And that did not just apply to Dunley’s villagers. Whoever or whatever was in need, Elspeth could be counted on to lend her aid. Her desire to help others was what drove her to endless study of the plants and flowers in the vicinity. She knew enough in her mere seventeen years to heal almost any malady. The village physician had even suggested to her father that he send her to be privately tutored. And Brother Algred had admired her to her father, calling her a true blessing from God.
Mayhap, she considered, hurrying on her way, if she helped the prisoner, it would atone for whatever sin her father and his men may have committed today by possibly taking another life outside of war.
Suddenly, she stopped. What if the man was a murderer? What if he had killed another man, or a family? How dangerous was it for her to go to him with all her father’s guards under a sleeping tonic?
Aye, she was a fool and would definitely pay the price of her actions when her father woke up. But the man in the dungeon might die and she had to try to help him.
Girding herself up, she continued. The poor stranger was too injured to harm her.
She had always been ‘too compassionate fer this harsh world’, her father had often said of her growing up. She did feel things deeply. Until she was ten and five, she believed everyone felt mercy the same. It took her two years to finally, sadly convince herself that most didn’t feel any compassion at all.
She would never become so hardened, so cold.
She reached the dungeon’s entryway and stepped into the darkness. With just a few melting candles to light the way, shewove around a corner and came to Gilchrist Allen, a commander in her father’s small army, sitting at a table with his head face down on the wooden surface.
She bit her lip. She hoped he wasn’t furious with her when he woke up. She knew all her father’s men. At peacetime, they protected her from unseen enemies. They were her friends. She hoped they wouldn’t hate her.
