AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Most horrible of all, there was only a sunken pit where his left eye should have been.
Abigail screamed.
THEY ALWAYS SCREAMED.
Sir Alistair Munroe scowled at the woman and children on his step. Behind them the rain suddenly let down in a wall of water, making the children crowd against their mother’s skirts. Children, particularly small ones, nearly always screamed and ran away from him. Sometimes even grown women did. Just last year, a rather melodramatic young lady on High Street in Edinburgh had fainted at the sight of him.
Alistair had wanted to slap the silly chit.
Instead, he’d scurried away like a diseased rat, hiding the maimed side of his face as best he could in his lowered tricorne and pulled-up cloak. He expected the reaction in cities and towns. It was the reason he didn’t like to frequent areas where people congregated. What he didn’t expect was a female child screaming on his very doorstep.
“Stop that,” he growled at her, and the lass snapped her mouth shut.
There were two children, a boy and a girl. The lad was a brown birdlike thing that could’ve been anywhere from three to eight. Alistair had no basis to judge, since he avoided children when he could. The girl was the elder. She was pale and blond, and staring up at him with blue eyes that looked much too large for her thin face. Perhaps it was a fault of her bloodline—such abnormalities often denoted mental deficiency.
Her mother had eyes the same color, he saw as he finally, reluctantly, looked at her. She was beautiful. Of course. It would be a blazing beauty who appeared on his doorstep in a thunderstorm. She had eyes the exact color of newly opened harebells, shining gold hair, and a magnificent bosom that any man, even a scarred, misanthropic recluse such as himself, would find arousing. It was, after all, the natural reaction of a human male to a human female of obvious reproductive capability, however much he resented it.
“What do you want?” he repeated to the woman.
Perhaps the entire family was mentally deficient, because they simply stared at him, mute. The woman’s stare was fixated on his eye socket. Naturally. He’d left off his patch again—the damned thing was a nuisance—and his face was no doubt going to inspire nightmares in her sleep tonight.
He sighed. He’d been about to sit down to a dinner of porridge and boiled sausages when he’d heard the knocking. Wretched as his meal was, it would be even less appetizing cold.
“Carlyle Manor is a good two miles thataway.” Alistair tilted his head in a westerly direction. No doubt they were guests of his neighbors gone astray. He shut the door. gue
Once upon a time, long, long ago, a soldier was hiking home through the mountains of a foreign land. The way was steep and rocky, black and twisted trees clung to the edges of the path, and a cold wind blew bitterly against his cheeks. But the soldier didn’t hesitate in his stride. He had seen places both more fearsome and stranger than this, and few things had the ability to make him shiver anymore.
Our soldier had fought most bravely in his war, but many soldiers fight bravely. Old, young, fair of face, and those who misfortune stalks, all soldiers go to battle the best that they are able. Often it is more a matter of luck than justice that determines who shall live and who shall die. So, in his courage, his honor, his very virtue, our soldier was perhaps no better than thousands of his fellows. But in one respect, our soldier was very different. He could not tell a lie.
Because of this, he was called Truth Teller….
—from TRUTH TELLER
Chapter One
Now dark began to fall as Truth Teller made the crest of the mountain and saw a magnificent castle, black as sin….
—from TRUTH TELLER
SCOTLAND
JULY 1765
It was as the carriage bumped around a bend and the decrepit castle loomed into view in the dusk that Helen Fitzwilliam finally—and rather belatedly—realized that the whole trip may’ve been a horrible mistake.
“Is that it?” Jamie, her five-year-old son, was kneeling on the musty carriage seat cushions and peering out the window. “I thought it was ’sposed to be a castle.”
“’Tis a castle, silly,” his nine-year-old sister, Abigail, replied. “Can’t you see the tower?”
“Just ’cause it has a tower don’t mean it’s a castle,” Jamie objected, frowning at the suspect castle. “There’s no moat. If it is a castle, it’s not a proper one.”
“Children,” Helen said rather too sharply, but then they had been in one cramped carriage after another for the better part of a fortnight. “Please don’t bicker.”
Naturally, her offspring feigned deafness.
“It’s pink.” Jamie had pressed his nose to the small window, clouding the glass with his breath. He turned and scowled at his sister. “D’you think a proper castle ought to be pink?”
Helen stifled a sigh and massaged her right temple. She’d felt a headache lurking there for the last several miles, and she knew it was about to pounce just as she needed all her wits about her. She hadn’t really thought this scheme through. But, then, she never did think things through as she ought to, did she? Impulsiveness—hastily acted on and more leisurely regretted—was the hallmark of her life. It was why, at the age of one and thirty, she found herself traveling through a foreign land about to throw herself and her children on the mercy of a stranger.
