Page 86 of Devil Black

Randal addressed Isobel abruptly, while still her senses swam. “What part of you will your husband recognize?”

“Eh?”

“We need a token to show him, to prove our intentions when he comes.”

“If he comes,” Bertram put in. “The Devil Black likes to play the dangerous villain, but we all know his heart is white.”

“He will come,” Randal told his son. “’Twill be a point of pride with him. So, Mistress, what will your husband recognize? This man, here, is a surgeon.” He grimaced. “Well, so, he is a barber, which is nearly the same thing.”

Isobel gasped, and for an instant the room went dark around her. They could not mean what they said!

The ginger-haired man unfurled his roll of fabric; it contained an array of knives arranged small to large.

“Come now,” Randal told Isobel. “What token?”

“You are mad!”

Bertram laughed, a strange, high-pitched giggle.

The ginger-haired barber looked at Isobel uneasily. “Her hair?” he suggested. “’Tis bonny hair. Surely her husband will recognize—”

“Yes,” Isobel said through a throat constricted by terror.

“Na, na!” Randal waved a hand. “Perhaps a finger.”

“A strip of flesh off her arse,” Bertram suggested, “or a nipple. Sure, he will know her nipple.”

Isobel’s legs failed her, and she sank to the floor. “No,” she mumbled.

Bertram nodded to the guards. “Bring the other wench. I told you, Father, the best message we can present to them, when they arrive, is the babe cut from her womb.”

“No!” Isobel struggled to her feet. “You shall not harm her! Use me!”

Randal MacNab nodded at the barber. “Take a finger. No doubt her pretty hands have been all over him.”

“A lock o’ hair—” the barber suggested again.

Randal glared at him. “You will do as you are told, man, if you wish to keep that wee bit cottage over your eight—is it eight?—squealing children’s heads. And that wife o’ yours—she is ill, is she no’? A shame to force her out into the winter snow.”

The barber, avoiding Isobel’s eyes, reached among his knives and selected one. “Hold her.”

In the end it took four strong men to hold Isobel and another to stretch her hand on the hearth stones and pin it there. She struggled and fought with every drop of her strength, but they bore her down until she could only watch the barber move, like something in a dream, slow and deliberate.

She did not want to scream, but the sound tore from her—not when the barber’s knife severed the smallest finger on her left hand, but when he pulled an iron from the fire and cauterized the bleeding stump.

Then, even before her eyes rolled back in her head, she bellowed like a banshee, “You shall pay for this! He will come! I tell you, the Devil Black will come!”

Chapter Thirty-Five

“Open the gates, MacNab!” bellowed Dougal MacRae. “Open to me! You have something that is mine!”

The filthy weather had cleared at last, and a weak sun had now sunk into the horizon, stealing all light. In the dense gloom, the stones of MacNab’s stronghold looked dark and forbidding. Surrounded by the handful of men left to him, Dougal knew himself to be utterly vulnerable. If MacRae let him in—and he would—there existed a good chance Dougal would never ride out again.

At his side, Thomas sat his horse, looking grim and uneasy. No fool, he. The man knew the odds. Yet he had been the first to declare himself ready to ride into the monster’s lair.

“I am no warrior,” he said, “but I am willing to die for the woman I love. My life is nothing without her anyway.”

Those words hung in Dougal’s mind and played over and over again. Aisla, the woman he had always loved, had died here in MacNab’s hands. Dougal could no longer say what he felt for Isobel. He still believed himself incapable of the fine emotion called love, but the idea of failing her made him go cold and hollow inside.