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“Shows that the man we are holding for execution is an immoral reprobate that will be killed for his crime,” her father said strongly. “The proof is right before your eyes, my dear, written in black upon white. Before this year will end, he will swing.”
…The Viscount, ailing and ill, being strangled by the prisoner-doctor who was charged to save his life…. This is a sworn testimony…Oh Caelan, how you have fooled me.
Chapter 18
Adelaine was the first woman who had broken through to him to make him feel anything but fleeting lust. Caelan was not going to pretend he was innocent. He had women back in the day. In his twenties and in the company of other soldiers he had gone to those taverns and slept with those women to slake his lust when he felt it. As he grew from the early twenties to the later ones, he had even tried to have a relationship for the sake of his image. What Laird did not have a lady?
There was this lass in the village, Clara, with a head of soft flax and eyes of the purest blue he had ever seen but, she was a villager, so nothing much could have come from it. He could not make her a wife and many had taken their relationship for a good romp at best. Truthfully, with the long days he had spent away from her with doing his duties, when they did meet, it was just that—a romp. He had tried his best to be mindful of her and ensure the joining was more than satisfactory, but his heart had strayed far from her over time. Soon enough, he had been too busy to think about finding a partner.
Adelaine was innocent, and he was honor bound to protect her, even from himself. If only he could hold himself back from all the urges bubbling up in his mind about her. He knew that he had to hold back because if he did and tasted her just once, his desire would never be quenched.
“Such a soft creature…” he murmured into the dawn.
He stood and began to pace the stiffness out of his limbs. The cold that seeped through the stone was getting worse with each day. Sometimes, he woke up in the middle of the night and walked to stave the chill from freezing his limbs into stone.
The snow outside his window was getting thicker as winter strength
ened. The tiny window showed him a continuous sheet and sometimes the flakes flew in. When he did catch them before they melted on the stone, a strong memory of his home overtook him. With God’s grace, Adelaine would give him the location of the tunnel so he could go home.
He kept pacing and got warm but as the sun’s weak rays grew marginally stronger, he realized the cook, Mrs. Hertha had not come. He frowned. Why was that?
Still, he paced and did not fixate on it too much. What did worry him was that Adelaine did not come at all and when Leicester came with his bowl of tasteless meat and stale bread, that evening, he knew the reason. The Earl had come back home. The tiny pleasures he had enjoyed in the past days had melted away like the tiny snowflakes that flew into his cage and faded on the ground.
His escape had just gotten that more difficult and complicated. As long as the Earl was there, Adelaine would never be able to get access to those plans. The Christmastide celebration was in six days and if the Earl was staying for that time, he would never have the location of the tunnel, send his men in time, or be able to use that window of time to run.
He rubbed his face in frustration. His time was running out and there was nothing he could do about it. Robert Duglas was dead and the King was waiting for his confession. Could he dare write to the King and take advantage of his leniency, whatever it was? Eyeing the stack of paper his hand even reached out and took a sheet before he dropped it. No. It was tempting but not now, not when he had decided to fight.
Caelan had in his mind to take the stack of paper and crush them into balls or even rip them to shreds, but he did not. He let them stay in the stack they had come in. This would say much more than destroying them. The Earl was bound to show up soon and demand something from him. There was nothing more to say.
The evening dragged and eventually, he drifted off to sleep with heaviness in his heart. When she did not show up the next day, nor the one after, only then he realized the dullness the came from her absence. The days before he met her were filled with pain and then, exhaustion. Agony and fatigue from walking barefoot, tethered like an animal. He had expected nothing but being a prisoner and enduring long days of nothingness which was torture in itself.
Then Adelaine came, and with her, a spark of light. After her first bout of anger, she became the only thing he could look forward to. Her presence had brought warmth…but now that warmth was fading.
Another day passed and she did not come. His outlook for escaping was getting thin. He had almost given up on her coming when the door above scraped. Unreasonably, his heart gave a little lurch. Was it her?
Sibilant echoes of soft steps had him up at the bars in moments, and his throat felt tight when he saw her. He was relieved seeing her before he noticed the guarded look on her face.
“Adelaine—”
“You’re a liar,” she cut him off indiscriminately and rather coldly too. “All this time you’ve been lying to me and I believed you.”
Where was this coming from? How had she gone from trusting him to accusing him of lying? He did not have to wonder much—it was her father. The damned Earl had found another way to make his already-painful life that more difficult.
“What lies has yer faither told ye?” he asked.
“They are not lies,” Adelaine said. “I read a written statement from a witness who saw you choking my brother to death the morning you said he died from poisoning.”
“C-Choking him to—” his mind flew back to that early mornin’ when Peter had woken up choking and he went to hold him down, just to stop him from falling off the cot and injuring himself even further. To anyone who was looking in from the stairwell, it could certainly look that way as his body was blocking the real picture. “Listen to me, I dinnae choke yer brother. That morning yer brother woke up choking and I went to help. I held him down to stop his flailing and when I went to get more medicine, he had already passed.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said emptily. “I should have never believed you in the first place. Where was this part of the story when you told me how he died? Did you just happen to casually forget it or, did you leave it out on purpose in order for me to believe you?”
Caelan was so stunned, he was not able to reply yet. Where was his lovely Adelaine? The one who had kissed him so tenderly and had been a bundle of temptation in his arms? Where was the Adelaine that had told him he should not suffer for a crime he had not committed? She was gone and replaced with someone who was withdrawn and suspicious.
“Lass—”
“Who’s to say that the medicine you gave him wasn’t poison? Who’s to say that he really had a knife cut and you took the chance to finish him off?” she pronounced.
Now, Caelan was getting angry. “I did nay such thing. I only laid hands on your brother to heal him. I would never have added another life to hundreds of deaths that happened the days before. I would lay me head on the chopping block to prove me innocence.”
