“Mind Ella while I clean up those nasty scratches and put her to bed,” Una said, and shooed him out of the bedchamber
Finn waited in the other chamber with the door open. Though it could not have been long, it seemed like hours passed before Una stuck her head out.
“All she needs is rest. I’ll send for ye when she wakes,” Una said. “And stop your fretting, or you’ll worry the poor bairn.”
Ella took his hand and looked up at him. Hoping to make her smile, he pulled her doll out of the tuck in his plaid and held it out to her. When her bottom lip trembled, he saw that the thing was soaking wet from the seawater in the crevice and even sadder looking than before.
“She just needs a wee cleaning up,” he said, then he remembered the dog he’d brought her. “I have a new friend for ye to meet.”
He suddenly realized that after the dog had helped him find Margaret, he’d ridden off and left him without a backward glance.
“Don’t want another horse,” she said. “I likeCeò.”
“Then let’s go visitCeò,” he said.
When they stepped out of the keep, the wee dog was sitting at the bottom of the steps waiting. He was even more pathetic looking than her doll, with his raggedy fur and one eye.
Ella adored him. The bairn had a soft spot for broken things.
“This wee dog deserves a good meal after all he’s done,” Finn said, patting it on the head. “You two get acquainted while I go to the kitchen to get him some meat.”
When he went down into the undercroft, he decided he needed to talk to Isabel one last time. He nodded to the two guards watching the door and went in.
“George will rescue me,” she said as soon as he entered. “After I delivered Alex into his hands, he won’t forget me.”
“He doesn’t have Alex anymore,” Finn said.
Her eye twitched. She had not expected that.
“George doesn’t need ye now,” he said. “He’ll let you take all the blame for the murders.”
“I’m a Sinclair,” she said, staring ahead. “He’ll stand by me.”
She would find out in time. “Ye didn’t ask, but I thought you’d want to know that your husband isn’t doing well.”
“He never loved me,” Isabel snapped. “All these years, he mourned my dead sister.”
Finn wondered for a moment if she knew that her sister was his real mother.
“She ruined everything when she ran off with the manIwas supposed to wed,” she said, jabbing her thumb to her bony chest. “’Twas all arranged. She was to wed Gilbert, and I, as the elder sister, was to marry Robin Sutherland and become Countess of Sutherland.”
“Ye would have become the widow of a rebel, not a countess,” he said.
“With me as his wife, Robin would have succeeded in taking the earldom,” she said. “Nothing and no one would have stood in our way.”
“He chose love instead,” Finn said. “They both did.”
“He died for making the wrong choice,” she said.
Finn was more than ready to leave, but she continued talking, as if he was not there.
“If I had to marry a Gordon, an enemy to my clan, it would not have been such an insult if he was the Earl of Huntly’s first or second son,” she said, bitterness oozing from her like black bile. “But nay, I was bound for life to the third son, a man of low stature and little property. And worst of all, a man my sister discarded.
“I needed to pay them back and take what should have been mine. When my sister came to me seeking forgiveness, I spat in her face and had her followed when she left. Then I told the Gordons where she and Robin were hiding.”
“How could you?” Finn asked. “She trusted you.”
“Robin was caught because of me,” she said. “And yet I wept when I saw his head over the gate at Dunrobin.”