“Ye will tell Glynis your true intentions,” Alex said, leaning forward until they were nose to nose.
“I did not mean to deceive her,” D’Arcy said, and took a step back.
“Ye will tell her today.”
“I will be honest with Glynis, of course.” D’Arcy raised an eyebrow. “Will you do the same, my friend?”
“I haven’t misled her.” In fact, he had made her an honorable proposal.
“Yet, I do not believe you have told the lady your true feelings,” D’Arcy said, studying him with narrowed eyes. “If I’d known them myself, I would never have approached her.”
* * *
Sorcha hid behind Bessie’s skirts when she saw the black-eyed woman coming toward them. Sometimes the woman looked at Sorcha like a mean dog that bites.
“You can go,” the woman said to Bessie. “I’ll take her to her father.”
“The mistress told me… ,” Bessie started to say, but her voice faded.
Sorcha understood how words could get stuck inside you.
Bessie left them with a long look over her shoulder. When the woman took Sorcha’s wrist, Sorcha tried to pull away, but the woman gave her that mean-dog look.
“Don’t fuss,” the woman snapped, and started dragging her down the path.
Sorcha wanted to call out for her father or Glynis, but her throat was closed tight.
“Do ye understand a word I say? Ach, how did a clever man like Alex sire an idiot?”
The woman’s voice was like her eyes, full of jagged teeth.
“The man dotes on ye like a pet,” she said. “I can’t have my husband putting his idiot child before me and the children of Campbell blood that I intend to give him.”
CHAPTER 30
Glynis stared out the bedchamber window at the distant hills as she brushed her hair. Like a child, she had spent the entire afternoon in here to avoid seeing either Alex or D’Arcy before she made up her mind. Although she knew it would be the sensible thing to do, she could not quite convince herself to give D’Arcy permission to approach her father to negotiate a marriage contract.
From the corner of her eye, Glynis caught a flash of hair the color of moonbeams. She stepped closer to the narrow window for a better look.
What was Catherine Campbell doing leading Sorcha down the path that ran along the loch? The child missed Rosebud and Buttercup, as they all did, so Glynis had sent her with Bessie to see if Alex could take her for one last ride before the horses’ owners came to claim them. Alex must have let Catherine take Sorcha for a walk instead.
This was a ploy of Catherine’s to win Alex, for the woman did not like the child. Glynis had seen how Catherine looked at Sorcha when Alex was not watching. To be charitable, perhaps Catherine was attempting to forge a bond with the child.
But there was something about the determined way Catherine was walking that made the hairs on the back of Glynis’s neck stand up. And the child was dragging her feet. When Glynis saw how Sorcha kept glancing over her shoulder, she dropped her brush and flew out the door.
She was probably being foolish, but fear pulsed through her veins, urging her feet faster. When she reached the hall, she forced herself to slow to a fast walk and took care not to meet anyone’s eyes, lest they try to speak with her. She could not see Sorcha and Catherine when she stepped out of the doors of the keep. Sweat broke out on her palms.
As soon as she reached the bottom of the keep steps, Glynis picked up her skirts and ran across the castle yard, through the gate, and down to the loch. She continued running along the path that disappeared into the tall brush by the loch. Though she had no reason to suspect Catherine would harm the child, Glynis could not talk herself out of her fear. She ran faster, heedless of the briars that tugged at her gown. Branches slashed at her arms and face.
When she reached a split in the path, she paused, heart racing. One fork went up the hill, while the other continued through the thicker vegetation along the shoreline. She took the shoreline path, instinct telling her the greater danger lay in that direction.
When she still did not see them, panic pounded through her veins. Had she taken the wrong fork? She started to turn around when she thought she heard something.
Glynis paused to listen. At first she could hear nothing over the thundering of her heart. But then, she heard it again. A child’s whimper.
“Your father will be disappointed,” she heard a woman’s voice, cajoling, “when I tell him ye are afraid of the water.”
Sorcha did not fear the water—Glynis had never seen a child less afraid of it.