By Fire and by Sword (22 page)

There was no one else in the room and not a sound could be heard, save the occasional snap or pop of the low fire. The light coming in the windows touched his dark, shining hair with glints of burgundy, and the skin over his high cheekbones glowed.

She caught the way he looked at her, for it told her he was well aware of her scrutiny, and she saw the humor in his intense blue eyes.

“I thought you were still down at the ship.”

“I have only this minute returned. I was looking for Alejandro.”

“He was in the courtyard with Josette.”

“What are they doing out there?”

“Archery.”

“Alejandro? Are you sure?”

“I saw it with my own eyes. Why does that seem so strange to you?”

“Alejandro has never shot a bow in his life.”

She grinned. “I know. He managed to hit everything in the courtyard except the target.”

Colin shook his head. “When a man becomes infatuated with a woman, he does strange things.”

Her brows went up. “Oh? I was not aware of that. So, tell me Colin Montgomery, what strange things have you been doing of late?”

It was his turn to grin. “A man has to keep some secrets, otherwise you would probably have me out there shooting arrows like an idiot.”

Before she could respond to that, he said, “I will go and look for him, and hope I don’t get an arrow in my backside doing it.”

The sound of her laughter stayed with him, long after the sight of her was gone.

The next morning Kenna supervised the maids in the unpacking of her trunks, while two doors away, Josette did the same. They were both still thankful that the
duc
had devised a plan to get both their things to Scotland.

When she opened the last trunk, Kenna found the sword the
comte
had given her lying on top, and when she removed it from its velvet sleeve, the wide-eyed maids looked at one another fearfully, until Kenna assured them they were in no danger. “It was a gift to me from a very dear friend,” she told them. “He is dead, and the sword is more precious to me now than it was before.”

The maids smiled and went back to work, but Kenna knew she would be the topic of discussion in the kitchen tonight, when the staff sat down to dinner together.

She left her room and went to see how Josette was doing with her unpacking, and found everything tidied away. As for Josette, she was lying on the bed, with a dreamy look on her face.

Kenna sat down beside her. “You aren’t falling in love with Alejandro, are you?”

“No, but if I was, would that be a problem for you?”

“Of course not. All I want is for you to be happy.”

“I am happy, and I am also surprised, for I did not expect to be, at least not so soon after the
comte’
s death. I am glad you insisted I come with you. If I had remained at the château, I would have grieved myself to death.”

Josette’s gaze went to the end of the bed, and Kenna knew she noticed the sword Kenna had placed there before she sat down. “I’m glad you brought it. It is good to have a part of him here with us.”

“I know.”

“You have not worked with your sword for several weeks. The
comte
would not be pleased.”

“Where will I find a fencing master here?”

“You do not need a fencing master. The
comte
said you had learned all he could teach you. If you want to practice, I will fight with you like we did before.”

“I don’t know…you always got so angry.”

“You were not my friend then.”

“Excellent! But we will need to get a sword for you.”

“I brought my sword with me, just as you did.”

Kenna stood and picked up the weapon. “I will find a place tomorrow. It will be good to pick up the sword again.”

“It will also help save your life, or have you allowed a false sense of security lull you into complacency?”

“No, I have not done that, but I was a bit overwhelmed when we first arrived. I will see you at dinner,” she said, her tone cold and final.

A man may drink and no be drunk;

A man may fight and no be slain;

A man may kiss a bonnie lass,

And aye be welcome back again.

—Robert Burns (1759-1796),

Scottish poet and songwriter.

“There Was a Lass, They Ca’d Her Meg” (1788).

F
or the next two days, Colin and Alejandro spent most of their time on board
Dancing Water
, and their work was paying off. With no timber the size of a mast available, they had to work with what timber they could find to brace the mast, after which, they wrapped it with rope from top to bottom. They then ran cables from it to the outer extremities of the ship, to hold the mended mast straight and in place. It was not repaired, but it was mended enough that they felt it would get
them to where they needed to go to have a new mast built.

Because they were away from the castle, Colin did not have much time to be with Kenna. It wasn’t the way he wanted things, but he knew she had much to take care of, and she needed to start her training again. He knew he was a distraction for her. Part of him wanted to stay nearby to protect her; part of him knew she would resent that.

He informed the crew to take the rest of the afternoon off, for tomorrow they would prepare the ship for sailing. He calculated they had one more day here and then they would be gone. Soon, Colin would have her repairs finished, and there would no longer be a reason for him to remain in Scotland.

Kenna was someone he cared about, and he cared a lot. He wanted to pursue this attraction they had for each other, and see if it led to something permanent, or if it would eventually die out. There was a price to pay for this pursuit, though, and it was the slow torment that left him feeling as if he was standing on a razor-thin edge of sanity. He not only had Kenna to worry about, and the clock that was eating up the minutes he had with her, but also the ever-mounting desire thundering through his veins. All in all this was fast proving to be a trying afternoon.

For most of the day, he carried in the back of his mind the memory of being with her the day before, an image of how he imagined her naked—of her generous, rose-tipped breasts, a nipped-in waist, and the flare of feminine hips. And that caused a flare of something else. With a sad sigh, he damned himself for a
fool for pushing away the thought. Some trade-off that was—the image of her naked body in exchange for the sudden shrinking of his erection.

In spite of what Kenna said, Colin was not sure there was a distillery at Durness Castle, for they had just spent a good part of the morning searching for it and had thus far come up with only a small room for brewing beer. “If there was a distillery here, where is it?” Colin asked.

“I don’t know, but we will find it.”

“Doesn’t Ewen know where it is?”

“He said my grandfather shut it down before he came to work for him.”

“Well, he should still know where it was.”

“I know, and I cannot decide if he truly does not know, or if he does not want me to know where it was located.”

“That doesn’t make much sense, though, does it?”

“No, but it doesn’t make much sense that we cannot find something as big as a distillery.”

They walked together toward the sole entrance in the north wall, at the base of the tower, where there were two cellars at one time. One cellar was made into the great hall, but they were having no luck finding the second one.

The steps to the first cellar that led to the great hall were to the right. Colin opened the double door and paused to study its construction.

“This is ingenious,” he said. “Look at this. See how the doors were designed so they opened to the outside and blocked access to the stairs.”

“Smart ancestors,” she said. “I must have inherited that from them. Remind me to show you the beheading pit, with a beheading block,” she said. “It lies on the other side of the castle.”

“Nice ancestors you had.”

“We have a turbulent past, you know. I hope that the unfortunate ones who ended up there truly deserved it. It is a gruesome thing to have in close proximity to one’s home. I want to have it dismantled.”

“A sensible idea. In the meantime, I will strive not to anger you.”

They inspected the kitchen and storage rooms, then the laundry, and found nothing. She was disappointed and it showed on her face. “I know it has to be somewhere.”

“Perhaps it was blocked over at some point in time.”

“You could be right, and since we cannot find it, I suppose that is why. That means we have to see every place it could have been.” They walked down a long corridor and passed several places where it looked like windows were once there but had been blocked up with stone. Kenna stopped. “Look at this,” she said, pointing to the shape of a window that had been filled in. “There are several of them along this corridor.”

“It looks as if they closed off a section of the cellar. Perhaps they did not need it, so sealed it off.”

“Or, perhaps it is where my grandfather had his distillery.”

They walked toward the end of the corridor, but instead of going out the doors, they continued on to the end, where a long table stood in front of a window. To
the right they found curving stairs that led down to a door. Colin broke the padlock and they entered through the narrow arched doorway.

They entered a cavernous room and stepped back in time to the ancient world of alchemists. The scent of peat and malt permeated the room, blended with a hint of smoke that clung to the smoke-darkened stone walls.

Colin took out his tinderbox and a lit a candle with the flint and steel, and used the candle to light one of the torches hanging from a metal bracket on the wall. The glow of candlelight revealed the clutter that had accumulated over time. “It doesn’t look as if it has been cleaned in a century,” she said. “Some of these things look ancient, as if they have been here since the castle was built.”

A table along one wall was covered with an assortment of jars, vials, pestles and pottery jars with lids that she was afraid to lift.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but each time I think about opening them, I get a cold chill.”

He laughed at her trepidation, while he studied some shelves on one side of the room that did not look sturdy enough to hold all the wooden boxes, moldering books, rolled scrolls of parchment, with a scattering of tins, beakers, vials and flasks, that it held.

She rubbed her arms, roughened by goose bumps. “This looks like the den of an old Celtic crone,” she said.

“Or Merlin’s abode in a cave,” he said.

“Doesn’t it feel creepy in here to you? I feel as if all
we need are some ground bat wings, and a ewer of bog water.”

He chuckled. “If we’re going that far, we might as well add a few frog toes, blind worms, lizard legs and a raven on a perch,” Colin said.

“Hmm, I have learned something else about you,” she said. “You read
Macbeth.
”

“I did, but I am surprised I remembered any of it, other than the first line—‘Double, double, toil and trouble.’”

Kenna finished it for him:

“I am amazed you memorized that,” he said. “Why?”

She shrugged. “You know Macbeth was a Scot. Well, my father thought his bairns should all learn several passages from it. Naturally all seven of us chose the witches’ lines as one of them.”

She looked around the room. “I can picture what it
must have been like in here. Can’t you just imagine it? I can see them now, entirely isolated from the outside world, like medieval monks, veiled by the silence of their vows. They would walk along these same vaulted corridors, across the polished stone floors to the barley room. As if they were the sole guardians of some mystical secret, they protected the centuries-old scrap of parchment…an ancient recipe taken from Arab al-chemists for a mediaeval elixir, which my ancestors transformed into whisky.”

“Your imagination,” he said, “is overwhelming.”

“Come on,” she said, and they looked along the walls, where silent torches once gleamed and sputtered from dozens of metal brackets. Farther over, they discovered dozens of remnants of guttered candles lying in dust on tables. An old brass brazier stood in the corner.

She gave it a closer inspection. “We had a brazier like that. It burned sea coal. I wonder what tales the shifting shadows in this cellar could tell, what secrets still lie in here, waiting to be revealed?”

She spied two cupboards in the wall and she went and put her hand on the handle. She glanced back at him with a mischievous look on her face. “I hope bats and ravens do not fly oot.”

She opened the cupboard and found a large, cracked, leather-bound book. She lit two more candles, and watched as the light of the feeble flames crept forward as slow as the wispy veils of fog that came in with the tide.

She opened the book. It was written in Gaelic, so she
translated it for Colin. “It says that in 1294, some of my ancestors dedicated themselves to live in seclusion, self-sufficient and isolated from the rest of the world. Here they were able to get peat, and could grow most of the grains needed for their secret recipe.

“According to this, in the year 1244 a Spanish ship wrecked on the rocks below the castle. There were only three survivors, who were brought into the castle. Two of them died, but the third, an Arab, survived. When he was well enough to return to his home, he gave them an alchemist’s recipe for an elixir he called the Water of Life.

“They locked it away and forgot about it. It wasn’t until half a century later, when bad weather and failing crops threatened the lives of all the residents of Durness, that they turned to the ancient recipe.”

“The recipe was for whisky?”

She read on. “The Egyptians practiced the distillation of perfumes three thousand years before the birth of Christ. The word
alcohol
comes from the Arabic word
al-koh’l.
Koh’l, it says, is a dark powder from pulverized antimony and was used as an eye makeup.” She paused. “Do you know what antimony is?”

“I think it’s a sulfurlike compound.”

“The rest of it says the distillation of
aqua vitae
, or water of life, spread across Europe, especially Ireland and Scotland under its Gaelic name of Uisge Beatha.”

“Is that all?”

“Almost, but the rest of it is not so important. It says all the distilling utensils, and the
bere
, which was a preferable type of barley, was imported from Ireland beginning in 1650.”

She closed the book and a cloud of dust arose, which set both of them to coughing.

Kenna returned the book to the cabinet. “I wonder who wrote that, and how long ago it was written.”

“Come over here,” Colin said, and she turned to see him at the opposite end of the cellar. It was darker at that end, so she carried a torch, and saw the old still that was mentioned in the book. It was probably copper, but it needed cleaning to be certain. What really excited her was, it was all there—the four parts—the vessel, head, arm and the worm.

They opened a door and found wooden casks stacked along one wall, and farther over were what she called “Ancient Celtic copper cauldrons.
Celtic copper cauldrons
,” she said. “It is a phrase that tangles and tickles the tongue.”

“Now, here is something interesting,” he said, and she followed him to a door with another huge padlock. “This door leads outside.”

She studied it a moment. “How do you know?”

He pointed at the keyhole. “I can see daylight through the original keyhole.”

“Aah, I was wondering how they carried all their supplies up and down those stairs.”

They walked back to the center of the room. She stopped beside the long table that ran down the center and leaned against it, suddenly aware of the way he was looking at her.

Her first impulse was to tell him to put the thought out of his mind. There were more important things to be done than falling in love with him, and she itched
to tell him so, but she knew it would lead to an argument, and she was not up to one right now. She was trying, really trying to keep everything pleasant until his ship was ready and he was gone. She clamped her mouth shut in order to be sure she did just that.

She did not know how long they stood there, neither of them speaking, but at some point, he must have grown tired, for he moved over to the table and leaned back against it. She followed the long line of his legs down to where his ankles crossed. A woman could do a whole lot worse than a man like him.

A lot worse.

They stood side by side, leaning back against the table, and said absolutely nothing, each aware that their bodies touched lightly at the hip. She wondered if he was going to kiss her, and she knew she would let him. Not only let him; she wished that he would do just that, and more. She wanted to know how it would feel to lie with him in total abandon, to give him the freedom to teach her all he knew about a woman’s body. She swallowed audibly. Along with the mental yearning, strange things were happening to her body. She knew it was desire, and she did desire him.

Yet, neither of them spoke as they looked upon the leavings of those who had used this room a long time ago.

“I guess it’s going to be me,” he said at last.

“I do not get your point—if you are making one.”

“I am talking about what we are both thinking.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You are not that dense, but you are too stubborn to
give an inch. You were thinking what I was thinking, only I will admit it. You want me every bit as much as I want you, but you are an obstinate wench,” he said. He took her face in his hands and touched his lips to hers, silencing forever the intended retort that waited on the tip of her tongue.