Highland Surrender (20 page)
Read Highland Surrender Online
Authors: Dawn Halliday
He reached out and slid his fingers over hers. They stood for several minutes in silence, their hands clasped as they looked down the heather-covered slope of the mountain.
Elizabeth didn’t eat a bite of her dinner, for she was certain that if she did force something down, it would travel straight back up. She managed a taste of claret, but even that made her stomach rumble and complain. Her uncle watched her throughout the meal with eyes narrowed into slits, but he didn’t comment beyond the banal dinner conversation they had spent endless nights perfecting.
The fact that Cam and Ceana hadn’t appeared made it even more unbearable. A sickening fear stormed incessantly through her, leaving her adrift on a violent ocean, unable to combat the seasickness.
Afterward, she and Uncle Walter retired to the drawing room, where Cam eventually joined them. She and Cam continued the game of chess they’d been playing, but it couldn’t hold her attention.
“You look fatigued this evening, Elizabeth,” Cam said stiffly. “I hope you are sufficiently recovered from this afternoon’s adventure.”
She flicked a glance at Uncle Walter, who sat in one of the silk-covered armchairs reading a religious treatise. “Everything is very well, thank you, my lord. Perhaps I am a little tired.”
The gentlemen excused her, and shortly afterward, Elizabeth lay rigid in bed, eyes closed. She tried not to shake, tried not to imagine the forthcoming punishment.
Please let Uncle Walter come in alone. Please let him give me one more chance. If he comes alone, I shall never speak to Ceana MacNab for the rest of my life. I swear it.
As she did each time she’d earned a punishment, her mind filtered through her options. Could she go to someone? Cam? Explain everything to him? What then? He’d approach her uncle, who would convince Cam of his innocence. Uncle Walter was a duke, above reproach.
The last time she’d trusted someone enough to ask for help—her governess—the woman had believed her uncle when he said she’d been altered by the deaths of her parents. They’d threatened her with Bedlam. For so long, people had looked at her with pity in their eyes. It had taken years to undo the rumors that she’d gone mad.
Perhaps she could run away. She’d escaped from Purefoy Abbey on one occasion, when her uncle had gone to fetch Bitsy for a punishment. Uncle Walter had forgotten all about Bitsy until his men had found Elizabeth shivering in a nearby abandoned barn the following afternoon. She’d learned two important lessons as a result of that ordeal. The first was that if she wasn’t present, her uncle had no reason to abuse Bitsy, and her maid would be safe. The second was that when Elizabeth returned, the repercussions would be severe.
She couldn’t run away. Where would she go, and what would she do? She didn’t know the Highlands well enough, and if she was found, she didn’t doubt that the reprisal to Bitsy would be more than either of them could bear.
Hopeless options still tumbled about in her mind until the clock struck one and Uncle Walter opened the door. “Are you awake, Lizzy?”
She couldn’t summon the voice to answer.
He entered her room, and relief coursed through Elizabeth, for he was alone and empty-handed. But the relief turned into ice-cold panic when wavering candlelight came into view behind him.
“No,” she whispered.
“You leave me no choice.” He sounded tired. “You will never learn.”
Bitsy appeared at the door, holding the flickering candle, her face sallow behind the yellow light. “You should beat me, Uncle,” Elizabeth said breathlessly. “Please. Beat
me
instead. Perhaps then I will learn.”
me
instead. Perhaps then I will learn.”
He sighed. “I wish I could, but you know the many reasons why I cannot. You’re to be married in less than a month. We can’t have you unable to sit at your own wedding feast, now, can we?”
Bitsy set the candle on the table beside the door and stood just inside with her arms clasped behind her back, staring at the floor.
This couldn’t be happening. Panic surged through Elizabeth as she looked desperately from the windows to the door. “Please . . .”
She couldn’t scream, couldn’t fight. She’d tried both before, and to punish her for being difficult, he’d made it worse for Bitsy.
All she could do was watch. She slid her gaze to her maid, who stood still, her thin body vibrating like a plucked violin string.
“Go to the bed,” Uncle Walter ordered, not deigning to look at the frightened woman.
Mechanically, keeping her gaze averted from Elizabeth, Bitsy walked to the bed. She lay on her stomach beside Elizabeth, hitching up her skirts until she revealed her pale, bare buttocks.
A small whimper leaked from Elizabeth’s throat, and she looked away.
“Pay attention,” he snapped.
Her eyes watered. Streams of liquid rolled down her cheeks. “Please,” she whispered.
“Quiet!” He strode to the side of the bed and shoved Bitsy’s skirt higher up her back. “Your mistress has been disobedient again, girl, so you must take another punishment for her.”
Elizabeth choked back a sob. “No!”
“You defied me, Elizabeth. After I warned you, very clearly, against doing so.”
Uncle Walter’s reptilian eyes flicked to Elizabeth, ensuring she watched. She was well trained by now. Knew that she must observe every moment, every detail. She must follow the rules he’d laid out at the beginning, or he would make it worse.
“How many strokes? Ten?” He shook his head gravely. “No, twenty. I think twenty will do it.”
Elizabeth released a low sound of disagreement and shook her head vehemently. The last punishment she’d received was at Purefoy Abbey a year ago. He’d caught her sneaking into the village to deliver a satchel of stolen books from his library to a boy who wanted to learn how to read. Twenty strokes. It was the harshest beating to date. Bitsy wouldn’t sit for days.
He pulled his paddle from an inside pocket of his coat. It was a long, narrow strip of wood that, when hit against flesh, made a
thwack
—a sound Elizabeth had grown to equate with suffering.
thwack
—a sound Elizabeth had grown to equate with suffering.
Bitsy made a low murmur, anticipating the pain.
“Be still, or I’ll make it thirty,” Uncle Walter commanded.
When the first strike came down over her buttocks, the maid flinched and released a low, gravelly cry. Uncle Walter closed his hand over the top part of her skinny thigh and pinned her to the bed as he released another hard blow low on her back. Elizabeth watched, stoic, frozen, but a deep, dark emotion twisted inside her, scraping against all the shields she’d built to keep it contained.
Blows rained down on her maid’s back, thighs, and buttocks. At five strokes, the pale flesh pinkened, and at ten, welts erupted over her skin. At fifteen strokes, blood streaked her buttocks, and she began to make sobbing noises that tore at Elizabeth’s chest.
Elizabeth watched it all, her body quivering, the coverlet held to her throat.
Since she’d arrived in the Highlands, she’d been lured by the promise of friendship, by the idea that she someday might belong, and that had begun to soften her. But she would never find that elusive happiness, acceptance, desire. She wrought only pain and suffering on others. She was a naive fool to have forgotten it.
Her uncle finally stopped. Mottled red spots covered his face, and sweat beaded on his forehead. His close-cropped graying hair stood up in sparse, damp spikes over his head.
He leaned down over Bitsy and gave her his standard warning. “You speak of this to anyone, and the pain you feel now will be merely a soft caress. Do you understand?”
The steely hardness of his tone made it clear that he did not exaggerate. Elizabeth wondered why he bothered with his warning. Bitsy believed every word Uncle Walter told her, and she had never dared to speak to anyone of the beatings. Elizabeth knew that some of the servants at Purefoy Abbey had suspected what was happening, and she’d noted their special kindness to the withdrawn maidservant, but still Bitsy never talked.
He shoved the paddle back into his coat. Elizabeth didn’t watch him leave. Instead she scrambled off the bed, only a dim part of her brain registering the door clicking shut behind her uncle.
She reached down and touched Bitsy’s cheek. “Stay there. Don’t move.”
Long ago, she’d bribed one of the older housemaids at Purefoy Abbey to give her a gallon of the soothing unguent the woman had once made for her brother when he’d fallen and scraped his knee. As a child, Elizabeth had seen the sweet-smelling concoction as a miracle cure, because his tears had turned to smiles and he’d jumped out of her lap and continued running about the countryside, with Elizabeth and their nurse trailing behind him.
I’m sorry, Bitsy. And William, and Mama and Papa. I’m so, so sorry . . .
Now all that was left of the unguent fit into a small jar. Elizabeth stumbled to her dressing table, finding the bottle where she kept it among her lotions and perfumes. Removing the stopper, she returned to Bitsy, who still lay on her stomach on the bed, unmoving but for her chattering teeth.
Elizabeth swallowed. “I’m sorry, Bitsy.”
Bitsy stared at her with blank eyes. There was no pain, no anger. Just a dark, fathomless blankness.
Biting her lip hard enough to draw blood, Elizabeth smoothed the medicine over the hot, flame-red marks on her servant’s backside.
Her fingernail scraped the bottom of the little unguent bottle. Irrational panic bubbled up within Elizabeth. What would she do the next time this happened? She’d have nothing with which to help Bitsy.
Impulsively, she jumped off the bed and returned to her dressing table to open the single drawer. She removed the smallest of the jewelry boxes, the one containing her mother’s diamonds.
She returned to the bed, carrying the box. “Bitsy, look at me,” she commanded. “Look here.”
Slowly, Bitsy’s eyes came to focus on her.
Elizabeth opened the lid and tilted the box so that Bitsy could see the contents. “I want you to take these. I want you to run away.”
Some life flared into Bitsy’s eyes. “No.” Her voice was a harsh croak. “No, milady.”
“He hurts you . . .”
“If I weren’t here, he’d hurt you. Or someone else.”
Elizabeth’s eyes stung. “I don’t care.” For goodness’ sake, she
wanted
Uncle Walter to hurt her. It would be far less painful than being responsible for someone else’s suffering.
wanted
Uncle Walter to hurt her. It would be far less painful than being responsible for someone else’s suffering.
“I won’t go.”
“Please, Bitsy. Please. I cannot bear to watch him do this to you again.”
Bitsy closed her eyes. “There is nowhere for me to go.”
Elizabeth remembered Gràinne, the mountain, how all the women there had rallied around her. If Bitsy told them her story, they’d protect her as well. She knew they would. “I know where you can go.”
“He will be gone soon.”
But that didn’t satisfy Elizabeth. She knew herself. She knew her uncle. He’d executed tonight’s punishment with more glee—and more might—than usual. For some reason, his desire to punish her had increased with their imminent separation. He was searching for a reason to punish her. And she couldn’t promise she could prevent him from finding another reason. She didn’t trust Uncle Walter. Worse, she didn’t trust herself.
“Very well.” She sighed and replaced the lid. “The offer shall remain open. If this happens again . . .” She took a gulping breath. “I fear for your safety, do you understand?”
“I will be all right,” Bitsy said tonelessly.
“You take the diamonds if you like. Anytime. You know where I keep them.”
“I shan’t be needing them.”
Elizabeth shook her head, and as she gently tugged down her maid’s skirts, she recited precise directions to the mountain.
A loud, hollow noise resonated downstairs. Rob leaped to his feet, dirk in hand, before he registered that someone was banging at the door to the stables, which he’d bolted before going to bed.
Gripping the dirk, he took the stairs three at a time and threw open the door, convinced someone had come to tell him disgruntled Jacobites had finally killed the Earl of Camdonn.
Instead, with her golden hair falling over shoulders covered only by the material of a thin shift, the future wife of the earl stood before him. Elizabeth’s blue eyes were wide, and her shoulders shuddered beneath the thin linen.
Rob glanced beyond her into the empty courtyard, then at the darkened windows of the keep. He took her hand to pull her out of the way of curious eyes and shut the door behind them before relocking it.
He clasped her upper arms. “Why are you here? What happened?”
“I . . . I . . .”
She buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.
Rob gathered her close and lifted her in his arms. She grasped his shirt and turned her face, weeping into his shoulder as he carried her. Once upstairs, he gently set her down on the sofa.
Her sobs subsided as he added peat to the fire, and he felt her eyes coming to focus on him. Already abed when she’d knocked, he wore only a linen shirt that covered him to midthigh.
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