‘Oh, I think she does,’ said Colonel Graeme’s voice, as cold and dangerous as thinly frozen ice.
Sophia, scarcely able to believe it, let her eyes come open just enough to brave a look. She saw the colonel standing close behind the gardener, looking as he must have looked in battle, with his face no longer kind but deadly calm. He’d twisted Billy Wick’s one arm back in a painful hold, and had his own arm wrapped around the gardener’s neck. She saw in Wick’s own eyes the fear that he had often fed upon from others as the colonel jerked Wick back again and brought his hard mouth close beside Wick’s ear and said, ‘I think she has a choice.’
And then Sophia saw the colonel’s hand and arm, in one swift motion, sweep around and catch Wick’s jaw, and from the sound that followed and the way the gardener slumped she knew his neck was broken. Colonel Graeme cast Wick’s body to the side disdainfully. ‘Now get ye to the devil,’ he advised the corpse, and kicked it with his booted foot to send it tumbling over down the steep slope of the hillside to the rocks and sea below.
Stunned, Sophia watched him. She had never seen a man do murder. Not like this. This was, she thought, how Moray must himself be on the battlefield—he too must wear that calm face that had set aside its conscience, and his eyes would, like his uncle’s, hold a fire she did not recognize. It shook her to observe the transformation.
She was staring at him, wordless, when the colonel’s features altered once again. The soldier’s face became the face she knew, and all the fury melted from his eyes as he bent down to her. Concerned, he asked her, ‘Are ye hurt?’
She could not frame the words to answer, shaken still by Wick’s attack, by what she had just witnessed. But she slowly shook her head. The pain of that small action made her wince.
The colonel placed a gentle hand beneath her, fingers warm against her hair, and then withdrew it. She could see his palm was wet with blood. Her blood.
‘Christ.’ He looked around and seemed to be deciding something, thinking quickly. Then he leaned in close again. ‘I need ye to be brave now for me, lass. We need to get ye home, and if I could I’d carry ye, but then the people that we pass would ken that ye’ve been hurt. There would be questions. Do ye follow what I’m saying?’ Just to make sure that she understood, he spelled it out more plainly. ‘No one saw this. No one kens Wick’s dead. And when they find his body, if they do, they will believe he fell by accident. And Ogilvie,’ he told her, ‘will believe it, too.’
He held her gaze a moment, making sure she took his meaning, and she knew that he had overheard Wick’s threat to her. For that at least, she thought, she could be grateful—Billy Wick had done what she could not. He’d given proof to Colonel Graeme by his words that Ogilvie, despite his years of service to King James, had come among them as a traitor and a spy.
She knew that Captain Ogilvie must never know the truth of what had happened on this hill, or he would know that he himself had been discovered.
Looking up at Colonel Graeme, she breathed deep and found her voice again to tell him, ‘I can walk.’
He helped her stand, and held her steady on her feet, and with the hands that had so lately killed a man he gently drew the soft hood of her cloak up so it hid the blood upon her hair. ‘Brave lass,’ he called her, with a trace of pride, and placed her hand upon his arm. ‘Go slowly now, and keep your head up. ’Tis not far to go.’
That was a lie, and well he knew it, for the walk was not a short one, but she managed it, and Ogilvie himself would not have known that she was injured, had he seen them coming up the path to Slains. She did not see him anywhere, but she could not be certain he was not against some window, looking out, and so she kept her head held high as Colonel Graeme had advised her, though the throbbing in it pained her and she felt at any moment she might faint.
The chills of shock had settled well upon her and her limbs were trembling, but the colonel’s strong arm underneath her hand was a support. They had not far to go now, to the great front steps.
‘How did you know?’ she asked him, and he turned toward her, with an eyebrow lifting.
‘What, that ye had need of help? I kent when I came back here and I saw the gardener setting out. I saw the way he marked that I was on my own, and I could see he had a mind for mischief. So I came,’ he said, ‘to fetch ye home.’
A few more paces, and he’d have accomplished that. She fought the rising blackness, and looked up at him in hopes that he could see beyond the pain that filled her eyes and know her gratitude. The words took effort. ‘Colonel?’