After all the upheaval today, last night seemed so very long ago.
“Good night, then,” Niall said.
“Good night,” she returned softly.
Listening to the young man’s footsteps fade, she shivered. The candle in her hand wavered, throwing shadows on the gray stone walls. “I dislike to think of Cromwell visiting this place, let alone using it as a headquarters.” Oliver Cromwell had been indirectly responsible for the deaths of her parents and her own exile that followed.
“It was against my father’s wishes, to say the least. He was a Royalist, through and through.” When Trick wandered to one of the deep-set windows, his voice echoed back out from it. “My mother talked him into leaving.”
“Did she, really?” Squeezing into the niche, Kendra joined him at the window. In the small space he felt warm and near, yet cold and distant, too. By moonlight, she could barely make out the village below, surrounded by acres of wild pasture and tended fields. “This was her family’s ancestral home, wasn’t it? Why would she willingly surrender it?”
“She was a Covenanter,” he said shortly, stepping back into the room. “Come, our chamber is this way.”
He ducked through an arch in the wall and pushed open a thick oak door. On her way inside, she shot one last look at the empty vaulted chamber. The garrison. She wondered if it was haunted by ghosts of dead soldiers.
Not that she believed in anything like that.
The bedchamber was enormous. A four-poster bed in its center looked dwarfed, and after the din of the wake below, the room seemed deathly quiet.
She moved to set the candle on a bedside table, the dull wooden floor sounding gritty beneath her shoes. A fire burned on the hearth, and she wondered who had built it. Jane or Cavanaugh? One of Duncraven’s servants? “Are we the only ones up here?”
“Aye. The towers are mirror images. One great room and one bedchamber on each top level.” With a rueful smile, he locked the door behind them. “As a child, I was terrified to come up here alone.”
“I’m rather terrified now,” Kendra admitted. She sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. “After you left the place to Cromwell, how long was it before you returned?”
“Until now.” Trick shrugged out of his surcoat, folding it over the back of a chair that sat before an immense carved oak desk. “My father settled my mother with relations and spirited me away to France. I was five.” Abruptly he dropped to the chair. “I never saw my mother again.” His voice cracked. “And now I never will.”
Kendra rose to wind her arms around his neck from behind. “Surely she knows that you cared, that you came for her.”
“Maybe.” Sighing, he absently slid open the top desk drawer and riffled through some papers. Dust flew out, tickling her nose. She felt him stiffen. “Losh, would you look at this.”
She straightened. “What is it?”
“A letter. From Oliver Cromwell himself.”
A chill ran up her spine. “We were just talking about him. How odd.” Irrationally afraid to touch the evil man’s writings, she kept her distance while Trick scanned the page. “When was it written?”
“Eighteenth November, 1650.”
“So long ago. Nearly eighteen years.”
“Other than my father, I rarely remember anyone coming up here.” His gaze swept the chamber. “Nothing’s changed in the interim. The same bed, the same desk. This letter probably sat here all this time.”
“What does it say?”
He looked back down to the yellowed parchment. “‘I thought fit to send this trumpet to you, to let you know that, if you please to walk away with your company, and deliver the house to such as I shall send to receive it, you shall have liberty to carry off your arms and goods, and such other necessaries as you have. You have harbored such parties in your house as have basely and inhumanly murdered our men; if you necessitate me to bend my cannon against you, you may expect what I doubt you will not be pleased with. I expect your present answer, and rest your servant, O. Cromwell.’”
“Dear heavens.” Kendra released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Words from the devil himself. Can you blame your mother for wanting to walk away?”
He shrugged uncomfortably. “Father refused at first. He’d fought well and bravely in support of Charles, but when Cromwell opened fire…well, I was inside.” He drew a sharp, shuddering breath, obviously remembering.
Kendra was horrified. “He opened fire with a child inside?”
“Aye. The bombardment destroyed the east parapet and tore a large cavity in the stonework—did you not see it as we came in?”
“I wasn’t looking.”
“At my mother’s behest, Father sent word to the Lord Protector that he saw the point, and he walked away, taking me with him and never looking back.”
She folded the bed’s simple white coverlet back and lowered herself to the plain sheets below. “She wanted to save you.”
“She wanted to save her family’s castle.” He turned in the chair to face her. “If she’d cared for me, she would have come along with us.”
“Maybe your father wouldn’t allow her.”
“Maybe,” Trick conceded. “He was certainly mum on the subject.” He shoved the paper into the desk and slammed the drawer. “And I wouldn’t blame him if he did leave her that coldly. She was no mother or wife to be proud of. Besides being a Covenanter, she was an adulteress, and—”
“You judge her harshly.”
A momentary look of self-doubt crossed his face, then disappeared so fast, she wondered if she’d imagined it. “I’ve told you how I feel about infidelity.”
She’d told him how she felt about infidelity as well, but she knew better than to bring that up. Living with three brothers had taught her how to deal with male moods. Gingerly. “Do you remember her as being
