“Uncle Richard! Emma!” she screamed. Other people around them started running away. No one would stand next to her. Her uncle and his men were leaving. Wasn’t it just a few moments ago that she was protected by thirty men? She couldn’t be dying!
“Uncle Richard!” she screamed, but he kept on running, not even looking back.
She turned to Harry and Alex and the others, who looked as horrified as she felt. “Take me home. I will ride with—”
“You are infected, lady! John cried out. “You cannot go home! None of us can!”
“What? No! Please, take me home. I…I am not infect…” But she most likely was. Did she want to go home and infect her father?
She let her eyes fill with tears and turned away from them.
After four hours of walking around the town in dazed circles, the realization finally penetrated. They were likely dying of the terrible pestilence. Rose found an inn and paid for four rooms with a ring Emma had given her. She no longer wanted it. They’d left her. It was only a matter of time before the Black Death reached them and they could no longer run.
The men got sicker as the night wore on, as did Rose. They were all infected. Some of the men roamed the hall of the inn crying out that they did not want to die. Some of the others were quiet in their rooms, coughing, burning up with fever and swelling up in certain places.
But Rose closed her eyes happy, at least to have a bed to die in. She didn’t worry about tomorrow. Word was, the plague didn’t take long to kill.
Mercy, at least.
Two days later, almost everyone in the town was dead from the disease.
Rose still lived, though she still felt deathly ill. She tried to do what she could to help the people dying around her. She was sure this was hell. John, Alex, Harry, and all the others were dead. Everywhere she turned, there was crying and the smell which, at some point, had stopped being so continuously sickening.
She didn’t know if she would live to return home. She doubted it. Would she ever see her father again? There were horses here. Some of them died, but not all. Rose thought about going home. But she didn’t know the way, and she didn’t want to spread the pestilence to her father.
She wondered how long she had to live and wanted to fall on her knees and weep to God. But she had done that already. Her eyes were sore and red. She remembered the man falling on her and his bloody eyes.
She thought it couldn’t get any worse. But she was wrong. Soldiers arrived the next morning and began burning the dead and the sick along with them. Some were alive while they are set on fire.
No! Not fire! Rose tried to run away but fell to the ground, weak and coughing. She had no strength left in her when they carried her off and dumped her onto a pile of soft, cold bodies.
Rose was blissfully unaware of where she was, but she knew she was dying. She knew they were going to burn her. She screamed over and over in her thoughts.
With deepest regret, she considered all of the things she hadn’t yet done, hadn’t seen. She had never been courted or kissed. She had never been in love, nor been intimate.
She wanted to weep but it would take too much from her. She wanted to sleep, but she was afraid that if she closed her eyes, she wouldn’t have the strength to open them again.
Someone approached her, blocking her from the sun. A man. He didn’t have a torch. He was handsome and rugged with black hair and pretty eyes that were the same color as the treetops last summer. She couldn’t see the rest of the man’s face.
With her very last ounce of strength, she lifted her hand to him. “Please, sir, help me.”
Chapter Two
Tristan didn’t stop in Crawford for the dead. He came for supplies. What the hell was he doing staring at some dead lass in a pile of bodies?
But she wasn’t dead.
“Please sir…help…me.”
Damnation! He had no idea Crawford had been so ravaged by the Black Death. Was it too late? Should he bother going south? Aye, he should. He’d been paid to see to tasks and they were not yet done.
“Sorry, lass,” he told the dying girl from beneath the kerchief covering his nose and mouth. “Ye are on yer own now.”
“I’m afraid,” she croaked out.
He kneeled by her and shook his head and did his best to sound soothing, but he wasn’t a damned nursemaid. She had the plague. There was nothing he could do for her. He didn’t know why he even stopped over here. He was looking for food and heard her faint voice crying for help. Curious, he’d approached the pile of dead.
He wasn’t afraid of being around death. Death was his occupation.
Still, he wasn’t ready to die just yet, and not from a pestilence. When he died, he’d like to be taken out by someone as skilled and proficient as he was.
He looked around. He didn’t want to stay. “Look, Miss, ’twill be over before ye know it. Ye—”
“No! They will burn me!”
Hell. They couldn’t burn her while she was still alive. He thought about finishing her quickly, but he didn’t kill women or children. Even when Lizzie Noble, the wife of a man he’d killed, followed him through two towns to kill him. She had come after him with vengeance and a quick dagger—quicker than some men. He subdued her and tied her to a tree. Travelers passed the tree every so often, so she would be saved and he’d be miles away.
But this was different.
With nothing more to do for this lass, he straightened and
