I followed the whisk of her disappearing skirts round the bend of the hall. The floor here was carpeted; if I didn't hurry, I might lose her at an intersection, unable to hear from the footsteps which way she had gone. I put my head down, charged round the last corner, and crashed head-on into a man coming the other way.
He let out a startled "Whoof!" as I struck him amidships, and clutched me by the arms to keep upright as we swayed and staggered together.
"I'm sorry," I began, breathlessly. "I thought you were—oh, Jesus H. f**king Christ!"
My initial impression—that I had encountered Alexander Randall—had lasted no more than the split second necessary to see the eyes above that finely chiseled mouth. The mouth was much like Alex's, bar the deep lines around it. But those cold eyes could belong to only one man.
The shock was so great that for a moment everything seemed paradoxically normal; I had an impulse to apologize, dust him off, and continue my pursuit, leaving him forgotten in the corridor, as just a chance encounter. My adrenal glands hastened to remedy this impression, dumping such a dose of adrenaline into my bloodstream that my heart contracted like a squeezed fist.
He was recovering his own breath by now, along with his momentarily shattered self-possession.
"I am inclined to concur with your sentiments, Madam, if not precisely with their manner of expression." Still clutching me by the elbows, he held me slightly away from him, squinting to see my face in the shadowed hall. I saw the shock of recognition blanch his features as my face came into the light. "Bloody hell, it's you!" he exclaimed.
"I thought you were dead!" I wrenched at my arms, trying to free them from the iron-tight grip of Jonathan Randall.
He let go of one arm, in order to rub his middle, surveying me coldly. The thin, fine-cut features were bronzed and healthy; he gave no outward sign of having been trampled five months before by thirty quarter-ton beasts. Not so much as a hoofprint on his forehead.
"Once more, Madam, I find myself sharing your sentiments. I was under a very similar misapprehension concerning your state of health. Possibly you are a witch, after all—what did you do, turn yourself into a wolf?" The wary dislike stamped on his face was mingled with a touch of superstitious awe. After all, when you turn someone out into the midst of a pack of wolves on a cold winter evening, you rather expect them to cooperate by being eaten forthwith. The sweatiness of my own palms and the drumlike beating of my heart were testimony to the unsettling effect of having someone you thought safely dead suddenly rise up in front of you. I supposed he must be feeling a trifle queasy as well.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" The urge to annoy him—to disturb that icy calm—was the first emotion to surface from the seething mass of feelings that had erupted within me at sight of his face. His fingers tightened on my arm, and his lips thinned. I could see his mind working, starting to tick off possibilities.
"If it wasn't yours, whose body did Sir Fletcher's men take out of the dungeon?" I demanded, trying to take advantage of any break in his composure. An eyewitness had described to me the removal of "a rag doll, rolled in blood"—presumably Randall—from the scene of the cattle stampede that had masked Jamie's escape from that same dungeon.
Randall smiled, without much humor. If he was as rattled as I, he didn't show it. His breathing was a trifle faster than usual, and the lines that edged mouth and eyes cut deeper than I remembered, but he wasn't gasping like a landed fish. I was. I took in as much oxygen as my lungs would allow and tried to breathe through my nose.
"It was my orderly, Marley. Though if you aren't answering my questions, why should I answer yours?" He looked me up and down, carefully evaluating my appearance: silk gown, hair ornaments, jewelry, and stockinged feet.
"Married a Frenchman, did you?" he asked. "I always did think you were a French spy. I trust your new husband keeps you in better order than…"
The words died in his throat as he looked up to see the source of the footsteps that had just turned into the hall behind me. If I had wanted to discompose him, that urge was now fully gratified. No Hamlet on the stage had ever reacted to the appearance of a ghost with more convincing terror than I saw stamped on that aristocratic face. The hand still holding my arm clawed deep into my flesh, and I felt the jolt of shock that surged through him like an electric charge.
I knew what he saw behind me, and was afraid to turn. There was a deep silence in the hall; even the wash of the cypress branches against the windows seemed part of the quiet, like the ear-roaring silence that waves make, at the bottom of the sea. Very slowly, I disengaged my arm from his grasp, and his hand fell nerveless to his side. There was no sound behind me, though I could hear voices start up from the room at the end of the hall. I prayed that the door would stay closed, and tried desperately to remember how Jamie was armed.
My mind went blank, then blazed with the reassuring vision of his small-sword, hung by its belt from a hook on the wardrobe, sun glowing on the enameled hilt. But he still had his dirk, of course, and the small knife he habitually carried in his stocking. Come to that, I was entirely sure that in a pinch, he would consider his bare hands perfectly adequate. And if you cared to describe my present situation, standing between the two of them, as a pinch…I swallowed once and slowly turned around.
He was standing quite still, no more than a yard behind me. One of the tall, paned casements opened near him, and the dark shadows of the cypress needles rippled over him like water over a sunken rock. He showed no more expression than a rock, either. Whatever lived behind those eyes was hidden; they were wide and blank as windowpanes, as though the soul they mirrored were long since flown.
He didn't speak, but after a moment, reached out one hand to me. It floated open in the air, and I finally summoned the presence of mind to take it. It was cool and hard, and I clung to it like the wood of a raft.
He drew me in, close to his side, took my arm and turned me, all without speaking or changing expression. As we reached the turning of the hall, Randall spoke behind us.
"Jamie," he said. The voice was hoarse with shock, and held a note halfway between disbelief and pleading.
Jamie stopped then, and turned to look at him. Randall's face was a ghastly white, with a small red patch livid on each cheekbone. He had taken off his wig, clenched in his hands, and sweat pasted the fine dark hair to his temples.
"No." The voice that spoke above me was soft, almost expressionless. Looking up, I could see that the face still matched it, but a quick, hot pulse beat in his neck, and the small, triangular scar above his collar flushed red with heat.
"I am called Lord Broch Tuarach for formality's sake," the soft Scottish voice above me said. "And beyond the requirements of formality, you will never speak to me again—until you beg for your life at the point of my sword. Then, you may use my name, for it will be the last word you ever speak."
With sudden violence, he swept around, and his flaring plaid swung wide, blocking my view of Randall as we turned the corner of the hall.
The carriage was still waiting by the gate. Afraid to look at Jamie, I climbed in and absorbed myself in tucking the folds of yellow silk around my legs. The click of the carriage door shutting made me look up abruptly, but before I could reach the handle, the carriage started with a jerk that threw me back in my seat.
Struggling and swearing, I fought my way to my knees and peered out of the back window. He was gone. Nothing moved on the drive but the swaying shadows of cypress and poplar.
I hammered frenziedly on the roof of the carriage, but the coachman merely shouted to the horses and urged them on faster. There was little traffic at this hour, and we hurtled through the narrow streets as though the devil were after us.
When we drew up in the Rue Tremoulins, I sprang out of the coach, at once panicked and furious.
"Why didn't you stop?" I demanded of the coachman. He shrugged, safely impervious atop his perch.
"The master ordered me to drive you home without delay, Madame." He picked up the whip and touched it lightly to the off-horse's rump.
"Wait!" I shouted. "I want to go back!" But he only hunched himself turtle-like into his shoulders, pretending not to hear me, as the coach rattled off.
Fuming with impotence, I turned toward the door, where the small figure of Fergus appeared, thin brows raised questioningly at my appearance.
"Where's Murtagh?" I snapped. The little clansman was the only person I could think of who might be able first, to find Jamie, and secondly, to stop him.
"I don't know, Madame. Maybe down there." The boy nodded in the direction of the Rue Gamboge, where there were several taverns, ranging in respectability from those where a traveling lady might dine with her husband, to the dens near the river, which even an armed man might hesitate to enter alone.
I laid a hand on Fergus's shoulder, as much for support as in exhortation.
"Run and find him, Fergus. Quickly as you can!"
Alarmed by my tone, he leaped off the step and was gone, before I could add "Be careful!" Still, he knew the lower levels of Paris life much better than I did; no one was better adapted to eeling through a tavern crowd than an ex-pickpocket. At least I hoped he was an ex-pickpocket.
But I could worry effectively about only one thing at a time, and visions of Fergus being captured and hanged for his activities receded before the vision Jamie's final words to Randall had evoked.