Page 27 of Highlander's Sinless Nymph
“If any word of what we come across is leaked to the camp at large, I will have each and every one of you systematically whipped raw until I find out who it was that spoke. And, when I find out who that man is, I shall have a spectacle made of him. Do you understandthat?”
“Yes, Captain,” the soldiers repeated.
“Good. Now, who is the tracker in this band?” Captain Bolton said, his eyes sweeping the company.
“I am, sir,” a bald, pockmarked fellow said.
“Well then, might I suggest pressing your nose to the ground and finding out where that damned girl has got to?” Captain Bolton said.
“Yes, sir,” the tracker replied, scrabbling at his reins and kicking his horse into a walk. “Very good, sir.”
* * *
Adair Bolton was a rational man. He knew that his daughter embodied many traits––intelligence, inquisitiveness, perseverance, and stubborn single-mindedness––which would have seen her go far had she been born a man. But she did not know the first thing about covering her tracks.
They followed her obvious trails across the moors. It was not a trail that needed an expert hunter to follow. Captain Bolton could see clearly for himself that there were two distinct set of tracks; both coming and going down the same path. The grass was bent, mud churned under foot.
Eventually, they fetched up at the edge of a glade, an open space surrounded by gnarled beeches and filled with their fallen leaves. Had he known it, it was the very glade in which the fox cub had run its claws down Charlotte’s arm, where Edward had first come across her.
“Halt here,” Captain Bolton ordered.
The group of riders did as they were told. Captain Bolton dismounted and walked out into the glade, his highly polished boots crunching through the dead leaves.
“Sir?” one of the men ventured.
“Speak,” replied Captain Bolton.
“Sir, there are tracks leading up this hill. The dragging footfalls of a couple of people if I am any judge, perhaps three.”
Captain Bolton’s eyes were glued to the forest floor. Something in his guts, a feeling that he never ignored and which had saved his life on more than one occasion, told him that he would find his answers here.
Though, clearly, my daughter and her cursed basket are nowhere to be seen.
“Go and follow them as quick as you can. Report back to me when you are done,” he told the man who had spoken, without even looking up from his investigating of the area. The sound of receding hoofs told him that the man had gone.
He kept searching for a good while. Part of the reason he was such a successful military campaigner was because he trusted his instincts implicitly and because he never allowed anything to rush him. Impatience and haste, in his experience, could be the parents of disaster and delay.
The sound of a horse returning made him look up. He turned and saw that the rider he had sent away had come back. He was empty-handed.
“And?” he demanded.
“They led up to a dell hidden behind a blackthorn hedge, sir. I found a couple of beggars in there.”
“You questioned them?” Captain Bolton asked.
“Yes, sir. I asked them whether or not they had seen a young woman in the area––then proceeded to give a physical description of Miss Bolton––and they told me that they had not.”
Captain Bolton turned back to his survey of the terrain around him.
“However, they did say that they were assaulted last night by a tall young man,” the red coat continued. “English, if his accent was anything to go by. A violent man. One of the beggars was sporting a rather impressive black eye, which I took to attest to their words.”
“Did you question them…hard?” Captain Bolton asked, his back still to the rest of the men.
“Um, no, sir,” the trooper said, “their information seemed credible, and they had no reason to lie to one of His Majesty’s soldiers, surely?”
It was only Captain Bolton’s iron self-control that stopped him rolling his eyes at these pompous words.
“So, no sign or rumor of my daughter?” he clarified.
