Page 72 of Highlander's Sinless Nymph
Who would have thought that all it would take was a little time spent with a wild and able-handed Highlander to make me realize just what I am capable of?
She slipped through the camp, making sure not to try and hide. She knew that she would be easily recognized by her stature and the way that she walked, and so to act furtively would only draw attention and suspicion to her.
Besides, I doubt that my father’s pride will allow it to be made general knowledge just exactly what I have done.
Her suspicions on both counts proved to be correct. As she was approaching the picket line, where most of the camp’s horses were tied to a long rope, she was hailed at by someone out in the rain and the wind.
“Oi, who goes there!” came the muffled voice––the sound of a sentry with his face stuck deep in the collar of his great coat.
Plumbing the new reserves of courage that the situation called for, Charlotte walked boldly towards the voice. She could make little out of the man in the dark, with the storm whipping all around them.
“It’s Miss Bolton,” she yelled over another crashing roll of thunder that cracked so loudly overhead that she would not have been surprised to see cracks run across the cloudy night sky. “Don’t pretend you don’t recognize me!”
The man seemed quite taken aback by her tone, and Charlotte realized that she had always been kind and meek in the presence of the soldiers. Now though, she spoke with authority––ironically, for the first time in her life, sounding like her father’s daughter.
“What do you mean hailing me when I’m trying to get to my horse in this weather?” she yelled, poking the man in the chest with an admonitory finger.
The man stuttered something that was lost in another roll of thunder.
“What was that?” Charlotte demanded.
“I just wondered why it was you might be out and about in the middle of the night, especially on a night as foul as this, Miss Bolton,” the wretched man said in a louder voice.
Charlotte frowned. “I don’t see what business that is of yours, my good man,” she said. “I need to get something I left in my saddlebags and was meant to show my father in the morning, and that should be quite enough for you to know.”
The man, clearly wishing that he had simply allowed Charlotte to pass, and so saved himself an ear-bashing, bowed his head and went to move off.
“Wait!” Charlotte said, struck by a sudden thought. The sentry came splashing back to her.
“Yes, miss,” he said.
Lightning lit Charlotte’s face, showing, just for a second, the puffy bottom lip that told of her latest run-in with Captain Bolton. In one hand, concealed beneath her cloak, she held the antler handle of Edward’s knife.
Please, God, do not make me have to use it.
She might have found previously untapped wells of courage within herself, but she highly doubted whether she had the nerve to stab a man at such close quarters and in such a clandestine fashion.
“Tell me,” she said, “where about is my horse tethered?”
* * *
Looking back on that escape from the camp and the race over the Highland dales and tors, Charlotte could not recall how in the world that she survived, let alone made it back to Castle MacQuarrie. How she managed to get back, without falling into a ravine or river or bog was something that defied explanation.
Fate or God had a hand in it I do not doubt.
Make it back she did though. How she had even navigated without the stars, or anything else for that matter, was something she could not explain. The fact that the horse ran for so long without collapsing was nothing short of a miracle.
She even outran the storm. At times she felt that she was borne up upon its very wings, and that it drove her onwards all the faster.
Eventually, riding through a night of rain and fog, with her horse’s breath steaming out in front of her and the sound of her own heartbeat thudding in time with the horse’s hooves, Charlotte saw the lights of MacQuarrie castle twinkling on the cliff in the distance.
“Is anybody there?” she called out, when she reined in her horse in front of the closed and barred gates of the castle. “It is I, Charlotte Bolton! I have urgent news for the Laird!”
Her voice rang out, shrill and lonely. It was, fittingly, the darkest hour of the night, that hour that precedes the coming of the dawn.
“State yer business,” someone yelled from up in the gatehouse.
“I told you, I need to see the Laird most urgently! Please, there’s not time to waste!” she cried back.
