Page 62 of Beyond Dreams

“Take your slattern abovestairs, Duncan,” Doirin objected, “and pray do not subject the likes of Moire or any other innocent to her wickedness.”

No doubt Holly could not understand the words, but he doubted she could mistake the tone. Duncan bristled, only able to maintain his composure by recalling that his stepmother and stepsister would forever be gone from Thallane in a fortnight’s time. “Hold your tongue, woman,” he snarled at her.

Doirin kept at it. “If I could but lay a curse upon her head, I would.”

A threat he could not let stand. His lips thinned. “What is your grievance with my wife, woman, that you would speak thusly?”

Doirin drove her hand into a small, cinched bag at her waist, struggling to withdraw something, actually growling as she fought with what turned out to be a folded sheet of parchment.

Holly gasped at the sight of the missive while Doirin proclaimed triumphantly, “This is my grievance.” She waved the parchment violently, striding closer to Duncan and Holly.

A letter, Duncan presumed, the wax seal broken, the parchment edges frayed and bent.

“You would banish your own sisters and bring this—her—a MacHeth into our home,” Doirin continued. “And allow her to apply thread to the cloth as I’ve not ever been allowed to do! Treat me like an old sow and her a blooded mare! Forsooth! For she is wicked, Duncan! The proof is here!”

“That is mine, Doirin,” Holly interjected, even as she likely did not know what Doirin said. “I left that with you—you said you would have it delivered. You had no right to open my letter!”

That, then, wrought the first frisson of alarm in Duncan. He’d never heard such a brutal outrage in Holly before, and she’d suffered through more than one dreadful encounter since he’d known her.

She leapt forward and reached for the note. “That is mine!” She shouted again.

Doirin swiped the parchment away, securing it behind her back.

Duncan caught Holly around the waist before she would have attacked Doirin. He wasn’t entirely sure she would have, but she had lunged forward with her arms raised.

“Hold,” he growled to Holly, aware that indeed there were spectators aplenty now. Red Moll and several lasses had come from the kitchens while Graeme and several soldiers crowded in the doorway, Doirin’s screeching likely the noise that had beckoned all.

“Duncan, she had no right—” Holly persisted.

“I have every right,” Doirin bellowed, now flapping the letter over her head. “All these years, treating me and your own dear sisters as if we were beneath you,” she railed now at Duncan. “Pretending your father never loved me, that I’d not bore him—”

Graeme approached from behind, his scowl dark, swiping the letter from her hand, handing it directly to Duncan.

“It’s mine,” Holly said, tears pooled in her eyes now. “Duncan...?”

He alone stood at the front of the high table. Everyone else stood before him, the kitchen lasses and Red Moll wide-eyed and huddled to his left; more than a dozen soldiers now stood just inside the door; Doirin and Holly stood directly in front of him, a good half dozen feet separating them. He stared at the ill-treated missive in his hand and then considered Doirin’s rising glee and Holly’s growing panic.

“What is it?” He asked Holly, his heart hammering in his chest.

“I’ll tell you what it—”

“Silence!” Graeme roared at Doirin.

Duncan waited. Holly lifted her hand in a beseeching fashion.

“It’s just a letter I wrote to Sidheag...my aunt,” she said, her voice tremulous. “It doesn’t...I didn’t...” her words trailed off.

Duncan’s brows snapped together while his mouth flattened into a fierce line. With one hand, he flipped the parchment open. Four lines greeted his fiery gaze, penned in an English script such as he’d never seen. It took him a full minute to make sense of the words.

Dear Sidheag,

Now what? I’m here. I married him. When can I go?

Will it be you or someone else coming for me?

Holly

“Duncan, please,” Holly implored once more. “Can we discuss this in private?”

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