The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(125)

His nod was gracious. ‘I am touched by your concern, my dear. In truth, I deemed it an honor to be taken, and only wished I could have been here with my well-affected countrymen to stand in chains beside them in the king’s good cause.’

Sophia knew he did not mean a word of it. She knew that he had seen to it that he had been at his estates in Lancashire when young King James had tried to land in Scotland. From the countess’s own pen Sophia had received the tale of how a messenger had reached the duke with news the king was coming, and in time for him to turn back and be part of the adventure, but how he, with sly excuses that his turning back might give the English warning, had continued on to Lancashire, from where he could await the outcome, poised to either take young James’s part, should the invasion be successful, or to claim his distance from it, should the English side prevail.

It had given Sophia at least some satisfaction when she’d heard the English had imprisoned him as well, regardless. Though it now appeared he’d managed, with his usual duplicity, to orchestrate his own release. How many other lives, she wondered, had he been content to sell to pay the price of his?

She could not keep from asking, when he’d finished telling in dramatic style the tale of his arrest and journey down to London, ‘Did you see the other nobles there? How does it go for them?’

He looked at her with vague surprise. ‘My dear, have you not heard? They are all freed. Save of course for the Stirlingshire gentry, but I could do nothing to argue their case—they had taken to arms, you see, actually risen in force, and the English could not be persuaded to let them escape being tried, but I trust they will come through it fairly.’

Mr Hall, leaning over, explained to Sophia, ‘The duke did kindly take it on himself to argue for the release of his fellow prisoners, and the English were not equal to his arguments.’

Sophia took this news with mingled gratitude and deep distrust. However glad she might be that the Earl of Erroll and the others were now free and would be coming home, she could not help but think the duke would not have done such an enormous thing unless he stood to profit by it somehow. And her own sense told her still that he was not upon their side.

The coach drew rattling to a stop upon the cobbles of a crowded street, with people pressing round and voices shouting and a thousand jumbled smells upon the air. ‘Here is the market,’ said the duke.

Sophia, in her eagerness to leave that plush, confining space and get clear of the duke’s unsettling scrutiny, leaned forward with such sharpness that the chain around her neck slid from its pins and tumbled from her bodice, and the silver ring gleamed for an instant in the light before she quickly caught it in her hand and slipped it back again.

She was not quick enough.

She knew, when she glanced over at the duke, that he had seen it. And although his face to any other eyes might have appeared unchanged, she saw the subtle difference in it; heard the altered interest in his voice when he remarked, ‘I do have business to attend, but I will send my coachman back so that when you are finished here you may return in safety to the place where you are staying with your…friends.’ The emphasis on that last word was not for her to hear, but still she heard it, notwithstanding, and it made her blood run cold.

Sophia tried to keep her own face bright, to make her voice sound normal. ‘That is kind of you, your Grace, but I am being met and will be in good company, so there will be no need.’

His gaze was narrowed now, and fixed on her in thought. ‘My dear Miss Paterson, I do insist. I cannot bear to think of you, in company or otherwise, upon these streets without a fitting escort. Here, Mr Hall will walk with you and see you do not come to harm.’

He had her, and he knew it. She could tell it from his smile as he sat watching Mr Hall get out and hand Sophia down onto the cobbled street. The duke’s eyes in the dimness of the coach were like the eyes of some sleek predatory creature that had trapped its prey and could afford to wait before returning to devour it. ‘Your servant, Mistress Paterson,’ he said, and with a slight nod of his head he gave his driver orders to go on.

‘Well,’ Mr Hall said, looking round in expectation as the black coach clattered off into the growing crowd. ‘What was it in particular that you desired to buy?’

Sophia’s thoughts were racing far beyond her efforts to collect them, and it took her half a minute to reply. The market place was ringed with tall tenements whose upper storeys projected to more closely crowd the already close space and cast shadows across the rough cobbles. And over their roofs she could see the stern outline of Edinburgh castle set high on its hill like a sentry, and seeming to watch all that happened below. She could not see, at first, any route of escape.

Then her searching eyes fell on a small stand not too far away, set near a narrow gap between the buildings, and she forced a smile. ‘I should be glad to have a close look at those ribbons.’

‘As you wish.’

She’d always thought the priest a good man, and because of that she felt a bit ashamed of what she had to do, but there was simply no escaping it. She could not risk remaining here until the duke returned—she did not know what he intended.

She thought of Moray’s parting words about the duke: ‘Ye must be careful, lass,’ he’d warned her. ‘He must never learn that you are mine.’

Too late, she thought. Too late.

The duke’s reaction to his glimpse of Moray’s ring had left her little room to doubt that he had recognized it, and knew all too well to whom that ring belonged.