Page 74 of The Scot’s Secret

“When Gilbert grabbed me, I thought he was an attacker. I turned and hit him with such force, his shoulder hurt for days. Or so he said.”

Her cheeks tingled, the scene so clear in her mind it was as if she were experiencing it anew. “My father, the proud man who kept me safe all my life, who survived the bloodiest of battles only to die in his own hall, a traitor to the crown.”

She let the tears flow. Alex pulled her close as she kept talking. Mumbling really. “As I said, I see it every night. Most nights. Not with you, though. But last night.”

“Shhh, lass.” He held her so tightly against him that Clara could feel the knot in his tunic pressing against her cheek.

“Sometimes, I’m running across the hall. Other times, I simply stand there, as it truly happened. Still others, we’re on a battlefield. . . not that I’ve been on a battlefield before. . . but ’tis what I imagine one would look like. Every time, the man stands beside my father, his face hidden. And Father never looks. He never turns his head, no matter how loudly I scream for him to do so. It ends the same way every time.”

She couldn’t continue.

“No one should be forced to witness such a thing.”

The sounds Clara made were hardly recognizable as her own. But she didn’t care.

He pulled her hair away from her face, rubbing her cheeks with the back of his hand.

“I’m so sorry,” he repeated over and over.

Eventually her sobs became sighs. She would finish the story. The whole story.

“Gilbert pulled me away from there, and we used the secret passageway to escape.”

“You had no time to leave before they came?”

She shook her head. “It was as if they’d followed my father, and the others who’d escaped, directly from the siege.” She rushed to continue, “Our people were lucky. Barrington was seized, and my father killed, but most of our household was spared. Some of the ‘traitors’ lost everything. Everyone. The price for revolt was more than being stripped of titles and land. Some lost their entire families and all of their supporters to death or imprisonment.”

“And the ruse?”

“You’ve heard of Margoth?”

“Was she the woman responsible for Simon de Montfort’s loss at Kenilworth?”

“Aye. Rumor was that she disguised herself as a man and warned Prince Edward of the earl’s unguarded state. ’Twas his foolishness, and her cunning, that led to the end of his misguided campaign.”

“The earl should consider himself lucky to be dead, for it sounds as if you would do the job yourself if given half a chance.”

Clara sat up and looked at Alex’s poor shirt, which she’d just soaked with her tears.

“My father came to believe in him, but to me, he and his followers were responsible for the loss of my father. So now you know.”

“And when Barrington's armorer decided you were no longer safe as a woman, Alfred was born,” he said. “And you believe, so many years later, that if your identity were discovered—”

“I would be imprisoned. Or killed.”

Alex took both of her hands in his. “But Clara, the Dictum of Kenilworth—”

“Protects those who were not among the earl’s most fervent supporters.”

“And your father was one of those men?”

She nodded her head. “He gave everything to a cause he believed in. And he paid the ultimate price.”

Alex sighed. “I don’t know your English politics well enough—”

“But I do.” She needed him to understand.

“If you were to live in Scotland—”