Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

F rances intended to do as she was told, she really did. Not because she was naturally obedient—having hied off practically to Scotland with a man really put any such rumors to bed—but because Evan had a good point.

Frances wasn't really built for a physical fight. The skirts alone were a clear detriment.

And so she (showing a remarkable level of fortitude and constraint, if she did say so herself) stayed where Evan put her.

She stayed even when Evan grappled first with the old giant, and then the younger, even more giant one. She stayed even when her legs protested her crouched position, and her choices were to either get out of the hole or give up on her gown once and for all.

She stayed in the hole even when the rising light showed that a frankly enormous insect was also in the hole and insisted on wriggling about precariously close to Frances' boot.

But she could not wait and watch any longer when she saw the woman, a basket of what looked like eggs over her arm, approach the house and then pause when she saw the two bound men near her front stoop.

She could not wait and watch while the woman, instead of running and shrieking like an innocent person might, squared her shoulders determinedly and entered through the door.

The same door through which Evan had passed several minutes prior.

He could take care of himself, she scolded herself even as she dragged herself from out of the trench—oh excuse her, from behind the bush .

Maybe she should let him get attacked from behind.

But no, her feet were already running, her legs clumsy after sitting still for so long, her skirts tangling damply as she moved. She ran even though she was unused to running, even though no doubt Evan would be fine, just fine, he had to be fine.

When instinct told her to scoop up one of the fallen logs, however, she obeyed, even though it took her discomfortingly close to the bound men on the ground. She again tried to convince herself out of this course of action—what would she do with a weapon? She'd be hard pressed to use the log to even start a blasted fire!—but her body, again, ignored her.

A moment later, though, she took it all back, her body was a genius because she bolted through the doors to find the woman approaching Evan, a fire poker held high above her head.

And Evan, distracted by something in a pantry of some sort, didn't see her.

"Evan!" Frances shrieked.

Evan turned, but so did the elderly woman, which meant that the log Frances was brandishing came down not on the woman's shoulder, but instead on the side of her face.

The woman collapsed in a heap that was almost neat, tidily slumping to the floor in a daze.

"Frances!" Evan shouted back, crossing to her in quick strides, kicking the fire poker away from the woman. "Are you all right?"

Frances didn't answer; she was staring down at the woman with a faint sense of horror. Yes, the woman had been attempting to attack Evan, but Frances had smashed a woman with a log . An elderly woman.

She fought back the urge to vomit. Or, worse, apologize.

"Frances?" It wasn't Evan who spoke this time; it was a woman, a woman whose voice pricked at Frances' memory. "My Frances?"

Frances' heart was pounding very loudly in her chest as she looked up, the blood rushing through her head in a dizzying manner. She looked at Evan, who looked as though he was having the precise same experience.

And then he stepped aside, and Frances was looking into another face, one very like his and yet very different at the same time. One familiar and yet made foreign by time. A face she'd never thought to see again.

"My goodness, Frances," said Grace. "Whatever are you doing here?"

And that was when Frances' much misused legs gave up on her and she sat down on the hard stone floor with a painful, ungainly thump.

Evan watched dumbly as his dead sister looked calmly around the room, then picked up the discarded fire poker and levelled it at the prone woman, who was beginning to regain her bearings.

If Evan had been capable of experiencing much more than shock and concern as he hurried to Frances' side, worried she'd hurt herself as she'd fallen, he would have been impressed at the precision with which Frances had struck her.

"If you even think about standing," Grace said, and her voice made Evan want to weep in a highly unmanly sort of way because she was here, she was here, and she was alive, " I will strike you far, far harder than my dear friend did."

"I always did say ye were an ungrateful bitch," the woman spat, her tone dripping with rage.

Grace's mouth twisted in a vicious smirk that looked nothing like the girl Evan had once known. "And I've always maintained that one does not owe gratitude to one's abductors. Now do shut up, or I shall strike you anyway. I've heard enough of your voice for a lifetime."

Frances, hand clutching at Evan's proffered arm, scrambled back to her feet.

"Grace," she said, sounding like she could hardly believe her eyes. Evan commiserated. "You're here."

"Unfortunately," Grace said dryly, her eyes on the woman. Her expression did lighten slightly, however, when she glanced over at Frances. "It's a bit more surprising that you're here, dear," she said with a rueful little chuckle.

Frances seemed incapable of doing much more than staring, at least for the moment, so Evan said, as gently as he could, "We thought you were dead."

Something flashed in Grace's expression, but she schooled her face into impassivity before he could tell what it was.

"Perhaps not surprising, that," she murmured. Then, in a clearer, stronger voice, "There's twine in that cupboard." She indicated with her free hand. "Better tie her up before I lose my patience and give the old crone a few whacks."

Frances continued to stare as Evan hurried to find the string and subsequently used it to lash the woman to one of the chairs. She spent the entire time spitting epithets, mostly at Grace, until Evan, too, wanted to strike her, no matter that he had moral qualms about hitting elderly women.

Moral qualms, he had learned, went on holiday when faced with one's sister's kidnappers.

"You can't just leave us here!" the woman wailed when she realized her vitriol was having no effect.

"Madam," he said with tight politeness. "We can. We will. But worry not, the local constabulary will be along in due time."

And then he hurried the two women out the door, because Grace's expression was growing more murderous by the second, and Frances still looked as though she expected to be told she was dreaming. He herded them without pause across the yard in front of the mill—pausing only for Grace to kick some dirt in the direction of the bound men with a satisfied hah !—because he, too, felt certain that this could not be reality and merely wanted to get as far as possible from that wretched place and those wretched people before his mind caught up with him.

They'd made it just shy of halfway across the field back to the road when Frances stopped dead in her tracks so abruptly that Evan's hold on her nearly yanked her off her feet. He stopped himself just in time.

Grace, too, paused.

"Grace," Frances said simply. And then she hurled herself into her friend's arms. "It's you."

"It's me," Grace said.

And then, as one, both women began to weep in noisy, happy, overwhelmed tears.

Evan could not cry, not when his responsibility was not over. He had to be strong for his sister and for Frances. He had to get them home safely.

But he could not just keep going, not after everything that had just happened, not after he'd fought and grappled and had the one thing that he had hoped for over these past three years somehow, impossibly prove to be true .

So he did the next best thing; he sat right there, squashing one of the furrows in the field, and put his head in his hands and laughed, the sound pure and full of joy.