My Heart Stood Still by Lynn Kurland (best book club books of all time .TXT) 📕

doubt in his mind that he was facing men who were no longer flesh and bone. They stood at attention, with their backs against the four walls of the great hall. Thomas gave up trying to convince himself he was having stress-induced hallucinations. He'd had a great night's sleep, a substantial breakfast, and a brisk walk up the way. The only thing he could surmise was that this kind of sight was something he'd inherited from his mother. It was certainly nothing he would have gotten from his father.

Well, there was a decision to be made. He suspected that these unexpected fixtures in his house might be very reluctant to leave. For all he knew, they had been there for centuries. So, he supposed the best thing to do was pretend to ignore them. Maybe they would be just as busy ignoring him.

He walked around the great hall, looking up at the roof— or lack thereof—and examining the fireplaces. There were two, one on either side of the hall. They were large enough that he could walk inside them. He did, then looked up and hoped to see sky. He heard the chatter of birds instead and saw nothing but black. Not good signs, but perhaps Thorpewold's village had a chimney sweep.

He stepped back, then found himself face-to-face with a ghostly Scot. The man was huge. Thomas was tall, and he considered himself quite fit. But this guy was taller than he was and definitely broader. His sword had to be almost six feet long if it was an inch. Thomas was almost blinded by the brooch on the man's shoulder that held his plaid to his shirt. He was so startled by the complete picture of power and menace that he stared right into the man's eyes.

The man blinked in surprise, then a scowl of formidable proportions came over his face.

"So, ye can see me, can ye?" he growled.

Thomas found himself without a single coherent thing to say.

The man drew his sword with a flourish. Thomas stepped back instinctively.

"To me!" the man roared. "Clan MacDougal!"

Thomas waited to be assaulted, but only a handful of men drew their swords, and it was done with less enthusiasm than he would have suspected from that kind of bellow.

"Ach, damnation," the man groused. "All right then, ye great bunch of women, to Herself! The MacLeod!"

Thomas had several thoughts running through his mind as he found himself tripping backward over something he was sure hadn't been behind him moments before—or maybe he'd been so distracted he hadn't noticed it—and those thoughts came to him in no particular order.

First, it was one thing to keep out of the way of one sword; it was quite another to try to avoid the flashing blades of three dozen angry Scots.

Second, it was extremely embarrassing to go sprawling and land, sans his dignity, on his backside with his head still traveling at a velocity high enough to render him unconscious when that head apparently struck a rock.

And as he surrendered to the blackness, actually quite grateful that he would be spared the humiliation of listening to said Scots laughing themselves sick over his poor performance, his final thought was perhaps the most disturbing.

Were the swords real?

At least he would be unconscious when he learned the truth.

Chapter 6

 

 

 

Iolanthe walked down the flat stone pathway between her roses, plucking off a diseased leaf here, removing a spent blossom there. She paused and looked down doubtfully at a rose she'd been just recently given, which bore the dubious name of some Colonial rock legend. The only king she knew of resided in London, or at least he had the last time she'd stirred herself to make note of him.

She stood in the midst of her garden and breathed deeply, imagining how it would have smelled had she possessed a mortal nose to smell it with. Lavender, rose, mint; aye, they would have mingled with the aroma of sun-warmed earth and the hint of greenery from the forest.

The sight at least was something she could enjoy. She looked over the plants that made up the large expanse of her unlife's work and named them all in her head. The majority of them had been gifts from a handful of ghostly monks who had happened upon her digging in her illusionary dirt in some century or other. They had brought her cuttings from their travels and taught her the names for things she'd never seen before. It was the single pleasure of her existence, her garden with its strange and marvelous collection of plants.

Of course, they weren't plants from the physical world, but perhaps that was even better. In life, she had gardened for survival, to feed herself and her kin. In death, she had the luxury of growing what she pleased merely for the joy of seeing it all in glorious array around her. No pests, no weeds. Nothing but what she chose to see.

"What a lovely garden, um, Patience?"

Iolanthe gritted her teeth. Perhaps her garden had a pest after all, and it was surely the man who had just come up behind her. A pity she couldn't squash him under her heel like a bug. She turned and glared at him.

"My name, you bejeweled peacock, is not Patience."

She brushed past him and made for her bench near the wall.

"Well," Roderick said, following hard on her heels, "if you won't give me your name freely, I suppose I must continue to try to guess it." He tidied up his immaculate suit of clothes, then sat next to her. "Let's see. We've eliminated the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and what doing that took!— so I suppose that leaves us turning to the sixteenth. Perhaps one of those charming Puritan names. Charity? Humility?"

"I'm a Scot, you simpleton."

"Tribulation? Mercy?"

Ach, but she'd been through the former and had little enough of the latter.

"Fly-fornication?"

She glared at him. "Have you nothing better to do than trouble me?"

He examined his perfectly tended fingernails, then looked at her and smiled. "I'm