The Highlander's Thief

Chapter Nine

27 April 1739

Rosa paced from one side of the room to the other. She knew, even with her eyes closed, that it was eight steps between locked door and locked window, four steps from the end of the bed to the creaky desk and half a step between the bed and the battered bedside table.

Three days she'd been locked in this room. It might not have been a cell like Newgate Prison's she'd read about, but it was a cell nevertheless.

She pressed her ear to the door. Footsteps sounded as someone made their way up the stairs, but they quickly passed her by, disappearing into a room further down the narrow corridor.

Nobody had come to visit her since she'd been locked up except for the grumpy housekeeper who brought her breakfast and dinner each day. She also supplied Rosa with another secondhand dress, just as ill-fitting as Mistress Thomas's had been.

McWilliam hadn't been lying when he'd told Rosa that she'd find no allies amongst his people. Rosa had given up trying to talk to Fenella after receiving a continual stream of cold-shoulders and threatening glares. Even Cameron hadn't shown his face. (He'd called her a 'sassenach'—what did that even mean?)

It wasn't hard to imagine the headline. Governess fades away, alone and friendless.

Followed by: 'Locked in her bedchamber for three days without a single book, Rosa Blair, aged 20, dies in her sleep of acute boredom.'

"Miss Blair was kidnapped by Scottish laird Anndrais McWilliam in the wake of her surrender to a Bow Street Runner.

"She pleaded guilty to the theft of 3,000 pounds from the Uilleim Estate earlier this year. But Blair has since retracted her statement, claiming she only admitted to the crime after receiving letters threatening the life of her cousin, Miss Amelia.

"Six days on, Blair passed away in her sleep from acute boredom brought on by a complete lack of any reading material supplied by her kidnapper.

"She is succeeded by her uncle, Viscount Oliver Blair, and cousin. However, Rosa's untimely death prevented her from attending the magistrate in Leeds on the 15 May and, subsequently, Amelia too is now dead."

She ground her teeth. Locked up here she couldn't work on persuading McWilliam of her innocence. Nothing was going according to plan, and she didn't even have a back-up.

Governess fails to out-think her Scottish capturer and is imprisoned for the rest of her life.

It sounded just like something she'd read in The Public Ledger—a story of betrayal, pain and sacrifice. Bennie Cooke would lap up a story like this.

Counting out the days on her fingers, it became increasingly obvious that five of her precious thirteen days had passed. That left only eight, including today.

That was it. If she couldn't get out of here by only telling the truth, then she had no other choice but to escape.

The instant that thought flashed through her mind, her shoulders dropped. She couldn't get out of here. It was a fortress, and she wasn't a fighter, she was a governess, her only assets being an over-creative imagination and a taste for grisly true crime. Sure, she could practically recite every murder that had been reported in London's popular press since 1728, but that wasn't exactly a useful skill when it came to picking a lock or sneaking over a drawbridge.

Rosa made the eight steps across the room to the window. The window's glass had broken and instead of being repaired someone had boarded it over, blocking out most of the light. With her face pressed against a gap in the wooden boards, she could see part of the courtyard and even a little of the open fields beyond the great wall.