The Betrayal of Maggie Blair - By Elizabeth Laird Page 0,106

and botherations. Just think, if Annie finds out that you're here, she might report on you to the military, to that fancy fellow of hers. She'll get you taken up."

My stomach lurched.

"You're right, Tam. What'll we do?"

"Only one thing for it," he said dolefully. "We must take to the road again. I'm not sure that I trust Timmy Shillinglaw either. The man's a lawyer, after all, and his daddy was awfully sharp on any birds that went missing from his dovecote. We'll set off as soon as we can. There's to be no rest for poor Tam, after all."

Chapter 28

We didn't set out for Dunnottar the next day or even the day after, because that night Tam fell ill. I couldn't rouse him from his pile of rags in the morning. He stared up at me unseeingly, his cheeks sunk, his lips cracked, and his tongue as dry as a piece of felt.

"Old fool," Mistress Virtue said crossly, standing with her hands on her hips as she looked down at him, while I knelt on the floor, anxiously holding one of his hot, trembling hands. "He'd better not die on me. I should never have taken the pair of you in."

But she pulled some old dried herbs from a niche in the cellar wall and made up a concoction with them. I expected her to mumble spells as Granny would have done, but she only held the bad-smelling mixture to Tam's lips. I was surprised to see how patiently, even tenderly, she helped him to sip, though all the time she was muttering, "Stupid old Tam. Daft old man. You think you can get around Virtue, but you can't."

When the beaker was empty at last, she noticed me watching and stabbed a finger at me.

"What are you staring at, miss? There's not much I don't know about him. He's done more sinning than half the prisoners in the tolbooth, but he's more of a saint than all your prating Presbyterians."

"I—yes, I know," I said, taken aback.

"Well, get on with it," she said, rising to her feet with a creak of bones.

"Get on with what, Mistress Virtue?"

"If you want to stay here till he's out of the fever, you'll have to earn your keep. Get up to the pump and fill these buckets. There's washing to be done, in case you hadn't noticed."

I hardly stirred from Mistress Virtue's dreary cave for the next two weeks, except to run up the wynd to the pump on the High Street to fill her buckets and carry them down to her cellar again. My back ached every night, and my arms felt as if they'd been stretched by inches, but the pains of my body were nothing compared to the worries in my mind. What was happening to Uncle Blair? Was he still alive? How were they all managing at Ladymuir?

At least after the first two dreadful days, I could feel easier about Tam. Whether it was Mistress Virtue's remedies, or the rest he so badly wanted, or his own willpower, he came back from what had seemed like the brink of death. At the end of ten days, he was sitting once more on a stool by Mistress Virtue's fire, drinking too much whiskey and spinning outrageous stories, accepting her scoldings with meek nods of his head.

***

In the end, it wasn't even I who got us on the road at last, but Tam himself.

"If I stay another day in this airless hole, I'll turn into a goblin," he whispered to me at the end of the second week. "I feel like a worm that's been too long under a stone."

We set off the next morning. There must have been more money in the purse that Tam had stolen than I had realized, because Mistress Virtue grunted with surprised gratitude when Tam pressed a yellow coin into her hand.

"And there's to be no more skulking about on the moors and mosses on this journey," he told me proudly as we walked, at a slower pace than usual, down the road out of Edinburgh toward the port of Leith. "We've no need to hide now. Presbyterians aren't so hot and strong over in Fife, and the soldiers won't be so keen to know everyone's business. And, anyway"—he patted the pocket of Uncle Blair's coat and winked at me—"we've money enough to pay for our food and our beds, like gentlefolk."

I can't remember much about our slow progress to Dunnottar, only that I burned with impatience