“Hold ye horses! I'm comin’, I'm comin’” her mother’s voice came from inside the small cottage.
“Hurry!” Isobel repeated as she heard the lock sliding open. As the door opened, Isobel fell inside, pushed past her mother and slammed the door shut again with her back up against it.
“Good Lord child, what on Earth has got in to ye?” Her mother said, peering at the sweat soaked curls that stuck to Isobel’s face. Isobel waved her off as she struggled to catch her breath.
“What's all the noise?” Isobel’s father came barreling in, his green eyes fiery and his hand on the hilt of his sword.
“Isobel has herself all in a tizzy!” Her mother said. “Lord only know what's wrong with the girl.”
Isobel turned around and slid the lock across to secure the door. Then she turned back to face her parents.
“It's Willie.” She said, still slightly out of breath. “He wrote to Duncan. There's a highlander clan on the move. They're heading our way.” She said, stumbling forward and sitting at the kitchen table. Her mother followed her, leaning down.
“What do you mean, they're heading our way?” She asked, the color draining from her face completely. Isobel looked at her and then back at her father, she could see that he was already calculating, his fingers twitching on the handle of his sword. She had always believed that her father could protect her from anything, but with an entire highlander clan headed their way, she wasn't so sure.
Chapter 3
Isobel lay in bed staring up at the ceiling in the darkness. She wore the days clothes in case danger should come during the night. She was going to be prepared. She wondered just what a clan of highlanders would do were they to come straight through Dunn Hill. She had heard plenty of stories, plenty of warnings that had kept her in Dunn Hill to begin with. Everything she had heard couldn't possibly be true though, could it? Would a group of men really burn down a village just to burn down a village? Or murder children for having blood other than their own? Did they really carry off women in the middle of the night to make them their own? The more she thought about it the louder the thrum of her heart became. It was deafening.
Isobel pulled up the blankets, covering her mouth to muffle the sound of her hurried breathing. The warmth of her breath in the cocoon of blankets was comforting, but her fear still left her with goosebumps. It was as though her insides were trembling. As she lay there she tried to do the math. In the time that it took for a letter to travel from Loch Mead to Dunn Hill a highlander clan could make some headway. She wasn't sure exactly how long it would take for them to arrive – if indeed they were to arrive at all, but it couldn't be that much longer. Her father had furnished Isobel and her mother both with swords, but when it all came down to it, Isobel wasn't sure that she could even pick hers up, let alone use it! Still, she had put it beside her bed and as she lay in the dark, she ran her hand over the cool metal handle.
It must have been three o’clock in the morning when Isobel awoke with a start. She hadn't fallen asleep all that long ago, but something had caused her eyes to snap open. She lay wide eyed, listening again for the noise she thought she had heard. It sounded like scuffling, like a badger or a hedgehog moving clumsily in the dark. She waited. When the sound didn't come again, she began to slowly drift off to sleep. Just as she was beginning to dream, the scuffling noise came again, but this time it was louder and it was definitely not a badger. Isobel lay still, afraid to move, her fingers poised on the handle of her sword. She debated calling for her father, but he would have to be up in just a few hours to get to work and she didn't want to awaken him for her own peace of mind. Besides, she thought, even with as loud as the scrabbling noise had been, there was no way that there was a clan of highlanders preparing to steal her away. No, this sounded more like a stag, a single creature stumbling in the darkness, scrabbling to find its way under the new moon. She relaxed her grip on the handle of her sword, that's probably what it was, she told herself. The darkness of the new moon always sent a handful of creatures in to town as they lost their way.
Isobel threw back her blankets and knelt up on the bed, peering out of the window. The blackness of the night stared right back at her. She strained her eyes, staring in to the tree line of the woods behind the cottage. From the closeness of the scrabbling, she had imagined that she would see something, but no matter how long she searched the darkness, she still saw nothing.
“Stupid girl!” She chastised herself. “Yer imagination is getting’ the better of ye!” She shook her head at her own stupidity and lay back down in bed, pulling the covers back up over her mouth. Whatever was out there wasn't going to get inside, she told herself as she closed her eyes, her father had made sure of that. She just needed to relax, there was nothing a group of heathens could do to take over Dunn Hill, not with the men of the town at the ready.