Bess placed a steaming bowl of stew in front of her and hovered as Vanessa tucked into it immediately.
“How do ye like it?” the proprietress asked, pretending to shine a glass.
“Oh, this is…” Delicious wasn’t the word. She luckily had some incredibly fibrous and gamey meat to chew as a stall tactic. “It’s really filling and—erm—flavorful.”
“Aye, it’ll put some meat on yer bones.” Bess winked. “I gave that driver of yers something extra in his stew. He’ll be up all night heaving into a chamber pot for leaving ye in the storm like a blighter.”
Vanessa suppressed both a giggle and a spurt of sympathy for the man while she reminded herself never to get on Bess’s bad side.
Even after only a moment away, Vanessa was antsy to get back to her room.
To Johnathan. However, she thought this an excellent time to do a little sleuthing for his sake. “So, Bess, you were saying, about the inn. It was here during the Jacobite rebellion? And the battle of Culloden?”
“Och, aye!” Bess said, obviously delighted to have someone to tell, as she was a natural raconteur. “Like many crofts and castles around here, it was a safe haven for the Jacobites, to be sure.”
“But, not the English?”
Bess’s features wobbled as she narrowed only one eye at her. “Well, no offense to yer countrymen, but after the battle at Culloden, the English were everywhere were they not? They stayed at the inn, to be sure, as it was sedition to deny them entry. But, they never found our secret spots, did they?” She tapped her head as if she’d thought of those secrets herself.
Vanessa perked up. “Secret spots?”
“Just so. Like Carrie Pitagowan’s Chamber of Sorrows.”
“Chamber of Sorrows?” Vanessa echoed. “Now that sounds deliciously ominous.”
Bess leaned closer, her chins wobbling in agreement. “Aye, Carrie worked beneath these old rafters during the days of Culloden. A saucy minx she was. Curious, like you. Always looking for something more.”
Vanessa winced. Was she that obvious?
Bess seemed not to notice, continuing with her story. “Carrie would go to Jacobite battlefields and strip the English soldiers of their treasure. It was about this time of year back then, another blizzard, another Na Fir Chlis when ’twas said she cursed that room. Warned all who would listen that a lion lived there and would devour any who stayed.”
Chills spilled over every part of Vanessa, and she took another bite just to distract herself from them.
Oblivious to her discomfiture, Bess continued, “Of course each new generation doesna believe in Carrie’s lion, but every time we try to let that room, the occupants are haunted right back out of it again.”
At this, Vanessa frowned. “Why let it to me, then?”
Bess cast her eyes down as she drew her fingernail through the pit in the wood of the bar. “I doona ken, lass, if ye want the honest truth. I couldna leave you out in the storm and…something told me the Chamber of Sorrows would welcome ye, and the lion with it.”
Vanessa swallowed the dry meat in a lump that made its uncomfortable way down her esophagus, and drank a long swallow of dark ale to force it down.
She could see Johnathan de Lohr as a lion. Fierce and golden haired. Not only a conqueror but commander, ruler of all he surveyed.
And well he knew it.
“Ye’ve known a bit of the longing that lives in that room, I wager.” Bess lowered her voice to the decibel of confidants. “And yer fair share of sorrow, too. Else why would ye be here alone what with Christmas bearing down on ye? If ye doona mind me asking, why’s yer family in Paris without ye?”
Her pitying look speared Vanessa through the ribs as she cast about for an answer. “Well I—”
“Tell me the young, cheap whisky isn’t making me see things, Priestly,” a nasally, masculine, British voice slurred with a bit of a lisp. “Tell me this isn’t little Vanessa Latimer, wot?”
Vanessa turned to see that the men who had been playing cards at the edge of the bar now crowded close around her, effectively trapping her onto the tall stool upon which she perched. They each had an empty glass in their hands, and the one who’d addressed her swayed, dangerously.
“By Jove.” His dark-haired friend—Priestly, she presumed—might have been passably handsome but for sporting a pathetic, thin mustache. He leered down at her from marble-dark eyes held way too close together. “I thought she looked familiar when she blew in, but she was in such a state of disarray I didn’t care to look at her. She cleans up rather well, though. I could almost believe she was respectable.”
“Yes,” the first one intoned, combing his hands through fair hair made greasy with too much pomade. The scent of it was nearly overpowering. “Quite respectable. But we know better, don’t we?”
The food turned to ashes in her mouth. Vanessa locked everything down just as she’d taught herself to when preparing for just one such encounter.
“Gentlemen,” she greeted soberly. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced and, therefore, it is not polite to approach me thusly.”
Priestly’s eyebrows shot up. “My, aren’t we all grown up and putting on airs? What do you say to that, Gordie?”
Gordie’s watch chain gleamed as he leaned in obscenely close, his breath reeking of scotch. “We’ve heard tell you spend your time galivanting to exotic places. Learning, no doubt, exotic skills.”
Priestly all but tossed his glass to Bess. “I’d take a whisky, but not the kind that tastes like we’ve licked a peat bog. The good stuff you’re no doubt hiding back there. And I’ll make a bloody ruckus if you water it down.”
Vanessa let out an outraged breath, ashamed of her countrymen. “That’s beneath you, gentleman, talking to a proprietress like that.”
Gordie leaned even closer, forcing her to bend over backward to escape him, which caused her to bump into Priestly. “I’d rather you were beneath me.”
“I beg your pardon!” she huffed. She’d been heckled before, but not so publicly. Nor so rudely.
“Really, Gordie, don’t be vulgar; we’re sharing a room in this shitehole, there’s not privacy at all.”
Gordie’s suggestive expression caused the gorge in Vanessa’s stomach to rise into her throat. “We can share other things. We’ve done it before.” He raked her with a glare miraculously overflowing with both disdain and desire. “Woman like her will let you put it anywhere you like.”
Before he even finished his last word, her entire bowl of stew lurched from the table and was heaved into his face, the scalding gravy latching onto his skin.
A shrill scream erupted from him as he clawed at himself, trying to wipe it off.
Vanessa’s hands were still clenched at her sides. She’d never even reached for the bowl.
She looked across the bar at Bess in time to see that the whisky bottle she’d retrieved was snatched from Bess’s hands and smashed over Priestly’s head. The jagged neck hung in the air as if brandished by an invisible hand, ready to plunge into the man’s throat.
“Sweet Christ in heaven.” Bess crossed herself and made a few other signs against evil as well.