"In what way?"

"It will take a while to explain, but we have time. Rachel will go on foot, it is two or three hours each way and we have a long night of waiting ahead of us."

*

Rachel thought it was very clever the way Kevin hid the passageway through the outside wall. As far as Rachel could tell, only five people knew it was there and Connor wasn't one of them. It was another thing she could do that Connor couldn't. The door was right behind the cottage Rachel shared with Catherin and Justin. Justin was a good man and treated her mother as though she were a rare treasure. He was very loving and never told his wife what to do. Nevertheless, if he suggested something, her mother was happy to please him.

Every once in a while her mother got a confused look in her eye and if the bridge was up at night, Catherin slipped through the hidden passageway to go outside the wall. Rachel had no idea what caused the odd behavior, and her mother always came back sopping wet. Why anyone would swim in the moat at night instead of a perfectly good loch in the daytime was beyond her. But that was what her mother preferred and Rachel didn't question it. When Catherin came back, the confused look on her face was always replaced with smiles. Sometimes her sister Anna went out too, but not very often. It was just something that happened.

A few years earlier, Rachel wondered if there were more hidden doors and started examining the rest of the wall closely, when no one was watching. She found two more doors, hidden behind bushes that clearly had not been disturbed in years. Bushes all along the outside of the wall hid all three doors and finding them with the naked eye was impossible.

This night Catherin was inside the cottage. She sat on Rachel's bed, watched her roll up two yellow Ferguson plaids and tie the bundle with twine. "Kevin will kill the lads who hurt the woman and the child. He promised me."

Rachel wasn't sure why Catherin said that, but she was sure her mother was right; Kevin would kill them.

"Rachel, sit by me for a moment."

She was dressed, almost ready to go, and there was time so she did as her mother requested.

Catherin held her hand out, turned it palm up and opened it. Inside was a small blue stone. "Take the stone. If you are captured, try to send the stone to us. Trust a lass to bring it."

"How will I know which lass to trust?"




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