Let Me Be Your Hero by Elaine Coffman Read Free Book Online Page A

be able to endure this, or will I go the way of weakened constitution, and faint? God, help me. Grant me courage. Make me strong.
    She reached for the cloth, but Fraser’s hand closed gently over her wrist. “Are ye certain this is the way ye wish it to be, Claire? Once ye have done it, ye willna ever forget what ye saw.”
    “It is not what I wish, but what I must do,” she said.
    He released her hand and stayed by her side. She drew the cloth back and gasped at the sight of his head lying where it should be, with the bloodied and bruised evidence of his dreadful death, so painful for her to see. The purple, swollen neck, crusted with blood, seemed to cry out to be joined once again to the bloodied stump from which it had been split asunder.
    His hair was as it had always been, thick, beautiful and brown, spiced with ginger-red. She touched his hair. It was silky and cold. It was somehow fitting that today the mournful words in her heart came not in Scots, but in Gaelic, “Fhiranleadain thlath,” lad of lovely hair.
    She could not staunch the flow of tears that seemed cursed to flow eternally, and splash one after the other upon her outstretched hand.
    Unable to move, she felt like one awakened from an opium dream, disoriented and unable to make a choice. As if he understood, Fraser captured her by the wrist and pulled her away, and after he drew the cloth over Breac’s body, he walked her from the room.
    “I am dying inside, Fraser, where ye canna see. I bleed from a thousand wounds inside me. Can ye no see what I feel? Will it always be on the inside? I want this pain gone from me, and yet it stays. How can I let it oot?”
    “There is no fast and simple way to healing. We all take different roads, but the distance we must travel is the same. Ye have no choice. Ye must make the journey, but ye will not have to go it alone. I am with ye, Claire, for as long as ye have need o’ me, I am with ye.”

Six
    I should like to know who has been carried off, except poor dear me—I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan War.
    Lord Byron (1788-1824), English poet. Letter, October 29, 1819, answering accusations of debauchery (published in Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 6, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 1976)
    L ord Monleigh and his brothers remained on Inchmurrin Island during the terrible days that followed. By the second week after the funeral, Claire, her brother and her sisters realized they had accepted them as part of the family.
    Out of their tragedy, Kendrew, the youngest and only surviving male of the Lennox family, became the Earl of Errick and Mains. Claire was concerned for him, for Kendrew was only twelve, and too young to bear the weight of such a title.
    She was grateful to have the Grahams there. It was especially good for Kendrew to have Lord Monleighthere to encourage him. He spent hours with Kendrew, teaching him the clansmen he could entrust various jobs to, as well as those to keep at a distance. He told him to rely on Claire’s judgment and the experience of Dermot, whom his father trusted with his most prized possession, his children.
    Day by day, Claire saw Kendrew’s confidence return, albeit by slow degrees. Her sisters, too, although saddened and given to moments of tears and despair, were also able to laugh when they all gathered in the evening and spoke of their fondest remembrances, but Claire was not doing as well. Attentively, she listened to the tales of love and humor related by her siblings, and those contributed by the Grahams. Upon occasion, she could relate a special moment of her own.
    The similarity ended there for, unlike the others, Claire did not laugh, nor could she cry. She still carried her grief inside, and in spite of Fraser’s encouraging her to cry and let the pain out, she could not.
    Earlier that morning, Jamie left for Edinburgh, where he would meet with his lawyer to start the necessary proceedings to seek the guardianship of Lord Errick’s