by Faris, Fiona
“I’m his… friend,” she mumbled, then turned back towards the path. “I’m sorry,” she continued, “but I really must go.”
Duncan held up his hand as if to acknowledge that he had been prying.
“Please, tarry awhile,” he said contritely. “I have climbed all the way up here and…” He half-turned and cast his arm toward the sea “… the prospect is not as pleasing as I had hoped. Please, allow me the pleasure of your company for a few minutes, before I begin my perilous descent. Who knows, you might be the last mortal body I speak to.”
Elizabeth looked at him coyly from beneath her brow. A sweet smile illuminated her face.
“You are still playing with me,” she gently chided him.
He put his hands on his hips and laughed at the sky.
“But, seriously,” he said, falling quiet and earnest. “Bide awhile. I would welcome your company.”
He dropped onto the clifftop and dangled his legs over the edge of the precipice.
“Come,” he said, holding a hand out to her. “Come and sit by me.”
Elizabeth pressed a hand above her breast and gave a horrified little cry.
“I daren’t.” She laughed. “I would fear that I’d fall.”
“It’s quite safe,” he assured her. “As safe as sitting on a stool at home.”
She chuckled in disbelief.
“Still…” she insisted. “Very well, I will stay awhile. But I will sit over here, well away from the cliff edge.”
She dropped onto the grassy knoll on which she had been standing, folding her legs demurely beneath her.
“Here,” she said, suddenly finding the kerchief of strawberries she was still holding in her hand and offering it to him. “I have these strawberries I found in the copse, yonder. Would you like some?”
She unfolded the kerchief like a napkin over her palm and leaned towards him. He plucked the plumpest and juiciest of them all and popped it straight into his mouth. He bit down, and a tiny trickle of juice dribbled from the corner of his lips
“You daftie!” Elizabeth laughed. “You’re not supposed to eat the stems, just the fruit.”
He snatched another of the small scarlet fruits and popped it defiantly into his mouth, stalk and all. Then his hand disappeared into the depths of his shirt, and he pulled out a brace of fulmar eggs.
“Here,” he said. “I collected them on my way to the top. Would you like one?”
Elizabeth screwed her eyes shut and wrinkled her nose.
“Urgh! No, thanks. I don’t care for the flavor of seabird eggs. They taste strongly of fish.”
Duncan cracked one of the eggs on a rock, threw back his head, and tipped the slimy mess down his throat.
“True,” he said after he had swallowed. “But you get used to it when you live on the coast. You’re not from the coast, are you? You’re a landward lass.”
“Why do you think that?” Elizabeth inquired, without answering the question.
“Because a seaward quine would have gulped a fulmar egg down in jig time – and bitten my fingers off to get at it.” He laughed. “They say it makes their hair glossy.”
Elizabeth twirled a ribboned tress of her glossy red hair around her finger and fixed him with a saucy smile.
“Is that right, then. Is that what the seaward girls say?”
He bellowed and slapped his thigh.
“The shameless bitches! And to think of all the eggs they’ve swindled out of me with that damned tale of theirs, and it turns out they’ve been lying to me all this time.”
Elizabeth buckled forward in mirth.
When she straightened up, Duncan was looking at her quietly, with a fond look in his eyes.
“But, my… what a pretty laugh you have,” he murmured. “It trills like a bell.”
Elizabeth was overcome by a fit of blushing. She dropped her eyes to the ground by her side and began combing at her long tresses with her hands.
“I really should be going,” she stammered, rising to her feet, suddenly flighty like a nervous foal.
Duncan gazed at her with an air of regret.
“If you must,” he said, looking away, out over the bay towards the distant horizon. Then he raised his eyes towards her again hopefully. “Can we meet again?”
A smile rose from the very soles of Elizabeth’s feet and blossomed on her downturned face. She swallowed it back down again.
“We really should not meet like this, unchaperoned,” she said, all at once remembering her manners as a lady’s maid. “Besides, we do not know each other. It would not be proper.”
“But can we meet again?” Duncan insisted, as if none of what Elizabeth had said was relevant.
“But…” Elizabeth looked at him, her eyes round with alarm. She wanted to meet with him again; she wanted it desperately. But she knew it could not be right. She did not know how to respond. She was suddenly tongue-tied again. Her heart was fluttering like a caged bird in her breast. “I hardly know you.”
“And I hardly know you, so I am hardly at an advantage. In fact, I really know nothing about you at all, other than that you’re a landward lass who, for her own safety, should not be allowed anywhere near the sea, and that you are friends with Gilbert Hay’s infant son.”
Elizabeth may have been mistaken, but she could have sworn that Duncan’s features twitched with a tic of dislike when he mentioned her master’s name.
“I would know you better,” Duncan concluded.
He stooped and quickly tore up a few of the wildflowers that were growing on the verge around where they had been sitting, gathering them into a rough makeshift posy which he then proffered to her.
“Please,” he added.
Elizabeth looked around in confusion.
“Where would we meet?” she mumbled, taking the flowers.
“Well.” He snorted. “Preferably not here. It would only be a matter of time until I broke my neck climbing those cliffs for our tryst.”
She gave a nervous giggle.
“It would not do for me to be seen,” she said.
“Your mistress would not like it, I presume.”
The mention of Lady Margaret added another layer of anxiety to Elizabeth’s already fraught nerves.
“I know,” he said. “If you follow the drove road across the moor, then a little way up onto the fells, you will find an old shieling. It is no longer used – at least, not since the Harrying,” he added bitterly. “We could meet there. It is a lonely place; no one would discover us there.”
Elizabeth hesitated. She would be all alone with him, in a secluded place, with no prospect of help should he…
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice trembling with both excitement and trepidation.
Duncan rose from the cliff edge and took the few steps towards her. He reached out and took both her hands in his.
“You needn’t fear me,” he told her gently. “I would not harm one hair on your glossy head. I would treat you with all the regard you deserve.”
She warmed at his words. A flush of blood coursed through her like a tide drawn in response to his assurance. She was not used to such consideration in her relationship with men. She was aware that what he was asking, and what she so desperately wanted herself, required a great leap of trust. She was not sure if she could make that leap.
“Very well.” Elizabeth committed herself, closing her eyes.
She felt as if she had been standing on the edge of the cliff and he had asked her to fall forward, promising that he would catch her. She had no way of knowing if his promise was true, but she knew that there was only one way of finding out. She surprised herself with her courage and audacity. She knew she was, by nature and as a result of her experiences as an abused child, a timid creature. Where had those reserves of trust and courage come from? she wondered.
“Shall we say three days from now, at the same time?”
“Very well.”
Elizabeth hoped and prayed that Duncan would not betray th
at trust.
Chapter Seven
Slains Castle
The Great Hall
Evening of the same day
Sanderson had not liked what he had seen. He had made his way to the landward side of the copse in the expectation that Elizabeth would come out onto the moorland from the north. He had hidden behind the gorse that edged the wood and waited, and waited, but she had not appeared. He had moved back into the wood and relieved himself against a tree. When he had returned to his post, there was still no sight of her. Stealthily, he had broken cover and worked his way towards the north end of the trees and peered down to where the path turned to strike out over the moorland. And there he had spied her, sitting on the grass, flirting shamelessly with a young lad who was sitting as brave as you like on the edge of the cliff in nothing but his underclothes.
Sanderson had watched with mounting anger and disgust as the lovers had laughed and pique-un-niched together on strawberries and gull eggs. He had seen them stand and take one another’s hands. It had taken all of his self-control to hold him from charging down the slope and throwing them both from the cliffs, such had been his rage.
And now, here she was, dining at the top table with the wee lad, Nicholas, playing the lady of the manor, all prim and proper as if butter would not melt in her mouth.
Sanderson broke another morsel from his gravy-soaked trencher and crumbled it between the aching stumps of his teeth, the same teeth that he had been grinding ever since he had returned to his duties at the castle after his surveillance of Elizabeth that morning. Around him in the hall, the other household servants and retainers sat at the long trestle tables and supped their meat noisily, while the hounds scavenged for discarded scraps between their feet. By rights, it was he who should have been sitting in the Earl’s place, supervising the meal in the Countess’ absence, and not that upstart trollop. He was the Earl’s steward, after all. The Countess indulged that lass far too much and granted her too many liberties. And, all the while, the wee slut was taking advantage of the Countess’ soft nature and laughing at them all.
He grasped the horn handle of his eating knife in his fist and pensively nicked at the table’s surface with its point. Elizabeth Bryce needed to be taught her proper station, and Sanderson reckoned that he was just the man to teach it to her.
* * *
Elizabeth could barely keep her attention on what Nicholas was telling her. It was only some childish nonsense about knights and Saracens in the Holy Land, and Templar castles and Holy Grails, and how his new dirk was all very well but what he really wanted was a coat of mail and a lance and a mace and a broadsword and a squire and a page to carry it all, and a giant warhorse like King Robert’s with wide feathery hooves and a deep chest and a broad rump…
As Nicholas prattled on, Elizabeth found her mind continually wandering back to her clifftop encounter with Duncan Comyn. She agonized over how awkward she had been, how flighty and tongue-tied. What must he have thought of her? She had behaved like a moonstruck milkmaid; she was sure he must have been laughing inwardly at her girlish lack of grace. He had found her amusing, nothing more, she told herself, her brow creasing with regret. And yet… he had asked for a secret rendezvous.
Of course, he might just be luring her to a secluded spot so that he could have his sport with her. It would not be the first time that would have happened. She remembered how the scullions at the King’s Castle in Peebles, where she had been kept as a scullery drudge after being taken off the streets as a tiny girl, would lie in wait for her, as she was sent down into the cellars on some errand or to the sluice with some slops, and fall upon her to use her roughly and painfully. The cook and the other kitchen servants used to call her the ‘broukit’ bairn because her dirty cheeks would be forever streaked with tears. That was before Lady Margaret rescued her and determined to make her a lady too, her protégée.
Yet, despite her experience of men, Elizabeth felt in some deep recess of her heart that she could trust this Duncan Comyn. There was a gentleness to him, beneath his carefree devil-may-care exterior, which inclined her to trust him, and trust was something that no longer came easily to Elizabeth as far as men were concerned. Take Ewan Sanderson, for example, she thought, casting a cautious look towards him where he sat at the table among the lave in the body of the hall: as steward, the castle and its dependents were supposed to fall under his care and protection; yet there he had been, leering at her in the undercroft, and skulking around after her, just awaiting an opportunity to ‘cowp’ her in some dark secluded corner.
Duncan was different from the run of men, she felt. Not only was he strikingly handsome, but he also exuded a chivalrous knightly bearing, a nobility, that made her feel safe in his company. He had already risked his life to pluck her from the sea when a more craven soul would not have risked himself for her sake but would have remained safe upon the shore, wringing his hands, perhaps, in vain and hypocritical anguish. In that respect, he reminded her very much of Lord Gilbert, a man who took his virtue seriously and held his honor, above all, in the highest esteem. She felt that this Duncan Comyn would rather die than harm a single hair on her head.
She could hardly wait to see him again. Less than three days, but the time stretched away from her until it seemed like an eternity. Since she had returned from her morning tryst, she had not been able to settle to anything. She had a small tapestry hanging to complete, but no sooner had she sat down at the frame in the solar than she sprang back up again to nervously pace the floor. She could not shake the thought of him from her mind, and that thought agitated her like an itch she could not reach. She was impatient with the servants and their inquiries; she snapped at them petulantly when they came to her with their trivial distractions over what should be prepared for dine that evening or what should be done about a scorched fire screen. The heather root she had fetched from the moor to make a handle for Nicholas’ new dirk lay abandoned on the mantel shelf above the fire in the solar. Her anticipation of their rendezvous at the old shieling on the fells filled her mind to the jealous exclusion of all else. A part of her resented the dominion it held over her as it was leading her to neglect her household duties.
What would her mistress, Margaret, say?
She became vaguely aware that Nicholas had asked her a question, but she had not heard what it was.
“Are you not listening to me?” the wee boy complained, tugging on her sleeve.
Elizabeth shook her head to clear it of her daydreaming and brought Nicholas into the focus of her attention.
“I’m sorry, Nicholas,” she said, “what was it you were saying? I had fallen into a dwam.”
Nicholas huffed.
“I was just asking if I could go down to the smiddy after dine, to help Auld Andra in the forge.”
“What? Smiddy?” Elizabeth stammered like someone who had been shaken suddenly awake and was trying to clasp hold of the threads of what was going on around her. “No… No!” she affirmed, shaking her head just a little vehemently. “After dine, it will be time for your bed.”
“Aw, Lizzie!” he cried. “Please! Just for a wee while. I do so love to hear the metal sizzle in the slake trough. The water fairly dances across the red-hot horseshoes.”
Elizabeth smiled down at him indulgently.
“Well,” she slowly conceded. “Maybe just until the sun is standing above the southwest tower. And only if you promise to have no nonsense while you’re getting ready for bed.”
“I promise!” Nicholas said, perhaps a bit too swiftly and readily to be completely convincing, as he slipped from his chair and scampered down the hall to the stair turret.
Elizabeth watched him go with a fond smile dimpling her cheeks, before rising herself to retire for the evening.
She did not see the glower of intense resentment that Sanderson fixed on her slim back as she walked between the long trestle tables to continue her daydreaming in the privacy of her chamber.
She had no inkling of the downfall he w
as planning for her.
Chapter Eight
Auchmacoy Farm
Ten Miles from Slains Castle
Evening of the same day
The bastle house of Auchmacoy sat squat and forbidding in the hollow of the low hills of the plain above the River Ythan. It was so well hidden in the fold of the land that Duncan would have missed it had he not, by chance, spied the thin wisp of gray smoke rising lazily from its chimney against the light of the full moon.
He approached it cautiously. As he crested the hollow, he could make out the hulking outline of the square two-story building in the glimmer of the moonlight. Dull yellow candlelight flickered in the small barred apertures that served as windows on the second story. In the stable which comprised the ground floor, an ox lowed out an alarm as it scented him on the light breeze.