by Faris, Fiona
“You will not take Elizabeth.”
Gilbert stepped forward.
“Yield, man,” he said, and it sounded like a plea, his voice containing no harshness or malice, but only kindliness. “The fight is over. You have acquitted yourself with valor, but now you must yield.”
“Never!” Duncan cried, tottering on his feet, waving the blade weakly from one to the other of his foes. “I will defend my lady to the death. I will never abandon her.”
Behind him, Elizabeth got to her feet, bringing with her a short length of driftwood. She came and stood beside her Duncan, and they kept each other upright with an arm around the other’s waist.
“And I will never abandon him,” she said defiantly, a dark glow in her eyes.
Neither Gilbert nor Matthew drew his weapon. They stood facing the couple in silence for a long moment, Gilbert considering them carefully.
“Matthew,” he suddenly decided, starting towards the yoal Duncan had been struggling to move. “Give me your help here.”
With Gilbert hauling on the prow and Matthew pushing at the stern, they dragged the vessel across the sand to the river’s edge.
“Go!” Gilbert urged them, plowing out of the water to join Matthew at the still beached stern.
Elizabeth and Duncan stood dumbfounded, unable to comprehend what was happening.
“Go, quickly!” Gilbert repeated, more emphatically, beckoning them towards the yoal with his arm.
The couple staggered down the beach. Duncan threw his dirk into the bottom of the boat, and they climbed in after it.
“Let the current take you out into the estuary,” Gilbert said. “The tide will be against you, but the current should take you clear of the river. We will not be able to pursue you until after daybreak, by which time the Frenchman will have set sail. I will warn him to look out for you.” Gilbert smiled. “We would not be wanting him to collide with you.”
Elizabeth reached out and clasped his hand.
“Thank you, my Lord,” she whispered. “You are a good man. And remind me to Lady Margaret: I would not have hurt her for all the world.”
Gilbert squeezed her fingers.
“I suspect she will secretly rejoice in your deliverance.”
She turned her head and met Matthew’s eyes. His gaze was sorrowful.
“Thank you,” she mouthed silently.
He blinked in acknowledgment.
Once they were settled in the boat, Gilbert and Matthew gripped the stern and shoved it out into the river. The yoal spun slowly like a lodestone until it found its direction, then drifted seaward into the darkness.
Chapter Forty-Four
The next morning, having supervised the departure of the French crayer, the Earl’s men struck camp and returned to Slains Castle.
It was a subdued company that trudged the road. The men were exhausted by their exploits in the shambles during the wee small hours, and they were downhearted at the failure of their mission. The rumor had soon circulated that the Earl and his lieutenant, Matthew Fitt, had themselves almost apprehended the traitor and his whore down on the beach beyond the wharf, but they had escaped by the skin of their teeth on a stolen fishing boat. They had watched helplessly as the Frenchman picked them up on its way out into the German sea.
The general wish was that the miscreants might rot in exile.
Gilbert reported to Margaret simply that Elizabeth and the Comyn chiel had gotten away. Outwardly, they both regretted the fact, but inwardly they were glad; Margaret even rejoiced.
“It is what it is,” Gilbert said philosophically, echoing Matthew’s words to him as they had trudged back along the quayside that fateful night. They had tacitly agreed never to speak of what had transpired at that place.
“Are you terribly disappointed?” Margaret asked Matthew when they met one evening, shortly after, on the battlements that overlooked the cast German Sea. “I know you had feelings for her.”
“I am not sorry she has gone,” he replied, choosing his words carefully. But he was not glad either.
“Nor am I,” Margaret said with a sigh, knowing that it was a cruelty to hide a selkie’s clothes from her in order to keep her from her own destiny, even for the sake of one’s love for the creature.
She hoped that Elizabeth would find her destiny.
Ewan Sanderson was gone from the castle on their return. No one knew where he had gone, but everyone knew he would not easily find a position in another household, bearing as he did the mark of his own treachery with the removal of his ears.
Dearbhorghil Goudie heard the news of Elizabeth’s flight a few days later from her son, Maolmhuire, as she lay on her deathbed in Slochd Altrimen, the Nursing Cave. Her lungs were full of phlegm that had been slowly consuming her since Elizabeth’s last visit.
“Good, lassie,” she murmured to herself. “You climbed yon knowe to find yersel. Now be all ye can be, and mak’ o’ it something worth being.”
Nicholas would not be consoled. He took the loss of his Lizzie sorely and blamed the ‘damned Comyns’ for stealing her away. He swore on his wooden sword that, just as soon as he was old enough, he would go on a quest to France to rescue her from the tower in which she had no doubt been incarcerated, slay the dragon which had no doubt been set at the base of that tower to guard her, and bring her home as his princess. Meanwhile, he sparred furiously every morning for the next week with James Robertson on the practice field, before he was distracted by other boyish concerns.
* * *
Elizabeth had a miserable voyage. She was terribly seasick, and it did not help that, as she would later discover, she happened to be with child.
“Why do you think they let us go?” Duncan said on the second night, as they gazed from the starboard side at the sun setting over the flats of East Anglia.
“Because they are good men,” Elizabeth answered him. “They were both burdened by conflicting loyalties: to their feudal duty and to their moral duty. And in the end, they remained true to their chivalry, which demands that they defend the weak against injustice, even if that injustice is required of them by the laws themselves. For it would have been an injustice to have punished you as a traitor when you hadn’t committed a treasonable act – though that was not for want of trying!”
Elizabeth took his arm and leaned into him, her eyes still fixed on the shimmering ball of yellowing flame that was starting to melt into the dark broads and marshes.
“Also,” she added, “I suspect that Sir Gilbert was taken by you.”
Duncan leaned aside and looked down at her with skepticism.
“You jest!” He snorted. “The chief of the Hay clan taken by a damned Comyn. I fear you are too taken by the parable of the lion and the lamb.”
“No, I speak in earnest, my love.” She looked up at him with her eyebrows raised. “He had respect for your worth as a knight, your virtue, and your courage. I think he only finally decided to let us go when you stood up against him on the beach, ready to defend me against his injustice, even though you could barely stand let alone fight. That, for him, was exemplary in his eyes. You may have been his foe, but he came to see you are a worthy foe.”
“And what about Matthew Fitt? Why did he make himself complicit in Sir Gilbert’s ‘lapse’ in duty?”
Elizabeth gazed back out over the East Anglian coast.
“Ah, Matthew,” she said sadly. “He was hopelessly in love with me. The mark of his greatness was that he was willing to sacrifice his prospects of having me as his wife for the sake of my happiness. He had obtained permission to court me, you know.”
Duncan was silent for a while.
“I don’t know whether I would be capable of such a sacrifice.”
Elizabeth looped her arm through his and drew him close again.
“But you were not willing to abandon me. Several times you could have fled: after the fight at Cullen’s cottage, when we were apprehended at the old shieling, back there in the shambles of Aberdon, even at that very l
ast moment on the beach, when you refused to let them take me. You would have sacrificed your very life for me. What greater sacrifice could you make?”
“That is because my life would be worth nothing without you, my love,” he said, turning her around to face him and taking her in his arms.
“As mine would be without you,” she replied, snuggling into his embrace.
“But we are together now, my dearest, and will be so for ay.”
“God willing.”
He covered her mouth with his own. Had it not been for the jeers of the sailors, he would have gone much further.
Extended Epilogue
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Afterword
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It’s the story of how Margaret and Gilbert met!
* * *
The Highlander's Virtuous Lady
Chapter One
“Joan! Will you come down from there?”
Margaret Fraser peered up through the young foliage of the broad beech tree, shielding her eyes against the shifting glare of the dappled spring sunlight. High above the river bank, Joan climbed up through the branches, snapping twigs and rustling leaves as she progressed.
“Joan!” Margaret repeated sharply. “Come down at once!”
Joan kept on climbing.
“I’m nearly there,” she called down. “I can see the nest. I’ve almost reached it.”
Margaret let out a heavy sigh of resignation. She was annoyed. Her sister was incorrigible. Her only consolation was that there was no one around to witness Joan’s most unladylike behavior.
Margaret shook her head and returned her attention to the daisy chain she was linking in her lap. It was almost complete and would make a pretty circlet for her head. The delicate white petals and bright yellow eyes of the flowers would perfectly complement the pale, silvery blondeness of her hair and the fairness of her brow.
She had gathered the flowers from the swards that punctuated the forest path that ran beside the River Tweed from their home at Neidpath Castle. All the way from the castle to their chosen haunt, her sister had capered and swished at the undergrowth with a branch she had cut from a sapling near the postern gate with a dirk that Margaret was sure their parents did not know she had. They had settled in their favorite spot, on a mossy bank beside the river’s edge, where the current caught in a languorous pool beneath the overhanging trees before hurrying off over its shallow, stony bed past Neidpath towards Peebles and into the wild, lawless Marchlands beyond.
“No treasure today,” Joan called. “Just eggs.”
A pair of magpie eggs broke on the turf beside where Margaret was sitting with the skirts of her mustard gown and vermillion surcoat gathered beneath her tucked legs.
“Joan!” Margaret protested, drawing her sumptuous woolen garments away from the sticky splatter and checking them for stains.
“Filthy, ill-omened birds,” Joan remarked, by way of excuse. “Father says we should smash the eggs in any nests we find.”
“I think he means ‘we’ in the general sense of ‘mankind’. I cannot imagine that he means it as a fitting pursuit for ladies. Though,” Margaret added archly, “given how he indulges you, I should not be too surprised to find he was giving you direct instruction by it.”
Joan had begun her descent, which was much more sure-footed and rapid than her going up had been.
“Pish!” she jeered. “You sound like you swallowed the psalter. I’m not a lady yet; I’m still but a lass. Where is the harm in a lass climbing a tree?”
“And sparring with the pages on the practice field and scrambling up the crags?” Margaret replied ruefully. “You are sixteen now, Joan. How do you expect to find a mate if you so persist in being ‘a wee lassie’ so late and lang? You are beyond such things in years. You are of an age when you should be comporting yourself more sedately.”
Joan slipped and swore before she regained her footing.
“It is not a mate I shall be marrying for,” she told her sister. “I shall be marrying the man who can match me on the crags and at the gallop.”
“Then you shall be marrying a filthy reiver,” Margaret retorted, “for no knight will have you.”
“Well, providing that yon reiver is hung like a stallion, I shall not complain.” Joan laughed.
Margaret gasped and pressed her hand to her breast. But she also blushed deeply and swallowed at the fluttering those words had set alight in her stomach.
She gazed out across the river to still her feelings. The water’s surface glittered in the strong spring sunshine, and the Tweed chuckled as it gamboled between the stones of its rocky bed. She closed her eyes and inhaled the sultry fragrance of the blossom on the trees.
Downstream, she could just make out the top of the red sandstone tower that was Neidpath Castle, which from its high crag commanded the river near where it emerged upstream from a steep wooded gorge. Thick forest tumbled down the Castle Braes, from the high Jedderfield Laws that loomed up behind the castle, to a half-moon meadow that fringed a broad curve of the river and which the Frasers used as their practice field.
On the far side of the river from where Margaret sat, lay the Boat Pool, overlooked by a promontory of rock that jutted about twenty feet above the river from the South Park Woods where Sir Simon and his household hawked and hunted.
She loved this place, it was so quiet and peaceful and encapsulated within its horizons the entire wealth of the Fraser household.
Suddenly, there was a crash and a cry. Margaret looked up in alarm and saw Joan entangled in the branches. She jumped to her feet, the daisies falling from her lap and spilling across the grass.
Unlike Margaret, who always chose to dress primly and properly in a gown girdled loosely by a thin belt of leather and a surcoat belted tight beneath her bosom, Joan preferred the freedom of a simple yellow kirtle. Also, whereas her elder sister always wore pointed buckled shoes and stockings hooked to the legs of her short linen braies, Joan went barefoot, and – Margaret could not help but notice, as she gazed up at her sister’s naked arse – often without her undergarments too.
Joan’s skirt had been caught on a branch and had rumpled up over her hips. Joan herself was hissing and spitting like a wildcat.
“Christ wept!” she squealed, as her bare legs scrambled for purchase and she hauled herself up by her strong, sinewy arms. “That bastard magpie must hae cursed me. Evil, vengeful cratur!”
Margaret could not help but laugh, even though, dangling there with her sex on display, Joan had exceeded even the bounds of impropriety.
“Do you need help?” She giggled.
“Much help you could give me, feeble bitch.”
“I could run for the squires,” Margaret sputtered in amusement. “I’m sure they would be more than happy to grapple you down.”
“Don’t you dare!” Joan shouted.
“No, they might see you for what you really are and not the ‘soft boy’ they think you are.”
Joan swung her leg over a bough and tugged her kirtle free. Her face was as red as a damson fruit, and her eyes were dark with fury.
“I’ve a good mind to jump down and scratch your bonnie blue eyes out,
” she spat, as much to cover her own embarrassment as out of any genuine malice towards her sister.
Margaret sat down on the bank again, a broad smile on her usually severe lips, and watched as two of her daisies spun lazily in the pool. Insects dabbed the water-surface while a deep glossy-blue damsel fly hovered among the rushes. On the sandy bed of the pool, three brown trout skulked in the shadows, holding themselves against the gentle current that lay outside the main stream.