by Fiona Faris
“I missed ye,” he said simply.
Margaret smiled nervously.
“But I have only been gone a few moments.”
William’s eyes widened and ran over her from head to toe.
“But ye are that pretty, Margaret. I missed your prettiness.”
He took a step towards her, and she slithered further along the wall.
“It is pretty here,” she said, looking out over the trees towards the lochs again, in an attempt to distract him.
He followed her eyes, a look of confusion and puzzlement in his own.
“That’s just…” He waved a dismissive hand at the view, his head rocking almost imperceptibly from side to side. “… ordinary,” he finished the thought. “You’re… out of the ordinary.”
She blushed and smiled despite herself.
“Thank you, William. That is very gallant of you.”
William beamed, pleased with himself.
He stumbled forward a few steps.
“Would you… would you like to see the swallows’ nests?” he offered. “I can show you where they daff, right up under the battlements. Ye can see them from the big room.”
He nodded encouragingly, running his tongue over his top lip as he did so.
Margaret hesitated.
“Maybe another day,” she answered him eventually. “I really should rejoin my sister’s wedding party.”
She started towards the door, but William stepped in front of her.
“It will have to be afore the summer’s end,” he said. “They flee awa’ at the end o’ the summer.”
“Yes, I know, William,” Margaret said firmly, with some impatience. “Now, will you let me past. I really should go in.”
He reached out a hand and brushed it against her forearm.
“Promise me,” he said. “Promise you’ll come up to the big room wi’ me afore the summer’s end, to see the swallows’ nests.”
Margaret rubbed her palm over her arm as if something ugsome had crawled over it, a little shiver wriggling up her spine.
“I promise, William. Now, will you please let me past.”
William hopped aside, a broad smile of contentment splitting his face.
“You promised, now, Margaret,” he reminded her. “Ye maun-na break a promise.”
“I promised, William. I will let you show me the swallows’ nests. Now, let us go back in. They will be wondering what has happened to the pair of us.”
When they slipped back into the hall, Auld Wat was regaling the company with the tale of how his wife, Mary, the daughter of Dryhope, had been known as the ‘Flower of Yarrow’, and of how he, out of all the young blades of the Marchlands, had ‘plucked’ her.
“I mind the time.” He cackled. “When supplies were low she served me up a set of spurs on a platter instead of meat, which was her way of telling me I should ride out and replenish them from our neighbors' herds.”
“What family do you have?” Lady Maria asked Mary.
She was clutching Mary’s skinny hand in both of hers as if it was the only thing that was anchoring her to the earth.
“Eight,” Mary replied. “Three laddies and five lassies.”
Auld Wat rolled his eyes at Patrick.
“Five lassies, mark you,” he said. “That makes six besoms to sweep me frae my rest. I never hae a moment’s peace at Harden. That’s why I’m ay oot on the reive; that and to put meat in the gawp o’ their mouths.”
Lady Maria put one hand to her chest and raised her eyes heavenward.
“Eight! My, that does not bear thinking about.”
“Aye.” Mary sighed and nodded across the table at Wat. “Yon randie auld loon turned me from the Flower of Yarrow into a withered auld stick, with all the bairns he got on me. I should hae snipped his bollocks off after the first three.”
Auld Wat looked up, in mock affront.
“Christ, woman!” he exclaimed. “Did I ken how the brood o’ you and your hens wad peck at my heid sae sair, I would hae snipped them off myself.”
Lady Maria’s eyes bulged with mirth as she tried to suppress a belly laugh.
Margaret smiled. The Scotts, and Mary, in particular, were proving good for her mother.
The conversation then turned to the war and became more somber once again. Margaret’s heart soared when Patrick recounted that he had heard from his father than King Robert had taken refuge in the Hebrides, though perhaps it was in Ireland or in the Northern Isles or even in Norway itself, the accounts were a little obscure on the exact location. At least Gilbert would be safe, Margaret reflected, wherever he had fled to.
Auld Wat grimly related that King Robert’s sisters, Mary and Isabella, had been captured and imprisoned in wooden cages suspended from the battlements of Roxburgh and Berwick Castles respectively, while Queen Elizabeth was languishing in a dungeon in York and his daughter, Marjorie, had been married to a nunnery. It was not expected that Mary and Isabella would survive a winter.
“That is monstrous!” Margaret exclaimed, her face full of horror.
“That is war,” Mary Scott observed. “The English hope to flush the Bruce out by mistreating his women.”
“But it does contravene the courtesies demanded of knights and noblemen towards their hostages,” Patrick pointed out.
Auld Wat closed one eye in a sly calculating wink.
“Aye, but sic ‘courtesies’ are only observed if there is a ransom to be had,” he said. “The Bruce is hardly in a position to pay Edward for his womenfolk’s safekeeping and return. They’re nae use to him in that respect, sae he maun put them to guid use in some other way.”
Margaret was shocked.
“But would you use womenfolk so ill, sir?”
Auld Wat gave her a grim look.
“Aye, I would, lass, if I were Edward and I thought it would bring Robert out into the open. I’ve nae time for the niceties o’ honor and convention. In sic matters, what is right and what is wrang is measured by the length o’ your sword and the strength o’ your arm.”
Margaret bridled.
“King Robert would never resort to such barbarity.”
Auld Wat squinted at her again with his cynical eye.
“Oh, but aye and he would,” he insisted. “Did he not betray and butcher Comyn when Comyn foolishly believed he was protected by the sanctuary of the church of the Greyfriars in Dumfries? Is that no’ for why the Pope has excommunicated him? Was yon the act o’ an honorable man?” He turned to Patrick. “Your faither had a hand in yon ‘barbarity’ as well, did he no’?”
Patrick stood, sending his chair clattering across the floor. His hand was on the hilt of his sword. Margaret and Lady Maria both let out gasps of alarm. Joan’s hand went to the dirk she concealed in her girdle. Mary looked on impassively.
“For all our friendship, Wat, I would that you did not disparage my father.” Patrick growled through gritted teeth.
Wat lounged back in his chair and raised a hand to wave away the perceived slight on Patrick’s family honor.
“Wheesht, man! I’m disparaging no one,” he said amiably. “Had I been your faither, I wad hae done the same. I was just saying that yon’s the nature of things. Chivalry or no’, a man ay acts to his ain advantage, and he’d be a fool not to.”
“That is a rather cynical view,” Margaret observed with distaste.
“It’s the realistic view,” Wat shot back. “If I didn’t take the realistic view, I’d be lang deid by now.”
Margaret gave a little shiver. She hoped and prayed that Gilbert would take ‘the realistic view’ and survive the present dangers to return to her.
Chapter Fifteen
Several days later, Margaret was sitting in the cramped living quarters of Dryhope’s small solar, embroidering a wall-hanging for the rather bare and spartan hall. Outside, it was raining, and a small fire had been lit in the fireplace, as much for its cheer than for warmth. From beyond the small leaded window with its opaque squares of cloudy glass, she could
hear the smatter of the rain on the foliage of the trees that crept close to the tower and the burble of the wood pigeons that sheltered on their bows.
She heard footsteps scuff the stone steps that led up from the hall, and a moment later, Joan rose through the hatch in the floor.
Margaret gasped, her sewing sliding from her lap.
“Joan! What on earth have you done to your hair?”
Joan’s long silver-blonde tresses had been roughly hacked into a short page-boy style. A ragged fringe ran across her high brow, and a straggly bob fell to barely brush her shoulders.
“I took the shears to it,” she said.
Margaret gave a snort.
“I can see that, but why? It makes you look like a…”
“A boy?” Joan completed the sentence. “Aye, that is the intention.”
“But why?”
Joan threw herself onto a chair and settled into a sprawl that made her look even more like a hearty fellow. Margaret frowned at the legs Joan spread loosely out in front of her, the elbows resting lazily on the armrests of the chair, the fingertips spanned across her temple. The affected male manner her sister had assumed was at odds with the still feminine charms of her dress and the swell of her bosom, the flare of her hips, and the long sinuous legs beneath the yellow kirtle.
“Patrick has convinced Auld Wat to mount raids upon the English army’s supply lines out of Carlisle. Wat cares not a jot for King Robert or the campaign to drive Edward from his realm, but he was persuaded by the prospect of plunder. I’m to join the raiding parties.”
Margaret could not believe what she was hearing. Her heart raced with anxiety, her whole being rebelled against the very idea of a lady fighting in battle.
“But you can’t,” was all she could say. “You just can’t. It would be too dangerous and… you are a woman, for pity’s sake!”
Joan grinned and looked Margaret boldly in the eye.
“That is exactly what Patrick said.” She chuckled. “He went on about honor and virtue and how it was his manly duty to protect his lady and keep her safe from harm… and all that chivalric nonsense.” Her grin turned mischievous. “But I just told him that, if he wanted me to ride him in bed, he would have to let me ride in the raids.”
“But what did Auld Wat say?” Margaret asked, still trying to comprehend the insanity of the situation. “Surely he will not want the added liability of a wench on such a risky enterprise.”
Joan shrugged.
“He just saddled up a pair of horses and took me out into the forest. We rode like Furies through the trees, then we took a few turns in a clearing with sword and stave, and he pronounced me satisfactory.”
She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial murmur.
“It was he that told me I should alter my appearance,” she confided. “He said that, if I looked too much like a woman, the enemy would seize on me as a tasty prize. It would be better, he said, that I appeared as a callow loon than as a brazen lass. So...” She raised a hand and flounced her shorn locks. “Here I am. ‘John Fraser, esquire’, at your service, m’lady.”
Margaret looked her up and down with a dubious eye.
“Of course, I won’t be riding into the fray in my kirtle,” Joan added hastily. “It will be a tunic, hose, and hood of Lincoln green for me, just the same as the other reivers. We are outlaws ourselves now, after all. We must adapt to our new station.”
They fell into an uneasy silence. Margaret turned her head to watch the thin flames of the fire lick the flanks of the log that burned on the grate, sending thin blue wisps of smoke curling up towards the chimney.
Joan, who was unable to settle quietly at the best of times, got to her feet and paced over to the window and back, clearly champing at the bit to be active in something but at a loss as to what she could turn her hand to.
“I am still not happy about this,” Margaret said, signaling to Joan that she had her acceptance but not her blessing. “I still think you should content yourself with the management of the house and let the men fight. There is so much that needs to be done here to establish a home at Dryhope. We are still living as if we were camp followers. As Patrick’s wife and lady of the house, the responsibility for this falls to you. It is how best you can serve your lord.”
Joan paused in her pacing up and down and gazed at the cloudy distorted world that the crazed glass in the window let out onto. Her jaw was set with a grim determination, a small muscle twitching just below her ear.
“It is not about serving my lord, it is about avenging our father and revenging the breaking of our mother,” she swore in a low resolute voice. “I am closest to being the son and heir that Father never had. It falls to me to repay the evil that was done him and raise our family up again.”
“But surely that is Patrick’s – and Gilbert’s – responsibility, to restore the family’s honor?”
Joan traced the lead in the window with her fingertips.
“It is not about the restoration of honor. This is a blood feud. Auld Wat said as much as we sparred in the forest. It will not be settled merely by the restoration of our lands and titles, but only by the blood of our enemies feeding the earth.”
“That’s barbarous!” Margaret declared. “That is the virtue of reivers, not of noble folk like ourselves.”
Joan turned her head and fixed Margaret with a stony, pitiless look.
“As I said, we are reivers ourselves now. We must adapt to our new station.”
Patrick, Wat, and William undertook to complete the training Joan’s father had begun as a fond indulgence, as an amusement as much for his own pleasure as for his daughter’s edification. But now her training began in earnest, in swordsmanship, horsemanship, and in close combat with the quarterstaff. For weeks, they worked her hard. But she did not flinch or weaken.
Margaret, Lady Maria, and Mary were sitting in the lee of the tower. Mary was showing the ladies how to prepare rabbit skins for the trimming of surcoats and capes for the winter. Margaret’s fingers were sore from pushing the long thick curved needle through the rabbit skin, despite the iron thimbles she wore in her delicate fingertips. Lady Maria found repulsive the very idea of handling the skins of the dead vermin, holding them at arm’s length in tentative fingers and wrinkling her nose at the feel of them.
Further down the slope towards the edge of the forest, Joan was clashing staves with the giant William. William, Margaret noted with surprise, was remarkably nimble on his feet, given the sheer size and weight of him. He also handled his quarterstaff with a dexterity that belied his oafish demeanor. It was if he came alive when he was fighting, the sluggishness of his mind being cast off with the slow infantile lour of his face as he struck and feinted, his eyes suddenly bright with alacrity and the joy of the fight. He became handsome, Margaret unexpectedly realized. His heavy hams and shanks, his shoulders and neck, abruptly became firm muscles that rippled efficiently beneath the surface of his skin and the lines of his sark and hose. It was as if he had found and flourished in his proper element, a fine salmon that had been returned to the river of combat from the dry land of polite society. He was like a bear that seemed soft and cuddly as it sat in chains by its master’s feet at the fair, allowing itself to be petted by the bairns, but which rose ferociously as soon as the dogs were set to bait it.
There was, Margaret reflected, something brutally attractive about the man. She also could not stop her eyes straying to the massive, rolling bulge that weighed down the crotch of his hose.
William was giving no quarter to Joan. With his stave gripped firmly in his paws, he flicked each end in rapid succession at Joan’s head and shoulders, light blows which she could parry effortlessly with deft flicks of her own quarterstaff while returning the probing attacks with interest.
Then suddenly Joan slipped and lost her footing. She went down and William, sensing victory, adroitly shifted his grip to wield the stave like an ax, cleaving down on Joan with long crashing blows.
Lying supine on t
he turf, Joan gritted her teeth and fended off the fierce assault with the edge of her staff, though how her long slim arms did not break under the sheer force of the blows Margaret did not know. Then, springing to a catlike crouch as William raised his staff high above his head to gather force for a decisive blow, she swept her stave across, inches above the ground, and caught him sharply across the shins.
With a loud bellow, William went down, dropping his quarterstaff. In a flash, Joan was on her feet, standing over him, with the tip of her stave quivering on his Adam’s apple.
“Yield!” she demanded.