“Send word to the Reevers,” John said. “Have them blend with the wedding guests in the chapel. Then—”
Abruptly words became a fit of coughing that wracked John’s frail body.
Duncan went to the bed and slipped his arm around his father, helping him upright until the coughing passed. He held a cup of ale against the old man’s dry lips until most of the ale had been drunk.
“You should rest,” Duncan said.
“Nay. Listen to me. Whether I live or die, you must let the wedding go forward before more Normans come! You must! Only then will—”
Coughing took away words and the will to say them. When John was once again quiet, Duncan gave him more ale to drink; but this time he added two drops of the medicine Meg had made to alleviate John’s pain.
“Ease yourself,” Duncan said. “I’m listening. What have you planned?”
With a surprisingly gentle hand, Duncan brushed back the forelock that had gone gray between one winter and the next as disease ate John’s strength.
“Get Meg,” John said hoarsely. “I can say it only once.”
“I’ll send for—” Duncan began.
“There is no need,” Meg said from the doorway. “I am here.”
No longer was she dressed in the clothes of a cotter’s child. She wore a long inner tunic of soft rose wool and an outer tunic of forest green that was trimmed with a heavily embroidered strip of cloth. Unlike the tunics many women wore, Meg’s were closely fitted, for she had no patience with flapping cloth. Her narrow waist was wrapped about with a sash that crossed in back around her hips as well before being tied in front, further keeping folds of cloth from getting in her way when she worked in the herbal. The sleeves of the outer tunic were long and narrow, hemmed with more embroidery.
“What did you want of me?” Meg asked.
Her intense green eyes looked from Duncan’s muscular good health to the withered shadow that was her father. She noted the stopper out of the small medicine bottle and looked quickly at Duncan.
“Two drops only,” he said, knowing her concern.
Her mouth flattened. “He had that much before mass.”
Everyone in the room knew that the potion was very strong. Six drops sent a patient into dreamless sleep. Three times that could kill the average man. A person as frail as her father had to be given the medicine with great care.
“No matter,” John rasped. “If I die sooner, so be it. Listen well, daughter of Anna of Glendruid. You will be wed on the morrow, before the feast.”
“What feast?” Meg said tightly. “Duncan forbade the gamekeeper to—”
“Silence!” John coughed, but only weakly. “When the priest asks if you agree to the marriage, you will say no.”
“But—”
John talked right over Meg, his voice as dry and withered as his body; and like his eyes, his voice burned with the intense flame of an obsession that was little short of madness.
“There will be confusion among the Normans when you refuse the match,” John said. “Duncan will strike and the Normans will die. Then you will marry Duncan before blood dries in the aisle.”
“You cannot mean that,” whispered Meg.
Stricken, she looked at Duncan. His hazel eyes were as hard as agates. There would be no help from that quarter.
“The Church refused our marriage six years ago,” she said urgently. “For good reason, Duncan. You are my half brother!”
For a long time there was only silence barely disturbed by the quick, frail breaths of a man who clung to life.
Duncan looked at John.
“Tell her,” the old man said.
Reluctantly, Duncan turned back to confront the intense green eyes of the woman who had little real blood relationship to the men in the room.
“At most, sweet Meggie, I’m your stepcousin.”
“Nonsense,” she retorted. “You are John of Blackthorne’s bastard. Anyone with eyes to see knows it.”
“Aye. I am his son. But you are not his daughter.”
Meg took a step backward before she controlled her shock. She straightened her spine and stood proudly.
“What are you saying?” she asked.
Before Duncan could speak, John did.
“Your mother was breeding when we married,” he said bluntly. “You might be my stepbrother’s bastard. And you might be a groom’s spawn, for all I know. The bitch is dead and it matters not to me, for I will die soon.”
“I don’t believe you,” Meg said tightly. “You may be able to blind priests with lies and offers of gold, and lure Duncan with promises you can’t keep, but not me. I am the daughter of Blackthorne Keep. I know it the way I know plants will lift their faces to the sun!”
John struggled to sit up, but had to be content with turning onto his side to confront the girl whose birth had been the greatest affront ever suffered by the proud Saxon thane.
“Look at me, Glendruid witch,” he said roughly. “Know my dying truth. You aren’t of my blood. Duncan is. Despite the meddling of English kings and the perfidy of Glendruid women, my son shall inherit my land.”
Meg sensed that Lord John wasn’t lying.
For a moment she couldn’t breathe. She fought the ice condensing just beneath her skin, chilling her until she shuddered. She had always known that her father could barely suffer the sight of her.
Now she knew why.
“Your son will inherit only death,” Meg said in a low, clear voice.
“I’ll nae listen to your curses, witch!” John hissed.
“Curses? What nonsense,” Meg said harshly. “’Tis only common sense.”
She turned to Duncan, who was watching her unhappily.
“I’m sorry, lass,” he said. “I didn’t mean for you to find out this way.”
“My bastardy or lack of it matters not one bit right now. Listen to me, for John is too far into death’s embrace to care what happens to the living.”
“Meggie—”
She put her hands on her hips and interrupted sharply.
“Don’t you ‘Meggie’ me, Duncan of Maxwell. I vow we must be close in blood, for I am immune to your Scots charm!”
A crooked smile crossed Duncan’s face. “That you are. ’Tis why I like you so well. We will do nicely as man and wife.”
“God blind me,” Meg said through her teeth, shocking both men. “John has the excuse of grave illness to explain his lack of wit. What is your excuse, Duncan? Does ambition cloud your mind as much as death clouds his?”
Duncan opened his mouth to answer, but Meg kept on talking, her voice both angry and pleading.
“King Henry won’t accept the treacherous murder of his knights,” Meg said. “The great barons will also—”
“They are busy with the Celts in the south,” Duncan interrupted curtly, “when they aren’t fighting among themselves or plotting against the king. They have tried to take the northern marches. They failed.”
“They had no reason to succeed. There is easier land to the south.”
“Exactly. They won’t—”
“They will!” she interrupted passionately. “You will give them the reason!”
“No more than they had before. It wasn’t enough then.”
“Tell me, Duncan,” Meg said in a scathing tone, “if your right arm were cut off by a bandit, would you notice its loss and seek vengeance?”
“Aye, but I’m not the English king.”
“Ah, you’ve noticed that, have you? ’Tis a thing to keep in mind whilst planning the death of Norman nobles.”
“Meggie—”
“Norman barons quarrel among themselves because there is no better game to play,” Meg continued without pausing. “Slay Dominic le Sabre and you will provide the barons with the best game of all. War.”
Duncan shrugged. “It is a game we shall win.”
“You will not win! If I can see that, why can’t you?”
“You are a girl with a tender heart and no understanding
of war.” Duncan smiled. “’Tis another of your graces, Meggie.”
“Save the oil for the serving wenches,” she said acidly. “I’m not so easily tricked. Neither is the king of England. When word of the slaughter reaches London, the king and his barons will unite and deliver such a harrowing to the marches as will still be whispered of a thousand years hence! You have but twelve knights—”
“Sixteen.”
“—and a rabble of brutes good for little more than butchering women and children.”
“Enough!” Duncan demanded.
“Nay! ’Tis not enough until you understand that you can’t win!”
Duncan’s hands wrapped around Meg’s shoulders, holding her still while his words hammered at her like stone.
“Understand this,” he said flatly. “If you marry that Norman bastard, I will have to watch my birthright—”
“Nay!” she raged. “Bastards have no birthright!”
“—pass into the hands of another man,” Duncan continued relentlessly, “and with it the green-eyed Glendruid witch whom the vassals of Blackthorne Keep love more than they love anything but God. That, as much as the English king, is why John hasn’t disinherited you. The vassals would have set aside their plows and walked from the land as from a cursed place.”
Pale, trembling invisibly, Meg tried to get free of Duncan’s grip. He barely noticed her struggles.
“Know this, Lady Margaret. I will have land and a noble wife to bear my children. If I must kill ten Norman nights or ten thousand, I will have land.”
Shaken, Meg wrenched free of Duncan’s grip. Torn between understanding of her childhood friend’s need for a place in a society that made no place for bastards, and her certainty that his plan would be the ruin of the land and the vassals she loved, Meg watched Duncan with tears overflowing her eyes.
“You’re asking me to throw Blackthorne Keep into war,” she whispered.
“I’m asking you not to marry a brutal Norman lord. Is that such a grand favor to seek from you?”
Meg’s only answer was her tears.
“Ask not for favors of a Glendruid witch,” John rasped fiercely. “I’m commanding you, Margaret. I am lord of this keep and you are as much my chattel as a pig rooting in my forest. You will obey me or you will rue the day of your birth as often and as deeply as I do!”
“Dinna worry, Meggie,” Duncan said softly, tugging on one of her long braids. “I’ll see that you come to no harm in the church.”
Meg closed her eyes and struggled not to scream out her anger at the ambitions of the men around her. To have her life and her body used as pawns in the name of the English king’s peace was an expected, if harsh, duty of a noblewoman.
To have her life and her body used to start a war could not be borne.
“I cannot,” she said.
“You shall,” hissed John. “You may be Duncan’s wife or you may be a whore for his Reevers, it matters not to me.”
“Lord John—” Duncan began unhappily.
“Silence! Far better you have any other wife than the green-eyed spawn of Glendruid! At your urging, I agreed to ask the witch for her alliance. She refused it. Go you now and tell your Reevers to rise up and slay the—”
“Nay!” Meg said. “Father—”
“I am not your father.”
Meg’s breath came in harshly as she looked for a way out of the trap Duncan and John had sprung around her.
No way came. Meg interlaced her fingers and gripped so harshly that she drove blood from her hands and feeling from her fingers.
“I—” she began, but her voice cracked into silence.
The two men watched her with hazel eyes so alike and yet so subtly different. In John’s there was a hatred as old as her mother’s betrayal. In Duncan’s there was a hope as old as his understanding of who his father really was.
“Meggie?” Duncan asked quietly.
She bowed her head.
“I shall do what I must,” Meg whispered.
5
MEG LEFT HER FATHER’S ROOM so quickly that her wool mantle lifted and swirled behind her. She had much to do before she fled the castle. First she must prepare a quantity of medicines for the vassals who depended on her aid. Then she must sneak enough food and blankets from the castle to last her a fortnight.
And then what? she asked herself.
There was no answer except the obvious one: anything was better than being the stone upon which her beloved Blackthorne was broken.
Candle flames bowed and whipped as Meg hurried by on flying feet, descending the tight spiral staircase at reckless speed. No sooner had she reached the great hall than Eadith spotted her and moved to intercept despite Meg’s obvious hurry.
“My lady—”
“Not now,” Meg interrupted.
“But Lord Dominic wants—”
“Later. I have medicines to prepare.”
Startled by Meg’s curt manner, Eadith was for once speechless as she watched her mistress’s rapidly vanishing form.
As though afraid Eadith would pursue, Meg redoubled her speed. Once below the level of the great hall, she met no one on the ground floor but servants. She slowed to a more reasonable pace. Even so, her mantle still rippled and stirred behind her.
Small, dark rooms—more like stalls than true rooms—opened on either side of Meg as she hurried down the aisle. Smells of piled roots and ale casks permeated the gloom, as did the odors of salted or smoked fish and eels in their barrels, and fowl hanging by their cool, faintly scaled feet. Beneath all the food smells was the arid, complex scent of the herbal that had been created by Lady Anna for the drying of her plants and the preparation of her medicines.
Meg’s memories of her mother were vivid. Many of them involved standing in the herbal or in the garden with Anna, listening to her musical voice describing each plant and its properties for healing or soothing the small aches and great pains of the vassals’ lives. The herbal, the gardens, and the bath had been constructed according to Anna’s exacting requirements, for each was important to the rituals and well-being of someone raised in Glendruid traditions.
Close to the entrance to the herbal were two tables for the crushing, chopping, and powdering of leaves, stems, flowers, roots, and bark; all of which were used in Meg’s medicines. Small chests, pots, bowls, mortars and pestles, knives and spoons were arrayed neatly at the back of the tables.
Twelve paces into the hillside, supported by stone rather than wood, there was rack after rack of things drying or stored beyond the reach of light. Basins waited to be filled with the fresh springwater that welled to the surface in the center of the keep, for water was at the heart of many Glendruid rituals.
Meg breathed deeply, letting the familiar mixture of scents fill her, driving out the malodorous air of the sickroom. After a few more breaths her hands stopped trembling and the ice in her stomach began to melt. Meg loved the serenity and generosity of the herbal, with its silent promise of aches eased and ills healed.
But nothing in this room will cure war or the famine and bloodshed that attends it.
The unhappy thought made ice condense once more in Meg’s stomach.
“I can’t send my people into that bloody maw,” she whispered, looking around the herbal with eyes that saw only catastrophe. “And for what? For nothing! Duncan can’t win. Dearest God, make him see that!”
But even as the prayer left her lips, Meg knew it wouldn’t change what was planned. Duncan would have Blackthorne Keep or he would have an early grave.
“Oh, Duncan,” she whispered, putting her face in her hands. “I would not see you dead. Of all the people of my childhood, only you, Mother, and Old Gwyn ever truly cared for me.
“What will I do?”
As though Anna were still alive, words came to Meg. Do that which you can, daughter. Leave the rest to God.
After a moment Meg straightened, wiped away her tears, and tried to concentrate on the tasks that had always soothed her in the past.
One of her favorite jobs was to create the fragrant bouquets of herbs that both pleased the senses and kept vermin from hiding within mattresses and sleeping pallets. Harry’s wife was bedridden with a difficult pregnancy, and in special need of anything to ease her days.
Everything Meg needed was in front of her, for she had been preparing sachets for the wedding mattress that was even now being made up from fresh straw; the mattress upon which she would have lain down a virgin and arisen the next morning a maid no longer.
Unbidden came the image of Dominic’s fingertips soothing the falcon so sweetly that the fierce bird calmed. Meg had wondered then what it would feel like to be so carefully touched. There had been little of gentleness in her life from the man who was her father in name only.
And, even though she sensed that Dominic’s restraint had been a tactician’s cool calculation of the quickest way to victory, his caress had raised a hunger within Meg to be gentled like that again.
If we had married, would Dominic have treated me like a falcon or like an opponent to be vanquished?
Meg remembered the tip of Dominic’s tongue gliding warmly over her lower lip, a tasting as light as a breath, a caress so sweet and unexpected that remembering it made her shiver. The tactile memory sent odd frissons shimmering through her. She had felt nothing like Dominic’s caress in her life. She had imagined nothing like it in her dreams.
If that is what marriage offers, ’tis no surprise that women settle to it after a time.
Then came the memory of Dominic’s words to the young mews girl he so casually had offered to buy.
Small falcon, marriage has nothing to do with this.
For Dominic, marriage was a matter of cold calculation. It had nothing to do with Glendruid hope, much less affection between a man and a woman.
A pot tilted and dried leaves leaped from Meg’s suddenly uncertain hands. The herbal bouquet came apart like a flock of ducks at the shadow of a peregrine flying overhead.
“Keep that up, girl, and I’ll have you out weeding the garden as though you were six once more.”
Gwyn’s familiar voice made Meg jump. More herbs scattered.
Untamed Page 5