Captive of the Border Lord

by Blythe Gifford

  Nor had she wanted to learn.

  After the first few months, she spent most of her days looking out to sea, a slight pout on her quivering lower lip.

  He tried to make her happy, but the King was no more than a boy then. Factions warred over policy. Families warred on the border. His father was Warden and often away. His mother had died long since. Carwell Castle offered her little but his companionship.

  But at least it promised her safety.

  Or so he thought.

  When she was not gazing toward the firth, she would disappear to walk the beach. He warned her, so many times, against the treacherous sands when the tides were ebbing. But after a while, she seemed not to hear.

  She seemed not to hear anything.

  She would appear, her skirt damp with sand and mud, just after the flow of the incoming tide, coming in fast as a galloping horse. And he would feel a chill, realising she had put herself in danger again.

  Wondering whether he should lock her up to keep her from harm.

  In time, though she had seemed repulsed by the joining, she told him she was with child.

  His joy was immeasurable. This would be the first of many. She would find purpose as a mother. He would have an heir. In time, perhaps a brood of bairns large and close as the Brunsons.

  Children who would care for each other as much as those in the family of the woman who slept beside him now.

  He looked down to see Bessie’s eyes open. She smiled as if she were happy.

  She had no right to be happy.

  Yet his lips curled upwards in response. He must have pleased her.

  ‘I wish the dance came so easily to me.’

  He allowed himself to smile. A broad grin, with nothing hidden. ‘It will. When you let it. You look content.’

  She snuggled closer to him. ‘I am. People have watched me, expecting a new bride to beam. They frown when I do not smile. Now, I will.’

  ‘Your feelings are your own.’ He shared none of his. She deliberately put forth some of hers, he had learned, in order to shield the rest. ‘Smile or frown at whom you wish. No one else.’

  ‘Until I came to court, no one was so interested in my feelings.’

  He wondered about her brothers, but did not ask. Most men would not rock a steady boat.

  ‘I am.’ He surprised himself with the words, an assertion perilously close to jealousy. Certainly he wanted no one to know more of her than he did.

  She sat up, pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped herself in the blanket. ‘You care about my feelings, but you do not want to be shackled with me as a wife.’

  He wanted to be shackled with no one as a wife.

  He rolled off the bed and stood, as if distance between them mattered now that it was too late. Now that, despite his intentions, they could not be put asunder. Was there still a way? If he had time to think...

  But he was still too close, close enough that she could grab his hand and tug him toward the bed again. ‘Was I more awkward than...she?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your other wife?’

  The world seemed to drop away. He had not expected that question. And was not prepared to lie. ‘No.’

  She smiled again. Relief. ‘You did not tell me much of her. Not even who she was.’

  ‘Now is not the time.’ Naked, in bed, desiring this woman again so soon. No. He did not want memories of Annabell in this room.

  ‘We are well and truly wed now. Can you not share the truth?’

  ‘Truth? Why do you think that is such a thing to be cherished?’

  ‘Are lies better?’

  ‘Lies are not necessary.’ Not in most cases. Only a slant on the truth. Only the sin of omission. ‘Let me tell you my feelings instead,’ he said, sliding back under the covers. ‘I want to join with you again.’

  She smiled and opened her arms.

  He could not tell her now. Could not bear to have her hate him for the truth. Some day, she would discover all. About the treaty. About what he had done that Truce Day. Even about how he had failed before.

  But not now. Not yet.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After, she woke smiling every morning.

  She was learning his body and her own. One step at a time and even she had reached the hilltop.

  She knew there would be an end. Some day. They might be wed in truth, but Carwell did not want a wife. Not for ever. She had no doubt that even now, he was thinking of a way to break the betrothal after the danger had passed.

  But now, today, she was at the court of the King, where a host of servants would conjure feasts and dancing to celebrate the season, married in truth to a man she loved against all reason.

  And for these few days, she realised, surprised, that she did not miss home.

  Treaty signed, the King had put aside any thought of governing, politics and war. It was Yuletide. He would make merry.

  The night celebrations began in earnest. Bessie stood beside Thomas as the music started. He turned, performing the most formal reverence, and held out his hand. ‘Will you?’

  Music, colour and laughter surrounded her, along with delicious smells from a meal prepared by other hands. And there, palm up, he tempted her to step into the midst of it all. To be a different person. A woman who laughed and danced gracefully and even carelessly. A woman who was nothing like Bessie Brunson.

  But a woman who might be Elizabeth, wife of Laird Thomas Carwell.

  A woman named Elizabeth might dance lightly all night without tripping or treading on a toe. A woman named Elizabeth might draw envious glances from the men and women on the edges of the room.

  She put her hand in Carwell’s and stepped onto the floor as if her name were Elizabeth.

  His palm was warm and sure, his smile genuine, as he led her into the circle. The room swirled around her while, with her hand in his, she stayed steady and sure. She let go of the logical, argumentative grip of a mind that counted steps and anticipated beats. Instead, she let the music speak directly to her feet. They moved of their own volition, moved in perfect time, paralleling his, as if his body and hers were somehow connected through music, each able to mirror the other.

  Something floated up from the back of her brain, but, drowned by wine, it sank, leaving her bobbing gracefully on the swell of a wave of ever-changing music.

  Somehow she was able to change with it.

  The dancers flowed; it was time to change partners. Did Carwell’s fingers linger on hers? No time to ponder, for the next hand that grasped hers was the King’s.

  She gasped. A catch of breath stopping the flow of the music through her for a moment, but she inhaled again. It was a dream. She was still Elizabeth, still floating across the floor. In her dream, long ago, she had been dancing before the King. Now, she was dancing with him.

  Tonight, he had a wicked, happy grin, yet for those few moments that he partnered her, she thought she saw murderous frowns from both Long Mary and Carwell.

  It mattered not. Tonight, she was Elizabeth. And she was dancing with the King.

  * * *

  Now Thomas was the one who almost stumbled, trying to watch Bessie and the King through the midst of swirling dancers. Better this way, his calculating mind reminded him, if they were to have any hope that the King might forgive her stubborn brothers.

  But what if the King liked her too much? What if the price of his forgiveness was too high?

  It was not his promise to Rob and John that haunted Thomas now. It was something much deeper and more dangerous. It was the way he felt about this naïve, stubborn, beautiful woman.

  Dance over, she rejoined him, smiling and flushed. She wore one of those pointed caps to cover her hair, but it had been knocked askew, and a ribbon of hair ran riot, cascading over her shoulder.

  And he wanted nothing so much as to take her back to their bed.

  ‘You danced with the King.’ The words came out more gruffly than he had intended.

  Her smile faded at his tone.
Then she lifted her chin. ‘And I did not trip.’

  He had taught her the steps and now she was ready to take them with someone else.

  I do not want you to dance with him. I do not want you to dance with anyone but me.

  And he felt his jaw sag with the realisation. How had he come to care about this woman so much?

  ‘He has cold hands.’

  ‘What?’ He forced himself back to the present. ‘Who?’

  There it was. Bessie Brunson’s set of the lips. ‘The King, of course.’

  He nodded, swallowing a shout of joy. ‘Does he now?’ His face softened. ‘You danced beautifully.’

  Her smile flashed then, as if his praise were somehow worth more than the actual dance.

  ‘The King,’ she said, with a smile that teased him, ‘is a very good dancer.’

  Vixen. But to see her so easy with him made him smile as well. ‘He particularly likes the brintle.’

  A little furrow squeaked between her brows. ‘I don’t know that one.’

  ‘I can show you,’ he said, with a glance towards the building where their chamber awaited.

  ‘In private,’ she said. ‘Where no one can see me stumble.’

  Thomas held out his hand.

  And he could tell by her smile that she knew there was no such dance as the brintle.

  * * *

  Thomas regretted each coming dawn. On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, King James would leave Stirling for Edinburgh, where the Parliament would be called back into session to officially ratify the treaty.

  That left the problem of what to do about Elizabeth.

  He had planned, long ago, to bring her home safely to her brothers. Then he had thought to protect her with a betrothal, in name only, so that it could be broken when they were safely away from Stirling.

  He had never planned this. Never planned to bed her. Never planned to care for her. And his very caring, his loving weakness had trapped both of them.

  The King had blithely ignored the fact that her family had not condoned, or even been informed of, the match. That should be his first task: to return to Liddesdale and negotiate with her brothers, to see if they could jointly find a way out of this marriage.

  If they did not kill him first.

  But the king expected him to meet with the English Warden to set Truce Day—a man who would no doubt accuse Thomas of betrayal when he discovered the language they had carefully crafted had been flung into the Berwick Bay.

  In order to make the timing required by Treaty, he would have to travel directly home. That course held even less appeal, for it would bring Bessie to Carwell Castle where she would invade the retreat he had tried to cleanse of all memories of his marriage. He wanted no woman there. What he wanted was to retreat to his castle alone so he could purge his feelings for this woman.

  And every day they spent together made that harder.

  * * *

  On the day that presents were exchanged, the King received from his mother the Castle of Stirling itself.

  Bessie’s gift to Thomas would be not nearly so fine.

  She had wondered whether to give him anything at all. Frivolous gifts had not been a custom of the Brunsons. But here the King was gifted by his adoring subjects. If he was feeling generous, he gifted them in return.

  So on New Year’s Day, she woke early and sat up in bed, eager for her betrothed to wake.

  ‘Here,’ she said, the moment he opened his eyes. ‘For you.’

  She plopped the softly wrapped bundle on his chest, without waiting for him to sit up.

  He looked at the present, then up at her, and even in the dim light, she recognised regret in his eyes.

  Moving it gently to the bed, he struggled to sit up. ‘I have no gift for you.’

  ‘You gave the King a silver goblet and told him it was from the Brunsons. This does not begin to repay that debt. And you have given me...’ What could she say? For these weeks, he had given her a world she had never thought to see, including the one inside her. ‘Much.’

  He looked down at the package, silent.

  ‘Go ahead. Open it.’

  He pulled the ribbon and put aside cloth wrapping. There, nested against the fabric, was an embroidered square of cloth.

  She held her breath. ‘It’s a thistle.’ An extravagance. Something that served no purpose but decoration. ‘Do you like it?’

  He raised his eyes to hers. ‘This is fine enough for the King. Did you stitch it yourself?’

  She shook her head. ‘A broudster did it.’ Proud to give him needlework worthy of royalty. ‘Perhaps, at home, it might adorn your...bed.’

  Yet in his hands, it looked like such a small thing compared to the yards of curtains hanging around them. Her scrap of a gift would not cover a pillow.

  ‘Thank you. It will remind me of the First Brunson.’

  She smiled. ‘The one who trod on a thistle.’

  ‘And swallowed the pain.’ He set her gift aside, carefully, took her face in his hands and kissed her.

  They did not talk again for a long time.

  But she hugged his thanks to her heart. She had spent the precious silver coin Johnnie had given her to pay the woman who stitched it so that Thomas would have something of her.

  Later.

  * * *

  ‘Daft days’ they called this time. And Bessie let herself be daft, let herself dance through the days without thinking of what came next because she did not want to know.

  Just a few more days, she told herself, with each dawn. Celebrations would end on Twelfth Night, but what would happen then, she had not asked.

  ‘Will you go home, then?’ Wee Mary asked, one afternoon. ‘And have your wedding there?’

  If they went home, there was likely to be no wedding at all. ‘We haven’t...talked about that.’

  Wee Mary’s grin was wicked. ‘You haven’t been talking much at all, I’ll wager.’

  Bessie’s cheeks turned hot. No, she had not been talking. Or asking. He had said little of what would happen next and, for all her forthright tongue, she had not asked.

  Bessie gazed out to the hills. ‘When I came here, I couldn’t wait to go home.’ Home. The place that had been hard, near impossible, to leave. ‘But now...’

  ‘You’ll miss Stirling?’

  She shook her head. ‘This isn’t home, either.’ It was a world as treacherous as Johnnie had warned her, where dance and music disguised dangers. Where a false step in the dark of night could plunge you off a cliff or into the bad graces of a King who played the lute and penned poetry and would watch you dance on your way to the dungeon.

  Yet it was also a place where life had been easier, where beauty rounded the sharp edges of danger.

  And where a man had cared that she stay warm and learn to dance.

  ‘What’s it like, then, your home?’

  And the first word that came to her was hard.

  ‘It’s family. Duty.’ Everything her father had taught her. At home in Liddesdale, she would return to a world of work and Odd Jock and the whine of wind on the hills and endless flights of stairs. ‘Things are...certain.’

  ‘I thought there were raids.’

  She smiled. ‘Ah, well, that’s part of the certainty.’

  Yet as she spoke of the only home she had ever known, it seemed to grow more distant, as if it were only a memory and not a place at all.

  Did she not want to see her brothers again?

  She thought of Johnnie, now making a life with Cate. The brother she had missed so deeply for all those years he had been away. And Rob, gruff and growling Rob, growing into his new role as leader of the family.

  She loved them still, but Johnnie and Cate were married now. Rob, some day, would have his own wife, a woman who would be more important to him than a sister.

  And who, or what, would Bessie be then but a lonely woman, climbing stairs?

  She held out her hands and turned them over, studying her palms and fingers. It was deepest winter, y
et her hands were smooth and soft. Calluses and cuts were nearly gone. Delicate lace edged gold-coloured sleeves.

  Lace that would be destroyed in one day of work, once she was home. So it would be carefully packed away and saved to adorn her in death.

  Her father had been right. Brunsons did not dance. Or drape themselves in lace. Seduced by music and dance and clothes and Carwell, she had forgotten who she was. If she did not go home, she was no longer a Brunson.

  And if she were not a Brunson, who, what, was she?

  The wife of Thomas Carwell?

  Would he wed her in truth? Or find a way to dance away from the vows and the joining?

  She pretended she knew him, trusted him, because her body had known his, but she knew nothing of joining or of other men. She could trust herself no more than she could trust him.

  Despite her distrust, she had taken one step at a time with him. Now, she was lost in a landscape as trackless as Tarras Moss. Aye, she had lost her way. Who was she and what did she want?

  She had forgotten even her duty to discover whether Carwell had betrayed her family.

  * * *

  Tonight. Tonight, he reminded himself, was the last of the Daft Days.

  Fête de Fous, the French called it. And such a fool he had been, to allow himself to take this woman. Not once, but again and again. And worse, to allow emotions to take him.

  The King had commanded this night to be a celebration like no other. Music. Dancing. A poem read and acted out before the court. A celebration as grand as if Angus had been hanged instead of freed.

  The last night in this strange swamp of a world where glitter sparkled atop the quicksands.

  All week he had danced around the subject of what came next, surprised Bessie had not questioned him. Delaying a decision, hoping it would become easier.

  It had not.

  And now, dancing, she smiled still. As if tomorrow were as certain as today.

  * * *

  When the music began that evening, Bessie smiled, as if thinking of nothing but pleasure.

  Only one more night. One more night of song and dance and laughter.

  The morrow and its truths would come soon enough.

  So they danced. The basse danse. The pavanne. The galliard. Even the La Volta, which left her breathless and held tightly in his arms.