“Aye, sure, if such pain be from fever. But willow stays all fever, including the heat o’ lust in a man or woman. So, as ye’re young and bonny, ye’ll no want willow. Yarrow be good for most ailments, but me own potion o’ rectified wine wi’ camphor and spirit o’ sal ammoniac be gey better. I’ll give it a good shake and—”
“Mercy, you do not expect me to drink such stuff, do you?”
“Nay, me lady. I’ll just rub some on me hand and hold it hard on the injury till the potion dries.”
“I can do that for myself,” Sibylla said, trying not to recoil at the thought of the old woman pressing hard on the knot the branch had left on her forehead.
Looking at Simon, she said, “Prithee, sir . . .” Recalling that he believed he owed her punishment and was unlikely to be sympathetic, she paused there.
To her surprise, he said, “Thank you, Mistress Beaton. You may leave that bottle with us. How often should her ladyship apply this treatment?”
“Until the pain be gone, o’ course.” She seemed about to protest her dismissal, but after a second look at his stern face, she patted her sack and said, “I’ve other things, too, me laird. A good eyewash, and dried betony leaves from the monks at Dryburgh Abbey for a tisane, aye, oils o’ rosemary and marjoram, and clover for—”
“Thank you, mistress, but the headache potion will be enough,” Simon said.
“Wait, sir,” Sibylla said, smiling now at the herb woman. “We’ll take the clover, the rosemary, and the marjoram, if you please.” She looked at Simon, who shrugged and nodded, surprising her.
Gratefully the herb woman accepted the coins he gave her and handed him the potion bottle and the other requested items from her bag.
When he had summoned a servant to show her out, he shut the door and turned back to Sibylla. Then, with a glance at Kit, he said, “I want to speak to the lady Sibylla privately, lassie. Go downstairs to the first door you will come to and open it. I believe Dand is awake now, so you may visit him until I finish here.”
Soberly, Kit nodded. Then she looked at Sibylla.
“Go along, Kit,” Sibylla said. “The laird cannot eat me.”
“Aye, but he may try,” the little one said fearlessly. Then, with a quick, wary look at Simon, she hurried past him and out the door, leaving it open behind her.
Simon shut it and turned back to face Sibylla.
A tremor shot up her spine. So much, she thought, for her foolish assumption that he would observe the proprieties.
Cocking her head, she said, “Surely you know you ought not to be alone with me in here, my lord. Think what people would say.”
“I don’t care what they say.” “I do.”
“Do you?” He regarded her thoughtfully before he said, “I should think a lass with such concerns would not have marched out of that wee kirk as you did.”
“I was not then a member of Isabel’s household,” she reminded him. “I could lose my place with her if she should learn I’d been alone with you in a bedchamber.”
“Doubtless, my mother’s presence here at Elishaw will protect you.”
She dared to shrug much as Kit had and saw with unexpected satisfaction that his eyes opened wide. Their fathomless green color fascinated her anew. How unfair, she thought, that a man should have such beautiful eyes. And, too, his lashes were dark, absurdly long, and lushly thick. Most unfair, indeed!
Giving herself a mental shake, and realizing she had instinctively braced herself to step back, she said, “Surely, you’ve outgrown your fury with me by now.”
“I warned you I would not.”
“An overproud, angry lad’s warning,” she countered, undaunted. “That wee kirk was well nigh empty. They read no banns, the priest had not yet said your name, and none who saw us that day will have spoken of it except perhaps my father. And I am very nearly certain that he did not.”
“I believe you. But I also know that was not the only time you did such a thing. You did it the year before in front of a crowd at St. Giles in Edinburgh.”
“So I did,” she agreed. “I also did it the following year just before Otterburn when I refused to marry Thomas Colville of Cocklaw. It pains me to admit that I did not even present myself at the altar to face him,” she added with a sigh.
“I knew about Colville but not that particular detail,” he said with a disapproving grimace. “You prove my case for me.”
“I must agree that I do not care much for some proprieties,” she admitted. “In troth, I am burning now to ask why no one in your family seems to know that you and I nearly married each other. However, inasmuch as I may owe my life to you today, I expect that would be unmannerly.”
“It would, aye,” he said. “But what makes you think no one knows?”
Dryly, she said, “Your mother is not one to keep such knowledge to herself. Nor, if she did know, would she have greeted my arrival as she did. The most telling evidence, though, is that Amalie has never spoken of it or shown any indication that she knows about it. Do you mean to say someone in your family does know?”
“Nay, I’ve told no one.”
“But your father must have known. Did you not have to discuss marriage settlements? Mine never shared such information with me, but I believe such a discussion is commonplace before any marriage.”
“It is, but I was fully of age and capable of managing my own settlements.”
“How could you? You had not yet inherited Elishaw. Surely Sir Iagan would have had to agree to any decision about the land.”
“Aye, sure, but I made no agreements about Elishaw, and your father was content with the things to which we did agree.”
“Which were?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t see how that can be any affair of yours now. By marching away as you did, you effectively rendered those agreements moot.”
“Call it unmannerly curiosity then,” she said. “Or is there aught about those agreements that you do not want to reveal?”
She saw that she had angered him again, and the knowledge made her head throb. It had been aching all along, but she had ignored it, well aware that she had exacerbated the pain herself by standing as long as she had.
“I should not have said that,” she admitted ruefully.
He was watching her closely again, and he said with an indecipherable but decidedly different note in his voice, “The settlements contained nowt that was out of the ordinary. Sir Malcolm agreed to settle a generous dowry on you and to arrange that you would inherit something more than half of the Akermoor estates if—”
“Faith, sir, I had no right then to any Akermoor estate. You forget that until Otterburn my brother, Hugh, was still alive!”
“Aye, sure, but just consider the nature of Sir Hugh’s duties as a knight,” Simon said matter-of-factly. “With extreme hostilities then between Scotland and England, the likelihood was high that he might die young—as of course he did.”
She gasped at the rush of anguish produced by so cruel a reminder of Hugh’s heroic death during Scotland’s victory over the English. The image her imagination produced of the unseen event was nonetheless stark in its clarity, as always, stirring both outrage and resentment.
Ruthlessly suppressing both, she abruptly shifted the focus of her questions, saying, “Tell me this, my lord. How much had the Governor of the Realm to do with those marriage settlements of ours? You and Thomas both serve him, after all, and I believe that Lord Galston was likewise an ally of his.”
His silence answered her question. “I see,” she said, putting a hand to her pounding head as a new wave of dizziness struck her.
Simon shook the bottle he held. “Get back on that bed before you fall down.”
Stiffening, ignoring her pain, she said, “I dislike being ordered about, my lord. You would do better to make polite requests.”
“Would I? Then, pray, my lady, get back on that bed if you please, or I will pick you up and put you there.” His expression had not changed. “Is that be
tter?”
Knowing he meant every word and was capable of doing as he threatened, she abandoned the remaining shreds of her dignity and got back on the bed.
“Lie back,” he said.
“But I—”
He loomed over her and, without setting the bottle aside, pressed her to the pillows, holding her down as he put his face close to hers and said, “I will not let you do harm to yourself through nowt but more of your damned stubbornness.”
“Let go of me.”
“Not until you understand that you will stay in this bed because I command it. If you refuse, I’ll take every stitch of clothing from this room to see that you do. Do you understand me?”
“I do,” Sibylla said angrily, glad she had had the good sense not to say those two words when she had stood at the altar with him three years before.
“Do you promise?”
“Aye, my lord,” she replied meekly.
He eyed her shrewdly. “If you hope this sudden docility will persuade me that I need not take the clothing, you are going to be disappointed.”
As that was exactly what she had hoped, she wanted to smack him.
Her expression provided a mirror to her thoughts, but Simon wished he had not touched her. He’d wanted to shake her the minute she had defied him but restrained himself, not just because of her injury but also because the thought of putting his hands on her had stirred feelings that had nothing to do with vengeance.
When he got close to her, though, and she had made it plain that she would argue with him for the pure sake of argument, he had been unable to stop himself.
To have escorted the herb woman upstairs, expecting to have to waken the lass, only to find her standing before him in the too-revealing red dress, had been a shock to his sensitivities. He had recognized the kirtle as Amalie’s but only because, when Amalie had first worn it, the dagged neckline had been a new and daring fashion, and Amalie was particularly buxom.
Fashion had decreed then, however, that the lace edging of the wearer’s shift should peek out between the jagged bits, and thus it had covered more of her.
Sibylla was taller and slimmer than Amalie, and clearly had not realized how much of her soft, mud-dusted but nonetheless tantalizing breasts the dagging revealed. In the chilly bedchamber, her nipples had stood out as if eagerly inviting his touch.
Sakes, but they still stood out, lying back as she was, and he could see that she wore nothing beneath the enticing red silk. Collecting his wits, he reminded himself sternly that she deserved whatever he might do to her but said only,
“If you will stay as you are, I’ll take the stopper out of this bottle.”
She grimaced, then said bitterly, “ ’Tis hard to retain one’s dignity when every facial movement brings pain. But pray, sir, do not remove that stopper.”
“The stuff is useless with the stopper in.”
“I do not want that potion. I cannot bear the smell of camphor or sal ammoniac separately, let alone together. If you want to help me ease this pain, hand me the vials of oil she gave you. I want to smell them to be sure they are pure, but either marjoram oil or rosemary will do me more good than that horrid potion.”
He obeyed, watching her pull out the stoppers and sniff each vial’s contents suspiciously. She chose the second over the first.
“Which is that?” he asked.
“The marjoram. One rubs it on the wound, but I suspect the scent does more than the oil itself to ease what ails one. Rosemary oil is similar, but I find marjoram more soothing. If you are willing to aid me more, pray ask your cook or someone else you can trust to steep the clover Mistress Beaton gave you gently in hot but not boiling water and make a cloth poultice from it, wringing the poultice out well. You can then send it back up with the child. It will give her something to do.”
“Will it?” he said, making his tone stern again. The lady Sibylla was mistaken if she thought she could command at Elishaw. “I’ll have Tetsy bring up the poultice,” he added. “She is one of the maidservants who put you to bed. Kit needs rest as much as you do. My cook’s wife will look after her. She can keep warm by the kitchen fire and nap in the chimney corner if she likes.”
“How is her brother?” Sibylla asked. “I’ve not clapped eyes on him yet, you know. Is he older than she is or younger?”
“He must be eleven or twelve, but he’s a thin lad and worn to the bone. Unless Kit is gey small and fragile for her age, I suspect she is only six or seven.”
“I doubt she can be as fragile as she looks,” Sibylla said. “She is very self-possessed for one so young, and she is not the one in bed.”
“She lied to us, though, by omission if not by design.” “About what?” She had put several drops of oil from the vial on two fingers and began now to rub it on her forehead, flinching when she touched the knot.
He felt an impulse to offer to do it for her but suppressed it, saying, “The lad told me those men pitched him into the river first.”
“But how can that be? Kit came downriver well ahead of him.”
“Aye, but he said they flung him well upriver. He was trying to swim across to the other side when Kit leapt in, doubtless with some crazy notion of saving him. But the river swept her away. The men had thrown rocks at him, Dand said, so he’d pulled hard for the opposite bank, seeking shelter. When he heard them shouting and saw what Kit had done, he hurled himself after her.”
“No wonder the poor laddie is spent,” Sibylla said. “But what did the men do then? If they did not throw Kit in, did they try to save her?”
“Dand said they rode after her but when they met another horseman, they all turned back and rode away at speed. I’m thinking they must have been a band of the English raiders who have been plaguing this area and lands to the west of us. I’d like nowt better than to catch and hang them all.”
“I saw no other rider,” she said. “But I had come from
Sweethope Hill and was approaching the river when I heard Kit scream. Do you suppose the other rider Dand saw had seen you and your men crossing the river?”
“If he was acting as a lookout for them, he must have seen us approaching the ford,” Simon said. “Growth is thick on that bank between the river and the track. For him to see us would have been gey easier than for us to see him or his horse.”
She nodded, winced, and he shook his head at her. “Go to sleep,” he said. “ ’Tis plain you are not yourself yet, so for once, do as I bid you.”
“I don’t like doing as I’m bid,” she said grumpily. “Moreover, I’m filthy, uncomfortable, and my head itches from mud as much as it aches with pain. And this bed is now as dirty as my body is.”
He could see that her hair was tangled and dull looking, but he could not think of her body, still mud spattered or not, without stirring thoughts he dared not think.
Believing she would not stay awake long if left to herself, he said brusquely, “Just lie back and rest as well as you can. I’ll send Tetsy up when your poultice is ready, and I’ll have someone bring up hot water and clean bedding then, too.”
“A bath, too,” she pled.
“We’ll see,” he said. “The herb woman said you’d likely be dizzy from that knock you took, and I saw you sway just before you returned to the bed. It would not do for you to fall and hurt yourself again.”
“Sakes, I’m not a bairn,” she protested.
“You’re beginning to sound like one,” he retorted. “You may as well accustom yourself to resting, because I mean to see that you do. I promise you, you won’t leave Elishaw until I am persuaded that you are fit.”
With a sigh, she said, “Very well, sir, but I do not take well to confinement. So if you expect gratitude—”
“I don’t,” he said curtly. “I expect obedience. Bearing that in mind, give that kirtle to Tetsy when she comes in to make the bed, and tell her to bring it to me.”
On those words, he turned and left the room, taking care to shut the door without banging it. He did not wan
t her to guess how much it disturbed him to see such visible expressions of pain on a woman he was sure usually hid such feelings.
Sibylla watched Simon go with mixed emotions. She was glad to be alone and to rest against the pillows without feeling at a disadvantage. But she was not happy about her confinement to the bedchamber and did not mean to give up the only clothing she had. She had to think how she could avoid his taking it from her.
Uncomfortably aware that he meant well and she was probably just suffering from her usual fierce resentment of pain or illness, she shut her eyes and inhaled the mintlike scent of the marjoram oil. It was one of her favorite fragrances. She used it in scent bags in her clothes kists and frequently used the oil in making her perfumes.
Sweet marjoram grew wild in the tall grass of the hills near Akermoor Loch, where one rarely had to search for it. Its strong scent announced the presence of its small, clustering purple flowers well before one trod on them.
Relaxing, she let her thoughts drift back to Simon and how much more human he seemed than the day he had stood in the wee kirk, looking as cold as winter and as if he were about to bestow a grand privilege on her by marrying her.
She clung to that thought, breathing in sweet marjoram. The fragrance reminded her of her pillows at Sweethope Hill. She would remember to drip some of the oil on the clover poultice when the maidservant brought it up, and on the fresh pillow slip, too, when she changed the bedding.
Simon walked into the small chamber that opened off the landing below Amalie’s room and found the two children murmuring to each other.
He was tempted to question them further about the men who had thrown at least one of them into the Tweed. But he knew he would learn more by talking to them separately. The lass, when she turned to him, looked less confident than when she was with Sibylla, and much wearier.
Her eyes widened as he stepped nearer.
“What will ye be doing with us, laird?” she asked bluntly.
“I don’t know yet,” he replied. “For the present, I mean to let you both rest and eat. Art hungry yet, Dand?”
“Aye, sir, I’m peckish,” the lad said.
But for their thin faces and a certain wiry fragility they shared, the two did not look alike. The boy’s hair was almost as dark as Amalie’s, and Kit’s was flaxen light. The two provided a stark contrast, but so did he and his dark-haired sisters.
Amanda Scott - [Border Trilogy 2] Page 5