The Border Lord

by Sophia James

  ‘N-No. He came to Grantley w-with Stephen.’

  ‘Your cousin? The man who came to Belridden with my brother’s things after…?’

  He left the question hanging and she looked around. Pale blue eyes bored into her own.

  ‘After the h-horse threw him,’ she finished, her nails digging into the soft flesh on her palm. Lord, after last night lying was infinitely harder, reserve and restraint replaced by the knowledge of a kinder man.

  There was something, too, in the way he frowned that suggested disbelief in her story. Stephen had said the same when he had returned from Belridden all those months ago and the surprise that had accompanied the offer of Lachlan Kerr’s hand in marriage had been underlined with fear that this other brother might have guessed, might know…

  Again she shook away the thought.

  No one knew, no one save the man who had tumbled head over heels into the depths of the Grantley gully, never to be seen again.

  Shouts in the language of Gaelic from the castle wall brought her abruptly from her reverie. Two men on horses were coming from the direction of the village, the clothes they wore telling Grace that they were probably English. Her heart began to thump. Was her family safe? Had something happened to her cousins or her uncle?

  ‘Who are th-they?’

  Lach shaded his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Friends,’ he answered finally and raised his own hand in greeting.

  Lachlan stood with his back to the fire as he tried to understand what he had never thought to hear.

  ‘I saw your brother’s missing servant this last month in one of the taverns in London, Lach, drinking more than he should have by all accounts and losing a grand lot of gold on the cards.’

  ‘Kenneth MacIndoe? And you are certain that it was he?’

  ‘I walked straight up to him and slapped him on the back. Said that you were on the look out for him and would appreciate some answers on the death of your brother. When I told him of your marriage, he cursed you on the name of your wife somewhat wicked, and was all in a swivet as he left the hall. I couldnae find him after that, though the tavern master said he had been around a while.’

  Lachlan tried to find reason in the man’s behaviour. Why would he be hiding in London if there was nothing to conceal, and if any story other than the one circulated of his brother’s death became public property, how would this affect Grace? She had loved Malcolm. Still did, perhaps.

  The web of deceit and consequences reached around him, tangling him in the lies that he had told, and his hand tightened on the handle of his sword. If law and kings could fasten one knot, then steel could untie another. It was simple and he had never trusted Kenneth MacIndoe. The story worried him. Gold had its own way of leaving trails and a man with a family waiting for him in the Borderlands had no business to be laying low in a London tavern. Unless…

  He shook his head and refused to think on politics. Unbidden, his glance went to the daylight outside. At least seven hours until dusk. Seven hours until he could take his wife again without the questions that a daytime tryst might have engendered. He cursed the length of it and cursed also his own damnable needs, mounting with every second he was not in her, not feeling her hands in places on his body that no woman had ever touched. Sweet. Hot. Generous.

  Sending the newcomers for food and drink from the Great Hall, he wiped his hair back from his face and ordered his retainers to the field where the quintain stood, reasoning that a bout of hard work might excise the demons that were growing within him.

  By dinnertime his irritation was still not assuaged, the bruises from many hours of heavy fighting practice just underpinning a deeper ache. Rebecca was working on a tapestry on the corner seat by the fire when he summoned her. Stripping off her clothes, he brought her to his bed, the heavy furs of the coverlet soft against their skin as he began the mating dance.

  ‘I thought ye would nae return to me, a luaidh.’

  ‘Shh.’ He did not want to hear her voice, not now, not with the sound of another in his ears. Burning want. Rebecca’s hands were cold and the perfume on her skin was strongly pungent. Not flowers!

  Turning her over, he cupped the roundness of her bottom, the silk of corn-white hair outlining her back.

  Beautiful. She was beautiful, pale against his brownness and unmarked, the lustre of candlelight radiant on her skin.

  Blowing out the flames, he felt her surprise, for always they had copulated where they might look on one another. And enjoy. And when the early evening shadow was not enough, he closed his eyes. Another difference. Better. The blood lust that had been his companion all day had fuller rein now.

  Almost right.

  But not quite. He swore as the sense of urgency dimmed and his body softened.

  Grace saw them leave his room together as she went down to dinner. Lachlan made no effort at all to acknowledge her as they went past, though he did separate himself from the woman as they came into the main hall and Rebecca McInness took her place on the benches as Grace made her way to the top table.

  A small victory. A hollow prize. She wished that dinner would be over and she could escape back to her room, away from the stares and glares and questions. Tonight her gown was one of midnight blue, the sleeves slashed from shoulder to wrist to show the paler lining beneath and her hair unbound. Just as her husband liked it!

  Lord. Her hands pulled the length forwards and she plaited it into one tight braid, securing the end into the raised collar of her gown.

  When his flinted pale eyes met her own, she glared back, no quarter given to manners or propriety.

  ‘Have you c-caught your fire-starter yet, or have you been too busy?’ She was so furious she almost forgot to stutter, and the small glimmer of wariness in his eyes irritated her further.

  ‘Too busy,’ he returned before finishing a large draught of strong ale.

  The many servants bustled in with platters of meat as he signalled them and he cut a wide crust of bread. ‘There was something found in the embers of the mill that was interesting…’

  Lifting her eyebrows, Grace waited.

  ‘When did you last wear the brooch you have of a rose fashioned in gold?’

  She had not seen it in days, since the very first moments of being here at Belridden, since the bath she had taken before the night they…

  ‘It w-was found there?’

  ‘At the edge of the flames and is still intact, should ye wish for it back?’

  ‘No.’ Shades of distrust were heard in his words. The cloak, the shoes and now the brooch. ‘S-someone has gone to a l-lot of trouble to m-make me look guilty.’

  ‘Indeed.’ His voice was low as if, given the seriousness of such an accusation, he wanted what was said to stay between them. She knew that it could not be like this for long, not with the clues stacking up against her. Looking down the table, she noticed how Connor watched her, and Ian. And further away on the benches she caught the worried glance of Lizzie. She had one person in her camp after all. She wished most desperately that there had been others, for the loss of Malcolm Kerr’s jewellery box was also of concern and the messages within it properly interpreted could be damning.

  Lord, if only her lady’s maid had not packed the letters in her chest under the misguided belief that she should want to take such a treasure with her into her new life. She should have burnt the letters when she had first found them unsent in Ginny’s room and tossed away the casement. But there was some jarring immaturity contained in the lines that might one day help her cousin to see that youth had held no chance against the designs of a deceitful and older lover. Nay, no chance at all.

  As if her husband could read her mind, he asked the one question she hoped he might not.

  ‘Do you read and write?’

  When she nodded, the bleak anger that seemed such a part of him deepened; to fill the growing silence, she carried on the conversation. ‘I l-learnt the way of the alphabet in a convent outside York after my p-parents died.’
r />   ‘There was a note left at the mill. Perhaps later you might show me an example of your hand.’

  ‘L-Later?’

  ‘Tomorrow. I shall not lie with you tonight.’

  His words were harsh, thrown off with an easy cadence and with little regard for her feelings.

  Nodding, she looked him straight in the eye, rings of grey around blue seen in the bright light of the candles. Something else lingered there, too. Curiosity? Question? She hoped that her smile did not look too forced and that the quiver of desolation on her top lip wasn’t noticeable.

  Lachlan spent the night alone in his room, dismissing Rebecca when she tried to waylay him, tired of her pouts and sullenness and the way her hair wound around him like serpents in his bed. The train of thought made him frown, for he had been a man who had had many women in his time, seldom finding faults in any, but enjoying what they had to offer. Tonight, however, he only wanted one woman, Grace, with her stutter and her freckles and her fathomless amber eyes. She did not have the artifice of beautiful women. She did not bat her eyes at him or play with her hair like the others were wont to do, the veiled lure of appearance such an easy bait. No, Grace did not have those tricks at all. Her appeal was in her imagination and her secrets and in confessions that had the strange ability to make his heart turn.

  He filled a tumbler and held it up against the candlelight, thinking that the gold in the mead was the exact same shade as Grace’s eyes in the sunlight, and chastising himself for the very thinking of it. Lord, she had loved his brother and probably still did and had made no secret of the fact that this marriage had been as unwanted on her account as it had been on his.

  ‘Dinna let her get to you, Lach,’ he whispered, the fire in the mill an unsolved mystery and his clan as suspicious of her as they had been of her cousin Stephen when he had come with the news of the death of his brother.

  A political alliance to assuage ill feeling between two kings doing their level best to avert war, two kings who would join families who had no wish to unite. Wearied by everything, he finished his drink, pouring himself another to replace the first.

  Tonight the cold seeped between the stones of Belridden. He pulled a skin of hide across his shoulders, remembering the moment he had downed this particular stag on the mountains behind the keep two days after his father had died. He had uttered up a prayer then to the soul of a worthy foe, no religion in it either, just the plain knowledge of place and home and hearth. His home. His land. The blood of the stag and the sweat of his brow had mingled in the warmth of breath and the knowledge of life’s passing, transient and fragile, the broken dreams of family wrapped in the cord of rope around his father’s neck.

  A life easily taken.

  Malcolm had cut Hugh down, holding the damage to his breast like a mother might a child, his stream of tears contrasting strangely against his own dry cheeks. Lachlan still remembered his attempts at sorrow, paltry endeavours that had sent Malcolm into a fury and widened the growing gap between them, though politics had taken the heart from the Kerrs long before their father had died. It was in the soil of the place, wedged as it was between two kingdoms, a small corridor for the pretensions and greed of men.

  The jewelled box on the table caught his attention and he opened the catch, surprised by the tilt of the green felted lining in the bottom of the bauble, showing askew in the light of the candle. Reaching in, he picked at the layer of card and fabric and when it came away from the silver metal he saw the hidden folded papers in the base.

  His wife was nowhere in the castle the next morning. Nowhere in the grounds. Nowhere in the chapel or in the gardens. Anger sharpened until he heard her singing voice echoing strangely across the western wall. He followed the sound, through hedge-rows and into a cave he had not known was there.

  Grace sat before a shrine of sorts, jars of flowers and a painting of the Holy Family on the wall. Beside her was a series of collected rocks and twigs. When he looked closer he saw one to be of amber, the body of an insect caught within. A moth! To one side of this assortment was the shape of a heart in the dirt, wild clover dotted across it. She stood clumsily as she heard him enter, wiping her eyes with the back of one sleeve.

  Grief. For his brother? He had read the notes of love she had written to him, the lines of ardent and flowery prose contained in the jewelled box, and folded in secret, for ever hidden.

  When she saw where it was he looked, she kicked at the dirt with her heel, the flower heads scattering.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I heard you singing and followed the sound.’

  ‘He said no one would hear me here—’ She broke off, guilt in her eyes, and Lach wondered wildly for a second if it was his brother she spoke of?

  Silence hung like a shadow between them. The pearls she wore at her throat were double stranded and her hair was plaited with ribbon. Both gown and train were yellow. The colour of anger.

  ‘This is the one place that I do not stutter so b-b-badly. Had you noticed?’

  He had not.

  ‘So I should like to tell you that I had n-nothing to do with the burning of your mill. Indeed, my family would attest that I have an aversion to f-fire.’

  ‘I see.’ Unexpectedly tears wove the brown in her eyes to gold. He noticed the way the fingers on her right hand turned the ring he had given her. Too big. He would need to remedy that.

  ‘The chapel at Belridden is beautiful, but no one ever uses it. Why?’

  ‘We have no priest here.’ A much simpler explanation than the curse Dalbeth had lain on his father in this very room, condemning him for his excesses in women and drink. Every religion had its limits, after all, as to what it was able to condone.

  ‘I am certain if you applied, the church could find—’

  He broke into her well-intentioned advice with some of his own.

  ‘You are a newcomer here. It would be far wiser to keep out of things that you know nothing of and leave things as they are, aye.’

  ‘Because the keep is divided and there are some people who could be dangerous to me here?’

  Lachlan felt the blood thump in his temples. Who would have told her that? His guess was one of his own soldiers. But why would they jeopardise everything when the safety of David lay fragile enough?

  He tried to laugh it off, but saw in his wife’s face more than a hint of question.

  All of a sudden he was sick of the lies. ‘My brother was not, maybe, the man you think he was.’

  He looked at the flowers at her feet and she paled dramatically. ‘What sort of a man was he, then?’

  ‘A jealous man.’

  ‘Of you?’

  He nodded. ‘I went with David to France after Edward’s victory at Halidon Hill. My brother wished he had been the chosen one and, as he was older than I was, I suppose his reasoning was sound.’

  Lord, Lachlan thought to himself, and that was putting a kind face on the reaction. Years of hatred had been difficult to deal with and their father’s subsequent death had left Malcolm a punitive and often absent Laird.

  Grace felt her heart race. What was he saying of his brother? Could she risk confession here and now and lift the guilt a little from her shoulders? No. She could not chance it, for the bonds of blood ran deep and a wife-by-edict was as nothing against the weight of family. Still, she was fascinated by the cameo of a younger Lachlan Kerr, and whilst he seemed in the way of talking she kept him to it.

  ‘Were you with your king again in England?’

  ‘I was, though the imprisonment there was not a rigorous one. I was able to come back to Scotland on occasion.’

  ‘But your brother was here, still?’

  ‘As Laird it was harder for him to leave.’

  The muscles in the side of his jaw tightened as he said it. Not quite the truth, perhaps? She did not dare to question him further as he stood there, a blade in his belt and pale eyes full of secrets. In this cave he looked huge, strong, not a man who had been reared in ease o
r constraint. He was David’s knight, and war was drawn upon his arms and face in the peculiar way that desolation marked those who had known chaos.

  Perhaps as marked as her face might become?

  Were the ghosts of the badly departed never still? Feeling the rosary in her pocket, she was comforted, tangible history reaching down into the now, reassuring and solid.

  ‘Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee…’ The prayer she had recited all her life running in her mind.

  She watched as her husband touched the cloth Donald had given her, painted with the image of Jesus. A long welt of redness lay across the top of his left hand. Another injury. She wondered how the wound on his arm had healed, but did not dare to ask him. Today his hair was plaited, the tail of it bound in soft brown leather.

  Beautiful. He was beautiful. Every time she saw him anew the harmony of his features combined with sky pale eyes amazed her.

  Mine.

  For a time.

  For the time it took to be ripe with child.

  The breath she did not realise she was holding slipped from her body, the secret place between her legs soft-throbbed in want. Would a child be the image of him? She hoped so fervently and her hand, with a will of its own, cradled her stomach. He looked down and his fingers reached out to touch.

  Only that, in the cave, with the stream and the gifts of a boy they had helped. Like the Argus moth she was caught in time and space and movement, alive in the warmth of his skin against hers, and hoping, as shards of dust motes swam in the light.

  I love you.

  Had she said it?

  No.

  Relief had her reaching out for support against the cold earth in the wall. He would not wish to hear such words from her.

  Not yet. Not now. Not ever.

  Please, God, make me beautiful. A new prayer in this place of worship. A selfish plea that left her contrite in the face of all the suffering in the world.

  ‘I often talk with God.’ Her admission wound a frown into his brow.