Brodie’s smile faded. “What do you mean?” he asked. “What does the missive say?”
Cassius wriggled his eyebrows, perhaps hinting at the shocking nature of the missive, as he unrolled the vellum and looked at the scribed words. He’d already read them once but he did so again for the benefit of his wife and Brodie.
“I-It would seem that Red Keith Kerr showed up at Monteviot after the battle and demanded de Wolfe’s best warrior against his best warrior,” he said. “A warrior-against-warrior battle to decide whether or not Keith would demand his outpost returned to him or if de Wolfe would keep it. William evidently pitted Troy against the Kerr warrior.”
Brodie’s eyebrows lifted. “And?”
Cassius glanced up from the missive. “Troy lost.”
Brodie’s face went slack with shock. “Impossible,” he hissed. “Troy de Wolfe cannot lose. The man is too skilled and too powerful to lose to a Scotsman!”
Cassius held up a hand to ease the man’s disbelief. “From what Troy says, all was not as it seemed,” he said. “He was asked to fight a Kerr warrior who turned out to be a woman. Troy was so surprised that it gave the woman the upper hand and she was able to force him to submit. At least, that was how Troy tells it.”
Brodie’s mouth was hanging open. “I do not believe it!”
Cassius’ gaze lingered on the vellum for a moment longer before rolling it up and handing it to Brodie. “Believe it,” he said. “Red Keith’s terms were not the return of Monteviot, however; the terms he set forth were that a man of William’s choosing would marry Red Keith’s daughter to form an alliance.”
Brodie’s shock was gaining. “A marriage?” he scowled. “Who was the hapless fool to be forced into that agreement?”
“Troy.”
Now, Sable’s disbelief joined Brodie’s. She leapt out of her chair and snatched the vellum from Brodie’s hands. She could read, in fact, and she began to read Troy’s handwriting carefully.
“A wife!” she gasped as she scanned the words. “I cannot believe it! Now Troy has a wife?”
Cassius nodded. “A-Aye, and he needs help with her,” he said. “You will note on the missive that he has asked you and me to go to Monteviot. In particular, he asks that you come to help Lady de Wolfe with her new duties. He asks that we come right away.”
Sable could read that part. Like Brodie, her mouth popped open in shock but she quickly shut it, looking to her husband with wide eyes.
“We are going to Monteviot, then?” she asked.
Cassius nodded. “Troy has asked it of us,” he said. “I-I do not know how long we shall be there, so you had better pack everything you need to be away for a few weeks at least. Brodie, you are in command while I am at Monteviot.”
Brodie nodded, taking the missive back from Sable when she finished with it. As he read the missive one more time, Sable was already thinking on what she needed to take and how quickly she could pack.
“I shall have the servants bring my trunks down from the storage room,” she said. “I shall bring clothing and personal things, like bedding. But I wonder what more I should bring?”
Cassius shrugged. “Monteviot has undoubtedly seen a serious battle,” he said. “T-That means that the outpost itself will be damaged. Even the smallest things, like kitchens and stables, will see damage. I would suggest we bring all we can, expecting to find the place in ruins. I cannot imagine, with the size of de Wolfe’s army, that much of the place is still intact.”
Sable thought about all of the trunks she had in storage and of all the things she could pack in them. A woman with an innate sense of determination in all things, she nodded firmly and turned on her heel.
“I will go now and begin preparations,” she said.
Cassius stopped her before she could get too far away. “How soon do you believe you will be ready?” he asked. “Troy has asked us to come right away, so you cannot take days. You can only take hours.”
Sable nodded smartly. “I can have everything packed and ready to go in a few hours,” she said confidently. “How long will it take us to reach Monteviot?”
“No more than two or three hours.”
Sable thought quickly. “It is not quite the nooning meal yet,” she said, thinking aloud. “Give me two hours. I believe I can have everything ready by then. We will need a wagon, however.”
“A-Aye, my love.”
“And I want to bring Eda and Hazel,” she said. “You do not think there are any house servants at Monteviot, do you?”
Cassius shook his head. “Nay,” he said. “T-The army would have only brought servants and trades related to the army. I would wager to say there is nothing by way of household servants at that outpost.”
“Then I shall bring them,” Sable said decisively. “I will need their help.”
With that, she blew her husband a kiss and rushed off to complete her task, leaving Cassius and Brodie with the contents of the missive lingering between them. When Sable’s footsteps faded away, Brodie looked at Cassius.
“He had to marry a Kerr wench?” he hissed. “God’s Bones, Cass. That sounds like a nightmare. He could not have done it willingly.”
Cassius could only imagine Troy’s reluctance at such a thing. Furthermore, he was surprised that the man’s father, William, would have suggested it, knowing how Troy was still grieving for his first wife. At least, that was always the impression he got from the man. He honestly couldn’t fathom how Troy was handling the situation, but he was soon to find out.
“First he is defeated by a woman in a challenge, and then he has to marry a woman he does not even know,” he said. Then, he cocked his head curiously. “G-God’s Bones… do you think it is the same woman?”
Brodie was appalled at the mere thought. “I hope not,” he said. “If it is… God help the man is all I can say. My grandmother was Scots, you know. Clan Kerr, in fact. She died several years ago but the woman was a spitfire up until the end. As children, we were terrified of her. I think all of the women of Clan Kerr must be fearsome creatures.”
Cassius, too, was concerned for Troy and his forced marriage to a Scots woman. “I do not think I have ever heard you mention your grandmother.”
Brodie nodded. “Cari was her name,” he said. “I remember that she and my grandfather were deeply in love, so I suppose there is some redeeming quality in a Scots woman. But she was terrifying, by God.”
Cassius smiled faintly at the real fear Brodie displayed, even after all of this years. “Well,” he said, taking the missive back from Brodie. “I-I suppose all we can do is hope for the best and hope that Troy’s new bride is not as frightening as your grandmother. But I will admit I am rather concerned with what I will find at Monteviot. Troy is undoubtedly extremely unhappy with this marriage and…”
“And it could make for a miserable situation,” Brodie finished for him. “It sounds selfish of me to say this, but better that you’re going than me, old man. Best of luck. I fear you will need it.”
Cassius simply cocked an eyebrow at the man as he fled the solar, away from Cassius as if fearful the man would rope him into going to Monteviot, too. It sounded like a perfectly ghastly situation at the fallen outpost, one that Cassius and his wife would soon be entering. But Troy had asked for help and they had no choice but to answer the call.
Cassius had to admit that he wasn’t looking forward to it.
Any of it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Monteviot Tower
The more Rhoswyn worked, the more at ease – and the more determined – she became. In lieu of the chaos she was faced with in the kitchen area, it was simply a matter of picking a place to start, and she did.
She started with the animals.
The nanny goat and her kid were her priority at first. They had a little shelter, she could see, but the roof had been ripped off of it, perhaps to make projectiles or even to be used as firewood, so she walked the bailey of Monteviot in a hunt for scraps of wood or rocks to use to repa
ir it. The wood was scattered from the projectiles the reivers had made from furniture in the tower, pieces of bed frame or legs of a chair.
On her walk, Rhoswyn came across the priest, and Audric offered to help her. Unused to help of any kind, she wasn’t sure how to deter the priest who seemed undeterrable, so she simply kept hunting for wood and other materials while Audric followed her around and picked up pieces on his own.
As they hunted, Rhoswyn paid no attention to the man, but that didn’t discourage him. He was determined to help her whether or not she wanted him to. Soon enough, they had quite a bundle of scrap wood and they headed back to the kitchen where Rhoswyn was forced to explain what she was doing. Audric wasn’t going anywhere so she could no longer ignore him. He was more than happy to help with her projects and while she fixed the roof on the goat enclosure, Audric worked on the chicken pen, which was also damaged.
Between the two of them, they managed to repair the housing for the animals. Rhoswyn put the goats back into their pen and then she and the priest hunted down all of the chickens, which turned out to be nine more of them, including a cock. They also found more eggs on their hunt, mostly in the buildings behind the kitchen which might have been a buttery or butchery at some point. In all, they collected twenty-one eggs and eleven chickens total, and put the chickens back into their pen while the precious eggs were set aside.
The entire time, Audric kept up a steady stream of conversation while Rhoswyn remained mostly silent. She was wary of the priest from Jedburgh but, more than that, with her conversational skills lacking and not having any friends, she was unaccustomed to being with someone on a friendly basis. Comfortable companionship had no meaning to her. Every time the priest would talk about something, she would look at the man as if greatly annoyed – or greatly confused – by his presence.
But Audric soldiered on. He suspected that the lady was leery of him because of the part he played in her wedding, but it didn’t dissuade him. William de Wolfe had asked him to remain and lend counsel to the couple, and that meant earning their trust. Audric had been a priest for ten years but before that, he grew up in the church and was educated by the priests at Jedburgh. An orphan at a young age, the church was the only family he knew and he took his duties very seriously. He knew what it meant for his flock to trust him.
Therefore, he had to earn the woman’s trust.
So, he kept up a stream of conversation as they rebuilt the habitats for the animals and collected more eggs, putting them with the four that Troy had found earlier in the day. He continued to follow the lady as she went to the stable to bring hay for the goats and chickens to bed down with, and he stood by and watched her make cozy little homes for the animals. By then, it was after midday and both of them were growing hungry. At some point, they had to think about food and preparing a meal for the evening to come.
As Rhoswyn stood by the goat’s pen and looked as if she wasn’t sure what to do next, Audric went around the kitchen yard and began to collect the pots that were strewn about to put them all in one place.
“The bread oven looks as if it has survived, my lady,” Audric said, pointing to the beehive-shaped structure made entirely of stone. “Mayhap we should build a fire to start the oven?”
Rhoswyn looked at the oven as if it had come from another world. “Why?” she asked. “I canna make bread.”
Audric looked around the yard. “Surely there is grain to grind into flour,” he said. “Look, there; a sack of grain. We can use that…”
She cut him off. “That is for the animals,” she said. “I took it from the English provisions wagon.”
Audric went over to it, peering inside. “’Tis barley,” he said. “We can make flour out of it and bake bread.”
He was forcing Rhoswyn into an embarrassing admission. “I dunna know how tae make the bread,” she said. “Even if we had everythin’ we needed, I’ve never made bread in me life.”
Audric understood now; it wasn’t that she couldn’t make the bread, it was simply that she had no idea how to do it. In truth, he wasn’t surprised – this was the lass who had bested an English knight. He’d seen it. A lass like that had to be trained, for years, and Audric was coming to think that Red Keith had made his daughter a warrior and nothing else. For certain, she seemed very lost in a kitchen. She’d rather take care of the animals and repair their pens than prepare food, and now he found out why.
But Audric was unconcerned.
“Ah, but I have made bread before, many times,” he said confidently. “When I was young, one of me duties was in the kitchens at Jedburgh. I can make bread. Would ye have me show ye how?”
Would it be admitting she was helpless if she agreed? Rhoswyn didn’t have much choice. He was offering and it was a skill she needed to know. Swallowing her pride, she nodded, once. And it was difficult for her to do that.
“Aye,” she said.
Audric beckoned to her. “Then come along,” he said. “I will show ye what we need tae do. First, we must build a fire in the bread oven. Can ye do that? If ye do, I’ll find what we need tae start the bread.”
Starting a fire was something Rhoswyn could, indeed, do and she quickly took to the task. She went out to collect more scattered wood, bringing it back to the kitchen yard while Audric went on the hunt for what he needed to bake the bread. He needed a mortar and pestle, or a grinding stone at the very least, and he went about looking for such things but was unable to find them. When Rhoswyn returned with the wood for the fire, he explained his problem and she was able to improvise two rocks for him to use to grind up the grain.
As Rhoswyn started the fire in the oven, she watched Audric grind the barley for flour and she didn’t feel quite so helpless because she’d helped him make the flour in a sense. She’d come up with the rocks for him to use, so she had a vested interested in this process. But she watched him closely as he worked and when the fire in the oven was burning brightly, she went to help him grind up the grain by using another set of stones, wiped off with the hem of her tunic to remove the surface dirt.
It was hard work, but satisfying. Rhoswyn and Audric ground a good deal of the barley grain into a coarse flour, which they piled into a wooden bucket they’d found. It was good for their purposes and into the coarse flour that looked like sand, Audric added two of their precious eggs, a bit of the nanny goat’s milk, and enough water to make it a paste.
Bread was in the making.
Rhoswyn was rather thrilled to see how easy it was. Audric sent her on the hunt for salt and she ended up in the bottom level of the tower where there were some food stores. She found baskets of dried, dirty carrots, turnips, dried beans of some kind, and meat that had blue mold on it. In one of the last sacks she checked, she came across the salt she was looking for, as salt was as necessary to men as was the air to breathe. No good Scottish house was without it. She rushed the salt sack out to Audric, who mixed it in with his bread dough. Then, they began to make the flat discs of bread.
It was really very simple and Rhoswyn was eager to do it. She mimicked Audric as the man made flat discs of dough, about the size of man’s splayed hand, and laid them on the hot stones of the oven. Once he showed Rhoswyn how to do it, she was making dough discs at an alarming rate, confident in her newfound skill. But Audric called her off of the bread making to go start another fire in the pit in the center of the yard, where it looked as if much of the cooking had been done. The pit was deep and full of charcoal.
While Audric watched the baking bread, removing discs that were finished and replacing them with those that needed to be baked, Rhoswyn started the fire in the pit. At Audric’s instruction, she rinsed out both of the big iron pots they’d found, making sure they were free of grit on the interior, and filled both pots up with water from the well. There was one other bucket that they’d located, a smaller one, so it took her some time to do it, but soon there were two pots of water sitting on the pit. Audric had her put all of their eggs into the smaller pot to boil.
> In truth, Rhoswyn felt as if she had accomplished a good deal as she watched the pots begin to steam. Soon, they would boil. Looking around the kitchen yard, she noted the fixed animal pens, the bread oven that was working, and the yard in general that had been cleaned of its clutter for the most part. She’d even organized the garden implements and other iron tools she’d come across. Aye, she’d accomplished something today and she felt rather proud of herself.
She wondered if Troy would be proud of her, too.
Oh, but it was a secret and silly wish. That she should look for approval from a Sassenach was foolish, indeed, but she harbored that secret hope. As the smell of baking bread filled the air, she was coming to feel as if taking care of a house and hold wasn’t such a difficult job, after all. If the priest knew how to cook, surely he could teach her, too. Surely she could learn to mend clothing or stuff a bed, or any of the other chores that ladies did.
Her confidence in herself was growing.
As Audric continued with the bread, Rhoswyn went back into the bottom level of the tower and brought out the carrots. She pointed them out to Audric, who encouraged her to cook them in the second pot of water that was coming to a boil. She did, dumping several big handfuls into the water before Audric realized she was doing it without washing the carrots of their grime. She’d just dumped quite a few dirty carrots into the water and seemed quite proud of herself, so he was gentle in telling her that she should have washed them first. As he was trying to explain the way of things, Troy entered the yard.
The smell of baking bread had lured him and he entered the yard, looking around with great surprise. He spied Audric, by the bread oven.
“What are you still doing here?” he asked the priest, surprised. “I thought you left with the armies this morning?”
The Original de Wolfe Pack Complete Set: Including Sons of de Wolfe Page 227