A cloud passed over Edward’s countenance. “Women bear children all the time, brother. It could take all bloody day. And we haven’t got all day.”
“Women do not bear your children every day, Edward – although it seems nearly so.” I looked at him pointedly, but he gave no admittance to the fact that this woman, who had worshipped him enough to follow him to battle through the dead of winter, starving and footsore, loved him and was about to give birth to his own flesh and blood. “You owe her your protection. You owe the child a chance to live.”
He snorted. “That is in God’s hands.”
Two of Sorcha’s companions flanked her, clamping her elbows as they helped her into a squatting position. Her loins were but inches from the soggy ground, which reeked of decay and stagnant water. It was no place for the son of a king to enter the world.
“Fetch my furs and blankets,” I said to some of the other women, “so that she might have her child in warmth and on a dry place. Not like this.”
The old hag shuffled off. Gritting my teeth, I strode toward Edward. “I am tired of fighting with you, Edward. For weeks now I have yielded to you, kept my mouth closed, so that we could march as one. But it is here I draw the line. Here that I stand. Move on if you will. You’ll not make it more than two leagues down the road before those who loathe you will fall upon you and scour the flesh from your bones. And with only half an army, you’ll expose your backside just as you did when we first left Carrickfergus. Sorcha will have her child under the safeguarding of my men and once that child comes I will grant her escort sufficient for her to return home when she is able. Only then will I move my feet from this very earth.”
His expression did not change. To go on with a depleted force was absolute suicide. His lips twisted in a scowl.
Sorcha screamed loud enough to topple the nearest mountain. One of her companions gripped her arm, urged her to focus her strength on her belly and squeeze. Sorcha gulped, stifled another scream and bore down. Another woman shoved forward and yanked Sorcha’s skirts up past her belly.
Enthralled by the vulgar miracle taking place before me there on the boggy plains, I did not notice Edward leaving. Sorcha pushed and cried and pushed some more until finally, a small, purple bundle slid from between her milky thighs. The old woman took the child and wiped him clean with my bedding, then held him up so all could see his sex.
Blood spilled bright and red in a puddle at Sorcha’s small feet as the women pulled the afterbirth free. Then she collapsed backward into the pile of furs that had been brought for her. The boy was placed on her bloated belly. With tears bright in her eyes, Sorcha traced a finger over his tiny nose and chin. He looked, I mused, more like a wrinkled old man than a newborn. When he paused in his crying and began to turn his groping, naked gums toward her, she unlaced and pulled down her gown, showing without humility a brown jutting nipple. She clenched her hand around her breast, sliding the teat into the infant’s greedy mouth. Carefully then, to shield her new bairn from the wind, she arranged a borrowed, woolen cloak over him as the child suckled. Sorcha, although spent, wore a look of pure ecstasy, just as she must have when the child was created.
Edward was nowhere to be seen. He had called off the march evidently though, as the soldiers had sunk back down to their quivering haunches and were grumbling miserably over the void in their bellies and how much better it would all be when they got back to Carrickfergus. Better yet when they returned to Scotland.
Too sore in the loins to ride, Sorcha was given space on one of our last remaining carts. She would not stay behind, insisting on going on the very next day with us. Prideful, she kept her bairn in plain view of all. The wee lad paid no heed to the cold, seldom crying, for he was too busy guzzling his mother’s milk in between naps. Edward, she called him. How unfortunate for the lad to be so cursed. I had not known a worthwhile Edward in all my days, least of all my brother. Not once did he acknowledge Sorcha or the child.
By the time we crawled, famished and raw-footed, into Carrickfergus, Sorcha was down with a fever. She did not live out her son’s first month. Too ashamed of her, Sorcha’s family did not claim her body for a proper burial, nor the child.
April rains were falling gently when she was laid into the ground in a common grave on a hillside outside the fortress. The first wildflowers of spring sprouted blue and pink over her grave. I found a mother in the nearest village, one of the O’Neil clan, who had recently lost a child to the rampant sickness abounding over the island. She gladly took Edward’s son to her breast as if he were her own child. I made certain that she and her husband knew whose child it was that they were fostering and told her that when he was weaned I would send for him and have him brought up in Scotland. Even as I said that I knew they would not part with the little dark-eyed babe so readily. He would be loved by these strangers more than his own father ever would.
In May, Randolph and I took ship back home. With every mile that fell behind us over the horizon, separating me from my last remaining brother, I felt a burden lifting.
I would no longer come to Edward’s aid. I would no more ask for his. In truth, if I never saw him again I would not suffer for the loss. So very little had been gained by this venture onto Irish soil. So many men lost along the way. Our losses had been as numerous as our victories. We had neither fallen to the forces of the English in Ireland, nor wiped them from there.
***
Carrick, 1317
The hills of Carrick were in their flush when I returned to the land of my boyhood. I sent my soldiers home and dispatched Randolph to Edinburgh with word that I would be delayed while looking over my holdings in the southwest. Ever mindful of my safety, my nephew balked at leaving me with so small a retinue, but I ordered him on, mostly because I could not bear the accusations behind his every look. He knew where I would go.
Aithne greeted me at Loch Doon Castle with arms wide, a smile warm and inviting on her mouth, and a willing ear.
Her husband, Gilbert, had once relinquished the castle to the English and fled south, but before he could find refuge he died. I had never known much of him, except that he had beaten Aithne for her inability to bear him a child, telling her that God had cursed her for her sins. Marriages are often made out of convenience, but some are so devoid of kindness as to be cruel. In this instance, fate had served the hand of justice and released Aithne of her domestic imprisonment. Sometime after Bannockburn, I returned Loch Doon to her, so that she would have a home and the means to raise her son.
With unmistakable pride, Aithne showed me about her shrewdly managed estate. The dense pines and grassy hills surrounding the loch stirred melancholy sighs in me that did not go unobserved by my gracious hostess and first love. For two days, we walked through her budding orchards at forest’s edge and rode past fields thick with cattle while I talked of all that had befallen me in the decade since we last met. And talk we did – from the breaking of fast to the verge of midnight. I spoke frankly about Elizabeth, her guarded secret, her rejection of me. Aithne listened astutely, held my hand when all was said, lent me words of comfort.
Then I asked to see Niall. She beckoned him from the loch where he was straining to pull up a net onto shore with one of the local fishermen. They had picked out their scanty catch and were unraveling the knots in the webbing of the net. As the lad came walking up the road toward the house, pulling a sweat-soaked linen shirt on over brown shoulders, I said to her, “You make him do that? Go out in a boat and bring back his supper?”
“Make him? No, not at all. He fancies the fisher’s daughter. I’ve no doubt they’ve had a tumble or two when he sneaks off before dawn. You were the same at that age, as I recall.”
“At sixteen is there anything else?”
The lad who bowed before me was no more a boy. As he raised his eyes, I imparted a few words of well wishes and venerable wisdom, all of which brought only a blinking stare interrupted by swift glances over his shoulder. The object of his affections was lingering next to an old, crumb
ling wall draped with rambling ivy. Obviously, she was curious as to why the King of Scots would come calling upon a country woman and her orphaned son, but the lass was also anxious with separation, twirling her black braided hair about her fingers. So I bid Niall to return to his work, at which he dashed breathlessly away, grabbing up his lass’s hand and yanking her along the road toward the wood.
“I must ask,” I said to Aithne, as we began walking, “does he know he’s my son?”
Her chin sank. “No, I could not tell him. Not without your consent. Do you want me to?”
“He should know, but perhaps ... I don’t know. There is Elizabeth to think of. I have no wish to hurt her.”
“What happened between us, Robert, it was long ago. Before Elizabeth.” She hooked her arm through mine. “What does your heart say when you look at him?”
“That he is happy as he is.”
“Then listen,” she said enigmatically. “Your heart always speaks the truth, doesn’t it?”
The late morning sun glinted silver off the dark waters of the loch. There was an indescribable void within me. I needed more. Children of my own that I could call as such. But sometimes, what we wish cannot be had. Not for all the hope or all the prayers of a lifetime.
“Aithne, I want you to bring Niall to Edinburgh. I’ll set you both up in the court. Give him a fine education. And you, everything you want or need.”
She stopped where it was safe from prying ears, rose on her tiptoes and pecked me on the cheek in endearment. “As the mother of your bastard? Thank you, truly, Robert, but I decline. It’s not my fashion to be dependent. All we want or need is here. And you may come back whenever you wish. My door is always open to you – any time, for any reason.”
An invitation that was sweetly tempting, had I not the future of a kingdom on my shoulders. Indeed, though, this would be a fine retreat when burdens and woes were too much to bear. And Aithne, I would have liked to believe all my life that she had loved me alone, but I knew it not to be true. If she could make me feel that way for a time, though ...
I took her hand, kissed it cordially. “I think I will. But breathe not a word of it to Edward, aye?”
“Not a single word.” She winked above a frolicsome smile. “You’ve something else to say, Robert? I know the look of an unspoken thought.”
I let her hand slip from mine. “I should like to say a thousand things, but even now God frowns upon me for thinking them. If ever you or the lad need anything, anything at all ... just say.”
“As I said, we’re well enough. Truly. Besides, if I took what you offered, the gossip would fly like crows over a field of ripened grain.”
So it would, Aithne. Oft times, gossip is spun from a thread of truth.
***
Five days I lingered in Carrick and never once did I come close to Turnberry or Lochmaben, where I had told Randolph I was headed. Instead, I dallied at Loch Doon, teaching Niall the intricacies of sailing and relaxing in Aithne’s pleasant company.
Sunset had long come and gone. When we both first yawned at the supper table and left for our own beds, we talked the length of the corridor and up the stairs and were still talking at her doorway when she moved inside. Without a thought I followed her.
“If you could only see him for yourself, Aithne.” I sipped from my goblet, then drained the cup in the next swallow. “My God, what a wreck he is. And plans of procuring allies in Ireland – shattered, destroyed. All because he could not restrain himself.”
Aithne filled my cup again. “What did you expect, Robert? Truly now. That Edward would, by some convenient miracle, become a better man without you there beside him? Aye, he fought you. But is it possible that he reveled in that? Somehow needed to do that?”
“Please. He lives to annoy me.”
“Ah, then you’ve known all this time and yet you chose to play along? If he could never quite be ‘you’, he could at least ply at the one imperfection in you that he could grab onto.”
I gazed at her soft-edged face through candlelight. We were sitting across from each other in her spacious chamber, her bed on the far side by the hearth, a few benches scattered about, and between us a small round table. Even through the fog of wine, she was making entirely too much sense. My brother had learned how to master revealing to the world my weaker side – that of anger and intolerance. “True as it may be, I am not responsible for who he is, now or then. He picked his final battleground ... and he’ll go out, not in a blaze of glory, but sputtering like a candle that’s been spit upon.”
She sighed and shook her head. “He could never be like you, even when he tried.”
“He never tried. Never.” I reached out, took her hand. “Did he ever say that to you, though? That he wished to be like me?”
Beneath long, thick lashes, she gazed at me with a cutting sincerity. “Men say many things when they’re flushed from lovemaking, don’t they? Some of it true, some a dream. It is, for some, the one time they open their hearts. For Edward, that was so. All those women in his life – they all knew a different side of him than he showed to you. He was like a little boy when he was with a woman – vulnerable, sensitive, needing. All you know is the Edward who makes a hell of your life.”
I said nothing to that. She did pity the wretch. And I pitied that she had been so duped by him. I had thought her wiser.
“Once, no ... twice, you said that you loved me, Robert. And I, you. Why did we never marry then? What kept it from being?”
“Love alone is not enough. I seem to recall my father thought your family beneath mine.” But I wondered – had she spoken words of love to Edward? I had known them to be together and it had filled me with jealousy. Yet why did I keep coming back to her? What was it that I wanted from her or could not do without? I thought to pull my hand away, but she had by then laid her other hand over mine, holding me prisoner. “What if Edward had asked to marry you? By the way you speak of him, it seems you would have considered it.”
“What Edward and I had ... it was nothing.”
“Nothing? He came back to you time and again.”
“As have you.” She rose then and, facing away from me, said, “I thought about what you asked – about Niall and me coming with you to Edinburgh. I might consider it, if ... if ...”
If I said that I loved you now? Could I have said it just then, or ever, that I more needed than loved her? That I often wanted her? That somehow, in this odd way, we were good for one another? I had not lain with Elizabeth, or any woman, in so long a time ...
We gazed upon each other that evening, Aithne and I, for a long while, sharing no more words. The warm spring breeze wafted around us from an open window, candle flames fluttering, the wine flowing endlessly. In time, as the drink filled our veins, we saw each other as young again, with no cares or duties or guilt to stand us down. The small lines at the corners of her mouth had faded and her eyes twinkled with the joy of the moment. I pulled my chair closer to hers, touched her cheek and leaned to her, the wine on my breath swirling with the wine on hers. Our lips came together, lightly, then full and hard.
My head was light. My will gone. The allure beckoned of spending myself within her and then falling into a deep and dreamless sleep against the curve of her back.
My eyelids drifted downward. I forced them open. Sadness began to drown me. Too much wine. Too little sleep. Was I sad for Sorcha’s lost innocence? For Edward’s cruel indifference? Sad for the child, growing up poor in a hut in Ireland? Or sad for myself – the king who could not have the one thing he truly wanted? Damn popes and English princes and all the rest of the world. If I never had their approval I wouldn’t care. I only wanted a child to carry on my name. A child to share with Elizabeth. Sitting back, I pulled a hand over my face, as though I could erase what I had just done.
Aithne looked searchingly into my eyes. “Robert, what is it? Have I done ... I assumed that you ... wanted me? Don’t you?”
I went to sit on the edge of her bed. The feath
ery mattress sank miles beneath my weight. “Edward had a woman who loved him, gave him a child and died for it. How could he not care?”
“Do you envy Edward?” She joined me, laying a hand lightly upon my thigh.
“Strangely, aye. As much as I hate him, he has had, a dozen times over, what I wish for – children of his own. Yet they mean nothing to him, except as trophies of his own virility.”
She rested her head against my arm. “You need to go home, Robert. Home to her.” Then, in a distinctly pained voice, she added, “You don’t belong here. Not with me.”
In my heart, I knew it, too. I brushed calloused fingertips over the softness of her cheek.
“Aithne, if only you knew the hole in my soul that you fill. If only you knew ...” I rose, kissed her lightly on the crown of her head, and left, never looking back.
***
Edinburgh, 1317
Word of my return had preceded me. People gathered along the road to greet me, slowing my progress even more. The days of racing lightly armed through the hills and heather were long gone. A man of middle years, scarred, stiff in the joints and dusted with gray at the temples, I did not travel so fleet of foot any more. But as that black dome of Edinburgh reared up against a lead-colored sky misted with rain, my pace quickened in rhythm with my heart.
I found her the first place I went to: the rose garden outside Holyrood Palace. The flowers were still clenching their first buds. Elizabeth sat alone on a stone bench beneath the drooping branches of a willow tree, its slender tips gilded with dangling catkins. She wore a green kirtle a shade darker than her eyes. I inhaled the fresh scent of rain and paused before setting my feet on the flagstone path that led to the bench where she was with her back turned to me. I did not have to call out her name or pound the stones with my feet. She knew my presence and turned to look over her shoulder. In that moment, she was up and gliding toward me.
I wrapped my arms around her and held her tight without apology or restraint. The wound between us, which had been clawed open and salted, had already begun to heal during my absence.
The Honor Due a King (The Bruce Trilogy) Page 16