by Alex Dylan
“Mark A’Court, if my intelligencers are correct. He’s a well-connected cleric and has the ear of the king. They say the royal emissary is himself royally related, to judge by the cast of the complexion, but no one is prepared to say how exactly. We should beware if his temper matches his hair.”
Heughan regarded the man with interest. He seemed to have his emotions well under control, and Heughan didn’t judge him the sort to indulge in rash outbursts. This man was more dangerous by far, he decided. A cold killer if ever he saw one.
“Royal emissary, eh? Why is he here alone? He is staying tonight?” Rodrigues had no answers for him.
He debated whether he would be able to winkle anything else out of Melisande. “Why is it you omitted to tell me Melisande was Walter Middlemore’s widow?” he asked Rodrigues.
Rodrigues looked vague. “Did I? A minor detail; not important. Manners and titles rarely are. It’s only when we have to face a king that we remember where we came from.”
“You trust her, knowing that she’s connected to Middlemore?”
“Perhaps more so because of it. She has access to places I can’t go. It’s useful.” Rodrigues was quickly serious. “As you know, Melisande and I go back many years. There is much more to her than meets the eye, although what does meet the eye is favourably endowed, to be sure.”
As if she knew they were discussing her, Melisande hesitated in her conversation between Mark A’Court and Ross Middlemore and glanced at Rodrigues. A look was all that passed between them, but Heughan knew instinctively that it was a signal.
“Melisande knows something. Are you going to meet with her?”
“I can’t, not without arousing suspicion. Not here. Later maybe.”
Heughan shook his head. “Later could be too late. My plans are already in motion, and I still need to know where she’s put my wine.”
“Then you might be best to ask her yourself,” Rodrigues offered simply. “Perhaps another dance?” He saw the look on Heughan’s face and tugged at his moustaches, coughing slightly.
“Melisande, like you, is fond of the Volta,” he suggested. “Be bold.”
Heughan looked up at the top table. Phillice was yawning and Ross was casting covetous glances in her direction. He would be keen to conclude the evening’s formalities. It was time for action.
“I don’t even want to know how you came by your insights,” said Heughan, “but I don’t like you prying into my personal business. Keep your spying for your so-called friends and never forget who your real friends are.”
He unbuckled his sword belt, leaving it with Rodrigues, and walked away, calling a page to him for a hurried conversation.
“My enemy’s enemy is my friend, even so,” muttered Rodrigues to his departing back.
Heughan strode boldly up to the top table and made a deep bow. He addressed himself directly to Ross, judging that his lapse in protocol would appeal to Ross’s vanity more than to any sense of indignity he might feel on behalf of his prominent guest.
“Before the ladies depart and take all the light of the evening with them, my Lord Middlemore, would you grant me the pleasure of one more dance with the Lady Melisande?”
Phillice fluttered excitedly like a disturbed butterfly. Melisande turned stony grey eyes on him. Mark A’Court looked simply amused. Ross beamed expansively, the indulgent host, and waved his approval. However, his eyes were shrewd as he watched Heughan. Melisande had no choice but to comply.
Heughan held out his hand to her and escorted her to the dance floor. He looked up to the gallery and nodded his head. The musicians began to play. The drum beat out a steady pulse, like the pounding of an aroused heartbeat: the Volta.
She circled round him, twirling her skirts, and stopped back in front of him. “You are ridiculous,” she hissed.
He bowed low. They squared up to one another across the floor. He flourished his arm in front of him and kissed his fingers to her, “You underestimate me, my lady.”
She jutted her hips to him. The other musicians took up the theme; the pipe was brazen, the cittern scornful, the shawn sultry. The dancers matched them all.
They sketched a cross step with each other, flirting dangerously, and skipped around opposite sides of an imaginary ring, two adversaries circling one another. Closer and closer they spiralled in to one another, watching each other’s eyes, feet nimbly manoeuvring. Heughan grasped her hand as she came too close and held her fast.
“I have no time for bully-boys,” Melisande said, noticing his surprisingly large hands, feeling again his strong grip as she tried to pull away.
He twirled her in to him and lifted her high into the air on his raised knee. There were gasps of admiration from those watching.
“Again, you misjudge me,” he said.
Her feet had barely touched the ground again when he spun her to face him and lifted her high in front, letting her slide down the full uneven length of his body back to the earth.
“I am no boy,” he said, meeting her eyes with a bold blaze of blue.
He timed the landing nicely; before she had the opportunity to land a well-placed knee on him, he managed to get his own knee behind her again and lifted her once more, kicking her around him, none too gently this time. When he spun her back to him, her eyes were dangerous. He looked steadily back with eyes ignited with the fire of Celtic passion.
He put one hand directly onto her pelvis and cupped her to hoist her high, “And I bet I could make you forget you were a lady.”
She gasped at the intimacy of his hold as he flung her aloft, smouldered with dark mischief brimming as she came back to land. She wrapped her arm around the back of his neck, raking him lightly with her nails as she passed.
“Be careful what you wish for,” she threatened.
He grasped her round the waist, just under her breasts and hoisted her up above his face, holding her there just a little longer than the beat called for.
He lowered her to the ground, where she stood stock still. He circled behind her and leaned in to kiss her neck. “A private conversation with you, my lady,” he breathed insistently into her ear.
The music stopped. The spectators clapped. He bowed to her and before she could escape, he clasped one hand and held her firm into him with the other around her waist in a dancer’s hold. Smiling and bowing to the company, he escorted her hurriedly from the room, crushing a path through the flat red flower meadow which rippled and settled behind them, and into the series of antechambers.
Heughan steered her into the alcove at the entrance to the stone staircase, with the flat of his hand pushed firmly into the small of her back.
“I need to speak with you alone,” he whispered.
Once they had made the haven of the shadows, he kissed her steadily with parted lips. He felt the damp hotness beneath her skirts as she bent into him. Parting them easily with his free hand, he cupped the fork of her legs and watched her face eagerly as he drove two fingers deftly into her. Melisande’s eyes flicked wide open with her sharp intake of breath and her mouth made an ‘O’ of aroused surprise. Heughan smirked and kissed her quiet. He crossed his fingers and moved rhythmically inside her, feeling her spine stiffen and arch.
Like rubbing a pearl through silk. The thought danced across his mind, as he planted encouraging kisses on her reaching neck, whispering enquiringly, “Well, Mistress Meddlesome?”
Stormy eyes flashed open with a blaze of sudden angry fire. “You mock me, Master Corwin? You, who’s even had to steal a name for yourself?”
“No,” he drew out the single syllable into a long cadence of denial. “This one is my own and I am my lady’s humble servant.”
She moaned softly with pleasurable agony as he pulled his hand free, placing a glistening finger on her parted lips.
“Hush,” he crooned encouragingly. “Or I will have to find another way to stop your mouth.” Melisande flicked her tongue around the tips of his fingers and held his gaze with studied wickedness.
; “A little fornication is traditional on May Day, is it not?” She curved her head downwards and looked up at him through coyly lowered lashes. Then she hitched up her green skirts and squatted in front of him, releasing him from the constraints of his hose. His hard cock sprung forwards, and he gasped as she took him into the warmth of her mouth, licking him with lascivious strokes. Hell but the woman was brazen!
Laughter and strains of music floated through to them, muffled by the thickness of the walls. Heughan was aware that in the silence of their seclusion, it was his breath coming in ragged gasps, no longer hers. He grunted. “Oh fuck, oh fuck…”
Her scornful voice was low and sultry, “Be careful what you wish for, I said…” In one svelte move she stood, lifted her leg onto his hip and thrust him inside her. They gasped together with shared delight; he at her soft moistness, she at his velvety iron. Heughan cupped his hands around her taut buttocks and she wrapped one leg higher, encircling his waist and bracing her back against the wall so that she could lean into his urgent thrusts.
Heughan found her hands everywhere on him. They fluttered gently around the nape of his neck as she looked him boldly in the eye. They stroked the hard muscles of his back with firm flatness as he continued to drive his full length into her. Unexpectedly, she cupped him; damp fingers stroked his shaft as he plunged into her. She probed between his legs with experienced dexterity. Heughan couldn’t stop himself from erupting into sudden climax. He felt Melisande’s muscles grip him powerfully, she pulled him closer to her and he felt her bite down hard into his neck.
Afterwards, they clung together, breathing heavily and battling for control.
As Heughan readjusted his hose, the cresset torches flickering unseen on the curve of the steps above them caught the flecks of Melisande’s dark-enhanced eyes, dancing with unnatural fire. Heughan felt his hackles rise warningly.
She was inspecting him, he felt sure of it, and yet, when she spoke, her voice was modulated and intimate, designed to soothe, as she questioned, “Who are you, Heughan?” more to herself out loud than in the expectation of a response from him, it seemed.
With a lover’s touch, she stroked the curve of his head above his neck and withdrew two small pieces of dried meadow flowers. Heughan reddened involuntarily. She feigned surprised and examined the small flowers with exaggerated interest.
“You’ve hidden another posy for me? Heather and,” she raised one eyebrow delicately, “common bog grass?” A sly smile played on her softly curving lips. “You are a country boy.” She kissed him again. “Mmm,” she mused, “I taste salt and the Solway.” Her eyes glinted, “And sedition, I believe?”
Voices in the room below them echoed up the stairwell, and Heughan snapped to alertness. He grasped instinctively for his sword, forgetting that he’d left it with Rodrigues.
“You’re no nobleman, in spite of your fine garb. You’re just another bastard reiver who’d rather fight than think,” Melisande said evenly.
“What do you see in me that irks you so?”
“Heughan the Hawk, an unpredictable thief, whom I am forced to trust. Small messenger to a big man, tell Roddy, look about you, it’s all about numbers. Carpe diem, mañana.”
There was the rising sound of approaching footsteps on the stairs, distracting him to see whom the spiral would disgorge. Abruptly, the noise veered away in a different direction, and when he turned back to Melisande, she too had vanished. Blood coursed through him and he took the stairs upwards two at a time. When he reached the torch, he realised that he could see no shadows, so she wasn’t ahead of him. Cursing, he pounded back down the short flight into the antechamber.
A serving woman dressed in homespun drabness emerged from the gloom carrying a covered basket. He stopped her by the arm as she made to pass.
“I seek a woman. No,” he corrected himself, “a lady. Did you see anyone?”
With her face lowered deferentially, she bobbed a small curtsey and shook her head. He released her and stalked down the dark passageway to a screened stone recess in the outer wall. He cleared his throat into the silence. After a moment’s hesitation, he jerked back the battered leather curtain of the garderobe. Unreasonably, it revealed barren, if somewhat pungent, emptiness.
Heughan strode back to the alcove in search of the servant he had passed. Finding no one, he ruefully adjusted both his dress and demeanour to return to the merry hubbub of the main chamber. He slid sideways with practised inconspicuousness onto the wooden bench next to Rodrigues, who glanced at him for the briefest of discrete moments, just long enough to take in the newly-formed bruise which was just visible above his ruff, before pushing a goblet of wine in Heughan’s direction.
Rodrigues coughed delicately and brushed his moustaches from his top lip, shaping the ends into rapier points with studied thoughtfulness. "Does my eye deceive me or do you have a new Queen of the May?
Heughan scowled at his drink and took an intemperate scull. He covered his mouth but Rodrigues was too quick even so to see his eyes crinkle.
“Ah, so I do see true. You have better acquainted yourself with the Lady Melisande? That’s her mark upon you?” he mock-bowed in deferential acknowledgement to Heughan.
Heughan slid his hand away from his mouth and quickly took another swig. His fingers brushed the bruise on his neck. “Willie has the right of it. ‘Sleekit kelpie’, he calls her.”
“Hmmm,” was the only repartee from Rodrigues, who found a sudden fascination for a distant point on the minstrels’ gallery. The quartet of players had yet another assortment of instruments between them, pipe and tabor, rebec, dulcimer and psaltery. They were biding their time with sawing melodies of no consequence; harmonious, nothing too fractious to disturb the many muted conversations being carried on.
Rodrigues tried to redirect the conversation. “Did Melisande have anything helpful to offer?”
“Not really,” confessed Heughan ruefully. “One minute we were…then she said…” he found himself unable to complete any of his sentences. Just the memory of her hard against the wall, locking eyes with him, completely blocked his other thoughts.
Rodrigues stared into his wine and tried helplessly to keep his shaking shoulders under control. He sniffed a couple of times, but the muscles in his jaw were clenched with tension, and Heughan could see he was trying very hard not to laugh and failing dismally.
“It’s no fucking laughing matter.”
He sounded so annoyed, it caused Rodrigues to snort wine through his nose and then cough and splutter until Heughan thumped him hard in the back. He hit him harder than was strictly necessary, but it felt good to do so.
Ross Middlemore turned his attention to the noisy commotion. “Can’t you hold your own wine, you evil Spaniard?” he boomed and laughed uproariously at his feeble joke.
Rodrigues was suddenly serious. “Where is Melisande now?” he demanded.
Heughan stared back at him in surprise. “She hasn’t returned ahead of me?” He looked around the room. The other ladies appeared to have excused themselves in the interim. There was only the company of men now.
“Did she say nothing to you?” Rodrigues pursued. “Think, lad! Anything at all?”
Heughan was drink-confused. He rubbed at his forehead with his fingertips, trying to work up the memory, but all he could think of was her buttocks cupped in his hands and her tongue and the feel of how she slid upon him. A jolting memory broke. Melisande telling him he was the small messenger to a big man. He hated that.
Heughan glared. “She said, ‘Small messenger to a big man, tell Roddy, look about you, it’s all about numbers. Carpe diem, mañana.’”
Rodrigues thought some, looked around the great chamber, solidly built from dressed stone carved by masons long dead. His eye was caught by the oddly shaped lintel above the doorway and as he studied it more closely, he noticed the carved inscription, deeply etched. It was one of a number of stones the Castle had borrowed from Hadrian’s Wall. Rodrigues let out a low whistle as realisa
tion dawned.
“It means something to you?”
Rodrigues dipped a finger in the spilled wine and traced the letters C and D on the table, copying what was written on the lintel. “Carpe Diem, it’s Latin. It means ‘seize the day’.”
“So what?” snorted Heughan.
The Spaniard ignored his rumblings, focusing on his own deductions as he continued to think out loud, “All about the numbers, eh? Roman numerals guarding the gateway. C is a hundred. D is five hundred. C before the D means a subtraction.” He paused to calculate.
Heughan was quicker, “Four hundred. It means four hundred. Four hundred what, Roddy?”
“Soldiers guarding something maybe?” suggested Rodrigues. “Carlisle is the gateway to the Borders.”
Heughan scoffed derisively. “There aren’t than many garrisoned men in the Castle. That would be…”
“An expeditionary force?” Rodrigues finished for him.
Heughan was silenced. The larger reiving families could command an army of thousands. Heughan shivered. The memory of pitched battles in the long feud between the families made his blood run cold.
Rodrigues was worrying his thumb up and down the furrow of his scarred cheek. Most named it as a Lockerbie lick, the kiss of a sharp sword and a memento of a decade. Heughan watched sparks of fire twist inside the black ruby ring Rodrigues wore, his breath clouding the facets as on that terrible day ten years previous when they’d torched the last surviving Maxwells in Lochmaben kirk. Much time had passed since Heughan had ridden into battle for the first time, but it was still the largest and bloodiest action he’d seen.
Heughan blamed Scotland’s king for the bitter feud between the Johnstones and Maxwells. As James had sought to keep his options open, changing allegiance between Spain and England, the fortunes of both families wavered with the machinations of the Scottish Court. He could still remember that cold December day when Lord Maxwell’s vast force of two thousand grim men rode with the sole intent of wiping the name of their old enemy from the face of the earth and settling the matter.
Somehow, the wily Laird Johnstone caught wind of the attack before Maxwell arrived to torch him out of Lochwood Tower. Jamie Johnstone had had a mere four hundred ‘Devils’ in his muster but not one of them wanted to die in their beds. A punishing ride over winter-hardened ground had put them at Dryfe Sands in the narrows on the approach road. A reiver would always come out to face you in the field.