Once Upon a Plaid

by Mia Marlowe

  He delivered a solid clout to Ranulf’s jaw and the man staggered backward. But only a pace or two. Blood trickled from the corner of his lips. MacNaught ran his tongue around his mouth and spat out one of his eyeteeth. Then he wiped away the smear of red from his chin whiskers with the back of his hand.

  “Been wantin’ to have a go at ye, Douglas.” His face split in a bloody smile. “Expect this is going to be fun.”

  MacNaught launched himself at William, fists flying. The brawl boiled up and across the dais in a flurry of jabs and wild swings. The rest of the revelers formed a moving circle around the fighters, the better to see this new entertainment. From the corner of his eye, Will caught one enterprising fellow laying odds and collecting bets on the outcome from atop one of the trestle tables.

  Will landed a blow to MacNaught’s temple that sent him teetering, but then he reared back against one of the tables and kicked William in the center of his chest with both booted feet.

  All the air rushed from Will’s lungs. He sucked wind, trying to fend off the darkness that gathered at the edges of his vision.

  William’s world spiraled down to the next punch, the next blow to his ribs, the next stinging jab to the jaw. He fought doggedly on, not thinking about strategy or form, but only focusing on connecting his fists with MacNaught’s unyielding flesh.

  Then suddenly Ranulf was giving ground, stumbling back toward the foot of the staircase that led to the family portion of the keep. Will followed up his advantage with a hail of punishing strikes.

  Above the din of catcalls and raucous encouragement, Will could hear Nab, still bleating out his distress.

  “For the love of God, somebody cut down the fool,” he grunted as he put the power of his whole body behind his punch to MacNaught’s belly. Ranulf doubled over as most of the onlookers realized there was another spectacle they’d forgotten about and milled back toward the dais, where poor Nab still hung upside down by one foot.

  Ranulf was holding the short straw in the fight, so he took advantage of the crowd’s inattention to call out to his companions, “Get him, lads.”

  Winded and sore, Will suddenly found himself faced with four fresh pairs of fists. And they didn’t seem inclined to take turns. He circled, trying to face his attackers, but he couldn’t prepare for a blow because he never knew which of them would dart within his reach to jab at him. Again and again, MacNaught’s cronies struck him in the back at the base of his ribs. He managed to pop a couple of them in the face a time or two, but the fight had become markedly one-sided.

  Finally, one of MacNaught’s men picked up a chair and brought it crashing down over William’s head. He crumpled to the flagstones. His vision tunneled, and the last coherent thought skittering through his brain was, “Thank God. Nab’s finally stopped making that infernal noise.”

  Make we joy now in this fest

  In quo Christus natus est.

  —From “Make We Joy Now”

  “I like the music. Ye can dance to it. But for the life of me, I dinna ken why we sing in a language no one but God and them who pass for educated understand.”

  —An observation from Nab,

  fool to the Earl of Glengarry

  Chapter Six

  Nab tore the loaf in two and took a bite. The barley bread was still warm, but he took no pleasure in it. Even so, he forced himself to wolf it down. He didn’t want to wake later and be tempted to wander back down into the main part of the keep in search of food. Then he stopped himself from demolishing the whole loaf in one sitting. He might be truly hungry tomorrow. He wrapped the rest of the bread in his handkerchief and set it aside. He never wanted to go back to the great hall, even though he was pretty sure his appetite would return sometime.

  But then again, maybe not.

  His stomach roiled uncertainly. Nab was used to being thought the fool and made the butt of countless jokes, but never before this night had he felt so helpless, so small, so . . . exposed.

  He didn’t express himself well. He knew that. But what the rest of them didn’t understand was that he thought as well or better than any of them.

  Just a wee bit differently.

  The Earl of Glengarry ought to see it, but he never did.

  Maybe out of all of them, only William could see him clearly. Maybe he knew there was something more to Nab than motley and a fool’s cap. He must since he’d entrusted him with such a precious thing as the scepter. And William had stood up to Ranulf MacNaught for him.

  But William was the only one.

  Nab settled on the old rug and laid down the scepter so that the silver rod rested by his thigh. The smooth metal was restful and helped quiet the fidgets inside him.

  He cracked open his book. No one in the castle, not even his friend William, would believe Nab could read. He’d started by studying the Latin inscriptions carved into the walls of the chapel, and before long, he’d puzzled out the code of the written word on his own.

  The priest thought he was just parroting what he’d heard instead of reading. It made Nab smile. Sometimes it was good to be underestimated. If folks expected less of him, it gave him fewer chances to fail.

  Lord Glengarry had a small library in his solar. The shelf held nearly half a dozen bound volumes, an unspeakable trove of riches meant to impress visitors to the keep. Nab was sure the earl himself couldn’t read. He’d certainly never seen his master with a book in his hand unless he was showing it to someone else. Lord Glengarry wasn’t likely to miss one of them. Nab just had to be stealthy about borrowing in case the maids who dusted the books could count.

  He reminded himself to feel grateful that he was able to stay at Glengarry Castle, even if he did have to play the fool. His parents had been glad to be shed of him. They had no idea what to do with the likes of him. There’d even been superstitious talk in the village about Nab being a changeling, some queer offspring from the hollow hills. Everyone in his family was relieved when Lord Glengarry took him on as his fool. Nab was slight enough of frame that manual labor would have been a hardship, and this way, at least he never knew hunger or lacked a roof over his head.

  There was another good thing about living in a place like Glengarry. The keep had been added to piecemeal over the years, a new dovecote here, a barbican there. As the centuries rolled by, certain things were forgotten. Like the derelict passageway that led into the old tower room where he took sanctuary.

  One particularly rainy day last January when the sky was falling like shards of grey glass, Nab had slipped away from his place by the earl’s side and set off to explore the lower regions of the castle. In a deserted portion of the souterrain, he’d discovered a bricked-over passage. After pulling out enough of the crumbling mortar and bricks to slither through, he’d followed a set of uneven stairs to the top of a secret tower. It was flush up against the newer square tower that held the family quarters, and served to buttress that structure, but it was much shorter and smaller.

  The room at the top of the tower wasn’t big enough to fit a bed. Nab could scarcely lie down without his head touching one wall and his feet another. He guessed it had once served as a lookout of sorts, but judging from the thick layer of dust, he figured it had been abandoned for far longer than living memory.

  “Odds bodkins, a secret place,” he’d said to himself. “And it’s all mine.”

  Whenever the taunting laughter that earned him his daily bread became too much to bear, Nab slipped away to his own little hidey-hole. After discovering the place, he’d spent several weeks furnishing it with threadbare, cast-off rugs and a small chest whose latch was broken. No one missed them.

  Nab was a hopeless magpie. Bits of twine, fishing hooks, and oddly shaped rocks that reminded him of the scaly back of the waterhorse he’d once seen all found their way into his secret cache.

  How to stay warm was a problem. The small fireplace in the tower room had collapsed in on itself and, in any case, to light a fire might alert others to the chamber’s existence. Nab made do w
ith wrapping a thick blanket around his shoulders.

  Despite the eternal chill leeching from the stone walls, the tower room’s good points outweighed the bad. Its window overlooked the loch and wasn’t visible from any point on land.

  Usually Nab read there by the light of a tallow candle through the dark watches of the night, but now he couldn’t seem to make his eyes focus on the leather-bound volume of Le Morte d’Arthur. After hanging upside down in the great hall, his face still burned and he felt all hot and jittery inside.

  He stood and limped to the window. It was a wonder his leg hadn’t been yanked out of the socket. His hip joint pained him something fierce.

  But Nab had a good imagination and picturing Ranulf MacNaught dangling over the loch from the tower window with a rope looped around his ankle cheered him tremendously. It was a long drop to the water.

  The earl’s men had taunted him unmercifully about the helpless little sounds he’d made while he hung upside down in the great hall. Nab wondered what sort of noises Ranulf would make if someone sawed on the rope with his boot knife ever so slowly. . . .

  “Nab!” A hissing whisper echoed up the spiral steps.

  Someone had found him. He scuttled away from the window and plopped back down on the rugs, hugging the blanket around him. Had they heard his wicked thoughts about Ranulf? He hadn’t thought them very loudly.

  “Are ye there?” the voice came again.

  “Nay, I’m here,” he called back. “Ye’re there.”

  “Quiet, ninny. D’ye want the rest of them to find ye?”

  He recognized the voice now. It belonged to Dorcas. She was either the serving girl or the upstairs maid. Nab had trouble keeping track of her since she could never be counted upon to turn up where he expected. He liked things and people to be tidy and in their place. Dorcas should stay where she belonged.

  He thought the same about Lady Katherine.

  Which was why he had to help William find a way to take his lady wife home. Those two belonged together, whether they realized it or not.

  But he couldn’t think about that now. A soft swish of kid soles told him Dorcas was coming up the stairs. His stairs. The secret ones.

  Nab grasped the scepter Will had given him and twisted his hands around the cold metal, wishing Dorcas would turn around and go back down. William had told him the rod was a thing of power, but Nab felt none coming from it. If the scepter had a bit of glamour about it, Nab would use it to wish himself to blend into the cold stone of the tower, invisible as a spirit, so Dorcas wouldn’t see him and would go away. But since he could still see his own hands, he figured the scepter didn’t work that way.

  Dorcas peered over the lip of the floor as she cleared the last of the stone steps. “What are ye doing here, Nab?”

  She’d never believe he was reading. He tucked the book under a flap of his kilt.

  “I’m . . . I . . . ye canna be here.”

  “And yet, here I am, so I most certainly can.” She tipped her round face to the side and raised a brow at him. “But ye probably shouldna be here either. The stairs are in such disrepair, I shouldna wonder if the whole tower isna about to tumble into the loch.”

  “Nay, ’tis safe enough.” He’d made sure of that, pacing the length of the small chamber and examining the walls for crumbling mortar. “Leaks a bit when the weather turns soft, though.”

  She peered at the overhead thatch. A watermark stained the stones to the right of the window. “Someone needs to scrub that or it’ll go black with mold. I’ll bring a pail and brush when I come next time, shall I?”

  “Next time. Ye mean to come again?”

  “Aye, and why not? D’ye think ye’re the only one who’d like a place to disappear to from time to time?”

  Yes, he had. That was exactly what he’d thought. He was the only one who needed to get away, who needed to distance himself from all the noise and chatter. All the poking and prodding and people pressed up against each other . . . Sometimes living in such close quarters with so many others made him feel like a swarm of midges were loose inside him.

  Dorcas turned her pale eyes on the contents of the small room, her gaze darting from the chest to the sorry-looking rugs and meager stash of candles. Seeing it as she did, he realized the place was hopelessly shabby, but surprisingly enough, she grinned at him.

  “We canna bring more furniture up the stairs. The opening in the bricks below is too small and even a pair of chairs would overwhelm this wee space. But I found an old wolf pelt in the lumber room last week. It would warm the floor better than those rugs, I’ll warrant.”

  “Ye want to change things?”

  “Only for the better, Nab.”

  “When things change, ’tis usually not better. Things usually get worse.” Hadn’t he warned William of that?

  “Not necessarily. Dinna ye have a hope of something better?” Her cheeks pinkened as her gaze darted away from him. “Findin’ a lass and gettin’ married someday, perhaps?”

  There was a strange twinge in his chest at that. He’d never considered getting married, but he supposed it was different for a girl. Working in service, Dorcas had little chance of making a decent match. Nab felt sorry for her. He decided to try to cheer her up about it.

  “I wouldna worry that ye’re not a wife, or be in a hurry to marry, were I ye.”

  “Did I say I was in a hurry to wed?”

  “Nay, but—”

  “Then I’ll thank ye not to put words in my mouth.”

  Who knew girls were so touchy? Nab hunched his shoulders, making himself as small as possible. “I just mean that since ye have no property or dowry, any husband ye might find is likely to be some old boar with no teeth and one foot in the grave, so marriage isna something ye should covet. Especially since—”

  “Let me be the judge of that,” she interrupted and then went on to denigrate his parentage for several generations.

  Her words tumbled on top of his. He sometimes imagined that words hovered in the air like little soap bubbles, unheard until they burst in someone else’s ear. Now he wondered if his wee floating wordlets felt as overwhelmed as he did by the way she ran roughshod over them.

  “And have a care with yer predictions, Master Nab,” she said archly. “In my family, women have the Sight. And I know I shall marry for love.”

  “Ye’ll not wed at all unless Lord Glengarry approves it and he doesna trouble himself overmuch with what his servants want.” Nab was on solid ground now. If there was anything he was an expert on, it was his laird’s benevolent neglect. “Besides, he thinks girls are only good for making alliances and babies, even his own daughter. Ye know—”

  “What I know is that a younger son whose family didna know what to do with him is only good for serving as a fool.” She looked down her freckled, slightly too long nose at him.

  That stung, but he couldn’t let her see it. He was nothing to his parents except a burden from which they were relieved to be free. That knowledge was a small keening ache that never quite stilled. It didn’t help that someone else apparently knew how he felt about it either.

  “At least if I decide to wed, I willna have to crawl into bed with some gouty old—” He stopped when her little chin began to quiver. “Forget about what I said, Dorcas. I didna mean it. Ye’ll not have to marry an old ogre if ye dinna want to. Besides, ye’d have to find an ogre ye wish to marry first and that might take a long—”

  “Not so long as ye might think,” she interrupted while rolling her eyes at him. Even though of the pair of them he was sure he was the only one who could read, she made him feel like a dunderheid. “Girls grow up quicker than boys, ye ken.”

  He snorted.

  “My mother bore my brother Malcolm when she was fourteen. Ye’ve a passel of brothers and sisters at home. Which of yer older brothers is a husband?”

  She had him there. At twenty-eight, his oldest brother, Stewart, wasn’t even promised yet. Her smug smile reminded him of a cat with a mouse’s tail
hanging from one corner.

  “So dinna dispute my word when I tell ye I shall marry for love, Nab,” she said decisively. “And he willna be an old ogre either.”

  He decided to let her keep her delusions for now. Life had a way of knocking the dreams out of a body without the need for him to take a part in the beating.

  Of course, allowing her to think she could join him in his tower room might actually encourage those unreasonable dreams.

  “If two of us are using the tower—” he began.

  “Stop fretting.”

  “I’m not fretting.” He was wondering why the middle of his strings of words kept interrupting the beginning of hers. It had happened five times now. It made him wonder. His words usually weren’t that careless.

  She tucked her skirts around herself and settled beside him, letting the shawl-like portion of her arisaid slip from her shoulders.

  He stopped wondering about words completely. Odds bodkins, a girl in my tower.

  It had seemed so unlikely a happenstance that he’d never considered it. He’d never considered how good one might smell either. Dorcas had a whiff of something sweet wafting about her, clinging to the folds of her arisaid.

  The real surprise was that Nab didn’t mind that she sat so close to him. He cut a glance at her and then pretended complete absorption with his hands in his lap.

  “The worst that will happen is that we’ll be found out here and the stairs will be resealed,” she said.

  That would definitely be worse. Where could he read if the tower was closed to him?

  “I brought ye something. I’m thinkin’ ye didna have much supper,” she said, pulling a small bundle wrapped in cloth from her pocket. “’Tis a bit of Clootie Dumpling. Are ye fond of sweeties?”

  He was. And Clootie Dumpling was his favorite—a rich, dense pudding flavored with currants and raisins. He took it from her with thanks and made short work of it.

  “I like to see a man enjoy his food,” Dorcas said. “But yer hand’s all sticky now. Here. Let me.”