Authors: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Finding she was quite decently clad in her own skirt and tunic, the cook’s herbal towels crumpled under her elbow, she decided to extricate herself the rest of the way. Wriggling upwards, she sent him rolling to the foot of the bed as she drew her legs out from under him and hugged them to her chest, huddling there for a moment, still not feeling quite herself after her indisposition.
He flopped over on one side and attempted to arrange his slack features into a creditable leer. “Aha!” he mumbled. “Spirited wench. Likes ’em with spirit, I do.”
“If you’ll pardon my saying so, your lordship, I think you’ve already had an overabundance of spirit.”
“Oh, no, m’dear,” he said, playfully swinging one shovel-sized hand in the general direction of her ankles and swigging from the bottle with the other.
She fetched him a kick that caused him to withdraw the hand for a moment. She wished she could drop one of her grandmother’s powders into his bottle to convert it to something less intoxicating.
He nursed his hand tenderly. “You’ve hurt me,” he blubbered, his bloodshot blue eyes filling with tears.
“Well, I’m very sorry, I’m sure, but you shouldn’t go around lying all over people and grabbing at them like that,” she said.
He looked slightly more alert, and also more dangerous, as he said belligerently, “You could have fooled me, woman. I thought that’s what you were here for, because you wanted me to grab you.” Seeing indignant denial oozing from her every pore, he flopped face down in the bed again. “Then do me the courtesy to get out of me bedchamber.”
“This is
your
bedchamber?” Maggie looked around at the sumptuous room, with draperies masking its curved wall, rich rugs on the floor, and tapestries, and the enormous bed on which they argued. “Sorry,” she got up and looked at him curiously, having recognized her brother-in-law and being at a total loss for a decent way to save the interview.
“It’s one of them,” he said. “Kept THIS here,” he swigged from his bottle. “Dammitall, it’s empty.” Before she quite realized what was going on, he had hooked a brawny arm about her waist and pulled her back down beside him. He breathed a winey whisper into her face. “Cook hides it from me, if I don’t hide it first. Bloody servants have the gall to say I’ve been drinking too much. Don’t know their place. Ought to thrash the lot of ’em.” He grinned conspiratorially. “I fool ’em though. Hide it in these chambers. Don’t want any guests anyway, and the lazy buggers never touch these rooms otherwise.”
“How clever of you,” she said, drawing back from him as far as she was able. She was just about to open her mouth to scream when he gave her a hard look and shoved her away from him. She tumbled to the floor.
“Go on then, you heartless cold wench!” he sobbed with maudlin abandon into his big hands. “Bloody awful women. Always wantin’ this and that from a fellow for nothin’ but a how-d’ye do, then along come some other fellow and you don’t even want that! Use a poor devil and throw him away!”
Maggie stopped at the door. To leave him in this state of mind would probably alienate him for good and defeat her entire purpose in coming to the castle. She looked at him for a moment, trying to see the stately nobleman at Winnie’s wedding, the man they said might succeed Finbar as king, and whom her beloved sister had pronounced handsome beyond her wildest dreams. Picking up his empty jug in one hand and concealing it, just in case, in the fold of her skirt, she walked back to him and put a conciliatory hand on his massive shoulder. He did not even look up.
“Don’t cry, your lordship. It’s not at all how you think,” she said. “You’re really much too good for the likes of me, and I’m honored by your attention, really, but I’ve got these—um—pressing family obligations. I have this grandmother who’d turn us both into frogs, you see.”
He passed a hand over his face. “Did you say—? I’m drunker than I thought.”
Maggie extracted the jug from her skirts, and poured a drop of the remaining dregs onto her finger. She mumbled a brief spell over it, sprinkled a powder from her pocket over it, and wiped it on the lip of the bottle. Then she cast a general expanding spell and held the bottle out to him. “Have a bit of this, Lord. It’ll clear your head.”
He swigged a few draughts, gagging on it at first, but eventually both his posture and vision appeared to improve, and he regarded Maggie more soberly, “Can’t think how I ever went after such a red-nosed, puffy-eyed, tangle-haired mess of a wench at that.” But he grinned, if a little sadly. “Looks like you’ve been doing some bawling yourself.”
“Sneezing, m’Lord.”
“Sneezing?”
“Yes, I’ve had a strange reaction to something hereabouts. I was put to bed here to rest when I became ill.”
He said nothing for a moment but looked sheepish. “I—um—didn’t exactly advance your recovery, I suppose?”
“Well, I did wake up in a hurry.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sneezing seems to be done.”
“It does.”
“Let’s have a truce then, little lass. Come sit by me and I promise not to bite you. I’ll finish this brew. Have some? No? I suppose you know, like everyone else knows why it is I’m actin unbefittin’ m’station, as cook says.”
“I do—I mean—you’re not…”
“Oh, I am. I am indeed. But how is it that you know? Not one of our girls, are you?” Able to see color again, he was curiously aware now of her darkness in a country of mostly fair-haired women.
She felt her cheeks go hot under his scrutiny where they had not with his more direct advances. “No, m’lord, I’m not from here.”
“But—you
have
heard.”
“I’ve heard.”
“How? Has it gone so far abroad then?”
“Oh, no, you might say a little bird told me.”
“And did he tell you why she did it?” he asked softly. “Because if he did, I wish you’d tell me. No one has. Amberwine—well, she just said she was going with him, she didn’t say why.”
Maggie looked away. She didn’t know what to say.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Maggie.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Maggie. I’m Roari Rowan and this is my place, but since we seem to be so close on such short acquaintance, you can call me Red.”
Maggie nodded and he continued as though he hadn’t interrupted himself. “She just sat there, Maggie, on that horse I gave her, looking bonny as ever with the wind kinda liftin’ her yellow hair, and she says to me, ‘I’ll leave you now, Roari, and the house as well, and go with Gypsy Davey.’ I was so mad I could have cut them both in half, and the horses too! How could she prefer that low-born greasy wretch to me and all I gave her—all I was going to give her? Oh, I know I was gone a lot, searchin’ for the border raiders, but for the sake of all that’s sacred, Maggie, how could a sane woman leave her man like that with no word at all and just GO?”
In his agitation his voice had risen to a shout, and his fists were clenched menacingly. A shudder ran through him, and for a moment his shoulders shook. Maggie awkwardly patted his back. His fists relaxed and he shrugged. “Ah, well, what good would it have done to kill them? To dirty my honorable sword with that gypsy’s filthy gore? To kill the woman I hoped would be the mother of my children? No. I suppose they deserve each other.” The tears were flowing freely again, and Maggie could think of nothing to say, but just kept patting him on the back. Red had a passing ignoble moment when he wondered if she might not be ready to offer more substantial comfort, when footsteps came pelting down the hall and the door crashed open.
Colin and the cook tumbled in with Ching at their heels. Rowan leaped to his feet.
“Unhand that woman, sir!” demanded Colin, boldly brandishing the fire iron. “Or you may find yourself scampering to a mousehole to escape yon cat!”
“Keep a civil tongue in your head, young man!” scolded the cook. “Oh, my poor, poor boy. At it again, are you, Red?” she asked, snatching the bottle from him. “Never you mind nasty young men and lewd women, dearie, go to your chamber, and cook will make you a nice pot of tea and fix a bag for your head.”
Maggie was going to say something rude about being called a lewd woman, but Rowan was ahead of her.
“Has a man no privacy!” roared Roari Rowan to cover his embarrassment. He had found a roar a very effective measure to hide one thing and another, such as the tears that still glistened on his cheeks and in his beard. “I need no tea nor bag for my head. What I need is a drink!”
* * *
Re-entering a state of inebriation with a minstrel, Red found, was a most economical way to drink. The fellows sang more than they drank.
First drinking songs, then ballads of love lost, love spurned, love unrequited, love unconsummated, and love unconsecrated, both men sang with tears streaming down their faces in poetic abandon, until Colin was afraid his fiddle strings would go limp from the soaking.
Ching sat on Maggie’s lap and purred. At first she sang along with them, but she didn’t really care for their selection. The sleep that would have rested her from her illness had been interrupted by Rowan’s admittedly collapsed lust. She yawned in her chair as Colin and Rowan wailed on. Eventually she leaned over Ching to fold her arms on the table and rest her head on them.
When she woke in the morning, she was in the same lavish bedchamber as the day before, quite alone this time, she noted with relief. She poured cold water from a painted pitcher into a matching bowl, washed and dressed herself, and set out to find the others. Ching hopped down from the bed and followed on her heels.
The stone floors whispered beneath her feet and the place seemed deserted till she once more found the kitchen. Colin was not in sight, but Lord Rowan greeted her as she entered. “Ah, Maggie. The servants obviously must prefer you to our last guests. Squire Bumple and Lady Limely’s quarters were not so grand as yours.” His eyes were a bright, clear blue this morning and Maggie wondered if perhaps Cook had not after all got to him with her healing poultices and herb teas, though when she might have done it was beyond Maggie. The sky had already been lightening when she had succumbed to sleep.
“You rested well, I hope?” His Lordship inquired.
“Very well, m’Lord,” she replied primly before reverting to type and asking boldly. “Were Squire Whatsis and his lady the people we met as we came down to your castle, Lord?”
“Aye, they were.” He gestured to a chair at the table, the same where she’d fallen asleep earlier. He sat with his legs straddling his chair, elbows resting on its back. “Of course, Cook didn’t fancy them as she did you, lewd woman or not; they were only neighbors and not kinfolk.”
“Well I must say I’m glad not to have to formally introduce myself again,” she said.
“A more informal re-introduction would have scarcely been possible, eh, little sister-in-law?” He got quite a hearty laugh from the black look she gave him for his impropriety. “Family obligations, indeed, m’dear!” His laughter wheezed to a stop. “Ah, damn, that felt good. I’ve not laughed in a long time. You and the minstrel are better than all of Cook’s tonics.”
“Where is Colin?” She touched the mirror in her pocket and remembered with a spurt of impatience her sister’s image in the crystal.
“He’s about. Choosing a horse for the rest of your journey, I suppose. Gypsies have good mounts. You can’t hope to overtake them on foot.”
She stared at him.
“Oh, aye, Colin told me of your daft plan.” He shrugged. “I did my best already. If you can talk sense to your sister, I hope you’ll find her then.”
“When we saw her in my aunt’s crystal ball, she was leaving the gypsies,” Maggie said. “And she was pregnant, my aunt said.
Very
pregnant.”
“Very—?” He looked irresolute for the first time that morning. “Too—?”
Maggie nodded in answer to his garbled question. “Five months at least by Aunt Sybil, who knows quite a lot about such matters. Way before the gypsy came. I don’t suppose you’d want to come along? Pregnant women have been known to do odd things before, and it surely must be your child.”
Rowan was quiet for a long time. “What do you want me to do, Maggie? How can I take her back, if she’d come? She’s shamed me before my own folk. They’d expect me to do something vengeful, and it’s not in me to harm Amberwine. I need the respect of my people to lead them, Maggie.”
She nodded. She wanted to tell him of her suspicion that Winnie had somehow been tricked, that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, including his own painful confrontation with her, his lady had been forced to leave her home. Remembering his confusion of the night before, she decided regretfully that it would be unfair to add to it, to raise his hopes when she had no real proof that her feelings were based on fact. “But you won’t stand in our way? If we find her and she’ll come home with us to Iceworm, you’d bear her no malice? You won’t mind if she comes home to me and Dad?”
“No, little darlin’.” He patted her hand and held the pat a moment too long. “I won’t mind that. But I think I mind your going.” They each looked in an opposite corner of the room after he said that, searching for a change of subject.
Uncomfortable, Maggie rose to her feet and went to the kitchen door, thinking she’d check on Colin’s progress with the horses. As she stepped a foot into the tree-lined courtyard, she sneezed a mighty sneeze and retreated, still sneezing, into the kitchen.