She would never forget her first sight of Ireland. It was early morning, and the mist was rising from the water, burning off to reveal a landscape so lush and flowery that it caused her to stop short and catch her breath. She had many times witnessed the astonishing miracle of an English spring, but this was new to her experience, a picture of Eden as Eve must have seen it. No wonder the natives clung to this place so tenaciously, she thought. It was truly lovely.
“Don’t tarry, Alexandra,” her uncle said. “My patience is not to be tested.”
A procession wound through the distance ahead of them. She didn’t know how far it was to the castle and decided it was wiser not to ask.
To her surprise, she was led to a horse, which she mounted in silence. She cantered along in the rear of the caravan next to her uncle’s sorrel for several miles, until they topped a slight rise and she saw the castle nestled in the valley spread out at their feet.
“Inverary,” her uncle said briefly, as if it needed explanation. “We shall arrive before noon.”
Alex relaxed just a bit. This was practically the first remark he’d addressed to her since he had discovered her on the ship.
* * * *
“There’s a woman at the castle,” Rory announced.
Burke stared at him doubtfully. It was mid-afternoon, and Rory had just arrived back from his watch.
“I’m sure of it,” Rory insisted. “We saw about fifty people come off the ship. They were met by Carberry’s detachment with horses and taken to Inverary. A couple of hours later a woman was out walking on the leads.”
“How do you know it was a woman?” Burke asked.
“She was wearing a skirt,” Rory said, gesturing in a circle around his hips to indicate hoops. “And a headdress, you know, with a veil. Unless the English are even stranger than we think they are, one of the new arrivals is female.”
Burke absorbed this information in silence. Since the death of Carberry’s wife two years before, the castle had been populated solely by men.
“Do you think the old fool got remarried?” Burke asked.
Rory shrugged. “Anything’s possible. I just thought you should know about it.”
“Watch her movements. Find out when we can snatch her.”
“Snatch her?”
“Think, man,” Burke said impatiently. “She’s got to be a wife, daughter, some kind of relative, or else what is she doing here in the back of the beyond, carted all the way from England? She’d be valuable as a hostage.”
Rory said nothing, watching Burke as he concluded, “It might just be we’ve found a way to get Aidan back.”
* * * *
Alex lifted the stiff linen coif off her neck and stared out through the castle window across the rolling Irish countryside. Her uncle had insisted that she be properly dressed as soon as they arrived, so Lord Carberry had given her his dead wife’s wardrobe, which had been folded into trunks for months. It was in the Spanish style, very much the vogue, with wide farthingales and high ruff collars. Despite having been packed with scented pomanders and pressed between silken covers, all of the clothes smelled musty. But Alex had done the best she could, not wishing to irritate her uncle further by prancing about in Luke’s leggings. Carberry had not commented on her presence or her ill-conceived hairdo. He acted as if she’d been expected and took command of the situation graciously, as only an English gentleman could do. Alex was content to fade into the background and to let her uncle attend to business. But the gorgeous countryside beckoned. After the close quarters of the ship, she yearned for a long, leisurely walk. The men, preoccupied with their plans for the Irish, seemed to have forgotten completely that she was in residence.
She would bide her time and escape the castle walls as soon as she could.
* * * *
Alex’s opportunity came several days later, when the guard assigned to her was at dinner and dusk was falling over the Inverary valley. Essex, her uncle, and Lord Carberry had ridden off at dawn and weren’t expected back until the morrow. Chafing at the bonds of her uncle’s orders, which restricted her to the keep, Alex changed into Luke’s clothes again and waited for her chance. When some local horsemen left the castle to return to the neighboring village of Carberry’s retainers, Alex quietly fell in with them and walked across the drawbridge. She was assumed to be one of the grooms and passed out of the gates unmolested.
Delighted with her success, she broke into a run, flinging her arms wide to embrace the soft mist and the falling night.
Her happiness was extremely short-lived. She had not come a quarter mile from the castle when she was seized roughly from behind and dragged into a thicket. She was bound and gagged as she struggled wildly, unable to make a sound loud enough to attract attention. A rough woven blindfold was tied round her eyes as she kicked helplessly. Her assailant then lifted her and tossed her across a horse as if she were a sack of meal. He climbed up behind her, taking off at a breakneck speed that set the animal’s hooves pounding beneath her.
The ride was short but wild and desperately fast. Alex barely had time to realize she’d been kidnapped before the rider stopped abruptly and hauled her off the horse. She stumbled and fell to her knees. She was trying to get her bearings when strong hands lifted her as if she were a straw puppet and set her on her feet.
The blindfold was removed, and she was staring up at a shaggy-haired giant dressed in a homespun tunic with a dagger thrust into his belt. He looked about thirty years in age, with wide shoulders and long, slim legs clad to the knee in hand-sewn boots. The top of her head barely reached his chest.
Alex almost fainted with fear. Why hadn’t she obeyed her uncle?
He might not be very kind to her, but at least he was of normal size and didn’t look as though he skinned his enemies with his bare hands. She had heard that the Irish painted themselves blue and went into battle naked; this one was dressed but otherwise looked capable of almost anything.
Burke examined Rory’s prize and then turned to his lieutenant.
“What the devil ails you, Rory?” he said in Gaelic, not bothering to conceal his disgust. “This is a
boy
!”
Chapter 2
Almost all (Celts) are of tall stature, fair and ruddy, terrible for the fierceness of their eyes, fond of quarreling and of overbearing insolence...
—Ammianus Marcellinus,
Historae
The rebel band gathered
around to view the spectacle, and Alex stared at the ground, afraid to meet their eyes. They weren’t as big as the one who had spoken, but they were all rough hewn and similarly clad. The younger man, who was evidently her kidnapper, replied in the same coarse language, which Alex decided must be what her uncle called Erse. It sounded to her like fits of coughing.
“It’s the woman I told you about,” Rory said. “I’ve been watching her for five days straight, I ought to know. She’s just dressed like a boy, Burke.”
Rory reached for the neckline of Alex’s tunic to prove it, but a harsh command from the leader stopped him in his tracks. Rory’s hand fell away, and he looked chagrined.
Burke moved closer to Alex and stared down at her, his muscular arms crossed upon his massive chest. His eyes moved over her face, then her figure, and Alex felt her face grow hot as he determined her sex for himself. He didn’t touch her, but he didn’t have to; she felt his gaze burning through her clothes.
“Who are you?” he finally said in English.
Alex was startled at the sound of her native language, but she didn’t know how to reply.
Burke seized her roughly under her arms and lifted her off the ground, holding her up to his eye level. “I’ll ask you once more,” he said in his slightly accented English. “Who are you?”
His blue eyes blazed into hers. She noticed that his lashes were long and thick, an absurdly feminine touch in a man who fairly exuded masculinity. She was terrified, but she knew instinctively that, like his enemy Essex, this towering rebel would respect a show of courage.
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she replied defiantly, her voice sounding a lot stronger than she felt.
Burke set her down abruptly. “Right enough,” he said, circling her as a wolf would a felled deer. “But I don’t have to let you live, either.”
“You kidnapped me, didn’t you?” Alex said. “If you want to use me as a hostage, I’m not much good to you dead.”
“You’re not much good to me alive if I don’t know who the hell you are!”
“Then perhaps you should have determined that before your minion here trussed me up like a prize goose and carried me off !”
The large man’s expression darkened, and Alex wished instantly that she had held her tongue. When he bent from the waist to put his eyes on a level with hers, it was plain that he was furious. Alex shrank from him, conscious that he could snap her neck in two with a twist of his hands.
“Now you listen to me, Miss Fine English Lady,” he said. His accent was strangely like hers, that of the upper classes, but with a lilt that made it sound almost musical.
Alex stared back at him, willing her knees to stop shaking.
“I’ll not believe that the first female to arrive at the castle in two years is a charwoman, dressed up like the Spanish infanta and moving about the grounds with a guard. You have one second to answer my question!”
Alex hesitated an instant too long, and Burke turned from her sharply, barking an order in Gaelic to her kidnapper. The younger man advanced on her with his rope at the ready, and she realized she had to take her chances with the giant.
“Wait! I’ll tell you.”
The leader looked back at her expectantly.
“I’m Lady Alexandra Cummings, niece of Sir Philip Cummings, scion of Stockton House and my lord Essex’s man, special envoy from the queen to Lord Carberry,” she recited proudly.
The Irishmen exchanged glances.
“A pretty speech,” Burke said after a moment, “but what does it mean? Is your uncle kinsman to the queen?”
Alex nodded.
Rory looked at Burke hopefully. “Her hair is the same color as the English queen’s,” Rory said in English.
“Her hair is the same color as the queen’s wigs,” Burke said. “The old hag is as bald as an egg.”
Under other circumstances, Alex might have found this comment amusing. It was widely known that Elizabeth’s luxuriant red mane was a thing of the past.
“How are you kin to the queen?” Burke demanded.
“By marriage. My aunt, sister to my uncle and my late father, is wed to Henry Howard, the queen’s cousin.”
Burke considered this. It was close enough. He was well versed in English politics, and the queen was known to be solicitous of her Howard relations. In any event, this Cummings would certainly want his niece back.
“What are you doing in Eire?” Burke demanded.
Alex sighed. “My uncle is my guardian and did not wish to leave me behind in England.”
Burke looked skeptical but didn’t pursue it. “What are the English plans here?”
“I have no idea,” Alex said.
“Did you hear anything of a prisoner at the castle?”
“I myself was a prisoner at the castle,” she replied. “They didn’t talk to me. I stayed in my room and ate alone. The only person I saw regularly was my guard, and he didn’t talk to me either.”
Burke studied her, and Alex wondered where he had learned to speak such good English. With the exception of the one called Rory, it was clear that the rest of the men didn’t understand her.
“What befell your hair?” Burke asked suddenly.
“It was burned in a fire.”
“Why were you outside the castle walls dressed like this?”
“My uncle didn’t want me to leave the grounds, and I felt like going for a walk.”
“And you just happened to have a set of boy’s clothes at hand?” Burke said sarcastically. “Something is not right about you, English miss, and I mean to know what it is.” He moved away.
“What are you going to do with me?”
He ignored her as he said something in a low tone to Rory. The leader turned his back, and Rory headed toward her. With her hands still bound behind her there was little she could do to resist, but she struggled futilely.
“Don’t you touch me!” she gasped.
Dodging her kicks, Rory scooped her up, strode into a nearby tent, and deposited her on a bundle of skins. A single candle burned on an upturned crate inside, giving feeble illumination to her primitive surroundings.
“Wait!” Alex yelled as Rory walked away, but he gave no indication that he’d heard her.
Time passed, and nothing happened. The rope was cutting into Alex’s wrists, her legs were cramped, and fear of the unknown overcame her. She was trying hard not to cry when Burke suddenly appeared, unbuckling his belt and pulling his tunic over his head. Alex looked on in horror as she realized that this was his tent and he was about to undress for the night.
He glanced over at her and read her expression.
“Never fear, my lady,” he said. “When I take a fancy to twelve-year-old boys you’ll be in danger, not before. All you are to me is a chess piece to trade.”