The Honor Due a King (5 page)

Gently, I lowered my axe to rest its head on the ground and took Marjorie’s hand by the fingertips. No sooner had I grazed her knuckles with a kiss than she yanked her hand back.

“An attempted escape, my lady. The ewe thought the grass would be better on the other side of the fence. I convinced her otherwise.” The ewe, in fact, had jabbed me in the thigh with one of her curved horns, even as I freed her head from the woven branches of the pen. The bruise was deep and throbbed with every stride, but it was nothing in comparison to a battle wound. When the tip of her horn snagged my leggings, I had bellowed more in anger than pain, but still, the women did not know that. I should have held my tongue.

“Sheep are such clever creatures.” She winked in jest.

Her companion, only a few years older and as plain of feature as Marjorie was perfect, giggled behind her upheld sleeve. Soon Marjorie, too, bubbled with amusement.

Heat flushed the rims of my ears. I drummed my fingers on the end of the axe handle, then rested it in a fissure of the tree trunk. “May I escort you inside?”

Marjorie flapped a hand over her breast, gulping air until her laughter subsided. “Why? Was I going there?”

Her friend clutched her elbow. “It
is
cold, my lady.”

“Cold? Invigorating, I say. Go on then, Sibylla. I’ll be along ...” – a warm smile lit her face as she glanced my way – “eventually.”

Sybilla tossed me a shy glance, kissed Marjorie’s cheek and rushed off, skirts bunched in her hands to keep from trailing the hem over the soggy ground.

“A distant cousin by marriage to Walter Stewart, I’m told.” Marjorie turned to walk back in the direction from which I’d just come. With eyes the deep blue of a bottomless loch, she threw a look over her shoulder, beckoning me to follow. By then Boyd was nowhere in sight and Sybilla was almost to the door of the church. A light wind tossed a long golden ringlet across her face, momentarily covering her eyes. She tucked her hair behind her ears and scrunched her small nose. “Father insists I sit next to Walter at the supper table. He’s polite enough, or tries to be when he can get the words out, but a complete bore and dreadfully awkward. Oh,” – she covered her mouth, as if to recapture the words – “
please
don’t tell him I said that.”

When I shook my head, she sighed, smiled and went on as we descended the short hill and joined the path back toward the sheep pen. “Anyway, Father sent Sibylla along with Lord Randolph when they came to fetch us from the English at Jedburgh. I remembered her from Rothesay, but she was a few years older and seemed so grown up to me. We didn’t talk much then, but it’s much different now.
We
’re different, older. I’d go insane here without her. I feel so ...
confined
. Just like those sheep there.”

A cloud of black faces lifted to appraise us, ears twitching. By then we were standing not far from the sheep pen.

“I remember your brothers, too,” she said. “Did you ever find them again?”

“Aye, they fought with me at Bannockburn. Hugh – he was born to fight. There’s not much else he can do.” Hugh was my full brother. His birthing had been so long and difficult that the effort had robbed my mother of her life. When the midwife cut her belly open to pull Hugh out and clean the blood from him, his skin was a deep, purplish shade of blue. That was the first sign of many that he was not right in the head. He was late to take his first steps, slow in speech, shy as a fallow deer – but I looked after him as best I could, even though it frustrated me beyond measure at times. As boys we practiced with our spears in the hills beyond Douglas Castle and he grew big and strong. While his hands were so large that he fumbled to nock an arrow, his arms were stout like the branches of an old oak and he could heave an axe with deadly force. At Bannockburn, he fought bravely, perhaps because he was simple and had no ken of death.

Between lashes as black and thick as strokes of ink, Marjorie’s eyes narrowed. “There is another, much younger?”

“Archibald. My father had hopes that he would enter the clergy, but I do not think it was meant to be.” In truth, he had a weakness for women, much as my father had. In the same year that my mother died, my father, Sir William Douglas, caused himself untold troubles when he abducted a young widow, Eleanor Ferrers, from Fa’side Castle. Longshanks, the first Edward of England, ordered my father’s arrest for the incident, but by then they were already wed. It was not the last time my father incurred Longshanks’ wrath. When Longshanks came north to besiege Berwick, Archibald was barely weaned and he wailed whenever another stone from the trebuchet thundered against the castle walls, smashing holes in its thick curtain of stone.

In time, the walls toppled and eight thousand people were butchered in the streets. Eight
thousand
. I witnessed it all from the castle’s parapets.

“Archibald was still very young when I left Scotland to study in Paris. I didn’t see him again until two days before Bannockburn.”

“I’m told it was the greatest battle ever fought. Someday you shall have to tell me about it –” Her shoulders hunched up as a shiver rippled through her body.

“Here, my lady ...” – I unclasped my cloak and placed it over her short mantle – “Marjorie,” I added. We had once been as close as brother and sister and even though many years had gone by, the more we spoke, the more the familiarity returned. “It smells of damp wool and mud, but –”

“Before we were parted at Dalry,” she interrupted, “you used to loan me your cloak. Sometimes just to lie on, when the ground was hard or wet. Do you remember, James?”

I nodded and, bashful as a mountain hare, averted my gaze. Eight years ago. She was only a girl then – and I barely a man. Our forces nearly destroyed at Methven by the Earl of Pembroke, we had gone into hiding, moving ever southward through the Highlands, intent on reaching the western coast and going on to Ireland. But at the Pass of Dalry, we were attacked by John of Lorne and his fierce Argyll warriors. In a moment of desperation, Robert sent the womenfolk back north with his brother Nigel. Robert saved my life that day when I fell from my horse.

“I never forgot how kind you were to me,” she said, curling her arm inside mine and leaning her head upon my shoulder. The cadence of my heart quickened. “I wish there was some way I could repay that kindness. Some way I could let you know how much your company meant to me.”

A lone blackbird cawed from the treetops in the encroaching darkness. Startled, Marjorie gripped my arm harder, her fingernails pinching my flesh through the cloth of my sleeve. As the bird flapped overhead and flew away, she exhaled, relaxing her hold.

“They could have been such bleak days,” she said lowly. “I was so often hungry and tired. I remember that keenly. But I was never afraid. Never. Not with you beside me.”

Her hand slipped downward, until she held mine. I closed my fingers around hers, sensing her gaze on me.

“I thought of you every day, James.” She drew in a breath, held it long. “
Every
day. Sometimes, the hope that I would see you again was the only thing that kept me going.”

I looked at her then ... and saw her differently. Not as the laughing girl with golden curls who had shared my saddle over the many miles of Highland deer paths. Not as Robert’s beloved daughter and heir, to be protected or taught as the occasion demanded. Not as a former captive of England’s king, to be pitied for her years of undeserved solitude. No, I saw her just as Boyd did: as a woman, vulnerable and bewitching all at once and all too temptingly near.

And it filled me with guilt to think of her that way, just as it filled me with an undeniable madness to take her in my arms.

I slipped my fingers from hers and stepped backward. “It’s nearly dark.”

She clutched at my forearm, full lips pouting. “Did you not think of me, too, James? Did you ever think of ...” – she tilted her head – “of us?”

She had been a young girl then, like a sister to me. Until now, I had always thought of her as such. No, she had merely mistaken my concern for affection. My duty was, and always had been, to watch over her, to protect her. Robert had sworn me to it.

“I prayed often for your safe return,” I mumbled, but even that, I feared, was saying too much. I jerked an arm toward the path leading back to the abbey. “Come, please. If your seat goes empty at supper, your father will come looking for you.”
And flay my hide for letting you rove about.

I expected a protest – some sulking at the very least. Instead, she raised her heart-shaped chin, blue eyes bright, and issued a challenge: “Race me, James Douglas. Twenty counts head start.”

She snatched up the front of her gown, shins bare above slippered feet, and ran back up the path to the abbey steps, never looking back, the wake of her laughter rolling across the expanse.

***

I
n the days that followed, I had strict orders from King Robert that Lady Marjorie was not to be allowed beyond the abbey’s walls without an escort. True to her capricious nature, she proved incompliant, shirking her guards and slipping away at every opportunity. Sometimes I found her with Sibylla at the river’s bank, watching the ducks skim over the water while the sun languished in the western sky; sometimes in the infirmary before prime, conversing with the sick and maimed as she dabbed salve on their wounds and gave them tincture of willow bark to ease their pains; sometimes in the orchard alone, footprints in snow betraying her.

By far, she had been less difficult in her youth. But I began to suspect her reason for elusiveness was something more than willful disobedience.

When I saw her that December morning, her cheek pressed to the smooth stone column in the south aisle of the church, humming a tune from many years ago that I had taught her, there was only that moment, only the sight of her. Nothing else.

Robert the Bruce – Melrose Abbey, 1314

E
arly arisen, I knelt before the humble altar in the little chapel of the abbot’s house to give thanks to God and St. Waltheof for returning Elizabeth to me. Already her appetite had returned, but it would still be many days before we could depart from Melrose for someplace with more domestic comforts than a ruined abbey. Last night, she had been well enough to sit at the supper table in the abbot’s house. Although she ate heartily, the exertion of having walked even so short a distance had exhausted her. More than once I placed my hand over hers, just to feel the warmth of her flesh beneath my own.

But I could not, should not hope for too much. She was home. She was well, or nearly so. That
should
have been enough. Still ... an old oath dogged me. An oath I had yet to fulfill.

“My lord?” My nephew Thomas Randolph stood at the chapel doorway. He raked fair locks from his eyes, nodding a bow. Aside from the monks, I ventured to guess that he was the only one who woke as early as I did each day. Captured by the English at Methven many years ago, he had sworn his loyalty to Longshanks to spare his skin. When he later led a contingent over the border, James Douglas had slain his company, captured him and brought him to me as a prisoner. Randolph had been reluctant to renounce his loyalty to the English crown, but in time he did and had proven himself steadfast a hundred times over. He hitched a thumb behind him. “I took some fresh bread and cheese to your room. When I didn’t find you there, I thought to come here.”

Stooping over the candles, I cupped a hand behind the wicks and blew them out one by one. “I thank you, Thomas. But the food will keep awhile. Find Walter Stewart. Tell him I wish to meet him in the cloister at once. We can talk there privately, at least until Abbott William discovers us and runs us off.”

“As you wish, my lord. Is there anything else?”

“Nothing, no. We can speak of repairs later. There’s sparse little left to do and I fear we are a grave imposition. The Cistercian brothers are not keen to welcome the outside world. We distract them from their devotions and invite iniquity – or so the abbot often informs me.”

I followed Randolph outside and we parted ways. With a new, brightly dyed, red wool cloak clasped at my right shoulder, I strolled the perimeter of the grounds, beholding the hallowed beauty of the abbey in the hush of early morning. Bold rays of morning sun cast their warming glow upon its walls, the great eastern window capturing the virgin light within the blush of its traceried rose. While spires strained heavenward, rows of winged buttresses anchored the massive structure to terra firma. Melting snow spouted from the mouths of gargoyles affixed at the roof’s edge: clawed demons with pointed ears, winged angels plucking their lutes and dancing ladies with arms held aloft.

The abbey grounds were just now beginning to stir with activity after the morning’s devotions. A cart piled high with hay and driven by two lay brothers rumbled past on the road leading away from the abbey. The lay brethren, while not initiated members of the clergy, gave their labor in service to God. Orphans and younger sons of the poorer classes, most could not read, but their efforts in farming and shepherding in particular provided the abbeys with their primary source of income. I continued on past the north transept and the outer door to the cellar, then through a gate between two dormitories and on into the arcaded cloister.

There, Walter Stewart stood before me at the edge of the tile covered walkway, one hand slack against the base of a stone column as if to steady himself, the other palm-flat against his abdomen.

“Walter, come, come.” I motioned him to me, since his feet seemed moored in place on the cobble walkway.

He swept back the hood of his cloak, dipped his head in a slight bow and approached almost hesitantly.

“I came as quickly as I could, my lord.” He rubbed at his chin nervously. Although he hadn’t shaven since we arrived at Melrose, his whiskers were still so sparse they cast no shadow. “Is there, perhaps, some mission you wish to send me on? An errand you require?”

“No, Walter. Nothing so urgent. Much more important, though.” The boy was eagerly obedient, if nothing else. “Your father was a good man, Walter. Wise, honest ... loyal to Scotland, to my family. Willing to gamble his holdings, his life even, on what he believed in.”