The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (29 page)

The Scots howled and
beat their shields at her crackling put-down.

Clifford’s lips quivered. “A wicked tongue on a woman is a
facile skill. You are fortunate to be spared the rectification of battle.”

Belle met him glare for glare. “No, it is you, sir, who is
fortunate. If I
were
a man, the day to follow would be your last.”

Clifford tried to summon
a reply to her impudence, but finding no words sufficient, he spurred to catch
up with Pembroke, driven by catcalls.

As the Scots cheered Belle’s mettle, James saw that Robert
had sunk deeper into despair. He rode to the women and faced their ponies
toward their sulking king. “What say you, ladies? Will you still ride with this
crown-toting devil?”

Belle was a ready conspirator. “Aye, and fight St. George’s
legions for it if need be. But surely this cannot be Hell’s keeper who sits
before us. I have it on good authority that the real Satan has freakish legs
stretched to keep his royal baubles from being singed by the flames. I’m also
told that long shanks make good cooking over a hot spit!”

The men roared and
stomped about, imitating the English king’s loping gait.

Try as he might, Robert could not suppress a grin at that
crack.

Simon Fraser tossed a dagger to their new Amazon, and Belle,
catching the weapon, smirked at James to match that feat. He grinned back at
her, his anger melted by this, her second courageous act to bolster their new
king.

The old MacDuff sass had returned.

T
HAT NIGHT, THE
S
COTS PULLED
back from Perth and bivouacked
in a tree-lined vale near the abandoned castle of Methven, less than a league
from the next day’s designated field of battle. Robert refused to take shelter
in the tower and instead placed his bedroll along side those of his men. He
had intended for his brother Nigel to escort the women to Kildrummy that night,
but Elizabeth had convinced him to delay their departure until a few hours
before dawn.

Belle sat on the outskirts of the camp, feeling out of
place, a Comyn woman among these Bruces. After turning against her brother and
husband, she’d had nowhere to call home, until Elizabeth Bruce had asked her to
join her court as a lady in waiting. Seeing the new queen traveling without a
servant, she had gratefully accepted the offer, cheerfully taking up the tasks
of attending to the royal meals and laundry despite her noble station.

Now, finding the men preoccupied with tending to their
weapons, she threw a bundle of soiled clothes over her shoulder and walked
alone toward a nearby stream to wash them. It was one of those clear midsummer
eves when dusk cast a shimmering hue and danced with shadows. At the banks, she
sat on a boulder and reached into her bundle.

The basket was empty.

She was about to bite off a choice Fife curse when she heard
singing:

“On moonlit moor in November
We tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen
The true worth of passion’s pledge…
She thought the tune sounded vaguely familiar.
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts
And I not making hay.
Oh I loved too much and by such,
Is happiness thrown away. …”

She stalked the voice, but the nearer she came to it, the
more it receded. Were the Little People serenading her? No mortal could conjure
such unnatural glamourie, for the voice became fainter, then stronger, as if
the singer was able to fly around her:

“I gave her gifts of the mind,
I gave her the secret sign,
That’s known to the one who has seen
The true gods of sound and tone.
And word and tint, I did not stint
For I gave her poems to say.
And with her own name there,
And her long dark hair
Like clouds over the fields of May.”

The singing finally faded, causing a heavy sadness to strike
at her heart. Forced to return to the real world, she walked back along the
stream and heard something flapping above her. One of the queen’s undergarments
was hanging on a branch. Farther upstream, she saw another dangling blouse, and
then another. She scurried to gather them before anyone in the camp saw them.
She reached up for the last garment—and arms grabbed her waist from behind. She
tried to shout a warning that English were attacking, but a hand stifled her
mouth.

“You still fall for it.”

Heaving with fright, she turned and found James rollicking
with laughter. He had repeated the prank he first played on her in Lanark years
ago. She pushed him away, feeling the firmness of his chest, and huffed off.

“Belle, I did not mean to …”

She flushed with indignation, but her heart raced from a
disturbing elation. Pulled by conflicting emotions, she stole the crude
mandolin he was carrying.

Astonished by the brazen theft, James tried to retrieve the
instrument.

She turned a shoulder on him to deny the attempt, and then
pushed him into the stream. “And
you
still fall for that!”

James landed with a thudding splash, and went under.

When his head bobbed up, Belle loaded a handful of rocks and
sent him back down. After she had spent her rounds, the water slowly calmed,
broken only by the soft rippling of the undercurrent. Alarmed, she began
stripping off her cloak to go in for him. But then, she remembered his old
trick, and held back. She had wised up since those days when he declared her
the most gullible lassie in Scotland.

Submerged for nearly a minute, James sprang up holding his
nose, expecting to find her frantically searching for him. She was nowhere in sight. Had she run off in anger? He felt a sharp pang of regret. She was a woman now, and a
married one at that. She likely thought him immature and shallow. Things could
never be the same as before, he realized. Too much had happened to darken their
lives. Chastened, he prepared to walk out from the stream and return to camp—

His feet were pulled down into a whirlpool.

He struggled for breath as his head went under again. He was
drowning in the jaws of a loch creature, and no one would know! He fought to
the surface gulping air. His head shot forward, buffeted by a sharp cuff behind
the ear.

Belle had thumped him with the Aberdeen Sweetie, a thumb
flick used by Highland wives on their lazy husbands.

“Are you trying to kill me before Clifford gets his chance?”
he sputtered.

She resurfaced a few feet from his reach and, sticking out
her tongue, splashed water into his face. “Oh my! If you were to give up the
ghost, the Parisian courtesans would fill the Seine with their tears.”

“That was not my doing! The Bishop forced me to go!”

She backstroked away, arching her wet bosom. “And did the
Bishop also force you to make puppy eyes at that French tart?”

He swam after her. “And what about you? It wasn’t me who
went off and married—” He stopped himself, too late.

She hurried to the bank and wrapped herself in one of the
hanging garments. “Go off?” she cried. “You don’t know anything, Jamie Douglas!
Not a word from you! What was I to do? Run away? I couldn’t just board a ship
and sail from my suffering like you! A woman’s love means nothing in this
world.”

“You speak of love?”

She plopped onto a rock,
dropping her head to her hands to hide her sobbing.

James crawled to the bank. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She tore at his collar, ripping off two buttons and
extracting the cord from around his neck to display the heart-stone. “What did
you think this meant? Are all men so thick-headed that they cannot understand
such things?”

“I kept it, didn’t I?”

She was stunned. His coldness at Berwick, she realized, had
been only a front to hide his injured heart. How foolishly blind she had been.
She couldn’t look at him for fear of suffering his judgment.

He gently captured her shoulders, but she drew away. How
could he want her after she had been with Tabhann?

He pulled her to the dewy grass, hiding her from view of the
camp on the far banks, and wiped tears from her cheeks. Their lips met, and
they kissed savagely. She wrapped her legs around his waist. Slowly,
threateningly, he caressed the flaps of her necking while examining the mayhem
that she had inflicted upon his saffron shirt. With a grin of anticipation, he
ripped apart the fastenings on her blouse in retaliation.

A rush of air swept down the valley of her exposed chest. She pushed him on his back and waited for him to finish
disrobing her.

He lay transfixed by the ripped blouse that tenuously held
her breasts in check. She reached behind her neck, untied the blouse for him,
and slid it from her shoulders. She rested her hands at the sides of his head
and hovered inches from his gaze. Mocking him with an exaggerated French
accent, she purred seductively, “
Mon dieu
! Have you never seen the
Highlands,
monsieur
?”

He rolled her onto her back and pinned her arms behind her
head. “Bonnie as Ben Bulben they are,
that
I cannot deny.” His tongue
trailed down her neck and made the slow pilgrimage toward her navel. “Stirling
Bridge, the gate to all worth having.” As he moved deeper down into the
borderlands, he blessed each landmark on her ravishing dark body with a kiss.
“The Highlands are fine,
mademoiselle,
but I’m partial to the lush
vales of the south.”

Shuddering, she was about to cry out when he silenced her
with another hard kiss. He fumbled to remove his leggings, and she assisted him
until he was freed and atop her. She surrendered to him with tears of bitter
joy. After all those nights under Tabhann, she feared she could never feel this
way. She wanted to lose herself in this moment, never let it end—

“No!”

Startled by his shout, she opened her eyes.

He sat trembling, gazing up into the darkness.

“Jamie, what’s wrong?”

He had not heard her question. A raven sat perched on a
nearby limb. After staring down at him for several moments, the black harbinger
blinked and fluttered away, causing him to shudder. Eight years had passed
since the goddess Morgainne had demanded two souls for his survival. Until this
moment, he had forgotten about the pact made during his boyhood race. He could
not possibly tell Belle of the bargain forced on him that day. She would never
believe him, or worse, think him deranged.

“Am I not pleasing to you?” she asked.

James rolled aside her and drew his knees to his chin. “Too
much so.”

She wrapped herself in his cloak and knelt waiting for an
explanation, but he could not look at her. She gathered him into her arms and
stroked his chest. Somewhere in the darkness, the raven cawed like a mother
protecting its nest. That eerie sound caused her to think of the stories told
by the old women in Fife about the raven Valkeries that flew over the camps on
the night before a battle to choose their next victims. She had always wondered
why only the female ravens were held to be omens of death. Probably because men
blamed women for all of their troubles.

The playful voice of a girl roused Belle from the memories. Across the stream, she saw Robert sitting near a fire with Elizabeth and his ten-year-old daughter, Marjorie, who was trying to engage her parents in a game of dice. Belle sighed, empathizing with the poor girl who had no sisters with whom to frolic. “Robert seems changed since Scone.”

“We’ve all changed.”

“Not you.” She wrung her soaked blouse over his head as
evidence.

Instead of rising to her bait as he used to do, James turned
reflective. “Maybe a king can’t have a friend. There’s a distance between us now. He
has a family. That will change a man.”

“Do you think about children?” She regretted that question as soon as she spoke it. Yet, seeing that he did not flinch from it, she risked snuggling closer. “How many?”

“Ten would fill a castle, no?”

“Does Castle Douglas still stand?”

“Last time I saw it, the walls were near collapsing.”

She rested her head on his chest and gazed up at the clear
sky. “Remember the night we spent looking for your star?”

He pointed out their favourite constellation. “There it is.”

“Tell me the story again.”

“I told you stories?” James was driven to the tale by a
sharp elbow to his ribs. “St. Columba, like all Irishmen, loved words.
Especially those spoken from his own mouth.”

“Are you sure you’re not Irish?”

“Will you hear the tale or not?” Only when she surrendered a
nod of contrition did he agree to continue. “Many centuries ago, there existed
just one copy of the Holy Gospels in all Ireland. Ulstermen are a strange
breed, believing as they do that a book carries magical powers. So, St. Finian,
the owner of this precious tome, forbade all from looking upon its pages lest
their thaumaturgy be stolen. One night, Columba hid inside Finian’s abbey and
copied the gospels. The next morning, Finian sensed with his vision powers that
the book’s magic had disappeared.” Suspecting her of enjoying his embrace more
than the story, he paused to test her attention.

“Well? What did Finian do?”

“A bard has to be paid.” Compensated with another kiss, he
revealed, “Finian offered a prize to any who could recite the twelve Apostles
in order.”

“Columba didn’t fall for that, did he?”

“Aye, he did. Columba admitted the theft, and he was set off
to sea in a hollowed trunk and ordered not to set foot on land until Ireland
disappeared from his sight.” He angled her head toward the west. “While the
saint rowed, he kept watch on that star until he landed at Iona.”

“On our Scotland.”

He nodded. “And every night for the rest of his life,
Columba would gaze upon that star. He knew it’d be the closest he’d ever again
come to seeing home.” Seeing that the story had cast Belle into a melancholic
silence, he stroked her long dark hair, tangled and frazzled by the night air.
“You needn’t worry, Belle. You’ve found your home now. And you’ll never be
forced to leave again.”