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‘Blunkit? Why?’ She could not imagine this angry man dragging a blanket behind him.
‘Because of his eyes.’
‘Ah.’ Blunkit fabric was a soft blue-grey, remarkably similar to the colour of John Brunson’s eyes. ‘He must have hated that.’
‘Later, aye—’ Bessie nodded ‘—he did.’
Cate shook her head, trying to picture this strong knight as a youth. ‘I don’t remember him.’
‘You must have seen him when he was younger.’
‘When?’ She would have been no more than ten when he went to court, Bessie even younger.
‘A wedding, a year, maybe, before he left. I cannot remember whose, but the tower was full. Everyone had come to celebrate.’
Cate tried to summon the event and had a dim memory of two lads in the courtyard, crossing swords. The taller—it must have been Rob—had the advantage, but John gave no quarter, fighting harder when he accused his brother of holding back.
‘So long ago.’ She was no longer the giggling girl of nine who knew nothing of the world’s horrors and still thought to be a bride one day. ‘I had forgotten.’
‘He was not like the others.’ Bessie nodded towards the bed where her father lay. ‘Even then.’
Cate shook her head. Perhaps Bessie no longer knew her brother. ‘He’s like enough.’
He was a man. One whose first thought had been to kiss her.
When John returned to the hall, the fire had burned low and the raucous conversations had quieted. Some men dozed.
He accepted a mug and took a wedge of cheese, the first food he’d had all day. So simple, the things that kept a body bound to the earth.
Rob sat alone on the stone window seat. He did not move or speak when John joined him.
He wasn’t sure what drew him back to his silent brother, but he had faced the truth: his father was truly gone. The triumphant return he’d hoped for lay shattered at his feet. There would be no reconciliation.
It was the king’s favour he must seek now, not that of a family who had never granted it and never would.
His father, Cate, his brother. Each had judged him and found him wanting. The king would not—not when John brought three hundred Brunson men to fight at his side.
Cate walked into the hall and another man rose to take her place in the dead man’s room. This stubborn woman, determined to oppose the king’s will, was haunting him more than the things that should have been: his father, the king, his mission.
She was nothing like the women he had known at court, any of whom seemed ready to flip their skirts for a chance to bed a king’s man. Even those women already wed.
‘She’s a skittish one, isn’t she?’ he said to Rob, nodding towards the other side of the hall where she stood with one of her men.
‘Cate?’ Rob shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
John took a sip, waiting.
His brother said nothing more.
He gritted his teeth. Silence was not the way at court. There was always chatter, even if the words were meaningless.
Even if they were false.
He forced another question. ‘Why is that, do you suppose?’
Another shrug. ‘Not for me to say.’
‘Not for you to say or not for me to know?’ Was Rob hiding something? With as few words as the man used, it was hard to tell.
Then, Rob turned his head to look at John with that familiar expression that needed no words to say Little Johnnie Blunkit. ‘She lost her father to the Storwicks. Do you expect her to be dancing?’
‘No,’ he said, refusing to yield, ‘but I don’t expect her to dress like a man and wield a sword, either.’
Rob shrugged and made no answer, but his face spoke his grief. He had just lost a father. He was not dancing. And if John forced him too soon, he’d not be sending men to the king, either.
‘She has no mother?’ John said, cracking the silence.
‘Dead. Years before her father.’
‘Brothers? Sisters?’
Rob shook his head.
She had no family, so she stole his. Well, she could have them.
‘When did it happen?’ His brother delighted in making him beg for each scrap. ‘Her father’s death?’
‘Two years ago.’
Longer than he had thought. Long enough that she should no longer be in grief’s grip. ‘How?’
Rob sighed, finally accepting John would ask until he was answered. ‘She said little. It was about this time of year. They were still in the hills with the cattle when Scarred Willie came. Killed everyone but Cate. Took the cattle.’
Killed everyone. It was not the way of the Borders, such killing. But the woman’s life had been spared, as was right.
‘Could you not chase him down?’
‘We didn’t find out till weeks after.’
‘Why not?’
‘She buried them, her father and the others, before she came down from the high land.’
John studied her again, the woman who could barely keep a blade upright. How had she summoned the strength of body and heart for that? ‘And then?’
‘We tried,’ Rob growled, as if John accused him of shirking his duty, ‘but the Storwicks denied his guilt and the English Warden wouldn’t hand him over for trial.’
The Borders had their own laws, enforced jointly, on occasion, by royally appointed Wardens on both sides of the border.
‘And even if he had,’ Rob continued, ‘it would have been his word against hers.’
‘So Father promised her the justice the Wardens wouldn’t.’ Suddenly, he saw hope, something that might persuade Rob, persuade all of them, to the king’s side.
‘The king has appointed a new Scottish Warden.’ John leaned forwards. ‘I carry the papers with me. This one will insist Storwick is brought to justice.’
Rob snorted. ‘One Warden’s no different from the next. Scots or English.’
‘This one is.’ John’s statement was more emphatic than his certainty. He knew little of the man. ‘You must give him time to prove it.’
‘I must?’ Rob near shouted. ‘You left us and now you come back and tell me what I must do?’
‘I didn’t leave. Father sent me.’ He lowered his voice, hoping Rob would follow.
He did not. ‘Well, I didn’t see you running home when you turned one and twenty.’
‘And I saw no invitation.’
‘You don’t need an invitation to come home, Johnnie.’ All the arrogance of a big brother was in his voice.
‘For no better a welcome than I’ve had, I do.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that conversation in the hall had stopped.
‘Well, what have you done since you arrived but yammered about what the Brunsons must do because your precious king says so? You might at least have given your father the grace of his burial.’
His plan to make Rob’s decision easy had already gone well awry. ‘We’ve little time. The king needs our men in East Lothian by mid-October.’
Realisation reflected in Rob’s eyes. He rose. ‘Well, Johnnie, my father is more important than your king. He, and you, can wait for my decision until we’ve laid Geordie the Red in the ground.’
Rob turned his back and walked out of the hall.
And when John looked up, everyone was watching, silent.
Including Cate Gilnock.
Chapter Three
It was no day for a funeral, John thought, as they gathered outside the tower’s walls the next morning. The sun looked downright cheerful to see the man put in the ground.
To Bessie fell the role of leading the procession to the burial ground, as her mother would have had she been alive. Awed, John watched his sister calmly assume yet another duty. When last he had seen her, she’d been a lass of eight. Now, she seemed a woman who had already seen, and accepted, all the sorrow life could offer.
His brother stepped up to the coffin, first man to be ready to heft it to his shoulder. John moved to take his place on the other side.
‘I’ve five other men already,’ Rob said.
‘None of whom is his son,’ John said, warning them back with a glance. Estranged as he might be from his father, from the family, this was his role, his right.
His duty.
The others stepped away, not waiting for Black Rob’s permission. In this, John had the right.
He took his place and at Rob’s nod, they lifted the coffin to their shoulders.
Bessie led them from the tower, singing of sorrow in a song that needed no words. Cate fell in behind her, ready to lend an arm if she faltered. Next to his sister, Cate, with her cropped hair, loose pants and knee boots, seemed as young as a lad.
The burden rested heavy on his shoulder as the men found their common step. Arms raised, he steadied it with both hands, feeling as if his father’s weight held him fast to the earth. But he would not be the first to cry off. And in the mile between the tower and the burial ground, they only paused once to let the coffin down.
The Brunson burial ground perched on the leeward side of a hill beside an empty church. The grave had been prepared beside his mother’s. All there was to do now was to take the body from the coffin and lower it into the ground with ropes.
Not for them the priest and the prayers, the laying on of hands, the final rites that might have eased his father’s passage. A few years ago, the Archbishop of Glasgow had banned the riding clans from the church and cursed them to eternal damnation with a vengeance that would have made a reiving man proud.
The priest had left.
The Brunsons remained.
So at the end, his father was laid to rest with only his family and the land he belonged to. Perhaps, he thought, as they consigned his father to the earth, this was more fitting.
John looked out across the valley his father had loved. Grey clouds had gathered atop the hills, shielding the sun, and he felt a stir of unwelcome emotion. This earth, this clay, had made him, too.
Yet now, he was a stranger to it. His brother and the others who rode it daily could find their way on a moonless night. To him, it was like a woman he had not yet bedded. The soft hills, the surface he could see, beckoned, but he did not know what parts of her body would respond to his touch. Hadn’t found the hidden places.
He found himself watching Cate, wondering what hid beneath her disguise. She embodied every dilemma he faced: a family who had disowned him, a land that kept its secrets, a way of life at odds with everything he wanted.
And yet, something about her tugged at him, tempting him to peel back her layers, to discover her secrets. And something about her made him mourn what he had lost.
The ancestral melody began. Bessie and Rob joined voices to sing the ballad of the Brunsons. The song that had come down from ancestors no longer remembered, except through song.
This is the story, long been told
Of the brown-eyed Viking, man of old
Left on the field by the rest of his clan
Abandoned for dead was the first Brunson man
Abandoned for dead was the first Brunson man.
Left for dead and found alive
A brown-eyed Viking from the sea
He lived to found a dynasty.
There were verses unnumbered, names and stories of the Brunsons since the first, and when the last had been sung, Rob stepped forwards to sing alone.
I sing today of Geordie the Red;
A Border rider born and bred
A man more faithful never found
