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‘Yes,’ she wailed, ‘and he’s my only child, too. If you must take him, then take me with him. He cannot do without me, nor can I do without him.’
‘I don’t take women.’ His tone was brutally uncompromising.
Then what would he take? Could she bribe him? Shame him? The master-at-arms had shown her once how to use a dagger, but today she had seen no need to wear one. She would not make that mistake again. Sardonically, he had also advised her that, if ever the need arose, she should offer reivers anything she possessed to buy herself time, or life. Any currency, he had stressed. Bargain with them. Life is more important, he’d told her, not needing to explain what life was more important than. His advice at the time had seemed to be a particularly masculine way of looking at things, though now the gravity of what she knew she must offer seemed trifling in comparison to her need. ‘Please…please, you must,’ she whispered, forcing herself to look at his eyes to show him what she was saying.
‘Must?’ he said. ‘What are you saying, exactly?’
‘I’m saying,’ she said, looking away, ‘that you can…’
‘Can what?’
‘…can have me…whatever you will…if you’ll only let me go with him, or leave him here with me. I beg you not to take him from me.’ The words sounded as foreign to her as if coming from someone else’s lips, and he was silent for so long that she began to wonder if indeed she had said them. Yet it needed an effort of will, after that, to look into his eyes. ‘Unless…unless there is something else?’ she ventured, hearing the absurdity of her question. What else did she have that such a man could possible make use of?
The pressure on her wrists was suddenly released and her hands, freed of his cruel grip, fell numbed to her sides. His body arched away from her as he leaned with his hands on the wall at each side of her head, making a barrier too large and powerful to evade, though it seemed likely that her offer had now passed the stage of evasions.
She noticed how fine lines scored the corners of his mouth—made, she supposed, by commands and a life out of doors—and she had little doubt that, if he had indeed understood the nature of the bargain, he would be weighing up the implications, for there was a wealth of experience in the eyes that roamed leisurely over her face and figure. If there was triumph or greed in his expression, then he was hiding it well. Nevertheless, his hesitation mortified her.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘So we are bargaining, are we?’ His eyes rested upon hers at last, searching behind the tears.
She resolved to have strong words with the master-at-arms for initiating this charade. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, looking away. ‘It’s all I have. It’s worthless compared to my bairn’s life, but it’s yours if you want it. You see, I have lost my shame.’ Which was a lie he would hardly recognise.
‘Your bairn’s life is not at stake, lady. He’s a surety against reprisals. Quite a prize. So have you been used to offering yourself—’ his words were interrupted as her hands came up between them to rake savagely at his face, but her wrists were caught again and twisted away behind her back ‘—to reivers?’ he finished.
‘No, sir!’ she snarled, glaring up at his laughing eyes and incensed by the insult. ‘The gift I kept for my late husband will always be his, no matter who else must be paid off. You could have claimed to be the first, for all the good it would do you, but I’ll not offer it again to have its value questioned so. You are a reiver and not worth the breath it takes, nor will you ever know what it has cost me to offer my body to a common thief and murderer. Forget it! I did it for my child, not for your amusement.’
‘Yet only just now you told me it was worth little,’ he said, softly, holding her close to him. ‘Is there some confusion here, perhaps?’
‘Not to a woman. Worth and cost are not the same thing, but that’s not something a man like you would understand too easily.’
‘That’s as may be. Yet I am inclined to accept the offer. Does it still stand?’
Now it was her turn to hesitate as the enormity of the bargain began to grow and fill her with dread. She would have to go to bed with this stranger, or to allow him some appalling intimacy here in the passageway, whichever he had more time for. The consequences could well be disastrous, too awful to think about. She had been near no man except Robbie, for three years remaining completely uninterested in any man’s arms except during the darkest hours of the night when she wept into the pillow. This man would care as little for her lost experience as for her conscience, her reputation, or the long-term effects.
‘Well?’ he said.
She took a deep breath, closing her mind to everything except the need to be with her child. ‘You will allow Sam and me to stay together? Wherever you take us?’
‘The safety of your child and your access to him will depend entirely on my access to you. At all times. Do you understand me, my lady?’
Shocked, she looked up to search for a trace of the laughter that would explain his demand. But there was no laughter, only the hard blue steel. ‘At all times? Not…not just once?’
‘Not once, no. For as long as I want you. Is your son worth that to you?’
The breath left her lungs in a shudder, leaving her cold and numb. Put like that, she had little choice but to accept that, if she wanted Sam at her side, she must stay by this man’s side, literally, and without argument. ‘Yes, he is!’ she said. ‘And you, sir, are a devil!’
‘Then we have a bargain, do we?’
With her teeth clenched, she tried to push herself out of his arms as a picture of dear Robbie appeared before her like a reproach. ‘Yes, we do. And now do I get to know the name of the man to whom I’ve just sold myself?’
But her struggle was ill timed as his arms moved across her back, tipping her head sideways into the crook of one shoulder where her cheek came to rest on his quilted doublet. He gave her no other warning of the depth of his hunger and, as his lips closed over hers with their bargain still upon them, she braced herself for the sudden and inevitable roughness, the display of lust that she had occasionally caught in men’s eyes. Prepared to be hurt, she held her breath during the first tender exploration by his mouth, the tasting, savouring, the incredible gentleness of his dominance until it became clear that pain was not his intention, nor were her initial fears borne out. She had expected brevity, too, while his men waited upon his reappearance, but his kisses were unhurried and in no respect perfunctory, nor were they in any way comparable to the gentle kisses that Robbie had taken or offered her. And when he released her at last, she discovered that her eyes had been closed and that there were fresh tears upon her lashes.
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Somers. Alex Somers at your service, my lady.’ There was no ambiguity in his meaning.
‘Master Somers,’ she said, finding her voice far away down some rusty channel, ‘you are—’
‘I am Sir Alex,’ he corrected her.
‘I see. And I suppose that was a prelude, was it? Are you about to take me here against the wall, or do we have to…?’
His teeth showed evenly as he laughed and pulled her back to him, halting her supposition before it staggered to an embarrassing conclusion. ‘Here? Now? Is that what you want, lady?’
Oaf! Lout! ‘I do not want you at all, sir. I want my child,’ she snarled.
‘And I would prefer a more comfortable setting,’ he said, pressing his nose close to hers, ‘where we could take a more sedate approach to the matter. Your chamber will do well enough, when things have settled.’
‘How knightly. How chivalrous. I should have known.’
‘That I don’t take half a bargain when I can have it all? Yes, lady, you should. You will come to know me better than that, in time. Now I suggest you take a filial interest in your wounded father-in-law.’ He released her from his embrace, pointing down the passageway. ‘Second left.’
‘That’s the steward’s office,’ she said, wiping her damp cheeks.
‘Yes. That’s where Sir Joseph is. He’d have been dead by the time they’d carried him up to his chamber.’
‘And you didn’t want that?’
‘Not particularly. He has information I need.’
‘Then why wound him?’
‘He came back wounded from his raiding, lady.’
‘You lie!’
‘No. Go and see for yourself. His wounds are hours’ old.’
For a moment, she stared at him. ‘And what about my child?’
‘He’s having the time of his life. He’ll come to no harm.’
‘How can I be sure of that?’
In one swift and practised movement, his fingers pulled the net off her bundle of hair, spilling it in a black glossy tide over her shoulder. She saw his eyes darken suddenly and once more she found herself in his arms with neither the time nor the wit to protest. His hand buried itself deep in her hair as his second assertion of authority came fierce enough to take her breath away, making her cling to him for support.
His reply was breathless and husky, as if he was fighting for control. ‘Until our bargain is sealed, my lady, you can’t be sure, can you?’ he said. ‘So don’t go where I can’t find you.’
Chapter Two
Even as the door closed behind him, the relief of being allowed to stay by her child’s side was being eroded by doubts that her bargain with such a man could be the action of a sane and intelligent woman. During the most humiliating and degrading conversation of her twenty-three years, Ebony’s mind had been crystal clear in obtaining one thing at any price. Now, she found that a cold fear was setting in like a Scottish mist, chilling her to the bone and waking her to the significance of her first bid and of his raised stakes, resulting in an abominable bargain that could tie her to his side indefinitely unless she took prompt action to release herself and Sam. Escape? Yes, there were ways out of the castle other than the gatehouse. She had not fled from one mob of reivers simply to be caught up in this devil’s crowd, and nine years was not too long for her to forget her way home.
At fourteen, Ebony had been more than eager for a new life in Scotland. Coming from Carlisle, just over on the English side of the border, to Galloway’s glorious mountains and lochs had meant a complete break from her widowed mother, Lady Jean Nevillestowe, who had willingly accepted an olive branch from a Scot to cement a prestigious family connection. Sir Joseph had no problem, he had said, with the idea of an aristocratic Englishwoman for his newly knighted only son Robert. And though the two countries had not been on the best of terms in 1310, it was not so uncommon for the English and Scots to unite at board and bed, ignoring dissenters whom Sir Joseph could stare down with his pale prominent eyes.
So she had gone to live with the Moffats of Castle Kells to prepare for the time when she would wed Sir Robert, and by the age of seventeen she had been deemed old enough to accept him as her husband and to bear him a son almost immediately. Tragically, their idyll lasted only three years, their manor being in the path of English reivers during one of their raids from across the Solway Firth. The last image Ebony had had of her dear one was silhouetted against the roaring flames as he pushed her, Sam and Biddie out of a low upstairs window. The house and its contents had burned to the ground with Robbie in it while the three survivors had fled to the nearby woodland where the thick bracken had hidden them all night. At daybreak, trembling with shock and cold, they had set off in their shifts along the loch side to the castle. Sir Joseph had found them, the man who last night had been inflicting the same fate on someone else as she and Sam slept safely. Had he found the culprits at last and taken revenge for his son’s life? And were his wounds the result?
Since that appalling event, her main concern had been to keep her small son safe from further harm and to find ways of redirecting his cries for the father he adored. Lately, he had stopped asking for him, but his nightmares continued to be fuelled by his insensitive grandfather who saw no harm in nightly warnings that, if he didn’t go straight to sleep, the reivers would come and get him. Needless to say, he rarely did fall asleep quickly, and never alone, and now he was in the very hands of those ghouls who were cleverly disguising themselves as his friends. Whatever bargain she had made with them, she saw no dishonour in making an effort to outbid Sir Alex which he, no doubt, would call going back on her word.
As far as she knew, this was the first time that Castle Kells had suffered a raid. She had begun to think it would never happen, being so well fortified and protected by the loch and the mountains, and Sir Joseph a reiver himself and more than able to look after his own. Now that he was out of action, she had not for three years felt so vulnerable or so out of her depth.
Stuffing the caul from her hair into the pouch at her girdle, she forced her shaking legs to move reluctantly down the stone-flagged passageway to where the laird of Kells was apparently suffering a dose of his own medicine. Believing Sir Alex to have been exaggerating the seriousness of Sir Joseph’s injuries, she was unprepared for the ravaged body that lay motionless and grotesquely spread out upon the trestle table in the steward’s confined office where his rolls of parchment were squashed beneath tatters of burnt clothing.
‘Meg…oh, Meg!’ she whispered. ‘Dearest. I’m so sorry.’
Meg’s fresh, smooth face was almost as white as her father’s, her blue long-lashed eyes sorrowing at the plight of her disabled protector. ‘The first day of May, Ebbie,’ she said, quietly, ‘and this is what we get. Who would have thought, this morning, when we…?’ Her voice broke, her arms opened and dropped helplessly to her sides. Always so tidy and prim with the air of an efficient red squirrel, Meg at twenty-four years old was not one to break easily. With a father as difficult to please as hers, and a life constrained by her environment, her natural stoicism had been honed to perfection, a barrier against melodrama in any form. This was one of the few times that Ebony had seen her distraught.
She held out her arms and took Meg into them, rocking her. ‘Shh, love,’ she crooned. ‘Hush, then. ’Tis all right. We’ll get through this.’ She caught Brother Walter’s dour expression over Meg’s shoulder as he shook his head and frowned as usual, which was his habit whether he had good reason or not. As Sir Joseph’s chaplain and physician, this was probably the only time he had tended his obstreperous master without having to fight him about the treatment.
His pessimism appeared to have affected the usually buoyant Meg. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘but Father won’t. Just take a look at him.’
The terrible wounds were much worse than Ebony had supposed and now she understood Sir Alex’s wry comment about carrying him up flights of stairs. He was badly burned, and unconscious.
Brother Walter surveyed the mountainous, hairy, scorched body, then offered his verdict. ‘Nay, but I dinna ken when I’ve seen worse na this, m’lady. ’Tis bad. Verra bad, I tell thee. Clooted him across his back, it did.’
‘What did?’ Ebony said.
‘Flaming timbers, m’lady. His back’s worse na his front, ye see.’
Instead, Ebony saw only the irony of Sir Joseph’s timing after the numerous occasions she had wished him to hell without the slightest hope that he would ever oblige.
‘But what I dinna ken either,’ Brother Walter grumbled as he carefully peeled away a charred sleeve off one arm, ‘is why that crood shoulda come here, of all places. I ken Scots raid their own side when it suits ’em, but na-body’ll traipse all the way up this glen unless there’s a ver’ guid reason. If they hoped to kill the maister while they were about it, then they must be wearisome glad the noo.’
‘I believe they may not be,’ Ebony said, rolling her sleeves up. ‘It’s information they’re after.’
There was the sound of muffled sobbing from the corner where Meg’s maid, Dame Janet, stirred a pot of lotion, hardly daring, even now, to come too close to the man who cared not for too many females in his household.
Meg stared at Ebony, seeing for the first time the streaks of tears that had left their mark upon her cheeks, the disordered hair, the swollen lips that had howled and pleaded and been ruthlessly kissed. ‘Ebbie! You’ve been weeping! Oh, my goodness…what happened? Did they harm you, pet?’ She took her sister-in-law’s hands in hers. ‘Tell me!’
‘No, nothing,’ Ebony said. ‘I was bothered about Sam, that’s all.’
‘And you found him? He’s safe? And Biddie?’
‘Quite safe, love.’ Her eyes held less than the truth, and Meg was quick to see it.
‘You mean, safe at the moment? What, Ebbie? You must tell me. D’ye mean they’re going to take him?’ She shook Ebony’s hands.
Tears welled up again as the words were forced out angrily. ‘Sam and me. I made them promise not to take him without me. I believe they’re planning to stay till tomorrow so they can get Sir Joseph to speak.’ She glanced again at the blistered skin and the blood-soaked rags, not daring to say what was in her heart. ‘But heaven knows where they’ll take us.’
‘Then you must take Sam away,’ Meg insisted. ‘Now. This minute.’
‘How can I do that? I cannot leave you like this, Meg, when you need me more than you’ve ever done. What d’ye think they’ll do to you when they find I’ve taken Sam off? They’ll kill you.’
‘They won’t!’ Meg shook the hands again, harder, her tone as decisive as ever. ‘Course they won’t. And I can cope on my own, anyway. If they were going to strip the place and fire it, and kill all the men, they’d have done it by now and gone. But you must get away, Ebbie, and take Sam to safety down the glen. You know what my father would say if he could hear.’
Neither of them was prepared for the shock of Sir Joseph’s touch upon Meg’s skirt, the fumbling clench of his fingers over the woollen fabric, the tug as her hand claimed his. ‘Father,’ she whispered. ‘What is it?’
The swollen cracked lips breathed a command. ‘Take…Sam!’
‘Yes, Father. Ebony will take him, I promise. Are you…?’ But the effort was too much for him to sustain and he relapsed into his dark agony-free world once more, leaving his daughter speechless with his pain. ‘He heard us. You heard him,’ she said at last. ‘Now you have to go. I promised him.’ There were tears on her lashes.
‘When it gets dark,’ said Ebony. ‘Then we’ll go. Now, Dame Janet, do we have any of that fern-root salve for these burns? What’s in that jar you have there?’
Dame Janet handed it to her. ‘Fern-root and butter, m’lady,’ she said, pulling the linen cover off. ‘It’s as good as anything, but we need more bandages.’ Her head shook, sadly.
‘I’ll go and find something,’ Meg said.
‘No,’ said Ebony. ‘I know where the oldest sheets are. You stay and plaster him with this.’ Stay where it’s safe, was what she meant.
It was a great pity, she thought as she closed the door, that Meg’s mother was not here to help. In 1317, the terrible year that followed Robbie’s murder, Sir Joseph’s wife went to heaven with a broken heart. And who was to blame her? Life with her boorish husband would be no picnic without her beloved son to take her part. Sir Robert Moffat had never approved of his father’s unlawful activities, but had been in no position to prevent them when almost every sheriff, governor, warden and assistant warden, keeper and laird was open to bribery, blackmail and treachery of every kind. The years since the battle at Bannockburn had been lean ones, floods, crop failure, famine and disease had been nationwide, and raiding had become an accepted way of staying fed. Robbie would never have abducted a child or bargained with a woman’s honour.
He and Ebony had been friends as well as husband and wife, with never a word of conflict between them, and only Biddie and Meg knew of the bitter tears she shed at night, longing for the courteous comfort of his arms. That morning at daybreak, she and Meg had gone down to bathe under the waterfall, Meg insisting that, on this of all days, they must look into a still pool to see the reflections of the men they would marry. None of the pools had been still enough and they had given up, laughing at their distorted faces. But Ebony had been glad not to see, for it might have shown her Davy Moffat’s face, Meg’s cousin.
Taking care to evade Sir Alex, Ebony took a longer route through the maze of passageways to reach the stable yard via a door in the kitchen-garden wall, which she and Meg used to take them along their path to the waterfall. She picked up a basketful of beets and cabbages left by the garden lad in his panic, passing the men and grooms who tended the beasts that seemed to have multiplied with alarming speed since the morning. Sam was with Biddie and the grandfatherly Joshua and, though he spared his mother time for a quick hug, he was not inclined to be diverted from learning how to pick his pony’s hooves clean and to brush his fetlocks.
Still distinctly on edge after her earlier conflict, Biddie was eager to comfort her mistress with the whispered information that Sam believed the reivers to be the king’s troops who had come to demand Sir Joseph’s men for another battle against the English. A muster, they called it, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. ‘Which is why they’re so fierce,’ she said, round-eyed with the well-rehearsed innocence she used to sweeten the truth.
‘King’s troops!’ Ebony scoffed. ‘And he believes it, of course.’ She took Biddie’s arm and led her away from Joshua’s sharp ears.
Biddie tipped her white-wimpled head towards the yard. ‘Course he does. They’ve just marched the men away who went raiding with Sir Joseph last night as well as those who didn’t. Sam watched them go. Well,’ she said, noting Ebony’s disdainful expression, ‘he’s better off believing that than the truth, isn’t he? We can do without the extra nightmares. And look at him now. No one’s ever bothered to show him how to do that before.’
They watched the man called Joshua, gnarled like an oak, brown-armed, white-haired as a prophet and as fit as any of the younger men, though he must have been the oldest. His face was a weathered parchment, his eyes a lively brown, his mouth ready to smile. Biddie’s attention was riveted equally upon the two pals as she monitored their new relationship.
Ebony turned her back on the two of them. ‘We’ve got to get him away from here,’ she said, keeping her voice low.
The large eyes swivelled in her direction at last. ‘Escape, you mean? Before they take Sam with them? Are they really going to do that?’
There was no question of telling either Biddie or Meg of the bargain. ‘Yes,’ Ebony said, looking away. ‘As soon as it gets dark, we have to take him down to the waterfall and into the boat. It was there this morning when Mistress Meg and I bathed.’
‘And what about Mistress Meg and Sir Joseph?’
‘They say we must take him. Both of them. If we go before dark, we chance being seen. If we delay, they may find the boat and take it away. It’s got to be tonight, Biddie. I have to go and help with Sir Joseph now, and you must go up, if they’ll let you, and gather together what Sam will need to keep warm, and some food. Hide it in the stair-passage so that we can collect it once we’re out of sight.’
Loyal to the roots of her hair, Biddie would never have questioned her mistress’s motives and, if she secretly wondered when Ebony had last shown a streak of indifference to Mistress Meg’s needs, she was hard-pressed to remember. After all, Sam’s safety came first, and time was not on the side of heroism. ‘If they take Sam,’ she said stoutly, ‘they’ll have to take me too. But I could go on my own, you know, and get help from further down the glen. They could be here by daybreak tomorrow.’
‘You can’t go in daylight, Biddie. You’d not stand a chance.’
Biddie pulled her wimple down, leaving it in white folds around her neck as a nest for her brown curls. ‘Not even if I take this off?’
‘No, love,’ Ebony smiled. ‘We cannot spare you.’
Bandaged around the laird’s wounds, the strips of torn linen sheeting did little for him except to make him more decent. As the task continued, Ebony’s conviction that she could not leave Meg one moment before she must increased with each passing hour. Meg had lost her mother and brother in the space of one year. Her father was strong but, even if he survived, would likely be disabled and she would be left behind at the castle with only a skeleton staff of household servants and no defence. Even her father’s retainers had been marched away, and though he and Meg had insisted and Meg had promised, Ebony knew that her premature departure would be heartless. She went about her business, saying nothing of her doubts, and Meg fell silent with foreboding.
