Sophia James - Knight of Grace

When it was finished and her husband handed her a large goblet of wine, she drank it without taking breath and then helped herself to another, her more normal sense of optimism submerged under the heavy weight of duty.

Judith held her hand, hard clasped and shaking.

‘If he is anything like his brother, Grace…’

She did not let her finish. ‘He w-won’t be.’

‘You can tell?’

‘I can hope.’

‘We could be at Belridden in two days to get you if you needed to come home.’

‘I am married n-now, Judith. Under what law should I be able to leave my h-husband?’

They looked at each other in silence, the enormity of everything a dark shadow of truth in both their eyes.

‘This should not have been your cross to bear. It should have been mine. I am Ginny’s sister, after all; if anyone had to pay the price for Malcolm Kerr’s death, it should have been me.’

Grace looked at her new husband, their eyes meeting across the crowded room. He was as beautiful as she was plain, the pale blueness of his eyes catching her anew with the contrast of colour against his darkness of hair.

David’s knight. A man who had ruled the fields of battle from France to Scotland for a decade. She had heard the tales from various bards when they had come to Grantley with their songs and their stories. Sword, scabbard, mail and shield: Lachlan Kerr’s weapons of choice as he rode beneath the gold-and-red standard of the lion of Scotland, its border pierced by ten fleurs-de-lis.

And now her husband.

She turned his ring around the third finger on her left hand and the warmth of the metal made her smile.

A sign. Of hope? She wondered about her marriage night, about being close to such a man.

‘If you l-love me, Judith, you will promise to st-stay silent about everything, because if you do not then all of this will have been in vain.’

Judith did not look happy at all. ‘Perhaps if you told him about what he tried to do to Ginny…’

‘And ruin her r-reputation for ever?’

‘This is for ever too, Grace.’

‘I know, but I am twenty-six and Ginny is b-barely sixteen.’

‘She has not spoken since…’ Judith stopped and regrouped. ‘Perhaps she never will.’

‘T-ten months is only a l-little time. With c-care…’

A single tear traced its way down Judith’s cheek. ‘You were always the best and the bravest of us, Grace, and if Lachlan Kerr ever hurts you even a little…’

‘He won’t.’

‘You are certain?’

The pale stare of her husband caught her across the head of her cousin, beckoning her, arrogance written in every line of his face.

Grace tipped up the goblet she held and finished the draught within. This charade was for a reason and their marriage was final. There could be no going back on such a promise even had she wanted to.

‘I am c-certain,’ she returned before limping over to join him.

He barely acknowledged her as she came to stand beside him, his shoulders a good foot above her own even when she straightened. He spoke to his men of his hopes for Scotland and of his want to be again in the land of his birth before another moon waned.

So soon? He would not stay here at Grantley for one night? The shock of such an imminent departure made her breathing uneven and she felt his gaze full upon her.

‘Belridden has favours that Grantley lacks. The mountains around it, for example, are lauded for their bounty when hunting.’

Grace tried to smile, tried to understand that it was a reassurance he gave her. Bounty in hunting? All she could see in her mind’s eye was a far-off, lonely place with trails and tracks used for forage and pursuit.

The easy luxury of Grantley closed in. ‘I have n-no knowledge of h-hunting, Laird K-Kerr,’ she returned and the red-haired man next to him laughed.

Lachlan Kerr did not, however, his eyes bruised with the growing realisation of the enormous gulf that lay between them as he wiped his mouth free of wine on his sleeve before turning.

‘It is time to go.’

Even his men on the other side of the room heard his words, standing almost as one, and the colourful gowns of her cousins seemed caught in a time frame, like an etching, England swallowed up by the muted earthy tones of plaid. Judith’s wail came first as she pushed forwards, her arms encircling Grace, tears running freely down her cheeks.

‘I cannot bear to think of life without you, Grace,’ she cried, ‘the stories you tell us will be so sorely missed.’

Grace noticed the look of interest that flinted across Lachlan Kerr’s face.

‘Stories?’

‘Grace has the most wonderful imagination. She tells us tales at night.’ Bright red coated Judith’s cheeks as she registered the Laird’s attention.

‘I am c-certain that I sh-shall b-be back often.’ Her own reassurance vacillated as incredulity appeared on the face of every Scotsman. The sheer volume of wine she had consumed began to take effect, for she rarely drank very much. The room tilted and the noise in it dimmed as she felt her hand on Judith’s arm without any sense of it really being there. The goodbyes to her other cousins and to her uncle were just as unreal, the farewells far away through the haze of unreality and less difficult than they would have been were she sober.

A kiss and a hug, food pressed into her hands and her cape draped around her and then the party was outside and she was up, on a horse in front of her new husband. A hastily packed chest on a steed behind. Quick steps to another life, the angst of it all banished by too many glasses of fine Rhenish wine.

She wiped her eyes and struggled for control, for normality, but already the whirling tiredness was upon her. Leaning back against the solid warmth was comforting and she did not push away the arm that anchored her firmly into place.

The landscape swam out of focus, soft, troubled. Almost known.

‘Keep still.’ The voice was angry-close and as her eyes flew open wide the world again began to settle.

They were in the foothills of the Three Stone Burn, miles from Grantley.

And heading north.

Away from home. Away from her cousins and her uncle and the people she had known all her life.

She wriggled forwards, her muscles tight from the effort of countering the pressure from the easy canter of his horse.

His horse!

She was on his horse. Hot panic and cold fear.

‘Get me off…let me down… I want to get down…’ When she flung herself away the ground came up, fast, and hit her hard against the shoulder, winding her.

She had not been on a horse since… She shook her head and tried not to remember. Since the moment in the forest outside York when her parents had been ambushed and killed!

Consciousness was lost under pressure. Ripping. Screams rent from the very depth of fear. And silence.

‘What the hell is wrong with ye now?’ A deep voice shattered memory, blue eyes narrowing against the last slant of sun as he caught her wrist and pulled her up from the ground. Close.

She slapped him as he relaxed his grip, all the pent-up months of worry behind the movement. And when the edge of Malcolm Kerr’s ring caught at his skin, red spilt down the hard line of his cheek.

He released her immediately and stepped away, the muscles along his jaw rippling as he lifted his hand to the wound.

‘Mother of Mary, are ye a crazy woman? Has David joined me to a cackle-head?’

She made herself be still, placing her fingers across the beating terror in her heart and waited for retribution.

None came.

No true sharp blade into the soft folds of her throat, no well-aimed kick or clenched fist. Nothing except for a silence that was stark against the shrill, quick call of a forest bird nesting for the night.

His men melted back, leaving them alone. Grace could just make out their forms through the leaves of the trees thick in the glade.

‘Do ye have a death wish?’

‘No.’ She whispered the word. Mouthed it. No time to even think of stammering, for the light in his eyes held her transfixed. No empty threat here. No quiet warning.

‘Give me your right hand.’

She hid it behind her back, away from him. What did he want her hand for? To cut it off at the wrist? To break her fingers one by one by one? To slash his initial into the lines of her palm?

‘Give me your hand, Grace.’

She hated the way her chin began to wobble, hated the tears that welled in her eyes and the aching fear in her throat. Hated the way too that her arm came forwards. Towards him.

He took her middle finger, gently, and removed the ring. She felt the roughened skin of his palm and saw the marks of scars under a cloth he wore around his wrist before he let her go.

No, not scars. A brand. A circle dissected by two lines. Indigo. Complex.

‘This ring is a family heirloom. My grandmother holds the other half of a matching pair and I am certain that she would wish it back.’ For a second he held it before depositing it in his sporran. Gone from her.

Memory!

She began to shake, badly, her teeth chattering together even as she tried to stop them, and, without meaning to, she closed her fingers over the place where the ring had been and buried her hand in the copious folds of her gown.

Relief and the release of a duty and a lie! She thanked him silently for the taking of it.

Lachlan caught his breath and cursed this ridiculous farce that the King had burdened him with. More than twenty years of selfless service repaid by the fetter of marriage to a woman who was scared of her own shadow. If it wasn’t so permanent, he might have laughed. Indeed, he had seen the puzzled faces of his men as they tried to fathom out the character of his new wife, and failed. The whispered asides told him that they appreciated her about as little as did the echoes of laughter.

She had hit him!

His frightened mouse of a wife had hit him. Hard. And in the shadowed depths of her amber eyes he had recognised what he so often saw in his own.

Secrets.

Taking a breath, he tried to lighten his voice.

‘We still have a few hours of travelling yet as I mean to cross the border north of Carlisle.’

‘We c-c-c-cannot m-m-make y-y-your k-k-k-keep?’ Lord, her stammer was worsening by the moment. He wondered if she would be able to string even two words together by the time they had reached his castle.

‘Nay, it will be safer to camp in the Borders.’

Stressing the word ‘safer’, he saw the calculations of a walked distance clouding her focus.

‘Lord, help me,’ he muttered and wished that he was at home in the arms of his mistress.

But he wasn’t. He was stuck with a woman who stuttered and shook and lied, and was scared of horses.

Lady Grace Stanton. Nay, he amended as he mounted and pulled her up in front of him, Lady Grace Kerr, now.

His wife.

He made mental calculations as to how many hours he would ever truly be required to spend in her company and was heartened to determine that it would be very few. Perhaps he was more like his father than he had thought, and the realisation made him uneasy.

Freezing. She was freezing. Even with a cloak and blanket and three shawls laid across her she could not stop the shaking that had woken her up a good hour ago. And now she needed to relieve herself. Desperately.

It was dark. Black. The forest trees stretched towards an inky sky, and the moon, that had been high when they had finally reached this place, had fallen, a small and weak slice of crescent on the horizon, surrounded by mist.

Ten feet away Lachlan Kerr lay on the dirt without a scrap of blanket or pillow, the dim light from the fire showing the beaded drops of dew threaded through his night-black hair. Even asleep he held his dirk across his thigh, fingers curled around the shaft in habit.