Sophia James - Knight of Grace

Standing, she began to move across to him, meaning to shake him awake, but his eyes were open at the first whisper of sound and he was up on his haunches in a quick and easy grace.

‘I need to relieve myself.’

He did not budge, question easily seen on his brow.

‘It’s v-very dark,’ she continued and looked towards the trees on the edge of the clearing.

Amazement began to etch out a heavy line on his brow. ‘Ye want me to take you?’

‘Not to w-w-watch, y-y-you understand. Just to k-k-keep watch.’ Damn. Her stutter was back badly and she pressed at the soft skin at the base of her neck to try to ease the tightness.

‘Keep watch against what?’ His laughter was hard.

The ghosts of the dead and the souls of the nearly living, pressed close against the thin veneer of time .

‘I am n-n-not sure.’ Uncertainty leached the movement from her limbs. Should she chance it? Could she walk into the dark, dark forest under a nothing moon and be safe?

Ginny’s screams and then silence. Stephen’s whispers to make it right. Below them a deep chasm and above them a blue, blue sky .

‘Grace?’ Lachlan Kerr’s voice was close and she saw that he had moved up beside her, no longer laughing.

‘Come. I’ll take ye.’ His fingers were warm against her skin, even through the cloth at her elbow, and she was pleased for the support as they walked across the uneven ground towards the river.

When they reached a glade that offered a little privacy, he stopped and disengaged her arm. ‘I will wait here.’

‘You promise. You w-w-won’t go back? You w-w-won’t leave me here…?’

She hoped that he could not see the mounting flush on her skin.

‘If we dinna come back soon, my men will investigate.’ This time something akin to amusement laced his words.

Lord. And she had lost time already with her chatter. Stepping away from him, she crept behind a tree, keeping the shape of the Laird in her vision. When she was finished, she rejoined him and looked up into the sky.

‘Do you e-e-ever wonder if there is anything out th-th-there? Any other place like this one, I mean?’

‘No.’

His reply was short, but it did not deter her.

‘My father once t-told me of the ideas of Aristarchus of Samos. He wrote that the Earth r-revolved around the Sun.’

‘And you believed it?’

‘I do, though I can hear in your t-tone you do not.’

‘The holy scriptures would say that the Earth is the centre of everything.’ He frowned as he looked up. ‘A useful ploy to further their own cause, I should imagine.’

‘Their cause? You sp-speak like a disbeliever?’

‘Once I was not,’ he returned obliquely. ‘Your stammer seems remarkably lessened tonight.’

‘Oh, it only is b-b-bad when I th-th-think about it.’

She tripped on the root of a tree and his hand shot out to balance her body against his.

And for a moment, with the heavens around them and the silence of the very early morning, Grace felt a sense of safety that she had not felt in a long, long time.

Her wedding night. It was not as dreadful as she might have otherwise expected. A husband who had accompanied her into the trees and stayed when she had asked him to. A man who had listened to her explanation of the stars above them with at least a pretended interest and whose arm had steadied her against falling. She tried to still the shivering that had overtaken her and was glad when they reached the clearing.

‘We will be breaking camp in about two hours and as it is a long ride home I would advise ye to get some sleep.’

‘If w-we were to w-walk, how long would it take?’

Laughter was his only response as he settled himself down, fire highlighting his face.

‘Go to sleep, Grace,’ he muttered and closed his eyes.

She liked the way he said her name, his accent giving the plain shortness of it a hint of the exotic. Snuggling into her blankets, she felt for her wedding ring. It was an emerald set in yellow gold and engraved on the inside with his initials. L.K. She had seen it in the earlier light.

From this small distance his profile was distinct. The most handsome Laird in all of Scotland. She had heard that said of him each time some soul had uttered his name, which was ironic given her own lack of any charm, though she supposed that a sizeable dowry had its way of talking. Her fingers pressed the numbed welts on her thighs and she felt the hollow ache of all that she was.

Ugly. Beneath her clothes as well. She accepted the summation of her appearance now without question, and made it her habit to seldom look into any mirror. Biting down on tears, she hated the aching lump in her throat. She was tired of wishing herself otherwise, tired of the groundless hope of some miraculous cure for the dry skin she was afflicted with, and the stutter. Taking a deep breath, she willed composure and shut her eyes.

She sat on the royal dais, watching her husband in a joust, her scarf upon his sleeve as he declared himself her champion, her knight, before thundering towards his opponent. And when it was finished and he had easily won, he knelt before her in an act of homage, the ritual of courtly love causing the faces of the other ladies about them to wish it was their favour he donned, their love that he sought …

In her sleep she smiled.

Lachlan listened as she rearranged her blankets, amazed at the fact that she should need so many layers against a night he felt was almost…warm.

One foot was visible from where he sat, its smallness swamped by a thick woollen stocking. Grace Stanton was nothing like the tales he had heard of her at court. She was unusual, to be sure, but there was something about her that intrigued him. Her imagination, he decided after further thought, as he remembered the softness of her skin when he had steadied her arm to make certain that she did not fall.

She wanted to walk to Belridden and she believed that the stars circled the sun according to an ancient Greek astronomer. He thought of the manuscripts explaining the heavens his father had brought home from Anjou and wondered where they were now. Sold like the rest of the Kerr treasures, he suspected, a further sop to an escalating gambling habit.

Lachlan had barely thought of his father for years and yet here in the space of a day he had thought about him twice. Good times. Before the drink had made Hugh crazy and soft regret had spiralled into sheer and brutal hatred.

Nothing lasted for ever. Not laughter. Not happiness. And certainly not love. The only thing you could count on was the land, and the Kerr land was in sore need of the attention that the Stanton gold would give it.

That was all he expected. Anything else would lead to the disappointment that he was far more familiar with.

He laid his head down against the dirt.

Ever since his return to Scotland it had been a struggle. Government had almost ceased to exist under Robert the High Steward and it had been hard to reassert the authority of his king against the vested interests of landowners made powerful from the long years without covenant. Lord, if David did not step up to rule them, they would rule him, and the murder of the royal mistress was testimony to that.

Lachlan pulled his hair free and shook the length in the night air. Under the Bruce all this might have been so much easier, and for the thousandth time he wished that Robert Keith, the trainer of arms in Normandy, had insisted on a more rigorous tutorship for David.

Everything was uncertain and dangerous with the rebellion of powerful men afoot and yet here he was, dragging a wife home to a land he barely knew. A wife who now lay on her side with her hands clasped beneath her face and the wild redness of her hair a long curtain on the ground beside her.

She was not as plain as he had been told. He wished suddenly that she might open those eyes that were so direct and begin to talk again to him. It had, after all, been a long time since a woman in his company had not reverted to the wiles of flirtation and coquetry, and the change was refreshing. The red stocking she wore on her right foot had also come astray with her disturbed slumber and her ankles were more than shapely.

Lord, he thought to himself, and he turned over to find sleep, trying not to listen to the soft and muffled breathing of his unusual new wife.

Chapter Three

Connor crouched down beside him in the morning before the dawn had properly settled, smouldering anger on his face.

‘Your wife had this with her.’ He dropped a small jewelled box on the dirt beside him; Lachlan knew the casing immediately.

‘How did you find it?’

‘It fell out of a layer of clothes as we transferred the contents from her chest into our saddlebags. Ian’s horse was suffering under the weight of the thing, you see, and we thought to distribute it around.’

‘Does she know ye took it?’

‘She dinna see if that’s what you are asking.’

Lachlan nodded and jammed the thing in his sporran, making certain it was hidden.

Malcolm had been given the heirloom on his thirteenth birthday by their grandfather, and when the precious stones on the lid had winked against the new light of morning, the bare memory of his brother caught Lachlan anew with the way it had all ended.

‘Who else knows?’ He took a quick glance at the form of his still-sleeping wife.

‘Ian saw it. And James. Do ye think Malcolm gave it to her?’

‘Knowing the worth of the thing, I doubt it, but say nothing to anyone else, and seek the silence of Ian and James.’ His words trailed off, something disturbing him in the presence of a treasure Malcolm had held such fondness for.

‘You would protect her?’

‘For now.’

‘If Eleanor finds out she had it…’

‘She won’t.’

‘Your grandmama is a wily woman, Lach, and she has always believed that your brother was murdered. Perhaps it was your wife who killed him?’

Lach shook his head. ‘If Grace Stanton killed Malcolm, it will be me who deals with her. Understand?’

But Connor was not finished. ‘Our king could not expect you to stay married to a murderer.’

‘The king wants these lands strong and with her dowry the lives of all those at Belridden will be safer.’

‘And you? What of your life? What of the nights you lie asleep in your marriage bed with the full bare skin of your throat exposed?’

‘You think she will be there beside me?’

Smothering fury, he looked over at Grace clambering from her pile of blankets. The dress she wore was stained and creased and yet as she stretched into wakefulness the sun behind caught her hair, long and fire red, molten silk unfurling down her back to reach along the rounded lines of her hips. She tempted him and left him feeling unreasonably irritated.

‘Tell the Lady of Kerr that we will be breaking camp in half an hour. Find her someone to ride with.’

‘You won’t be taking her with you?’

‘I won’t.’

‘She can ride with me, then.’

‘Very well.’ Lachlan tossed his plaid over his shoulder and completely ignored his wife’s worried frown.

Turning to the forest, he walked just outside the lines of saplings towards the river, taking a moment to contemplate all that had happened in the last few days.

His life had been turned upside down, yet some things stayed exactly the same, and the betrayal that had dogged his years from boyhood was as repellent in this wife as it had been in the last one.

A gap in the trees allowed him another glimpse of the new Lady of Kerr as she tried to wipe the marks of dust from her costly gown, the fine wool of her skirt drawn tight across the generous outline of her bottom.