Sophia James - Knight of Grace

Heat rushed into his loins and he felt an odd unbalance as the forest and his men melted away into nothingness. Lord, what was happening? Had she placed some tonic in the wine at Grantley, some potion to mask his reasoning and raise his lust? His mistress was full-blooded and well endowed, the wares on show offered without condition, but he had not felt this…excitement with her.

Not once.

Grace Stanton with her fire-red hair and welt-roughened skin should have run a poor second to Rebecca’s charms and yet…dressed in a high-necked gown with little showing save the top of her hands and the curve of her throat she was…sensual. The thought amazed him.

How?

How did she do that?

How did a woman with so little in the way of obvious endowments manage to be alluring? Had his brother felt it too?

He refused to follow further down that particular track, though he was niggled by the question of whether the Kerrs were to be for ever cursed by the words of Alec Dalbeth.

‘ Your keep shall be a ruin and any love that you foster will be as dust in the darkening days of your clan .’

It had been years since his father had banished the priest from their lands, one arm around the mistress that had caused the chasm and the other on a bottle. Clutching. Tight. But the words shouted back into the space between the departing horses and the front portal of Belridden had stuck. Darkness had come in the form of strong drink, and his father, on seeing the sins of his ways too late, had taken the easy path out.

It was Malcolm and he who had found him dangling from the middle beam of the chapel roof, a half-finished tankard smashed beneath his feet, as if he had taken one last sip to see him through the gates of Hell.

He cursed, hating the weakness of a man whom he had once admired, when a noise to one side of the stream slowed his movements. Bending down, he scoured the far-off bank. A group of men were creeping through the undergrowth, metal glinting from the first rays of the sun. The Elliots or the Johnstones, neighbouring clans whom the Kerrs had no reason to trust. From this distance he could not quite make out the muted colours worn.

Three minutes, he guessed, till they rounded the slower part of the river and crossed. Unsheathing his claymore, he backtracked with care. Twenty against forty. The odds were good if it came to a head and he’d be hard pressed to find a better group of soldiers around him.

Would that be enough? He refused to think about it not being so even as he began to run, a branch swiping hard against his face and another slashing his shins.

Grace was standing against the bough of a tree to one side of the camp as he fled through the last saplings and she turned towards him as the others did, eyes bright with fear. He knew she was trying to say something, but could not quite get the words out. Dragging her against him, he placed her in the middle of the circle his men were forming.

‘Shield your head and shut your eyes,’ he shouted at her as he took his own place between Con and Ian, the outlines of the other group now visible between the thinning forest. More than forty. Lach’s grip tightened on his sword and he made himself breathe.

Grace watched Lachlan Kerr’s back and saw the way he brought in breath. Once, twice, three times and then stillness, the echo of a malevolent danger harnessed with a steely control.

Magnificent . The thought burst from nowhere as he raised his sword, the strength of his knotted muscles rippling free. Waiting. Wanting. A man tempered in war and killing and fear. She could see the lines where blades had cut against the solid muscle of his forearm when the fabric in his shirt fell back, white against the brownness of his skin, tense, honed. All the forest still as the party from across the river gained the clearing.

‘Who goes there?’ Her husband’s words held no inflection of fear. She felt calmed by his very equanimity.

A big man facing them stepped forwards. ‘Alistair Elliot. And I dinna remember giving ye invite to cross my lands, Kerr.’

‘You had no word from David?’

‘The King?’ Uncertainty shallowed out the other’s voice and the glances of the men behind sharpened.

‘I have it on David’s authority to collect my wife from her home in England.’

Grace knew in the hollow lack of humour the truth that such an admission must have cost him.

A wife who looked like her and English, and a battle that could easily cost the lives of some of his soldiers.

The man opposite shook his head, catching sight of her at the exact same moment that he did so, arrant disbelief in his eyes. The tensing of the muscles in Lachlan Kerr’s jaw was worrying as all around her the men closed ranks, drawing in on the spaces between them, a solid wall of protection for a woman that they could feel no allegiance to, no favour for. The thought stunned her. They would fight and die to keep her safe just because Kerr willed it.

‘Your wife looks as though she may be ailing. Are ye sure it’s the right woman ye have picked?’ The offence was measured and Grace tensed, the heavy mantle of insolence falling between them, a breathing living thing that smote good sense and reason.

Lachlan gestured his men back and the space in the clearing widened. ‘Ye’d be willing to sacrifice your men for the slur you have just offered or are you man enough to stand and fight me alone?’ His glance was pale-blue-cold and for the first time the other man stepped back, hand running to the sword at his side, testing the grip. Waiting.

Time quivered and the whispers of those who began to question snaked over silence.

‘I’d give my word that if you were to fight me and win, every blade we harbour would be yours to keep.’ Lachlan Kerr’s voice held the bland edge of indifference, as if his death was but a trifling consideration and the cache of armoury a greater prize.

‘And I could take your word on it?’

‘My word, or your men’s lives, it worries me not. Or are ye afraid?’

When the newcomer pulled up his sword and slashed suddenly, shiny slick steel missed Lachlan Kerr’s throat by a matter of mere inches and Grace had to rise on tiptoes to see over the shoulder of the man in front, her heart beating so hard that she was certain that the sound of it must be heard.

If Lachlan Kerr was killed, what then?

Would she be taken back to Grantley or would someone else here claim her? She doubted the men from Belridden would want to let go of her money so easily and doubted too the fineness of their morals. Lord, the man who even now circled his adversary, waiting for a chance to strike, was becoming her protector, even given his lack of caring.

The hollow sound of steel against steel rang so loud that she found herself placing her hands across her ears just to dim the noise. Not pretty. Not easy. No dainty practised fight this one, but the raw lunges of two men who would kill each other should the chance present itself. And it nearly did as Lachlan parried, his feet hitting the roots of an elm behind and tipping him off balance, the wicked sharpness of his opponent’s blade making him pay for the mistake in a deep slash down his left arm. The soldiers near her mumbled, and Lachlan bade them back.

‘Nay. Be still. It’s a scratch and my word has been given.’

He did not look at her as he said it, did not in any way include her in the moment. Grace tried to catch his glance to show him that she was at least grateful for his protection, but he allowed her nothing. His very indifference to his fate angered her, made the whole basis of this marriage even bleaker. She wondered how much longer she would have a husband, so careless was he of his life?

With the settling of the fight a different rhythm seemed to come, a closer, finer combat, thrust and counter-thrust, the sweat building on both men’s brows belying the chill in this part of Scotland in early August. Lachlan Kerr moved with a grace seldom seen in a big man, his every movement carefully honed and delivered, nothing left to chance as he came in again and again against his opponent’s weakening thrusts. And then the other man was down on the ground, a sharp swordpoint pinning him motionless and pressing deep. Horror overcame disbelief. Her husband would kill a defenceless man and risk the wrath of God and the eternal promise of an afterlife?

‘No!’ The desperate shout distracted everyone and all eyes came upon her. Without conscious thought she drew herself up to her tallest form and made herself speak. ‘H-H-He h-h-holds no weapon and if you sh-sh-sh-should kill him, God w-w-will punish y-y-your soul.’

Silence met the statement and then the budding of anger. From everyone.

‘Is she a gomeral or just plain saft in the heid?’

The dark-haired man spoke from his position on the ground, the words strangling with such caustic incredulity that pure wrath replaced Grace’s softer anger and she made no effort to harness it. ‘You m-m-might c-c-c-consider the message of m-m-my words r-r-rather than the s-s-stutter in them, sir.’

‘ A Dhia, thoir cobhair , she insults me again?’

Lachlan unexpectedly began to smile as he released the throat of his foe, allowing the man to roll over.

‘Get up, Elliott, and be thankful that my wife has not yet worked out the ways of the Scots. She thinks her truth does you a service.’

A quivering waiting filled the air around them, sifting out options as to a way forwards.

‘Then if I hear you have smothered her in the night, Kerr, I will know the reason why.’

He laughed and anger dissipated, and as the group from the river collected their armour and withdrew, Grace was finally allowed from the prison of her tight band of men.

‘They d-d-did not l-l-leave their w-weapons and you w-w-won.’

‘Ye think that? Ye think that I won?’

For a second Grace imagined Lachlan Kerr would raise his hand against her, so forcibly did she feel the fire of his fury.

‘Next time when you think to order me, wife, know that you will be punished. Severely.’

He swiped at the wound on his arm as he pushed past her, the fresh red flow of blood marking the trail of his passage into the trees.

Horrified, she glanced at the ground, not wanting to meet any other censure. Connor was the first to speak.

‘You can ride home with me.’ When he turned away before she could argue, she felt tears prick behind her tired eyes. No one fostered manners here. No one held to the polite tones of normal deportment. She had saved a life and a soul and these men were too arrogant to realise the help she had given them. With her head held high, she leaned against the bough of an oak and contemplated just how far in walking distance it was to the Kerr’s keep of Belridden.

Lachlan could barely stop the roiling anger from bubbling over into a shout of wrath. His wife had shamed him and he knew with a certainty that the news would be travelling around the Marches like wildfire come the evening. The Laird of Kerr brought to task by the plain Englishwoman he had been forced to marry.

Damn it. He had told her to shut her eyes and hide her head and instead…instead she had spoken with her quavery voice, stuttering a truth in the way that only she could have imagined it. His hands tightened around his aching arm and he looked down at the injury, the sides of skin peeling away and leaving the wound wide open.

He should have killed Elliot, for if this cut should fester then he himself would be the man marked for the hereafter.

A wavering sadness counteracted fury. His first wife had been a harlot and this one was a blabbering loudmouth. Dalbeth’s curse weighed on his shoulders, and the banal and aimless void of living stretched long and lonely into a future he could no longer imagine or care about.