Sophia James - Knight of Grace

He drew in breath and listened to the birds in the trees. Life. His life. This one and only life. He was no longer a religious man, though he hid his lack of belief well, stacked against the certainty of the Kerrs’ bad luck and the vagaries of a more primitive faith. He had lived by the sword for so long now he could barely remember what it had been like before.

Once he had been young, hopeful, running through the forests to the north with his brother, and seeing in the shape of leaves or the colour of the first flowers of spring, a God-given beauty, a plan, a way of living that did not incorporate so much death and loss and despair.

‘ If you kill him, God will punish you .’ Grace’s words, give or take the stutter. She was a woman who still believed in the power of a soul and in the very darkness that his should be cast into. He grimaced. She knew nothing of his life and could not understand that it was well past time to worry about his particular salvation or to chart the celestial journey of any humanity that still lingered inside him.

His life! He remembered his fingers around the neck of those who would support David’s enemies when the talking had come to nothing and the splintered and isolated monarchy was again threatened. God, he wiped the hair from his eyes and said a prayer, not believing in the message but comforted by the habit of it.

Nay, the bleating goodness of a woman of principle was not for the likes of him, buried as he was in the netherworld of survival.

David had no notion of what he destroyed under the auspices of politics. Her life for one: Grace Stanton-Kerr and her bloody stuttered truths. Running his fingers through the length of his hair, he wondered again about the validity of what was whispered by royal enemies who would sacrifice the monarchy. Yet the alternative bore down on him like a heavy harbinger of doom. No king? The mantle of tradition was preferable to the absence of it.

Anarchy!

He had seen it in the eyes of the powerful magnates and the sons of Balliol, and heard it in the words of Edward of England’s detractors and Philip the Sixth’s enemies.

Change for the better? This was a risky hope pinned on rebellion and paid for in the blood of men. Countrymen!

Finding at last what he sought he stripped the sphagnum moss and mulched it between his fingers, spitting on the pink mass to form a paste before smearing it across his wound. The astringent flared and he swore softly, but held the potion in place until the pain ceased altogether. His mother had taught him about the medicines found in the forest.

His mother!

When she had died in childbirth, the light had gone out of Belridden, and had been out ever since.

As he pulled down the sleeve of his jacket, the angry sound of his new spouse’s voice broke across his thoughts.

‘I w-w-w-will not get up on that h-h-horse.’

Con’s reply was surprisingly patient.

‘It is a long way to the keep, my Lady, and it is in my mind that your brogans are hardly up to the task.’

‘B-brogans?’

‘Shoes, my Lady.’

‘F-f-fetch me my h-h-husband.’

Even at this distance Lachlan could hear the aristocratic edge to her command and knew too that Con would be no match at all for her. With resolve he strode forwards, breaking from the shelter of the forest to find a ring of men regarding his wife.

‘She will ride. With me.’

The fight he could see in her eyes came quickly to the surface and Connor moved back, relieved of his need to argue further.

‘I c-c-cannot.’

In answer he simply strode forwards and threw her across his shoulders, her shapely backside brushing the side of his cheek. Her fingers scratched at his back and he was pleased for the thick covering of his plaid and highland shirt. ‘Put me down you…you…blackguard,’ she finally said, the semi-curse a long way from the language that he was much more used to. ‘Put me down this very moment or I shall…’

‘What?’ he countered as he dumped her on his horse, keeping her balanced there with a sheer dint of will as he swung up behind her. His arm hurt like hell from the tussle. ‘What exactly will you do?’

She was silent and he refrained from mentioning how much better her stutter was, though with his thighs pressing on hers and her back warm against his stomach Lachlan was more than aware of his damnably traitorous body rising to attention with each passing second. The scent of her filled his nostrils, the scent of woman and heat, long strands of her hair burnishing his skin with fire-flame red.

Her heart drummed at thrice the pace of his, racing in the slender curve of her throat and as her fingers tightened over his legs she began to shake.

‘Zeus is a fine mount. He obeys my commands unquestionably. You have nothing to fear.’

Sitting on his horse in the clearing with his men busying themselves for departure, Lachlan could feel in the silence every ear upon them.

She did not answer, but he felt her feet fold up as if she would be completely free of any stirrup that hung there and heard the quietly whispered prayers. Over and over again.

Shifting in his seat, he tried to summon back anger, but the zealous ardency of her invocations amused him and her skin, exposed at the nape of her neck, made him catch his breath.

Nothing about this woman added up and her shivers of fright made him wonder. Had she been unnerved somehow by a horse? There was so much about her that he did not know. When she had lifted her skirts yesterday no mark of an accident had been visible, and yet she limped!

Lord! Putting all thought aside, he concentrated on the narrowing path in front of them, loose rocks falling into the nothingness of the gully below as the mounts picked their way through.

‘Y-your horse is v-v-very obedient.’ The whisper was soft.

‘Unlike my wife,’ he returned, regretting it when she stiffened and did not speak again.

They stopped by a river three hours from home to rest the horses. When he slipped from the saddle, he was surprised that she made no effort to follow him, given her preference for walking, although the reason for her reticence was obvious a moment later.

She could barely stand when he helped her down. Placing her hand around his, she clung on, the leg with the limp buckling under the weight of her body.

Turning a brighter shade of red than even her hair, Lachlan was aware of the effort the ride must have cost as she tried to stand unaided, the shaking sending her teeth to chattering.

‘H-how far n-now?’

‘Belridden lies about an hour from here.’ He found himself minimising the distance even though he meant not to. Damn it. Everything about her irritated him and yet here he was halving the journey home in an effort to lessen the worry in her eyes and the weary cadence he could hear in her voice.

He watched her nod and watched too as she hobbled a little way from him, awkwardly placing her weight as she went.

If she fell… He made himself stop and turn away.

God, Grace Stanton had been with them for all of thirty hours, in which she had shamed him in front of an enemy and split his cheek open with his dead brother’s ring. She had a stutter that hurt his ears to listen to, and a fear of life that boded badly for the wilder climes of his own estate, and that was without taking into account her damaged leg and a skin condition that looked at best more than a little itchy.

Yet despite everything Lachlan found himself smiling, for there was something about her that was…brave. A woman who was her own person. A lady of means who believed in the power of God and stood up for his soul with the crystal-clear goodness of one who had never been confronted with the bad.

Pureness was a potent power in the face of suspicion and doubt, he suddenly decided, and a quality that Belridden had long been bereft of.

He imagined taking her to his bed, undressing her, feeling the tightness of her sex around him. He could take her tonight when they arrived at Belridden.

The throb in his loins settled hard against his shirt and he adjusted the fullness as he walked. Would she be virgin or would his brother have known her intimately? He hoped not. He had never had a virgin before, preferring the ease of well-experienced women. Yet he saw suddenly the appeal of such an encounter. Everything to her would be new. And in the unknown he sensed an aphrodisiac that he had not before pondered upon.

Connor interrupted his thoughts as he walked. The sound of his wife’s prayers droned on through the air.

‘Lady Grace is very devout…’

‘She’ll need to be to survive Belridden.’

Irritation rose to a newer level at the continued and fervent incantations and when Grace Stanton finally came up behind him he did not even try to hide his displeasure.

‘I came to a-a-apologise,’ she stated quietly. ‘A-a-and to say that I was j-j-just trying to h-help you.’

‘Help me?’ Her small smile of agreement incensed him further. ‘Help me?’ he added again as he watched her nod, incredulity replacing wrath. Did she have no idea at all as to the consequences of her behaviour? Another darker thought skimmed across the first one. Was she bating him?

His arm throbbed. His keep was still far off and beside him stood a woman who had neither the intellect nor the inclination to understand his anger. When his fingers shot out to lace around her wrist, he could not find it in him to lessen the bleakness of his tone.

‘You are my wife by the edict of David, King of the Scots. Do nothing more to annoy me. Do you understand that?’

He felt certain that the fright in her eyes would allow her to think about the precariousness of her situation and to mould her behaviour into an appropriate response.

‘No, I do not q-q-quite.’

Amazement at her effrontery left him speechless.

‘It is my d-d-duty as your w-wife to p-p-protect you, too.’

His bitter laughter was loud as he removed his hand. ‘You are here to provide Belridden with an heir, nothing else. And protection is my domain. I do not require any such thing from you.’

As she turned away, he saw that her hand no longer threaded through the ornate rosary beads.

Chapter Four

Her husband of two days was looking across at a woman standing to one side of the room. A woman with flaxen hair, her blue eyes meeting his in a complicity that even at this distance was unmistakeable. For just a moment Grace felt a quick thud of envy, but she pressed it down. For her to presume love from a man like the Laird of Kerr was foolish and completely unreasonable.

He had a mistress, a beautiful mistress, and when he walked across and kissed her soundly in front of everyone in the Great Hall, Grace knew exactly her position here.

She was a breeding wife, the provider of money and an heir. Not a lover or a friend, but a woman to beget progeny. Lawful progeny. Boys who would some day take on the mantle of this place and make it stronger. War and fighting and reiving were the life-blood of the Borderland keeps after all, and she swallowed back singular disappointment.

Belridden mirrored the sudden coldness she felt inside, showing no glimmer of any redeeming feature in the draughty and ill-kempt hall. The wind whistled in through wooden shutters and the rough sleeping mattresses littering the floor had not been cleared away. Half-eaten food scraps and mangy dogs lay beneath a high table that had neither linen on it nor tapestries behind it. Impoverished and meagre, Belridden stood like a sentinel on the very last edge of civilisation. The rolling green pastures of Grantley, the manor house with its garderobes and its luxury and an ease of both language and weather seemed so far away in this unfamiliar and uneasy landscape.