Sophia James - Knight of Grace

Lachlan cursed this ridiculous farce.

More than twenty years of selfless service to the King, 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.

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.

Sophia Jameslives in a big old house in Chelsea Bay on Auckland’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist, three kids, two cats, a turtle and a guide dog puppy. Life is busy because, as well as teaching adults English at the local Migrant School, she helps her husband take art tours to Italy and France each September. Sophia has a degree in English and History from Auckland University, and she believes her love of writing was formed reading Georgette Heyer, with her twin sister, on the porch of her grandmother’s house, overlooking the sandhills of Raglan.

Previous novels by Sophia James:

FALLEN ANGEL

ASHBLANE’S LADY

HIGH SEAS TO HIGH SOCIETY

MASQUERADING MISTRESS

Sophia James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

It is 1360 and Scotland is in chaos. King David has just returned to Edinburgh after eleven years of captivity under the English and the vacuum of power created in his absence brings a crisis. While some landowners want to retain their hard-won sovereignty, others side with the English and the claims of those disinherited under Robert Bruce. Border politics is murky, and David himself makes things more difficult when he thinks to cede his crown to the Duke of Clarence, Edward of England’s son. A few honourable men support the concept of a self-determining Scotland, based on the principles of freedom written in the Declaration of Arbroath.

Laird Lachlan Kerr is one of these men…

…we will never on any conditions be subjected to the Lordship of the English. For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.

Words from the Declaration of Arbroath, April 1320, and affixed with the seals of forty Scottish nobles.

Chapter One

August 1360—Grantley Manor, Clenmell , Durham, England .

Lady Grace Stanton watched the man walking towards her. Tall, dark and beautiful .

She had not expected that.

This beauty worried her more than the danger that cloaked him or the distance he wore like a mantle, and when he finally stood before them and the dust of the horses had settled, she schooled her expression and looked up.

He was disappointed. She could see it in his eyes. Pale shadow blue with suspicion simmering just below the surface. Her heart sank and she felt the aching cold of his distrust. With a feigned smile she took his offered fingers into her own, hating her bitten-down nails and the way the red dryness on her skin looked against the brown smoothness of his.

She had been burdened with this complaint for the whole of her twenty-six years. But today at least the skin beneath her eyes was not crusty raw and weeping.

‘Lady Grace.’ He relinquished contact as soon as he had said her name.

‘Kerr.’ Her uncle was the Earl of Carrick and his tone was anything but welcoming, his furrowed gaze including the twenty or so clansmen who sat on horses behind Kerr. ‘We expected you a week ago.’

‘Ye have the priest, then?’ Kerr cut in, dispensing completely with any pretence to manners.

‘We do. Father O’Brian has come up from—”

‘Then bring him here.’

‘But my niece is not even dressed.’

‘A dress is the least of her worries given the decree of my king.’ His words were flat. Insolent, almost. Teetering on the edge of treason. As Grace looked around at her uncle, the harshness of light made him seem old; a man who had outgrown the demands of battle and wanted now to amble towards his dotage with some semblance of peace. When her glance fell on the weaponry that the Kerrs bristled with, she knew more plainly than ever before the true price of politics. One false move and her family would suffer, for innocent pawns were easily expendable against a background of political frustration.

‘I th-th-think, U-Uncle, that you should ask F-F-Father O’Brian to c-c-come out to us.’ Lord. Her stammer was far worse than it usually was. Grace heard rather than saw the way the men behind Kerr murmured and her pulse quickened so markedly that she wondered if she would fall over from a lack of breath.

No, she would not!

Biting down on her bottom lip, she was very still, centring calm across panic until she felt the alarm recede.

‘You would be married here? Outside? But you had hoped…’

‘Nay, Uncle. Here will be g-good.’

Hopes! She scanned the face of the warrior opposite, fully expecting mirth or at the very least pity, but saw neither.

Just a duty, she suddenly thought. This marriage was a duty, a way of appeasing his monarch and filling the coffers of his own keep.

‘ Tainted with a skin condition, but with good child-bearing hips .’ The envoy from Edward the Third of England had uttered exactly those words as she had been summoned for the first time before him. She remembered her uncle’s momentary fury as the decree was laid in his hands, a piece of paper that would change their lives for ever. If he did not comply, Grantley Manor would be at risk. Grantley! The family seat lost if not for the sacrifice of marrying a plain and ageing niece off to a chosen spouse. Even her uncle had limits as to what he was prepared to lose.

The will of kings. A union forged while all grappled with the concept of the self-determination of Scotland.

She could see the outline of impatience in Lachlan Kerr’s eyes, sky blue see-through-you eyes with just a hint of grey. Eyes that said he surely knew the extent of her reputation at court, where the rumours of who she was and wasn’t were touted in the songs of unkind jesters; a figure of fun to give the ladies and lords a moment’s respite against the harsher realities of intrigue. Stephen had told her last summer, after he had returned from London, her cousin reciting the faults, thinking he did her a favour with the warning.

Perhaps he did, Grace mused. A year ago she might have missed the censure and pity so plainly etched on Kerr’s face and imagined it merely as nerves. Today the full shape of an undisguised gall was evident in his frown, in his stance and in the way he stood before them, one hand on his hip and the other on the hilt of a sword.

His brother’s seconds!

This was not his choice, not his want. She pulled the sleeves of her dress down lower, glad when the lace covered even the very tips of her fingers.

A movement from the front door drew everyone’s attention as Judith, Anne and Ginny bustled down the stairs towards them, their fair hair burnished gold by the sun. Individually her young cousins were pretty; together they were much more than that. She felt the interest of the men behind Kerr as a sharpening of awareness, a distinct and utter masculine appreciation. She refrained from seeing if her husband-to-be was watching them in the same way, reasoning that even a slim shadow of doubt was preferable to the knowing of it.

Judith leaned over to her and whispered exactly what it was Grace was thinking. ‘He is far bigger than we had thought.’ Her husky lisp contained both tremor and question.

Nerves, Grace decided and squeezed the hand that threaded through her own, trying to give some sort of reassurance. Anne and Ginny crowded in behind. Waiting. She felt their collected fear like an ache and gestured them back, behind her, where she could stand between any threat of violence, should it come from the Scots.

‘These are m-my cousins.’ She felt she had to say something as an awkward silence hung across the group and was pleased when her uncle tried to ease the tension.

‘The envoy led us to believe that you would be at Grantley before the last Sabbath, Laird Kerr.’

‘I was…detained.’

Detained . The word held an edge of dark despair.

By what? By whom?

A woman, perhaps? The thought slipped into Grace’s mind as she observed him, for he had been married before. She knew, because Judith had overheard the king’s man saying so to his travelling companion, just before he had spoken of the lack of coinage the Kerrs were cursed with, and the desperate need of the Laird to find a woman of means.

Means. Indeed she had that.

With a substantial inheritance and a bloodline that was the very zenith of pure, her dowry would go far to help the ailing finances of any family down on its luck.

Marriage! Would this stranger demand his conjugal rights this very evening in front of his band of men? Lord, even the idea of removing her clothes had the blood rushing to her cheeks.

He would see.

He would know.

He would understand the truth of what before had only been whispered at and if he thought her ugly now… She shook her head. Hard. And feeling the sharp ends of Anne’s nails digging into the flesh of her inner arm, she tried to take charge.

‘W-Would you c-come inside and have a meal?’

Better, she thought. Much better. At least every word was not cursed with a stammer. Raising her glance, she looked straight at the man who would be her husband. In the direct sunlight he had squinted his eyes and the gathering lines to each side of his face were…attractive. No other way to describe them. Much more attractive than his brother had been, and he was deemed a handsome man! Angry at her wayward musings, she spoke again.

‘Father O’B-Brian is still at prayer and could be so for a while. If you could p-p-poss-poss…’

He stopped her simply by laying his hand across her own and she had the distinct impression of help.

Help?

Confused, she looked around. Judith’s eyes were filled with tears and weepy, and Anne and Ginny’s faces were pale. Lord, she prayed her cousins would not burst forth into noisy wailing. Not in front of these men. Not when the safety of Grantley depended on a marriage, signed, sealed and delivered.

Sacrifice. Expediency. Words that had shaped her life for all her years and would now continue doing so. It was written in the blood of men and in the ink of kings.

Irrevocable. Unalterable. Settled.

There could be no going back or refusal. Her life for her family’s lands.

She imagined herself with a sword in hand, beating back any enemy, protecting them with her finesse , winning a battle that no other ever could have …

The thought was so ridiculous she began to smile, but caught back the humour as flinted steeled eyes met her own. And swallowed. Now was not the time for foolish flights of fancy.

‘My uncle has some f-fine Rhenish wine.’

When Kerr inclined his head and gestured to his men, she felt a sigh of relief. Not quite time to leave, then. Still an hour or so before she would be wrenched from here and transplanted to Belridden, his keep a good forty miles to the north.

With a heavy heart she led the men in and, conscious of the fact that the Laird of Kerr walked directly behind her, tried her hardest to minimise her limp.