Ashblane's Lady

He turned back.

Madeleine forced herself to smile. For this moment he must believe all that was said of her family. The wound at her breast marked her as his and here as at Heathwater she needed to put a measure of protection in place. Men coveted women they could understand, soft women, weak women. Her armour lay in the foundations of superstition and magic. Even a man like Alexander Ullyot believed in superstitions.

She thought he might strike her—indeed, took a half step backwards before she stopped herself. At her side Jemmie had reddened dramatically and her eyes flicked with warning as she prayed her sister would not be foolish enough to try to defend her if Alexander Ullyot were to knock her down.

‘Do you court death, Lady Randwick?’ Ullyot’s query was bland and she looked up, puzzled.

‘Pardon?’

‘This.’ He had turned out the small dirk from her pocket before she could blink and it clinked uselessly on the dirt floor. ‘For a witch your face is surprisingly unschooled. But take warning. Should you bear arms against me in the company of my soldiers, you may find a sword through your heart before you have the time to explain it otherwise.’ His free hand ran across her breast in a surprisingly lewd caress. ‘And that would be a waste of good woman flesh, witch or no, I think.’

Maddy pulled away, the imprint of his fingers burning into her skin, and was intimidated again by his very bigness. With one single smack of his hand she could be dead if she should anger him further than restraint would allow. Her mind sought the anecdotes of his temper and the stories were many. Still she could not resist saying something as she hitched up her plaid.

‘I think your wife may object to such fondling should she be watching, Laird Ullyot.’

The chips in his eyes became colder. ‘And you think as Laird here I would have no right of choice?’

The question was so baldly provocative that the blood flared in Madeleine’s face as she comprehended his meaning.

‘Any choice by force is hardly honourable, sir, as any wife of honour would know.’ She drew herself up to her full height, which was not inconsiderable, and wished she were taller. ‘You have just need to ask your own.’

For the very first time warmth marked his face.

‘I am pleased to discover that mind reading is not one of your accomplishments, Lady Randwick,’ he said cryptically, speaking rapidly to Quinlan in Gaelic before he bent to retrieve her blade and left. She saw a group of women near the kitchen watching him, though he did not acknowledge their presence. Absolute interest was scrawled across every feminine face.

Madeleine turned to check Jemmie was tucked in safely behind her and wondered what was to happen next. Where would they be bedded and would the food he had promised arrive? Her stomach was rumbling loudly, protesting the lack of sustenance during the last two days, when a boy of five or so scampered out from a passageway, a broom of some weight bearing down behind him.

‘Away with ye, ye clattie imp.’ A serving girl chased him and Maddy found herself between the assailant and the child and in the first second of looking at him she knew him to be Alexander Ullyot’s child. He had the same eyes and hair. And the same sense of distance from everyone and everything around him. In a child the trait was heartbreaking.

‘Have you lost your senses?’ She turned on the woman and made an effort to snatch at the raised broom. ‘What has the boy done?’

‘Stolen buns from the evening’s wake,’ the woman wailed and Madeleine saw that, despite the etched lines across her brow, she was young. She turned to the child behind her for explanation, though none was forthcoming. He watched her with furtive eyes as he finished off the stolen goods.

Usually children denied their wrongdoings. The thought hit her forcibly. Other children she had seen dealt with in a disciplinary matter had been full of explanation as to why they had not possibly done what it was they stood accused of. This child did none of those things. He did not even run for shelter or brush the offending crumbs from his tunic.

‘Why did you steal the cakes?’ Madeleine made her voice as gentle as she could, bending so the child could see her face. She noticed he watched her lips and did not meet her eyes.

‘Because he is light-heided and dim-witted as well as being bone-hard deaf.’

The boy’s gaze caught the movement of the serving girl as she advanced upon him and with a swish of linen and wool he had run past them and up the stairs.

Turning to Quinlan, Madeleine saw he had distanced himself from the whole exchange. The child was known to him obviously, but he made no comment on the encounter at all as he walked towards the stairs and bade her and Jemmie to follow.

‘I’m to see ye to your sleeping place.’ He did not catch her eye. Was this a good sign or a bad one? Her fingers sought out the cross of gold at her throat and she rubbed it twice, stopping herself the instant she perceived herself doing such. Noel had chided her last week for the foolishness of such actions, castigating her again and again to rid herself of the cultivated habits of her childhood. At Heathwater everything was as measured as it must be here. No false moves, no reckless actions to place the weapon of knowledge in anyone’s hands. Schooled temperance and aloofness were the maxims of the Falstone men and their women suffered if they should forget such governance.

Keep your distance and the strength to maintain decorum no matter what.

Madeleine lifted her chin, remembering the words of her mother, and the words became a mantra as she followed the party up the stairs and into a room built at the back of the keep overlooking a lake. Some windows at least, then. Maddy drew in her breath with gratitude.

‘You will stay here, Lady Randwick, and the boy Jemmie next door until we find a job to set him to. Supper will be sent up on a tray as soon as it is ready.’

‘Thank you.’ She felt the tremor in her voice, though, as she bit back the question of the night’s sleeping arrangements. Quinlan surprised her again with his uncanny ability to read what was on her mind.

‘The mourning will keep the Laird busy for the next few days. You will’na be bothered tonight.’ Momentarily his eyes met hers. Imprinted with perplexity, she perceived also a humanity etched into the blueness. An honourable man, then, Quinlan Ullyot, and one uncertain of the implications of her imprisonment. Could he be persuaded, then, to let her go? Assist in the escape of both herself and Jemmie? Dare she ask the question at all?

‘I am a lady, sir,’ she began, wishing for the first time in her entire life that she bore the gift some young women had of bringing tears to their eyes on demand. ‘Your Laird has no right as a gentleman to keep me here against my will. If you could help me—’

She got no further.

‘Ladies dinna wear the mark of lovers on their breast or watch the slaying of good men in battle from a close distance. It is wise you learn that the will of our Laird is obeyed unquestioningly before ye ask of another what you were about to ask of me. Betrayal is measured in the cost of a life and no one’s life here is worth less than your own. One false step and ye shall be interred, Madeleine Randwick, with the bodies that this night will be laid in the coldness of Ashblane’s dirt.’

Without pausing for an answer he bade Jemmie proceed outside with him, the turning of a key in the lock giving her notice again that she was a prisoner here.

The light of a thin sun struggling through the October clouds hit the wall behind her and made her turn to the window. Through the panes of polished horn the world was strangely distended and made unreal. In the far distance she saw some hills. The Cheviots, she guessed. And just beneath her the movement of a priest hurrying, the black folds of his garment glued by force of wind around his legs and whipping the tassel on his belt sideways. If she listened carefully, she could hear the first tunings of bagpipes keening in the rising wind off the Scottish Lowlands.

Tonight she felt lonely and frightened and confused. Her hands dug deeper into the pockets of her skirt, feeling the last dustings of age-worn leaves. Chamomile. Lemon balm. Marjoram. They grounded her. Made her real. Pulled her bones to the earth in a way few people had been willing to. Jemmie. Goult. Her mother and grandmother. Shutting her eyes, she imagined Eleanor and Josephine calling to her in the way the de Cargne women had summoned their ancestors for centuries. The true witchcraft lay here, she smiled wanly and laid her hand across her heart, listening as the footsteps of the soldiers receded.

When silence reigned she crossed the room and bent at the timbered wall that divided her room from Jemmie’s. Knocking twice, she held her breath, releasing it only as two answering taps came back. Two for safety. Three for danger. The codes from Heathwater were so ingrained that she was suddenly and unreasonably angry. When would their lives ever really be safe? When would she be able to sleep at night without the edge of panic in her dreams? When could Jemmie set aside boy’s clothes and claim her place in a world that would not harm her? Ashblane was as much as a jail as Heathwater had ever been with its powerful Lord and its isolation, and here, caught in the borderlands of mist and drizzle, all she had ever tried to accomplish slid into nothingness.

The Black Widow. She mouthed the words into the quiet around her, hating the sound of them. At twenty-four she had become as notorious as her mother had been, and as trapped.

Chapter Five

The next morning she was taken alone to the Great Hall where the hum of conversation was quickly silenced by her entry. Maddy caught Alexander Ullyot’s glance as she walked by. Today he looked tired, the dark stubble of his beard unshaven and the clothes she had seen him in last night dishevelled and creased. He had not been to bed then, the wakes taking up all of the hours between then and now. The thought made the bile rise in her throat and she was thankful to note that the chair to which she was led at least afforded her a little privacy.

‘You are to sit here, Lady Randwick, and I will fetch you the morning meal.’

The woman spoke nervously and crossed herself as she scuttled away to the kitchens. Looking around, Madeleine caught the scowl of a man who shaped his hand into the form of a knife and whipped it across his throat. Her glance dropped away in shock. Such harsh and raw hatred was jolting—even though at Heathwater it had been every bit as potent, it had never been quite as overt.

She made herself sit perfectly still, hands tightly fisted in her lap, teeth gritted. She had sat like this so many times at Heathwater as Noel and Liam Williamson had drunk themselves into oblivion. She had shielded her emotions from her husband, too, when the ghosts that ate at his sanity threatened to take it completely. Aye. She was a woman who had learned not to expect much. Here at least there was not a fist in her face or a barrage of angry expletives every time she deigned to leave her room.

Her room. The tower room in the western wing at Heathwater Castle, black drapes drawn across the sun for fear the ghoulies and silkies of a thousand years of fairytale should enter unseen. Lucien’s gibberish and in the end her saviour. She liked the curtains closed and humanity shut out, the sounds of a world she could no longer fathom softened by the distance of darkness.

A movement at the top table caught her attention. Alexander Ullyot had summoned a young woman to speak with him, a girl with light hair and a blue gown and the complexion of someone who enjoyed a walk outdoors in the sunshine. A girl who was even now approaching her.

‘Would ye mind if I joined you, Lady Randwick? My uncle has bid that I be polite.’

A barely concealed insult. An explanation of intent.

‘I do not expect it,’ Maddy returned. ‘Tell your uncle that I relinquish any duty regarding manners that you or he may feel bound to.’

She was surprised when the girl smiled and sat. ‘My name is Katherine. I am the daughter of the Laird of Ullyot’s first wife’s oldest sister.’

‘His first wife? How many wives have there been since?’

Katherine smiled again. ‘Only that one. She died when Gillion, who you saw last night, was born.’

‘Then he is not married?’ Maddy did not question the silent spring of relief that rose in her breast.

‘No. Alice Ullyot has been dead for these past five years. She died in the chamber you have been placed in, though there is no ghost or any such thing. Not that you would be afraid, I think, Lady Randwick, for I have watched you. It is you the others are afraid of. They cannot afford to believe in your magic, you see.’

‘Magic?’ Her voice was guarded.

‘The way you heal. With your hands.’

‘It is not magic. It is only good medicine.’

‘And it makes you independent, doesn’t it?’

Maddy frowned, troubled by the drift of this conversation.

‘You’ve no husband,’ Katherine qualified, ‘and you need none. I, too, would like to become a woman without need of men.’

‘And that is how you see me?’

‘I overheard my uncle say it to Quinlan when first he brought you here. He also said you were a witch.’

‘And you believe him?’

‘Quinlan does and Dougal, and the men who watched your doctoring in the clearing before the Liddesdale Forest. I see them cross themselves after you have passed them by. For protection, I think, though my uncle frowns at them when they do so. I have heard, too, that at Heathwater you preferred your own company and were rarely seen in the fellowship of others and I wondered—is it sometimes not lonely to be you?’

The wave of desolation that rolled across Madeleine as a result of Katherine’s question had her struggling for a semblance of calm.

Lonely.

When had she ever felt anything else?

‘No.’ Even to her ears the reply sounded brittle.

‘I’m sorry. I must learn not to pry. Everyone is always telling me that. “Stop the questions, Katherine. Stop asking about things.” It is a failing that I am reminded of often. Why, when I was a child, I lost count of the times that my mother chastised me for impertinence and that is, I fear, a fault that I have just repeated.’

The prattle went on and on and Maddy relaxed, even as she had the strange feeling that the girl was actually giving her time to recover her defences. For the first time in her life she was uncertain of motive. This girl should hate her and yet she offered something else entirely. Friendship. Kindness. The lighter edge of companionship and a place where Maddy had never before ventured.

With anyone.

They were interrupted by a fracas at one end of the room that had them both standing. A man was screaming in Gaelic. She noticed the soldiers at the doorway fan around the table where they sat. A signal from the Laird, she fancied, when she chanced to glance his way and saw how he watched her. His air of tiredness had vanished into prickling alertness, the food untouched upon his plate. He watched her like a general might watch a battle, eyes scouting around the edges of the room with vigilant intent. He stood suddenly and Madeleine’s fingers tightened in a fearful grip. If these retainers meant to harm her, she would have no chance, though suddenly she sensed someone charging at her from behind. Turning to counteract the threat, she knocked Katherine out of danger, but the nearest soldier was faster, his body thrown between Maddy’s and the flash of steel. Everything sped up as he collapsed, the blade pushed through his ribs and out again. She could see the reddened tip as her unknown protector fell and she lunged for the knife at his belt, thrusting it before her in protection.

Nothing made sense, not the shout from the end of the room, nor the keening wail that came from her lips, nor the group of retreating soldiers burdened with the scuffling body of her would-be assailant. Only the grey eyes of Alexander Ullyot pierced the haze of her paralysing shock as he came to stand beside her. Only the gulping sobs of Katherine as she was led away by an older woman.

‘Give me the knife.’

A hundred Ullyot retainers stood near, each bristling with their own form of weaponry.

‘Give me the knife,’ he repeated. His voice shook as he held out his bare hand, and he seemed relieved when she placed it in his palm, secreting it in his tunic before motioning his men to a distance.

Madeleine knelt to the fallen soldier at her feet and taking a breath she cradled his head in her lap, the spittle from his mouth staining her bodice and blood wetting her skirts.

‘Thank you.’ Her words were soft and his eyes focused as he tried to smile. Soft brown eyes, and young. Everything inside her tightened. Already the paleness of dying tainted his skin, his focus looking inwards and glazing as the blood flow weakened.

He had saved her and given his life for her own. A soldier whose name she did not even know. She could feel the ache in her throat as she brought his body closer.

Still. Still. She summoned warmth and softness. She banished fear and pain with the de Cargne chant of harmony.

A hush fell across the Great Hall as soldiers strained to listen and watch. The steady drip of blood slowed further and then stopped. Madeleine Randwick’s hands pressed hard against the entrance of the sword point, then wandered to the young soldier’s face as his breathing eased into silence and life gave way to death.

The red of her hair mingled with blood and her linen kirtle sagged at the juncture of her breasts, leaving the swell of womanly flesh visible to all those who stood close. And Alexander noticed his men watching. After all, she was reputed to be a whore, and soldiers bound long in the regimen of battle could hardly be chastised for taking a good look. Though this morning, bathed in the light of a thin autumn sun and helping his man to die with dignity, Madeleine Randwick appeared nothing like what it was said she could be.

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