Knight of Grace

Judith held her hand, hard clasped and shaking.

‘If he is anything like his brother, Grace…’

She did not let her finish. ‘He w-won’t be.’

‘You can tell?’

‘I can hope.’

‘We could be at Belridden in two days to get you if you needed to come home.’

‘I am married n-now, Judith. Under what law should I be able to leave my h-husband?’

They looked at each other in silence, the enormity of everything a dark shadow of truth in both their eyes.

‘This should not have been your cross to bear. It should have been mine. I am Ginny’s sister, after all; if anyone had to pay the price for Malcolm Kerr’s death, it should have been me.’

Grace looked at her new husband, their eyes meeting across the crowded room. He was as beautiful as she was plain, the pale blueness of his eyes catching her anew with the contrast of colour against his darkness of hair.

David’s knight. A man who had ruled the fields of battle from France to Scotland for a decade. She had heard the tales from various bards when they had come to Grantley with their songs and their stories. Sword, scabbard, mail and shield: Lachlan Kerr’s weapons of choice as he rode beneath the gold-and-red standard of the lion of Scotland, its border pierced by ten fleurs-de-lis.

And now her husband.

She turned his ring around the third finger on her left hand and the warmth of the metal made her smile.

A sign. Of hope? She wondered about her marriage night, about being close to such a man.

‘If you l-love me, Judith, you will promise to st-stay silent about everything, because if you do not then all of this will have been in vain.’

Judith did not look happy at all. ‘Perhaps if you told him about what he tried to do to Ginny…’

‘And ruin her r-reputation for ever?’

‘This is for ever too, Grace.’

‘I know, but I am twenty-six and Ginny is b-barely sixteen.’

‘She has not spoken since…’ Judith stopped and regrouped. ‘Perhaps she never will.’

‘T-ten months is only a l-little time. With c-care…’

A single tear traced its way down Judith’s cheek. ‘You were always the best and the bravest of us, Grace, and if Lachlan Kerr ever hurts you even a little…’

‘He won’t.’

‘You are certain?’

The pale stare of her husband caught her across the head of her cousin, beckoning her, arrogance written in every line of his face.

Grace tipped up the goblet she held and finished the draught within. This charade was for a reason and their marriage was final. There could be no going back on such a promise even had she wanted to.

‘I am c-certain,’ she returned before limping over to join him.

He barely acknowledged her as she came to stand beside him, his shoulders a good foot above her own even when she straightened. He spoke to his men of his hopes for Scotland and of his want to be again in the land of his birth before another moon waned.

So soon? He would not stay here at Grantley for one night? The shock of such an imminent departure made her breathing uneven and she felt his gaze full upon her.

‘Belridden has favours that Grantley lacks. The mountains around it, for example, are lauded for their bounty when hunting.’

Grace tried to smile, tried to understand that it was a reassurance he gave her. Bounty in hunting? All she could see in her mind’s eye was a far-off, lonely place with trails and tracks used for forage and pursuit.

The easy luxury of Grantley closed in. ‘I have n-no knowledge of h-hunting, Laird K-Kerr,’ she returned and the red-haired man next to him laughed.

Lachlan Kerr did not, however, his eyes bruised with the growing realisation of the enormous gulf that lay between them as he wiped his mouth free of wine on his sleeve before turning.

‘It is time to go.’

Even his men on the other side of the room heard his words, standing almost as one, and the colourful gowns of her cousins seemed caught in a time frame, like an etching, England swallowed up by the muted earthy tones of plaid. Judith’s wail came first as she pushed forwards, her arms encircling Grace, tears running freely down her cheeks.

‘I cannot bear to think of life without you, Grace,’ she cried, ‘the stories you tell us will be so sorely missed.’

Grace noticed the look of interest that flinted across Lachlan Kerr’s face.

‘Stories?’

‘Grace has the most wonderful imagination. She tells us tales at night.’ Bright red coated Judith’s cheeks as she registered the Laird’s attention.

‘I am c-certain that I sh-shall b-be back often.’ Her own reassurance vacillated as incredulity appeared on the face of every Scotsman. The sheer volume of wine she had consumed began to take effect, for she rarely drank very much. The room tilted and the noise in it dimmed as she felt her hand on Judith’s arm without any sense of it really being there. The goodbyes to her other cousins and to her uncle were just as unreal, the farewells far away through the haze of unreality and less difficult than they would have been were she sober.

A kiss and a hug, food pressed into her hands and her cape draped around her and then the party was outside and she was up, on a horse in front of her new husband. A hastily packed chest on a steed behind. Quick steps to another life, the angst of it all banished by too many glasses of fine Rhenish wine.

She wiped her eyes and struggled for control, for normality, but already the whirling tiredness was upon her. Leaning back against the solid warmth was comforting and she did not push away the arm that anchored her firmly into place.

The landscape swam out of focus, soft, troubled. Almost known.

‘Keep still.’ The voice was angry-close and as her eyes flew open wide the world again began to settle.

They were in the foothills of the Three Stone Burn, miles from Grantley.

And heading north.

Away from home. Away from her cousins and her uncle and the people she had known all her life.

She wriggled forwards, her muscles tight from the effort of countering the pressure from the easy canter of his horse.

His horse!

She was on his horse. Hot panic and cold fear.

‘Get me off…let me down… I want to get down…’ When she flung herself away the ground came up, fast, and hit her hard against the shoulder, winding her.

She had not been on a horse since… She shook her head and tried not to remember. Since the moment in the forest outside York when her parents had been ambushed and killed!

Consciousness was lost under pressure. Ripping. Screams rent from the very depth of fear. And silence.

‘What the hell is wrong with ye now?’ A deep voice shattered memory, blue eyes narrowing against the last slant of sun as he caught her wrist and pulled her up from the ground. Close.

She slapped him as he relaxed his grip, all the pent-up months of worry behind the movement. And when the edge of Malcolm Kerr’s ring caught at his skin, red spilt down the hard line of his cheek.

He released her immediately and stepped away, the muscles along his jaw rippling as he lifted his hand to the wound.

‘Mother of Mary, are ye a crazy woman? Has David joined me to a cackle-head?’

She made herself be still, placing her fingers across the beating terror in her heart and waited for retribution.

None came.

No true sharp blade into the soft folds of her throat, no well-aimed kick or clenched fist. Nothing except for a silence that was stark against the shrill, quick call of a forest bird nesting for the night.

His men melted back, leaving them alone. Grace could just make out their forms through the leaves of the trees thick in the glade.

‘Do ye have a death wish?’

‘No.’ She whispered the word. Mouthed it. No time to even think of stammering, for the light in his eyes held her transfixed. No empty threat here. No quiet warning.

‘Give me your right hand.’

She hid it behind her back, away from him. What did he want her hand for? To cut it off at the wrist? To break her fingers one by one by one? To slash his initial into the lines of her palm?

‘Give me your hand, Grace.’

She hated the way her chin began to wobble, hated the tears that welled in her eyes and the aching fear in her throat. Hated the way too that her arm came forwards. Towards him.

He took her middle finger, gently, and removed the ring. She felt the roughened skin of his palm and saw the marks of scars under a cloth he wore around his wrist before he let her go.

No, not scars. A brand. A circle dissected by two lines. Indigo. Complex.

‘This ring is a family heirloom. My grandmother holds the other half of a matching pair and I am certain that she would wish it back.’ For a second he held it before depositing it in his sporran. Gone from her.

Memory!

She began to shake, badly, her teeth chattering together even as she tried to stop them, and, without meaning to, she closed her fingers over the place where the ring had been and buried her hand in the copious folds of her gown.

Relief and the release of a duty and a lie! She thanked him silently for the taking of it.

Lachlan caught his breath and cursed this ridiculous farce that the King had burdened him with. More than twenty years of selfless service 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. The whispered asides told him that they appreciated her about as little as did the echoes of laughter.

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.

Taking a breath, he tried to lighten his voice.

‘We still have a few hours of travelling yet as I mean to cross the border north of Carlisle.’

‘We c-c-c-cannot m-m-make y-y-your k-k-k-keep?’ Lord, her stammer was worsening by the moment. He wondered if she would be able to string even two words together by the time they had reached his castle.

‘Nay, it will be safer to camp in the Borders.’

Stressing the word ‘safer’, he saw the calculations of a walked distance clouding her focus.

‘Lord, help me,’ he muttered and wished that he was at home in the arms of his mistress.

But he wasn’t. He was stuck with a woman who stuttered and shook and lied, and was scared of horses.

Lady Grace Stanton. Nay, he amended as he mounted and pulled her up in front of him, Lady Grace Kerr, now.

His wife.

He made mental calculations as to how many hours he would ever truly be required to spend in her company and was heartened to determine that it would be very few. Perhaps he was more like his father than he had thought, and the realisation made him uneasy.

Freezing. She was freezing. Even with a cloak and blanket and three shawls laid across her she could not stop the shaking that had woken her up a good hour ago. And now she needed to relieve herself. Desperately.

It was dark. Black. The forest trees stretched towards an inky sky, and the moon, that had been high when they had finally reached this place, had fallen, a small and weak slice of crescent on the horizon, surrounded by mist.

Ten feet away Lachlan Kerr lay on the dirt without a scrap of blanket or pillow, the dim light from the fire showing the beaded drops of dew threaded through his night-black hair. Even asleep he held his dirk across his thigh, fingers curled around the shaft in habit.

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.

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.