Knight of Grace

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.

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.

She shook her head, seeing in that moment how appealing her dowry must have been to a laird struggling with day-to-day expenses. Nothing here looked as if it had been attended to for decades. Even the occupants inside the keep looked ragged, their simple tunics and shifts dotted with repairs. She saw in their covert glances just exactly what they thought of her. Nobody smiled. Nobody welcomed her. Nobody hid the knowledge of her place here or sheltered her from the fondling of the Laird and his mistress, the woman’s arms now full along the rise of Lachlan Kerr’s buttocks.

She had been fooling herself on the journey north that this alliance could be anything more than a simple union of need—his need of legitimate heirs and her need of a husband. Any sort of husband given her advanced years. Even the brother of a man she had loathed.