Chapter 1 #2
The Honorable Macfayden, Castleton’s burly mayor, cleared his throat. In his official capacity as village spokesman and advocate of good causes he pronounced, “ ’Tis good the new Kerr laird has returned. The English warden will have his hands full. Maybe he’ll be leavin’ the rest of us alone now.”
“Hear, hear!” Enthusiasm mounted and a call to celebrate all future success for the Roxburghe heir rang out.
“To the Boar’s Inn, men!” The battle cry sounded.
Restored to their previous vigor, the crowd began to disperse. But watching the townspeople lumber away, Rose felt only disappointment that their returning hero had lacked the courtesy to acknowledge those lining the streets to pay him homage.
“His lordship is bound to pass near Hope Abbey to get to the river crossing,” Mrs. Graham said from beside her, peering at the sky. “If it rains, he may seek shelter.”
Startled at the unpleasant notion, Rose lifted her gaze to the darker clouds roiling on the horizon. ’Twas not uncommon that travelers stopped at Hope Abbey for food and rest. With Friar Tucker absent and Rose away from the abbey, Sister Nessa would panic.
Rose bid Mrs. Graham farewell and escaped down a backstreet that followed the turnip fields to the stable.
Viewing the open road beyond, relieved to see only remnants of a lingering dust cloud where the Black Dragon had been, Rose was confident that he would be across the river by the time the storm broke.
“ ’Tis a strained tendon.” Ruark rubbed his palm gingerly along the stallion’s foreleg. “This horse is not traveling farther or I risk permanently damaging him.”
His ship’s former second in command, Bryce Colum, knelt beside him. “A week or two at least,” he concurred. “Bloody hell.”
Ruark peered up at the sky. Amber tinged the red sky just in front of the storm that had been following them for the five miles since leaving the village.
The wind in the trees had picked up considerably in the last fifteen minutes.
“Hope Abbey is just beyond the woods,” Ruark said. “They have a stable. I know the prior.”
Most of his men sat around eating while talking in low tones.
The pace he had driven them these days had allowed little time for food or rest. Like him, each of them had a lawless quality about him.
He looked back over the road they’d just traveled, then scanned the surrounding area.
“Take all but four men and go north to Stonehaven. Leave one of the packhorses,” he said.
Colum rose. He was not as tall as Ruark. With Ruark standing five inches over six feet, few men were. “Hereford’s men are probably watching the road,” Colum said. I will remain with the stallion. He’s a fine horse—”
“Worth killing for? I want anyone watching this road to see this pack crossing the bridge. No purpose will be served if the warden’s men learn any of us has been here. Give me your jacket.”
Colum ran an impatient hand through his hair. He slipped out of his jacket and took Ruark’s. “You would leave that stallion to Hereford’s men?”
The question triggered an arched brow and the barest hint of a grin.
“I am disappointed in your lack of faith in me,” Ruark said, as he shoved his arms into the sleeves of Colum’s jacket, testing the fit.
“There is nothing Hereford can take from me that I will not eventually reclaim. But I would rather lose a horse than give our good warden a reason to hang you as well. Besides, I have another reason to stay. Take the men and go now. I will be a day behind you.”
Colum ordered all but four men to mount and ride. Amid the near silent commotion, another man approached carrying coffee. “Here ye be,” McBain said. “Thought ye might enjoy a refresher even on a blistering day like this.”
“Thank you.” Ruark took a swallow of the coffee and smiled inwardly for it was blacker than hell, the way no one but McBain could brew it. Powerful and unforgiving. The way Ruark had come to appreciate the world since his years at sea had driven the softness from his life.
He fixed his eyes on the rolling hills. McBain followed his gaze, scrubbing his hand across his bewhiskered face. “It’s been a long time. A bluidy long time.”
“Not long enough,” Ruark said, reflecting McBain’s reservations aloud.
“Do ye think there’s truth to the rumor that Hereford’s daughter is alive?”
“Aye, maybe,” Ruark said as he motioned for the remaining men to mount and drank the last of the coffee.
Ruark had not been home in almost thirteen years and he had no idea whom he could trust. But Friar Tucker was one of the few men he knew was not in Hereford’s deep pockets.
Ruark never understood the source of Tucker’s bitter sentiments against Lord Hereford, but he hoped they would serve to ally Ruark and Tucker now against a common foe.
If anyone knew the truth of the gossip, ’twould be Tucker.
“If there is a daughter,” Ruark said, “I doubt Tucker would appreciate what I have in mind for the girl.”
He had never used another man’s family to exact retribution, finding the practice repulsive.
But watching Colum and the men disappear over the rise, he found himself dwelling on his father’s second son.
Jamie was a half brother Ruark had never met and knew not, except by the packet of letters he had found awaiting him one year when he had brought the Black Dragon into Workington for a refitting.
The lad had been only nine at the time and had introduced himself through the writings.
For the first time since Ruark had left Scotland, a member of his family had attempted to communicate with him.
Ruark had spent that evening reading the letters and every six months afterward for three years, he had sailed into Workington just for those letters.
Their father’s death four months ago might have delivered Ruark the Roxburghe earldom, but Jamie’s imprisonment had brought Ruark home.
That and the fact that Ruark and the warden were hardly strangers.
Lord Hereford was a former British naval captain who had retired a year ago to his borderland estate to take up the mantle of English warden.
He and Ruark had a long history that included Ruark’s father murdered and now his half brother arrested for cattle lifting, a hanging offense according to law.
Ruark had only just been informed of his half brother’s arrest when he landed in Workington a week ago.
Hereford held the boy’s life for ransom in an attempt to do more than impoverish the Kerr estate.
In Ruark’s thinking, a man who would use a boy’s life to entrap Ruark was a man who did not value his own life. Ruark would find Hereford’s Achilles’ heel if it was the last thing he ever did. Vengeance controlled him.
Indeed Ruark rarely left anything to fate.
“They’re gone, Miss Rose. They’re all gone now.”
Jack had run back from the hill overlooking the river and now stood at the cart as Rose held the pony’s reins.
Thank heavens. She skimmed the open fields between her and the abbey. Sheer luck had caused her to see the riders in the distance or she would have been caught in the open when they crossed the bridge.
She and Jack had taken the old drover trail out of town, which shortened the distance to the abbey from town by two miles. But while the trail took her to the backside of the abbey, almost directly to the stables, it also exposed her for a hundred yards to the riverbank.
This was former reiver territory, after all. Exercising caution was always wise in a world where power was its own law, and Lord Roxburghe was more powerful than most. One did not earn the name Black Dragon without cause. “Are you sure it was Lord Roxburghe and his men?”
“Aye, mum,” Jack said, excitedly. “They carried a standard all splashed in blood with a fire-breathing monster flappin’ in the wind like the tail of a dragon. Is it true he be a pirate, Miss Rose? I heard he’s sunk twenty ships but that the king won’t hang him because he’s made the crown rich.”
“ ’Tis a crimson standard, Jack.” Her eyes caught a flash of lightning. “Get back on the cart. We don’t need to worry about being seen now.”
Bright hazel eyes aglow, the boy hopped nimbly into the cart and Rose clicked her tongue. The pony jerked forward.
“Coooee. The Black Dragon.” Squinting his eyes, Jack eagerly sought another glimpse of the riverbank, which was in full view as the cart emerged from the woods.
“Were we hiding because ye think his lordship would have trussed us like a boar to a spit and tossed us in the river? Ye have yer dirk. Ye wouldna have let anything happen.”
“Nay, I would not have,” she said, attempting to put his twelve-year-old imagination to rest before he gave himself nightmares.
No doubt his mind lingered on the more gruesome details of capture, and though he liked to think himself as Rose’s protector, he was still only a boy, recovering from his mam’s death last year.
Jack had taken to Rose like a shadow since she’d defended him from local riffraff some months ago. He followed her everywhere now. She was grateful that Friar Tucker allowed him to stay in the kitchens at the abbey or he’d be sleeping on the ground outside her second-story window.
“Did you get the books ye wanted from Mrs. Simpson?” he asked.
“Yes, I did. And you aren’t to tell anyone,” she reminded him again, having dragged the oath of secrecy from him before venturing into town. “My visits to Mrs. Simpson are our secret.”
He bobbed his blond head in reassurance, the perfect co-conspirator. Jack loved secrets. Last week he had helped her clandestinely bake a strawberry pie for Sister Nessa’s birthday, which had required sneaking into the henhouse and stealing two eggs.
Wind gusts lifted her hair. They both looked up at the sky. “Ye best be hurryin’, Miss Rose,” he encouraged.