Chapter 3 #2
Once she had dreamed of being an explorer of worlds as her father had been. Now she dreamed only of being free.
By summer’s end, she would reach one and twenty.
Sister Nessa had once told her that it was not a woman’s prerogative to choose her own destiny, but Rose would do exactly that.
She refused to be like the other girls at the abbey, confined by the social boundaries of their birth, accepting that their parents had chosen to give them to the church. She accepted nothing.
A part of her felt foolish for believing in such nonsensical rubbish as magic wishing rings. After all, she was an educated woman of twenty. She’d never believed in hobgoblins, fairies, witches or gremlins.
Yet she believed in the legend of Merlin, and if his power had helped guide and protect Arthur, and made him invincible to his enemies, then the ring would be her own Excalibur. Three months and she would change her life forever, break free and make of herself what she would be.
Jack burst through the door at that moment with a basket of eggs, chattering how he had fixed a hole in the coop to keep out the foxes.
Mrs, Simpson took him into her kitchen, divided the bounty as she always did to give half to the abbey.
Jack devoured a plate of pastries sloshed with strawberries and cream.
Rose listened as he recounted his activities of the past week, which included tales of Lord Roxburghe’s secret visit.
Rose wondered what part of secret the boy did not understand. “He came to see Friar Tucker,” Rose said when Mrs. Simpson lifted her gaze.
“But Friar Tucker is gone. Vanished!” Jack anxiously said. “Probably murdered by highwaymen. Or arrested and thrown into the gaol for smuggling. Sister Nessa thinks we’ll never see him again.”
“We need to go,” Rose finally said as Jack finished a third glass of milk. “We have more rounds to make on our way back to the abbey.”
After Jack hurried outside to tend to the cart and pony, Rose said, “Sister Nessa worries. Friar Tucker has never been away from the abbey for so long. His departure was sudden.”
Mrs. Simpson smiled. “He is alive and well in Carlisle. Perhaps ’tis this hostage business that has taken him there. Lord Roxburghe’s brother is rumored to be there.”
“How do you know this?”
“The mountebank passed through here yesterday. He always stops here to let me look over any tomes he might have picked up.”
“You gossip with the mountebank? He is a miscreant.”
“But a well-traveled one, dear. He speaks to everyone. ’Twould not be unusual for Friar Tucker to seek some form of mediation between Roxburghe and Hereford, though little good ’twill do.
” Mrs. Simpson stood with a swish of soft muslin.
“So you met the new earl of Roxburghe and you were not going to tell me? Most are curious what kind of man he has turned out to be.”
“He is a freebooter,” she managed as indifferently as possible, as she walked to the chair to retrieve her hat. “Quite at ease with his sins.”
“Most powerful men are, dear. And I assure you, he is not a whimsy to feed a young girl’s imagination. His sin goes deeper than most. He once tried to kill his own father.”
Rose paused in the middle of stuffing her hair beneath her cocked hat.
“Thirteen years ago, my husband and I were working a site near Chesters, which is very near Roxburghe lands,” Mrs. Simpson said. “I became friends with the housekeeper at Stonehaven and heard rumors. All hush-hush. But after the incident, the young lord was gone.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Mrs. Simpson wrapped her leathery hands around Rose’s. “Be careful what you bring into your heart, Rose. Hate is a darkness that once acted upon blights the soul. Men such as Roxburghe can turn a young woman’s head but beware the demon seed. He is the devil inside like his father before him.”
Ruark sat in the noisy dining hall, the early evening sunset slanting through the arched windows at his back.
The food had ceased coming an hour ago, though most of the men present had not noticed, the noise of their voices rising and falling as they fiercely argued.
No women were present, having been removed when Angus Murdoch returned carrying Hereford’s reply to the latest letter of negotiation, a lock of blood-caked hair, and a refusal to negotiate.
He had arrived that afternoon with Ruark’s uncle, Duncan, bringing back Hereford’s demands and the grisly momento carried in a box, the current cause for the war cries.
Angus’s gaze went to Duncan, who stood with his shoulder braced against the window staring outside. Silence filled the old great hall. Duncan was a russet-haired giant among traditionally tall Kerr men. He had not spoken since his return.
“Hereford left Carlisle five days ago,” Duncan said. “He is taking Jamie and Rufus and Gavin to Alnwick Castle.”
Alnwick was in Northumberland. Although the castle had fallen into disrepair since the days that Malcolm III of Scotland was killed there, in all Border warfare Alnwick was still one of the strongest fortresses on the English side. Rufus and Gavin Kerr were the two cousins captured with Jamie.
“The next gift we receive will no’ be so benign,” Duncan said.
A clansman down the long table slammed his fist down.
“And I say Hereford’s actions can no’ remain unchecked.
” The speaker was Angus, a bear of a man in his fifties with a scar across his cheek that bespoke of his own years in the earl of Roxburghe’s services.
“Strike while he thinks we are indecisive.”
“Aye!” another shouted. “Enough is enough, I say.”
“We can no’ give him the ransom he wants,” Angus said.
“Ninety thousand pounds Anglish sterling. No one has that kind of wealth,” another shouted. “And what of Rufus and Gavin? Will Hereford remove one of their ears to go with that bloody lock of hair?”
Duncan folded his arms. “We can prepare another response and spend yet another month awaiting his and this can go on for a year. I say fight.”
Hearty exclamations rose. All eyes turned to Ruark.
Ruark had been listening in quiet fury to the back-and-forth talk, his legs stretched out in front of him, an empty plate to the side of his elbow.
These were his father’s allies and friends.
Most of them family. Now they looked to him.
Not everyone trusted him. His fame might reside in tales of his exploits on the sea, but he had not yet proven himself as their chieftain.
If it was a war Hereford sought, then they were all nearly down that road.
“Do you not think this is what Hereford wants us to do?” he asked in the silence now confronting him. “A war, so he will have an excuse to make outlaws of us all? Send dragoons down on your families? Do you not think he will welcome the fight?”
Duncan faced him. “And maybe you’ve forgotten a Kerr is no coward to run from a fight that began when Hereford killed your father.”
“I have forgotten nothing.”
Ruark held no illusions about his own character.
But his uncle was a fool to think Ruark was anything like the younger man who had left Scotland years ago, or that his loyalties were anywhere but with Stonehaven.
Nor was he a novice when it came to sailing into a broadside.
Many an opponent had met his fate after lobbing the first salvo from a flawed position of power.
“Hereford’s first mistake is in thinking we are weak and without recourse,” Ruark said. “Do not let yourselves make the same mistake.”
The collective agreement came in mumbled ayes.
“The question is how we retrieve Jamie without more bloodshed. His or ours. I will not allow our actions this day to kill him.”
“Aye, but what choice has Hereford given us but to fight?” Angus asked.
“He has given us no choice,” Duncan said.
As if on cue, Colum arrived in the arched doorway. For the past few weeks, while negotiations had been going back and forth over the border in a useless time-consuming parley, Ruark had not been idle.
Colum gave Ruark a nod.
“But we are not helpless,” he told his men
Two men appeared with an elderly woman between them.
It had been Rose who had inadvertently given him the break he had needed the night he had stayed at the abbey, when she had told him that Tucker was in Redesdale to bury an uncle.
An uncle Ruark knew Tucker did not have.
Ruark had sent a man there the very morning he’d left the abbey.
An hour ago, Colum informed Ruark that his man had arrived with Countess Hereford’s former handmaiden.
They had found her in Carlisle after the disgruntled widow of the recently deceased captain of the guard at Kirkland Park came across an old letter in her husband’s effects.
After the exchange of a great deal of silver, the woman handed over the letter.
Wearing brown homespun that hung from her small frame and a faded purple-and-green plain wrap, Lady Hereford’s former maid looked terrified as she was brought to stand in front of the table, her eyes darting over the unfriendly bearded faces.
She clutched the wrap tighter around her shoulders as if the cloth were an iron shield.
Something about her seemed familiar . . .
“You are Anaya Fortier, former serving maid to Lady Elena Kirkland Lancaster, Countess Hereford?” Ruark asked over the murmurs of his men.
She hesitated. “What do you want? I have told your man, I know nothing . . . And I am not worth anything to anyone. My husband died years ago—”
“You are from Redesdale, Mrs. Fortier?”
Her knuckles tightened on the plaid wrap. She nodded.
“Are you acquainted with Friar Tucker? He is from Redesdale.”
“His father was a vicar living at Kirkland Park for twenty years.”
“Then he has family there? An uncle perhaps?”
“Nay, he does not.”