Chapter 8
Descending the path to the stable, Ruark still wore a leather jack and the red-and-hunter-green plaid, border-raiding attire, reminiscent of a long night of drinking with his men.
The rain had dissipated just after dawn, but under the plum trees, the ground was still damp.
Ahead of him, a half dozen stone buildings appeared out of the early-morning mist.
The stable block and distant carriage house was Angus’s dominion here at Stonehaven, a man in whose capable hands every Roxburgh earl of the last four decades had entrusted the care and breeding of his horses. Ruark was no different.
As he entered the stable, all around him the air was redolent of sweet hay, saddle soap, and linseed oil, and the ever-present pungency of manure that one found with a careless step.
The grooms and younger stable lads mucking the stalls looked up as he strode past them, his thick boot heels echoing on the flagstone floor.
He carried a note in his pocket that Colum had delivered to him shortly after Duncan left this morning.
Ruark’s ally, friend, and second-in-command, Colum was one of the few men Ruark trusted with his life.
Colum had returned during the night. He had a room at the house but rarely used it.
Nor, being British, did he take part in ceremonial or clan activities, preferring to bide his time in more favorable pursuits.
Thus, Ruark found him asleep on a pile of straw spooned with a naked woman.
They lay tangled in woolen blankets. The light picked out their shoulders and the curve of the woman’s breast.
No matter the place or the circumstance, Colum managed to find a woman. But even with his angel’s face and crown of golden curls, he looked nothing like the gently born solicitor he was when Ruark rescued him from a press-gang ten years ago near a dockside chophouse in London.
Ruark made no attempt at stealth as he knelt next to the two sleeping forms. Colum slept with a ten-inch dirk beneath his head, and as many a man had discovered, he took exception to being abruptly awakened. But then so did Ruark.
“Bloody hell, Ruark,” Colum mumbled without opening his eyes. “You couldn’t allow me an hour’s respite?”
Ruark rubbed the soft fur of an orange tabby that had run up to him as he crouched in the straw. “I need you to take Friar Tucker a letter.”
Colum disengaged himself from the sleeping maid and focused a jaundiced eye on Ruark’s face.
“Did we not just return from the abbey?” he kept his voice low.
“Did I not just spend two days searching the rocks beneath a waterfall for your blood-spattered remains? Did I not just spend those same two days trying to evade a platoon a’ dragoons chasing the thief who stole their captain’s horse? ”
The girl stirred, burrowing her head into the blanket. Ruark picked up the tabby and nodded toward the door. Throwing back the covers, Colum reached for his shirt and breeches. He dressed in seconds, then jerked on his boots. He grabbed his sword and baldric and followed Ruark out of the stall.
Giving the feline one final stroke, Ruark set it down. “Duncan left an hour ago for Alnwick Castle. He is bringing terms to Hereford.”
Ruark withdrew a letter from inside his shirt.
“With as fast as news travels, Hereford may well know that we have his daughter before our dispatch reaches him. If she is as valuable to him as I think she is, we won’t be riding with a contingency of men anywhere.
He will be coming to us. I need you to give Tucker this letter before that happens. ”
Colum reluctantly accepted the letter as one might a smelly boot. “Will Tucker read this before or after he does something contrary to his Christian beliefs, as in, takes a dirk to my heart?” he said in a low voice.
“I suggest you make sure ’tis before. I need to know if what Tucker said to me back at the abbey still stands. He will know to what I refer.”
“Aye, your concern for my welfare ever endears you to me.” He studied the letter.
“Have you had a sudden change of heart?” Colum said, when he recognized Ruark’s intent.
“The doors at the abbey are not that thick. I heard much of what was said in that room. Including the part where you told Tucker you would never join Kerr and Lancaster blood in marriage. Unless there is something else to which Tucker referred?”
“Give Tucker that letter.”
Colum wrapped a hand around Ruark’s arm.
“ ’Tis no simple matter here, Ruark.” His hushed words came out in a rasp.
“The girl is not of age. Hereford will merely have the marriage annulled and gleefully bring you up on charges of rape. She may be long lost, but she is still the daughter of an English earl and ’tis English law that binds you in this matter. You would need Hereford’s permissi—”
“Do tell. I do not need a lecture about the marriage act and English edicts. She is valuable to Hereford. Therefore she is valuable to me.”
“Bollocks. Gold is valuable to Hereford. This is madness. Make the exchange and be done with this. You never planned to remain at Stonehaven when this was over. By your own words you came back to make Jamie your heir. Why do you care?” Colum’s eyes narrowed.
“You actually want the girl,” he said in a loud whisper.
“Christ! Have you already bedded her? Hell, Ruark . . . What did she do to you when you followed her into that river?” He burst out in a laugh.
“I’ve not seen you hold a tendre for a female since that old cat that used to roam the hold and bring mice to your door as an offering of her fondness for you. ”
“Fook you, Colum. I am in no mood for your humor this day.”
Ruark was in no mood for a bloody lecture on his motives. He didn’t need to tell Colum a thing. Hell, he couldn’t explain half of it to himself, especially after a night of drinking. Except he was coldly sober.
Colum tucked the letter in his shirt. “What if Hereford denies the girl as his daughter?”
“Anaya Fortier saw Roselyn Lancaster last night and confirmed that she is the image of her mother, Elena. We have the right girl. But something does not feel right. I have my suspicions Hereford has known from the beginning where his daughter was. I just don’t know what Tucker has over him.
Hereford would never have allowed Rose to remain at the abbey. ”
“He would have if he spent most of his life at sea and it suited him to let the world think she was dead. Many men send their daughters to convents.”
Not Hereford.
Colum left for Hope Abbey and Ruark returned to the manor.
Having dismissed the staff earlier, he found the dining hall empty.
He walked past tables piled high with plates and glasses, empty whisky bottles, wine, and half-filled mugs of stale ale on his way upstairs to his room.
The dull light of a new day pressed against the tall windows in the gallery and somewhere Ruark heard the chime of a clock nine times.
But as he entered his chambers, his mind returned to Rose and the problem she presented him.
Maybe Colum was right. He wasn’t in his right mind. He had not returned to England to acquire the responsibilities of a wife or an estate.
He had planned to return to the Black Dragon and to the sea. He had not wanted Stonehaven’s responsibilities.
For his entire life, events and people had dictated and shaped the way he lived.
Only when he’d lived on the sea had he truly been free.
Now he was back in Scotland, thrust back into a world he’d not known just how much he’d missed until he arrived on her windswept shores.
He’d told Rose the truth when he had said he believed in very little, but something had changed inside him since he’d returned to the abbey as old yearnings and wants began to push through the holes in his heart, the way bilge water pushed through rotten oakum that plugged the deck of his ship. He recognized the danger of sinking.
And he recognized that Rose was the lightning rod at the center of gathering storm clouds.
One did not go into a storm with a leaky vessel. The Black Dragon had barely survived more than one squall, while under press of canvas, that snapped rigging and nearly laid her on her beam ends like so much flotsam. Until now, he had survived everything fate had thrown at him.
Was he making the wrong choice here?
He walked to the dresser and opened the top drawer.
He pulled out the neatly bundled letters tied with blue ribbon, all the letters Jamie had sent him, scribing bits and pieces of his life with boyish pride and how he waited for the day he would be able to join Ruark at sea and be just like his older brother.
What kind of example had he ever been to anyone?
“Does Julia know you’ve kept Jamie’s letters?”
He turned toward the voice. Mary Duff, his housekeeper, stood in the doorway of his bedroom.
Ruark retied the ribbon and replaced the bundle in the upper drawer. “I am sure I have you to thank for seeing that these found me,” he said.
“That lad saved every trinket ye ever sent him. Ye can thank Duncan that your father never found out. This whole business has been unnerving fer us all.”
Mary was a gray-haired woman, as stout of body as spirit, with a bearing to match the steel in her eyes.
She had practically raised him after a long illness killed his mother.
She wore a white apron pinned to her woolen plaid skirts, still too clean to have just come from the kitchens.
That, and the fact that she had followed him to his dressing room, gave Ruark pause as he dropped into a plum velvet chair to remove his boots.
He leaned an elbow on his knee. “I am bloody weary. If something other than need to turn down my bed has brought you to these chambers, it can wait. I intend to sleep all day and into tomorrow morning.”