Chapter 7 #2
As he pulled her toward him and she moved to thrust the dirk toward him, a grip of iron clamped hard around her wrist, startling her and throwing her off balance. Keeping her gaze fixed on her adversary, she saw his eyes widen just as Benjy’s had. His insolent grin returned a split-second later.
She had time only to note those facts and hear him say, “Thank ’e,” before a solid fist flashed past her ear to his square jaw and sent the man flying backward.
His feet left the ground before he crashed down and lay still.
Shifting her attention from the man on the ground to the one still gripping her right wrist in a viselike left hand, her startled gaze met Dev’s furious one.
He released her, reached down with his left hand, grabbed the man’s jack, and hauled him to his feet as if he weighed no more than a good-sized salmon.
“Can you stand by yourself, Gyb?” Dev asked quietly.
“Aye, sure, master,” the lout assured him, looking wary.
“Good,” Dev said. Letting go of him, he knocked him down again, moving so quickly that neither his victim nor Robina saw the blow coming.
“This is the lady Robina Gledstanes,” Dev said grimly as the man, Gyb, struggled to sit. “That lad you were skelping is her brother, Benjy, Laird of Gledstanes and Coklaw.”
“I didna ken,” Gyb replied from the ground. Blood streamed from his nose.
“You will henceforth treat them both with the respect due to their rank,” Dev went on. “You will also, if you have further complaints about anyone here, make those complaints to her ladyship, respectfully, or to me. Do you understand me?”
“Aye, sure, sir,” the man said, sitting now and bloody. “But ye canna blame a man for thinking she were nobbut a dairymaid or housemaid. Just look at her.”
“I thought you said you understood me, Gyb,” Dev said, his voice quieter and gentler than ever. The look in his eyes was like ice-covered flint.
Robina understood then, exactly, why men called him Devil Ormiston.
So did Gyb. “Aye, master,” he said hastily. “I do understand, I swear.”
When Dev continued to hold his gaze, Gyb cleared his throat, got awkwardly to his feet, and turned to Robina.
“I’m that sorry, m’lady, I didna ken who ye were,” he said humbly. “It’ll no happen again, I promise ye. I hope ye can forgive me error.”
“She does,” Dev snapped before Robina could speak. “Now, go and tell Jock that I want to see him, and see that you keep busy and out of my sight until my temper cools. That may be some time yet.”
“Aye, master, I’ll keep clear.” With that, Gyb hurried to the stable.
Benjy fairly danced with glee. “By the Rood, Dev, ye showed him!”
Turning a look on the boy nearly as flinty as the one he had shown Gyb, Dev said with surprising calm, “Go inside now, and wait for me at the high table. You and I will talk more about this. Meantime, give thought to how your own behavior may have caused the trouble, so we can discuss that.”
Nodding, Benjy turned toward the keep entrance.
“Benjamin,” Dev said, “a nod is not a proper reply to a command.”
Turning back, his face reddening, Benjy said, “Aye, I’ll think on it, Dev.”
“Have you not still forgotten something?”
Grimacing and shooting a rueful look at Robina before meeting Dev’s gaze again, Benjy said quietly, “Yes, sir, I forgot.”
“Take care that you do not forget again. You may go in now.”
Seeing a glint of tears in the boy’s eyes as he passed her, Robina forgot everything else. “If your other men behave like that brute, I don’t think much of them,” she said. “As for telling him that I’ve forgiven him, you can both think again. I’ll decide who deserves my forgiveness, not you.”
“Have you finished?”
Something in his tone stirred a tickle of caution, so she said, “Yes.”
“Good, give me that dirk.”
“I won’t,” she said. “Rab gave it to me, and he taught me how to use it.”
“Blethers,” Dev retorted. “He might have given it to you, but I’ll wager you plagued him witless to make him do it.
Whatever he taught you, I’d also wager any amount you like that he never thought you’d draw that dirk against a warrior like Gyb.
What did you hope to accomplish by thrusting it at him? ”
“I…” She paused. She had visualized such an encounter often, because Rab had told her she should plan for when she might have to use the dirk—or the smallsword that he had also given her. He had said she should do whatever she could to divert her opponent so she could strike true. “Rab said—”
“If Rab suggested that you could kill a man—”
“Not kill, just wound,” she said indignantly.
“Aye, sure, much better,” he growled. “Make the man angrier.”
The sarcasm in his voice fired her temper again.
“Sakes, do you think I’d want to kill anyone?”
“I know you don’t.” His voice was quieter, and his sweeping glance told her that he had remembered the others in the yard. “That you don’t mean to kill makes your actions more dangerous,” he went on. “By Heaven, if Rab were here, I’d…”
The look that crossed his face then told her two things: that Rab was fortunate not to have to face Dev just then and that Dev felt guilty and deeply saddened again to have thought such a thing, even for a moment.
She reached out to touch him, but he said brusquely, “We’ll continue this discussion inside.”
“Sir,” Jock Cranston said, striding toward them, “Gyb said ye wanted me?”
Robina snatched her hand back without touching Dev. As he told Jock that he had indeed sent for him, she remembered that her purpose in coming out had been to see how soon she and Benjy could finish planting Rab’s tree.
She glanced yearningly at the gate.
Dev said, “Jock, I want you to make clear to Gyb how near he came today to the hanging tree. He took it on himself to skelp young Benjy, and when her ladyship intervened, he had the temerity to threaten her.”
Jock grimaced. “I did see that some’un gave him a clout or two.”
“I did,” Dev said. “Her ladyship might well have gutted him had I not.”
Jock’s bushy eyebrows soared upward then. He glanced at Robina and back at Dev. “I’ll see to it, sir. D’ye want him flogged?”
“No, but put the fear of it into him and keep him out of my way.”
“Aye, sir,” Jock said. With a nod to Robina, he returned to the stable.
“I cannot go in yet,” Robina said. “I have things to do first. Also,” she added hastily when Dev frowned, “you told Benjy that he should wait for—”
“Benjy can go on waiting,” he said curtly. “It will do him good to wonder what I might do. But if you want to keep that dirk, Robina, you’d best stop trying to defy me. We have a few things we must settle between us straightaway.”
She cocked her head. “Will you let me keep carrying my dirk after we talk?”
“No, but I’ll let you keep it after I see that you understand why you must not carry it.” He waited a beat, then added, “Defy me, and I’ll keep it.”
Tempted to tell him that Rab had given her a smallsword and taught her how to use that, too—as proof that Dev should trust her with her weapons—she thought again and decided to hold her tongue. Dev would likely confiscate the sword, too, if she mentioned it.
It occurred to her only as they approached the main entrance that she had not heard a peep out of Rab since he had shouted at her not to be daft.
What if Dev was right? She had plagued Rab into teaching her, but she knew that he had taught her well.
Dev struggled to keep his temper. He wanted to put Robby across his knee again for her foolhardiness, but when memory of doing so before stirred his cock to life, he wondered if such thinking was not just as foolhardy.
As Warden of Coklaw, with the Scott’s Hall ladies concerned for her virtue, he dared not let his temper or any other emotion-driven impulse, or reflex, rule him.
Gesturing for her to precede him up the timber stairs, he said, “We’ll use the wee room off the hall landing, where Rab stowed visitors until he could see them when his men or others were in the hall.”
She obeyed silently. When she reached the entry, he leaned past her to open the door, thinking he ought to assign someone to act as porter. “Did Rab not have someone to tend this door?” he asked her as she stepped inside.
“Aye, sure, when he was here,” she said.
“We had a porter whilst Father was alive, too. After he died, whenever Rab was away, we had little need of one. We rarely had visitors other than on quarter days, and if Benjy or I went outside, we could open the door for ourselves. In the event that we did have a visitor, someone from the yard would escort him to Greenlaw. Dev, really—”
“Go on up,” he said. “I don’t want to talk here.”
With a sigh, she went up to the little room across from the great hall and looked around as she stepped inside, as if she’d expected someone else to be there.
The room was stark. A wide table with a back-stool behind it faced the door. Another stool faced the table, and two three-legged stools sat against the south wall, at Dev’s left. A long arrow-slit there and a second one over the table admitted daylight.
Shallow steps jutted from the west wall to the archer’s narrow platform, which served at present to hold a jar of quills, a tinderbox, candles, and other items within reach of anyone sitting behind the table.
The only ornamental feature was a rectangular, intricately carved wooden box at the near edge of the table that held a penknife, an inkpot, a silver seal, and sticks of red wax. Its lid lay nearby, inner side up.
“Sit down if you’d like,” Dev said.
“Are you going to sit, too, or tower over me and bellow?” she asked.
Irritation stirred. He did not think he ever bellowed.
He had certainly not intended to bellow at her.
But the look in her eyes was one that he had seen many times before on both twins and his sister Fiona.
Robina was testing him. He relaxed, amused, and gestured toward the nearby back-stool. “Sit, fierceling.”
To his dismay, her eyes brimmed with tears.