Chapter 29
Run away. Walk out! I do not care! Glenna glared at the wide open door, then realized her hands were in fists and she relaxed.
She looked down, surrounded by lush furs and thin fine sheeting on a huge soft bed, candlelight everywhere from over a hundred candles in the room.
Then she remembered she wasn’t alone. Also left in the midst of the opulent and massive chamber was another woman. Lyall’s sister?
They exchanged an odd look of surprise, suddenly alone together, strangers, then the young woman burst out laughing. “Oh, what a dear you are!”
She had the most lovely colored red-gold hair, not Lyall’s gold, but redder, like the rare, pinkish-gold hammered wristbands from Byzantine Glenna had seen in a seller’s stall once and could not bear to steal.
But those strands of that hair fell all about her face and shoulders, not unlike her own wind-tumbled mop.
Where was the velvet gown? Where were the jewels? Where was the smug look Glenna had expected? Except for her clear skin and soft, noble features, Lyall’s sister looked like a chorewife at the end of a long, hard day. Glenna was shocked silent.
Still laughing, Mairi said, “I have wanted to hit my brother with more than a wet towel!”
“Aye. I can imagine. Truly.” Glenna looked at the door, then shook her head. “You poor thing. I have been stuck with him for mere days, yet I cannot imagine the trial you must have had growing up with him.”
“Oh!” Mairi gasped, then in a laugh she snorted like a pig and put her hands to her face, which was bright red. Her giggles and embarrassment were infectious, and Glenna laughed, too, completely taken aback. Mairi’s open and blunt manner was a surprise. No coy noblewoman here.
The young woman closed the distance between them and gave a curtsey—an odd and uncomfortable gesture for Glenna to receive--holding her stained, dark leather apron and rough, worn, woolen gray gown with the torn sleeve and spotted with bits of hardened wax and splatters of oil.
“Lady Glenna,” she said, “I am Mairi Grey, Lyall’s sister and widow of my dear lord Robert Grey, and mother to those rascal lads who were bothering you. ”
“They did not bother me, Lady Mairi.”
Mairi shook her head. “Listen to us. We are not at court.” Mairi grabbed her hands and to her surprise and relief, Glenna felt as many calluses as she had on her own palms. “We are to be friends, I think, Glenna.”
“Moreso. Sisters,” Glenna admitted quietly.
“Sisters?” Mairi frowned, then her eyes grew large. “Lyall and you?”
Glenna nodded.
“Oh, Mother Mary and Joseph!”
Glenna winced a little, suddenly having second thoughts about spilling the truth—the lie?--so soon.
“You cannot be wed.”
“Aye.” The more people who knew, Glenna decided, the more she told, the more tight the knot would be around them and harder for Lyall to back away from her, and perhaps, the more difficult ‘twould be for her father or his councilors to dissolve the marriage.
She had no choice but to fight for Lyall, though she was not pleased with him at that moment and he still was not convinced how badly he needed her. Hardheaded, beautiful, stubborn man.
“But you are royalty.”
“So they tell me.” Glenna frowned and looked down at her pitiful clothing, then shrugged. “I look nothing like royalty.”
“Oh, you need not worry,” Mairi waved a hand casually in the air and if the news were nothing. “I have gowns for you, bolts of fabric, and more.”
Gowns? Glenna’s heart caught slightly. Gowns?
“My mother and I, along with some of the other women, have been stitching our days and nights away, but later with all that.”
“What kind of gowns?” Glenna whispered, almost afraid to believe the words she’d heard, afraid to ask, and thinking of her precious green velvet, far too big and that hung from her shoulders down to its ragged, knife-chopped hem, rolled up tightly in her satchel with her too-large red leather shoes.
Could she have two gowns, maybe three? What if one of them were silk?
She could barely breathe at the thought.
Mairi must not have heard her because she continued pacing on the thick carpet in the center of the room, then she stopped and said, “How can you be wed? Any marriage you make must be made with the king’s approval and witnessed.”
“We spoke vows to each other.”
“You handfasted? Lyall should be flogged with more than a towel. It matters not. You needn’t worry. A handfast cannot be binding. You are not a crofter or freeman. You are a Canmore. Any declaration of man and wife surely must be witnessed for legitimacy.”
Glenna started to tell her there was a witnessed document, but bit her tongue. She had best keep the proof to herself for now.
Mairi faced her, frowning. “I cannot believe Lyall is caught up in another complicated union.”
At first Glenna was deeply hurt, then she said, “Another?”
“Aye. He did not tell you about Isobel?”
Glenna shook her head. “He did say to me once that his wife was dead.”
Mairi came and sat on the bed next to her and her expression grew serious, “It was a terrible, terrible time, and a poor match, but Lyall was on his grand quest for Dunkeldon. Do you know about Dunkeldon?”
“I was there, but I did not know its significance. I found your brother standing at the graves of your father and brother. I had to prod him to find out that much. He would not speak of it, and I did not push because of the deep pain he carried in his eyes when he was there.”
Mairi nodded. “That is another story for another night.
‘Tis enough to know our father was declared a traitor days after his death and Dunkeldon burned to the ground. Our older brother died that day and our mother was left scarred from the burns she suffered. The lands were taken. We were very young. It was many years later that Lyall approached Huchon de Hay, whose only daughter Isobel’s dower lands included Dunkeldon, the very land our family had lost. Our stepfather tried to talk some sense into Lyall but he would have none of it.
His decision was made so the family stood by him.
“Isobel de Hay was raised in a convent, sheltered, and not the right match for my brother. She was as fragile as spun sugar, and about as sensible,” Mairi added in a wry afterthought.
“I believe she always thought she would become one of the sisters and wed her God, but her father never would have allowed it. She was too valuable to barter. The blood bond through Lyall to the Ramseys and the barony of Montrose, our stepfather and close friend and council to the king, was all too tempting for de Hay.”
A daughter’s barter value. There was something Glenna understood and she experienced a moment of deep sympathy for Isobel de Hay.
“Isobel was na?ve, and after they were betrothed, she was exposed to gossip and lies and manipulations of others with hard hearts and jealousies.
My brother had been very successful on the tourney circuit.
He had grown rich as Croesus from his prizes and purses, was acquiring the respect for the Robertson name-- he wanted so badly to vanquish all that had tarnished our name--and most expected that at some point, our stepfather would make him his heir to the barony.
But Lyall often kept to himself. There were not many he trusted, my husband, and at one time, another seasoned knight I only met a few times, Sir Ellar of Herth.
So often he was without close friends to stand by his side, and that time of the wedding was no different.
Isobel was a twit who listened to gossip.
The night before their wedding ceremony, when the de Hay castle was filled with wedding guests, she wailed and pleaded with her father that he had betrayed her, that he had shamed her because he gave her to the son of a traitor. Lyall heard her. We all heard her.”
Glenna closed her eyes. She could only imagine what that had done to him.
“The wailing was horrid. I wanted to gag her. The next morning they wed but soon afterward, while the celebrations were going on, she snuck away. Lyall was the one who found her body at the base of the tower, dead, broken.” A haunted look came over Mairi’s expressive face and she was pale.
“I have only seen that look on my brother’s face one other time, and I was so young.
That was how my brother had looked when he buried Malcolm and we left Dunkeldon. ”
Glenna wanted to know what happened to them, but she could see the telling of his story was painful enough for Lyall’s sister.
“By law, the dower lands stayed with de Hay because they had not yet consummated the marriage.”
“The betrothal was not binding enough?” Glenna asked.
“Not for the dower lands. The betrothal was the promise of the contract, but the wedding itself and the act of the marriage bed secures the deed. Lyall was left more broken than that poor, sad, young woman. Not because he had lost the lands, but what her words did to his pride. He blamed himself for her death and said had he treated her more kindly, she might not have chosen falling to her death over being wed to him. What she did to him.” Mairi shook her head.
“She broke his desire to even try to reclaim honor for his name, then finding her body seemed to break something else.
“In what way? He changed?”
Mairi nodded. “He put up a wall that none of us could break through. He had been close with Donnald, the baron, who has been a good father to us both. But Lyall blocked him out. He ran wild and drank and disappeared for days at a time. Finally, he came back one day, looking like he’d been to hell and back, and he let his squires and other men-at-arms go, found them positions with other houses, and other knights, and he struck out alone and none of us could stop him.
As far as I know, he never again joined another tourney. ”
“Where did he go?”