The Highlander's Virtuous Lady: A Historical Scottish Romance Novel

by Fiona Faris

  At length, the men had now had enough of their capering in the water and lay down on the table of the promontory to dry in the sun. Margaret and Joan still dared not stir from their hiding place, lest the men hear them, especially now that the splash and clamor of their sport had subsided.

  Margaret sat back down on a grassy hummock to await their departure. Joan stood on tiptoe and peered through the bushes.

  While the squires and pages withdrew to the back of the rock to sort through and straighten the company’s hastily discarded clothes, the two knights lay flat on their backs and bathed in the sunshine.

  They have fallen asleep, Margaret thought. We could be here for hours.

  But suddenly, the sandy-haired one rose on his elbow and considered his companion with a look of perplexity on his brow.

  “I meant to ask,” he said. “Where did you disappear to in the middle of the night? I stirred before cockcrow and had to rise to take a piss; your bed was empty.”

  The dark-haired knight raised both his hands and made a frame of them in which to catch the sun.

  “Yon serving wench, the buxom doxy with the bonnie brown hair,” he replied by way of explanation.

  Patrick flopped back down on his back.

  “Ah, you were wenching. I might have guessed. And was she worth rising for?”

  Gilbert sniggered, placed his hand on the crook of his elbow, and made a lewd gesture with his fist and forearm.

  “I had no difficulty ‘rising’ for her.” He laughed. “She was a winsome piece and no doubt. Breasts like firm autumn fruits fresh fallen from the tree and thighs as soft and creamy as milk still warm from the udder. The mere scent of her had my lance quivering.”

  The page boys giggled and were cuffed by the squires for their trouble.

  “And did she hang her favor on your lance?” Patrick grinned, continuing the conceit.

  “Aye, that she did.” Gilbert sighed contentedly at the memory. “That she did, with soft kisses and skillful fingers, before taking me as her mount and riding me across the field of the hayloft to her tilt, where we jousted for three strokes of the lance.”

  “And did your great helm not frighten the lass?” Patrick asked, raising his own tightly clenched fist in imitation of a swollen cock-head.

  “Perhaps,” Gilbert replied, pursing his lips as if he could not make up his mind on the matter. “But she was very accommodating.”

  At this, even the squires burst out laughing.

  By this time, Margaret had her fingers in her ears, and her eyes clamped tightly shut.

  “Well,” Patrick concluded, “let us hope you have not left the poor lassie with child. I doubt the innkeeper would thole a bairn being dragged around his hostelry on the ends of her apron strings.”

  “Let us just say,” Gilbert said cryptically, “that my seed was sown not in her ferny cleuch but in the sweet glen between her paps.”

  Joan snorted and clamped her hand over her mouth.

  “And what of you, Sir Patrick of the Ball-Headed Club?” Gilbert continued. “Where have you been swinging your morning star recently?”

  “Oh, here and there,” Patrick replied evasively.

  “Here, there, and everywhere, so I have heard,” Gilbert observed. “Did you really fuck Lady Beaumont, Countess of Buchan, when we were guests of the Comyns?”

  Patrick looked sheepishly at his fingernails.

  “I had little choice,” he admitted. “Widow Alice took rather a shine to me and probably would have fed me to her wolfhounds, had I refused her.”

  “But she is but a lass yet,” Gilbert pointed out. “A little plain; but, still, it cannot have been too onerous a duty.”

  “She grunted like a pig.” Patrick blanched at the memory,

  “A prettily formed pig, to be fair,” Gilbert added. “Shapely haunches and generous dugs.”

  “Aye, but with a snout and whiskers to match.”

  Gilbert laughed uproariously and slapped his naked thigh.

  “But surely it would have been dark in her chamber, man?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Patrick skelped Gilbert’s shoulder. “I had my eyes tight shut and was holding myself fast to the saddle like grim death.”

  Joan tugged Margaret’s hand away from her ear.

  “Did you hear that, Margaret?” She hissed excitedly. “The Countess of Buchan took her pleasure of him, and she’s a lady like yourself – an aristocrat, even.”

  “I do not want to hear.” Margaret hissed back. “We should not be listening. It is rude.”

  Joan looked her sister up and down with disdain.

  “Listen to yourself!” She sneered. “Do you honestly think you are better than the Lady Beaumont? She could be a queen.”

  Margaret just shook her head and covered her ears again. Joan turned back to the conversation on the rock across the river.

  “I hear Sir Simon has two daughters,” Gilbert was saying.

  “Poor bastard!” Patrick exclaimed.

  “What have you heard of them?”

  Sir Patrick considered it.

  “They are said to be pretty – beautiful, even. Very tall and fair. As alike as twins, only there is something like two years between them. And, of course, whoever wins the hand of the fair Margaret will inherit Sir Simon’s estates – since he has no heir of his own. And those would be tasty morsels.”

  Gilbert pondered this, nodding thoughtfully.

  “But, by all accounts, the sisters are tasty morsels by themselves,” Patrick continued. “Tall and fair, as I said, young and very beddable. The elder, Margaret, is considered a spirited mare, outwardly pure and virginal, but beneath her demure surface runs deep and treacherous waters, a maiden who knows her mind and will stop at nothing to win what she desires, which is to be in due course lady of her father’s estates. The younger, Joan, by contrast, is a bit of a wildcat, all teeth and claws, who can match any page in a mêlée on the training field and would, it is reckoned, make a fiercesome bedmate.”

  Joan turned, beaming, towards her sister. She looked like the cat that had gotten the cream and made clawing movements in the air between them, baring her teeth in a silent hiss and spit. She was much amused and approved of Patrick’s metaphor. Margaret huffed, finding the whole situation tedious.

  At length, the men arose and began to dress. The squires and pages had already garbed and assisted the knights, as was their duty.

  “Has anyone seen my braies?” Patrick asked, casting around the rock in search of them.

  The squires and pages adopted a hang-dog look; their masters’ clothes and equipment were their responsibility, and it would be their fault if anything had been mislaid. They set to searching in earnest, but to no avail. The braies were nowhere to be found.

  Gilbert eyed the vassals sternly, but Patrick just shrugged.

  “They are probably halfway to Berwick by now,” he said with a rueful laugh, indicating the flow of the river. “I’ll just have to go without them.”

  “Then let’s hope you do not go arse-over-tit in some lady’s presence, or they shall have a fine view of your knighthood,” Gilbert said grimly, then added in a low voice so that the others would not hear: “You are far too lenient with your underlings, Patrick. They require a firm hand, else they will seek to take liberties.”

  “Christ! It is but a pair of braies, man, hardly a thing of worth,” Patrick whispered back.

  “Ah, but it is the principle of the thing,” Gilbert insisted. “They should know their place and be reminded of it in the breach. A twist of a page’s ear would mind them of your authority.”

  “It would cast me as a petty tyrant, not a knight. Pettiness is hardly a chivalric virtue.”

  “Neither is weakness and laxity. If you do not show them the natural order of things, they shall start to forget themselves.”

  Patrick picked up his plumed cap and pulled it over his head.

  “I will show them in things that matter,” he insisted shortly, “and not over a pair o
f shitty braies.”

  And with that, he strode off down the slope towards where they had tethered their horses.

  Chapter Two

  When the men had gone, Margaret and Joan scurried back along the path and up around the castle rock to enter Neidpath by the postern gate. Once inside the thick red sandstone walls, they hurried upstairs to their bedchamber in the solar and collapsed, flushed and perspiring, across their beds.

  “What an adventure!” Joan gasped.

  “What an ordeal,” Margaret contradicted. “I thought we would never get away. I don’t want to have to go through anything like that ever again.”

  Joan pushed herself up on her elbows.

  “Away!” she said. “It was a bonnie sight, two knights in all the glory of their fine manhood, entertaining us with their bawdy tales. And did you see the size of their shapely cocks? I thought the time flew by all too quickly. I could have gazed upon them all day.”

  Margaret pushed herself up and scowled.

  “You would, you shameless hussy. I don’t know which I found more humiliating: having to listen to such unseemly talk or watch you swoon over their every word and slobber over their nakedness.”

  Joan threw herself back down on the bed and watched the scene unfold again on the chamber ceiling.

  “Ah, but they were fine bodies, especially the sandy-haired one,” she crooned. “Not that your dark-haired one was lacking in any way,” she added quickly.

  “He is not ‘my’ dark-haired one,” Margaret said haughtily. “I would not own such an ungallant as he. Bedding a serving wench, indeed!”

  “Ach, Margaret,” Joan scolded. “Don’t lie to me. Your eyes were drinking in the sight of him like those of a parched man in a desert, all those well-hewn muscles and that gorgeous prick of his. You caught him in an unguarded moment, that is all. I’m sure he’d be as gallant as you need him to be when gallantry is called for. We caught a rare glimpse of men as they are when they are not in the company of women, as they really are when the masque is dropped, in all their metaphorical as well as all their physical nakedness. Did it not excite you? Christ knows, it excites me.”

  Margaret rolled onto her side and drew up her knees.

  “It is something I prefer not to see,” she said in a distant hollow voice.

  Joan sat up quickly, a triumphant grin lighting her face.

  “See!” she cried. “You are thinking about him now, aren’t you? The memory is making you tingle in your stomach and between your legs. Deny it if you can!”

  Margaret rolled to the edge of her bed and sat up too, to face Joan across their chamber. Her features were twisted in anger, and her eyes shot a look of intense dislike at her sister.

  “I cannot deny it,” she spat. “But I still do not like it. It brings disorder. It disturbs the proprieties on which the divine order depends. Unless we observe those proprieties in our intercourse with one another, we would be no better than beasts in the field. That is why we have codes of chivalry and womanly virtue.”

  “Och, for pity’s sake, tread the measure more easily.” Joan scoffed. “Those things are all very well and necessary. But we must allow some respite to our ‘baser’ instincts, let them out to play awhile. Otherwise, we would shrivel up like nuns in a nunnery. Those knights this afternoon were just giving their virtue a holiday, as should you on occasion. Where was the harm?”

  Margaret bit her bottom lip at this, and a look of mischievous complicity slowly dawned on her face.

  “Well…” she began, “that Gilbert one was rather tasty.”

  “‘A tasty morsel’!” Joan chimed in, echoing the sandy-haired knight’s description of them.

  They laughed.

  Joan stood and began spinning and flouncing around the room.

  “A fine dish!” she chattered excitedly. “Especially the Patrick one. Can you just imagine being crushed to that broad chest, to feel those powerful arms around you, with those long, strong fingers tickling your private parts?”

  She closed her eyes and let out a long, loud sigh.

  Margaret shifted her bottom on the mattress as if she were plagued by a sudden itch.

  “If I could have yon Patrick to play with,” Joan went on, dreamily stroking a long tress of her silver-blonde hair, “I would tie him to these bedposts and tickle his balls until his cock was standing to attention. Then I’d let it stand sentinel while I explored the contours of his rocky crags from throat to toe, ignoring the stout fellow all the while and obliging it to wait for my pleasure until it was bursting with the want of me. Then, when I was good and ready, and he had melted my cruel heart with his pleas for mercy, I would climb atop of him and ride him hard until his flanks were slick with sweat and his eyes were rolling like a pony’s and his balls were tight, and his dowp was raw. And afterward, in public, I would sit with him at the table, ‘yea’-ing and ‘nay’-ing at my lord’s words, while all the time knowing the power I had over him.”

  Margaret was staring at her, struck by awe that was tinged with a little fear.

  “Jesus, Joan; you should be at Court.” She breathed out the words. “The factions could never withstand your oratory.”

  Joan threw herself down on her bed again, her long blonde hair fanning out around her head, her long slim arms and legs spread like the points of a star.

  Margaret stood and walked to the small leaded window that looked out over the Tweed. She was suddenly pensive.

  “The way things stand, we are likely never to be able to put our virtues to the test. Father dithers endlessly over what would be the most advantageous match for the family. If he does not make up his mind soon, I imagine we will both end up withering away in Neidpath Castle like two spent wallflowers.” She sighed. “Neither of us is getting any younger. I am already eighteen, and you are sixteen. Some girls are married by the time they are twelve. All the desirable young knights of the realm will have been snapped up from under our noses, and we shall be left with only the poor old toothless ones.”

  “If it comes to that,” Joan declared to the ceiling, “I’ll find a callow, well-hung stable boy with all his own teeth to fuck.”

  Margaret spun round.

  “Joan! That would be beyond the pale of propriety.”

  “If it is good enough for Lady Beaumont, Countess of Buchan, cousin to a man who would be king…” Joan left the point hanging.

  “Tush!” Margaret said dismissively. “You can hardly compare Sir Patrick to a stable boy.”

  “Alice le Latimer in her station is as high above a knight as I am a stable boy in mine.”

  “Well,” Margaret conceded, “not quite. But you may have a point.”

  “And it’s not as if I’d be taking him across the mounting block in the castle’s courtyard. I would exercise some discretion, as does every virtuous lady who fucks her inferiors.”

  Margaret covered her ears and grimaced.

  “Joan! For pity’s sake, will you stop using such a coarse tongue in public?”

  “But we are not ‘in public’,” Joan retorted, reasonably. “We are close in our own private chamber. That is the very point. One does not disturb the divine order in the closeness of one’s own private chamber. In your own private chamber, you can be free.”

  She kicked her heels in the air, her kirtle cascading to her waist to reveal again her long, lithe legs, her bare backside, and the long pink slash of her sex.

  “And, in any case,” she added, “it is all very well for you to speak of ‘a lady’s virtue’ when at least you will have need of it. There will be no fine marriage for me to play the lady in. As the younger daughter of a minor knight, I shall be lucky to marry a bonnet laird and count the cows as part of my household. There will be little need of ladyship there: just a fine pair of childbearing hips and a strong back for the work of mucking the byre.”

  Margaret traced the lead that held the tiny panes in place in the window.

  “That still does not excuse your lasciviousness and your lack of self-re
spect as a daughter of the house.” Margaret looked over at her sister and gave her a small sympathetic smile that belied the harshness of her words. “It may be a small consolation, but with Father’s indecision, a bonnet laird could be my fate as well.”

  Presently, it was time to prepare for that evening’s meal.

  Their mother, Lady Maria Fraser, had informed them that their father would be entertaining guests at the table and they knew that he was wont to put on a show of hospitality on such occasions. In consequence of this, the sisters were especially careful in their preparations.