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

by Fiona Faris

  Margaret continued to lie until she heard his heavy tread descend the stairs. Then she rose and pulled her gown back over her head. She would have to brush her disheveled hair, she minded herself, before she went down to supper, and bathe her eyes to take away the redness and the streaks of her tears.

  She hoped that Auld Wat, Mary, and William would have departed home to Harden. She could not bear the thought of having to see William again that evening.

  She straightened the bedcovers, and as she turned to leave for her own chamber, she noticed that the window was still ajar. She stepped across to close it. As she reached for the latch, she glanced out and saw William in the gloaming, leading the maid-of-all-work, Jean, into the forest.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The three reivers watched the English supply train lumber its way up the long curving drove road out of Moffat. The sky was just beginning to lighten over the hills to the east. A steady rain fell, and the surrounding fells emerged gray and dreary from the night. The hills were silent, apart from the gurgling of the Moffat burn in the glen below the ridge on which they stood, well beneath the skyline, their gray mail tunics and steel helmets leaving them invisible against the murky hillside. Even the moorland birds lay silent in their bields, patiently waiting the rain out.

  Half a dozen heavy wagons, Auld Wat counted, hauled by oxen and escorted by twenty or so foot soldiers armed with pikes and swords. The wagons were happed with jute sacking so Wat could not discern what plunder they carried. It would be worth something, whatever it was, he reckoned, given the heavy escort that was there to protect it. He hoped it would be silver coin, to pay the wages of English troops.

  Wat, Patrick, and William turned and slunk back around the crest of the hill, leading their horses by their rope bridles, to where the rest of the raiding party waited.

  “Right, lads.” Auld Wat chaffed his hands together. “Here’s the plan.”

  There were thirteen of them, including Joan, who was dressed in a leather cuirass, which hid her breasts, and thick wool leggings. Her shorn head was enclosed in a steel helmet lined with a linen hood. She did not look out of place among the men.

  They gathered around Wat, listening intently.

  “We’ll ride ahead, on the far side of the hills that flank the glen and take them when they ford the Black Hope burn. Sir Patrick here, will take half the men to Saddle Yoke, above the ford; the rest of us will conceal ourselves in the Hang Burn cleuch below the ford. When the wagons are plothering through the ford, Sir Patrick will come at them along the road. That will be our signal to fly from the cleuch and come at them from behind. Any questions?”

  The men shook their heads.

  “Once the English are slaughtered,” Wat went on, “and, mind, not one of them is to be left alive to tell any tales, we will take the wagons up the Black Hope to Falcon Craig. No one will find them there. We’ll have a couple of days’ peace to butcher the cattle, dismantle the wagons, and disperse the supplies among the clan. Any siller goes into the crypt o’ St Mary’s for safekeeping.”

  He slowly scanned the faces around him.

  “All right?”

  “Aye,” the men mumbled, more or less in unison.

  “Then, let’s ride.” Wat grinned his toothless grin and swung himself up into his saddle.

  The reivers mounted and set off down the back of the hillside into Graygill Cleuch, and from there, through the glen towards their ambush point.

  The men were in fine spirits, laughing and joking as their horses trudged through the rain. They were in a buoyant mood at the prospect of plunder and seemed little concerned about the combat that it would bring them, as if the fighting was a mere detail that troubled them less than the weather would trouble a duck. They were all armed with light lances, which they carried over their shoulders as carelessly as a farmer would bear a rake or a hoe, and each had a long dirk in his belt. Joan alone had forsaken the lance for a quarterstaff, which she wore tucked into a cross-belt diagonally across her back.

  The ground was sodden beneath the horses’ hooves, but the sure-footed ponies plodded on at a steady walk, and the raiding party easily made faster progress than the lumbering supply wagons that followed the pack-road running parallel to them in the adjacent glen. They passed deep rocky gullies and scree slopes. On a fine day, they would have expected to see peregrines, ouzels, and perhaps even an osprey soaring regally above Loch Skeen, but the steady rain had cleared the landscape of all but the feral goats and the occasional hare.

  Joan felt the cold drip of the rain dropping from the tail of her helmet and down the collar of her cuirass; she felt cold and miserable but was determined not to show it. Her backside was soaking and chaffing on the wet saddle and her fingers holding the reins were turning blue with cold.

  After an hour, Auld Wat and his contingent broke away to take up position in the Hang Burn cleuch. Patrick, William, and Joan carried on for another half-mile with their band to take up position at the Saddle Yoke. Between them lay the ford through which the heavy wagons would have to cross the swollen Moffat Water.

  It was a long wait. The foul weather made progress difficult for the heavy wagons, whose solid wooden wheels churned the road into a quaggy mire. The oxen slipped and slithered in the mud, and the escort frequently had to throw their pikes onto the backs of the wagons to put their shoulders to the wheels. The soldiers cursed and swore as they became increasingly caked in mud and the incessant rain beat down on them.

  Meanwhile, the reivers sheltered as best they could in the gullies in which they had taken up position above and below the ford. The men were mostly inured to the rain, simply turning their backs to the gusts of wind that drove it across the hillsides and tholing it patiently. They had long ago learned that it was no use grumbling and complaining; the weather was something they could not affect, so it was merely a distraction and a foolish waste of energy to worry over it. The weather was what it was, and that was the end of it; it was better to conserve one’s strength and remain focused on what they could affect, which was the outcome of the next battle. So, they stood as stoically as their fast-paced ponies, letting the rain run as easily from them as it ran from a duck’s back.

  After another hour, the supply train passed the mouth of the Hang Burn cleuch. Wat cackled with satisfaction, rain dripping from his grizzled chin and the end of his nose, as he peered over the tumbled boulders that lay scattered around the mouth of the ravine and watched the wagons lumber into his trap.

  A few hundred yards further along the glen, Patrick, William, and Joan were also watching the train’s progress as it rolled down towards the ford. As the leading wagon entered the water, William signaled his reivers to mount.

  The first wagon stalled halfway across the ford, its wheels snagging in the shifting stones of the riverbed. The train came to a halt behind it, the oxen bellowing fretfully.

  “Get that wagon moving!” the captain of the troop said with a bark.

  The soldiers reluctantly put down their pikes and waded into the swollen torrent of the burn.

  “Now!” William commanded, and the reivers burst from the entrance of Saddle Yoke and galloped down the track towards the ford, their short lances lowered in front of them.

  “The Scotts are out!” the reivers shouted as they raced in a ragged line towards the hapless English pikemen.

  The soldiers splashed and scrambled back onto the bank, scrabbling for their discarded pikes. But, before they could arm themselves and form their defense, the reivers were through the ford and upon them. Their ponies reared and pranced as the Scotts skewered the soldiers like fish in a pool, their short lances piercing chain mail and ribs, driving deep into the backs and chests of the floundering escorts.

  Joan fought with her sword, cleaving it down through helmeted heads and armored shoulders, exulting in the blood that sprayed her face and sword arm. Each life she took was a small part payment for the life of her father.

  A remnant of the guard broke away from the
mêlée and ran back up the track in the direction from which they had come. However, they were met by the charge of Auld Wat’s band, which had emerged from the Hang Burn cleuch and was now bearing down on them from the rear.

  “The Scotts are out!”

  A few of the soldiers broke for the hills, but reivers pursued them singly and in pairs, cutting them down and putting them to the dirk.

  The battle took only minutes. Following the devastating charges, the reivers slid from their mounts and scurried among the groans and screams of the wounded to dispatch them with a cursory but efficient blade to the throat. The waggoneers were dragged from their seats and swiftly butchered. Meanwhile, the draught-oxen stood patiently by, tholing the carnage around them as patiently as they tholed the rain.

  The reivers moved quickly around the bodies, stripping them of anything of value, which was not much: a pair of boots here, a medallion there… Then they leaped onto the wagons, and pulling back the sacking haps, began sorting through their freights, lightening the loads by discarding over the sides anything that was of no use to them.

  Auld Wat himself, who had a nose for such things, discovered in the third wagon the kist of silver that had been destined for wages.

  “The whores and taverners maun go hungry this night.” He sniggered. “For the soldiers shall hae nae money to pay them.”

  The reivers cheered. They knew that they would get their portion of the loot to keep well into their old ages.

  Wat turned to Patrick.

  “I’m sure your King Robert would rather hae this in the kists o’ honest thieves like ourselves than keeping his English loons sweet,” he observed.

  “Aye,” Patrick replied, “a disgruntled army is worse than no army at all. The English will be wanting away home if they’ve no wages to fight for.”

  “It’s like I always say, Sir Patrick,” Wat said with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “it’s siller that mak’s the world gang round. It’s a rare fool indeed that will fight just for duty or a lord’s fancy standard. Where’s the profit in that?”

  Patrick grinned.

  “Well, that is the difference between us, Wat Scott. I’m a gentleman and knight, while you are just a lawless thief.” He laid a hand on Wat’s skinny shoulder. “I’d like to think that what you did here today was just a tiny bit as much for freedom and justice as it was to line your own nest. Or are you just a magpie and not a man at all?”

  Wat threw out the wings of his cloak and gave a raucous squawk, before turning away in laughter.

  Patrick turned with his lips still curled upward in a smile. That smile began to fade as his eyes lighted on Joan, who was sitting quiet and sullen on a rock, gazing out over the waters of the ford.

  He walked over to her and sat down beside her. She did not so much as glance at his presence, but just continued to stare, lost in her own thoughts, at the passing river.

  Patrick frowned as he took in her blood-spattered clothes and face. A thick smear of gore besmirched her right cheek.

  “You should not be here, my love,” he murmured.

  Her eyes shifted slowly, distractedly towards his.

  “You should not be here,” Patrick repeated.

  “Where, then, should I be?” she asked after a pause. “Stirring the broth back at Dryhope? You know I would only burn it.”

  Patrick smiled at this, but it was a rueful smile.

  “You should not see such horrors.”

  “Ah,” she said, “you would spare me the truth of war.”

  “They are the stuff of nightmares.”

  “Yes.” She reflected, looking around at the bodies that lay strewn across the banks of the ford. “There seems little glory and honor in this. It’s not like you tell it in the halls.”

  Patrick thought for a while, his brow drawn down in a pensive scowl.

  “There is a higher value to this,” he said eventually. “And it is for the sake of this higher value that this…” He swept a hand across the scene of carnage. “… that this is done.”

  Joan snorted.

  “That sounds dishonest, a mere excuse,” she replied. “All I can see are mangled limbs and widows’ tears and orphans’ moans. At least there is an honesty to Auld Wat. He does not try to dress all this up in the clean clothes of chivalry and honor; for him, it is all for the sake of plunder.”

  Patrick hung his head and scraped at the pebbles with the toe of his boot.

  “And what of you? What is all this for the sake of?”

  Joan’s face hardened with a look of determination.

  “My father,” she replied fiercely.

  “Revenge,” Patrick said, giving it its name. “Well, the blood feud is certainly something Auld Wat and his ilk can well understand. He would just as happily have slaughtered Kers here today as he did Plantagenets. But is murdering for revenge any better than murdering for plunder?”

  “It is no better and no worse,” Joan returned as quick as a flash. “But at least they are both honest motives and not disguised as something ‘higher’.”

  Patrick thought some more.

  “Then,” he said eventually, “there is perhaps not that much difference. After all, what is this war but a blood feud between the Bruces, the Comyns, the Balliols, and the Plantagenets? And, larger still, between the Plantagenets and the Capets in France?”

  “Ah, but they each think they have ‘Right’ on their side, whereas Wat and I… well, we don’t make such grand claims as that. We are each just trying to do the best we can for our families, right or wrong, and to Hell with the rest. Just as my father was with all his juggling and maneuvering.”

  The wagons had been jettisoned of their excess weight, and Auld Wat was calling on the raiding party to move out.

  Patrick rose to his feet and extended a hand to help Joan up.

  “You probably have the right of it,” he conceded. “Perhaps we are all just caught in a mill that grinds us into flour for someone else’s bread. But that is where we are, call it ‘fate’, ‘destiny’, or whatever you will. If it is the nature of things, then it is the nature of things, and there is no point in wishing it any different.”

  Joan smiled at him and shook her head.

  “You sound just like my sister and my mother,” she observed. “But, here I am, dressed like a man and cleaving heads from shoulders. A virtuous lady indeed!”

  “In France…” Patrick laughed. “… you’d be burned as a witch, you unnatural creature, you.”

  Joan pushed his shoulder playfully as they turned towards their ponies.

  “Wheesht!” she admonished. “It might come to that yet!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Four Years Later…

  The household had settled into a pattern of normality. Joan and Margaret ran the small household between them, with Margaret assuming charge when Joan was out on a raid. Patrick flourished, pleased to be able to contribute to the Great Cause by harrying the English supply trains. Wat Scott’s kist swelled with English silver, while the English troops often had to go without their pay. Mary Scott continued to be a good friend to Lady Maria, frequently having her as a guest at Harden Castle; as different from one another as chalk and cheese, they nevertheless became almost inseparable. Their small household was augmented during the second year, when Joan bore Patrick a child, a long-limbed blond boy, Simon, who promised to be the image of herself.

  William respected Margaret’s virtue. He did once suggest that she ‘might make use of him for her pleasure’ until her man returned to her, but she politely declined his kind offer. She did, however, accept the pledge of his sword as the champion and protector of her honor. This unnatural act of chivalry on his part made him, she reflected, a knight of sorts.

  It was in the late autumn of the year that Patrick received an emissary from King Robert. He was brought in, trussed and gagged, by a party of Wat’s men who had intercepted him on the slopes above the Devil’s Beef Tub near Moffat, the deep and remote valley where the Scotts secret
ed the cattle they reived from their neighboring clans. They had taken him first to Harden, where Auld Wat had interrogated him, whence they had brought him to Dryhope once Wat had satisfied himself that the poor chiel was who he said he was and had nothing worth stealing about him.

  Patrick, Wat, and the ladies sat around the table in the hall while the emissary, John Halliday of Corehead, a brother-in-law to the martyred William Wallace, hungrily supped a bowl of thick broth. The ‘hospitality’ of the Scotts had not extended to feeding him.

  “It is a long tale,” Halliday began, as he scraped the last of the mutton broth from the bottom of the wooden bowl with a horn spoon. “King Robert and his followers spent the first winter in the Hebrides, sheltered by Christina of the Isles, kin to the Earl of Mar. Her brother, Gartnait, is also married to a sister of the Bruce.”