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

by Fiona Faris

  Lady Maria nodded approvingly. Lineage was important; it gave the context to any story and made the motivations of the various actors comprehensible in a way that nothing else did in the story of the kingdom.

  “In the spring,” Halliday continued, “they returned to the Scottish mainland in two groups. One, led by Bruce and his brother, Edward, landed at Turnberry Castle in his native Carrick and began skirmishing in the south-west of his realm. The other, led by his brothers, Thomas and Alexander, landed slightly further south in Loch Ryan. But they were soon captured and put to death.”

  Margaret’s hand shot to her breast, and she gave a gasp.

  “Sir Gilbert?” she asked, in a small hollow voice.

  “By God’s grace, he was with King Robert’s party,” Halliday replied with a small, grim smile. “Do not fret, my lady; Sir Gilbert is hale and hearty. Though, of course, he is still in constant danger, as well all are.”

  “Thanks be to God!” Lady Maria murmured.

  Halliday went on.

  “In April, Bruce won a victory over the English at Glen Trool, before defeating Valence, Earl of Pembroke, at Loudoun Hill. In was at this time that Jamie Douglas rose and made his first foray for Bruce into the south-west. He even attacked and burned his own castle in Douglasdale for the Great Cause. Were it not for Douglas’ raids from the north and your own from the east, obliging the English to defend themselves on three fronts, I doubt that King Robert’s force would have suffered the same fate as that of his brothers, Thomas and Alexander. For that, the king is eternally grateful.”

  Margaret reached beneath the table and clasped Joan’s hand. She squeezed it warmly. Her reiving had helped to keep her Gilbert alive. That was her ‘Great Cause’.

  “Leaving his brother Edward in command in the south-west,” Halliday continued, “King Robert traveled north, into the Comyns’ lands, capturing Inverlochy and Urquhart Castles, as he stormed through the Great Glen, burning Inverness Castle and Nairn to the ground, then marched on Elgin. Sir Gilbert has been at his side every step of the way.”

  Halliday gave a long sigh, to mark a change of mood in his narrative.

  “Then King Robert fell ill, seriously so, probably owing to the hardships of the lengthy campaign. But he recovered over that second winter, and leaving John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, unsubdued at his rear, the king returned west to take Balvenie and Duffus Castles, then Tarradale on the Black Isle. Then he looped back by the hinterlands of Inverness to defeat the Red Comyn at Inverurie in May; he then overran Buchan and defeated the English garrison at Aberdeen.”

  “So, the power of the Comyns’ has finally been broken?” Patrick asked, though it was more of an astute observation than a question.

  “Aye,” Halliday replied. “It has been broken like a stick, and the Bruce’s only remaining rival as king of Scots is vanquished. After the defeat of the English garrison at Aberdeen, the king ordered the harrying of Buchan, to make sure all Comyn family support was extinguished. Most of the Comyn castles in Moray, Aberdeen, and Buchan were destroyed and their inhabitants killed. Bruce then ordered similar harryings in Argyll and Kintyre, in the territories of the Comyns’ allies, Clan MacDougall. The king himself crossed into Argyll and defeated the MacDougalls at the Pass of Brander and took Dunstaffnage Castle, the last major stronghold of the Comyns.”

  Auld Wat clapped his hands and rubbed them warmly together in approval.

  “Now, that is what I call ‘a war’.” He cackled. “Skirmishes and harrying; none of your big fancy battles wi’ flags an’ bunting and big lumbering carthorses with knights in shiny armor. Yon Bruce chiel seems to be a bonny fighter.”

  “That he is,” Halliday affirmed. “And he leads by example, always in the van on his troops.”

  “So,” Patrick reckoned, “that will give King Robert complete control over his realm north of the River Tay.”

  “Aye,” Halliday confirmed. “And he held his first parliament at St Andrews in the spring of last year, where he gained the fealty of all the peers of the realm and the recognition of the Church, despite his excommunication by the Pope. The tide has turned in our direction.”

  “Then surely Edward of England’s position in support of the Comyn claim is now untenable.” Patrick thumped the table with his fist. “Surely he must now withdraw his forces and concentrate on his campaign in France.”

  Halliday snorted.

  “Aye, you would have thought so.” He laughed. “But Edward died, did you not hear? His son, Edward the Second, is now on the English throne, and he is not half the man or as canny the diplomat that his father was. He is likely to fight on out of sheer spite, like a petulant laddie crying over spilt milk. King Robert has already written to him with the offer of peace, but young Edward has spurned it.”

  “May Hell mend him.” Margaret spat, resentful of the peril that the English king’s refusal kept Gilbert in.

  “The English occupation’s days are numbered,” Halliday observed. “Since the young Edward’s refusal, one English outpost after another has been captured and reduced: Linlithgow, Dumbarton, Perth… We have even made raids into Northern England itself and laid siege to Castle Rushen on Man, denying the island's strategic importance to the English.”

  Auld Wat nodded approvingly, his features slack with awe.

  “As I said,” he repeated, “he’s a bonny fighter, your King Robert. He kens fine weel he could never defeat the English on open ground, so he’s picked them off little by little. I’m glad to have been a pairt of his mischief-making.”

  “Aye,” Patrick observed. “He has learned the lesson of Methven. And as he grows stronger…”

  “… things will soon come to a head.” Halliday completed the thought for him.

  There was a festive mood in the hall at dinner that afternoon. John Halliday recounted more of his adventures in the clandestine service of his overlord, the Bruce, while Auld Wat regaled the company with some bloodcurdling adventures of his own. The ladies’ spirits were buoyant, and the rafters rang with peals of laughter that had been absent for many a month.

  If anything, however, Margaret’s longing for her Gilbert was more intense, now that she had learned that his return was almost in her grasp, her prize almost won. Her heart ached for him with a longing that grew more agonizing as she came closer to her goal. She reveled in the celebratory mood of the company, but she also felt a need to be by herself for a spell, to gather her thoughts and emotions, to take stock and some private delight at the impending end to her nightmare.

  As the men’s voices thickened and grew sluggish with the wine, and the ladies began to suppress small yawns behind the backs of their hands, Margaret excused herself and made her way up the stairs into the solar.

  Margaret sat in a chair by the empty grate. Over the years, she and her mother had added decoration to what had been, when they first arrived, a cramped bare chamber. Embroidered hangings emblazoned the walls: light-colored depictions of hunts and stately progresses of knights and ladies through bucolic woodland scenes; azure blue seascapes with castellated ships and massive golden-scaled whales and fishes; Bible-scenes translated into the world of feudal Scotland, with God as king and the apostles as mail-clad knights with swords in their belts; and, Margaret’s personal favorite, a woodland scene in which a young maiden sits beneath a pear tree with a unicorn laying its head in her lap, while curly-bearded lions romp and gambol through the trees. Rich velvet curtains, the material purloined by William Scott from a traveling merchant and gifted to Margaret with great ceremony and deference, hung over the window from a gaily painted pelmet and reaching all the way to the floor. Various knick-knacks and ‘mindings’ crowded the mantelshelf above the fireplace, silver and bone trinkets, a gold crucifix encrusted with jewels (another gift from William), acorns and pine cones, feathers and bones and queer-shaped stones, including a long tail feather from a golden eagle in minding of Gilbert.

  Gilbert! she thought.

  Gilbert was alive and well. God willi
ng, he would soon return to her, and she would be returned to her rightful place at Neidpath and restored to her rightful station as its mistress. Peace would reign, and they would live happily ever after, as happily as she had lived before the disaster that had befallen them.

  She wondered where Gilbert would be laying his head that night. She wondered if he was, at that very moment, thinking of her.

  She felt a strong connection fall into place between them, a connection that spanned the leagues and leagues that separated them.

  The moon, she thought.

  The same moon would be smiling down on both of them. She suddenly fancied that the moon could join them, almost physically, that a silver moonbeam could be their communion.

  She rose and parted the curtain to open the window. The latch was stiff, but she managed to free it. But the window was frozen fast, jammed through lack of use. She struggled with it for a few minutes, growing increasingly frustrated and irritated by it.

  Then she remembered: the window in Patrick and Joan’s bedchamber opened; it had opened easily the day, oh so long ago now, it seemed, that William had shown her the swallows’ nest. And it looked out on the same south-eastern sky in which the moon would have risen.

  She hurried through into her sister’s bedchamber and slipped behind the curtain. The window opened easily. A bright silver moon hung like a lantern in the sky, casting a milky-blue light over the canopy of the forest and trailing a shimmering path across the distant lochs of the Lowes and St. Mary. She lifted her pale, angular face towards the heavens and bathed it in the cool moonlight. She could feel in her veins that, at that precise moment, Gilbert was doing the same, that, wherever he was, he was caressing her skin in that moonbeam.

  She cupped her breast in her hand and ran her other hand down the curve of her hip. Her flesh felt soft and pliant beneath the silk of her gown. She felt the blood shimmering like the moonlight in her veins. Her hand came across from her hip to rest its palm over her sex, and she closed her eyes in melting ecstasy.

  “Gilbert!” she whispered.

  Suddenly, her reverie was interrupted by a stumble and giggle from the stairs leading up from the hall and into the living quarters of the solar. Margaret’s eyes shot open in horror.

  It was Joan and Patrick, coming to bed.

  She cast around for an escape route, but to her dismay, she realized that there was none. She would be caught encroaching on the privacy of her sister’s apartment, unless…

  Margaret squeezed herself back as far as she could into the shallow recess of the window and checked that the long velvet curtain was drawn fully across. She hoped that neither Joan nor Patrick were feeling so romantically inclined that they too would want to gawp at the moon. She would just have to wait until they had fallen asleep before she could retreat to the refuge of her own chamber.

  However, neither Joan nor Patrick had any intention of going straight to sleep.

  “I’m going to fuck your brains out,” Joan announced just as soon as the chamber door was closed on the world.

  “Oh, you are, are you?” Patrick replied, as if intrigued by the challenge.

  “That I am.” Joan purred a throaty growl.

  “And what if I’m too drunk and I fall asleep?”

  “I will fuck you anyway,” Joan insisted. “Have you never noticed how sore your cock is when you wake up in the mornings? At least your cock doesn’t sleep. It is always glad to see me.”

  Patrick chuckled. He had clearly had too much to drink. Joan sounded a little wine-sodden too.

  “I have noticed how it always stands to attention whenever you walk into a room,” he observed.

  “As alert as a dog that thinks it is about to be set after the hare,” Joan crooned. “Now, let us release the hound.”

  Margaret heard a soft rustling.

  “My, what is this?” Joan said in surprise. “The hound would rather stay in the kennels?”

  “Give him time to stir,” Patrick insisted. “He hasn’t quite caught the scent yet.”

  Joan purred.

  “The let us see if we can help him,”

  Despite herself, Margaret parted a small chink in the curtains and pressed her eye to it.

  Directly across from her, on the other side of the bed, Joan was crouched down in front of Patrick with his semi-erect member in her hand. She was slowly stroking the length of it, pulling the foreskin back as far as it would go on each down-stroke and rolling her palm around the glistening glans at the top of each up-stroke. Patrick was smiling down at her, combing his fingers through her cropped, almost white-gold hair.

  As Margaret looked on, Joan stopped stroking, and clutching his shaft tightly in her fist, transferred the head of his cock into her mouth. The effect was electrifying. Patrick’s face turned towards the ceiling and he let out a long plaintive moan. His legs began to quiver and his hips to tremble uncontrollably as Joan worked her mouth over the end of his penis, her lips emitting the occasionally little sucking smack.

  Patrick shrugged his surcoat from his shoulder and hauled his tunic and shirt over his head. He now stood naked before Joan’s ministrations. She reached behind her and undid her girdle, and he tugged her kirtle over her head. To Margaret’s horror, she saw that Joan was wearing no undergarments again, but just a short chemise.

  As her kirtle came off, Joan rose to her feet and hooked her arms around Patrick’s neck. Like Margaret, she was tall and slender, with long firm limbs, small apple-like breasts, and lean hips. Only, her figure was lithe rather than willowy, honed by exercise into harder lines in contrast to the softer lines of her sister’s form.

  Their lips locked in a deep, hungry kiss, crushing Patrick’s now rigid penis between them. They were almost the same height, with Patrick exceeding her by only a few inches. They devoured each other eagerly.

  It was Joan who broke the kiss. She took a step back from him, placed a palm flat against his chest, and shoved him hard back onto the bed.

  She sprang onto his chest and pinned his shoulders to the mattress with her knees, her sex poised above his face.

  “Eat me, villein,” she commanded and slipped forward.

  She ground the lips of her vagina against his mouth. He sucked and nibbled and probed them with his tongue. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and made him look up into her eyes as he pleasured her. She looked down at him like a mistress might look down at a pleasing pet.

  Then her expression changed. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the ceiling. Her hands came up to cup and squeeze her breasts, and the rhythmic rock of her hips grew more forceful as she ground herself against his lips and nose.

  She reached around and took hold of his penis with one hand, while she pinched and rolled her nipple between the fingers of her other hand. She pumped his cock with strong, forceful strokes. From beneath Joan’s hips, Margaret heard plaintive groans and squeals of pain. Joan rocked ever faster and harder, a low moan gurgling deep in her throat. Her fist plunged down the length of Patrick’s cock quicker and quicker until it was a blur. With a buck and a muffled scream, Patrick came, a long powerful jet of semen shooting into the air.

  But still, Joan did not stop. She threw her shorn head back and laughed as she continued milking Patrick’s red and swollen member. His hands came around to grasp Joan’s thighs and try to pry them apart, but she clamped them tighter. She slowed her hand and smoothed the sticky semen into the glistening head of his cock with circular motions of her thumb.

  “Eat me,” she commanded again.

  Patrick began to lap eagerly at her clitoris, spreading the lips of her vagina with his fingers., while she tickled the eye of his penis with her nail. Patrick’s body was trembling uncontrollably, as if he were unbearably cold. But he forced his tongue to keep lapping at the hard, pink bud beneath the light, almost invisible fuzz of Joan’s pubic hair, as she arched her back and began to pump his cock again.

  They both climaxed together. A second spurt of semen pulsed from the eye of Patrick’s
cock, splashing his thighs and dribbling down his shaft, while Joan rose on her knees and grasped the bedposts in a cruciform of ecstasy, her pert apple-breasts heaving as she gasped for breath.

  Behind the curtain, Margaret came too, in a long shuddering spasm. Her gown was gathered up about her waist, her middle finger still pressed to her swollen clitoris, and the hand that had been squeezing her breast was crammed between her lips to stifle her cry.

  After a moment, she removed her hand from between her legs and let her gown fall to cover her again. Perspiration beaded her brow and dampened her armpits, though she almost shivered with cold. She felt no shame, although she had thought, when she succumbed to the lust that the spectacle of Patrick and her sister had aroused, that she would. The cool moonlight – Gilbert – still streamed over her, and it was with him that she had been making love. She had nothing to be ashamed about.