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

by Fiona Faris

  Her situation seemed hopeless. With a groan of despair, she sank to the floor and wept.

  The reivers rode hard through the twilight. They followed the Yarrow Water to Philiphaugh, where it joined the Ettrick Water, from where they intended to strike out across country to Lilliesleaf and Jeddart, a few miles to the south of which sat the Kers’ Ferniehirst Castle. A five-hour journey, Auld Wat hoped they would arrive just after midnight.

  Halfway into their journey, they halted by the confluence of the Yarrow and Ettrick to let their horses drink. Night had fallen, but a full moon hung like a lantern in the sky, casting a milky light over the land. An owl hooted three times in a nearby wood, as if to draw attention to the deep silence. Only the jingling of the river over its shale bed and the occasional snort of a pony clearing water from its nostrils disturbed the profound peace.

  Patrick came up to Wat, who was deep in thought by the water’s edge.

  “What is your plan for when we get there?” he asked.

  Wat raised his eyes to peer eastward, as if he could discern the lie of the land around Ferniehirst from that great distance.

  “They will be expecting us.” He sighed. “The doors will be barred, and men-at-arms will be patrolling the land around the castle. They’ll have the lassies somewhere safe; locked high in the solar in the tower, no doubt.”

  “Perhaps we have no choice but to pay the ransom,” Patrick suggested.

  Wat smiled at Patrick as if he were simple-minded.

  “I’m thinking we need something to bargain with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean John Ker has a daughter married to a cousin’s son, Adam Ker, who’s the laird of Monteviot, to the north o’ Jeddart. If we were to call by there on our road to Ferniehirst and lift wee Anne and, maybe, her infant Johnnie, John would be amenable to trade.”

  Patrick was mortified.

  “But that would make us as bad as the Kers,” he protested.

  Auld Wat laughed.

  “Oh, believe me, we’re worse than the Kers. I’m minded to slit the lassie’s throat in full sight of her faither and then offer to spare his grandson in exchange for my Mary and the Fraser women.”

  “Christ!” Patrick swore. “You drive a hard bargain. What kind of people are you in the Marchlands?”

  Auld Wat gave him a grim look, his features suddenly sullen.

  “Desperate people,” he replied. “And sometimes you have to be more desperate than your neighbor if you’re not to go under.”

  “Well, God forgive you if it comes to that. I wouldn’t have the blood of an innocent mother on my hands.”

  Auld Wat clapped him on the shoulder as he turned back to the horses.

  “I ken fine I’ll be riding into Hell at the head of the Scotts,” he remarked, but only half-jokingly. “And I’ll toast the De’il on the end o’ my lance.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Scotts fell upon Monteviot just after midnight. Approaching the house on foot, they eluded the watchmen stationed on the roof of the tower and found the keep door unlocked. The household servants, asleep in the undercroft, were quickly overcome and a group of Scotts men rapidly ascended the stairs through the hall to the solar and snatched Anne Ker and her child from the bedchamber, leaving her husband, Adam, run through by a sword in his own bed.

  With a dirk to the wee boy’s throat, the Scotts fled to where they had left their horses, mounted, and galloped down the carters’ road towards Jeddart.

  They passed through the burgh swiftly, on a ‘hot trod’, raising a hue and cry, with each man carrying a piece of burning turf on the point of his lance to openly announce their ‘lawful’ purpose.

  “Under March law,” Patrick had explained to Joan as the company paused at a cottage on the outskirts of Jeddart to obtain turfs and the fire to light them with, “a clan which has been raided has the right to mount a counter-raid within six days, to recover his goods. No one will meddle with a band on a hot trod, provided it does so openly with much ‘hue and cry’.”

  Once they had left Jeddart by the abbey bridge, they slowed to a walk. Two miles along the road to Carter Bar, they set up camp in a spinney on the bank of the Jed Water, a short distance from Ferniehirst Castle.

  “What now?” Patrick asked Wat, as his men collected wood for a fire and unpacked the light provisions they had brought from their brief stop at Dryhope.

  “Well, the Ker kens we’re here,” Wat said. “Yon gallop through Jeddart will hae made it certain. And word will no doubt hae reached him about our wee visit to Monteviot. He’ll be in a fury, but he dares not move against us from fear for his daughter and grandson. So, we wait here till dawn, then we’ll tak’ our proposition to him.”

  “You’re not really going to slaughter his daughter, are you?” Patrick asked with concern.

  Wat stabbed him on the shoulder with his forefinger.

  “Look, Fleming.” He snarled. “There’s no place for chivalry in the Marchlands. We’re outlaws, not knights. Ker would hae no compunction if the boot was on the other foot.”

  “But he spared my son,” Patrick objected.

  Wat stabbed him again, harder, pushing Patrick back on his heels.

  “Only because there was no advantage in killing him, nothing to be gained. I’ll spare his grandson too, if he gi’es us back my Mary and your Fraser women unharmed, but his Anne must die to show him we mean business and haven’t just ridden over here, hot trod, for the amusement o’ it.”

  Patrick turned and walked away. The very idea of trading an innocent life for a bargaining advantage went against everything he had been educated as a knight to believe. But what angered him the most was the brutal sense it made, the pitiless logic that ruled in the Marchlands. Anne Ker would be slaughtered like a heifer as Auld Wat’s opening gambit; even her father would not expect him to act otherwise.

  “What’s wrong?” Joan asked as Patrick slumped down beside her on the grass beneath the trees.

  He looked askance at her. The flickering firelight danced across the strong angular lines of her face, where they peeked out from the shadow of the hood she had pulled over her head against the growing chill of the night. He saw how tired and drawn she looked, which hardly surprised him given that they had spent days and nights in the saddle, first on their raid into Annandale, and now on their counter-raid on the Kers of Ferniehirst, on the other side of the country.

  He did not reply, and she shrugged and offered him a hunk of bread and a thick slice of cheese, which he refused with a wave of his hand.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked again.

  He sighed and shook his head.

  “It is just the viciousness of it all, the constant feuding and war. When will it end?”

  “When King Robert drives the English from his realm and restores good government to his kingdom. That’s what you always tell me.”

  “But will it though?” Patrick ran a hand down his face. “How will King Robert bring law and order to the Marchlands, to the Highlands. He could march ten thousand men up and down the glens and valleys and still the clans, the Scotts, the Kers, the Elliots, the Armstrongs, will steal one another’s cattle and murder one another’s children, and melt into the wilds whenever the king’s law appears. It’s hopeless. How can even King Robert, undisputed, make a nation out of all these reivers and cutthroats?”

  “How, indeed!” Joan took Patrick’s hand in hers. “Except by entrusting his peace to men like you, lords who will ensure justice in his estates in the king’s name. It may take time; it may take hundreds of years and scores of generations to bring peace to the realm. It may turn out to be an unending task; it may be that good government is a constant struggle against the injustices that the king’s subjects will always visit on one another, and perhaps the peace will always be imperfect. But it is a struggle you must continue, Patrick, or else injustice will overwhelm us.”

  Patrick was looking at her in open-mouthed amazement.

  “Wher
e did that come from?” he eventually asked.

  Joan smiled and looked bashfully away, but evidently pleased with herself nonetheless.

  “Do you mean, how could a mere woman have such lofty thoughts?” She laughed her deep throaty laugh. “Well, don’t worry, my lord. You will not have to burn me at the stake as ‘unnatural’. My father spoke all this to me and more while we would catch our breaths on the practice field or when we were out hawking in the park.”

  “As he would to a son,” Patrick added.

  “He never had a son,” Joan pointed out sadly, “so he had to make do with me, a poor substitute.”

  “You would make a fine knight,” Patrick said, drawing her to him and lying back on the grass.

  But she disentangled herself from his embrace and stood up, brushing the leaves from her hose.

  “Remember our agreement, my lord.” She smirked. “Never while we are out on a raid.”

  He gripped her slender ankle and grinned up at her.

  “Then let us hope that this filthy business is over with soon, so I can return you to your natural station – in my bed.”

  Margaret awoke with a start. She had wept herself asleep on the floor beneath the window in the solar. The events of the previous day rushed back into her consciousness, dispelling the dream in which she and Gilbert were reunited as the Lord and Lady of Oliver and Neidpath, the castle at Neidpath a bower for her and her husband while her mother lodged at the castle of Oliver.

  Her mother!

  She scrambled to her feet and unlatched the window. It had rained overnight, and her mother sat drenched in the corner of her cage, which creaked back and forth in a chill breeze. Lady Maria was slumped like a broken doll, her chin on her chest and her arms lying motionless at her sides, her palms turned towards heaven as if in supplication. She still breathed though; Margaret could see the slight rise and fall of her chest. But she looked terribly weak; she had not had any sustenance since the raid on Dryhope in which they had been captured.

  “Mother! Mother!” she cried, trying to rouse her.

  But there was no response.

  Margaret spun around and rushed to the door to the turret stairs. It was locked. She hammered on the wood with her fists.

  “Hello! Hello!” she hollered. “Please, someone… Please, will someone come? Please!”

  At first, she heard nothing. Then came the sound of footsteps shuffling reluctantly up the stairs.

  “Please, open the door,” she pleaded. “You must help my mother.”

  The door was unbolted and opened onto a large red-headed man in a knee-length coat of mail covered by a shorter smock emblazoned with the Moult arms.

  “What do you want?” The man growled.

  “My mother,” Margaret said. “She is dying. You must release her.”

  The man barked a short laugh.

  “You jest, milady!”

  “If you are a Christian man, you will release her and give her some food and warmth.”

  “Even if I was minded to, Sir Walter has given orders that the lady is not to be removed until the crows have picked her bones clean. He’d have me in there in her place if I were to disobey him.”

  He began to close the door.

  Margaret clasped her hands in supplication.

  “Please! For mercy’s sake!”

  But the guard was unmoved.

  “I’ll send the lassie up with some meat to you,” he said and pushed the door shut.

  Margaret heard the bolts shoot home and the man’s footsteps descending the stairs.

  A short time later, the bolts snapped back again, and there was a tap at the door.

  “Enter!” Margaret called after a pause.

  She found the propriety of the tap unsettling. It ran counter to the fact that she was a prisoner, completely at the beck and call of her captors; yet here she was, being extended the polite courtesy of a knock at her prison door. Her heart leaped in apprehension. Was it Moult come to ‘play’ with her?

  It was the young scullery maid with a board, bearing a loaf of bread, a platter of greasy-looking fowl meat, and a jug of small ale. Behind her in the doorway stood the same red-haired man who came before.

  Margaret motioned for the maid to enter.

  “For your breakfast, milady,” the girl announced.

  She carried the board through to the makeshift dining room and laid it on the table. She was a small, skinny maiden. Twelve or thirteen years, Margaret guessed, with greasy black hair beneath a scarlet kerchief and spots on her chin and brow. She was barefoot and bare-legged beneath a shapeless smock and walked with the awkwardness of a body in the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Her small hands were red and raw from work, and her eyes flitted with shy nervousness and anxiety. The lass was, Margaret saw, something of an ugly duckling, yet she could also see beneath the surface of her adolescence the beautiful swan that she would become.

  “Thank you.” Margaret smiled at her as she moved back towards the door.

  “You’re welcome, ma’am,” she murmured.

  “What’s your name?” Margaret enquired in a friendly voice.

  The girl blushed and faltered in her step.

  “Please, ma’am, ‘tis Lizzie, ma’am. Lizzie Bryce.”

  The guard in the doorway growled.

  “Enough, Lizzie Bryce.” He snarled. “Get your arse out here.”

  He reached towards the girl and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck.

  “There’s no need for that,” Margaret protested. “I was just speaking to the lass.”

  The guard ignored her. Instead, he pushed his face close to Lizzie’s.

  “Mind your place and don’t be getting above yourself.” He hissed. “You’re just a wee fuck, and don’t you be forgetting it.”

  He shoved her through the door, and she stumbled and fell onto the staircase landing.

  “Leave the lass alone,” Margaret cried. “She did no harm.”

  The red-haired guard smiled thinly at Margaret.

  “I’ll give her her place,” he said ominously.

  The door closed, and the bolts shot back into place.

  “Come here!” Margaret heard the man shout.

  There were a sob and squeal of protest, then the sound of a slap. Lizzie screamed. There was a scuffling.

  “You’re nothing but a wee fuck,” the man repeated, “and the sooner you learn that, the better.”

  “Leave her be!” Margaret shouted through the door.

  “No, Hugh, dinna… Please!”

  There were another scream, a wail of despair, and sobbing.

  Margaret pressed her face to the door, tears streaming down her cheeks, tears of pity, frustration, and anger.

  “There ye go, whore!” The guard, Hugh, sniggered. “How do you like that inside ye?”

  “Get off me!” Lizzie keened.

  There was another slap and a cry, then the heavy rhythmic grunts of a rutting beast.

  “No, please!” Lizzie wept. “It’s sore, it’s so sore!”

  “Hold your wheesht, bitch!” Hugh gasped breathily, then resumed his grunting.

  Margaret stopped pounding the door, and her nails scraped slowly down the wood. She was suddenly overcome by a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. The realization was driven home to her with each of Hugh’s bestial grunts that she was powerless, powerless to help Lizzie, or her mother, or herself.

  Behind Margaret’s prison door, Hugh let out a triumphant bellow as, between the girl’s thin, childlike thighs, his seed mixed with blood.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Dawn found a thin mist wreathing the ground between the trees of the spinney.

  The reivers rose stiffly from their sleep, their clothes drenched by the moisture in the air. They quickly ate the remains of their provisions from the night before, retrieved their hobbled mounts, and rode the short distance to the walls of Ferniehirst Castle.

  The Kers stood on the walls, watching their approach. A somber mood lay across
the scene, and the mist swirled around the horses’ legs. The only sounds that broke the silence were the dull thudding of the horses’ hooves on the turn, the plaintive call of a curlew in the air, and the occasional clink of a bridle.

  The Scotts stopped about a hundred yards from the castle gates, and Auld Wat dismounted. William brought their prisoners to stand beside his father, the infant Johnnie held in the crook of his arm. The child was mewling in terror but his mother, Anne Ker, stood proud and grim-faced in her white linen nightdress, her hands bound behind her back. She looked for all the world, Patrick thought, like a waiting sacrifice in some infernal ritual.