Another Man's Bride

by Ariel MacArran

  “You will be the first of our beloved queen’s maids to marry this year, Lady Isabella,” the king said to her. “We very much anticipate making merry at your wedding when your lord returns to us, do we not, my milk white dove?” he asked the queen, using his nickname for her freely in this company.

  The queen smiled. “Indeed I do. ’Tis too long since we had the pleasure of wedding to cheer us! But Lent is nearly upon us and I fear ’twill be past Easter before I see you properly married, cousin. I do implore, Your Majesty, bid them marry immediately upon Lord Douglas’s return.”

  “I think we must.” The king laughed. “We cannot be so cruel as to make Douglas wait through Lent to gain his marriage bed!”

  “Indeed,” the queen said mischievously. “The delay would bring him nightly to whisper love sonnets at her door and I fear my Lord Douglas’s face handsome enough to ply my cousin from her chastity.”

  The king regarded Isabella kindly. “We shall cease to send your lord away in our name for a time, Lady Isabella, so that you do not grieve his absence. Nor he yours.”

  “You are very kind.” Isabella wet her lips. “But Your Majesty …”

  James tilted his head, his expression open. “My lady? Something weighs upon your heart? Tell us, for we would have it blithe again.”

  “Your Majesty,” Isabella said in a rush. “There is a lady, Caitrina—the MacKimzie’s sister—who was ever kind to me. For her sake, I beg you—”

  James held up his hand to silence her.

  Frowning, Catherine Douglas put aside her needlework. The other ladies stirred in confusion and consternation, their embroidery and books forgotten as the queen stood.

  Then Isabella heard it: the sound of horses, of men calling to each other sharply in the courtyard below.

  The king blanched.

  “Lady Isabella,” the queen said quickly, “call the guards!”

  Isabella hurried to the chamber door. But it required no effort on her part to open; it had not been locked.

  She looked into the corridor. The hall was silent and deserted.

  “Madam,” she called frantically to the queen as she returned. “The guards are gone!”

  Queen Joan looked to her husband, the women gathering around her. “James—”

  The king’s lips had gone white. “Bolt the door!”

  “Kat, quick, help me!”

  Isabella threw herself against the door, shutting it with enough force to splinter the old plaster. Time slowed as Isabella watched in horror as the cracks spread outward, writhing like snakes.

  “Oh, no,” Isabella whispered. She held the door shut and her voice rose in panic. “Kat! Hurry, lock the door!”

  “I cannot!” Kat cried, the metal rattling uselessly in her hand. “The bolts have been broken!”

  “The sewer!” James seized the fireplace tongs, pulling up the floorboards to reach the chamber below. Another of the ladies bent to help the king pull boards from the floor, making a hole there.

  Isabella heard the stomping footfalls of the men’s boots as they entered the corridor outside. They shouted, urging each other onto the queen’s apartments.

  These men are not bothering with quiet! They know there are no guards to challenge them.

  Isabella’s head turned at the sound of a breaking slat.

  A fissure formed, running along the board where she stood.

  The floor beneath her foot split…

  The king and one of the queen’s ladies disappeared into the hole in the floor.

  The fire, the knife—

  “We must hold the door!” Isabella screamed to the other ladies.

  The other women threw their bodies against the door with Isabella and Kat just as there was a mighty shove from the other side. Catherine Douglas set her arm against the door to keep it shut. Isabella’s feet slid beneath her, her fine indoor slippers unable to find purchase against the smooth wood.

  Isabella threw herself against the chamber door along with the other women. Only their desperation closed it again.

  “Hold it!” the queen cried. Her cousin was beside Isabella, her fair face now etched in fear as the men battered at them.

  Catherine Douglas let out a scream, her arm dangling, broken as the men shoved inward.

  The men pushed their way in, weapons drawn. Some were courtiers, soft-cheeked men with whom she had feasted and danced, Robert Stewart among them.

  Most wore Highlander mantles.

  The smell of horses ridden hard, the heat of the men’s bloodlust, and sting of the ladies’ fear became jumbled together in that crush at the chamber entrance. The men’s faces could have been cast from the same cold-eyed, vicious mold. For an instant Isabella thought them not men at all but demons born.

  Caught in the narrow space, the women screamed and tried to flee as the men cut their way through. At Isabella’s side, Lady Mary threw her arms up, trying to protect her face. She cried out as her forearms were slashed.

  Isabella was pushed back by the onslaught and lost sight of Kat. It was like falling into a churning sea of bodies with no sense of where safety lay. She backpedaled, but something—a chair or a table—was behind her, the queen in front, and she was trapped there.

  She caught a glimpse over the queen’s shoulder of Robert Stewart’s face. His dark brows were pulled low over his eyes. Isabella had seen that look long ago in Rouen on Cardinal Beaufort’s face when her uncle condemned Jehanne. It was the face of one mad enough for power he did not even fear damnation.

  Robert plunged the knife into the queen’s belly.

  Queen Joan gasped as he pulled the knife free and fell back against her. Isabella was off balance and not strong enough to hold her injured cousin alone. She staggered under her cousin’s weight.

  “Kat!” she screamed.

  In the next instant the queen was pulled away from her.

  Isabella’s hands were wet with the queen’s blood.

  No, oh, please!

  Isabella raised her head to look at him.

  He was wild-eyed with hatred—a man crazed—and in the light of the fire his hair seemed to glow red and gold. The queen collapsed against him, his arm around her belly.

  His eyes met Isabella’s.

  “Colyne,” she whispered.

  The knife glinted as he brought it down.

  He turned, shielding her from the men who followed him.

  “The king is nae here!” he shouted to them. “There’s none but the women!”

  Another of the assassins pushed into the fray. This man was a courtier and spoke with the authority of a leader. “Harm not the queen. She is but a woman; think shame of yourself! Let us go and seek the king!”

  There was a moment of consternation among the men, until one noticed the torn floorboards.

  “Graham!” the man shouted to the leader, using his torch and peering into the hole in the floor. “There! The tyrant is down there!”

  Three of the men went down the hole after the king. Colyne was already pushing Isabella into the corridor. He handed the injured queen over to Kat.

  Kat and another of the queen’s ladies half carried, half dragged the queen toward safety. Isabella could hear the cries of men in pain from within the chamber.

  “Colyne, please—”

  His eyes focused on her for a heartbeat. In that instant she felt a fundamental change, a shifting, as his path—and hers—converged and altered forever. He stood on the other side of a gulf as wide as eternity but for a hairsbreadth of time she reached toward him and offered her hand for him to clasp.

  “Go,” Colyne said roughly, pushing her after them. His grip tightened on the dagger. “Go with the queen.”

  “No!” she cried, trying to catch his arm. “You must away with us too!”

  Then he was gone, through the doorway and back into the chamber.

  “No!” She held her hand toward him. “Colyne!”

  Isabella watched in horror as Colyne disappeared down the splintered floorboards.
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  Then came the sound of a man in agony from the chamber below and she knew it to be the king.

  “Poppet!” Katherine cried, panicked, from her place at the end of the corridor.

  “Colyne!” Isabella felt her legs go weak. “No, no.”

  “Poppet!”

  The shout went up from the servants in the abbey, spreading the alarm as she turned toward Kat.

  Robert Stewart pushed up through the floorboards. In his triumphant face, before he turned to flee, Isabella read that the men’s task was complete and the king dead.

  Stumbling, sobbing, catching herself against the wall, she ran after the queen.

  “He is gone, poppet,” Katherine said firmly. “The MacKimzie has fled to France or beyond.”

  Isabella looked out over the blooming gardens of Edinburgh Castle. Queen Joan, English and unpopular as co-regent to her son, the six-year-old James II, would not venture from this place. She was fearful too of the nobles who came to pledge their loyalty. Perched on Castle Rock, the castle loomed above the city as an ominous and unparalleled fortress for the young king.

  The queen had good reason to be afraid. Fortune’s Wheel could turn again at any time.

  “Do you think me wicked to love him still, Kat?”

  “The man killed his king.”

  “A king who destroyed his home and hanged his father. A king who killed his mother, a sister and crippled another,” Isabella reminded softly. “’Tis well known James had his own cousin David imprisoned and killed to secure his throne. The king spilled an ocean of blood, enemy and kin alike.”

  Kat shifted. “Whatever the king’s faults, the MacKimzie stands condemned as a murderer.”

  “I know.” Isabella closed her eyes for an instant. “And loving him does not spare me hating what he has done. He should not have been there to strike at the king but for me.”

  Kat gave a snort. “To foresee a thing is not to forge it, poppet.”

  Wherefore foresee if I could not save him from it? Verily, I am cursed, but he should not be.

  “He could have reached MacKimzie lands or MacLaulach. They would hide him, any of them would.” Isabella thought of the cottage they had sheltered the night she had become lost in the snow. “He could hide himself.”

  “He has fled abroad! That is why he is not yet found when all others have been caught and executed.”

  In her rage and grief, Queen Joan was merciless. Isabella’s stomach still churned when she thought of the Earl of Atholl’s hideous three-day torture and execution. The court was made witness to the deaths of Robert Graham, who went bravely, and Robert Stewart, who had not.

  Idly she fingered the skirt of the black mourning dress she wore for Alexander Douglas.

  Alexander had not been the object of her sendings. An innocent, after all. A man who would have loved her, mayhap already had. She would have loved him too, had her life’s path not been turned those months ago by gray-green eyes full of mischief.

  She wept when they told her Alexander had made a brave end in fighting for the child king. The Douglas family threw themselves to the young king’s cause, appearing prominently during his coronation at Holyrood Abbey.

  They paid little honors to their own fallen, though.

  Isabella suspected that Alexander’s brother, the earl, was too busy plotting to rule through young James to notice his brother’s sacrifice. If the earl could rid himself of the queen.

  Gentle, shy Alexander had deserved better from his family.

  From her, as well.

  Isabella’s shoulders slumped. Alexander. The child. Caitrina and all those at Castle MacKimzie. Colyne. Her many wrongs weighed heavy on her heart.

  “Surely Queen Joan must remember—”

  Katherine cut her off. “The MacKimzie may have come to Her Majesty’s aid, but you yourself saw him go through the floorboards. Sir Robert Graham said the MacKimzie was there when James was slain. Graham released him from prison that morning to kill the king. Even if we could remain here, there is naught you can do, poppet.”

  A letter had arrived that morning from her grandmother, the dowager Countess of Somerset. Even now it lay open on the floor of her chamber where Isabella had thrown it. She was ordered to return to England and present herself to her grandmother at Bella Court.

  Still unmarried but maid of honor to the Scottish Queen, Isabella was arguably under the young king’s guardianship. By his word, she might have remained at Edinburgh Castle in defiance of her family’s wishes. She had appealed on her knees to the queen just an hour ago, begging to be allowed to remain in Scotland.

  Queen Joan, who looked to have aged ten years in these few months, barely glanced at her.

  “If you have been recalled, cousin,” the queen replied shortly, already turning away, “you should to England and we wish you godspeed.”

  She and Kat were to go by ship in two days’ time to London, then to Bella Court.

  “Perhaps with King Henry near his majority we will find the English court a merry place again,” Kat offered brightly as they walked through the garden.

  Isabella gave a short laugh. “Merrier than the Scottish court, in any case.” The scandal of the Duchess of Bedford’s marriage to her husband’s knight, Richard Woodville, reached them even here. “But with Jacquetta gone from court Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, shall ride higher than ever.”

  “Ah, Jacquetta is mad!” Kat declared, waving impatiently at a bee. “A royal duchess ruining herself to marry—without the king’s permission!—a man far beneath her station.”

  “I do not think her mad.”

  “Well,” Kat said briskly, “to be certain, Jacquetta’s fall makes small any whispers the king’s eye on you garnered last year. We will find you a good match yet, my poppet. But, mark my words—Eleanor would do well not to incur the greater enmity of your uncle, Cardinal Beaufort!”

  She knew without being told that once she married, Kat would return here to wed William.

  “I shall write to Jacquetta,” Isabella said, stopping to pluck a bloom of maiden pink, “and send her my blessings for her marriage.”

  Kat harrumphed. “The king’s fine for marrying against his will has beggared her. Methinks she will not have coin enough for parchment to send a reply.”

  She gave a faint smile, rolling the flower’s stem between her fingers. “I will write just the same.”

  Isabella slept fitfully that night. In the morning, she sought Sir William only to be told he was abroad on the queen’s business, and would not be expected back for days.

  Isabella spent the rest of the morning and much of the afternoon composing a letter to Sir William begging him, without ever writing Colyne’s name, to contact her if any news was heard of him. Finally, she was satisfied. She sealed the letter and entrusted it to her maid, telling her to deliver it to William’s servant with the instructions that he should put it in no other hand but William’s.

  With no hope of sleep, she lay on her side in the curtained bed, watching the room darken as the sun set. She thought of Colyne, imagined him hiding in his cottage, and wondered if he ever thought of her as she did him.

  If only she could delay their journey! Or convince Kat to leave, but rather than make for the ship, head instead to MacKimzie’s land.

  Isabella shifted, rolling onto her back. It would never do. Kat would never agree. She had to delay their journey somehow.

  She rubbed her eyes, considering which symptoms would forestall the court physician from prescribing a truly unpleasant purge.

  A rustle of fabric, a quiet footfall.

  Her eyes snapped open. It was full dark.

  Kat was attending the queen this night. Elizabeth, her maidservant, slept on a pallet in the room, but Isabella could not recall hearing the girl return from her errand. Nor would Elizabeth strive so not to be heard.

  Another rustle of fabric and a dull thud, as if someone had bumped against the wooden clothing chest.

  Her heart hammered. The child
king sat on a throne a half dozen lords could lay claim to—were he dead. None but promised loyalty and a weak English queen stood between him and destruction. The castle could even now be filled with men seeking to take the throne—

  Silently she freed herself from beneath the quilts.

  The bed curtain moved.

  She kicked out, gratified when she heard the grunt of pain, and scrambled to gain her feet. She barely stood when she was knocked backward onto the bed and pinned. She struggled, biting at the hand over her mouth.

  “Ach, sweet,” he yelped. “Are ye trying to wake the whole place?”

  She froze.

  “Colyne?”

  “Aye, ’less yer expectin’ another man in yer bed.” He let her go, shifting his weight off her to cradle his hand. “God’s cock, ye bit me but good!”

  She pushed the bed curtain back.

  He had grown thinner; the bones of his arms and jaw were sharper now and there were faint marks still on his wrists. The skin around his eyes more creased with care. His mouth was tight as he examined the damage to his hand and in the firelight his hair was a blaze of red and gold.

  “Colyne!”

  Instantly her arms were around his neck, her mouth on his, the wonderful warm scent of him in her nostrils.

  He gave a grunt of surprise, but eagerly returned her kiss.

  “Ah, sweet, I have longed so for ye,” he murmured, bringing his mouth to hers again.

  When he broke away, she took his face in her hands, looking at him joyfully. “Are you really here?”

  Her eyes widened in horror.

  “Oh, Colyne, you cannot be here!”

  “Oh, aye, I’m here! And I’ll be glad to prove it to ye,” he answered with a grin, shifting his weight against her to make his meaning clear.

  “No!” she whispered fiercely, pushing him away. “No! You must away quickly!”

  He held her gaze a moment then released her. He straightened, frowning.

  “What’s this now?” he demanded. “Katherine said you were grieved, for me and the bairn.”

  At the mention of the babe, Isabella’s eyes stung. “More than I could ever say.”