The Recruit

by Monica McCarty

  “We can’t delay,” Janet said. “Christina’s men are waiting for us. We need to be there before dawn.”

  Still, Mary hesitated. Atholl’s capture hadn’t changed anything. Or perhaps it made it even more important that they not do anything rash. But waiting to see whether Edward’s wrath would fall on them was a little bit like stepping into a cage with a hungry lion and hoping he didn’t notice you.

  What should she do? Mary had little experience making important decisions. First her father, and then her husband, had made them for her. She envied her sister’s independence in a world ruled by men. Janet had been engaged twice, but both betrothals had ended in death.

  Janet must have sensed her uncertainty. She took her by the shoulders and forced Mary to look at her. “You can’t stay here, Mary. Edward has lost all reason. There are rumors …”

  She stopped as if the words were too painful.

  “What?” Mary asked.

  Tears filled her sister’s eyes. “There are rumors that he has ordered our niece Marjory to be hung in a cage atop the Tower of London.”

  Mary gasped. A cage? She could not believe it, even of Edward Plantagenet, the self-styled “Hammer of the Scots” and the most ruthless king in Christendom. Marjory, Robert’s daughter by their deceased sister, was only a girl. “You must be mistaken.”

  Janet shook her head. “And Mary Bruce and Isabella MacDuff as well.”

  God in heaven! It was almost too horrible to imagine such barbarity—against women, no less. She swallowed, but a lump of horror had lodged in her throat.

  Suddenly, her sister turned to the window. “Did you hear that?”

  Mary nodded, and for the second time that night her heart jumped in panic. “It sounds like horses.”

  Was it too late? Had the soldiers she feared finally arrived? A cage …

  The two women raced to the window of the peel tower, a square-shaped defensive structure that was common in the borders. It was dark and still pouring rain, but Mary could just make out the shadow of three riders approaching. It wasn’t until they entered the circle of torchlight below the gate, however, that she saw the familiar arms and her lungs released its vicelike hold on her breath. She heaved a heavy sigh of relief. “It’s Sir Adam.”

  But the relief was short-lived. If Sir Adam was here at this time of night, there was a reason, and given her current circumstances, it probably was not a good one.

  Her husband’s seneschal admitted him to the Hall a few minutes later. She barely waited for the door to close behind him before she rushed forward. “Is it true? Has Atholl been taken?”

  Obviously surprised that she’d heard, he frowned. But noticing her sister behind her at the table, his surprise faded. “Lady Janet,” he said with a nod of his head. “What are you doing here?”

  Before her sister could answer, Mary asked him again. “Is it true?”

  As he nodded, his rough, battle-weary face sagged. Sir Adam was only forty—the same age as Atholl—but the war had aged him. As it had them all, she realized. She was only three and twenty, but sometimes she felt as if she’d lived twice as long.

  “Aye, lass, it’s true. He’s being brought to Kent for trial at Canterbury.”

  Mary sucked in her breath. In choosing Kent as the place of trial, King Edward was leaving little doubt of the outcome. Like many Scot nobles, Atholl had significant lands in England, including vast estates in Kent. As such he’d been forced to do homage to Edward for those lands. It was as an English subject that the Scottish earl would be tried.

  She crumpled, knowing that the charming Earl of Atholl would not escape the noose this time.

  She saw the knowledge reflected in Sir Adam’s face. But she also saw something else. “What is it?”

  His gaze slid to her sister’s. “You shouldn’t be here, lass. You can’t let them see you.” He looked back and forth between the sisters. “If I didn’t know you so well, I’d have a hard time knowing who was who.”

  “Can’t let who see me?” Janet said, echoing Mary’s thoughts.

  Sir Adam sighed and turned back to Mary. “That’s why I came. I rode ahead to prepare you. Edward has sent his men to collect you and David.”

  Mary froze. She could barely get the words out. “We are being arrested?”

  “Nay, nay. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. The king merely wishes to see that you and Davey are provided for.”

  Janet made a loud scoffing sound. “ ‘Provided for’? That’s an interesting way of putting it. Is he ‘providing for’ our niece Marjory as well?”

  Sir Adam could not hide his repugnance. “Edward is in a rage right now, but he will reconsider when he has calmed down. I cannot believe he would see a young girl put in a cage.” His eyes met Mary’s. “The king does not blame you and David for Atholl’s actions. He knows you have been a loyal subject to him, and David is like a grandson to him, after the better part of eight years in Prince Edward’s household. You and the boy will not be in danger.”

  “But what if you are wrong?” Janet said. “Would you bet my sister’s life on the whim of Edward Plantagenet’s temper?” The monarch’s apoplectic fits of rage—a legacy of his Angevin ancestors said to be descended from the Devil—were well known. Janet shook her head. “Nay, I’ve come to take her home.”

  Sir Adam looked sharply at her. “Is it true, lass? Are you fleeing England?”

  But Mary didn’t answer his question. She looked up at him, silently begging him to tell her the truth. “Does the king mean to make my son a prisoner in another English household?”

  She saw the flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “I don’t know.”

  Her chest squeezed painfully. Nine years had passed but it might have been yesterday, so sharp were the memories of having her baby ripped from her arms.

  Mary made her decision. She would not—could not—let her son be taken from her again. The son who was already more English than he was Scot. She held Sir Adam’s gaze. “Will you help us?”

  He hesitated. She didn’t blame him. She hated to ask so much of him when he’d already done so much, but with Edward’s men right behind him, she didn’t have a choice.

  His moment of hesitation didn’t last long. “You are determined to do this?”

  She nodded. Atholl wasn’t coming for them. It was up to her now.

  He sighed in a way that told her he did not agree but recognized the futility of argument. “Then I will do what I can to delay them.” He turned to Janet. “You have a means of transport.”

  Janet nodded. “I do.”

  “Then you’d best gather David and be gone. They will be here any minute.”

  Mary threw her arms around him. “Thank you,” she said, blinking up at him through watery eyes.

  “I will do whatever I must to see you safe,” he said heavily. Mary’s heart swelled with gratitude. If only her husband would have done the same. “I owe Atholl my life.”

  Though Sir Adam’s father had fallen on the battlefield at Dunbar, her husband’s heroics had enabled Sir Adam to escape. Once she’d been proud of her husband’s feats of bravery and battlefield prowess. But her pride hadn’t been enough for him. Admiring such a man from afar was very different from being married to one.

  She donned the garments Janet had brought for her—which were indeed too big and hung on her like a sackcloth—and went to wake her son. If her sister noticed the wariness in the boy’s eyes when he looked at his mother, Janet didn’t say anything. It would take time, Mary told herself. But after three months, David still pulled away from her touch. Perhaps if he didn’t look so much like his father it wouldn’t hurt so much. But except for having her light hair, the lad was the image of her handsome husband.

  Fortunately, David didn’t raise an objection to being woken in the middle of the night, covered in a scratchy wool cloak, and rushed out into the stormy night. Being raised in England as a virtual prisoner—albeit a favored one—had made him very good at keeping his thoughts to h
imself. Too good. Her young son was an enigma to her.

  Cailin swept her in a big bear hug when he saw her. She had to bite back a smile. Janet was right; with his round, jovial face and equally hearty belly, he did indeed make a good monk.

  Exchanging the horse Janet had purchased for two in her own stables—she would ride with Davey, and Janet would ride with Cailin—they set off toward the eastern seaboard.

  It was slow and treacherous going, the road muddy and slippery from all the rain. The rain was too heavy to keep a torch lit, so it was also difficult to see. But far worse was the constant fear, the taut, heightened senses and frazzled nerve endings set on edge, as they sat readied on constant alert for the sounds of pursuit.

  Yet with every mile they rode, some of the fear slipped away.

  She knew they must be close when Janet confirmed it. “We’re almost there. The birlinn is hidden in a cove just beyond the bridge.”

  Mary couldn’t believe it. They were going to make it! She was going home. Scotland!

  But as they crossed the wooden bridge over the River Tyne, she heard a sound in the distance that stopped her cold. It wasn’t the pounding of hooves behind her that she’d feared, but a clash of metal ahead of her.

  Janet heard it, too. Their eyes met for a fraction of an instant before her sister flicked the reins and jumped forward with a strangled cry.

  Mary shouted after her to stop, but Janet, with Cailin behind her, raced ahead. Mary tightened her hold around her son in front of her and surged after her, plunging into the darkness, the sounds of battle growing louder and louder.

  “Janet, stop!” she shouted. Her sister was going to get herself killed. Somehow the English must have found the Islesmen, and their sister-in-law’s clansmen were fighting for their lives.

  Fortunately, if Janet wasn’t thinking rationally, Cailin was. He forced their horse to slow, enabling Mary and David to catch up to them.

  Janet was trying to wrest the reins from the older man. “Cailin, let me have those.” Mary was close enough to see the frantic wildness in her sister’s eyes. “I have to go. I have to see.”

  “You’ll not help the men any by getting yourself killed,” Cailin said sternly—more sternly than Mary had ever heard him talk to her. “If you get in the way, they’ll think about defending you, not themselves.”

  Janet’s eyes filled with tears. “But it’s my fault.”

  “Nay,” Mary said fiercely. “It’s not your fault, it’s mine.” And it was. She never should have let it get to this. She should have fled months ago. But when it was clear Bruce’s cause was lost, she’d trusted her husband to come for them. Had he spared a thought for what would become of them, when he raced off to glory?

  “Who is fighting, Mother?” David asked.

  Mary looked into the solemn upturned face of her son. “The men who brought your aunt to us.”

  “Does that mean we aren’t leaving?”

  Her heart pinched, hearing the hint of relief in his voice. But could she blame him for not wanting to leave? England was the only home he’d ever known.

  God, how they’d failed him!

  She didn’t answer him directly, but looked at her sister. “We have to go back before we are discovered.”

  They would never be able to make it to Scotland on their own.

  “Don’t give up yet, lass,” Cailin said. “The MacRuairis know how to fight.”

  But how long did they dare wait?

  The decision was made for them a few moments later when they heard the sound of horses coming toward them. The English were fleeing! But unfortunately, the soldiers were headed for the bridge, and they were right in their path.

  “Hurry,” Mary said. They raced back toward the bridge before they ended up in the middle of the fleeing Englishmen and the Islesmen, who from the sound of it were pursuing them.

  She had just made it to the other side of the bridge when she heard Janet cry out behind her. Mary looked around just in time to see Cailin fall off the horse, landing with a horrible thud on the wood planks.

  Everything seemed to happen at once. Janet pulled to a stop, jumping down in the middle of the bridge to help him. Cailin had landed facedown, an arrow protruding from his back. Mary glanced behind her sister, seeing the hillside they’d just escaped now swarming with men. The fierce war cries of the Islesmen pierced the night air. The pursuers had caught up with their prey, and the riverbank had become a battleground.

  Mary yelled through the din of swords to her sister. “Leave him! You have to leave him.” The English were heading straight for her, trying to evade the Islesmen. Janet was going to be trampled.

  Their eyes met, spanning the distance of the forty or so feet that separated them. Mary knew Janet wouldn’t leave Cailin. She was trying to lift him under the arms, but struggling under his weight.

  Mary turned her horse, intent on forcibly dragging her sister off that bridge if she had to, when she thought she heard a voice shout “no” behind her. But then her horse reared as a terrifying boom shattered the stormy night.

  She screamed, clenching David and holding onto the reins for dear life, trying not to slide out of the saddle. She’d nearly gotten the animal under control when a blinding flash of light crashed on the bridge before her. Lightning? And the strangest thunder she’d ever heard.

  Oh God, Janet! She looked in horror as the bridge seemed to burst into a ball of flames and her sister disappeared from view. The last thing she remembered was holding her son in front of her as they pitched backward off the horse.

  When she woke hours later, warm and dry in her bedchamber, at first she thought it had been a bad dream. But then she realized the nightmare had just begun.

  Cailin was dead and her sister had vanished, presumed dead after being swept away in the river when the bridge collapsed. The voice she’d heard had been Sir Adam’s. He’d arrived just in time to see her fall. David had been unharmed, but Mary’s head had struck a rock, knocking her out cold, and her back was badly bruised.

  But her injuries were the least of her problems. If not for Sir Adam their next few weeks would have been precarious indeed.

  Protecting Mary from Edward’s anger by the lie that she’d been forcibly taken by Bruce’s men, Sir Adam made a plea to the king that she be allowed to recover before making her journey to London. Thus, it wasn’t until November that she and David were brought before the king. She’d had nearly two full months with her son before he was once again taken from her and imprisoned in the Prince of Wales’s household to serve as a yeoman.

  She left court, returning to Ponteland (where she’d been ordered to remain) on the fourteenth of November, one week after the Earl of Atholl was hanged from an elevated gallows as befitting his “exalted” status—King Edward’s cruel response to her husband’s reminder of their kinship. Leaving the city, she was careful not to look up as she passed under the gatehouse of London Bridge, where her husband’s head had been impaled on a spike beside those of the other Scottish traitors (or heroes, depending on which side of the border you lived on) William Wallace and Simon Fraser.

  The handsome, gallant knight had raised his sword for the last noble cause. Mary had put her love—or was it youthful infatuation?—for Atholl behind her a long time ago, so the depth of her sorrow took her by surprise. But along with her sorrow was anger at what he’d done to them.

  She was fortunate, it was said, not to be sent to a convent like the other wives and daughters of traitors. Her “loyalty,” the king’s fondness for her son, and Sir Adam’s surety had saved her. If not for the vows she had made to herself, she would have welcomed the quiet solitude of a nunnery, free from the tumult of a war that had taken her father, brother, and now her husband. But she vowed to see their son restored to his father’s earldom, and to never stop searching for the sister who in her heart she refused to believe was dead. The life she knew, however, was gone.

  One

  July 1309

  Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North
umberland, English Marches

  Mary handed the merchant the bundle that represented nearly three hundred hours of work and waited patiently as he examined the various purses, ribbons, and coifs with the same painstaking attention to detail he’d given the first time she’d brought him goods to sell nearly three years ago.

  When he was finished, the old man crossed his arms and gave her a forbidding frown. “You did all this in four weeks? You had best have a team of faeries helping you at night, milady, because you promised me you were going to slow down this month.”

  “I shall slow down next month,” she assured him. “After the harvest fair.”

  “And what about Michaelmas?” he said, reminding her of the large fair in September.

  She smiled at the scowling man. He was doing his best to look imposing, but with his portly physique and kind, grandfatherly face, he wasn’t having much success. “After Michaelmas I shall be so slothful I will have to buy an indulgence from Father Andrew or my soul will be in immortal danger.”

  He tried to hold his scowl, but a bark of laughter escaped. He shook his head as a doting father might at a naughty child. “I should like to see it.”

  He handed her the bag of coin they’d agreed upon.

  She thanked him and tucked it into the purse she wore tied at her waist, enjoying the weight that dragged it down.

  One dark, bushy eyebrow peppered with long strands of gray arched speculatively. “You wouldn’t need to work so hard if you agreed to take one of the requests I’ve had for your work. Fine opus anglicanum embroidery like this is wasted on these peasants.”