Captive of the Border Lord

by Blythe Gifford

  He lowered his sword. ‘But why, Bessie? Why leave us for him?’

  She looked up at her husband, smiling. Everything she thought was solid under her feet had shifted. And still she stood.

  ‘Because,’ she answered, ‘he taught me to dance.’

  * * *

  Laird Thomas Carwell, Warden of the Scottish March, did not take the Brunsons to Edinburgh to be hanged.

  And he did not appear to meet Lord William Acre at February’s Truce Day.

  Instead, while the English Warden stood alone in the main street of Kershopefoote, the lightly defended Storwick tower was visited by the full wrath of a Reivers’ raid. Hobbes Storwick, leader of the family, was kidnapped and taken back across the border. No one knew where.

  But they knew who. It was the Brunson family.

  And riding beside them were Carwell men.

  Epilogue

  Spring came to the castle by the sea. Thistles sprouted near the tower. Gradually, she stopped hoping to hear from her brothers. Brunson and Carwell had ridden side by side, but their truce was only temporary.

  Unlike Rob’s anger.

  Meanwhile, she and Thomas waited, knowing the King’s silence was just as temporary. Some day, King James would come to the Borders himself.

  Some day, they would have to fight again.

  But now Bessie learned the land and the Carwell people and they learned their new lady. She still walked the sands, more carefully now, and watched the water, wondering, now and then, whether the First Brunson had thought often of his distant family, after he made the valley his home.

  One day late in the spring, Thomas walked with her. As the sky turned scarlet and the sun said farewell, they walked back to the castle from the beach.

  ‘I’ve something to tell you,’ she said.

  He smiled. How open and loving his smile had

  become. At least their private world had nothing but trust. ‘What is it?’

  Now that the time had come, she swallowed, uncertain what words to use. ‘I am with child.’

  He flinched, memories erasing the joy she had hoped to see. ‘Are you sure?’ As if he hoped there might be another answer.

  ‘Yes.’ She threaded her fingers in his. Squeezed. ‘It was not the birthing that killed her.’

  He smiled, sheepish that she had understood his fear so quickly. ‘When?’

  ‘It will be in riding season.’ When the sea turned cold and the waves large.

  He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her to him, tightly at first, then, looking down, he let go and stepped back.

  She pulled him tight again. ‘Hug me at will. You will not squash the babe.’

  ‘You ought to have someone with you.’

  She nodded. ‘I will ask Cate to come.’

  ‘Will he allow it?’

  Now she was the one wounded by memories. ‘I hope so.’ Rob had let Carwell ride beside them, but that had not meant forgiveness. Stubborn as a Brunson. She was learning anew exactly how stubborn that was.

  Her husband held her at arm’s length and studied her, silently, head to toe, as if he were trying to see inside her mind as well as her body. ‘Are you well?’

  She raised a hand, as if ready for him to do a reverence before asking her to take the floor with him. ‘Well enough to dance the galliard.’

  He extended his foot, bowed to her and they danced their way home to their castle, moving to the rhythm of the sea.

  * * *

  Now Bessie Brunson went to court

  Her brothers for to save.

  And there a Brunson learned to dance

  Like foam upon a wave.

  But then a Carwell man she wed

  She loved him pure and true

  A man the Brunsons could not trust

  A choice they hoped she’d rue.

  The Borders were a land of families and feuds. Both continued for generations. Sometimes, the feuds ended in surprising ways, as Black Rob was to discover.

  But that’s a song for another day.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt of Some Like It Wicked by Carole Mortimer!

  Author’s Afterword

  Once again I have mixed real and fictional characters and events. The Brunsons, the Carwells, the English Warden are all fictional. King James, the Dowager Queen, the Earl of Angus, and the outlines of the peace treaty between Scotland and England are real.

  The story of King James V’s assumption of his ‘personal rule’ is much as I described it. The son of King James IV and Margaret Tudor, sister of King Henry VIII of England, young James become king as a babe of seventeen months. He grew up under a series of regents, including his mother.

  The Dowager Queen did, as I alluded here, marry Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, and subsequently divorce him to marry again. Angus was, in the end, hated by both the Queen and her son, who was held virtual prisoner and finally escaped his stepfather by running away in the middle of the night.

  The first months after he seized power, James did spend much of his time trying to gain revenge on Angus and the man’s status was a key point of negotiation in the treaty with England. Hated as the man was by King James, King Henry favoured him because Angus sought a Scottish alliance with England instead of the country’s traditional ties to France.

  In the end, Angus was allowed to live in exile in England and left Scotland shortly after the period covered by this book. The King never forgave him, however, and Angus did not return to Scotland until James’s death, reportedly riding with the English in Border raids against the Scots in the interim.

  The dances I describe were well known in the Renaissance, though I cannot confirm that the galliard, the dance that so baffled Bessie for a time, was danced at the court of James V in 1528. Most probably, James learned it during his trip to France in 1537, but I hope my readers will forgive me for compressing the years.

  I must also confess that the date of the first Truce Day after the treaty was stipulated to be January 1529. In order to smooth the timeline of my story, I shifted it into February.

  The court Bessie visited, though not as lush as it later became, still held much more art and culture than the Borders. A few years later, James V married women related to the French throne, and they brought much of the continental culture with them. Yet even before his marriages, James was extremely interested in architecture, poetry, music, and the other arts. He did play the lute and a few songs are traditionally attributed to him. The Royal Palace he built at Stirling Castle—after the period of this story—is considered one of the finest examples of the era.

  He also did have the habit of sneaking out ‘disguised’ as a commoner and his lusty reputation was also, apparently, well deserved. History records nine illegitimate children, with a variety of mothers. Oliver Sinclair was indeed one of the King’s favourite ‘minions’, or male friends, though I cannot prove they roamed Stirling’s streets together.

  As for the story of the First Brunson and the thistle, students of Scotland may recognise its kinship to the famous legend. The story goes that an invading Norse army, perhaps like that of the First Brunson, was sneaking up on the Scots army when a Norseman stepped on a thistle and, unlike the First Brunson, cried out. This alerted the Scots to the attack. Thus, the thistle that protected Scotland became its national symbol.

  Read on for a sneak preview of

  TAKEN BY THE BORDER REBEL

  featuring Black Rob’s story, coming

  March 2013 in THE BRUNSON CLAN.

  Taken by the Border Rebel

  The Middle March, Scotland, April 1529

  When Black Rob Brunson took his first waking breath that morning, he inhaled air free of the stink of cinders for the first time since the Storwicks had torched the tower’s buildings scarce two months before.

  Yet his waking thought was the same that morning as it had been the one before and the one before and the one before that. They would pay. Every last one of them.

  Oh, he had
taken retribution quickly. Their roofs had felt flame. Their head man now languished under their eyes of a Scottish guard.

  But it wasn’t enough. Not for all they had done.

  The ashes had faded with the snow. The kitchen roof had new thatch, but with his second breath, he knew the truth. His nose would never be free of the stench.

  Nor would theirs. He’d make sure of that.

  He swung his feet over the side of the bed and glanced over his shoulder, still half expecting his dead father’s ghost to lurk behind him.

  Nothing there.

  Rob was alone in the head man’s chamber. He was the head man now, as he’d been raised to be for twenty-six summers.

  He stretched, scratched an itch on his back, and reached for his boots.

  Snow and frost had lingered, but this morning he felt a softness in the air. Spring. Lambing time. Time for him to be a shepherd as well as a warrior, riding the valley to be sure the flock was well tended.

  Last year, he had ridden this route beside his father.

  Up and dressed, he foraged the kitchen, searching for a leftover bannock to stuff in his bag. His sister used to do that for him, for all of them. Cooked the food, washed and cleaned, kept everything in order until a few months ago, when she deserted them for that untrustworthy husband of hers.

  Soon, they’d be harrying him to find a wife. Some woman who would fuss at him for riding out alone. Danger was not gone with the snow, but he would be back before dark and no one would dare a daylight raid on a sunny spring day.

  Besides, he preferred the solitude. A few moments when no one was looking at him, waiting for his word to be the final one.

  He walked out of the gate and surveyed the ponies grazing outside the walls, glad to leave the tower behind. He whistled, and Felloun trotted over, ready to ride. In truth, Rob felt more at home on the horses than anywhere else. The ground beneath the pony’s hooves, the land itself was home to him. He was part of it—hills, moss, rocks and soil. Kin to the earth, he sometimes thought, and not to men at all.

  But that was the way of all Brunsons, since the First. A Brunson was of the land. Of this land.

  The other half of him, the half some men found in mates, that half was in these hills. None would force them asunder.

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  Chapter One

  May 1817—Highbury House, London

  ‘Do smile, Pandora; I am sure that neither Devil nor Lucifer intends to gobble you up! At least...it is to be hoped, not in any way you might find unpleasant.’

  Pandora, widowed Duchess of Wyndwood, did not join in her friend’s huskily suggestive laughter as they approached the two gentlemen Genevieve referred to so playfully. Instead she felt her heart begin to pound even more rapidly in her chest, her breasts quickly rising and falling as she took rapid, shallow breaths in an effort to calm her feelings of alarm, and the palms of her hands dampened inside the lace of her gloves.

  She did not know either gentleman personally, of course. Both men were in their early thirties whereas she was but four and twenty, and she had never been a part of the risqué crowd which surrounded them whenever they deigned to show themselves in society. Nevertheless, she had recognised them on sight as being Lord Rupert Stirling, previously Marquis of Devlin and now Duke of Stratton, and his good friend, Lord Benedict Lucas, two gentlemen who had, this past dozen years or so, become known more familiarly amongst the ton as Devil and Lucifer. So named for their outrageous exploits, both in and out of ladies’ bedchambers.

  The same two gentlemen Genevieve had moments ago suggested might be considered as likely candidates as lovers now that their year of mourning for their husbands was over...

  ‘Pandora?’

  She gave a shake of her head. ‘I do not believe I can be a party to this, Genevieve.’

  Her friend gave her arm a gently reassuring squeeze. ‘We are only going to speak to them, darling. Play hostess for Sophia whilst she deals with the unexpected arrival of the Earl of Sherbourne.’ Genevieve glanced across the ballroom to where the lady appeared to be in low but heated conversation with the rakish Dante Carfax, a close friend of Devil and Lucifer.

  Just as the three widows were now close friends...

  It was sheer coincidence that Sophia Rowlands, Duchess of Clayborne, Genevieve Forster, Duchess of Woollerton, and Pandora Maybury, Duchess of Wyndwood, had all been widowed within weeks of each other the previous spring. The three women, previously strangers, had swiftly formed an alliance of sorts when they had emerged from their year of mourning a month ago, drawn to each other by their young and widowed state.

  But Genevieve’s suggestion a few minutes ago, that the three of them each ‘take one lover, if not several before the Season was ended’, had thrown Pandora more into a state of turmoil than anticipation.

  ‘Nevertheless—’

  ‘Our dance, I believe, your Grace?’

  Pandora had not thought she would ever be pleased to see Lord Richard Sugdon, finding that young gentleman to be unpleasant in both his studied good looks and over-familiar manner whenever they chanced to meet. But, having found it impossible to think of a suitable reason to refuse earlier when he had pressed her to accept him for the first waltz of the evening, Pandora believed she now found even his foppish company preferable to that of the more overpowering and dangerous Rupert Stirling or Benedict Lucas.

  ‘I had not forgotten, my lord.’ She gave Genevieve a brief, apologetic smile as she placed her hand lightly upon Lord Sugdon’s arm before allowing herself to be swept out on to the ballroom floor.

  * * *

  ‘Good Lord, Dante, what has put you in such a state of disarray?’ Rupert Stirling, the Duke of Stratton, enquired upon entering the library at Clayborne House later that same evening, and instantly noticing the dishevelled state of one of his two closest friends as he stood across the room. ‘Or perhaps I should not ask...’ he drawled speculatively as he detected a lady’s perfume in the air.

  ‘Perhaps you should not,’ Dante Carfax, Earl of Sherbourne, bit out. ‘Nor do I need bother in asking what—or should I say, whom—is succeeding in keeping Benedict amused?’

  ‘Probably best if you did not,’ Rupert chuckled softly.

  ‘Would you care to join me in a brandy?’ The other man held up the decanter from which he was refilling his own glass.

  ‘Why not?’ Rupert accepted as he closed the library door behind him. ‘I have long suspected that my stepmother would eventually succeed in driving me either to drink or to committing murder!’

  * * *

  Pandora—having found herself trapped in a corner of the ballroom with Lord Sugdon once their dance came to an end, and only managing to escape his company a few minutes ago when another acquaintance had engaged him in conversation—could not help now but overhear the two gentlemen’s conversation as she stood on the terrace directly outside the library.

  ‘Then let it be drink this evening,’ Dante Carfax answered his friend. ‘Especially as the Duchess has been thoughtful enough to conveniently leave a decanter of particularly fine brandy and some excellent cigars here in the library for her male guests to enjoy.’ There was the sound of glass chinking and liquid being poured.

  ‘Ah, much better.’ Devil Stirling sighed in satisfaction seconds later after he had obviously taken a much-needed swallow of the fiery alcohol.

  ‘What are the thr
ee of us even doing here this evening, Stratton?’ his companion drawled lazily as he threw wide the French doors out on to the terrace with the obvious intention of allowing the escape of the smoke from their cigars.

  ‘In view of your dishevelled state, your own reasons are obvious, I should have thought,’ the other gentleman remarked. ‘And Benedict kindly agreed to accompany me, once I told him of my need to spend an evening away from the cloying company of my dear stepmama.’

  Dante Carfax gave a hard laugh. ‘I’ll wager the fair Patricia does not enjoy being referred to as such by you.’

  ‘Hates it,’ the other man confirmed with grim satisfaction. ‘Which is the very reason I choose to do it. Constantly!’

  Devil by name and devil by nature...

  The thought came unbidden to Pandora as she remained unmoving in the shadows of the terrace, having no wish to draw the attention of the gentlemen to her presence outside by making even the slightest of noises.

  The aroma of their cigars now wafting out of the open French doors was a nostalgic reminder to Pandora of happier times in her own life. A time when she had been younger and so very innocent, with seemingly not a care in the world as she attended such balls as this one with her parents.

  Occasions when she would not have felt the need, as she had this evening, to flee out on to the terrace in order to prevent any of Sophia’s tonnish guests from seeing that Pandora had finally been reduced to humiliated tears by Lord Sugdon’s blatant and crude suggestions...

  Not that most of the ton would care if she did find herself insulted, many of society not even acknowledging her existence, or troubling themselves to speak to her, let alone caring if she constantly found herself being propositioned by those gentlemen brave enough to risk her scandalous company.