“So you made it back, did you? I had hoped you’d find the colonies so much to your liking that you’d never return.”
“Luke!” Margaret gasped.
“Matthew…no,” Alex moaned, but it was too late, and Matthew was on his brother, punching him, tearing at him, cursing this spawn of Satan, this misfit, this maggot of a man. He took Luke by surprise, throwing him to land on his back with Matthew on top of him, and for some long seconds Matthew was certain that this time he would put an end to him, this time he would kill his brother with his bare hands. He squeezed, Luke’s eyes bulged. He did it again, and Luke’s mouth opened wide. But then Luke began fighting back, and in his hand appeared a dirk.
“No!” Margaret lunged and grabbed at Luke’s knife arm. Alex was on Matthew, her arms around his neck, crying as she pleaded with him to stop, please stop this, and what about the children, for God’s sake, Matthew, the boys!
Alex kept hold of him as he got to his feet. He was trembling all over, his right ear was ringing from where Luke had clapped him one, and when he wiped his mouth he noticed he was bleeding. Luke was a mess and the silver nose had been knocked askew, baring his maimed face to the world. Matthew couldn’t stop himself from staring. He heard Mark ask of someone what had happened to his uncle’s nose, but he didn’t catch the reply, all of him focused on his brother.
Luke rose. The dashing courtier was in serious disarray, his fashionable coat torn, the elegant linen shirt flecked with blood and dirt. At least his breeches were whole this time, Matthew thought fuzzily, not like that day four years ago when Alex had hindered him from literally cutting his brother’s balls off.
Luke’s hands shook when he adjusted the nosepiece back into place. At his back hovered his two grooms, having wrested themselves free from the restraining grips of Samuel and Gavin.
“I’ll never forgive you for this,” he said to Matthew, cupping his nose. Matthew almost spat in his face; what was he on about? With a heave he shrugged off Alex’s restraining hold, and tore off his shirt to display his scarred back. There was a collective gasp from the household, Margaret exclaimed, and even Luke, bastard that he was, looked stricken.
“Forgive me? Nay brother, you have the shoe on the wrong foot. It is I that won’t forgive you. Not for your attempts to murder me and my wife—”
“Luke! You didn’t!” Margaret exclaimed.
“Ridiculous,” Luke blustered. “Unsubstantiated accusations, and—”
“Don’t pretend innocence, dear brother,” Matthew interrupted. “Had it not been for good friends and quick wits, Alex and I would both have been dead by now.”
“I—” Luke began, but Matthew just raised his voice.
“And what about the years you’ve stolen from me, first with your false accusations that led me to gaol, then by having me sold as a slave.” Matthew inhaled, grinding his teeth to force the red veils of anger into submission. “I took a wee bit of your nose. You’ve damaged me for life, and you stole my son.” He heard Alex gasp behind him, but he couldn’t stop, not now. He raised his finger and pointed at Ian.
“My son, Luke, mine. And you know it as well as I do. You need but look at him to see it. Every line of him shouts to the world that he’s mine. Mine!”
Ian shrank back against his devastated mother. If Luke had been red with rage before, he was now a deathly white, eyes the colour of a mountain cat’s.
“Ian is my son. But you’ll pay for these slurs on my manhood.”
“Manhood? You don’t have a manhood. You connive and scheme, you backstab, and when you can’t beget a son of your own you steal mine! And—”
“How dare you?” Luke interrupted, his voice shrill. He took a step towards Matthew, sword pulled halfway free. Matthew grabbed at what was closest, a pitchfork. Ian made a strangled sound and threw himself towards Luke, blubbering with fear. Both men froze. The sword slid back into the scabbard, the pitchfork was lowered.
“Go,” Matthew said, “be gone, Luke Graham.”
Luke backed away, shielding his wife and son.
Alex came to stand beside him, and they watched in silence while Luke got his family onto his horses and set off up the hill. At the top Luke wheeled his horse, rearing it to kick with its forelegs.
“You should have been dead, brother.”
“But I’m not, am I?” Matthew called back.
“Not yet,” Luke shouted, brought the horse down and without a backward glance rode off.
*
“Right,” Alex said in a carrying voice. “Show’s over, everyone. Sarah, take the children inside, will you? Janey, there are windows to be washed.” She stood with hands on her hips, waiting until they all scurried away to resume their tasks. Then she walked off, leaving Matthew to stand half naked in the deserted yard.
It took time for Matthew to collect his thoughts. His body was shaking with tremors, and he sank down to sit on the ground, staring at his hands. If Alex and Margaret hadn’t intervened, he or Luke would have been dead by now. The shivering increased and Matthew found his shirt and put it back on, fumbling with the lacings.
Where was Alex? He felt abandoned, a wee lad in a yawning plain of nothingness, and he desperately needed his Alex to somehow put the scattered pieces that were him together again, but she had just walked away. He got to his feet, his brain unscrambling itself to give him a clear rerun of the whole incident. And then he knew why she had left him sitting alone in the yard.
Alex was in the kitchen garden, working her way up an empty bed. In all her movements, in the set of her shoulders, he could see she was not only upset, but furious. He dropped a hand onto her shoulder and she shrugged it away.
“Alex,” he wheedled. “Come here.” She shook her head and sank her wooden spade into the earth. “What has changed? You knew Ian was mine already before.”
“But he didn’t, and you didn’t see the look he gave you.” She turned to scowl at him. “And what about Mark? He’s too small to understand, but he heard you, didn’t he? He heard you say Ian is your son. You’re such an idiot!”
“Surely it isn’t that bad,” Matthew tried, ignoring the insult.
“You think? You just gave away our son’s birth right by announcing to the world that you have an older son.” She clumsily got off her knees, threw the spade to the ground, and strode away.
Matthew sighed and dragged his hands through his hair. She was right: it had been a foolish thing to do, and even if Ian was legally Luke’s lad, not his, he had inadvertently opened a window through which Ian, aided and abetted by Luke, could attempt to claim Hillview. His eyes followed Alex as she crossed the water meadow, forded the stream, and continued up the farther slope. She dropped out of sight below the trees and he got to his feet to go after her.
He found her by the millpond, sitting on a rock and throwing pebbles into the water. Her cap lay discarded, her hair bared to the world, and at his approach she threw him a look over her shoulder. Blue, blue eyes, regarding him in a way that made him twist inside.
“I’ll never let any harm befall Mark,” he said.
She sighed and looked away. “I know you won’t. The problem is that you won’t be around, will you? The issue of inheritance sort of depends on you being dead to begin with.”
He smiled crookedly at her matter-of-fact tone. “I’ll speak to Simon, but I’m sure there is no legal issue.”
Alex plopped yet another stone into the millpond. “Probably not. I suppose that by Luke taking him as his, Ian is no longer your son in the eye of the law. Not unless Luke decides he must renounce the boy. And he’ll rage about having had the boy foisted on him, that you disowned him despite knowing he was yours.”
“But that’s not the way it was,” Matthew protested.
“No,” Alex sighed, “but who cares about the truth?”
Matthew sank down on his knees beside her. “I swear to you that Hillview will be safeguarded to our son.”
She looked at him for a long time before stroking his
cheek, in a gesture far more maternal than wifely.
“I’m sure you’ll do your best, but what will you do the day Ian comes to claim his paternity? Will you be able to turn him away, knowing without a doubt that he is as much yours as Mark is?”
“Nay he isn’t,” Matthew lied stoutly. “Of course he isn’t.”
“That’s not what you said today.”
Matthew winced at her tone and tried to take her hand.
“No,” Alex shook her head. “I just need to be alone, okay?”
“Will you come down for supper?”
Alex nodded but kept her face averted from his.
*
It was dark by the time she came down from the hill, no longer angry even if she had no intention of letting him know that just yet. After all, how could she be angry with him for losing his temper, when he’d been so cruelly goaded by that toe-wipe he had for a brother? She busied herself with supper, chatted casually with Sarah about tomorrow’s tasks, and made sure the children were fed and put to bed before joining him in the parlour.
They didn’t speak much throughout the evening. The silence grew tangible and Alex was aware of every single breath he took, only feet away from her. Finally, she folded together the half-mended shirt, stood and extended her hand to him.
“Bed?”
She almost smiled at how his shoulders dropped with relief at the sound of her voice. Matthew followed her up the stairs, undressed, helped her with her lacings and retreated to bed. Alex took her time, spent an inordinately long time cleaning her teeth and slipped in to lie beside him. He rolled her over on her side, curving his body round hers. For some minutes they lay close and silent, fingers braided, a general sinking together that was restful. Alex drifted off, suspended halfway between sleep and wakefulness.
“Do you think…” Matthew shifted himself even closer. “…is there any possibility do you think?”
“Possibility?” Alex wanted to sleep, not engage in complicated discussions, but she smothered a yawn. “Possibility of what?”
“That we forgive each other.”
Alex laughed. And then she wasn’t laughing, she was crying, and he had to hold her and shush her until she was able to talk.
“I think you can forgive him, because ultimately you have what you want in life; Hillview and your family.” Alex rolled over with the grace of an overweight elephant to properly see his eyes.
“You; I have you,” he corrected her.
“Whatever,” she mumbled. “Do you want to? Forgive him, I mean.”
Matthew fell over on his back, eyes caught on a fold in the bed hangings.
“I don’t know,” he replied after a while. “But all this anger, it threatens to drown me.”
She propped herself up on an elbow to see his face, visible only as a grey oval in the darkness of the little room.
“Well, don’t expect him to be wallowing in self-recriminations, and after today he most certainly won’t forgive you – not after you shouted out to the whole world he’s incapable of siring children.”
“You’re most comforting at times,” Matthew grumbled.
“I’m just telling you the truth. Anyway, the king seems to be keeping him busy, and if we’re lucky he might send him off on a diplomatic mission to Mongolia or somewhere.” She turned back on her side and scooted closer to him. “He’ll never disown Ian,” she yawned, “not for his own sake, not for Margaret’s sake, but because he doesn’t want you to have your son back.” She was very comforted by her own conclusions, nodding in agreement with herself. “Very warped, your brother is, and if you ask me, someone should have bundled him with the kittens and drowned him as a baby.”
“Alex!” Matthew sounded horrified.
“Well okay, not as a baby,” she amended. “Too bad someone didn’t, though, because Luke will be back. I don’t know when or how, but one day he’ll be back to take this from you.”
“He can try,” Matthew said, “try and fail.” He placed his hand on their unborn child, splaying his fingers in a protecting gesture.
*
The next morning, Matthew rose to do his chores and found his yard full of people, all with a sudden errand to the master. For the coming week, people milled about, their eyes travelling with interest over Matthew. Conversation would be cut short at his appearance, only to resume as he walked away, and he could hear his workers, his tenants, buzzing with the repeated story of how the Graham brothers nearly killed each other. And had they seen the master’s back? Badly flogged, and all because of that miscreant of a brother.
Occasionally, Matthew heard a muttering about the lad, the boy of just nine, and how was it, was he the master’s or wasn’t he? Wasn’t, the majority seemed to agree, for surely a mother would not have cheated her own son out of an inheritance as fine as Hillview. Speculations were swallowed back at the look in Matthew’s eyes, and the men would hurry back to their work.
“Tough,” Alex shrugged when he complained. “That’s what you get when you decide to air a reality TV show.” She laughed at his incomprehension and went on to explain that there were people who invited the public in to partake of every facet of their lives, from squabbles over breakfast to full blown fights in the marriage bed.
“Why?” Matthew asked. Alex rubbed her fingers together in a money grabbing gesture, making him smile. “And you watch? Unknown people living their lives?”
“Some do. And you,” she said, kissing him on the cheek, “you’re Hillview’s own first class celebrity.”
*
For well over a fortnight, Alex kept a constant watch over the lane, convinced that any minute Luke would come storming down with a full complement of men at his back. She took to keeping the loaded musket in the kitchen, went nowhere without her dagger, and never let her husband out of her sight – unless he was accompanied by others.
At night she’d start awake at any sound, and it was at her insistence that Matthew brought home a dog – an old dog, already grey around the muzzle, but according to Matthew a renowned guard dog that now slept in the yard. It irritated her that he should be so unconcerned, shrugging off her worries with a laconic comment that as far as he knew, Luke wasn’t a fool, and to plan any kind of full scale attack on Hillview would be the act of a madman, bringing with it the risk of trial, disgrace and potential death. Hmm; maybe he had a point.
Alex relaxed back into normality as the days became weeks. Luke was far away in London, a heavily occupied man, and with time he’d forget all about Matthew, everyday life reducing his obsessive hatred of his brother to a mere irritation. Besides, on one of his visits Simon told her Luke was now Sir Luke, proud owner of a manor in Oxfordshire, and if so, what on earth would he want with Hillview?
Simon had agreed; Luke was a man of the world, entrusted with one more complex mission after the other, expected to remain at all times at his royal master’s beck and call. And, he added with a twinkle to his eyes, as he heard it a wee bird had whispered details of Luke’s doings into the king’s ear, causing wrinkles of displeasure to form on the royal brow, and so Luke was forced to watch his step – at least for a while.
So instead Alex concentrated on preparing for the imminent arrival of their third child, wondering how she was to cope with two children in clouts. At least Rachel was weaned, delighted with her discovery of a world that contained butter and milk, and nice sticky things like porridge that could be used to decorate one’s hair with.
*
One night early in December, Alex got out of bed, wrapped herself in her cloak, and stepped out into the yard. The budding football player who lived in her womb was kicking its way into the world, and she braced her back against her hands, face to the sky. She smiled when she felt Matthew slide his arms around her, and leaned against his chest.
“It’s coming,” he stated needlessly, letting his hands rest on her hardening belly. She just nodded, relaxing into his arms.
“You best come inside,” Matthew said a bit later. “I won’
t have my son born out in the cold.”
“Son?” Alex laughed. “And I suppose you’ve already named him as well.”
“Aye, of course, but I won’t tell you. You have work to do first.”
“Work,” Alex muttered, “what a bloody euphemism.” She took another breath of cold night air and turned towards the door. “Well, come on then, because if you think I’m doing this alone, you’ve got another think coming, mister.”
*
It was just after midnight and the bedchamber was quiet again. A single candle lit the room, throwing most of it into an agreeable duskiness. On the little stool stood a tray, there was still a whiff of blood and fluids in the air, and Alex closed her eyes, tired to the bone.
“I told you, a lad.” Matthew was sitting beside her in bed, the child cradled in his arms.
“It’s a fifty-fifty chance. You’re just a lucky guesser.” Alex sank down, feeling exhausted. A quick birthing, Rosie had commented, quick and easy. Alex wasn’t all that sure about the easy part, but it had all been uncomfortably fast.
“The next one will be a lad as well. Here, he needs you.”
“The next one?” Alex struggled up to sit, took her new-born son from his besotted father.
“The next one.” He rubbed the bald crown of his son, crooning softly. “My wee Jacob,” he whispered, “and you so bonny and strong, hmm?”
“Nothing wee about him,” Alex protested, “he must be well over ten pounds.” She smiled at Matthew and leaned towards him to kiss his cheek.
“Jacob, hey?”
“Aye, Jacob Alexander.” He ran a finger down her neck, up again to touch her mouth. “I love you.”
“Huh, you’re only saying that because you want to get back in my bed – soon.”
Matthew laughed and pummelled his pillow into shape. “I’m already here.” He scooted closer to her, hugged wife and child to him. “And I don’t plan on sleeping elsewhere,” he yawned. A few minutes later, he was fast asleep.
“I love you, too,” Alex murmured to his sleeping head. One eye opened wide.
“Of course you do. Insatiable, you are.”
Like Chaff in the Wind (The Graham Saga) Page 35
