Exile’s Bane

by Nicole Margot Spencer

  “Lord Devlin, Lady Elena wishes to speak with you,” Duncan said proudly. With a little bow, he led me forward.

  “Are you blind?” Startled by our entry, the earl flexed his hands in fury. “Deaf? Can you not see that I am engaged? Who are you anyway?” he demanded, his long, straight nose held aloft in pretentious dignity. The nose lowered, and he moved toward us.

  The severe countenance of the earl shortened my breath. A step back and the blood left my face.

  The tall cavalier strode quickly to intervene, his large, faithful dog with him step for step. His long arm flew out and stopped the earl’s forward momentum, pushing him aside.

  “Calm down, Devlin. You should remember Captain Comrie.”

  Duncan pushed me closer to the two armored men.

  “Elena, I would like to present His Royal Highness and Commander-in-Chief of his Majesty’s Armies, Prince Rupert,” Duncan said, his face beaming.

  The prince’s youth surprised me. He looked no older than Duncan, who could not be more twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. Knowing the prince’s reputation for fairness, as well as Peg’s fascination with him, I sank into a deep, respectful curtsy.

  The earl’s face curled up in disgust.

  “Come in.” Prince Rupert extended an open hand toward Duncan and me.

  The earl shied away at Boye’s approach. He didn’t like the white dog. It was not wise of my uncle to let that distaste show, for the curly-haired dog, tail like a thick brush at its end, was a proven hunter and veteran of the war. He looked the part at that moment with his heavy neck ruff and an astute wariness of his master’s proximity to the earl. But Boye simply sat down beside the prince and looked up at the earl with a silent show of teeth.

  Duncan motioned at my presence. “Your Highness, this is Lady—”

  Off to my right, the earl expelled a loud huff and placed himself bodily between the prince and his captain, effectively cutting off Duncan’s words. Too close for the prince’s comfort apparently, for Prince Rupert stepped back in agitation.

  “My niece, Lady Elena Roland,” the earl said, introducing me, stark resentment in his manner. “She is confined pending . . .”

  I did not hear the earl’s remaining words, for the prince, the wary dog with him, stepped around my insolent uncle and bent pleasantly before me.

  “Elena. I remember the name. John Roland was your father?” he asked with appealing dignity.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding my head emphatically. “You knew him, your Highness?” The possibility of word of my father from this honorable man enthralled me.

  “I knew him well,” he said, a slight German drag on his words. “He spoke of you often. He was a good officer. His death was a sad loss for King Charles. My sympathies, Lady Elena.”

  The prince’s eye fell to my dress hem, where my red satin underskirt peeked out from under my black dress. Softness crept into his resolute expression.

  “Sparkish style, there,” he murmured to me.

  “Thank you, your Highness,” I said.

  “Tell me, Devlin,” the prince said, turning to the earl, who had assumed an attitude of bruised dignity. “Who is this Mistress Carey, whom I met when I arrived?”

  “She is no one, your Highness,” my uncle said blithely.

  The doubting prince gave him a severe look.

  “Mistress Carey is a distant cousin adopted by my brother,” the earl finally spit out.

  I liked the handsome prince already, though Peg had told me of reports of his terrible temper and his refusal to accept anything less than loyalty, courage and strict military protocol.

  “Mistress Carey is part of your household?”

  The corners of the earl’s mouth went white, standing out beside his downward curving mustache. I stepped back in distress and grasped Duncan’s arm, for it was a sure sign of my uncle’s impending temper. The earl’s hand shook. Somehow it reminded me of his fury upon his entry into the great hall much earlier in the day. He controlled himself now, wisely, though it was something I had never witnessed before. He sniffed in indignation.

  “She is. And she was out of place—”

  “I will not,” Rupert interrupted in a deep, chilling voice that carried throughout the room, “have her ostracized on my account. Do you understand, Lord Devlin?”

  “As you wish, your Highness.”

  The earl moved away. Duncan looked at me uncomfortably. He seemed concerned for me as he had been back in the storage tower, when he tried so carefully to warn me of my uncle’s temper.

  “What are you doing escorting young women around?” Prince Rupert asked Duncan, a crease in his brow.

  “The countess’ orders, your Highness.” Duncan stepped forward and came to full attention.

  That was not quite true, but I could hardly protest.

  “Tor House?”

  “Secured, sir. I have men at all the gates and on the gate towers at the main entrance. Captain Wallace of the house guard has been especially helpful.”

  I had to smile at his mention of Wallace, whom he had not trusted earlier.

  “Very good.” The prince seemed about to say something else, but Boye’s sudden movement caught his attention.

  With obvious concern, the earl watched the dog, who growled and lunged in his direction, restrained only by the prince’s sudden hold on his collar. The earl stepped back toward the bookcase, running into one of the chairs there. Once the prince settled his dog and the earl knew it was safe to move about, he approached Duncan, craning up into his face. Duncan, well below the prince’s lofty height, was still considerably taller than the earl.

  “Captain Comrie, you have not pleased my countess. I object to your blatant misuse of authority in bringing Lady Elena here.”

  Boye now duly chastised and lying at his feet, Prince Rupert looked up, his mouth suddenly tight, eyes alight.

  “Captain Comrie has done as I commanded him,” he said sharply. “He is not a lackey for my dear, brave cousin to use at will.” The prince put a hand on my uncle’s shoulder, spun him around and thumped an index finger on the earl’s breast plate hard enough to create a metallic onk, onk, onk.

  The earl looked down at the tapping finger and cleared his throat. He stared up at an intent Prince Rupert.

  “Are you threatening me . . . uh, your Highness?” he asked in a heavy voice.

  “Think twice, Devlin,” Rupert shot back. His hand moved to the hilt of his rapier. “The King needs leaders like you. I should hate to lose you.”

  In a duel, he meant. Boye’s deep growl underlined the threat.

  “Of course. My apologies, Captain,” the earl said quickly, without turning to Duncan.

  Rupert shoved my uncle away and turned his attention to Duncan, who had returned protectively to my side.

  “Captain, I want you to leave your men in place here under command of an officer of your choice. You are to join Quartermaster General Gordon in the vanguard and proceed with that force to find suitable housing for our troops in Bolton. I want you to keep the general on course. That is your assignment. We must have quarters for every man by nightfall.”

  The serious-minded prince gave his orders, and Duncan’s suddenly animated face left me amazed. I recalled his earlier words regarding the prince, he whom I honor above all things.

  “Yes, your Highness.” Duncan saluted his prince, then turned and, with a quick, intimate lift to his eyebrows, smiled wickedly at me. “I will return, Lady Elena.”

  His gallantry swelled my breast. I thought I would cry. In this room where I expected disrespect and coercion, his courtliness touched me. With a flourish of his hat, he bowed before me, then pivoted smartly on his heel, and departed.

  I stood astounded by his dynamic ability to change direction in mid-stream and remain so happy about it. It was beyond me. Sudden loneliness whittled away at my fortitude, as though I had been deserted.

  As the room went gray, misty fog at the windows now, I regained my intent and pushed Duncan, th
at fatal distraction, out of my mind. I shivered, a sudden chill once more upon the room.

  “I will announce our plans at dinner tonight,” Rupert told the earl.

  “Certainly, your Highness.” Mouth set in a hard white line, the earl lowered his head in muted bitterness. “We are honored by your presence and most appreciative of the relief of Tor House.”

  Prince Rupert strolled past the earl and looked him over critically. “I don’t want to see you without your sash in future, Lord Devlin. If you don’t wear it, you can hardly expect your men to do so.”

  The earl nodded in agreement, his face rigid. It was a rule that soldiers wear their sashes at all times so as to be identified in the case of a sudden action, a rule my uncle evidently did not think applied to him.

  The prince whipped around, his dark locks flying, and left the room. Boye loped along at his side, and his lifeguards fell in behind him.

  The prince, like Duncan, gave me a feeling of rock-solid safety. Its loss left me keenly insecure at that moment, for my uncle closed the door slowly. He turned on me, the veins in his temples huge and throbbing.

  “You dare come here.”

  “Uncle.” After a shaky breath, I steeled myself. I could not falter, not now. Chin raised, I spoke as matter-of-factly as I could manage, considering my quaking limbs. “I appeal to you for justice.”

  “You would have justice?” He leered into my face, so close his straight, fly-away hair brushed my cheeks. His anger dissipated and he hawked a bitter laugh. “You, who conspire against the hand that feeds you? You, who flaunt your indecent nature by riding like a man with the house guards?”

  My mouth fell open in surprise. I did not think anyone knew of my presence in the sorties against our besiegers.

  “You,” he went on, his voice rising. A sneer lifted one side of his face. “—who instigate that companion of yours to insult the prince and my countess?”

  “Peg? I did not.”

  “Oh, Marie Louise warned me of your delusions.” He strode to the chair at the document desk, where he sat down and rubbed at a spot on the helmet that remained on the desk. “And now I suppose you want something more than the roof over your head and the support I’ve afforded you.”

  Resentment flared within me. I struggled to maintain my calm.

  “I want my rights restored to me,” I said flatly.

  “What rights?” His thin-lipped pout stretched into a sly smile. “Lies and fabrications cannot change your duty to your family.”

  My mouth dropped open. I snapped it shut.

  “I refute the betrothal you forced on me last year. I will not marry Edward Gorgon, of all people, and I will not leave the house. Tor House is my home by right.”

  He came up off the chair in a heated rush, swung past me and put his fist into the end of the bookcase. It rocked precariously. He turned back to me, like a maddened bull, and shook his fist inches in front of my nose, so close the small black hairs on the backs of his fingers stood out in stark relief.

  “You are a willful, selfish child! Do you ever think of anyone but yourself?”

  My lips quivered.

  “There are other issues involving many people in this,” he screamed. “Do you really believe you are more important than they? What about your duty to your father’s memory? To me, who took you in? Did it never occur to you that I also care deeply for Tor House?”

  “Is it so selfish to want what belongs to me?” someone asked. In my terror, I grasped that it was my own voice.

  He looked down at his clenched fist. The hand dropped away.

  “We have spoken of this before. Why can you not be useful,” he went on, suddenly, inexplicably calm, “and accept this marriage? It will assure my hold on the isle. I will be able to control the man.”

  “You intend to keep Tor House for yourself,” I stated, aghast at my own conclusion.

  “Tor House is only suitable for an English lord.”

  “But Tor House is my dowry portion. What was this betrothal based upon, if not my position as heiress of Tor House? Besides, Edward Gorgon is no English lord.”

  His dark eyebrows went up, and his face tilted in surprise. “Wise little girl. But no, I have given Gorgon other incentives for your hand.”

  He strolled back to the table, and I followed, trying to understand why he would do such a thing.

  “You cannot do that, Uncle. Father settled Tor House on me as a freehold estate for life unless I marry; and then, it passes to my husband. A jointure, he called it.”

  “Ah, yes. He did, my dear.” He nodded, somehow pleased.

  He must have changed his mind, for he bypassed the table and went on to the record cabinet. I remembered the top two shelves of the cabinet as open-shelved and full of neatly piled record books. But they lay now hidden behind doors and a locked iron bar, which extended to the bottom of the cabinet. He unlocked the bar and searched among the sheaves in the bottom section of the cabinet. Finally he pulled out the long deed I remembered, with all its seals and ribbons.

  “I was witness to his signing,” he said. His dubious cheeriness grated on my nerves. He turned with the deed, held it out for me to see. “The only witness. It has never been seen by anyone else. And so . . .” He strode across the room and threw it on the fire.

  “No!” I cried, running after him. I bent and reached around him to pull the smoking deed from the flames. His fist entered my peripheral vision. Pain exploded in my head. In agony, I brought my hands up, and a whirling vertigo claimed me. The next thing I remembered was the rough carpet against my cheek. Arms snaked under my armpits and lifted me, positioning me to watch the last black fragments of the deed crumble into dust atop the lowering fire.

  “It never existed. Just a figment of your questionable imagination,” he rasped in my ear. He withdrew his arms.

  I dropped to the floor, narrowly missing the stone edge of the hearth. I struggled to unsteady feet, grasped the hearth mantel, and pulled myself upright. The room whirled around me. I tried to focus on the old battleaxe mounted above me.

  When my strength returned enough for me to look around, I found him studying me out of dark, deadly eyes.

  “You have no rights,” he said, his voice as hard as the steel of his rapier, aimed for my heart. “Tor House belongs to me as sole surviving male heir. You leave at first light tomorrow for the Isle of Man where you will marry Edward Gorgon.”

  Chapter Four

  In my teary-eyed stupor, I did not know where my uncle was or how he had summoned Wallace. I only knew it was Captain Wallace who gathered me up, led me out of the library, and down the long corridors toward the back of the house. My anger slowly returned and with it, my resolve.

  “Let me go, Captain. I have to get away.” If I stayed, I would be forced to leave and marry Gorgon on the isle. I would never see my home again, and that terrified me more than my uncle’s wrath.

  But Wallace ignored me, and we continued on. He stopped at a little used doorway set deep in the stone wall. He turned to me, face alight, his mouth set in a bitter line.

  “Through this door and along the passageway, you will find yourself outside near the stables. I go now to release Mistress Carey. Wait for her.” My look of amazement must have pressed him to explain, for he went on. “The earl ordered her expelled from Tor House.”

  My mouth dropped open in shock. I searched his face. Prince Rupert’s warning to the earl echoed through my mind, and it astounded me that my uncle would cross such a man.

  “Your condition tells me your fate at his hands will be far worse should you remain here.”

  I touched my temple, where a painful knot had formed. To elicit such a response from my loyal captain, it must have looked scandalous.

  “I can give you enough time to clear the valley. But then I must report to Lord Devlin, insisting that you shoved me into the wall and fled through this doorway. Do not allow yourself to be caught, Lady Elena. There are places you can go, people who will support your claim. You
must find them.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Your short sword is in its sheath with Kalimir’s tack, should you need to defend yourself.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” I whispered fervently. I moved quickly through the door and down the passageway.

  The stable was busy with stable boys running here and there. They were taking the horses out beyond the walls, even with the weather like it was. After three months of confinement, I could understand why the horse master would want to get his horses out to crop fresh grass, even if it was wet. From the shadows behind the stable doorway, a boy left the stable’s east aisle with two horses and took them past me out the stable door.

  As soon as he passed out of sight beyond the gate, I slipped down the west aisle and into the back where Kalimir was stabled. The great bay had been wounded at Edgehill when my father died. The deep slash wound in his mighty shoulder had been slow to heal. He was a skittish stallion, though not around me, not anymore. I entered the straw-strewn stall and hugged his neck. He whickered, content. But his war sense must have detected my alarm, for he side-stepped, once, twice. I quickly got his bridle on, the blanket and saddle on his back, girth secured, and the sword that my father had given me strapped in its sheath on the saddle.

  By the time I saddled Peg’s mare and led her to Kalimir’s stall, Peg herself came running down the stable aisle, her cloak waving around her. Distraught, her face beamed in a splotchy red agony of alarm.

  “Wallace says I have to leave, that the earl has banned me from Tor House, like he did Thomas!”

  Thomas, another of my father’s charities, had been brought to Tor House the year after Peg. We had grown up together, the three of us, me, Peg, and Thomas. But upon his arrival in 1642, without explanation, Uncle Charles had banished Thomas from ever setting foot near Tor House again, on pain of death.

  “It is worse than that, Peg.”

  “From Mrs. Lowry.” She pressed a rolled cloak into my hands. Her big cape flared open and displayed a clean homespun dress, which the good housekeeper had also undoubtedly supplied to her.