“Have you changed your name yet?”
Luke gave her a blank look.
“It should be Cain, shouldn’t it?” she said, very pleased with the red that stained his cheeks.
“Cain killed Abel,” he said icily.
“Well, bully for you, how unfortunate the sentence to hang was commuted to one to rot in prison. But I’m sure you attempted to find ways round that, didn’t you? You probably bribed the prison guards to give him hell.”
He paled and turned away.
“Oh my God! You actually did!” She stepped up close. “Have you any idea what they did to him?”
Luke hitched a disinterested shoulder. “He should’ve been dead.”
“Why?” Alex demanded. “What has he ever done to you to deserve that?”
“Done to me?” Luke echoed. “Has he not told you then? Of how he had Da throw me out?”
“Matthew had nothing to do with that. Your father threw you out because of finding you with Margaret, not—”
“He asked him to, aye? Matthew had taken a liking to Margaret already then, and he made Da throw me out.”
“That’s not what he says,” Alex said. Had he? Her Matthew?
“No, but he wouldn’t, would he?” He was standing far too close, brittle eyes boring into her. No warmth, some interest, and Alex backed away. It seemed to amuse him. He took a step towards her and she retreated. Two quick steps and he had his hands on her, and when she backed away again she slammed against the tree, with him far too close.
“A kiss for your brother-in-law?”
“Go to hell! Go home and fuck your two-timing wife instead.” She winced at the pressure on her wrist bones.
“I love my wife,” Luke hissed, a fanatical gleam in his eyes. “And he, that bastard brother of mine, tried to take her from me.”
“Really? As I heard it, she eagerly led him on.”
“Led him on?” Luke’s voice climbed a register or two. “What lies has he been telling you? He forced her! He violated her, dishonoured her, and then what was she to do? What could she do but wed him, all alone as she was in the world? For that he deserved to die, for all the pain and sorrow he put my Margaret through, you hear?” He twisted his hands into her skin.
“Ah!” she gasped, tears springing in her eyes. “Let me go!”
“I will, soon. Once I’ve made my own comparisons between you and Margaret. After all, he probably already has.”
“You heard her; let go of her.” The quiet voice cut through the clearing and Luke wheeled. Matthew was standing only feet away with his dirk in his hand. “I should have killed you that afternoon in my bedroom,” Matthew continued, “and I am of a mind to do it now. I won’t, not this time. But if you as much as lay a finger on my wife again – any wife of mine – I swear, on my blood, that I’ll have your balls off, you hear?” He took two long strides across the clearing, raised his knife and slashed himself across the palm, holding up the bloodied hand to Luke. “My word, brother. And now, get off my land.” He motioned with his knife and waited until Luke disappeared up the hill before moving over to Alex.
“What were you thinking, coming up here alone? I told you to stay away from her cottage. And why didn’t you kick him, like you did with those men on the moor?”
“He got too close, okay? And I wasn’t under the impression that your brother was going to behave quite as erratically as he just did. You never told me he’s a total wacko.”
Matthew blinked in incomprehension.
“He’s insane,” Alex explained impatiently.
“Ah no, he’s not insane. He’s twisted and dangerous, but very sane.” He muttered a quick prayer and held out his hand to Alex. “Come, lass, let’s go home.” She turned and stalked away, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Is that why you don’t want me to see her?” she demanded a couple of minutes later. She was seething inside, wanting very much to hurt someone.
“See who?”
“Her. Margaret.” She turned towards him. “Luke just told me that we could be sisters she and I, is that true?”
He didn’t reply, keeping his eyes on the ground.
“I asked you a question!”
“Aye, and I’m not inclined to answer.”
“Fine. I’ll go and check for myself.” And just like that she was off, running back the way they’d come.
He caught up with her and tried to grab her. She wrenched herself free, gripped his forearm, and with a twisting motion sent him flying to land on his back. He lay staring at the sky for a long moment, his breath coming in loud, choked gasps.
“I’m sorry,” she said, made as if to help him up, but he waved her away. He moved his legs, rolled over on his side. “I didn’t mean to.” She stood a distance away, not quite sure what to do. “I’m sorry, do you want me to…” She swallowed down the rest. He looked at her with blank eyes as he got to his feet. She could see he was bleeding from just below the ear and her stomach turned with shame.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated.
He wiped his face with a shaking hand and spat into the ground. He was bleeding from his mouth as well, and she wanted to rush over and try to make things right again, but the look on his face was cold and forbidding.
“You wouldn’t defend yourself against him, but me you throw like a sack of barley.” He pushed through the closest thicket and walked away.
“Fuck.” She sat down. “Djävla skit, bloody hell, fuck.”
“Well, you have a tongue on you.” The voice was soft with amusement and Alex swivelled towards it, not seeing anything much with the sun in her eyes.
“I’m a bit upset.”
“Aye, I gathered.”
Alex could hear someone moving and stood up, fists balling. This time she’d send whoever got close flying first and ask questions after.
“So you’re his new woman then?” The disdainful tone cut, and Alex drew herself up straighter.
“His wife, I’m Matthew’s wife.”
“The foreigner,” the voice laughed. “But I had him first.”
“Oh, you’re Margaret. Lucky me, first your lowlife husband and then you. What else could a girl want?”
The disembodied voice stepped out from the trees, and a dark-haired woman walked towards her. Alex inhaled noisily. Luke was right; this could have been her sister. Margaret seemed equally surprised and stopped an arm’s length away, her eyes amazed.
“You look just like me!”
Alex just stared. Where she had brown, curling hair, this woman had a straight blackness that hung down her back, uncovered except for a most nominal linen cap. Margaret’s eyes were several shades lighter than Alex’s dark blue, but the shape was the same as were the brows, dark and elegantly arched. It was like looking in a flawed mirror; the same nose, the same mouth, although Alex’s lower lip was fuller and no one had ever broken Margaret’s nose. And where Margaret’s face ended in an exquisite point, Alex’s chin was square.
“Well,” Margaret said, having completed her own inspection, “it would seem he hasn’t forgotten me.” She smiled and brushed at her hair. “Does he talk much of me?”
“No, not really, but he’s mentioned your name.”
Once she got home she was going to flay the bastard. Luke was right; the resemblance was eerie. Make comparisons indeed! And it didn’t exactly help that while she, Alex, was attractive enough, bloody Margaret was absolutely ravishing. She was quite glad she’d sent him flying, except that the look in his eyes as he’d stared up at her still cut her to the bone.
“Mentioned it, aye? I think it would be somewhat more.”
“Well, let’s say that what I’ve heard hasn’t been to your credit.”
“No,” Margaret said, and there was a tinge of sadness in her tone. “I suppose it wouldn’t be.” She sat down and patted the ground beside her in an inviting gesture. Alex hesitated. “I won’t harm you,” Margaret assured her, making Alex raise an amused brow before sitting down.
�
��I never loved him,” Margaret said. “It was always Luke for me.”
“Oh good; nice to have cleared that one up. So, you married a man you didn’t love, you fucked his brother on the side, foisted him with a cuckoo child and…let me see, have I forgotten something? Oh yes! You contrived to have him convicted for crimes of treason of which he was perfectly innocent. I sincerely hope that any resemblance between us is only skin deep, because the world doesn’t need more than one conniving bitch of that calibre.”
Margaret was staring at her with a gaping mouth, and Alex had a sudden urge to stuff it full of grass.
“You don’t like me much, do you?” Margaret said.
“I don’t know you. But what I know of you doesn’t have me hoping for a long and mutual friendship.”
“It wasn’t quite as simple as you describe it.”
“Simple? There’s nothing simple about this whole mess, is there?” Alex glared at her and Margaret shifted away.
“They threw him out. He was my whole life and they threw him out, telling him he was never welcome back again.” She glanced at Alex. “You’ve heard, I suppose? Of how his father found us in the hayloft, and us only fifteen.”
Alex nodded.
“I took Luke to bed when I was not quite fourteen. We couldn’t help ourselves.” Margaret smiled and picked up a bright yellow rowan frond, running it through her fingers. “We loved each other, and had Malcolm only asked, we would have wed the next day. But to Malcolm what we did was sinful, and he was disgusted by us, but mainly by Luke whom he called rotten to the core.”
“Good description,” Alex said.
Margaret frowned. “He was but a lad. Wild and high-spirited, aye, but rotten?” She shook her head, and Alex muttered a vague agreement. It still struck her as excessively harsh to boot your son out for sleeping with a girl he loved.
“Malcolm gave him a horse and some funds, and with those Luke rode north and spent the following years trailing the king on his progress. Took a liking to him, the king did, and even more after Luke took a blade for him in a skirmish just over the border.”
“There is no king.”
“Ah but there is!” Margaret said. “King of Scots and soon to be King of England as well. He will prevail. He’s only five or six years older than me, is Charles, and already a king and a fine man says Luke.”
“Oh, and Luke would know?”
“Mayhap.” Margaret looked like a smug cat at the idea of her Luke being confidant to the king.
“I was rather referring to the fact that Luke wouldn’t exactly be a reliable judge of character – given his own.”
Margaret sniffed but continued with her story. “I missed him so much it hurt, every day I woke and missed him yet again. I was lonely, and Joan and I were never close, so I turned to Matthew. He’d not noticed me much before, but I changed that right quickly. After all, he’s not bad looking, and stood to inherit all this – the only home I’d ever known.”
“Callous.” Alex exhaled, relieved to hear there’d been nothing going on between Matthew and Margaret before Luke had left.
“I was only fifteen. And I was good to him, to Matthew I mean.” She gave Alex a coy look.
“I don’t want to hear this.” Alex got to her feet, but Margaret grabbed her skirts.
“But I want to tell you. You’ve only heard his side, haven’t you?” She refused to let go until Alex sat back down.
“If I’d thought there was even the slightest chance of Luke coming back, I swear I’d never have married him, and as long as Malcolm lived, that was never going to happen. So I wed Matthew, and five months later his father was dead and Luke rode into the yard. I thought I was going to die.” She fell silent, fingering the rowan frond.
“I did try to hold to my marriage vows, but I…just to see Luke again, to have his hand touch mine…” She looked away, gnawing at her lip. “It was unbearable, and Luke…well, he was so angered, accusing me of being false.” She hitched her shoulders. “But I wasn’t, not really; in my heart there was ever only Luke.”
Alex rolled her eyes at this somewhat melodramatic statement. “And I suppose you told him that, right?”
Margaret ducked her head, her fingers tearing the rowan frond to shreds. “Aye, I did.”
“So how did you explain it to him?”
“Explain what?”
“That you’d married Matthew, seeing as you swore Luke undying love.” Margaret brushed the crumbled leaves off her lap and shrugged.
“I just said I had to. He understood my predicament.”
Alex pursed her mouth; not quite as simple, and in particular given Margaret’s piggy pink hue. And it definitely didn’t tally with Luke’s version of events earlier. No; Margaret had concocted a heart pinching story, starring herself as victim and Matthew as the beast.
Margaret fidgeted under Alex’s eyes. “In the end I couldn’t help myself, and you know the rest, how Matthew threw us out naked, threatening to kill us both.” She dropped her eyes to her lap, fiddled with her waistband. “I didn’t mean to hurt him so badly, to leave his heart permanently scarred.”
“That he’ll get over; in fact, I think he already has.” Alex smirked. “But the rest…” She shook her head.
“I did try to stop Luke, but he’d heard that the Commonwealth men had information about a royalist spy, a Graham just like the Montrose, God save his soul, and so he gave Matthew up. He had to, for the sake of the cause.”
Alex stood up and spat at Margaret’s feet. “That lie has probably saved you from many sleepless nights, but isn’t it time you admit what you did – at least to yourself? You were sending an innocent man to hang! And how convenient, that in the case of his death his heir would’ve been the brother who denounced him.”
“I’m sorry,” Margaret said. “I truly am.”
“And that doesn’t help, does it?” Alex said and walked off.
*
She wandered through the woods for hours, piecing together what Margaret had told her with what Matthew had said about the whole business. She avoided the house all day, wondering what she could possibly say to Matthew that would wipe the look of astounded hurt from his face, and at dusk she slipped in to the stables to delay a bit further the confrontation with those cold hazel eyes.
She rubbed Samson over his back and fed him a small apple before sinking down to sit on a pile of hay by the door. She sat there for a long time, watching how candles were extinguished one by one and the house before her went to sleep. He hadn’t come looking, and she had hoped he would.
Alex was hugely embarrassed when Sam shook her awake. After a muttered good morning she rushed over to the house, and taking a big breath walked inside.
Matthew was sitting by the kitchen table but gave no sign of having noticed her entry, so she hurried through, grabbing at some bread on the way, and disappeared into their bedroom. She could hear Matthew talking below, even heard him laugh. He hadn’t worried about her, the bed very obviously slept in. On the floor he’d left a discarded pile of linen and dirty stockings, and she kicked it into a corner. He could do his own bloody laundry!
She spent the morning helping Joan make preserves, a strained silence between them. Alex wondered how Matthew had explained her disappearance, somehow she suspected he would never admit to having been thrown to the ground by his wife. When she saw the men return from the fields, Alex escaped, mumbling something about taking a walk, and darted out below Matthew’s arm, her face averted from his. He didn’t come after; she wished he had.
Matthew stayed outside for as long as he could, only reluctantly returning to the house. She wasn’t there, and the reply to his casual question indicated that she’d been gone all afternoon. She didn’t appear for supper, and when a quick inspection revealed that she was neither in the stables nor the barn, a small coil of unease snaked through his belly.
He’d been so angry with her yesterday, humiliated by the ease with which she’d wheeled him to the ground, but even more ups
et by the fact that she’d done that to him but not to his accursed brother. So when she’d not come in for supper, he had put out the candles and locked down the house, assuming that she’d either come knocking or find a pocket of hay in which to sleep. And he’d been right, hadn’t he, seeing her come in this morning with hay in her hair. But now…he walked through the stables again, he climbed up to the hayloft and she wasn’t there, and he stalked through the nearby woods, calling her name but she didn’t reply.
For a giddy second he contemplated the terrible possibility that maybe she’d been thrown back to her time, and he would never know his bairn or see her again, and the anguish made him bend over in pain. For another second he considered that she’d just left, taken what few things were hers and walked off. The thought brought him up cold, and he rushed to his study to retrieve his little strongbox. It was gone; John’s ring, her necklace and the ring her father gave her.
“She can’t have gotten very far,” Joan said. “She’s on foot, Matthew.”
“But where would she go?” He threw a saddle on Samson, brusque in his haste.
“To Cumnock I imagine, where else?”
“To do what?” Matthew said. “What can she do there, a woman all alone?”
Joan shrugged that she had no idea. “Why did she go? What did you quarrel about?”
“I’m not even sure we had a quarrel, we had a silence.”
“Ah,” Joan nodded.
Matthew threw her a quick look; for all his expansive nature, wee Simon was a master at cutting silences, days when his gregarious self would disappear and be replaced by a stranger. It would seem that at times those silences were directed at his wife.
“And she found out about Margaret and her being alike.”
“Really? How?” Joan shook her head. “I told you.”
“Luke.”
“Luke? Was he here?”
“Aye. I came upon them by the large rowan, Mam’s spot, and he was trying to kiss her, making interesting comments about wanting to compare for himself.”
A Rip in the Veil (The Graham Saga) Page 23
