The Falconer’s Daughter: Book I

by Liz Lyles

  “Hush, the child is waking,” Kirk whispered, going to Cordaella’s pallet where Culross had positioned himself.

  Reaching over the wolf, he touched her head. He was grateful that she hadn’t woken earlier.

  Now he glanced over at Geoffrey. “Don’t say anything about this in front of her. She doesn’t need to know. It will only frighten her. She has had nightmares since visiting Lochaber. She is sure someone will come here.”

  “Killed in his own castle. Not far from his bedchamber. Late last night—or was it this morning?—I can’t tell, I’ve ridden for hours to get here and can’t stay long.”

  “But who did it? Why?”

  “Papa?” she stirred.

  “I’m here,” he answered, even as Culross crept closer to her curled body, licking her hand and between her small fingers.

  “Is someone here?” she murmured.

  “No one, Cory. Go back to sleep.”

  “But I heard—”

  “It’s just a dream.” He motioned Geoffrey to the door, one finger pressing against his lips. “It’s just a dream.”

  *

  Culross had alerted them to the noise outside.

  “It is probably McInnes,” Kirk said, rising from the hearth where he had been adding wood to the fire. It was November and winter was already heavy upon them.

  Cordaella sat up in her bed, excited by the prospect of a visitor. Maybe someone from Lochaber, she thought, rising to her knees. She waited while her father unlatched the door, sliding the bar open. He stepped into the night, Culross growling low in his throat. “Who is it?” Kirk called.

  “We are lost,” a voice answered from the darkness, the moon half-hidden by clouds, just the barest trace of silver in the sky. “Can you give us a bit of food to keep us until we reach the town?”

  Culross growled again, his teeth baring. Kirk patted the wolf’s head to quiet him. “How many of you are there?”

  “Just my boy and me,” answered the man. “We were crossing the mountains and took a wrong turn.”

  “You come from the south, don’t you? A long way to be traveling.” Kirk shut the door behind him, his voice carrying into the cottage. “We haven’t much,” he said, “but if you come this way, perhaps I can find you a bite—auugh—” His words were broken by a scream. Culross howled, a long low desperate howl, and Cordaella jumped from her bed, running to the door. She heard Culross howl louder, his cries fierce, terrifying, and she threw the door open calling to him, and then calling for her father. She could see nothing outside, the moon too small, too far away and her bare feet crunched ice on the slick white step.

  “Papa!” In the distance she heard a horrible thudding and Culross’ wild howling. “Culross—” she screamed, knowing without understanding that it was him being beaten, him being killed. “Papa, help Culross. Papa!”

  She didn’t know that her father had been killed first.

  When Culross’s whimpering had been silenced, and no sound came from the darkness, she walked out into the snow, searching for her father. He lay several yards from the door, his shirt sticky with blood. She tried to drag him inside, pulling at his arms and chest until she had him just inside the door. As she struggled to lift him, she heard voices coming from the trees, their accents strange, so foreign, and leaving her father on the doorstep, she ran back outside, into the open and screamed at them, screaming her terror and fury and frenzied pain.

  She knew they had remained outside all night, and she sat over her father until the first of the sun’s rays lightened the horizon. Stars still shone in the violet sky but it was light enough to see, light enough to look for Culross.

  Between the cottage and the wood, she found her wolf, the fur matted on his head, a dark spread of blood frozen on the snow. He looked so small now, not like the big Culross who had padded at her heels. She reached over to touch his muzzle. It was frozen. She ran her fingers over his nose and between his eyes, his cold, thick fur hard beneath her hand.

  She left the cottage then, without her winter cloak and wearing only her ordinary shoes. She knew of only one place to go. She reached Lochaber as the sun was setting, the winter afternoon so short that she was grateful she had reached the town before nightfall.

  She went to the merchant who had threatened her father months earlier, not knowing where else to go.

  “My father’s dead,” she said when his wife opened the door. “They killed him. And Culross too.” She didn’t cry. Too cold. Too tired. She hadn’t remembered how hard it was to walk from Ben Nevis to the valley floor. But then, she had never walked in snow before. Her legs were numb all the way to her hips, the drifts two and three feet high in places.

  Lochaber’s priest sent word to the Macleods, but there was no one alive in Aberdeen and one week passed before an English noble, an Earl from Derby, arrived in the Highland village to take the girl with him.

  “I am your uncle, your mother’s sister’s husband, and you will live with me,” Earl Eton told her, studying Cordaella’s slight shape and wan face. Her hair hadn’t been combed in months. Dark smudges accented the lightness of her gray eyes. “I have children, three of them, two boys and a girl,” he continued as she stared at him, stunned by grief. She didn’t think she would ever be able to speak again. “Is there anything you want—or need—from your croft?” he asked. She shook her head and he handed money to the butcher’s wife who had looked after the girl for the last week and a half. They set off the same day, the Earl, the soldiers, and the child riding in front of one stern-faced guard.

  Now the Earl’s retinue snaked through the last of the Derbyshire woods, down the rolling hillside and out of England’s peaks. They had been traveling for nearly five days but finally the pale rectangular tower of Peveril Castle could be seen rising above the Buxton’s trees. The fields in the small valley had the earth smelling fresh and clean, as it always did after a hard rain.

  Cordaella buried her face in the coated chest of the soldier, too overwhelmed to look at the landscape, the hillsides above Derbyshire’s fertile soil. Her father was dead, and Culross, too. She didn’t know how to make sense of the pain. It was bigger than her, bigger than anything she had known before.

  Within Peveril Castle, all was silent. At two thirty, everyone from children to stable hands was sleeping. The night was crisp and clear, no cloud to obstruct the view of the sky which was a deep inky blue, studded with a thousand faraway stars. This sky was the same sky over London and Aberdeen, Dublin and Edinburgh.

  *

  The shadow of the mountain remained with her, dwarfing the past and the present, subduing whatever resistance remained. It seemed that Ben Nevis always huddled over her, its ragged peak piercing her memory, the ridges of the mountain fixed to her spine. She was scrambling over rocks, scrambling over the red thorn bushes, scrambling as the dirt and pebbles scattered beneath her feet. The mountain could not hold her. The mountain would not hold her. She tore the skin from her palms and feet as she scrambled, her hands bleeding on each stone she touched. Papa was below her, far far down. Where was Culross?

  Cordaella reached higher, ever higher, the mountain growing, swelling in her face, pressing against her forehead and her chin and her eyes were full of the dark sharp mountain. She reached up and up for yet another ledge, a fresh fistful of coarse dirt and pebbles streaming in her eyes. She blinked back the dust, the grit between her lashes, beneath her eyelids. She could taste the dirt. It was in her nose, coating the inside of her mouth. Cordaella knew she had tasted this dirt all her life. Exhausted, she leaned into the wall of rock, the mountain her only mother.

  She craned her head, searching for a glimpse of her father. She could see him, he was still there, still at the base of the mountain, his own face pressed to the rock. Wasn’t he coming? If he didn’t hurry it would be too late. Time was running out. “Papa!”

  His voice was faint and yet the urgency carried, “Fly Cory! Fly.” His desperation echoed thinly on the silver air. The mountain trembled and
she screamed, her body hugging the cliff, her eyes wide with terror. “Help me!”

  “Fly Cory! Fly away!” He was bleeding worse, more and more red pouring from his mouth. She couldn’t hear his words, the blood taking them all away. Cordaella couldn’t hear him. She shook her head violently, her short nails digging into the cliff. The mountain trembled again. He would die down there. He would die without her. But he wouldn’t let her come down, drowning in his sea of blood.

  She threw herself from the mountain, leaping madly into the air, the legend of Icarus coming to life all over again, poor brilliant Daedalus far beneath. She pumped her arms harder, more vigorously and sobbed, “Papa! Wait!”

  He died.

  “Wake up! Wake up, you wretched wild thing!” Elisabeth pushed Cordaella angrily, her small hand snaking into Cordaella’s tangled hair. She gave it a hard pull. “Whatever are you howling about now?”

  The dreaming. Cordaella would forever be dreaming the end.

  “Leave her be, Beth.” Philip groggily raised his head from the pillow. “She’s having another of her bad dreams.”

  “She is a bad dream—” Elisabeth cried petulantly. “Why does she have to be in here with us?”

  “Because she’s our cousin.” Philip swung his legs clear of the bedcovers. “You shouldn’t be so nasty to her. She can’t help it. An orphan and all.”

  Elisabeth flounced back to her bed, “She doesn’t even speak English properly! She doesn’t belong here with us. What can Papa be thinking?”

  Grudgingly Philip had to agree with her. “It doesn’t make very much sense.”

  “It certainly doesn’t. Falconer’s daughter indeed! Papa is a fool to think she will ever change. What is he to do with her? He ought to put her with the other servants—”

  “But the inheritance—”

  “Keep it of course. But send her to a convent. Ugh!” She shivered in disgust. “A stable animal, that is what she is.”

  Cordaella lay silent, listening, her eyes open and fixed intently on the high vaulted ceiling of the nursery. Now that the dreaming had begun it would never end. Nothing was real anymore. It was as if she had fallen into a deep sleep and could not wake. God only knows what they did to him. Why couldn’t she remember better? Somehow she only saw the blood. There was so much of it.

  Elisabeth turned on her side and Cordaella could feel Elisabeth staring at her. Cordaella turned to look at Elisabeth, her cousin’s blue eyes brittle in the moonlight. “You do not belong here, Cordaella Buchanan,” Elisabeth said.

  Softly Cordaella whispered back, “Aye. I know that much.”

  “I am the lady of the house. And I say you shall go.”

  Cordaella would not cry. It didn’t matter. None of this mattered. Nothing would ever matter again. “Then I shall go.”

  “Have some pity, Beth,” Philip whispered.

  Elisabeth ignored him. “I shall have her sent to sleep with the pigs.”

  Cordaella squeezed her eyes shut, a hot emotion splitting her heart into two, and then into two again. She would have promised anything at that moment if it meant she could escape.

  Abruptly Philip rose from his bed, his footsteps heavy on the wooden floor. “Hush, Elisabeth! You are too cruel!” He crept to his cousin’s bed and knelt beside it. Awkwardly he pulled the covers up around her, his voice uneven. “Go to sleep, Cordaella. It is too late for this.” He patted the covers down before standing up. She closed her eyes. “That’s right,” he said approvingly, “Sleep now or Mrs. Penny will take the strap to all of us.”

  Cordaella kept her eyes shut until she heard his steps retreat across the nursery floor. She had been here two weeks and it seemed like forever. Everything was so new, so strange that it was still difficult to sleep in this room with these people. Her cousins. They were supposed to be her people—kin—but they didn’t feel like anybody she had ever known. Cordaella listened to Philip climb back into his bed, his eleven-year-old body still skinny, all pointy elbows and knees, and she remembered his gangly walk and the odd way he ducked his head when he laughed.

  She wanted to smile because there was something funny about Philip, a nice funny, but she wouldn’t let herself. She was too angry at being brought here, too angry at what happened to her father. Not wanting to think anymore, Cordaella turned onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow. Against the black of her eyelidsm and the dark of her mind she saw the rocks, and the rocks were dark red.

  *

  By night, the nursery served as a bedchamber for the children. By day it became a schoolroom, lunchroom and playroom. Now, in the early hours of the afternoon, it was a schoolroom and the tutor from London—a young man recently completing studies at Queen’s College—was assisting Philip in translating a Greek poem into English.

  “It is the new development,” he was saying to the boy, “this resurgence of interest in the Anglo-Saxon language. Since early time, historians and poets have written in Latin. Latin is the universal language of Europe and the educated people. But now, more serious works have begun appearing in translation.”

  “In English?” Philip asked.

  “Not just English, but many vernaculars—French, Italian, German. And some very modern authors have recently composed in English, like the Londoner, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Langland, who wrote Piers Plowman.”

  Cordaella lifted her head from her book. “Then why do we not read in English?”

  The tutor considered her for a moment in surprise. So far in his instruction, she had never asked a question, never directly addressed him. After two and a half months he was almost shocked to hear her speak.

  She repeated the question. “If there are books in English, why do we not read them?” It was, to her, a perfectly logical question. It seemed ridiculous to learn Latin only to read a book which might already be available in English. She was sure that if the Latin verse could be translated into English verse, Latin prose could also be translated into English prose.

  The tutor, Simon Pole, sniffed. “Only the common people,” he said, giving her a meaningful look, “need books in English.”

  “But why?” she interrupted. “Why do the common people need books at all if—as you say—they cannot read and do not need to read?”

  Philip lifted his head quickly up and to the side as he was wont to do when amused. He would have laughed, but he was embarrassed by his laugh, and instead he covered his mouth, his head bobbing silently and his eyes, light gray like Cordaella’s, creased.

  Mr. Pole shot a reproving glance in Philip’s direction before turning his hard gaze on the younger girl. “Some common people read.”

  Elisabeth closed her book. “Even you can now read,” she said coldly.

  Cordaella glanced from Elisabeth to the tutor. She thought the entire argument was stupid. Why should some people read one kind of book and others read another? It would be far simpler if all books were the same. “If I learn to read in Latin—”

  “You are already learning to read in Latin,” the tutor corrected impatiently.

  “Yes,” she answered, “but if I read in Latin, may I still read in English?”

  “Why would you want to read in English if you could read in Latin?”

  “Perhaps there are books in English that will not be translated into Latin—”

  “For example?” He sighed, exhausted and nervous.

  “The Londoner.”

  “Chaucer?”

  She nodded. “Yes. If he was English and wrote his poems in English, why should they be translated into Latin? An Englishman ought to be able to read his own language. Isn’t that so?”

  Simon rubbed his forehead anxiously. “But there are those in Denmark or Portugal who might want to read Chaucer. Thus, a Latin translation of Chaucer would be necessary.”

  She still didn’t know the places he named, her world barely large enough to include Scotland and England and France that she had heard so much about. “Why wouldn’t Chaucer simply be translated into another nat
ive language—”

  “Not native, vernacular!”

  “Into another vernacular?” She said the word strangely, the accents stilted on her tongue. It was hard for her to lose the Highland inflection, her words soft, the consonants full, round.

  “You ask too many questions,” Mr. Pole said.

  Her papa had said that, too, but at least he always answered them. “You can’t explain, then?”

  “I won’t explain,” he said irritably. “Your questions are irrelevant…no, it’s not even that. They are ignorant. You ask because you don’t want to learn. If you don’t want to learn, then waste somebody else’s time.”

  “I’m not,” She shouted, preparing to throw her book at him. “And you are the one who is lazy. You don’t want to explain, or you can’t, because you don’t know the truth.”

  “The truth?” he shouted back. “How would you know? Do you want the truth? I’ll give it to you. You’re a bastard, did you know that? A shame on your entire family.”

  Cordaella hurled the book, catching Mr. Pole squarely on the forehead. The years hunting with her father had given her an extraordinary arm. “Liar.”

  “True.” He dropped his voice as he rubbed the spot where she’d hit him, a look of fury in his eyes. “It is. Your parents were never married.”

  Tears welled in her eyes, furious tears that she dashed away with her balled hand. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, but her own voice failed her, all conviction gone. She felt Philip’s and Elisabeth’s eyes on her. She wished she were dead, killed along with her father. Anything would be better than this. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she repeated, hoping for a measure of defiance, for some disdain to disarm the tutor. “I loved them anyway.”

  *

  If lessons were bad with Mr. Pole, Mass with Bishop Langford was far worse. The only interesting part of Mass was the chapel itself, which, the Earl had noted in his most puffed voice, had been built only eighty years ago in the Gothic style, a style copied from Paris at the height of its popularity. The chapel was supposed to be a miniature of the great cathedrals in France, with its small ceiling soaring towards Heaven, which Philip confided, was meant to help one’s soul draw closer to God.