by Julianne Lee
The king proceeded. “Now that you are knight banneret, you will need lands commensurate to your standing, and where you will have the means to maintain your following.”
“Following?” It was as if Alex’s brain had gone for a walk. Huh?
“You already command men who are loyal to you. And you deserve the estate for your actions here and in the past. It’s not an excessively large piece of land, and it is remote, but it’s enough to support your status and enable you to maintain a garrison.”
“Estate?”
“Eilean Aonarach. In the Sound of Canna off Rhum. The castle barracks there can house fifty men, I’m told.”
Suddenly the king was speaking gibberish. It sounded like he was handing over an entire island. Stupidly, Alex said, “An island?”
Robert laughed. “Aye, Sir Alasdair. A lonely one, if it’s well named. But they say it has plentiful pasture and there are some farms. Your vassals are hardworking, pious folk. Exactly as everywhere else in Scotland.” That caused a ripple of laughter in the room.
Vassals. Holy crap.
But the king seemed in a hurry to get to the next beneficiary, and so proceeded, reading from a paper. “From the English pack train I award you four horses, ten cattle, fifteen sheep, a pair of goats, twelve pieces of linen and the same amount of silk, a hundred and twenty pounds in coin, and this ring for your finger.” The king produced a gold ring set with the most enormous pearl Alex had ever seen. He took Alex’s hand, and slipped the ring onto the pinky finger. It was entirely too large there, threatening to fall off, and Alex shifted it to his index finger. There it stuck out like a gumball nestled in filigree. “Also, a wagon. You’ll need a wagon.”
Alex nodded. Indeed, he would.
Robert lowered his chin and peered into Alex’s face. “Are you well, man?”
For one more moment of stupidity, Alex only blinked at him, then he decided for now to pretend this was business as usual and sort it out later. “Aye, your Majesty. I’m quite well. And well pleased by the largesse.”
Robert smiled. “Good. I was concerned for a moment I’d been too generous and could have had your loyalty for less.” Another ripple of laughter took the room, and Alex smiled.
“My loyalty is not for sale, for I pledged it to your majesty eight years ago. But if my king wishes me to live in comfort, how should I disagree?”
Again the tent erupted in laughter, and the king’s guffaw was loud, long, and happy. He handed Alex the paper from which he’d been reading, and a small chest of iron-bound wood filled with coins, wished him well, and handed the case over to one of his retainers. Alex bowed and withdrew as the next recipient entered.
The king’s minister directed him to find his livestock, and showed him the wagon containing his goods, then told him he would be summoned from his estate when next the king needed his services. Until then, he was free to go about his business.
Indefinite leave? Honorable discharge? What had just happened, and now what? Apparently he was supposed to maintain and command a garrison, and would have to figure out what that meant in terms of men, money, and logistics. He folded the letter and stashed it inside his shirt.
Alex paid a page to hitch two of his new horses to the wagon, and while that was being done he took his chest heavy with cash and returned to his camp and his men. The thing felt like it weighed a ton, but it was too small to hold a hundred and twenty pounds of silver. He guessed about half the money was in gold. The chest landed at his feet in the camp, with a loud, rattling ca-chunk. He brought the folded letter from his shirt, then announced to all present, “You’re now looking at the new master of a place called Eilean Aonarach.” A pleased but unsurprised murmur riffled among the men. Alex continued. “I’d like it a whole lot better if I knew where that was.” That brought laughter, then Henry spoke up.
“Tis among the Inner Hebrides. If you cross the sea to Barra, and halfway there turn north, there it is, exactly where they left it.”
“Good. All right, then, who of you wants to serve in my garrison, and will be loyal to me and the king?”
Twenty-three men volunteered for garrison duty, and the rest had lands of their own they were eager to see again but pledged their loyalty if called upon. Alex could hardly blame those men for wanting to go home, and for a brief, wistful moment he wished he were returning to his own home. But he shook that off as impossibility and counted out to each of the knights and squires a pound in silver coin. The men who would stay as retainers he assigned to collect his livestock and bring the wagon around. They would leave for Eilean Aonarach in the morning.
Alex’s pulse picked up as he went to the tent to see Lindsay, and he stopped just inside the flap. The oil lamp hung from the roof burned merrily in the midsummer twilight. Her eyes opened.
“Where did you go for so long?”
“I was summoned by the king.”
“What for? Did someone see the gun and he wanted you to explain it? You didn’t show it to him, did you?’
Alex shook his head. “He gave me an estate in the Hebrides and he expects me to maintain a garrison there.”
Her eyebrows went up. “You know property ownership isn’t like it is where we come from. The king can take back the land whenever he wants to; that’s how James Douglas was disinherited by Edward.”
He nodded. “I reside at the pleasure of His Majesty, I know. But I’m perfectly happy to keep the king happy, and it’s a place to go where we’ll be relatively comfortable. No more sleeping on the ground, and no more wearing the same clothes every day for weeks...I’d be willing to bet I can even find a blacksmith there who’ll build us a bathtub.”
A smile widened on her face, and it lifted his heart. “A bathtub? Honest? I think I’d do anything for a bath.”
He grinned. “Yeah. So marry me.”
The silence that followed landed hard in the pit of his stomach and his smile died. Rather than let the silence go on, he said, “Okay. Don’t answer that. Not yet. Think about it some more. Think carefully.”
Lindsay nodded, but said nothing more.
Chapter Fifteen
“Were I to accept your proposal, how would I change my gender?”
The ship rose and fell in the choppy, foggy Hebrides sea. Alex’s heart leapt in his chest as he leaned close to hear Lindsay’s question, spoken in a low voice under the wind. He’d not mentioned marriage since that day a month ago, and this was the first Lindsay had brought it up. Struggling to control his excitement, he hooked his thumbs into his sword belt, looked out over the water, and said, “This is a yes?”
“Still thinking.”
Now he didn’t know where to look, and stared at the deck planks. “What have you been thinking?”
“That you may be right, that I just don’t have the mentality for soldiering.” Now he looked over at her, and she was examining a frayed spot on her tunic sleeve as she continued. “All year I’d thought the victory at Bannockburn would help me to understand. I’d thought it would let me in on the whole glory concept you fellows seem so keen on. But all I learned from having my chest cracked open was that I don’t want to die.”
“I don’t want to die, either.”
“But you’ve accepted the probability. I’ve learned I can’t do that. I want too much to live. And it makes me a poor soldier.”
Her face turned toward his, though she didn’t look him in the eye. “Does that also make me a coward?”
Had anyone else asked that, Alex would have said yes. However, this was Lindsay and her life was even more precious to him than it was to her. He said, “No. Not a coward.” Loved. Lovely. Treasured. Not coward.
“So I’m open to other ideas. I have two choices now: to accept your proposal of marriage, or go off on my own and make my way in the world without you.”
Alex’s heart lurched, and he searched her face. Leave? “Don’t leave. I think you should become your own sister.”
“My what?” Lindsay lowered her head and peered over at him
.
“Remember when we explained to Kirkpatrick where we’d been for seven years? I told him your father died and there were sisters to settle with dowries, so now everyone thinks you have sisters. You can go away as the boy, and return as the woman.”
“And stay away for another seven years?”
He waved away the thought. “Nah. We’ll produce a letter and say it’s from your sister, telling us to expect a visit. Then we’ll go across to the mainland to ‘meet’ her. Once there, Lindsay will...die, or something. He can have an accident. Maybe he can be shanghaied, or run away. Eaten by wolves, maybe. That way we don’t need to return with a corpse. In any case, once the kid is gone I can fall in love with his poor, abandoned sister, whose paltry dowry has dwindled since it was settled on her.”
Lindsay made a disparaging noise in the back of her throat, a habit she’d picked up from her fellow squires. “I sound fairly pathetic, don’t I?” She gazed out into the mist, staring forward.
He eagerly dropped that idea and went for something she would like better. “Well, I guess the dowry part might be overkill. Maybe instead you’ll be a terribly pampered rich girl who will fall for me because I’m a war hero of great renown, an up-and-coming knight who is a royal vassal and possibly in line for a peerage title of some sort.” A smile curled the corners of her mouth though she wouldn’t look at him. “Hey, you never know,” he protested. Then he continued, warming to his invention. “Or maybe you’ll be a great beauty of comfortable means, who will graciously consent to marry me because I’ve fallen head over heels in love and you can’t stand to watch me suffer. Which would be more or less the truth.”
Now the smile came in full, and she looked at him. How he wished he could kiss her then!
But her smile faded, and she looked out across the water again. “And if Lindsay dies, what would his sister be called?”
Alex grunted. He hadn’t thought of that. “Name change. Right.” There was a long silence as he thought it over, then he asked, “What’s your middle name?”
“Thelma.”
He grunted again and kept thinking. “Okay, how about a relative you admired? Someone you knew back home and would like to honor?”
She looked down at her hands and her eyes began to glisten. It took a very long time, but he waited in silence. Finally, she said, “Marilyn. It was my mother’s name.”
Alex picked off a hangnail on his thumb, then said, “I miss my family, too.”
“Not your fault.” Lindsay straightened and took a deep breath.
He started to tell her how much it would mean to him if she would become his new family, when her eyes went wide at something out on the water. “Oh, look! Is that it?”
An island had materialized from the fog ahead. A fairly good-sized one, several miles across. It was hard to tell yet, but there seemed to be cliffs at one end, then rolling hills studded with patches of granite, that descended to the sea at the other end. A single peak thrust up from the center, a crown of bare gray rock surrounded by green.
Alex’s heart thudded in his chest as he beheld his estate, Eilean Aonarach. Lonely island. Moving from place to place throughout his childhood, then also traipsing around the world after joining the Navy, there had never been a place he’d thought of as home. No attachments to places, and no special people other than his immediate family. Now, for the first time in his life, though he’d never set foot here, he felt a tug from this bit of land. It was already his home, more than any other had ever been. As the island came clearer in the mist, there was a sense of belonging to it. Not it belonging to him, for only the king owned property in these feudal times and even that ownership was always bought and maintained by force of arms. But he belonged to it, and the nearer he came the stronger the pull. A smile lit his face, and he could hardly wait to arrive. He began looking for a place to land.
Half an hour later, as the ship negotiated a rocky breakwater to approach a stone quay, Lindsay said, “Look.”
Alex glanced over at her, then up to where she was staring. High above, built into the rock face of the cliff, was the castle. Gray stone like the rest of the island, it blended in so well Alex hadn’t noticed it until now. At the water, a high stone wall dotted with arrow loops backed the quay, the only entrance guarded by a square, blocky gatehouse that was empty of gate.
As the ship sidled along the quay, Alex vaulted the side to investigate. Chain mail and spurs jingling, he hurried to the unmanned gatehouse, where the opening gaped. “What happened here?” Not that he expected a reply, but the sight did not please him. The gate was blackened, and partly burned away. Dark burn marks covered that end of the quay, and it was apparent there had been an assault of some kind. Perhaps a siege. Arrows lay here and there, lodged where the weather couldn’t blow or wash them away.
Men followed him, and Alex turned back to count volunteers and give orders. “You five, come with me. You, too, Lindsay. The rest of you start to unload the livestock and bring them through the gate.” Then he returned his attention to the castle.
Alex strode through the gate, making mental notes of what repairs would be needed to make this a viable garrison again. First on the list: find wood and a blacksmith to build another gate. Immediately.
Inside the barbican, his heart sank. There had once been buildings here, but like the gate they now were nothing more than burnt remains, crumbled to black mush in the weather. There was nothing salvageable, and now his mind flew with assessment and calculation. These were less important than the gate, and the barbican would hold the livestock well enough for the time being. He’d need to have all this removed, and that would take manpower. Now he wondered what sorts and how many vassals he had at his disposal, and what would be required in payment for their labor. His knights would be no good for this; none of them would be caught dead doing manual labor.
Against the face of the cliff, a long, zigzagging stair leading to a doorway had been carved into the rock. He started up at a run, but quickly slowed to a more reasonable pace when his breath shortened. The stair took him and the others halfway up the cliff face, then disappeared into a doorway in the side of a rounded protrusion of the castle wall.
Inside was a spiral staircase, lit only by arrow loops that shed little light in the misty day. Alex climbed some more in the dimness, struggling for breath now. After a couple of turns he came to a broken door that looked as if it had been cleaved with an axe. Who had been here? English? Or had Robert’s army done this? It could even have been the assault of a feuding clan from a nearby island.
Alex entered a small anteroom and smelled cold ash and death. The darkness was nearly complete, for this room had no windows or arrow loops. He removed his right gauntlet and felt around for something to light. There was a candle sconce on a wall close by, and on it hung a striker.
“Give me a piece of cloth, someone.” He held out his hand to the shadows behind him, and there was a tearing noise. A bit of someone’s shirt was placed in his palm. With the striker he threw a few sparks onto the linen, then gently encouraged the ones that caught. Soon the cloth was aflame, smelling sharp yet welcome in this dank place, and he touched it to the candle in the sconce. Now they could see the door to exit the room.
With that candle he lit others his men took from sconces, and they ventured from this anteroom into the castle proper. It led directly to the Great Hall, a cavernous place overarched by huge beams and dimly lit by smoke holes in the ceiling. The enormous hearth ran down the middle of the room, a great, long pit filled with damp ashes, where spits for roasting entire animals appeared intact. Some of the tables and benches also looked whole, but the floor was scattered with broken pieces of others.
There was also the familiar stink of old blood and feces, but it appeared the bodies had been removed. Alex assumed there would be nothing of real value left behind by the attackers, whoever they had been, and he found himself grateful any of the furniture was usable. That the place was still standing, the beams and ceilings untouched
by flame, was a miracle, given the king’s penchant for tearing down castles as soon as they were in his possession. The fortresses at Edinburgh and Stirling were probably both casualties by now, and neither would be rebuilt for a long time.
He began looking for candles and lighting them, but the small flames did little to dispel the woeful atmosphere of the place, so he dispatched Sir Orrin De Ros to find some firewood and light the hearth.
“I’m no laborer, sir.”
Alex peered at the man and briefly wondered why he hadn’t died at Bannockburn. “Do you want to eat tonight?”
“Of course.”
“Then do as you’re told today. Until we get some villagers in here to help us, we’re on our own.”
“The squires—”
“Do you have a squire of your own to delegate this detail?”
Orrin shook his head.
“Then do as you’re told and stop giving me guff.”
Orrin hesitated, then said, “Aye, sir.” He obeyed his orders.
It was plain Alex needed to find some locals and put them to work, or he’d have a mutiny on his hands. “Anyone have an idea how we’re supposed to get our livestock up from the quay?”
Sir Henry said, “I observed a hoist at the rampart above us, sir.”
That perked Alex’s curiosity. “A hoist?”
“Above us, on the east side. It appeared undamaged.”
This sounded promising. Alex found a door to a spiral stairwell at the northwest corner of the hall. Two more flights, hurrying up wedge-shaped stone slabs in the dark, and he came out on the roof of the Great Hall. He lit the candle in the top sconce of the stairwell, then said, “Save your candles, men.” They blew out their lights and tucked them into belt pouches. Over the north battlement, they all looked out over a narrow, winding, overgrown bailey hemmed in by slopes of solid granite topped by stone walls. He led his men past two cisterns to the south side, where the vista was the misty sea that isolated the island in gray silence. As Robert had said, this place was well named.
