she flung one hand up to it, as if to trap it at the neck. She saw the warning in his narrowed eyes, saw the huge bearded face of Sim behind him and heard, like the tolling of a bell, the word ‘rescue’ clanging in her head.
‘Husband,’ she managed.
‘So it is, then,’ Malenfaunt declared in French, smiling with triumphant pleasure. ‘We part amicably, so to speak.’ Bruce turned a cold face on him.
‘For now,’ he answered, then held out one hand. Isabel, half numb and stumbling slightly, took it in one of her own and was led out. Behind her, Hal draped a warm cloak on her shoulders and pulled the hood up against the cold benediction of rain.
In the darkness of the nunnery garth were horses and more riders. Isabel felt a hand haul her long skirts up above her knees, then Sim was lifting her up, with a muttered apology.
‘No fancy sidesaddle, Coontess. Ye ride like ye usually do.’
His grin seemed like a bright light – then Hal was beside her and Bruce was leading the cavalcade away into the cobbles and ruts and stinking rubbish of the street, with the sea wind blowing clean and exhilerating through the bewilderment of her.
‘Isabel,’ Hal said and she leaned forward then, met his face in a fumble of salt and rainwashed lips, sucking as greedily as he until the horses parted them.
‘Aye,’ said Bruce wryly in French, ‘do not mind my part in this, mark you, for such chivalry and bravery is old clothes and pease brose to the likes of the Bruces.’
Isabel, starting to laugh with the bubbling realisation of it all, turned to answer him and heard a voice from the dark, slight shape on a big horse nearby.
‘Ye should nivver violet a lady.’
‘Dog Boy,’ she said and saw the great smile of him loom out of the dark. Then, sudden as a blow, she thought of Clothilde, trapped like a little bird and knew, for all she ached to free the girl, she could not persuade these men to risk it – nor should she.
She was crying so hard, the tears and snot mingling with the rain as Hal tried to get his horse close enough to comfort her, that she missed Kirkpatrick’s bitter growl – though Hal didn’t.
‘There will be the De’il to pay when Buchan finds his wife has been lifted like a rieved coo and his siller spent for no return.’
Neither of them missed the rain-pebbled exultation that was Bruce, grinning as he turned to them.
‘God’s Wounds, I only wish I could see his face when he is told of it.’
His laugh drowned out the mad tolling of the bell. Breaker of worlds, Hal thought wildly.
Chapter Eleven
Herdmanston Tower
Feast of St Theneva, Mother of Kentigern, July 1298
She woke to the sound of birds and the soft scent of broom from the fresh rushes, wafted from the tall window where the shutters were open against the stifle of the night. It had rained, though, so the heat had gone and insects buzzed in and out. The harsh wickedness of woodsmoke scattered the brief heaven of the moment.
Her leg was over his, the coverlet thrown back and he woke, slowly, as she watched the pulse in his neck, the trough of a slight pox scar dragging her eyes down to the muscled shoulder and another scar, a deeper, pale cicatrice. Lance wound from a tiltyard tourney, a mercifully glancing blow which, if it had struck full would have ripped the entire arm off.
Isabel’s flesh crept and tightened at the thought. Even in such a short time, she knew this man’s body almost as well as her own, each mole and scar of it – there were a lot of scars, she saw, and had mocked him for being careless.
‘None on my face, lass,’ Hal had answered, almost half-sorrowful. ‘Every man who is thought of as a great knight has a face like a creased linen sheet as far as I can tell.’
He stirred awake to her playful fingers, finally grunting as she clasped the rise of him.
‘Christ’s Bones woman – are there not Church laws that govern this?’ he growled throatily as she moved over him. ‘If so, we are condemned.’
‘Feast days, fast days and menses,’ she murmured. ‘Gravid, weaning and forty days after birthing.’
She stopped mouthing him and looked up.
‘I know them all, since it enabled me to avoid my marital duties more than once a week by canon law and more than that by contrivance.’
‘Condemned already,’ Hal muttered weakly, ‘so it would be a sin to stop now.’
‘Sheldrakes,’ she mumbled and Hal fought with his senses, eventually reaching the answer.
‘A dopping,’ he gasped and countered at once, before he lost it.
‘Harlots.’
Isabel stopped then and ignored Hal’s plaintive yelp of loss.
‘Under the circumstances,’ she declared primly, ‘you might have chosen better.’
‘You do not ken it,’ he accused and she frowned, started idly back to what she had been doing, though he could tell it was half-hearted and that she was concentrating on the puzzle.
‘A byre,’ she said eventually and then screamed when Hal whirled her round and on to her back.
‘No,’ he said, adjusting the curve of his hips until she gave a little gasp. ‘I win. It is a haras of harlots.’
A stud farm for stallions – apt, she thought, gasping as he began ploughing the long, deep furrow of her, and then her mind turned into white light for a long time. In the dreaming aftermath, the sweat cooling deliciously on her, there was a stamping and throat-clearing from below.
The lord’s room at Herdmanston was the top of the square tower block and the only thing higher than it was the narrow, crenellated walkway reached by a ladder. The lord’s room had no door and was reached by a stone wind of stair from below, coming up to a solid fretwork of balustrade.
It had its own privy hole, a strong oak four-post bed with heavy, faded hangings – blue, with gold owls, she saw – a table, a chair, a bench and two large kists but, best of all for Isabel, it had one window as tall as a man, inset with seats where someone could perch and sew in the light and sun.
A woman had wanted that and she had it confirmed from Hal.
‘My mother,’ he said. ‘She died when I was young, but even by then I knew my father could refuse her nothing – even the folly of such a window making a hole in a good stout wall.’
A fair hole it was, too, with cushions of velvet, faded from the original crimson to a dusted pink. It was also armed with stout shutters for those days – more often than not – when the rain lashed the Lothians.
Below, at the foot of the top landing, the Dog Boy slept like a guarding hound and, if he heard their frantic gasps and her squeals it scarcely mattered, for this, to Isabel, was more privacy than she had known and more, she thought, than she deserved.
Beneath that was the main hall and the main entrance, fortified with a steel yett and a thick door, twenty feet up the thick wall, reached by a cobbled walkway and, at the last, across a removable wooden platform.
Deeper yet were the under-levels, two deep floors of cool, dark storage and, surrounding the thick square of it was a barmkin wall four feet high, enclosing stables, a brewhouse and the bakehouse and kitchens among others. Nearby was the stone chapel, isolated save for the tall cross beside it.
The throat-clearing got louder.
‘Come up, ye gowk,’ Hal growled, already into tunic and hose and casting a warning glance at Isabel, who pouted at him and drew the sheet up just as Sim’s great tousled black head rose above floor level.
‘Ready, Lord Hal? Ye wanted an early start, ye told me,’ he said, then nodded and grinned companiably to Isabel.
‘Coontess,’ he added with a nod. ‘I see why he is laggardly.’
‘Cannot send my man off to war half-cocked, like a badly latched bow,’ she replied as lightly as she could manage and had the gratification of a Sim laugh, a bell of sound from his flung-back throat.
‘Weel said, Coontess,’ Sim declared and dropped out of sight again.
