A Rip in the Veil (29 page)

“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 upset 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.”

“What did you do? Please tell me you didn’t do anything daft!”

Matthew scowled at her. “The one daft thing I’ve done with my brother is to not have killed him when I found him in bed with my wife. That’s something I fear I’ll live to regret many times over.”

He tightened the girth one more time and led the horse over to the stable door. “But I told him; I warned him that if I ever catch him touching a wife of mine again I’ll geld him.” He ignored her shocked exclamation and swung himself up into the saddle. “Will you light a candle? In case she should come back and not find her way?”

She patted his leg. “Of course I will.”

He found her sitting just off the road, a couple of miles from Cumnock. By then he was worried sick, imagining one scenario after the other, all of them ending with her being carried forever out of his life.

If it hadn’t been for the horse’s little sound he might have missed her, a dark shape against a slightly less dark background. She was sitting just off the verge, shoulders hunched against the drizzle, and when he approached he saw her stiffen. He dismounted and dropped down beside her, arms propped on his knees.

“Why did you just go?” he said, breaking an endless silence.

She had no idea, she muttered; it definitely had something to do with coming face to face with Margaret and discovering herself to be a faded copy of a glorious original, but just as much with the shame she felt at having turned her anger at Luke on him, letting him pay for his brother’s intimidation. Most of all it was because he hadn’t cared enough to come looking for her last night, hadn’t even bothered to say something to her this morning.

“I was so angry with you, that you would toss me like that…” Matthew said, feeling shamed.

“I told you I was sorry.”