The Honor Due a King (21 page)

“Not a single word.” She winked above a frolicsome smile. “You’ve something else to say, Robert? I know the look of an unspoken thought.”

I let her hand slip from mine. “I should like to say a thousand things, but even now God frowns upon me for thinking them. If ever you or the lad need anything, anything at all ... just say.”

“As I said, we’re well enough. Truly. Besides, if I took what you offered, the gossip would fly like crows over a field of ripened grain.”

So it would, Aithne. Oft times, gossip is spun from a thread of truth.

***

F
ive days I lingered in Carrick and never once did I come close to Turnberry or Lochmaben, where I had told Randolph I was headed. Instead, I dallied at Loch Doon, teaching Niall the intricacies of sailing and relaxing in Aithne’s pleasant company.

Sunset had long come and gone. When we both first yawned at the supper table and left for our own beds, we talked the length of the corridor and up the stairs and were still talking at her doorway when she moved inside. Without a thought I followed her.

“If you could only see him for yourself, Aithne.” I sipped from my goblet, then drained the cup in the next swallow. “My God, what a wreck he is. And plans of procuring allies in Ireland – shattered, destroyed. All because he could not restrain himself.”

Aithne filled my cup again. “What did you expect, Robert? Truly now. That Edward would, by some convenient miracle, become a better man without you there beside him? Aye, he fought you. But is it possible that he reveled in that? Somehow needed to do that?”

“Please. He lives to annoy me.”

“Ah, then you’ve known all this time and yet you chose to play along? If he could never quite be ‘you’, he could at least ply at the one imperfection in you that he could grab onto.”

I gazed at her soft-edged face through candlelight. We were sitting across from each other in her spacious chamber, her bed on the far side by the hearth, a few benches scattered about, and between us a small round table. Even through the fog of wine, she was making entirely too much sense. My brother had learned how to master revealing to the world my weaker side – that of anger and intolerance. “True as it may be, I am not responsible for who he is, now or then. He picked his final battleground ... and he’ll go out, not in a blaze of glory, but sputtering like a candle that’s been spit upon.”

She sighed and shook her head. “He could never be like you, even when he tried.”

“He
never
tried. Never.” I reached out, took her hand. “Did he ever say that to you, though? That he wished to be like me?”

Beneath long, thick lashes, she gazed at me with a cutting sincerity. “Men say many things when they’re flushed from lovemaking, don’t they? Some of it true, some a dream. It is, for some, the one time they open their hearts. For Edward, that was so. All those women in his life – they all knew a different side of him than he showed to you. He was like a little boy when he was with a woman – vulnerable, sensitive, needing. All you know is the Edward who makes a hell of your life.”

I said nothing to that. She did pity the wretch. And I pitied that she had been so duped by him. I had thought her wiser.

“Once, no ... twice, you said that you loved me, Robert. And I, you. Why did we never marry then? What kept it from being?”

“Love alone is not enough. I seem to recall my father thought your family beneath mine.” But I wondered – had she spoken words of love to Edward? I had known them to be together and it had filled me with jealousy. Yet why did I keep coming back to her? What was it that I wanted from her or could not do without? I thought to pull my hand away, but she had by then laid her other hand over mine, holding me prisoner. “What if Edward had asked to marry you? By the way you speak of him, it seems you would have considered it.”

“What Edward and I had ... it was nothing.”

“Nothing? He came back to you time and again.”

“As have you.” She rose then and, facing away from me, said, “I thought about what you asked – about Niall and me coming with you to Edinburgh. I might consider it, if ... if ...”

If I said that I loved you now?
Could I have said it just then, or ever, that I more needed than loved her? That I often wanted her? That somehow, in this odd way, we were good for one another? I had not lain with Elizabeth, or any woman, in so long a time ...

We gazed upon each other that evening, Aithne and I, for a long while, sharing no more words. The warm spring breeze wafted around us from an open window, candle flames fluttering, the wine flowing endlessly. In time, as the drink filled our veins, we saw each other as young again, with no cares or duties or guilt to stand us down. The small lines at the corners of her mouth had faded and her eyes twinkled with the joy of the moment. I pulled my chair closer to hers, touched her cheek and leaned to her, the wine on my breath swirling with the wine on hers. Our lips came together, lightly, then full and hard.

My head was light. My will gone. The allure beckoned of spending myself within her and then falling into a deep and dreamless sleep against the curve of her back.

My eyelids drifted downward. I forced them open. Sadness began to drown me. Too much wine. Too little sleep. Was I sad for Sorcha’s lost innocence? For Edward’s cruel indifference? Sad for the child, growing up poor in a hut in Ireland? Or sad for myself – the king who could not have the one thing he truly wanted? Damn popes and English princes and all the rest of the world. If I never had their approval I wouldn’t care. I only wanted a child to carry on my name. A child to share with Elizabeth. Sitting back, I pulled a hand over my face, as though I could erase what I had just done.

Aithne looked searchingly into my eyes. “Robert, what is it? Have I done ... I assumed that you ... wanted me? Don’t you?”

I went to sit on the edge of her bed. The feathery mattress sank miles beneath my weight. “Edward had a woman who loved him, gave him a child and died for it. How could he not care?”

“Do you envy Edward?” She joined me, laying a hand lightly upon my thigh.

“Strangely, aye. As much as I hate him, he has had, a dozen times over, what I wish for – children of his own. Yet they mean nothing to him, except as trophies of his own virility.”

She rested her head against my arm. “You need to go home, Robert. Home to her.” Then, in a distinctly pained voice, she added, “You don’t belong here. Not with me.”

In my heart, I knew it, too. I brushed calloused fingertips over the softness of her cheek.

“Aithne, if only you knew the hole in my soul that you fill. If only you knew ...” I rose, kissed her lightly on the crown of her head, and left, never looking back.

***

Edinburgh, 1317

W
ord of my return had preceded me. People gathered along the road to greet me, slowing my progress even more. The days of racing lightly armed through the hills and heather were long gone. A man of middle years, scarred, stiff in the joints and dusted with gray at the temples, I did not travel so fleet of foot any more. But as that black dome of Edinburgh reared up against a lead-colored sky misted with rain, my pace quickened in rhythm with my heart.

I found her the first place I went to: the rose garden outside Holyrood Palace. The flowers were still clenching their first buds. Elizabeth sat alone on a stone bench beneath the drooping branches of a willow tree, its slender tips gilded with dangling catkins. She wore a green kirtle a shade darker than her eyes. I inhaled the fresh scent of rain and paused before setting my feet on the flagstone path that led to the bench where she was with her back turned to me. I did not have to call out her name or pound the stones with my feet. She knew my presence and turned to look over her shoulder. In that moment, she was up and gliding toward me.

I wrapped my arms around her and held her tight without apology or restraint. The wound between us, which had been clawed open and salted, had already begun to heal during my absence.

“I won’t leave you for so long again, my love. My heart needs mending as is.” I kissed her lightly between her neck and shoulder. As I placed both hands on either side of her head to tilt back her face, my fingers brushed over the teeth of the hairpin I had given her before my leaving. “You do like it then? You did not say.”

Her mouth curved in a smile. I reached to the hem of my cloak and groped for the tiny hole I had torn there. Then I drew out the old, tarnished hairpin of hers, rusted at the tips, that I had discovered over ten years ago and showed it to her.

“This,” I proclaimed, “has been with me every day and every mile that we were ever apart. I found it after we spent the winter on Rathlin and were making our way back to Scotland.”

“So small a thing.” She grazed its jagged point with her fingertips. “Oh, Robert, can you even imagine how my world fell apart when I rode away from Dalry? For months I wondered if you were alive or dead. They wouldn’t tell me anything. Not of you or of the war. Finally, I realized that as long as they kept me alive that you were succeeding. Eluding them. Winning, even.” Her chin dipped. Her eyes wandered to a row of rose bushes. “And I hated that. I wanted you to submit, so that I could leave and go home. So we could be together then – you as my lover, my protector. I wanted it to be like it was before ... when you were Longshanks’ man. We were happy then. Instead of missing you more with each passing day, I only grew angrier. Yet you kept faith, even when you lost so much. I am unworthy of you, Robert, and selfish for wishing your failure.”

You unworthy, Elizabeth? If you knew my heart, my sins, you would not say so
.

The smile had vanished. I thought she might weep, but her eyes were dry and sincere. It was I who wept. I had not kept my faith. I had fallen, many times over.

She kissed me then.
She
... kissed me. With lips as moist as morning dew. And skin smelling of roses.

“You should have told me, my love,” I said, pressing her to my chest and stroking her hair, “about the child. I didn’t know. My God, I am selfish myself to ask anymore sacrifice of you.”

“That’s what Mary said of you.”

“What did my sister say? When was this?” I leaned back a little, so that I could look upon Elizabeth’s face, so fair after all these years, so much less drawn than mine.

“After I lost the babe at St. Duthac’s. I cursed your absence, because I needed you more than ever then and I couldn’t understand why you sent us away from you. I thought that if you had been with us, or we with you, that you would have protected us, kept us safe from the English, that I would not have lost the child. And Mary said to me that your greatest strength and your greatest flaw was that whomever or whatever you loved, you gave to them everything within your heart.

“Once, that was me. In time though, it became Scotland. I have both loved and detested you for that. But if I am second in your life to anything or anyone, then I shall play mistress to your kingdom. Perhaps there is a purpose in it after all and I should give myself to that, instead of dominating your attention like some jealous cow-eyed lass of fifteen.”

“Blame yourself for nothing, my love,” I said. “Perhaps I should pray for a bigger heart, so I have more of myself to give you.”

Fine creases etched the corners of her mouth. Her cheeks were more gaunt than in years past, her lips thinner. Somehow though, that only made me love her more.

Hand in hand, we walked slowly through the garden before going inside, even though my clothes were damp and my stomach a cavern of emptiness. Putting aside talk of diplomacy and war and parliaments, I spoke with Elizabeth of the roses, her favorite hounds, of little Robbie, of the early years when I was that arrant knight and she the maiden I could not have.

In the days that followed, I sought her out as she walked in the gardens in the glimmering dew of early morning, before even the sparrows had stirred. Together we rode through the woods and meadows, taking in the intoxicating scents of wildflowers and watching the finches flit amongst high branches. Sometimes, we rode out on the moors with our hawks resting on our outstretched arms, not to hunt, but merely to watch them float free on the breeze, regal and keen.

The passions of youth are so quickly quenched. But a love that endures all only grows deeper with time.

James Douglas – Berwick, 1318

“D
are you trust an Englishwoman, James?” Walter whispered into my ear as he bent over me. “I think you hazard too much in one stroke.”

“And if we take Berwick?” I crouched in the thicket, listening for any slight sound that might rise above the murmur of the stream before us. “We’ve crawled too many miles to fall one inch short. Aye, it’s a risk we take and men, Scottish men, may fall. Fear is something we all carry in our hearts, Walter. I fear to trust this woman. I fear the next foe I meet may be stronger and swifter than me. But fear lasts only a short while. Victory lasts forever.”

“So does death,” he said morosely.

For hours we watched from the densely wooded bank, waited in the damp, clinging mist, until at last a mysterious lady approached like some courier of the hereafter on her ash-gray palfrey with a nervous, slant-shouldered escort riding at her side.

The stream we hovered beside fed into the Tweed two miles away. The riders had come from the direction of its source: Berwick. The place of this clandestine meeting was hidden to any who did not already know it. The hour: precisely midnight. Exactly as penned in her letter to me.

She sat on her horse, immobile in the argent light of a half moon, thin wisps of fog drifting and curling around her. The hood of her gray cloak was pulled far forward, concealing her face in deep shadows.

Walter tapped my shoulder. “The man with her –”

“Is Peter Spalding,” Boyd confirmed, squinting.

“How can you be sure?” Randolph, ever skeptical, folded his arms.

Boyd sank down to his haunches with a grunt, opened his flask and rinsed his mouth out with ale. “Fourteen years ago I was at his wedding. Married a Scottish woman from Dunbar where he did business sometimes. Took her back to Berwick. I doubt the English have been overly kind to either him or his wife. The world knows if you marry a Scot you become one.”