Читать книгу Lady with the Devil's Scar - Sophia James - Страница 10

He was naked.

He knew that as easily as he knew he was safe.

Isobel Dalceann was there in the shadow just beyond the candlelight, watching him with her dark eyes and stillness.

‘Water.’ He could barely get the word out.

She moved forwards and he saw that one eye was swollen, the deep bruise on her cheek below grazed into redness.

‘Who hurt you?’ His whisper was barely audible as she leaned forwards to hear.

‘I fell.’

He did not believe it, nor did he understand the shift of caution in her eyes or the gentle way she took a cloth and ran it across his chest.

‘It feels good.’ All the skin on his arms was raised with pleasure, leaning into the cool, and he saw she had a band of cloth wrapped around her palm. Another hurt. He tried to reach up and touch it, but she stopped him.

‘You must rest. Your arm has festered and only strength can save you now.’

His arm? Sliced in the sea. He remembered the boat bound for Edinburgh. He remembered the wave as it had caught them broadside, turning the vessel into the cold and green, the ropes tethering him and the sailcloth, people calling from everywhere.

He had cut free as many as he could with his knife and released them. Simon. Guy. Etienne and Raoul. Then the wooden splint had come down from the mast, broken by force of wind and wave above, turning sharp.

Aching now. Right down to his fingers in a cramping stiffness. A band circled his arm, white linen soaked in something that smelt like overripe onion and herbs strangely mixed. He could not move a muscle.

‘My sword hand?’

‘Ian says cloth sellers should have no need for such a weapon,’ she returned.

‘You found him, then, in the glade?’

‘Worse for wear with the knots you fashioned. It would have been a slow death had we come too late.’

‘Like this one is?’

Her pupils dilated. Always a sign of high emotion. Marc shut his eyes. She thought that he would die soon. Tonight even, he amended, looking at the ornate golden cross above his bed.

Other words came close. An ancient chant in the firelight! Isobel Dalceann lifting his palm against her own and cutting it open, blood mixed in an oath of protection. Was he going mad as well?

The glow from the candle hurt even though his eyelids burnt in fever.

‘Where am I?’

‘Ceann Gronna. My keep on the high sea cliffs above Elie.’

The sea was close, the moon seen through the space between skin and stone at the window. No longer full.

‘How long?’

‘Three days.’

He breathed out, nausea roiling his stomach. Even in Burgundy when the arrow had pierced his armour and gone deep into his back he had not been as ill.

‘You have tended me, then?’

Sickness. The room was full of its grasp. Basins, cloths and vials of medicine lined up on the table. His clothes were neatly washed and folded on the seat of a white ash wooden chair decorated with bands of vermilion paint. He wished he might have stood and taken charge, but not one muscle in his body would obey a command.

Helpless. The very word stung with shock.

‘You have spoken in your sleep in French of battles and of death. It is just as well that none here understand you.’

He turned then, away from her eyes, because there was a question in them that he had no answer for.

Are you an enemy?

Once I was, he wanted to say, but now? The bruising on her cheek was dark.

He should have kept silent, should have held his tongue even in the grasp of delirium. So many damn secrets inside him.

‘When you are better, you will be sent by boat across to Edinburgh.’

‘Better?’ The word surprised him. She thought he would survive this, then, this malady. Relief had him reaching out and taking her fingers into his own. Just gratitude in it. The cool of her skin made him realise how hot he was.

Isobel stood still, the nighttime noises of a sleeping keep far from this room. Her room. His fingers were strong like his body, the skin on the pads toughened by work. She felt them relax as he fell into sleep again, but she did not put his hand down as she should have, did not move from her position at his side, watching him in the midnight.

Marc. He had said his name was that when she had called him James, shrugging off the other name with agitation. He had said other things as well in his delusion that had made her glad she was alone, his green eyes glassy with the fever that raged through him, taking sense.

A warrior. She understood that now by all the other marks on his body, sliced into history. Neither an easy life nor a safe one, for fire and shadow sculptured the hardness in him lying on her bed.

He had spoken of some things that she had no knowledge of and of other things that she did.

Things such as the sovereignty accorded to David of the Scots and the ambitions of Philip of France. A king’s man, then? If Ian or Andrew had heard the words he would be long gone by now, breathless in the raging seas off the end of the Ceann Gronna battlements, only memory.

Why did she protect him?

Her eyes travelled over his body, masculine and beautiful, and with real regret she covered the shape with a thin linen cloth. Wiping back her hair with the sudden heat, she felt the raised ridge of scar and frowned.

Broken apart. By trust. It would never happen again.

With a ripe expletive she turned from the sleeping stranger and walked to the window to watch the water silver in the Scottish moonlight.

The knock on the door a few moments later pulled her from her thoughts. Andrew stood there, a pewter mug of ale in one hand and the remains of a crust of bread in the other. He walked over to Marc and laid a finger against his throat, before coming back to the doorway.

‘He is still out, I see. Ye’ll be needing help I’m thinking, lass. This captive is a way from healthy and the rings beneath your eyes are dark.’

Shaking off his concern, she faced him. ‘He is making progress, none the less. A day or two and he will be fit to travel.’

‘To Edinburgh, then. Is that wise?’

‘He has not seen the keep or the structures within it. Nor will he be given knowledge of the tunnels or of the entrance from the sea. He knows only this room,’ she added. ‘We will blindfold him when he leaves so that nothing is seen.’

‘Something is always seen, Isobel, and he looks like no cloth merchant I have ever encountered.’ The frown on his brow was deep. Concern for the security of the Ceann Gronna Castle, Isobel supposed, and those within it. A just concern, too, and yet …

‘If we kill him in cold blood we are as bad as those who come to oust us.’

Andrew laughed. ‘When David sends the next baron this summer to try his hand at the sacking of the keep, you might think differently.’

‘So you would have him as dead as Ian wants him?’

‘Not dead, but gone. The day after tomorrow even if he is no better. Do ye promise me that?’

The cut on her palm stung when she shook his hand and her right cheek ached from where Angus had hit out in the clearing after she had invoked the protections.

Probably warranted, she thought. She didn’t recognise herself in the action, either, as for so many years any stranger trespassing on the Dalceann lands had been sent away without exception.

Why not him?

Why not bundle him right now into a blanket and dispatch him west? He could take his chances of survival just as the others had taken theirs, and if God saw fit to let him live then who was she to invite danger to her hearth?

The Ceann Gronna hearth. She remembered when as a little girl her father had remodelled the fireplace in the solar, burying iron beneath the stones for preservation.

Lord, and then her father’s actions had inveigled them all into this mess when he had stood against the king in Edinburgh and demanded that the lands around this place would be for ever Dalceann. He had taken no notice of any arguments Alisdair had put forward, but had forged on into a position which he was caught in. The armies that had followed him home had been undermanned and he had easily rebuffed them, but by then they were outlawed. Surrender would undoubtedly mean death to them all and Isobel had long been one to whom strategy had come easily.

At twenty she had planned the defence of the next attack and the one after that. Now, they stood on the edge of the cliff with the world at a distance and no other great vassal of the king had ventured forth to try his hand at possession. Not for two whole summers.

So far the magic in the hearth had held. Except for Alisdair. But even his bones lay here in the earth of the bailey, defended by high walls of stone.

The unassailable Ceann Gronna Castle of the Dalceann clan.

‘We cannae hold on for ever, ye ken, Isobel. The new governance has its supporters.’

She nodded because truth was an unavoidable thing. When the time was right some of the Dalceanns would leave the keep by sea. Already the ground to the south was prepared. A different ruse and one bought with the golden trinkets and jewellery found in the French boat that had sunk a good two years before. There was still some left in case of trouble, hidden in the walls of her chamber. Alisdair’s idea.

‘If this stranger is as inclined to violence as Ian believes him to be, it would make sense to bind him in the dungeon under lock and key.’

‘You speak as if I could not subdue him, Andrew, should he become restless.’

‘Could not or would not, Isobel? There is a difference.’

His voice held a note of question and it saddened her. He had always been the father her own had not been—a man of strong morals and good sense.

A moan behind had her turning.

‘I will think on your words, Andrew, I promise.’

She was glad when he merely nodded and moved off, leaving her alone to tend to the green-eyed stranger.

She had said something of sea tunnels, Marc thought, and of an entrance from the water, but with Isobel beside him again, her hand across his brow, cooling fever, he filed the information away to remember at a later time.

His arm ached, small prickles of it in his chest and neck, the water she helped him sip tainted with a herb he did not know the name of.

The door held a key in the lock and there was rope in the shelf of a small cabinet. A fine woollen cloth hung on the wall by the bed. All things he could use to escape if he needed to he thought. But not yet. The weakness in him was all consuming and the dizziness took away his balance.

‘You need to get stronger,’ she said and her tone was angry. ‘For my protection has its limits, Marc’

Marc felt his lips tug up at each end. Not in humour, but in the sheer and utter absurdity of it all. God, when had he ever depended on anyone before and how many thousands had always depended on him? She had the way of his name, too. The fever, he supposed, loosening his tongue in the heat of swelter.

‘They would kill me here? Your people?’

She nodded. ‘For a lot less than you would imagine.’

‘And you? Are you compromised because of it?’

When she did not answer he swore, the night in the forest coming back to him. Lifting his right hand, he motioned to the wound.

‘Your blood and mine?’

‘The spirit of guardianship must be honoured in the proper way. It is written.’

‘A useful knowledge, that.’

‘You speak as if you do not believe it.’

‘Believe?’ Turmoil and battle were all he had known for a long time now. But Isobel smelt of fresh mint and soap and something else he could not as yet name. He closed his eyes so that he might know it better, every sense focusing on the part of his skin where her hair brushed against him, soft as a feather.

Hope!

The word came down with all the force of a heavy-bladed falchion—he who had led armies for the king against the great enemies of France for all the years of his life. Trusting no one. Guarding any careless faith.

It was the sickness, perhaps, that made him vulnerable or the mix of her blood against his own, inviting exposure.

He wondered just what she would do if she knew who he truly was and pressed down the thought.

Just now and just here. A room in a keep above the sea, its buttressed walls holding in a danger that it had long tried to keep without. He closed his eyes to stop her from seeing what he knew lay inside him, fermenting in the deceit, and was glad when she left the room.

She had seen the look in his eyes and needed to think. Seen the danger and the menace and the hidden knowledge of threat. Not to her though, she thought, as she went down the stairs, the heat of his fever imbued into the very tissue of her skin. She had locked the door and taken the key to keep the others out.

Safety again. For him.

Turning the silver band on her finger, she remembered the man who had put it there. Gentle. Manageable. Alisdair had railed against her father’s strong denial of David’s right in managing his kingdom and had warned him of the pathway fraught with danger that he would tread should he demand authority of the Dalceann tracts.

All his warnings had come to pass, save the one of losing his own life while in the process of trying to change her father’s mind.

She swore beneath her breath. ‘Listen to your heart, Isobel,’ her husband had said time and time again as they had lain in their curtained bed above the storms thrown in from the churning German Sea. ‘King David’s Norman education is changing everything in Scotland and only those who can change with it will survive.’

Slapping one hand against her thigh, she leaned back against a wall. Solid and cool, it steadied her.

Alone.

God in Heaven, why should such aloneness today be any worse than usual?

It was because of this outlander.

It all came down to him. His skin beneath her fingers as she wiped his brow. His breath against her face when she leaned in close, eyes of deep clear green shored up by carefulness.

His body marked by war and battle. She had told no one that!

Neither had she disclosed the silver ring she had found buried deep in the pocket of his gilded surcoat and engraved with the royal mark of King David.

Another day and she would have him gone. She swore it on the soul of Brighid, the Celtic Goddess, the keeper of the sacred hearth and the patroness of women.

Isobel Dalceann came back to him as the sun fell low against the window and she brought a mash of sorts with bread soaked in milk. He ate it as if it was his very last meal and felt stronger.

‘Thank you.’

Again. It seemed of late he had been indebted to this woman time after time.

Waving away the words, she countered with her own question. ‘Are you one of David’s men?’

She had found the ring, he supposed. He should have tossed it when he had the chance, but the piece held a value to him that was sentimental and he had not wanted to.

‘Once I was,’ he replied.

‘And now?’

‘It has been a while since I was in his company.’

She moved back and he knew he had erred.

‘You knew him, then, personally.’

The furrow on her brow deepened. Thinking. He could almost see her brain turn.

‘My mother was from the House of Valois in Burgundy. David of Scotland gave me the ring when he lived there.’

‘Under the protection of Philip the Sixth?’

So she knew her politics. He nodded.

‘You are a friend of the king’s, then?’ The words fell into the silence of the room, the talk marking him off as … what?

When she breathed out heavily he knew she had not wanted this truth. A simple soldier or sailor would have been so very much easier to deal with. Still, in the face of all her assistance he found it difficult to lie.

‘Many here at Ceann Gronna have already died under the guise of David’s ambitions.’ Her voice was flat and hard.

‘And I can promise you that I should not wish to bring one other person here harm.’

She swore again at that, a ripe curse that was better suited to a man. The lad’s hose were tight against the rise of her bottom and despite his sickness he felt his body react.

‘If I was braver, I would slit your throat as surely as you wanted to slit Ian’s.’

‘What stops you, then?’

‘This,’ she answered and leant down into him, her mouth running across his lips. Not gently, either, but with a full carnal want that left him reeling. He felt her bite his bottom lip before her tongue probed, felt the sharp slant of desire and the fierce pull of lust. Felt her fingers on his face and throat and then on his nipples pinching, the rush of hunger acute. When she had finished she moved back, wiping the taste of him away with the top of her uninjured hand.

‘There is not much to hinder the path of a woman taking a man.’ Her eyes went to the stiff hardness that was so very easily seen through the thin linen cloth covering him.

‘Men hold to the premise of self-satisfaction far more than any woman is likely to, you see. A small caress here, a whisper there, the cradling of flesh between clever fingers …’

Hell, she was a witch. He looked away because every single thing she said was true and because the need to come right then and there before her was overriding.

He had not kissed her back. The knowledge of it ran into her veins and made her step away, his face dim in the shadow. If a man had taken liberties like that with her, she might have killed him, quickly, with the knife she always kept in the leather holder under the sleeve of her kirtle.

But he seemed at home in silence as he waited for her to speak, his palms opened on the bed beside him as if the matter had not compromised him in the very least.

Perhaps it is the mix of our blood that has tainted me, she thought, as he began to speak.

‘How long ago did your husband die?’

‘Two years ago in the coming spring.’

‘Have you lain with another since?’

The question shocked her because she had counted her many months of celibacy every night since the sea storm.

The very thought of it made her ashamed. A woman who might sacrifice everything for the quick tug of lust. And she knew what obligations kept her here, above the water watching out for her enemies.

She had not forgotten the promise made to her husband the day he had died, the day she had tried to take her father’s arrow from him, embedded in his body.

‘You shall always have my heart, Isobel,’ Alisdair had said, as the blood filled his mouth in bubbles. ‘So could I take yours with me?’

In death he had meant. In the last breaths of thought.

She had laid his hands across her breast above the beat of loss, his fingers long and slender and soft. She could still feel them there sometimes as life had left him, tugging against the ebb of death.

Twenty-one and abandoned to any other hope of passion because those clansmen gathered about her dying husband had all heard his plea and her whispered answer.

‘Yes,’ she had said through the ache of sorrow, every day and every moment she had spent with him imbued in that answer. Until now when another power had turned her, the longing of lust snaking inside deadness. She was glad for the hard measure of this stranger’s cock beneath the cover because at least some part of his body had wanted her in the same way that she had wanted him.

It still stood proud and he made no move to hide it, lying there like an offering he had no mind to give.