A Cruel Courtship (5 page)

‘Do you speak only to my maid, daughter?’ Christiana called out in a voice that was scratchy, as if little used.

‘I thought you were asleep.’

Marion shook her head in sympathy. ‘She drinks little water. Her throat is ever dry,’ she whispered.

Returning to her mother, Margaret knelt and kissed Christiana’s parchment cheek. Despite the mounds of bedclothes her skin was dry and cold. A month ago she had still been lovely, indeed had seemed more vigorous than in recent years. Now her eyes were shadowed, her hair greyer.

‘How is Ada?’ Christiana asked.

Margaret wondered whether her mother had been told about her arrival or whether she had foreseen her visit. She did not ask. ‘Ada is well, Ma. And you? Are you eating? Resting?’

Christiana stopped the questions with a cold
finger to Margaret’s lips. ‘I am as you see me, as the Lord hath made me.’ She fumbled about. Marion hastened over to hand her the basket of tablet weaving. ‘Can you untangle this, Maggie? It’s snarled and needs your patient hands.’

Glad for the distraction from her mother’s condition, Margaret took the basket and sat down on a high-backed chair that Marion had placed close to the bed. The work was far more skilled than anything Margaret could recall her mother doing. The pattern puzzled her for a moment, but after some study she recognised the outstretched wings and the large, round heads. ‘Owls,’ she whispered with a shiver of dread.

‘The work helped me stop thinking about the men who died,’ said Christiana. ‘But one night the head on which I worked became a man’s and I saw that he was tumbling from Kinnoull Hill – one of the men I betrayed.’ She gave a sob and turned away from Margaret. ‘I could not bear to hold it.’

The Sight was a curse. Her mother had received no joy from it, her marriage had been ruined by it, her children had suffered. A cold panic numbed Margaret’s fingers.
Dear Lord, not me
.

‘Marion,’ Christiana called out, ‘I would sit up in my chair now.’

Margaret glanced up from her work and involuntarily winced as she witnessed how Christiana clutched Marion’s arm and struggled to
rise from the rumpled bed. Beneath the wool tippet her mother’s thin gown hung loosely. Her hands were claw-like in their fleshlessness.

‘How long have you been fasting?’ Margaret’s voice cracked with emotion.

‘You know when my penance began,’ Christiana said. ‘You tire me with such questions.’

Marion held firmly to her too-slender mistress, helping her shuffle to the cushioned chair near the bed. Christiana held Marion’s hand as she turned and sank down, and then the maid quickly tucked a lap rug about her. All was done with practised efficiency. Such quick deterioration bespoke a severe fast. As Marion straightened she gave Margaret an apologetic look and shook her head. Margaret did not blame the maid. Her mother would be far worse if she were not in Marion’s loving hands.

Christiana studied Margaret with fevered eyes. ‘Did Malcolm send for you?’ Her voice was surprisingly stronger now that she was sitting up.

‘No, Da did not summon me. I came here to see how Roger was healing before I go on to Ada’s house in Stirling, but I’ve learned he left a few days past.’

Closing her eyes, Christiana slowly nodded, and tears began to fall. Bowing her head, she crossed herself.

Margaret’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Ma, what is it?’

‘I fear for him,’ Christiana whispered.

‘What have you seen?’

Christiana shook her head. ‘I did not need the Sight to ken his condition. He has not recovered enough to travel. He limps so, he will be unbalanced in the fight.’

‘What fight?’ Margaret asked. ‘You must have had a vision.’ Not to mention that it was not her mother’s wont to be concerned about the consequences of another’s affliction.

Christiana’s pained expression suggested an affection of which Margaret had not been aware.

‘What have you seen, Ma?’

‘I told you, I saw how he limps.’ Christiana looked at the tangled yarn and tablets in Margaret’s lap. ‘Oh, put that aside, Maggie. I haven’t the strength to work on it anyway.’

Margaret persisted, finding the painstaking unravelling calming. ‘Did you see Roger often?’

‘I asked after him daily. When he was able to walk along the gallery he came to see me at least once a day. He is a good man, Maggie, a kind man. He told me you spoke of annulling your marriage. Did you?’

Margaret was confused by her mother’s sudden approval of Roger, whom she usually disliked. ‘You know of our troubles,’ she said. ‘Some things cannot be mended.’

‘But you came now to see him?’

‘I loved him once,’ Margaret said. ‘We are still man and wife in the eyes of the Kirk.’

‘Indeed you are, and he means to keep it so. Pity.
You are only nineteen and so pretty – we might have found you a more worthy husband.’

‘But you just said he is a good man.’

‘Did I?’ Her mother looked at her with an expression so blank Margaret thought it must be sincere.

‘Ma, do you know where was he going?’

Christiana averted her eyes, but not before Margaret saw a shadow fall across them. ‘He did not say.’ She shifted in her chair and fussed with her sleeves. ‘Why are you for Stirling? What is there for you?’ Her voice trembled.

Margaret could not confide in her mother; in her state she could not be trusted to practise discretion. ‘I have been lonely. Ada has invited me to her home in Stirling for a while. There is nothing holding me in Perth, so I am accompanying her.’

‘If only you’d had children. They give a woman purpose.’

Margaret agreed. But God had not yet granted her children.

‘Would that you had the Sight,’ Christiana murmured, then shook her head fiercely. ‘No, no I did not mean to curse you with this wretchedness.’

This wretchedness
. Margaret shivered. ‘Why did you choose to weave a border of owls, Ma?’

‘Aunt Euphemia said owls had the wisdom of women and lived in the moon’s cycles, as we do. I feel the need of the owl’s strength.’

‘Celia told me that her ma believed that when an
owl alights on a roof and wakes the household the master is marked for death. Have you ever heard that?’

‘I recall something like that. There are no roofs in this border.’

Not wishing her mother to read anything in her eyes, Margaret kept them lowered and tried to focus on the matter of her mission to Stirling.

But what came to mind was David, the Welsh archer James had brought to her in Perth, the man who’d deserted the English army at Soutra, intent on finding William Wallace and fighting for him. He’d brought news of her brother Andrew.

She remembered how shocked she’d been by the archer’s condition. ‘But you should be abed,’ she’d said to David, looking askance at James. It was inhuman to push this man to speak to her when he was so ill. He was sweating and obviously weak with fever, and his hands and face were disfigured with a crimson rash. Margaret tried to keep her gaze from it after expressing her sympathy that the brothers at the spital had been unable to ease it.

David had lifted his hands, turned them over to reveal oozing scabs on his palms, and shaken his head. ‘It was not for this I was at the spital, Dame Margaret. It is the price I paid for my freedom. I escaped by crawling out of the infirmary drain, which carries away the blood and offal.’ He gave a little shrug. ‘Freedom to choose for whom I fight –that is not so easily won. When I heard that you
were Father Andrew’s sister I asked to come to see you.’

Celia brought cushions for the one chair with back and armrests and Margaret invited David to sit. She took a seat on a bench, James beside her.

‘Andrew is well?’ Margaret asked.

‘He is,’ said David, ‘and respected by all the men. All trust him and find comfort in his presence, which is as it should be with a priest, I’m thinking.’

‘All the men,’ Margaret said softly, ‘even the commanders? The master of the spital?’

David nodded. ‘It is plain to all that Father Andrew was called by God to be a confessor to men. He chooses no sides.’

Celia brought ale and they were quiet as she poured.

‘He spoke of you, Dame Margaret,’ said David after a good long drink. ‘He said if I made it, and if by some blessed chance I saw you, that I should tell you he is glad he went to the castle.’ The man kept his eyes on his cup as he spoke the words, as if he did not wish to know how they were received.

Margaret crossed herself. ‘Bless him,’ she said softly. Andrew’s subtle message was that he did not blame her for being sent to Soutra. Ah, but she still blamed herself. She had asked Andrew to go to the English sheriff at Edinburgh Castle, the father of an acquaintance from his time at Oxford, to inquire about her husband. Andrew had disobeyed his
abbot in granting her wish. It was this defiance that had sealed his fate.

‘Father Andrew knew of your plans to desert?’ James asked, half rising to reach for more ale.

‘I had much on my mind, and Father Andrew listened. He sometimes talked about God’s kingdom on earth, how men should all join together in community, and how it’s our greed and jealousy and fear that divide us. He is a holy man, Father Andrew is,’ David said, nodding down at his cup.

For a moment, no one spoke. Margaret was moved and not a little surprised by the man’s description of her brother. She had never doubted Andrew’s vocation, but she had never heard anything so profound and all-encompassing from his mouth. ‘How do the other priests regard him?’

‘He and Father Obert seem easy with one another. I think Father Obert worries that he will lose Father Andrew to a more important post.’

‘In truth?’ Margaret murmured, glad that Andrew had a friend in his fellow priest. At least he had that companionship, and perhaps protection.

‘It is men like Father Andrew who helped me see the evil in King Edward’s ambition.’

‘I should have thought a Welshman would have learned to hate Longshanks while in swaddling clothes,’ said James.

Something in James’s tone caught Margaret’s attention, and she realised how restless he was, playing with his cup, shifting on the bench. James
was not easy about David. Neither was Margaret. She did not believe his last statement.

‘My da said that Scots fought with Longshanks against us, so it was fair to return the favour,’ David said, ducking his head. ‘But Father Andrew helped me see it differently.’

‘Did he encourage your desertion?’ Margaret asked, anxious about her brother’s trust of this man.

‘He – no,’ David shook his head. ‘He made sure I understood the danger. Not that he knew how I meant to sneak away. He forbade me to tell him that.’

‘You said he is well. Does he seem – content there?’ Margaret asked.

‘Not when he talks of home. And how nothing is as it might have been. But as I said, he is respected and the soldiers are grateful for his readiness to hear confession at any time.’

Later, Margaret learned that James was indeed uncertain whether to trust the Welshman, so he was keeping David in a shed in the backlands with a midwife to attend him.

‘He’ll not fight with the Wallace?’ Margaret asked.

‘I would not risk it,’ said James. ‘He escaped too easily for my comfort.’

‘The rash, Jamie, and the fever – his escape brought him great hardship.’

‘It smells wrong to me, Maggie.’

‘Except for his suffering, I’m uneasy about him
too, Jamie.’ Margaret admitted. She wondered whether there were different degrees of the Sight.

The thought brought her out of her reverie and back to her mother’s quiet, stifling room. The tablets were in order now. She handed the basket to her mother.

Christiana waved it away. ‘I’ll tell you this, Maggie. I’ve had no visions since the one that sent those men to their deaths.’

‘But you knew I was coming.’

Christiana shrugged. ‘Perhaps the Sight has been taken from me. I pray that it is so.’

Margaret knew it was not so, but that her mother wanted to believe it. ‘And you did not have a vision of Roger’s danger?’

Christiana shook her head. ‘I told you I’d had no need. I could see with my mortal eyes his unsteady gait.’

‘What did Great-Aunt Euphemia teach you about the Sight?’

Christiana idly poked at the tablets in the basket. ‘I pray that I have the strength to complete this soon.’ She sat back and gazed past Margaret’s shoulder. ‘She told me to discipline myself with meditation and long stretches of solitude to provoke the Sight and thus learn how it comes and how I might make use of it.’ She sighed and dropped the basket on to the floor beside her. ‘I have not the patience. Even the holy Dame Bethag despairs of me – though she never says so.’

‘Ma, your fasting is going to provoke visions. Hasn’t Dame Bethag told you that?’

Christiana shrugged, picking at a thread on a cushion.

Margaret said nothing of the fact that Christiana had at long last discovered to her sorrow another way to provoke the Sight – by
pretending
to have a vision. The Sight was a dangerous gift, requiring careful training, else it was as treacherous as a bird of prey in the hands of an inexperienced master.