After Flodden (35 page)

The hands again, this time on his brow. A woman’s voice, soft, soothing. And a kiss, cool on his eyelids. The flames retreated. The buzzing was stilled. He took the hand in his, and
clasped it tight to his aching chest. He slept.

*    *    *

When he woke, the room was silent. Fresh pine logs burned in the grate. A tallow lamp flickered on the wall, casting sooty shadows up to the rafters and darkening the window to
midnight blue. At his side Louise was slumped in a chair, wrapped in a blanket. On the foot of the bed the vixen was curled. When she saw Crozier open his eyes, she thumped her tail before burying
her nose in her paws, and going back to sleep.

He lay for a long hour, watching firelight dance on the beams. He felt bruised but weightless, as if his body had been drained of everything but breath. There was so strong a sense of peace in
the room it was as if a storm had passed, and everything stilled in its wake.

After a time the door creaked, and Wat’s face appeared. Seeing his master awake and calm, he was pulled up short. He was about to speak, when Crozier nodded towards Louise. With a finger
to his lips Wat retreated. Once in the corridor, he covered his eyes, fighting back emotion. Crozier’s fever had passed. It took Wat a minute to compose himself, before making for Mother
Crozier’s room, to pass on the news, which licked around the keep faster than its winter draughts.

Cold air from the passageway reached Louise, and she woke, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. When she found Crozier’s eyes on her, her mouth opened in silent surprise. He
smiled, but she did not smile back. She was shaking her head, a hand flattened on her breast, and he saw she was crying. The tears quickened, but all he could do to stop them was reach out. Pushing
off her blanket, she sat beside him on the bed and put her hand in his.

‘You are awake,’ she said, stupid with relief.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

She gave a watery laugh, looking at his face as if she had never thought to see it again, though it had been in front of her for days. He tried to pull her close, but his arms were not his own.
‘Come here, damn it,’ he said, and with a deep sigh she laid her head on his shoulder, and wrapped her arms around him.

They slept like that for a while, and when they woke again, in the fireside light, their eyes met, and then their lips. They kissed as if this was a conversation that was picked up from a moment
before, unspoken questions answered, doubts laid to rest. Crozier’s arm was stronger now, and he held her tight. Lazily, slowly, he kissed her hair, her eyelashes, her forehead, as if he was
discovering her by touch rather than sight.

Louise lay close against him on the narrow bed. His eyes closed, he took her hand, pressed it to his heart, and was asleep again, breathing soft and deep.

There would be no more sleep for Louise that night. Crozier’s recovery was so unlikely it felt more like a miracle than anything she and Wat had brought about. As delirium had taken hold,
she thought she had lost him. He had thrashed, the fever mounting and his colour high as a farrier’s fire. He babbled nonsense, furious words giving way to shouting, and it took two men to
hold him down as he tried to fight his way out of bed. Murdo and Mother Crozier, Hob and the other men, had hovered outside the door, wringing their hands while Wat and Louise bathed the patient
with cold cloths and dabbed water on his lips, trying to douse the fire that consumed him.

He could not be left for a minute, and they took it in turns to sit with him. It had seemed hopeless. Louise had lost count of the hours, and barely knew if it was night or day, though later Hob
would tell her it was five nights since Crozier had been carried unconscious into the keep. His fever had blazed for three.

After he had carried his brother into the keep, Tom had led the final charge. Dacre’s men were driven from the courtyard and the forest with a fury that was not only murderous but mad. It
would have given the young man some satisfaction to know that stories of his and his clan’s courage and skill spread through the English border swift as the plague. Within a few weeks,
Crozier’s Keep was considered Satan’s own seat, its men in the devil’s pay. Nothing else could explain their ravening swords and unquenchable anger. That a word as short as Dacre
could rouse such wrath was beyond most people’s comprehension. The supernatural was far more credible.

With the fever passed, Crozier began quickly to recover. His nurses could at last sleep in their own beds, though Wat and Louise would sometimes bump into each other in the passage in the middle
of the night, on their way to make sure their patient was safe.

In the early morning and at dusk, Louise would change Crozier’s dressing. The infection had cleared, and the wound was knitting well. It would leave an angry scar the width of his chest,
but already he was regaining strength, his body shrugging off its savaging. As she cleaned the cut and rebound it, she did not rush, enjoying the touch of him under her fingers, the sight of his
slim, firm body. She did not dare meet his eye as she did this. Since that first night they had not kissed again, nor spoken of it, and she wondered if it had been delirium that had prompted him.
Crozier seemed not even to recall it, and though he spoke to her warmly, he did not refer to what had passed. Had she seen the way he looked at her as she dressed him, however, she would have had
no doubt about his feelings.

While she had been closeted in the sick room, the keep had been busy as a hive. Dacre’s men had left the outhouses smouldering, the yards and forest a scene of devastation. The horses had
been returned to their stables, where the fire had done little damage, but the great hall was still a hospice for the injured. The dead had been buried beyond the walls in the clan’s
graveyard, their resting places marked with rough pine crosses.

Tom had led the clear-up, and taken charge of the keep. New gates had been made and heaved into place, and masons were repairing the ramparts. He was in a frenzy, moving so fast his spurs struck
sparks on the cobblestones, shouting orders and overseeing work late into the night, all the while unable to contemplate the fact that his brother might die.

When he heard that Crozier was going to live, he shook Wat’s hand so hard the man thought he would never hold a sword again. Without a word Tom then fled into the forest where he cried
like a child and gave thanks to a god he had previously never troubled, and rarely would speak to again. His temper would never be quiet or calm, but from that day he was less of a boy, and more of
his brother’s equal as a man who understood what the world held in store for him and his kind.

A week after the attack, order at the keep had resumed. Mother Crozier grumbled in the kitchen as she made broths for her invalid son. Murdo and the men spent the days cleaning, sharpening and
restocking their armoury, and the nights talking of revenge. The last of the wounded had limped back to their own beds, the hall had been swept, and the lingering smell of fire-blackened stone was
the only reminder of how near disaster had come.

‘I must think of leaving,’ Louise said to Wat one morning, as they stood at the keep’s walls, enjoying the last of the autumn sun.

‘I reckoned you were set on staying,’ he said slyly. ‘Mother Crozier seems to think so, and though she’s crabbit, she’s rarely wrong.’

Louise said nothing, but stared into the forest where russet leaves were fiery in the morning light. Their colour was defiant in the face of approaching snow, whose breath was on the air. The
next high wind would sweep them away, and the trees would soon be bare. She would have liked to see the woods in winter, but by that time she would be long gone. The thought of the road to
Edinburgh, where her troubles awaited, was unwelcome.

She wandered into the forest, to the edge of the crags, where the land fell away steeply. Leaning against a towering beech, broad and smooth as a rocking chair, she gazed across the valley, its
lonely beauty chasing all thoughts from her mind but how much she would miss this place.

It was here that Crozier found her. He was pale, but his step was firm, and he was dressed for work.

‘Wat told me you’d gone traipsing,’ he said. ‘You must be needing fresh air, after being shut up for so long.’ She nodded, and smiled.

They stood, in silence, looking across the sea of trees that stretched down the valley and out of sight. ‘To think I nearly lost all this,’ said Crozier, after a long while. He
kicked at a drift of leaves, for the pleasure of the sound. ‘You know, there was a time when I wished I’d never been born here. It felt like a prison. If I’d not been the elder
son, I’d have left the first chance I got. Now, I would die to protect it.’

‘You nearly did,’ Louise said, keeping her eyes on the horizon.

He hesitated. She was standing stiffly, hands at her side. He reached out, and touched her shoulder. ‘It was your voice that saved me,’ he said, moving close. ‘I knew I was
dying. It was like falling off a cliff, into an inferno. And then I felt your hands, heard your voice. I can never thank you enough for that. Even if I’d gone, I’d have had the comfort
of knowing you were with me at the end.’

Louise stifled a cry, and covered her face.

‘What?’ Crozier turned her gently to him, but she could not look at him.

‘My love, what is it?’

‘I thought . . . I was so afraid I had lost you,’ she sobbed, so quietly he barely caught the words. ‘That you would die before I could tell you what I felt for you, and how
much I owed you.’

‘You owe me?’ At the fierceness of his words she looked up, and saw in his eyes a blaze of passion that took her breath.

He pulled her to him and kissed her, so long and sweet her head began to spin. Heat ran through her as if a fire had been lit, and only Crozier’s arms, locked around her, kept her on her
feet.

When finally they could speak she gave a shaky laugh. ‘So you do remember that night?’ she asked, clutching his jerkin.

‘I have thought of nothing else since – or before,’ he said, pulling her down to sit next to him against the tree.

She laced her fingers in his. ‘You are a hard man to read. You give away nothing. I’ve hardly ever seen you smile,’ she said.

He frowned. ‘For a long time I’ve felt I was smiling every time I looked at you.’

‘I never noticed.’

‘Well, you can hardly blame me. You were in love with another man, or so I believed.’

She turned her face away. ‘No, I was not. I just imagined – and only for a short while – that I might be. I was childish, an utter fool. I didn’t know what love was. To
think I might have let you go.’

He pressed her hand to his heart. ‘But you did not, thank God.’ Then abruptly, as if to learn the worst at once, he asked, ‘And now, where do things stand between you and
him?’

Louise picked at the leaves by her skirt. ‘He knew some time ago that my feelings had changed. Before we had even reached Durham I’d made that clear. And he no doubt could guess what
you meant to me, when I left him to warn you. Though I only knew it myself that night.’

Crozier put his arm around her, and she put her head on his shoulder where it fitted as if he had been shaped for that purpose alone. ‘Saved all our lives, you did,’ he said.
‘If they’d caught us without notice, we’d have been dead.’

As the morning passed overhead, they sat without talking. Crozier laid his cheek against her hair, breathing in the perfume that had been in his dreams, waking and sleeping, since the day of the
fight.

Looking down, he found her asleep. He nudged her. ‘Wake up, birdie.’ She moved drowsily and nestled closer. Her hand was on his chest, small and white. He caught it to his lips.

‘Could you bring yourself to live here? It won’t be easy. The life is hard, and so are we.’

Suddenly awake, she looked up at him, into the face that had once seemed so harsh. The lines of fever and pain were receding, but its lean, wolfish look would never fade. Nor, she knew, would
her love of him. She kissed him softly and deeply, breaking off only to whisper, ‘Yes, oh yes.’

*    *    *

Father Walsh made his way to Crozier’s Keep, his horse plodding up the frostbitten trail. The dead he had buried here so recently were now under earth as hard as stone.
Beneath the grey midday sky the valley was steely cold, and the keep more forbidding than ever. Purple clouds were gathering. If the snows came, he might have to stay the night, but if Mother
Crozier was in a hospitable mood, and her kitchen oven well-fired, that would be no hardship.

Louise and Crozier were married before the great hall’s fire, with the clan at their side. The hall had been transformed into a festive bower of pine branches and berries, with ribbons
strung over the fireplace, fresh rushes on the floor, and logs enough to burn till Candlemas roaring in the grate.

Louise wore a green velvet gown, a trimmed and tightened hand me down from Mother Crozier. Around her shoulders was a fur cape, Crozier’s first gift to her, brought that morning by the
village trapper. Her hair was caught up in a golden net, but its lustre was as nothing to the brightness of her eyes. Crozier’s boots had been polished, and for the occasion he had worn his
grandfather’s jewelled sword hilt, which glinted in the firelight.

During the service, Hob stood behind them, clutching a narrow gold ring set with pearls. When the wedding mass had been said, and the vows exchanged, he handed it over, blushing as if he were
the bride whose finger it was slipped onto.

The Croziers ate and drank long into the small hours. It was many years since the keep had enjoyed a party, and the clan did not intend to waste this opportunity. Even Mother Crozier was seen to
laugh. Roasted chicken, braised duck and rabbit stew, with chestnuts, leeks and honeyed parsnips, were washed down with mead, and ale, and the richest claret Crozier could find in the cellars. A
brandy syllabub shivered on the table, but went untouched until the priest’s eye fell on it. While feet tapped to the hornpipes, and the clan kicked up the rushes as they whirled their wives
and wenches around the hall, Hob fell asleep under the table and slept till morning, the vixen curled under his arm.