Legacy (27 page)

“What a pleasant surprise,” he said, pulling me into his house and then into his arms. “I called this morning, but Kate said you were out. Did you forget we were to meet?”

For a moment I was tempted. The feel of his arms around me, the soapy smell of his skin, the rough comfort of his sweater against my cheek, almost broke my resolve. Would it hurt to forget everything I knew, to pretend that yesterday had never happened, that Ian and I were just another happy couple with ordinary differences and once they were solved we would go on just as before? He nuzzled my neck.

I stiffened in his arms.

Surprised, he lifted his head and looked at me. “Is anything wrong?” he asked softly.

I nodded, and he released me.

“Perhaps you’d better tell me what’s happened.”

Rubbing my arms, I followed him into a book-lined room. He closed the door and leaned against it. Folding his arms, he looked directly at me. “What’s troubling you, Christina?”

There was no point in dissembling. “I want you to tell me exactly what your relationship to Kate Douglas is.”

For a long time, he continued to look at me. At last he spoke, and his words condemned him. “How did you find out?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just tell me.”

He frowned and walked to the window. Pulling back the heavy drape, he stared out at the green-gold hills. “Kate is a distant relative. She’s a Douglas, descended on her mother’s side from the line that supposedly died out in the fourteenth century.”

“Go on.”

“Her father was James Maxwell, your grandfather.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He turned around and came toward me. Backing away, I held out my hand to prevent him from coming closer. He stopped several feet from where I stood.

“Believe it or not, I was going to tell you.”

I did believe it, but only because I’d eavesdropped the night before. “Why didn’t you tell me in the beginning?”

His face was pale. “Kate wanted a chance to know you, to convince you that she had earned a part of Maxwell’s legacy.” His face reddened, and he hesitated. “I’m not proud of this, Christina. I was supposed to entertain you, keep you contented while you stayed at Traquair. That’s all, I swear it. I didn’t plan on falling in love with you, and I had no idea Kate was planning anything else until she told me last night.”

“And then what?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What was supposed to happen after I was entertained?”

He looked bewildered. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? Weren’t you planning to end our relationship, hoping I’d go home brokenhearted and more than willing to leave Kate her house?”

“Don’t be absurd. No one would give up an inheritance like Traquair, no matter how brokenhearted.”

“I suppose you think Kate should have received a portion of the estate.”

He nodded. “As a matter of fact, I do, and it isn’t all that outrageous. Your mother and Kate were both Maxwell’s illegitimate daughters. I can understand how Kate feels. Why should one daughter have inherited more than the other?”

“Neither of them inherited,” I reminded him. “I did.”

His hands clenched. “What do you want me to say, Christina? I had no part in Kate’s scheme other than a very innocent one. What can I do to convince you?”

“Why don’t you start with the truth?”

He looked startled. “What do you mean?”

“Isn’t there something else you should be telling me?”

His eyes moved over my face. Finally, he nodded as if he’d come to a decision. “Very well,” he said, his voice low. “I blame James Maxwell for my father’s death. Maxwell spoke at the trial. He was the chief witness. His testimony assured my father’s conviction. The following day, after the jury found him guilty, they found his body.”

“Maybe your father was guilty.”

Ian nodded. “He was, but not of the crime for which they accused him. He was guilty of loving Maxwell’s wife.”

“Ellen?” I barely whispered her name, but Ian heard.

“Yes.” His eyes were haunted. “For years Ellen put up with Maxwell’s womanizing. She’d decided to leave him right around the time that the scandal involving my father and the girl was made public. The details no longer matter, and I won’t go into them. It’s enough to say that Maxwell planned well. His wife stayed with him, and my father killed himself.”

I refused to allow sympathy to interfere with my purpose. “What does any of that have to do with me?”

“I assumed that you wanted to know what I had against James Maxwell,” he answered.

“You’ve explained,” I said, turning to go.

“Christina, wait.” His hand closed around my arm. “I never intended for you to be hurt. I love you. You must believe me.”

“Don’t say anything more. I suppose Kate was going to divide her share with you.” Tears burned the insides of my eyelids.

“I don’t want your money.”

Unbidden, the words of our first conversation came back to me.
I hope you appreciate what you’ve been given
.

I turned on him, pain thickening my voice. “Don’t you? If I hadn’t overheard the two of you last night, you would’ve had the whole pie for yourself. Kate was no longer necessary.”

“It isn’t like that at all.”

“You never believed any of it, did you?”

“What are you talking about?” He looked confused.

“You pretended to accept everything I told you, about Katrine and Jeanne and Mairi of Shiels. Everything you said was a lie to convince me that you cared.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Isn’t it?” I felt the tears well up and spill down my cheeks. “Just which part of it isn’t true?”

He ran his fingers distractedly through his hair. “I do believe you. At least, I believe that you believe it. Oh, hell.” He gave up. “I don’t know what I believe any more. Kate is drugging you, Christina. These hallucinations you’re having may be a combination of what you’ve read about the Maxwell-Murrays and whatever it is that Kate is giving you. Who knows what effect this has had on you? I swear to you I knew nothing about it until yesterday when Kate told me what she’d done. I believed her when she told me she’d discussed your inheritance with Ellen Maxwell before she died and the two of them had agreed to ask you for her rightful share. I would never have allowed her to put you or the child in danger.”

I could feel my face pale.
My baby. The drug may have affected the baby
.

“Until yesterday, time travel was nothing more than fiction to me,” he continued. “But then I saw you fade before my eyes, and when you came back, you weren’t yourself. I can’t explain it. Maybe we’re both crazy.”

“I’m not crazy.” I didn’t normally raise my voice, but I was past logic. Ignorance was no excuse. He’d helped to harm my baby. “You’re despicable. I don’t know you at all. The only regret I have is that my child was fathered by someone who doesn’t know the meaning of the word
character
.”

The tears were flowing freely now. I don’t remember leaving the house or getting into the car. I’ll never know how I found the road or negotiated the twisting turns back to Traquair House. It was late afternoon. No one was in sight. I walked up the stairs. In the comfort of my own room, behind the privacy of locked doors, I looked longingly at the bed. I needed rest, hours of it. Climbing, fully clothed, beneath the feather comforter, I closed my eyes. Pregnancy was exhausting. Later, much later, I would decide what to do with Kate.

The Borders of Scotland

1290

Edward gritted his teeth. The stallion’s steady canter jarred his arm. A handful of moist peat pressed against his wound and held in place with strips of bloodstained linen cooled the fiery pain in his shoulder. Drops of sweat broke out on his forehead. The royal standard had fallen hours ago along with the bodies of ten knights who would be sorely missed in future battles.

Closing his eyes, he leaned forward to rest his head against the lathered neck of his mount, giving himself up to the endless swaying, the pounding in his head, and the sickening nausea that threatened to overtake him with every step. Soon, very soon, consciousness would leave him. There was no help for it. He would have to trust the boy.

Thomas led the way, urging his own mount and his master’s forward, worried that their forced haste would unseat his lord, more worried that the border rogues who attacked them would follow. He had never traveled this far into Scotland. No Englishman would dare without a full retinue behind him. Thomas was afraid. Scotland was a wild, uncivilized country, filled with men who fought in their bare feet and covered themselves with little more than ragged blankets. Rumors of torture and mutilation flickered through his brain.

He glanced behind at the still, hunched-over figure of his lord. His fear intensified. “Holy God and all the saints,” he prayed reverently, “please don’t let him die. Please help me find shelter.”

Hours later, his prayer was answered. Rising from a blanket of fog so thick it muffled all light and sound was a massive iron gate. Thomas pulled up his mount and sighed with relief. The border code of hospitality was strong. No one would turn away a wounded man.

“Where are we, Thomas?” The voice was thick with pain.

“I know not, Your Grace,” the boy replied honestly. “’Tis the house of a great lord from the size of it.”

Edward, king of England, grunted. The effort required to speak was too great. Once again, he closed his eyes. The lad had done well. If the house was truly the abode of a peer, he had nothing to fear.

Thomas shouted loudly and rattled the gate. It swung open. Guards bearing torches and spears materialized out of nowhere. Thomas waited, his heart in his mouth, as they positioned themselves in a menacing circle around him. He wet his lips. When he spoke, his voice cracked. He stopped and began again. “My lord is hurt.” He nodded toward his king. Instinct told him not to reveal the identity of his master. “We ask for shelter and bandages for his wound.”

Out of the mists came a rider on an enormous white stallion. The human circle parted, and the horseman stopped directly in front of Thomas. He was in full mail. Only his eyes, flat and expressionless, were visible through the slit in his bonnet.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“I am Thomas Droune and this man,” he nodded toward the king, “is Lord Durbridge of Surrey. We were set upon by thieves, and his lordship was wounded.”

“For what reason does a gentleman from Surrey travel to the borders?”

Thomas sucked in his breath. He wasn’t proficient at lying, and this man was no fool. “My lord inherited property in Northumberland,” he improvised. “He came to oversee the sale.”

The man’s eyes narrowed as he considered the boy’s answer. It was unlikely and yet possible. The jewels in the lord’s sword hilt proclaimed his wealth. He was also mortally wounded. Most likely, he wouldn’t last the night. “Follow me,” he said at last.

Thomas sighed with relief. His ruse had worked. Still holding the king’s reins, he followed the man across the grounds and into the courtyard. Something at the top of the stone steps caught his eye, something white. He turned to look, and his mouth dropped open. Did angels visit the borders?

“On your knees, knave,” the man ordered. “’Tis the mistress of Traquair.”

Clumsily, Thomas dismounted and fell to his knees.

“These men seek shelter, m’lady,” the man explained to his mistress. “Lord Durbridge of Surrey was set upon by border rogues. He is wounded.”

“Rise, lad,” the lady said. “Bring your lord inside.”

Edward lifted his head as Thomas attempted to pull him from his mount. “Easy, lad,” he mumbled. “I’m not so weak that I cannot stand without a bit of help.”

“I told them you were Lord Durbridge,” Thomas whispered. “This is Traquair House. The mistress bids us enter.”

The king nodded. Leaning heavily on his squire’s arm, he walked around the horses and looked up at Mairi Maxwell. For the first time in his life, Edward I of England, overlord of Scotland, defender of the faith, conqueror of Wales, father of a dozen bastard children, looked at a woman’s face and forgot to breathe.

The bards sang of this woman around a hundred great hall fires. They sang of great beauty and unusual virtue, of eyes filled with mystery and hair soft as silk and black as a crow’s wing in the shadows, lit with a hint of fire in the sunlight. For once, they had not exaggerated. Indeed, they had not begun to do her justice.

Eyes, clear as glass and framed with thick, sweeping lashes, assessed him gravely. Her hair hung unbound to her knees. She was more than lovely, Edward admitted to himself, with a kind of ageless beauty found in chiseled bones and clear skin and perfectly proportioned features. This was no Englishwoman who stood before him in her pink and white glory. Mairi’s Celtic ancestry was obvious in her long hands and pale olive skin, in the blue veins pulsing at her temples, in the thin, angular beauty of her face and the odd tilt at the corner of her enormous eyes. She was dressed in white, the shapeless gown pulled taut by the wind until every slender curve was revealed in the moonlight.

He drew a deep shuddering breath. “My lady,” he began, “I beg—” He stopped and bit his lip. The searing pain, his loss of blood, the wild flight across the moors, the chill night air, and, now, this woman. Blackness swept through him. There was no more pain. The ground rushed up to meet his head, and he crumpled in a heap at her feet.

***

Mairi stood in the doorway and looked at him, lying motionless in the great bed. He opened his eyes, and she could see their startling color from across the room. The tension deep inside of her eased, and she released her breath. For three days, she had watched helplessly as the dreadful fever took its toll, racking his body with tremors and soaking the sheets with sweat. She could offer no more than sips of cool water and a cloth to wipe his forehead and chest. Late last night, the fever broke, and for the first time since he’d fallen at her feet, he slept without moving. Now he was awake, and she could think of nothing to say.

Until this moment, Mairi had no idea why keeping this man alive was so important to her. There were others who had clung to life just as tenaciously and by the slimmest of threads. Some were strangers, others she had known quite well, but it had never been like this.

Never before had she knelt near a bed for hours on end, inhaling the acrid scent of an herb-strewn floor. Never had she fallen asleep with her head on a stranger’s pillow. Never had she lit candles and offered Masses to the saints for their intervention in keeping safe a man she had never seen before. He was just a man, larger and fairer than most she knew, but still a man, until he opened his eyes. Then she knew, and the knowledge tied her tongue into knots.

“My thanks, lass,” he said in a rasping whisper. “Thomas tells me you saved my life.”

Mairi flushed. “You did that yourself, sir. I merely offered you shelter.”

He lifted his head and groaned, dropping back on to the pillow.

She hurried to his side and rested a restraining hand on the bare skin of his chest. She felt the muscles clenched beneath her palm. “You mustn’t,” she warned him. “Give it another day at least.”

His eyes moved over her features. “They were wrong, you know,” he mused.

“Who?”

“The bards. They say you’ve the face of an angel, but it isn’t so. ’Tis a temptress I see before me.”

She laughed, her voice low and amused. “You’re delirious. I’m just a woman like any other, neither angel nor temptress.”

“Oh no, Mairi of Shiels.” His voice dropped. She leaned closer to hear his words. “No man alive would name you a woman like any other.” By the time the last word left his lips, he was asleep.

Mairi looked down at him for a long time. She had never seen hair of such color in her entire life. It was a shade between silver and flax, as pale and cool as the moon in winter. His face was brown from the sun, but the skin on his chest and arms was ruddy and fair. A Saxon, a Sassenach prince of Viking and Norman blood, a sworn enemy of her people. His chest was wide and furred and deeply muscled, his shoulders massive. Even in sleep, he was larger, more vital, than any man she’d ever seen.

So,
she thought,
this is how it happens. A stranger at the gates, and a woman’s life is changed forever
. Shaken to the core, she left the room and climbed the stairs to her solar.

The next day, when Mairi came to his room, he was stronger. He sat up in bed, his bare chest and shoulders propped up by pillows. He smiled at her, the brilliant turquoise of his eyes glinting with light.

“At last, you’ve come,” he said. “I’d begun to think you were a vision.”

Nothing of what she felt reflected itself in her still hands and implacable expression. “You are better today. I’m glad,” she said gravely.

“Are you, lass?” He patted the side of the bed. “Then sit beside me. I’ve never been so bored in all my life.”

Mairi approached the bed, but she did not sit. “You nearly lost your life,” she reminded him. “Sleep will help you regain your strength.”

“I’ve slept enough. What I need now is entertainment. Tell me about yourself. God’s wounds, I’ve heard enough about you, but I never believed it. Why have you never been to court?”

Her lip curled. “An English court is no place for a Scot.”

“You do not approve of England, m’lady?” he asked casually.

She lifted her chin. “Here in Scotland, we prefer independence, m’lord.”

“I see.” His eyes were on her face, noting the defiant tilt of her chin, the winged brows, and the pulse beating erratically in her slender throat. He did not want this woman to disapprove of him. Reaching out, he took her hand and pulled her down so that she sat beside him. “I am English, lass. Surely I’ve given you no cause to despise me.”

“I do not despise the English,” Mairi was quick to assure him, “however, I would prefer that they stay in England and leave the governing of Scotland to us.”

“Margaret of Norway died,” he reminded her.

“Aye, but there is still John Balliol and Robert the Bruce.”

“Both excellent men,” Edward agreed. “But neither has a strong following.”

“Only because the king keeps them in England,” Mairi countered.

Edward grinned. “A clever move on his part, do you not agree?”

She nodded. “Aye. A clever move for a man who seeks to rule both countries.”

He shrugged. She tried to pull her hand away, but he tightened his hold. Laying his palm flat across her own, he threaded his fingers through hers and rubbed the sensitive skin with his thumb. “Perhaps he only seeks to keep the peace.”

Mairi could barely think. “Edward is not a peaceful man,” she managed in a strangled voice.

He looked at her, an arrested expression in his eyes. “What do you know of Edward of England?”

It was her turn to shrug. “Only what I’ve been told. He is forceful in battle, merciful to the conquered, wise in council, but happiest on horseback with his dogs behind and a hawk on his wrist. He is a brave and gallant knight, and his reputation with women is legendary. Besides his wife, he has a slew of mistresses throughout England.” Her forehead wrinkled. “I suppose he is handsome, but I can’t say for sure. David Murray would never notice such a thing.”

Edward watched her carefully as she described his character traits. The light played over her face, illuminating the flawless skin and light, expressive eyes. Below his waist, the tension in his body was tight as the skin of a drum. Her informant had flattered him. For that Edward was grateful. If the truth were told, he was not always wise in council. His temper was inconsistent, and he hated muddle of any kind. He ruled with an impetuous decisiveness that inspired others to do as he commanded. His strengths were his battle strategy and his enviable charm. Without exception, those who disagreed with his decisions eventually came around to his way of thinking. It did not concern him that Mairi of Shiels believed him to be a womanizer. He had no intention of revealing his true identity. What puzzled him was her interest. It was obvious that her curiosity had passed the bounds of idle diversion.

“It sounds as if King Edward is highly regarded by your David Murray.”

Mairi nodded. “David admires him greatly.” A thought occurred to her. “What of yourself, m’lord? Do you admire the king?”

Edward’s skin reddened, and he shifted uncomfortably under her innocent gaze. “He is a man much like any other,” he muttered.

“Surely not like any other?” Mairi teased.

“Aye, he is,” he assured her. “He stands taller than most by half a head, and he is very fair.” He frowned. “There are those who consider him well favored.”

Mairi’s mouth turned up at the corners. “Why, Lord Durbridge. I do believe you are jealous of him.”

Edward’s eyes widened, and the flush in his cheeks moved to include his shoulders and chest. “Indeed I am not,” he protested, shocked that she could conclude such a thing. “Edward is a strong king, but he is not a god, mistress. Do not for one moment mistake him for one. He would not thank you for it.”

“Do you know him well?” she asked curiously.

Edward nodded, and when he spoke, his voice was low and gruff. “Aye. As well as I know myself.” Never in his life had he pretended to be other than who he was, and he didn’t like it. This pretense was becoming difficult to manage. Perhaps he should speak and end it now. “Lass,” he began, his eyes meeting hers across their clasped hands.

“Yes?”

He opened his mouth to confess, but the words wouldn’t come. Faith, she was lovely. What would she do when she found out? Would the trust shining forth from those incredible eyes fade and disappear forever? Nay, he couldn’t risk it.