The Saint (51 page)

“Oh God …” She moaned.

His hips circled faster. Harder. Increasing the pressure. She started to gasp. Her naked breasts arching against his chest, her legs wrapping tighter around his buttocks, pulling him deeper.

It felt too good.

Pleasure crashed over him in a heated rush, gathering in his groin, coiling at the base of his spine. His heart hammered in his ears.

He clenched. His muscles hardened as he fought to hold on for the last few moments.

She cried out and he let go. With a groan torn from the depths of his soul, he came in hot spasming waves, giving her everything he had to give.

Even when the last wave of pleasure had ebbed, he held her to him, not wanting to let her go.

He should have been content to stay like that forever, but he feared he would crush her to death. Rolling to the side, he wrapped his arm around her and tucked her firmly against his side.

She rested her cheek against his chest, drawing tiny shapes with her fingertips on his chest.

He knew why she was so quiet. The anger had dissipated, but the far more important emotion—fear—was still there.

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

She rested her palm flat on his chest, perching her chin on the back of her hand to look up at him. “I am. I need to do this, Magnus. And you need me. Your friends need me. If there’s a chance I could save you or one of them, I have to take it. This is what I’m supposed to do, I know it. It’s where I belong. By your side in all things.” She smiled. “Besides, you need someone to protect you.”

He groaned, feeling as if he were fighting against the inevitable. “Aye, but who’s going to protect you?”

Her eyes sparkled with mischief. “Remember how MacGregor told me if there was anything he could do to repay me I only had to ask? Well, he’s promised to watch out for me.”

“MacGregor?” he choked.

She wrinkled her nose. “I know how sensitive you are about him. He is rather distracting to be around—with that face and all—but perhaps there is someone not quite so attractive who could protect me? Although from what I’ve seen of the men in this army, I fear one is just as distracting as the other. I suppose there’s always my brother.”

He knew she was teasing him, but it didn’t quite stop the dark flare from sparking inside him. “I’m not sensitive about MacGregor, damn it. I’m sensitive about
you
. And if you think I’d let that hothead of a brother watch over you—the only person who’s going to protect you is me.”

He couldn’t believe he was agreeing to this. It went against every bone in his body. But Helen’s uniqueness—that wildness of spirit—was the very thing that had drawn him to her. He knew that if he tried to quash it, tried to keep her locked up in a castle somewhere to keep her safe, it would kill the very heart of her.

The smile on her face stole his heart. “Does that mean you’ll agree?”

“With some conditions.”

She looked at him with marked—and well-founded—suspicion. “What kind of conditions?”

“A long list of them.” He tipped her chin from his chest, drawing her up closer to him. “But the first one is the most important. If I’m to have a new ‘partner,’ it’s going to be as my wife. Marry me, Helen.”

And at long last, she gave him the answer he’d been waiting for: “Yes. Yes, I’ll marry you.”

It wasn’t until much later that she heard the rest of his conditions. By then, she was too well sated to put up much of an argument.

Six months later

Helen turned to her husband, who was riding beside her with a deepening scowl on his face. Not coincidentally, Dunrobin Castle had just appeared on the horizon ahead of them.

She laughed. “It won’t be that bad. It’s only for a few days.”

He mumbled something that sounded like “a few days underwater.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t seen Muriel and Will since we were married.”

He grumbled something else.

“I don’t see what the problem is—you never disliked Will as much as you did Kenneth, and you and Kenneth are practically brothers now,” she managed to say without bursting into laughter.

He shot her a deadly glare. “Your brother is an arse.”

“So you’ve said a few times,” she said with a grin.

In some matters he was still as stubborn as he’d always been. In others …

She thought of the past six months of acting as a healer for the secret army known as the Highland Guard. As he’d
seen how it could work, gradually Magnus had loosened up on some of his more ridiculous “conditions”—as if she could promise to never scare him or get so much as “one bruise”! Others, well, she was working on them. She knew perfectly well how to follow a command—in the right circumstances.

She smiled. The Saint and the Angel. MacSorley had overheard Magnus call her
m’aingeal
one day and couldn’t resist teasing the “holy” pair. Not surprisingly, the other Guardsmen had taken to calling her Angel. But recalling how he’d put her to bed last night and woken her this morning … perhaps sinner and harlot were more appropriate?

So far the danger had been minimal. But King Edward was moving on Scotland again. War would find them soon enough. But first the king had given them a few days to visit her family, and she intended to enjoy every minute of the time, grumpy husband or not.

Muriel and Will were in the
barmkin
, waiting to greet them as they rode in. After hugging her brother and new sister-in-law, she glanced down at the curious set of eyes peering from behind Muriel’s skirts.

Helen’s heart constricted. At her wedding, Muriel had shared with her the tragedy of her past. She knew how much this child who’d come into their life so unexpectedly must mean to them both.

She bent down. “And who is this?”

Gently, Muriel eased the little redheaded child out from behind her. “This is Meggie. Meggie, say hello to your aunt and uncle.”

Her brother made a choking sound at the reminder of Magnus’s place in the family, and Helen glared up at him sharply before turning her attention back to the shy child.

The lass was three years old and had been left an orphan after both her parents were stricken by a fever. The little girl had nearly died as well, but Muriel had nursed her
back to health. With no relatives willing to take the child in, Muriel and Will had welcomed her into their home and into their hearts. Her austere, formidable brother … who would have thought?

“You have hair just like mine,” the little girl said, reaching out to clasp a handful between her chubby fingers.

Will groaned again, and Magnus laughed with far too much pleasure at his expense.

Ignoring them both, Helen smiled at the little girl and gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Only the luckiest little girls have red hair, you know. It means the faeries have blessed you.”

“Have they blessed you, m’lady?”

Helen gazed up at her husband, meeting his gaze. “Aye, very much.”

She had everything she wanted. She’d found her more.

The earliest record of the great, long-running feud between the MacKays and Sutherlands was in the late fourteenth century, when a Sutherland chieftain was said to have murdered two MacKay chieftains at Dingwall Castle. But given the two clans’ neighboring lands—and the conflict
that
seems to always cause—it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suspect that it began earlier.

Magnus, the Chief of MacKay, who was said to have fought alongside Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, was the son of Martin, who was killed at Keanloch-Eylk in Lochaber. But by whose hand, and on what date he fell, it is not recorded. One of the MacKay clan sites (
www.mackaycountry.com
) referred to the MacKays as “a mountain race of people,” which made his skill in my Highland Guard easy. The real Bruce must have had a number of scouts and guides by his side to help him navigate the difficult and treacherous terrain of the Scottish “high lands.” I loved the idea of the proud, tough “quintessential” Highlander.

Magnus had two sons, Morgan and Farquhar, but the name of his wife is not recorded. Helen is a fictional daughter of William, the second Earl of Sutherland. Her brothers William and Kenneth, however, are based on the third and fourth earls, respectively. Kenneth became chief on the death of his brother William in 1333, who died without an heir—the inspiration for William and Muriel’s fictional relationship.
Kenneth’s son, also (shockingly!) named William, married Bruce’s daughter Margaret. Their son John was briefly designated heir to his uncle King David II of Scotland, but unfortunately, he died of the plague.

A recurring theme in my author’s note is the problem with names—repeat names, choice of names, et cetera. Given that surnames and clan names were not firmly established in this period, it is often difficult to decide what to call a character. For ease, I typically use modern clan names rather than the patronymic byname (Magnus “mac”—son of—Martin) or locative byname (William of Moray/de Moravia). There is some evidence that Sutherland (“south land”) might have been used as a surname at this time. It appears that when the two branches of the Sutherland lines broke off in the mid-thirteenth century, the northern (senior) branch took Sutherland and the other line became Murrays (from de Moravia/Moray, which to my surprise is pronounced “Murray”). At some point, the Earls of Sutherland dropped the “of Moray,” “de Moravia” designation, probably with William and Kenneth’s grandfather, but it’s unclear exactly when this happened. I went back and forth, and ultimately decided to use Kenneth Sutherland of Moray and Helen Sutherland of Moray to make it less confusing.

The Sutherlands came over to Bruce’s side sometime in 1309. Given their ties to the Earl of Ross—they were allies at the time and William Sutherland was said to have been his ward—it made sense to me to tie the timing to Ross’s submission.

William Gordon is the fictional nephew of Sir Adam Gordon, who did have an uncle William who fought in the Eighth Crusade (1270)—the inspiration for “Templar’s” black powder. Sir Adam was loyal to the exiled King John Balliol, and thus sided against Bruce with the English until the relatively late date of 1313.

The battle where my William dies combines a few events. Edward Bruce actually deserves credit (along with James
Douglas, Robert Boyd, and Angus MacDonald’s Hebridean forces) for the cover-of-mist attack. With a force of about fifty men, Edward Bruce planned to use the mist to hide his surprise attack of a force of fifteen hundred English soldiers under the command of Aymer St. John. When the mist suddenly rose, Edward found his small force exposed. Instead of retreating, he boldly attacked the flank of the English cavalry and created such surprise and confusion that the English forces broke. It’s one of those great David and Goliath apocryphal stories that seem to permeate the cult of the Bruce. Whether true or not, you can decide.

There were actually two battles fought in the area around this time by Edward Bruce against the English. The first was along the banks of the River Dee, where the English fled and took refuge in Threave Castle, which Edward eventually took and destroyed (at the time it was probably a wooden castle, not a stone one as I suggested). The second battle was along the River Cree when the English fled to Buittle Castle, which Edward was unable to take at that time.

The place of Robert the Bruce’s first parliament is generally believed to have been St. Andrews on March 6, 1309. However, some sources claim that Bruce had an earlier council or meeting at Ardchattan Priory, which is said to have been the last Scottish parliament in Gaelic.

Bruce did indeed make a royal progress to thank the Highland chiefs who had come to his aid during those dark days after Methven. It made sense to me that he might have also used the progress to check up on some of his new allies. The progress probably occurred the following spring (March 1310), but as Bruce was in Loch Broom around August 1309, it could have been earlier.

Duncan MacAulay held the oft-photographed castle of Eileen Donan for the MacKenzie chief. His castle on Loch Broom, however, is not named. I thought Dun Lagaidh,
located on a key defensive position overlooking the sea loch, a possibility. The ancient dun was thought to have been converted to use as a castle during the medieval period (
see:
http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/
).

Although the “killing team” sent after Bruce is my invention, at this time there would have been plenty of enemies and resistance to a Bruce kingship—even in the part of Scotland he controlled north of the Tay. The factions and blood feuds had been going on for years, and the supporters of the MacDougalls and Comyns would not have given up so easily. Indeed, as I alluded to in the book, John of Lorn was still causing trouble out west and trying to make a return to Scotland.

The inspiration for Bruce’s axe-in-the-forehead injury was taken from a dent over the left brow found in a cast made of what is believed to be his skull.

Whether the recurring illness that first struck Bruce in the winter of 1307 on his campaign north was scurvy, leprosy, or something else (syphilis is also hypothesized) is all conjecture. But there is some support for leprosy—which might have been contracted at a later date—found in facial anomalies of the skull.