The Scot's Oath Page 11

  He raised his eyebrows at her. “I doona wish to take Searrach.” He began walking backward, pulling her toward the door. “Come with me. Find Satan—he should have a day about as well.”

  “It’s Satin.” Her face softened, and Padraig couldn’t drink in enough of her features. He was winning her, he thought.

  “Satan,” he whispered.

  She sighed. “One hour, Master Boyd.”

  “You might also call me Padraig.”

  “Don’t press your good fortune.”

  Padraig threw back his head and barked with laughter before grinning down at her and whispering conspiratorially, “To the kitchens!”

  * * * *

  In a quarter hour Padraig was leading Beryl down the slippery slope of the hill toward the narrow brook valley where he’d first held a sword in his hand. She’d tried to maintain what he was sure was a decorous distance from him, but the rain had made the ground soggy, and the dead grass gave through easily to mud beneath their feet, causing Beryl to grab for him out of instinct the first time her slippers slid through the wet, tangled mass. Padraig transferred the basket and oiled skin to his other hand and took firm hold of her slight biceps while Satin slinked slowly behind them.

  The brook was high and swift with the late autumn rains, and Padraig spread the oilskin on a raised mound overlooking a melodic trill of water near a pair of boulders while Beryl laid the meal. The breeze played with the tendrils of hair that escaped from the dark twist around her head, like a crown or a halo, Padraig thought, and the hazy sunlight cast an ethereal glow about her face. The cat crept onto the oilskin as Beryl laid out the cheese and meat, although he only sniffed disdainfully at the crumb she pinched off for him before trotting on toward the rushing brook.

  Padraig watched her delicate, precise movements with something akin to wonder.

  “How’d you come to learn all this?” he asked without much forethought. The balmy weather, the sunshine, the company of the beautiful woman had all combined to make him rather relaxed and perhaps a bit more reckless than he should have been.

  “All what, Master Boyd?” she asked airily.

  “All the things you’re teachin’ me.”

  She looked up at him then. “They’re generally taught to everyone raised in a noble home.”

  “You were raised in one, then.”

  “Well,” she stammered, “yes. Of course. I…I spent quite a bit of time at the abbey, though. They are known as bastions of education, after all.”

  Padraig’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t told him anything really.

  “What about your home?” she parried, pulling a loaf of bread in half and handing him a piece. “Caedmaray.”

  He liked the sound of it on her tongue.

  “It’s certainly nae Darlyrede,” Padraig allowed. “Nae lords nor soldiers. Just the sea and the sky.” He chuckled. “And the sheep.”

  “It sounds quite primitive,” Beryl allowed.

  “Beautiful,” Padraig countered. “Wild.”

  “How did Sir Lucan find you?”

  Padraig chewed and looked down the valley toward the trees that only just hid the bend of the river. “He found my father. In Thurso, on the mainland. A man from our island—he’d borne Tommy a grudge since he came to Caedmaray. Last fall, they were on the mainland together getting supplies, and Dragan had heard rumor of a man wanted by the English king. He thought it might be my da, and so he left word with the sheriff. Lucan was waiting on Tommy at Thurso when the boat went over in the spring.”

  “And Thomas simply…left with Sir Lucan?”

  Padraig nodded. “Aye. He’s an old man, Beryl. Likely he was tired of running.”

  “He’s certainly put up quite a chase since his capture for an old man who has tired of running,” she quipped.

  Padraig could only chuckle, for he knew she was right.

  “Where were you?” she pressed. “When he was taken?”

  “Home,” Padraig said, and he wondered if Beryl could hear the regret in his voice. “One of our ewes fell ill, heavy with lambs, and I needed to stay with her.” He tried to avoid the memory of the sheep’s clouding eyes, her last hot breaths and whining sounds as she lay dying. Tried to block the images of his blade, taking the small creatures from its mother’s dying body. It had been an omen of things to come, only he hadn’t known it at the time.

  Thankfully, Beryl’s voice interrupted his macabre reminiscing. “How did you know what happened then? To your father?”

  “Lucan came back to Caedmaray himself. In April.”

  “You spent the entire winter not knowing where your father was?”

  “Aye.”

  They were quiet for several moments, and Beryl didn’t press him, but for some reason, he wanted her to know.

  “Lucan told me who my father really was—is. What he’d been accused of. He was kind to me, in his way.” Padraig vividly remembered sitting outside his own fishing hut that day in the frigid April wind, mending the net in his lap as if his life depended upon its completion in that moment, while the strange, proper, black-clad English knight had detailed the thing to him in a crisp, English tongue. Padraig remembered his shock. His anger. His initial resentment toward his father.

  “And then Sir Lucan told me that, because me da and mam had married, I was Tommy’s only legitimate heir. That if anyone had a chance of winning Darlyrede from Vaughn Hargrave, ’twas I.”

  “I can’t believe he would encourage you to come on your own into such a foreign, dangerous situation.” She seemed almost angered on Padraig’s behalf.

  Padraig laughed. “Och, he didna. He told me to wait until he notified the king of my coming.”

  Beryl gave him that brief, rueful smile she held in reserve for when Padraig was doing something purposefully incorrect to serve his own amusement.

  “All your life, you had no idea,” she mused, “that your father was the third Baron Annesley.”

  “Nae in a mad dream,” he said. “My father was Tommy Boyd, the hardiest Caedmaray man. He lived his life there as if he’d been born to it. Spoke the old tongue better than me grandda.”

  “What happened to the man who turned him in? Dragan, I think you called him?”

  “Aye, Dragan. He died that winter of the sweating sickness,” Padraig said, his jaw clenched. “I think he much have died happy, that he’d had his revenge on my da at last. Dragan’d been set on marrying me mother before Da came to Caedmaray.”

  “I’m sorry,” Beryl said.

  He looked over at her. “None of your doing, lass.”

  She was watching him closely now, almost as if she had something else to say, and so Padraig waited.

  “Why did you come, though, Padraig? Really? Is it because you hope to inherit your father’s title?”

  Now Padraig did look away, to the bare company of trees standing sentinel across the rushing brook. He barely noticed the white mass that was Satin, making his way stealthily across the boulders to explore that wooded darkness.

  He spoke aloud his own deepest fear. “Do you think I’m nae capable of it? Of Darlyrede?”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “My father has been wronged,” Padraig murmured at last. “He is a good man—I wish you knew him. If he never returns to Northumberland, if he has nae wish to, he doesna deserve to be remembered as a murderer.” He spat the absurdity from his lips. Then he looked at Beryl. “I’ll do whatever I must to bring him justice.”

  She met his gaze evenly. “I understand.”

  “Perhaps I’m a fool,” he said, suddenly self-conscious. He looked over at the ground near them and spied a bold red leaf tumbled there on the stiff breeze, leathery and moist from the rain. He picked it up and spun the stem between his fingers, watching the edges blur together. When he stopped he noticed the veiny pattern in the center: yellow-gre
en, broken lines forming the symmetrical outline of a heart at its center.

  He held it out toward Beryl suddenly.

  Her delicate hand raised, hesitated, and then took hold of the leaf.

  “But I believe that truth must always be spoken, even when it is of things that have long since passed,” he said. “For in that truth lies hope for the future.”

  Beryl dropped her eyes to the miraculously random design in the center of the leaf, her perfect lips parted in wonder and surprise. When she looked back up, Padraig leaned his face toward hers.

  She didn’t pull away as his lips brushed her mouth, and so Padraig brought his hand to the side of her face.

  But she stopped him then, her fingers wrapping around his wrist.

  “Padraig, look,” she whispered, her gaze focused on something over his shoulder.

  He turned his head and saw the small figure of a child crouching at the edge of the wood, his little hand held out, as Satin crept toward him.

  “One of Darlyrede’s?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so—he’s not dressed as one of the village children.” She pulled away from him and stood, stepping around the oilskin toward the brook. “Hello, there! Hello! Is your mother with you?”

  The boy’s head raised, and Padraig could see the surprise on his little oval face beneath his red hair from where he sat. Then the child skittered back into the shadows and was gone, leaving Satin standing in the berm between brook and forest, his tail slashing at the brisk breeze.

  “He’s likely afraid of a hiding, being beyond the brook,” Padraig said.

  Beryl hummed, clearly unconvinced. “Any matter,” she said briskly at last, “we should return. It has been a generous hour, Master Boyd. And although I would hold you to your promise of continued lessons, I fear that there are tasks I simply cannot put off.” She began gathering up the remnants of their meal and placing them in the basket.

  Padraig didn’t want to go. He felt that, just for the short time they had sat together in this quiet place beyond Darlyrede’s walls, everything else had ceased to matter. He reached out for the red leaf lying on the oilskin and stood, stepping toward Beryl and sliding the stem into the scallop of her hair.

  “So you doona forget,” he said.

  Her eyes were star-filled as his fingertips grazed the side of her face, but only for an instant.

  She reached down for the handle of the basket, the leaf a blaze of jagged color in her properly coiffed hair. “Don’t you forget your fitting. Good day, Master Boyd. Satin!”

  Padraig watched her climb up the hill in her gray skirts, her little white familiar following after her.

  Aye. He might be winning her indeed.

  Chapter 10

  The greenery that usually decorated the great hall only in the weeks during Advent had been strung in preparation for the arrival of the hunt guests. Iris could tell as she walked through the fragrant space carrying Caris’s freshly laundered underdress that no expense had been spared in making Darlyrede’s public areas as grand in appearance as any that could be boasted by royalty, and it was obvious that Vaughn Hargrave wished to make a very clear impression on his guests of his affluence and rank. But why he would choose to throw such a fete at this vulnerable time of Padraig Boyd’s claim to the hold baffled her—Iris would have thought it to the evil man’s advantage to keep word of Thomas Annesley’s legitimate heir secret until the king decided the legitimacy or no of his claim, and that was not likely to occur until well after the turn of the year.

  It worried her too. Vaughn Hargrave did nothing lest it was to his advantage.

  Her frown arched across her brow by the time she had mounted the stairs and arrived at the lady’s apartments. Lord Hargrave was dangerously sly, and Iris knew that there was a reason for his actions. She only hoped she could figure it out before someone else went missing.

  She heard a shrill voice issuing from the chamber. Iris took a deep breath and steeled herself into composure before tapping lightly on the door and then pushing it open.

  “No! No! No!” Lady Hargrave was shouting as Iris entered. She briefly caught sight of the noblewoman flinging a wadded ball of cloth at one of the older maids. “I’ve told you, it’s not the right one! Think you I don’t know my own costumes?”

  “Milady.” Iris strode toward the little group gathered around Caris Hargrave, already holding out the underdress across both forearms as if in offering.

  “Beryl, thank God.” Caris’s voice fell into a strangled whisper, and she clutched for the thick bedpost and leaned onto it as if her temper had cost her all of her strength. “The one with the ivory stitching?”

  “Yes, milady.” She held it higher toward the woman, who reached out one trembling finger to stroke the intricate and delicate hem.

  “I told you.” Caris turned her face only slightly toward the other women gathered. “You fools left it behind. My best underdress!” Her shoulders heaved as if she’d been running. “Get out,” she demanded, and then turned away from the post to stumble to her dressing table, muttering, “useless,” as she sank onto the cushioned seat.

  “But, milady,” the oldest maid offered hesitantly. “Your veil—”

  “Beryl will arrange my coif for me.” She waited for a response, her back to the chamber, her hairbrush in her hand. But when no one moved or replied, she slammed the tool on the tabletop. “Get out, I said!”

  Iris looked sympathetically to the maids, but most would not meet her eyes as they passed her. She walked to the bed and laid the underdress carefully atop the coverlet as the door closed.

  “What troubles you, milady?” Iris asked calmly, coming to stand behind the quaking woman. She reached past Lady Hargrave’s shoulder and retrieved the brush, setting at once to smoothing the woman’s hair. “Your gown has been found—it was only set aside from the rest of your costume because of its fineness. The beading of your kirtle would have snagged it.”

  Caris was panting shallowly through her mouth. “Useless,” she whispered. And then she met Iris’s gaze in the hazy-looking glass. “Forgive me, Beryl. I fear I am at odds with myself today.”

  Iris gave her a smile and continued brushing. “Surely it’s not the guests arriving that has upset you so—you are known for your generosity as a hostess.”

  “But it is,” Caris admitted suddenly, and the intensity of her tone caused Iris to pause the hairbrush in midstroke. “Oh, I’m a fool!” She covered her mouth with one pale hand and then closed her eyes as if against tears.

  “Milady.” Iris came around the stool to kneel at the woman’s side. “You must tell me so that I might help you bear this burden.”

  Caris dropped her hand and turned to look down into Iris’s face. “I fear I’ve done something in haste that I now very much regret, and because of it I have perhaps jeopardized your position at Darlyrede. With me.”

  Iris’s heartbeat stuttered. “Milady?”

  “’Tis vanity’s consequence, is all I can say,” the woman muttered, fidgeting with a fold of her dressing gown. “Pride. I wanted to show you off, I suppose.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Caris met her eyes again. “Lord and Lady Paget shall attend the hunt.”

  Iris blinked as the name wandered around in her mind, looking for its familiar resting place. Paget, Paget…

  Lady Paget!

  She swallowed with some difficulty. “I see. Lady Paget, my…former mistress. She is coming to Darlyrede…tonight?”

  “She’s already arrived.” Caris dropped her eyes again with a pained expression. “I wanted to, of course, thank her for sending you to me. You have been an answer to my prayers, Beryl. Truly, you have. But I admit that part of me wanted her to see how happy and well you are. And now I fear that when she sees you again, she will steal you away. You loved each other, did you not?” She glanced at Iris from the corne
r of her eye.

  Iris’s heart no longer skipped but galloped in her chest. Perhaps the only person in the whole of England who could testify without doubt that Iris was not in fact Beryl was somewhere within Darlyrede House at this very moment. Iris could have already passed her in a corridor.

  “Beryl?” Caris prompted. “Oh, I knew it. Already you dream of going away from here with her!”

  “No!” Iris shook herself and grasped Lady Hargrave’s arm. “Milady, no! I would never forsake you for Lady Paget. She is not my mistress. You are. I have no wish to leave Darlyrede House.” Her mind was turning, racing, seeking a solution.

  “She was very kind to you?”

  “She…demanded I return to her in her letters, which you know I could not do.”

  True.

  “Poor lamb,” Caris cooed, reaching out a hand and stroking Iris’s face.

  “I should sit elsewhere at the feasts and keep myself from your side beyond these rooms. If she asks of me, you might…you might tell her I am ill. With the excitement of the hunt, she will soon forget about me.”

  “But she might see you about the hold, and what then?” Caris prompted. “I would rather you meet her at my side.”

  “She won’t know me, surely,” Iris insisted. “It has been more than a pair of years since she has seen me last.”

  “That is not so long as to forget a treasured servant. Nay, a friend,” Caris insisted, pressing Iris’s hand.

  “Oh, but I have changed since France, milady,” Iris said. “Greatly. She will not know me, I swear it. I will…I will disguise myself if needs be.”

  Caris Hargrave stared into Iris’s face, her expression slowly relaxing into one of pleased surprise. “You truly wish to stay at Darlyrede, don’t you, Beryl? You’re not only saying that to stay in my good graces?”

  Iris smiled. “Of course I want to stay. Who else would look after you as I do?”

  Caris’s eyes widened with almost childlike wonder. “Beryl, dare I believe that I have your love as well as your devotion?”