The Laird's Vow Read online

  “Perhaps you might return later in the day to see if I’ve any left,” he suggested. “It’s all the Stygian returned with on this latest voyage. Silk. And oranges.”

  Audrey Keane nodded smartly and then dared to give him a wink as her maid took the tied bundle from Mam. “I will most certainly do that. I do hope,”—she paused a moment, met his eyes and lowered her voice—“there are…more.”

  “Good day to you now, Miss Keane,” Mam said pointedly through her smile.

  The redhead only glanced at Mam. “Mistress Cameron.” Then she turned and left the shop, trailing her expensive skirts and her young maid behind her through the open doorway and up the stone steps to the bustling spring street above.

  “She wanted one of those filthy books you promised her, nae doubt,” Mam hissed low at his side as she rewound the hairy twine she’d cut. “I doona ken why you’d waste space on such rubbish. She canna even read, I’ll wager.”

  “’Tis nae filthy, Mam,” Tavish murmured. “’Tis a single volume of poetry, easily carried among the bottles. You know as well as I that Audrey reads quite well, much to Master Keane’s dismay. You’re only salted because you canna read such stuff yourself.” He watched the man move to the other side of the shop.

  “Och, Audrey all the day now, is it?”

  “That’s her name.” Tavish felt beneath the bench top for the familiar smooth handle of the baton he kept, his eyes never leaving the stranger while his mother’s mumblings about the dangerous wiles of Audrey Keane faded into the hum of the street noise beyond the shop walls.

  Tavish guessed the man in black to be approximately his own age—a score and ten, perhaps a few years more. His profile revealed a high, sloping forehead with prominent brow and cheekbone, a Roman nose above a noble looking chin. Certainly, the man’s grooming was impeccable, his long, black hair tied at the nape with a dark-colored silk ribbon, both of which nearly disappeared against the plush quilting of the man’s fine gambeson. He was successful—or wealthy, any matter—considering his black suede leggings filling the shining leather boots. The stranger’s belt was wide and equipped; long gauntlets hung from his right side, his weapon on his left—a lengthy arming sword with shining silver pommel, its leather-wrapped scabbard stretching from hip to mid-calf. This was no home-forged, crude weapon.

  Nay, this was no ordinary stranger.

  So the burgess had hired a foreigner to do his dirty work for him, had he? Tavish took firm hold of the baton and slid it silently from its hiding place, holding it down by his leg.

  “—Audrey Keane since she was in braids and you’d think Captain Muir and yourself would—” Mam broke off her hushed tirade. “Tav?”

  Tavish’s eyes followed the stranger as he ambled ever closer to the bench, his eyes still seeming to peruse the bundled wool.

  Mam wrapped her fingers around his arm, seeking his attention, but all he would allow her was the slight angling of his ear toward her.

  “What are you thinking you’ll do with that?” she whispered, shaking his arm for emphasis. “Is it your plan now to beat those who come to hire you?”

  “He’s nae here to hire me, Mam.”

  “And how would you be knowin’ that?”

  “Only look at him,” Tavish said. “Nosing about the place, eavesdropping on my business with Audrey. Someone’s sent him.” Mam’s silence told Tavish he’d no need to explain his meaning. “Perhaps ’twill deliver a clear message to the burgess that I’ll have no more of his threats and his thieving, do I send his hired man back to him with a glen in his skull.”

  Now his mother’s fingernails dug into his arm. “You hush, now! Hush! Doona speak of such things! The burgess will jail you and take everything we have—everything you’ve worked so hard to build. To keep!”

  “I’ve a revelation for you, Mam—’tis the burgess’s intent to take it all any matter. The Stygian canna so much as anchor at Leith—as if I were no better than a common pirate.” His mother gave him a look from the corner of her eye, but he ignored it. “I’ll have nae more of it, I say.”

  “And I’ll nae have my only child hanged!” She pinched the inside of his elbow hard enough to make him wince, and then, before he could stop her, Mam had shoved past him and was gone from behind the bench, approaching the stranger.

  “Good day to you, sir,” Mam called out, leaning at the waist as if to draw the man’s attention.

  He turned and gave Mam a short, courteous bow that took Tavish a bit by surprise—usually those sent by the burgess possessed little in the way of manners. “Bonjour. A good day to you, Mistress. Forgive me for not greeting you sooner; I had no wish to encroach upon a private conversation.”

  Any good will kindled by the stranger’s courteous French greeting to Harriet Cameron was quickly extinguished by the remainder of his address, spoken with a proper, clipped accent.

  An Englishman.

  “Oh,” Mam cooed, causing Tavish’s bad temper to increase. “Well! How verra kind of you! That’s only my son, though.”

  Tavish had the suspicion that, had he been able to see his mother’s face, she would be looking up at the stranger through her eyelashes, much as Audrey Keane had looked at Tavish.

  “What I mean to say is, he’s the master of the shop but he’s also my—” Mam clapped her hands together once gaily and then held them against her matronly, aproned bosom. “Have you come to collect goods from the shipment? Perhaps some”—she paused, her turning and nodding head indicating she was looking the man over thoroughly—“cloth for your…your fine”—she reached out a finger and almost touched the man’s chest—“self?”

  A faint smile cracked the stranger’s proper façade and he gave her another short bow. “Thank you for your kind offer of assistance, but I believe I have located what I seek—you are Harriet Payne, are you not?”

  Tavish’s heart stuttered in his chest.

  “My, my!” Mam murmured, and Tavish was glad to hear a bit of caution creep into her tone. “I’ve nae heard that name in an age. Aye, I’m Harriet; Payne was my da.”

  The stranger nodded. “Mistress Cameron now, of course. I knew you by the lovely mark there on your upper lip.”

  Mam’s fingertips fluttered at her mouth, where the perfectly round mole she was known for lived, but this time when she spoke, all traces of coquettishness were gone.

  “Have we met, sir?” she asked.

  “Forgive me,” the man said and bowed again. “I am Sir Lucan Montague, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter of His Majesty King Henry of England.”

  Harriet turned wary eyes to Tavish, whose fingers tingled around the handle of the club he still held beneath the bench top.

  “What reason have you to seek my mother, sir?” Tavish asked quietly, his heart galloping in his chest as the barrel nearest him crowned so deliberately with a pyramid of orange fruit seemed to become exponentially larger in the room.

  Why was an English knight in his shop?

  Lucan Montague’s gaze, blue and cold, at last found Tavish. “In truth, I seek the proprietor of this works, and the owner of the merchant ship Stygian.” His accent was clipped and cool, but also completely at ease. He seemed to examine every detail of Tavish’s face before meeting his eyes again, and his face once more betrayed a secret mirth. “I believe you are he. You may retire the weapon you’re holding in your right hand; I vow upon my honor that I mean you and your mother no harm.”

  Tavish felt his brows raise, and he couldn’t help but glance down at the baton in his hand—for sure, the man could not have seen it from where he stood.

  “In fact,” the knight said, stepping to the door and kicking away the wooden wedge that held it open, “I’ve come bearing what I suspect you will consider to be very good news, and all I ask in return are answers to some few, concise inquiries.”

  A pair of ladies drew up short before the do
orway as Lucan Montague began to close the stout shop door.

  “Désolé. I do apologize—a matter of great urgency, you understand. So sorry. Good day.” He closed the door and looked up and down the frame before engaging both intricate locks, while Mam stepped backward quickly to join Tavish behind the safety of the bench.

  Tavish laid the club atop the wood, still firmly in his grip. When Lucan Montague turned around, the knight’s gaze went immediately to it, but he didn’t seem disturbed in the least.

  “Your shuttering my business without my leave is not endearing me to your request. You have a short amount of time to explain yourself, knight or nay, before I make use of this baton,” Tavish warned. “Now, I’ll only ask once more: What do you want?”

  “A fair request,” Lucan Montague said with a gracious nod. “I believe your mother may possess some knowledge that will assist my efforts on behalf of the Crown to investigate a series of murders that took place in England.”

  Mam gasped. “Murders?”

  But rather than cause him further alarm, the knight’s admission prompted Tavish’s shoulders to relax. “You have been misinformed, sir; my mother has not been farther south of Edinburgh than Peebles the whole of her life.”

  “They’ve lovely wool,” Mam added, her smile returning. She laid her hand upon Tavish’s arm. “Tav takes me each year for the festival. Have you been, sir?”

  “I’ve not yet had the happy fortune,” the knight said, and to his credit, Tavish could not detect even a hint of condescension in his tone. His gaze met Tavish’s directly. “Indeed, it was not my intent to insinuate that your mother was in England when any of the crimes were perpetrated, nor at any time before or after, Master Cameron. My questions for her are wholly concerning your father.”

  Tavish’s jaw grew tight, and a pair of moments ticked by in the silence of the shop. “My father is dead.”

  The knight nodded. “Oh, yes, likely he is hanged now. But he was very much alive a month ago. I interviewed him myself.”

  “You are mistaken. Sir.” Tavish spoke in a low, measured voice. “Dolan Cameron has been dead for fifteen years.”

  Lucan Montague’s gaze never wavered. “Forgive me my bluntness, but I don’t believe it is a secret to any here present that Dolan Cameron was not your true sire.”

  The shop was as still as a calm sea at midnight.

  Tavish forced himself to swallow while he tried to think of a reply. He had only discovered the fact of his bastard status fifteen years ago, the very day his stepfather had died. And he was fairly certain Mam wouldn’t have admitted it even then if Tavish hadn’t been intent on surrendering himself to the constable that terrible night.

  And it was Mam who came to his rescue again.

  “Perhaps,” Harriet Cameron said quietly, “you might agree to keep such an idea to yourself, sir. Tav has inherited this shop and his ship from his…from Dolan Cameron. Dolan claimed Tavish as his own son, and all of Edinburgh knows him as such. If rumor was started that…” Harriet paused. “We could lose everything we have.”

  Lucan Montague pressed his hand to his chest and gave another bow. “Upon my honor, Mistress, I’ll not reveal such to anyone in this city.” He rose, and his eyes once more met Tavish’s. “Although, if what I suspect is contained in yonder barrel is true, and my suppositions regarding your tenuous relationship with the city’s officials are confirmed, it will be you who reveals the news I carry. And gladly.”

  “I do doubt I would be glad to announce to all Edinburgh that the man who sired me was a wandering ne’er-do-well who got a teenage girl with child and then abandoned her to the spitefulness of her family. And then you said he was hanged, didn’t you? A bastard is bad enough—the bastard of a criminal might as well hang himself and save the magistrate the trouble.”

  “Tav,” Mam whispered, looping her arm through his and patting his shoulder with her other hand.

  Lucan Montague looked at Tavish and his mother in turn with an almost curiously pleased expression. For so long, in fact, Tavish was tempted to brain the man after all.

  “You will proceed how you think best, of course,” the knight said at last. “My oath will stand, regardless. All I ask in return is that Mistress Cameron answer my questions with candor. Then I shall leave you both. Never to return, if that is your wish.”

  “Never?” Tavish pressed.

  The man bowed again, and Tavish couldn’t help but roll his eyes. “Upon my honor.”

  Tavish looked down at his mother who, rather than mirror what Tavish was certain was his own worried expression, looked wistful and even sad.

  “What say you, Mam?” Tavish asked.

  She held his gaze for a moment and then turned to the knight. “Go on.”

  Tavish wondered that the man didn’t carry a perpetual aching head with all the bowing and nodding he did.

  “You have my deepest gratitude, Mistress. Now.” His demeanor seemed to change in an instant, his actions becoming clipped and efficient as he reached into his thick, quilted gambeson and withdrew a flattened roll of parchment, tied with a black ribbon. He looked to the bench and then Tavish pointedly, one black eyebrow arched. “May I?”

  Tavish nodded, and the man stepped to the smooth slab of wood, placing the parchment near the baton and then withdrawing a shortened quill pen and small glass phial of ink from his gambeson. After setting up his supplies in a tidy display, the man returned his attention to the rolled parchment. Undoing the package efficiently, he cleared his throat in a remarkably knightly manner and then looked once more to Harriet.

  “As one sworn into service of the Most Noble Order of the Garter and also as special emissary to His Sovereign Majesty King Henry, I, Lucan Montague, do proclaim this inquiry to be both lawful and binding. Do you swear before God that you are Harriet Cameron, born of the family Payne?”

  Mam nodded. “Aye. I do.”

  “Did you meet and have relations with a man in the late winter of the year fourteen hundred twenty-seven, known to you as Thomas?”

  “Tommy,” Harriet repeated quietly. And then, louder, “Aye, sir. He said his name was Thomas.”

  Lucan Montague’s quill scratched on the parchment even as he spoke. “And he was in fact an Englishman?”

  Tavish’s head whipped around to look down at Mam, but she was paying him no heed, her pursed lips hinting at the strain she felt.

  “Aye. He said he hailed from Northumberland. By the darling reeds, although I never could ken what he meant by that, as he seemed greatly afraid of the place to give it such a pet of a name. It had nearly killed him.”

  This was not part of the tale his mother had told Tavish. “Mam?”

  Mam hesitated, and her eyes held what appeared to be old sorrow. “He’d been shot several times. Once with an arquebus. If it hadna been so cold as to have frozen his wounds, he’d a’bled to death, for certain. He was in a dead faint on his horse when I found him.”

  “He’d been shot. That is new information. Thank you.” Lucan Montague’s gaze had flitted between Mam’s face and the parchment beneath his hand during her explanation, and he was ready immediately with another question. “Do you recall when you found him, Mistress Cameron? The date, as closely as you can recollect?”

  “Oh, I wouldna have ken such a thing if it hadna been for the feast day. Imbolc night, it was.”

  “You’re certain?” Lucan Montague, his quill paused above the page. “First February?”

  “Aye. I had come to the barn to lay the bed and table for Saint Brigid.”

  The knight nodded. “And do you vow before God that this man standing before me, known heretofore as Tavish Cameron, is issue from your relations with that Englishman, Thomas?”

  For the first time in his life that Tavish could remember, Mam blushed for an instant, but then her chin lifted. “Aye, sir. I knew no other before Tommy. I already carri
ed Tav when me da trothed me to Dolan Cameron. Although neither can give their own oaths to it as they’re both long dead, thanks be to God.”

  “I see.” Lucan Montague scribbled on the parchment for several moments before he turned the page toward Mam and dipped the quill daintily before holding it toward her. “If you will sign to your testimony, Mistress. Just here.”

  Mam took the pen and scrawled her name in careful, stuttering lines while Tavish skimmed the words over her shoulder. She handed the quill back to Montague. The knight laid it aside with a murmur of thanks and then reached inside his gambeson once more to withdraw another rolled decree, this one tied with a green ribbon. Although his words were apparently for Mam, his frosty gaze locked onto Tavish.

  “Because Master Cameron is, by yours and Thomas’s own vows, quite illegitimate—my apologies—there is little hope that he could claim Darlyrede House even if it weren’t being held under guardianship in perpetuity of a trial.”

  “Beg pardon—what?” Tavish said with a frown.

  “It can’t be bequeathed because its rightful ownership is already in question,” Lucan Montague said in a patient tone, as if clarifying something that should have been painfully obvious. He must have realized his mistake, for he pressed his lips into a thin line and gave a twitch of a bow. “Forgive me; of course you wouldn’t know. Tavish Cameron, your father was Thomas Annesley, third Baron Annesley, Lord of Darlyrede.”

  Tavish felt the floor tilt ever so slightly beneath his boots, but before he could think of a response, Lucan Montague continued.

  “He is accused by the English Crown of the murder of his betrothed, Cordelia Hargrave, on the eve of their wedding. Also for the murder of a vicar and a deacon, both belonging to Lindisfarne, as well as the theft of two priory horses. He is suspected in the deaths of several commoners, reportedly abducted from towns and villages nearby to Darlyrede House, as well as some as far away as London. Also, a noble couple, some years after his escape into Scotland, where he did manage to evade capture these past thirty years.”

  Tavish swallowed hard, while at his side, Mam whispered, “’Twas all true.” And then, louder, “Sir, Tommy didna kill anyone—especially nae that sweet girl.”