Amanda Scott - [Border Trilogy 2] (34 page)

About the Author

A
MANDA
S
COTT
,
USA Today
best-selling author and winner of Romance Writers of America’s RITA/Golden Medallion awards,
Romantic Times
’ Career Achievement Award for British Isles Historical, and Romantic
Times
’ Awards for Best Regency Author and Best Sensual Regency, began writing on a dare from her husband. She has sold every manuscript she has written. She sold her first novel,
The Fugitive Heiress
—written on a battered Smith Corona—in 1980. Since then, she has sold many more, but since the second one, she has used a word processor. More than twenty-five of her books are set in the English Regency period (1810–20); others are set in fifteenth-century England and fourteenth- to eighteenth-century Scotland. Three are contemporary romances.

Amanda is a fourth-generation Californian who was born and raised in Salinas and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from Mills College in Oakland. She did graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in British history, before obtaining her master’s in history from San Jose State University. After graduate school, she taught for the Salinas City School District for three years before marrying her husband, who was then a captain in the Air Force. They lived in Honolulu for a year, then in Nebraska, where their son was born, for seven years. Amanda now lives with her husband in northern California. She is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

MORE PASSION, ADVENTURE, AND ROMANCE ON THE SCOTTISH BORDERS!

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Border Lass

AVAILABLE IN MASS MARKET
SEPTEMBER
2008

Chapter 1

Scone Abbey, 14 August 1390

S
cotland’s long-awaited Coronation Day had come at last, and a vast crowd had gathered to see what they could see. Although it might be hours yet before the coronation was over and the newly crowned High King of Scots emerged from the abbey kirk, the teeming mass already overflowed the abbey grounds.

Scone Abbey sat on a terrace above the flat vale of the river Tay a few miles north of Saint John’s town of Perth. The monastic buildings lay east and west of the kirk, while to its north stood a higher mound of grassy land, known as Moot Hill.

Only minutes before, John Stewart, Earl of Carrick and heir to the throne of Scotland, had made his awkward way to the kirk from Abbot’s House, a three-story gray-stone building located between the kirk and the eastern monastic buildings. While he prepared for the ceremony, the rest of those attending would take their places.

The kirk being modestly appointed and small for its ilk, only royal family members, their attendants, and the higher-ranking nobility would be allowed inside. Even so, the crowd was enormous. Nearly everyone who was anyone had come, as well as many hundreds of lesser estate or no estate at all.

John of Carrick’s passage had occasioned much comment. He was thin, stooped, and pale, looked much older than his fifty years, and thanks to a kick from a horse some years before, the man walked with a limp. Worse, he was no warrior but a man of peace and a scholar with little interest in politics. Put plainly, he was not at all what most Scots expected their High King to be.

Scotsmen expected their kings to stride boldly and to rule with decisiveness. Carrick was unlikely to do either.

Movement at the entrance of the largest of the eastern monastic buildings abruptly diverted the crowd’s attention as a group of splendidly attired young noblewomen emerged. Cheers erupted when people recognized the princess Isabel Stewart, one of the few popular members of the royal family.

Her late husband, James, second Earl of Douglas, had been Scotland’s finest warrior, a great hero, and a man of enormous popularity. His death two years before, while leading the victorious Scots against a much larger English army led by Sir Harry “Hotspur” Percy at the Battle of Otterburn, had shocked the entire country—hence the wild reaction to his tragically widowed countess.

Many had been watching for her, because word had spread that the new sovereign and his wife were staying in Abbot’s House and that a number of lesser members of the royal family were staying in the eastern monastic buildings. The Austen canons who normally inhabited those Spartan quarters, and the Abbot of Scone himself, had moved with their brethren into the western buildings for the duration of the coronation activities.

Despite Scone Abbey’s importance to the country, it was not nearly as grand as Cambuskenneth near Stirling Castle, or Melrose in the Borders. But Scone had served as capital of the ancient Pictish kingdom, and therein lay its importance to the people of Scotland and the reason their coronations took place there.

The princess Isabel and her ladies walked two by two. Isabel walked with seventeen-year-old Lady Amalie Murray, whose neatly coiffed raven tresses, hazel eyes, and buxom figure provided a pleasing contrast to the princess’s fair, slender, blue-eyed beauty. Their gowns contrasted well, too, Isabel in pale primrose yellow satin trimmed with ermine, and the lady Amalie in leaf-green and pink silk with embroidered bands of trim. Isabel waved occasionally to the cheering crowd, but the other ladies paid them scant heed, chatting instead among themselves.

“’Tis a strange business, this, Isabel,” the lady Amalie said as her gaze moved warily over the raucous crowd. “When we arrived two days ago, all was fun and feasting. Then yesterday we attended a state funeral—although the King had been dead a full three months. Then, more feasting after the funeral, and now, on the third day, we are finally to crown the new King of Scots.”

“In fact, ’tis my brother Fife who crowns him,” Isabel said with familiar bitterness. “As we have seen for years now, all must be as Fife ordains. Even the name that the new King must take is Fife’s own Sunday name of Robert. Thus, John Stewart, Earl of Carrick, is to become Robert the Third, just because Fife declares that we cannot have a king named John without reminding people that John Balliol tried to steal the crown, even though that happened years ago. But if Carrick were to remain John, Fife says, he would have to be John the Second, which would give too much importance to the usurper Balliol and undermine the line of Robert the Bruce.”

“But to make such decisions is the Earl of Fife’s duty, is it not?” Amalie said, still searching the crowd. “He
is
Governor of the Realm, after all.”

“Aye, so he continues to call himself,” Isabel said. “The truth is that his grace, my father, appointed him governor because his grace believed himself too old and infirm to rule properly. But in May, when he died, Robert’s right to the position of governor died with him. He held it only at the King’s pleasure.”

“But when others said as much, Fife insisted that the right remained with him until we buried the old King and crowned a new one,” Amalie reminded her. “Moreover, besides being Earl of Fife, he is also Earl of Menteith, and so the right to act as coroner today is reserved to him by tradition, is it not?”

“Nay, that is but the way he chooses to interpret that tradition. The right to act as coroner lies with his wife’s family, the MacDuffs, not with the earldom he assumed by marrying her. A MacDuff has placed the crown on the head of every new King of Scots since ancient times—until today.”

Amalie had not known that, but Fife’s version did not surprise her. In her experience, he was not a man whose declarations one should accept as fact without corroboration. Nearly everyone she knew distrusted him, save her brother Simon, who served and admired Fife, and had done so loyally for over a decade. For much of that time, if not all of it, Fife had been, in effect, the ruler of Scotland.

His father, the late King of Scots, had once been a fine soldier and an effective High Steward of Scotland. He had also been the son of King Robert the Bruce’s daughter, Marjorie, and her husband, Walter, High Steward of Scotland.

Robert the Bruce had ordained that, instead of the nobles choosing the High King of Scots as they traditionally had, the succession would pass to the King’s eldest son. So, when his own son, David II, died childless, Robert the Steward, as the next male in the royal line of succession, had taken the throne as Robert II.

His family soon altered “Steward” to the surname Stewart.

Amalie saw that Isabel continued to frown, which made her look much older than her twenty-four years. With her fair hair and flawless skin, the princess was still strikingly beautiful, but she had once been merry, forthright, and carefree. Since her beloved first husband’s death, she had lost much of the animation that had set her apart from other pretty, well-dressed noblewomen.

As the princess’s party was passing Abbot’s House, and approaching the kirk entrance, Amalie’s anxiously searching gaze lit at last on an older couple near the stone steps to the kirk porch.

“Faith, Isabel, my parents are waiting for me,” she muttered as she slowed to let the princess walk a little ahead.

A pair of stalwart knights preceded the princess and her ladies, and Amalie had been watching closely, so she was sure that neither Sir Iagan nor Lady Murray had yet seen her. But they could scarcely miss her if she walked up the steps right past them, as she would have to do to enter the kirk with Isabel.

“You cannot avoid them much longer,” Isabel said over her shoulder with one of her rare smiles. “They mean you no harm, after all.”

“But I’m sure they have found a husband for me,” Amalie said. “I have told them I don’t want one, but now that Meg’s husband has succeeded to his father’s title and estates, I’m sure my lady mother will have persuaded my father that he can use me to make another advantageous alliance. Faith, but Simon said as much to me at Yuletide. He said, too, that being good-sister to Buccleuch will make up for all my faults, and that was eight months ago. I’ve avoided seeing them again until now only because, since then, you have rarely stayed anywhere longer than a sennight.”

“You’ve few faults that I can see,” Isabel said. “I’ve told you myself that I know of more than one eligible young man who would welcome you as his bride.”

“Well, I don’t want a young man or any other sort,” Amalie said. Isabel had been kind to her and had provided sanctuary when she’d needed one. But Isabel did
not
know all there was to know about her, and Amalie did not intend to tell her.

Instead, she said, “I’m going to slip away for a short time if you will permit me. I’ll rejoin you as soon as my parents go in.” When Isabel looked about to protest, she added, “I shan’t be long. Now that Carrick has gone in, they won’t stay outside much longer, because my mother will not want to end up at the back of the kirk.”

“Well, don’t let them see you leaving,” Isabel said. “I’d not be surprised to have your mother confront me and demand to know where I’d sent you.”

Amalie shook her head with a smile. Lady Murray was a controlling sort of woman, to be sure, but she would never behave so improperly as to demand any such thing of the princess. Amalie understood Isabel’s intent, though.

Despite her own sorrows, the princess was considerate to the members of her household and could always make a worried or unhappy one smile.

Casting one more look between the brawny pair that led their party, Amalie saw her mother still looking about. Perhaps, she told herself, Lady Murray was only on the watch for Meg and Buccleuch, but she could not make herself believe it.

Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch would be with the lords of Parliament, behind the kirk, preparing for his part in the ceremony, and Lady Murray would know that Meg was not even there. Due to advanced pregnancy, she would not be attending.

Shrubbery and tall beech trees shaded the front of the Abbot’s House, and Amalie snatched the first chance to slip behind a wide tree trunk. She had intended to wait there until the coast was clear, but as she looked nervously about, she saw her brother Tom striding toward her with some of his friends.

Although he had not seen her, she knew that if she stayed where she was, he soon would. Her overskirt was green and might blend in, but her tunic was not only pink but also boasted wide bands of trim embroidered with gold and silver threads.

Quickly wending her way through the shrubbery and along a gravel pathway, she came to the steps of Abbot’s House and saw that the front door stood open.

Aware that Carrick and his party were staying there, she was sure that at least a few servants must still be inside. But she was aware, too, that if she walked around the side of the building, she would look more furtive than if she just walked in.

If she went boldly up the steps, keeping her back to the crowd, a chance observer would likely mistake her for one of Carrick’s many sisters. If anyone challenged her, she could say she was looking for Isabel and suggest that she might have stepped in to have a word with her eldest brother before his coronation.

Having thus decided her course, Amalie hurried up the steps and in through the open doorway, moving the door just enough to conceal herself from view.

The dim entry hall was little more than a spacious anteroom with a stairway at her right leading to a railed gallery above. Doubtless, the kitchen and service areas lay beyond a door she could just see in the dark corner under the stairs. The walls ahead and to her left, however, revealed three other doors, and all of them were shut.

As she hesitated, uncertain where to go, heavy footsteps approaching the corner door made the decision easy. Snatching up her skirts, she ran silently up the stairs, hoping to find one of the two windows she had noticed above the entry porch, from either of which she might see when her parents entered the kirk.

At the top of the stairs, she saw that the gallery continued around two other sides of the stairwell with doors leading off of it, all closed. Window embrasures at each end of the landing provided light, but neither would overlook the kirk.

On the gallery opposite her, another, narrower flight of stairs ascended to the next floor. She would have to open one of two doors on that side to find a suitable window, and she would be in view of anyone coming down those stairs as she did.

Just then, to her shock, she heard a male voice inside the room immediately to her left. Something about it seemed familiar.

Stepping nearer, she cocked her head close to the door and heard a second voice say with perfect clarity, “In troth, if we give him sufficient cause, he is likely enough to cooperate, but one cannot trust the man from one moment to the next. ’Twould suit me better not to have to concern myself with him at all.”

“Sakes, sir,” the first voice muttered. “Is it murder you seek then?”

Amalie leaned closer.

“I did not say—”

Without the slightest warning, a large hand smacked tight across her mouth and nose as a strong arm swept her off her feet and away from the door.

Terrified and disoriented, she could not see her captor’s face, but his grip was like an iron vise, clamping her against a hard, muscular body. Her struggles did her no good as he strode swiftly around the gallery, bearing her as if she were a featherweight and moving as silently as he had when he had crept up behind her.

She kicked and continued to squirm until she realized that if she drew attention, she was likely to find herself in even worse trouble. Since she suspected that one of the voices might have been her brother Simon’s, and since Simon was not a man who would look kindly on a sister who secretly listened to his private conversations—especially one relating to potential murder—she thought that, for the moment at least, she might be safer where she was.