Arsenic and Old Armor (25 page)

The seasoned warrior appeared resigned to
that, but he still paused. “What concerns me most right now is the
whereabouts of the three missing Englishmen,” Alan confessed. “If
the bloody fools don’t show up alive in time for your wedding,
we’ll have more to worry about from Lord Dorset and his English
soldiers than Jack Fitzwilliam and his mangy pack of dogs.”

Iain frowned. “I was too outspoken when the
Council of Regents sent word that blasted emissaries were being
sent to witness the wedding.”

He’d been outraged when first told of the
demand being made by the English court. Another example of who was
really running things in Scotland. Before the loss at Flodden
Field, there was no question. No more, though. Now the Tudor king
felt perfectly free to demand proof that there would be an end to
the problem of a few outlaws in Scotland’s Borders area.

Iain’s word was not good enough. The
Scottish regent’s promise meant nothing. King Henry wanted his own
men to witness the union of the two clans. Refusal meant that they
would send troops to occupy and take charge of the area. Iain had
been angry and openly defiant. This was Scotland, and the slight
chance of isolated acts of banditry spilling over to the south of
the Borders was hardly reason enough for the Tudor court to be
rattling its long swords.

The Tudor court had been as stubborn, and
the Council of Regents had gone along. The regent himself had
traveled to Blackthorn Hall to speak to Iain about what his people
and Scotland stood to lose. There was no question that the English
troops would overrun them. Only twelve years had passed since the
king had died in battle at Flodden Field, and neither Scotland nor
the Armstrong clan had recovered enough to stand against
England.

Grudgingly, Iain had given in, leaving Lady
Elizabeth to become the welcoming hostess.

Iain knew the truth behind her seeming
willingness. She was doing her duty. He and his mother had many
differences, but they had one common bond—their hatred of the
English. In addition to the hundreds of their Armstrong kin who had
been cut down by English arrows, halberds, and cannon, she’d lost a
husband and Iain a father.

Still, Iain had not been able to accept the
situation in silence. Now there was no doubt who would be blamed
for the missing Englishmen. That is, unless Iain could find the
real culprit, Jack Fitzwilliam.

After all, who stood to gain the most by
getting Iain into this kind of trouble?

“
Yes, dear. There have been
others.”

Marion leaped off the
bench. “You mean…
others
?”

Margaret and Judith each put a hand on their
niece’s shoulder and pushed her back down onto her seat.

“
You’re getting hysterical
again, my dear,” Margaret warned.

“
Not good.” Judith shook
her head in disapproval.

Marion glanced up into one concerned face
and then into the other. They were looking at her like she was the
one who had lost her mind.

“
What do you mean by
‘others’?” she managed to croak.

“
Other gentlemen,” Margaret
answered.

“
Other Englishmen,” Judith
corrected.

With her elbows planted on
her knees, Marion buried her face into her hands. She was dreaming
all of this, she told herself. She was dreaming. She had to be
dreaming. If she repeated it enough times, she figured it might
even be true. That was what the nuns believed about prayer.
Repetition was crucial. Say it, chant it, pray it enough times and
your sin would be forgiven.
She was
dreaming
. This was her prayer.

She opened her eyes. The same faces were
looking down at her. “How many…others?” she asked hesitantly.

The two sisters went back and forth with
their special look. Then there was some counting on the fingers and
the murmuring of names.

“
Eighteen?” Margaret
finally announced.

“
No, this makes nineteen.”
Judith shook her head.

Marion slithered off the chair to free
herself from their hold. Neither of them appeared to mind.

“
No, this has to be
eighteen,” Margaret insisted. “We cannot count the first
one.”

“
We can, too,” Judith
argued. “He was English.”

At the window, Marion opened the shutters
and leaned out. She took a chestfull of fresh air. The two women
continued to argue in the background. Unfortunately, the drop to
the courtyard was too short. At best, she might break a bone if she
jumped. Marion tried to decide if being lame would do her any good.
What if she landed on her head? Perhaps she’d forget everything she
heard.

“
Marion!”

She focused on one of the men calling her
name from the courtyard. It was Iain. He waved at her.

Perhaps if she went to the top of the
tower…

“
How is the visit going
with your aunts?” he asked.

Suddenly panicking, she scrambled back from
the window and closed the shutters. She moved back a step into the
room.

“
Please go away,” she
whispered at the closed shutter. “You don’t want to know any of
this.”

“
We were never sure about
the first one. We thought he might have been an outlaw wearing
stolen English armor,” Margaret argued.

“
You thought that. I
didn’t,” Judith said. “And he did speak with an accent.”

“
I felt sorry for him, so
he couldn’t have been an Englishman,” Margaret insisted.

“
It’s too late to be
changing our minds about him. He’s down there with the others. We
must count him.”

“
Very well,” Margaret said
with a sigh.

“
And Sir George makes
nineteen,” Judith said with an air of finality.

“
Nineteen
?” Marion cried, whirling
around to face her aunts.

Margaret shrugged and moved around the
platters on the table. “If we must count the first one, then we
have nineteen.”

It was impossible to think straight. It was
hard to recognize that these two murderers were the same sweet old
ladies that had nurtured her and braided her hair and fed her. She
even remembered how gentle they’d been with the baby black squirrel
that she’d found at the base of the oak tree. They were
murderers.

Still, she told herself, this was her
family. Her trouble.

Another thought struck her. But she was
already married to Iain, which meant this was his trouble, too. As
her guardian and now as her husband, he was guilty of any crime
that she was guilty of. That was the law. Nineteen dead Englishmen
in the dungeon of her tower house. He was as good as dead if word
of this got out. They’d have his head on a pike.

“
No!” she said
aloud.

“
Did you say something,
dear?” Margaret asked.

“
She said ‘no.’”

Were they doing such things when she was
just a child? Did her father know about it? She had to know it
all.

“
How long has this thing
been going on?” she asked.

The two women looked at her as if they
didn’t know what she meant.

“
Who was the first one to
die?” Marion clarified. “And when did it happen?”

Again, there were some exchanged looks and a
short argument on the number of years.

“
It was the same year as
you left,” Margaret said.

“
No, it was in the
springtime after you left,” Judith argued.

“
No, dear. It was the same
year.” Margaret shook her head.

“
We didn’t get back from
Blackthorn Hall until there was snow on the ground that winter,”
Judith argued. “There was no snow when the Englishman showed up at
our door.”

Marion forced herself not to yell at them
again. “Very well,” she said through gritted teeth. “It happened
after I was sent to the Isle of Skye.”

They both nodded at that.

“
Who was he?” she
repeated.

“
We never learned his
name,” Margaret started.

“
No name,” Judith
agreed.

Margaret sat down on a bench at the table.
“And we really can’t take credit for him, as we didn’t poison
him.”

“
Nineteen!” Judith crossed
her arms stubbornly across her chest.

Marion wondered what the
difference in punishment would be between killing eighteen
Englishmen versus nineteen.
Your head on a
slightly shorter pike?

Margaret shrugged indifferently. “He showed
up in the middle of the night at our door. He’d been stabbed in the
chest and had very little life left in him.”

Nodding in agreement, Judith made the motion
of a dagger going into the heart.

“
Despite the fact that he
was wearing an English tunic, we brought him in.”

“
But he died on us during
the night,” Judith said, looking up.

Marion shook her head in confusion. “You had
done a good deed by bringing in a wounded man and caring for him.
Why did you have to go from that to poisoning all the others?”

The two sisters looked at each other before
nodding simultaneously. “Because of Sir William.”

“
Definitely William,”
Judith agreed.

“
Our brother has been
trying to raise an army to attack England since long before your
father died,” Margaret explained. “He so missed going to fight with
the king.”

“
He missed it,” Judith
concurred.

“
He was so excited to see
the dead Englishman here that we couldn’t refuse him.”

“
We couldn’t refuse our
brother,” Judith said passionately.

Marion looked from one woman to the other.
“And what did he want?”

“
He wanted to take our
special guest to the dungeon. He thought if the Englishman were
retrained and treated well, he might soon change sides and agree to
fight in his…in the Wallace’s…army.”

Marion forced herself to keep a calm face.
Becoming hysterical, as they called it, wouldn’t get out the rest
of the truth. “So…did he change sides?”

“
He did.”

“
He did.” Judith nodded.
“He’s been a devoted follower of William these past twelve years.
He is still down there.”

There was a twelve year old cadaver in Fleet
Tower’s dungeons. But there were others, too. Marion felt one of
her eyes uncontrollably jerk closed. She put a hand on it, but
couldn’t stop the involuntary twitch. She wondered if her aunts
ever had the same twitch, and at what age it had started.

“
And when did you decide
you needed others to join them?” she managed to ask.

“
In all our years, I’d
never seen William so happy,” Margaret said with a
smile.

“
Never,” Judith
agreed.

“
So we made up our mind.
Between the two of us, we decided then and there to add to our
brother’s troops.”

“
It was for an excellent
cause,” Judith reasoned.

“
An excellent cause,”
Margaret agreed. “We lost our brother—your father—to the English.
In doing this, we were helping his surviving brother raise an army
to invade England. And he would be leading an army of their own
kind.”

Judith laughed. “That was the best part.
Their own men fighting them.”

“
English fighting the
English!”
“Isn’t it wonderful, dear?”

“
Brilliant,” Marion replied
without enthusiasm. She wondered if these two knew that dead people
could not raise a sword. She shook her head. Considering everything
else, she decided that was a fairly insignificant point to make
right now.

“
How did you find these
men?” she asked.

“
It wasn’t easy,” Margaret
said.

“
Not easy at all,” Judith
agreed.

“
They
had
to be Englishmen.”

“
Only Englishmen,” Judith
said definitively.

Well, her aunts were murderers, but at least
they were patriots. She wondered if that would help.

“
Fortunately, we’re close
enough to the Borders that there have been occasional Englishmen
who show up at our door,” Margaret explained. “It’s surprising how
many would stop here to get in out of the weather.”

“
Not a very hardy lot, the
English.”

“
Not hardy at all,”
Margaret agreed.

“
One time, we had
three
of them at once,”
Judith said excitedly, holding up as many fingers.

“
Those three loved the
food.”

“
Loved it.” Judith nodded.
“Do you recall what they said about your mutton pie?”
“I do indeed, sister,” Margaret said with a smile. “The wine didn’t
agree with them too much.”

Judith made a motion with her hand of
someone falling on his face. “It surely did not agree with
them.”

“
William was elated,
though.”

“
Quite elated,” Judith
agreed.

“
Are they still down there,
too?” Marion asked.

“
Yes, they all are.”
Margaret smiled.

“
And they happily switched
sides, like the rest of them,” Judith said cheerfully. “England
must be a horrible place.”