Only For A Knight (29 page)

 

And neither did she just a scant few minutes later, when Robbie emerged from the narrow secret way cut between the thickness of the tower’s walls and maneuvered himself into the slight widening in the passage that formed the squint above his boyhood bedchamber.

 

But, although certainly at her leisure, as one peek through the small, down-slanted spy hole revealed, the tiny, dark-haired wisp of a woman he knew to be his betrothed was not sitting naked on a stool but merely
standing
unclothed before the little bedchamber’s one arch-topped window.

 

And the gray watery light silhouetting her nakedness afforded him a much greater shock than if he’d caught her practicing unmentionable acts of lewdness upon her surprisingly girlish-looking female parts.

 

A wholly unexpected and stunning shock but also, mayhap, another blessing in disguise.

 

One his chivalry made him hope he would not have to exploit.

 

For, unless his knowledge of women was much less considerable than he hoped, the lady Euphemia appeared to be enceinte—a distinct thickening at her waist and the slight swelling of her childishly small breasts softening her otherwise thin, sharp-angled body into gently rounded bloom.

 

And the longer he peered down at her through the square-cut spy hole, the more convinced he became.

 

His sisters’ jib-jabbering chatter held truth.

 

The lady Euphemia, proud daughter of the great race of MacLeod, if only sired by a drink-taken lesser laird who styled himself
Out-with-the-Sword,
was anything but a virtuous maid.

 

Where’er she’d kept herself in recent months, and with whome’er she’d dallied, did not interest Robbie.

 

All that mattered was what any practiced eye could not deny.

 

His unwanted betrothed was in the earliest swells of her confinement.

 

Beyond all doubt with child.

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twelve

 

 

 

ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE of Eilean Creag from Robbie’s boyhood bedchamber and the wee squint he’d ne’er known existed in those long ago days, the lady Linnet sat beside the hearth fire of the castle’s sumptuous Lady’s Solar, and made slow, tedious stitches on her embroidery, a fine gentlewomanly task her somewhat clumsy fingers ne’er truly allowed her to master.

 

She did, though, possess the ability to listen with only half an ear to her sister’s quiet ramblings.

 

“Battles, blood feuds, and usurpations,”
Lady Caterine was saying this time, murmuring the words from her own hearth chair as she, too, plied her needle, but with more skill and grace than Linnet could e’er dream to achieve.

 

Or, truth be told, cared to attempt.

 

Caterine glanced at her, shook her head as if to rid all thought of foolish men and their warring ways.

 

“’Tis glad my heart is that you’ve work a-plenty, for I weary of sitting in the hall and listening to the men recount the same vainglorious tales,” she declared, stitching away. “You would think they are all born with a sword in their hands and bloodlust in their eyes.”

 

“And are they not?” Linnet could not help the smile that curved her lips.

 

“But,” she added, setting aside her needlework to stretch her arms and flex her aching fingers, “full of steel and muscle or nay, oft enough are the nights old Fergus brings tears to their eyes with his fireside tales of heart-piercing love and yearning—or delights us with his knowledge of where the fairies dance of a night and in which lochs water kelpies can be seen.”

 

Linnet sighed, helped herself to a restorative sip of heather ale.

 

Truth be told, at the moment, much more interesting things than the Wee Folk were to be seen in Eilean Creag’s Lady’s Solar, and although she’d taken great pains to keep her head bent dutifully to her task e’er since her sister had joined her, too much candle shine and fire glow illuminated the chamber for her not to note what a less observant eye might miss.

 

Indeed, unless her vision was failing her, there appeared to be a great deal more of her sister than there had been at Christmastide, the last time they’d seen each other.

 

Unable to hold back her suspicions any longer, Linnet pushed to her feet and pressed her hands against the small of her tired back.

 

“Tell me,” she began, sliding a sidelong glance at Caterine although she pretended to be peering into the hearth, her gaze seemingly fixed on the softly-glowing bricks of peat, “was your sole purpose in visiting Doon truly to take provender to old Devorgilla . . . or could you be secreting another, more
vital
reason for having sought out the crone?”

 

To Linnet’s surprise, Caterine hooted a laugh.

 

A
chuckle
by anyone else’s measure, but for the splendidly elegant Lady Caterine, more prone to pensive musings than boisterous jollity, a good and hearty laugh.

 

“You can stop trying to pretend you are not staring,” Caterine said, looking at Linnet with amused affection. “The kitchen lasses and laundresses have been much less discreet—you, as my sister, have no need for such cantrips . . . aye, there was another reason for visiting the cailleach.”

 

“A wee sweet reason?” Linnet couldn’t resist teasing her.

 

In answer, Caterine put down her own stitchwork and flattened her gown over her middle, letting the taut-drawn linen reveal the swell her full skirts could no longer quite hide . . . the blessed bulge of a new, quickening life inside her.

 

“’Tis true, as you can see,” she said, her eyes filling with warmth and pleasure, “but although after four nearly-grown daughters, we have surely missed the joy of a son, my dear Marmaduke was beside himself with concern. He was troubled and fretting because of my age. So he made me promise to beg Devorgilla for a boon . . .

 

a charm or blessing to assure a safe confinement and delivery.”

 

“Oh, Caterine!” Linnet rushed forward to embrace her, placed a gentle, wondering hand on her sister’s swollen belly. “What joy, I say! And your great lumbering lout of a husband ought to have told us,” she added, her voice choked with emotion. “’Tis fair glowing with good health you are, though I understand his concern for you and the child.”

 

Stepping back, she smoothed Caterine’s hair. “Had aught been amiss, you know I would have . . . felt something.”

 

Linnet looked hard at her sister, pleased by the fine color of her skin, the luminosity of her smiling eyes, and, above all, the wonder and awe of the wee, growing life Linnet’s special gift had let her sense so strongly when she’d hugged her.

 

A healthy, strapping life—of that she was certain.

 

Mayhap even the son and heir she knew her sister and Sir Marmaduke had e’er desired but no longer dared to hope would bless them.

 

“All will be well—I am sure of it,” she added with all the joy swelling her heart.

 

“I am confident as well,” Caterine said, nodding agreement. “And Devorgilla claimed so, too. Though she did wave a rowan branch o’er my head and mutter some unintelligible blessing before giving me her reassurances. Strange, though . . . I cannot help but wonder if . . .”

 

“If . . . ?” A sudden flurry of prickly warmth on Linnet’s nape dampened her bliss, the shivery chills warning she ought hear her sister’s unspoken words.

 

As did the faint but unmistakable droning of bees.

 

A dread sound rising and falling with growing persistence and coming from the direction of the hearth fire.

 

“If . . .
what?
” Linnet coaxed again, sliding a quick glance at the hearth and its innocently glowing peats.

 

“If,”
Caterine capitulated, jabbing her needle into the embroidery cloth, “I went there armed with provender and seeking Devorgilla’s sage wisdom and counsel—or if she summoned me.”

 

“Summoned you?”

 

Catherine shrugged, flicked a speck of lint from her skirts.

 

“The cailleach is known to do so,” she said, her gaze on her stitching. “I considered the possibility because although she was pleased as always to receive supplies from us, and especially delighted at my own tender condition, she seemed more interested in impressing me to deliver her special healing ointment into the hands of Robbie’s soon-to-be bride, claiming the lass would need its curing.”

 

“So?” Linnet’s heart thudded, her nerves beginning to twitch and prickle.

 

She set aside her embroidery for good, tried her best to unobtrusively rub away the gooseflesh rising on her arms.

 

“Any worthy wise woman will have seen that the MacLeod lass is frail . . .
ailing,
” she said, not wanting to trouble Caterine with her own convictions about which lass beneath Eilean Creag’s roof would prove her stepson’s own true bride.

 

“’Twas kindhearted of the crone to send along a charmed potion for the maid,” she added, assuming her most calming tone.

 

“But that is what unsettles me,” Caterine explained, “do you not see?”

 

Linnet lifted a brow, not seeing at all, but well aware the explanation would soon bubble forth like a burn in spate.

 

Caterine stood again, moved to the opened windows where the evening chill stole up from the loch. With a small sigh, she looked out at the darkening sky.

 

“See you,” she began, “o’er the years Devorgilla has oft sent us potions or charms—she has ways of getting suchlike into the right hands. And whene’er she blessed us with such a remedy, she ne’er failed to specify who she felt might be most needful of her cure . . . and the cure’s purpose.”

 

Linnet took a deep breath, struggled to ignore how, in addition to the prickling of her nape, her stomach was now beginning to twist into knots.

 

“I have heard the crone can be a bit . . .
mischievous
about revealing the true purpose of her spells and potions.”

 

“Oh, ’tis not that.” Caterine turned away from the window, waved a dismissive hand. “She prattled on and on about the wonders of her healing ointment, even declaring it her best triumph because she’d imbued the cream with the magic of adapting a cure to suit the needs of whoe’er used it.”

 

“A cure to suit one’s needs?”

 

Caterine nodded, her beautiful face uplit by a nearby branch of softly-burning candles. “She minded me of the special bronze cook-pot she once sent to my lord husband, claiming his good-heartedness might, at times, make him a poor judge of men.”

 

“A charmed cook-pot?” Linnet blinked, her ill ease and even the drone of the dread bees momentarily besieged by her surprise. “How can a bronze cook-pot aid a man in assessing another man’s character?”

 

“I would have thought you, with your own special gift of
taibhsearachd,
would have known of such wonders?” Caterine’s face lit with teasing affection. “’Tis simple enough magic . . . perhaps not as infallible as your second sight, but effective all the same—as we have seen often enough whene’er we’ve had cause to use Devorgilla’s special cauldron.”

 

In a swish of skirts, Caterine returned to her stool by the fireside. “See you,” she said, settling herself, “the cook-pot has the virtue of yielding up to each guest the piece of meat to which his character entitles him. If my lord husband is unsure of someone’s heart, we invite them to table and then we wait . . . if the cook-pot produces a fine morsel for the guest, we know that person can be trusted—”

 

“—and if a less than savory portion is fished from the cauldron, wariness is in order?” Linnet finished for her, realizing she should have known at once for she had indeed heard of such charmed cook-pots.

 

Though, as best she could recall, such bronze cauldrons more often boasted the magic of offering up the choicest pieces according to a person’s status and not the goodness, or darkness, of one’s heart.

 

Scarce that it mattered with the feeling of fast-

 

encroaching dread beginning to swirl round her again, a darkness that lapped at the edges of her consciousness and even along the carefully-smoothed folds of her sister’s deep blue skirts.

 

“Even so, I do not see why Devorgilla’s ointment and its magical powers ought trouble you,” she managed, the words coming to her ears as if from far away, faint pulses of scarcely audible sound, lost in a renewed surge of buzzing, whirling bees.

 

“Or”—she forced herself to hold her sister’s gaze—“are you bothered because she wished you to deliver the cream to Robbie’s betrothed? You have seen the maid is not well-loved here.”

 

“Nay, ’twas not the delivery of the ointment that troubled me, but the way Devorgilla
spoke
of Robbie’s intended,” Caterine explained, her voice little more than an echo.

 

Linnet touched her brow, tried to concentrate past the droning sound pressing ever closer.

 

“I do not understand,” she said, repressing a near overwhelming urge to glance at the hearth fire, the usual source of her torments.

 

“Ach, I am making a muddle of it,” Catherine said, fluffing her skirts, the dark blue folds reminding Linnet of the deep blueness of the hills, an endless rolling expanse of them rising steeply from the sea.

 

But her sister was still speaking. “’Twas the crone’s references to Robbie’s bride as being ‘of a great beauty’ that bothers me,” she said, her voice so distant now, the words sounded more like the low murmur of ceaseless, lapping waves.

 

“
She is of a great beauty,
she’d exclaim, then give me that sly-eyed look of hers,” Caterine went on, shifting on her stool. “I’d dismissed the words as an old woman’s fancy until I arrived here and caught my first glimpse of the maid.”

 

“The maid?”

 

“The lady Euphemia.” Caterine’s voice came surprisingly clear, breaking with startling ease through the countless peaks rising dark against the deep blue of the sea. “Mischievous or nay, even at her most charitable, Devorgilla is too all-seeing to mistake one such as Euphemia MacLeod for a
great beauty.