word from the earl my husband?’ she prompted.
He winced as though she had struck him. ‘My lady, we were riding towards Brechin. It was growing dark, and the men were tired. The earl wanted to reach the burgh before dusk. My lady, we were ambushed.’ His voice was scarcely audible as he continued with a rush. ‘There were so many of them, hiding by the roadside. We stood no chance, my lady! We shouted at them! There must have been a mistake.’ He was appealing to her now. ‘They were lying in wait for someone else. It was twilight and hard to see. We shouted, my lady! They were the earl’s kinsmen, my lady! They wore the livery of the Abernethys. We fought them off as best we could, my lady, but two of our comrades were killed and … and …’
Joanna was no longer listening. The words washed over her with the icy rush of a mountain waterfall. Everything inside her had gone cold and the room was silent.
Isobel held her breath. It was as if the whole world had stopped breathing with her. Then she heard the man again. He rushed on, talking desperately into the silence. She barely understood his words, but she knew what they meant. Her father was dead. And she was glad.
‘… He did not stand a chance … they did not give him a chance to fight fair! He was murdered … murdered by his own kin.’ The man was blubbering now, like a child. His companion remained, as though stunned, rooted to the spot by the door.
Suddenly Joanna turned on the kneeling man, her eyes blazing, half in tears, half in anger.
‘And how, sir, does it happen that you are still alive? Did you flee from aiding my lord to save your own skin?’ She almost spat the words at him.
The man looked up with indignation. ‘The moment he was dead they fled, my lady. We could not follow in the darkness. And we could not leave … we could not leave him lying there.’
She stood looking down on him in silence.
‘The body is being conveyed to the abbey of Coupar Angus, my lady countess.’ The man by the door spoke at last. ‘We shall be pleased to help escort you there at daybreak.’
‘Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine.’
The mournful voices echoed back and forth, high in the shadowy vaults of stone in the abbey chapel across the garth. To Isobel in the guest house, it was the sound of doom. At her mother’s side she had ridden behind Mairi to the abbey the day before and despite Mairi’s protests, she had been made to accompany her mother to look at the Earl of Fife’s body.
It lay on a bier in the shadowy nave, covered by the earl’s own banner, surrounded by tall candles. Joanna walked slowly towards it, holding Isobel’s hand tightly in her own. The rest of the church was dark and empty. The praying monks, their heads covered by their cowls, withdrew silently to the shadows as the widow approached.
‘I want to see him.’ Her whispered command sounded harsh in the silence.
‘It would be better not, my lady.’ The knight at her side put out a hand as if to restrain her.
‘I want to see him,’ she repeated stubbornly. She stepped towards the bier. Isobel hung back, suddenly afraid, but her mother pulled her forward.
Duncan’s face, smoothed of its petulance by death, looked young and handsome in the steady candlelight; to Isobel, so small beside her mother, it looked already like stone. She wondered for a moment why her father lay so still in this cold, dark church; then she remembered. He was dead. She had seen death before, often, in her short life, but never so close; never so immediate. She stared curiously, resisting the temptation to reach out to touch him.
Joanna moved forward suddenly and caught the silken banner, with its rippling rampant lion, pulling it completely from the body. She gave a strangled gasp. The earl’s clothes were soaked in blood, the encrusted hands, crossed so reverently on his breast, mutilated almost beyond recognition.
With a shrill scream Isobel tore her hand free of her mother’s and ran blindly into the darkness of the abbey. No one saw her go, for Joanna, with a moan, had fallen to her knees, clutching in agony at her stomach as the first labour pain tore through her body.
Mairi found Isobel in the end: the child was huddled in the choir stalls, her hands over her ears. At least in the darkness after her mother had been carried outside, it had been quiet but she had been too frightened to follow, conscious of the silent figure, once more hastily covered by its silken pall, lying so still in the candlelight.
Mairi took her back to the guest house and left her, with firm instructions not to move, with one of Joanna’s ladies. She herself was needed by the countess.
Joanna’s moans had continued all night. The next morning, as the monks began to sing their requiem, the first of the woman’s screams echoed round the small square building.
Isobel cowered back, her small face white, her eyes enormous. The woman with her glanced at the child. ‘Outside, my lady. Go outside and play.’ She ushered her towards the door. ‘Go on, quickly. I must go to your mother.’
But Isobel hadn’t gone. Cautiously she had followed, creeping towards the door of the small guest chamber where Joanna had been lodged, and there, unnoticed by the panicking, frantic women, she saw and heard it all. There were no midwives to take charge. Joanna, still a month from the expected date of her confinement, had not thought to bring any. Her escort had consisted only of armed men, three of her ladies – all unmarried – and three servants, only one of whom had had a child of her own. This woman, thrust suddenly, trembling and terrified, into the role of midwife, could think only of what would happen to her if the countess should die. Mairi was the only one in the end to keep her head. Calm and reassuring she had bathed Joanna’s face and held her hands as the countess lay propped up in the high bed, cursing the mournful chanting which could be heard so clearly from the open door of the chapel.
In numb, terrified silence, Isobel stared into the room. She saw and smelt the blood; only this blood wasn’t black and clotted like that which had stiffened on her father’s embroidered tunic. It was red and alive. It soaked the sheets and covered the women’s arms, and it seemed to pour from her mother’s body endlessly as again and again Joanna screamed.
And then the baby came. Her brother. Duncan. Her father’s heir. The new Earl of Fife. A tiny, blood-stained, ugly doll, the cord still hanging from his belly as someone held him up. He was mewling like a puppy. And they were pleased. Even her mother, exhausted as she was, was smiling now through her tears, holding out her arms for the boy.
Isobel turned away. Tiptoeing towards the room where she had slept some of the night, she crawled under the covers of one of the beds and began to cry.
It was Mairi who had told her that she need never have a baby of her own; Mairi who had promised there were ways for women to stop it happening and that if need be she would show her how; Mairi – who now said it was God’s will – who had dragged the child Isobel back almost from the edge of madness that September day.
Isobel looked at her now reproachfully and wondered if she remembered those days too. She caught Mairi’s eye and held it, and knew that she did. It was Mairi who, shamefaced, turned away.
‘May I ask what has happened to our dinner?’
Paul’s voice cut through the silence like a knife.
Clare stared at him blankly, then horrified, she rose to her feet. The candles in the candelabra had burned down more than an inch; the room was full of the smell of cooking.
