“It has been a very interesting year, dear girl,” Thomas Bolton declared. “I am most devastated to have failed you in your search for a husband.”
“I am not an easy girl, Uncle. Do not all say it of me? I have already chosen my own mate, and despite your most delicate discretion you are well aware of it,” Elizabeth said with a smile. She patted his velvet-clad arm.
“He will return to you,” Lord Cambridge said encouragingly.
“If he leaves me, Uncle, he need not return,” Elizabeth replied quietly.
“Do not be foolish, niece,” Lord Cambridge warned her. “He must work out his loyalties in his own time, and if you do not force the issue he will. And he will return, for even a fool can see he loves you.” Thomas Bolton kissed her on both cheeks. “Now bid my good Will farewell, dear girl.”
“I will miss you, William Smythe,” Elizabeth said. “Go with God, and take care of my uncle as you have done so well these past nine years.” She kissed his cheek.
Lord Cambridge’s secretary and companion bowed low. “Listen to him, Mistress Elizabeth. We but seek your happiness.”
“Come along, Will!” Lord Cambridge, now mounted, called. “I am eager to return home! Good-bye, dear girl!”
Elizabeth watched the two men as they rode off from the house surrounded by their men-at-arms. She loved Thomas Bolton and would miss his amusing presence in the hall. And Edmund and Maybel had departed yesterday for their own cottage. Still weak and not fully recovered, Edmund had ridden in a cart with his wife. Maybel had wept, of course, as if she would never see Elizabeth or the house again.
“You but go down the path a piece,” Elizabeth said, laughing.
“I know! I know!” Maybel sobbed, “but I have spent most of my life in this house looking after the lady of Friarsgate. And Edmund has stewarded the estate since he was barely out of boyhood.”
“So it is time then for you to go home, and look after each other, and enjoy the days remaining to you,” Elizabeth said. But she knew her house would be very lonely without Maybel and Edmund. She had written her mother, and Rosamund had fully approved Elizabeth’s decision, not that she had needed Rosamund’s permission. She was the lady of Friarsgate, and had been for eight years.
Two days ago it had not been so, but today there was a distinct nip in the air. It was autumn. October. And before they knew it winter would be upon them. And she would spend the long nights wrapped in her handfast husband’s arms making sweet love. She sought Baen now, having last seen him in the hall bidding her uncle good-bye. Returning to the hall she asked Albert, “Where is Master Baen?”
“Gone to the stables, lady,” was the answer.
Elizabeth turned and hurried from the hall to the stables. He was saddling his horse. “Good!” she said. “We must check the outlying meadows today and be certain their shelters are ready for winter, stocked, and secure. But I think we should keep the flocks closer this year. It is just an instinct.”
“I am leaving, Elizabeth,” he said quietly. He tightened the girth about his horse.
“When?” Surely she had not heard him aright. He was not going to leave her.
“Now. Today. It is better I go before the weather sets in. Already they will have seen snow on the heights of the bens in the Highlands,” he told her. He fastened the tabs of his saddlebags. “With your uncle gone it is a good time for me to leave as well.”
She would not beg, Elizabeth thought, her heart hardening. “Why not remain until St. Crispin’s?” she asked him. “We would give you a fine sendoff then.”
He shook his head, but then, stepping forward, he put his arms tightly about her. “I do not want to go,” he said, “but you know that I must.”
Her heart cracked, and then she did what she had sworn to herself she would not do if the horrible day ever came: Elizabeth Meredith began to cry. “No! You do not have to go, Baen. You do not! You are my husband. How can your loyalty to your father be greater than your loyalty to me? I am your wife!”
“We handfasted to give any child we made a name,” he said.
“Do you truly believe that was the only reason, Baen?” she cried. “You love me!”
“Aye, I do love you, and nay, ’twas not the only reason I handfasted with you, my hinny love. I did it because more than anything in the world, I wanted you for my wife.”
“You would put your loyalty to a man who didn’t even know you existed for the first twelve years of your life above me?” she sobbed bitterly.
“A man who for the last twenty years has sheltered me, and treated me as if I had been born on the proper side of the blanket and not the wrong,” he reminded her. “Aye! My father is my first loyalty, and I have made no secret of it, Elizabeth. You have known from the first that once I had learned those things I needed to know to set up a cottage industry at Grayhaven that I would go. I never deceived you. If I deceived anyone it was myself. In loving you, in handfasting with you, Elizabeth, I dreamed briefly what it could be like to have a wife and a purpose of my own. I thank you for it.”
His words were kind, yet cruel. Elizabeth struggled to regain her composure. For a moment she rested in his arms, her cheek against his doublet, the steady sound of his heart in her ear. Then, swallowing hard, she stiffened her spine and pulled away from him, looking up into his handsome face. “Do not go,” she said softly. It was a plea, yet it was not a plea.
“I must,” he replied. Then his hand reached out and he cupped her face. “In a few months you will have forgotten me, sweetheart. And in a year you will be free to wed a proper man,” Baen said in a clumsy attempt to comfort her.
Elizabeth shook her head at him. “You are a fool, Baen MacColl, if you really think that I could forget you. And a bigger fool to believe I would wed another. Ever!”
“Elizabeth—”
