“I most certainly will tell Sir Udolf, Bab. Do you think I want to endanger my bairn, having to fend off his unwanted advances?” Alix pushed the tray away. “And you say naught to any until I have.”
Bab nodded her grizzled head. “Aye, lady, you may be certain I will say nothing, for I do not wish to be the victim of Sir Udolf’s disappointment and outrage when he learns your secret. I still ache two years after the fact from the beating he gave me when you ran away,” the older woman said.
“He should not have punished you at all,” Alix said angrily. “Everyone had been told I was praying and fasting and had no wish to be disturbed. You were simply obeying the orders that he himself had approved.”
Bab picked up the tray. “I’ll leave you, then, but a word of warning, lady. Bar your door this night against any surprise incursions.” Then she left the chamber.
Taking her advice, Alix went and turned the key in the lock of her door. She then took the heavy wooden rod that was used to barricade the door to ensure her privacy, and lifting it not without some difficulty, Alix set it in its place. The master of Wulfborn would not be disturbing her this night. But where was Colm? Should he not have come to retrieve her by now? But as he had not, Alix lay down on the bed to rest. She would just have to wait. Today was over, but Colm would come tomorrow, she was certain.
“It isn’t her,” the Laird of Dunglais said, looking down at the ravaged body of the almost naked woman who had been found out on the moor and brought back to the hall by the men who had made the gruesome discovery. He looked down with pity on the bruised and battered body. The woman had been very ill used, raped and beaten. Her face was a swollen mass of bloody pulp. It wasn’t Alix.It couldn’t be!
“Can you be sure, my lord?” one of his men asked nervously.
“It is not my mam,” Fiona Scott said with great certainty as she came around her father’s tall frame and peered down at the body curiously.
“Fiona! What are you doing here? Fenella, take her away,” the laird cried, disturbed that his almost-eight-year-old daughter should have seen such a terrible sight.
“Da, it is not Alix,” Fiona insisted. “Alix was wearing breeks. Those shreds of clothing still left on that poor lass are not from her breeks. And look closely at her hands, Da. The nails are cracked, broken, and dirty. And they are large hands. Alix has dainty hands, and her nails are never broken nor her cuticles cracked. And this lass has no belly. My mam’s belly was beginning to grow round with my brother.”
“The lass is right,” Fenella said quietly, quite startled by the child’s sharp perception as she too stared down at the body. The woman was too big-boned to be Dunglais’s lady. “This isn’t your wife, my lord.”
“The Englishman is clever in attempting to make me believe it is. Yet he was careless in his choice of henchmen to carry out his nefarious plot,” Malcolm Scott noted. “They did not bother to consider the differences between my wife and the victim they chose to masquerade as her. Poor woman. Can anyone identify her?”
“It may be Vika from over the hill,” Beinn said thoughtfully. “She’s a local whore, my lord.” He looked the body over very carefully and then nodded. “Aye, that’s just who it is, my lord. See that round pinkish brown mole there on the side of her ankle? Vika had just such a mole.”
Another man-at-arms sidled forward and peered down. “Aye, ’tis Vika, poor lass. She were a good whore, and never stole from a man when he slept,” he remarked.
“Fenella, find some respectable garments for the woman, and we’ll bury her decently. Someone go and fetch the priest. Father Donald can say a word over her. Did she have any bairns?” the laird wanted to know.
“Two,” Beinn answered him. “Lads both. Maybe three and five.”
“Is their sire or sires known?” the laird asked.
“If Vika knew, she never said, my lord,” Beinn told him.
“Find those lads,” the laird instructed, “and bring them to the keep. In an odd sense their mam died for my wife. I’ll see her lads aren’t left to starve or be mistreated.”
It had been a day now since Alix had been kidnapped, but with the discovery of the dead whore Malcolm Scott was once more delayed from leaving Dunglais to seek out his wife at Wulfborn and bring her home. The Englishman had to be mad to concoct such a wicked scheme. And what in the name of all that was holy had convinced him he could get away with it? While Malcolm knew Alix was safe, he was still concerned for his lambkin and the bairn she carried. An almost-two-day ride across the hills and over the border could not have been easy. If anything had happened to either his wife or his son the Englishman would regret his folly with his last dying breath, which the Laird of Dunglais promised himself would be a long, painful time coming. And not a stone of his house or village would be left standing.
Malcolm Scott decided he needed more men to ride with him. He sent to his uncle at Drumcairn, requesting that he come with all haste, bringing his clansmen with him. Then, despite his impatience, he waited another day, for to meet up with his uncle in the roadless borders would be more difficult. Early the next day Robert Ferguson arrived at Dunglais with twenty of his clansmen.
“What has happened, Nephew?” he asked as he dismounted his horse.
“Come into the hall,” the laird invited him, “and the rest of you. You’ll eat and then we ride for England!” He led the way, his uncle hurrying to keep up with him. Once at the high board Malcolm Scott explained the situation to his uncle. “I don’t know how he learned she was here, but he did. Now I must go and retrieve my wife. She is with child, Uncle. She carries my son.”
“Or a daughter,” Robert Ferguson said.
“Lad or lass, I care not,” Malcolm Scott said. “I want my lambkin back, and my bairn safe. The Englishman’s a fool to believe I won’t come for her.”
Robert Ferguson speared himself a slice of ham with his dirk and began to eat it. “How far?” he wanted to know.
“I only know the direction in which they went and the area where this Wulfborn Hall is supposed to be located. I sent scouts out yesterday to find exactly where this Englishman makes his home, but Alix always said it was very isolated, and she never met any neighboring families. But I also know it cannot be more than a day and a half’s ride over the border from Dunglais.”
The Ferguson of Drumcairn chewed his breakfast with thoughtful care. “What exactly do you intend doing when we reach this Wulfborn Hall, Nephew?”
“I shall demand my wife be returned to me immediately!” the laird told him.
“And if this English lordling refuses?” was the question.
