“I had just bathed,” she responded.
“My son tells me we are to marry,” he told her.
“We were,” she said.
“You do not wish to marry me now, madame?” His look was curious.
“How can I marry a man who does not remember who I am?” Rosamund asked him. “If your memory does not revive itself, my lord, there will be no marriage.”
“You do not wish to be a countess?” he asked.
Rosamund laughed almost bitterly. “I was not marrying you to become a countess, my lord. And before you ask it, I was not marrying you for wealth. I have wealth of my own. Nor were you wedding me for my wealth.”
“Then why were we marrying? I have a grown heir and two grandsons. I need no other bairns,” he said.
“You cannot have any more bairns, my lord. A fever burned your seed lifeless many years ago.” So there were other things he did not recall of his past. “We were wedding because we loved each other,” she told him.
“I had fallen in love at my age?” he laughed, but then he saw the stricken look upon her lovely face, and he said, “Forgive me, madame. It seems so odd to me that a man of my years should fall in love with so beautiful a young woman. And you returned my love?”
“I did. We spent last winter together, and you came back with me to Friarsgate in early summer. It was there we decided to wed. We would spend the spring and summer and early autumn there. In late autumn and winter we would live at Glenkirk,” she explained. “You believed that Adam had done so fine a job managing your lands in your absence that you might trust him completely now.”
“Though you say it is so, and I believe you, I can recall none of it,” he said to her.
“And you do not remember going to San Lorenzo last winter for the king?” she said.
“Nay, I do not,” he replied. “I would never have gone back to San Lorenzo. ’Twas there that my darling daughter, Janet, was taken from me. Nay. I would not go to San Lorenzo.”
“And yet you did because the king needed your help, and you are his loyal servant,” Rosamund said. “We spent a wonderful winter and early spring there. Our servants, Dermid and Annie, wed there with our blessing.”
“Dermid More is married?” He was genuinely surprised. Then he asked her, “What did Jamie Stewart want of me that he sent me back to San Lorenzo?”
“My king was harassing your king into joining what is called the Holy League,” Rosamund began. “Since the purpose of this alliance is against the French, your king would not join. He sent you to San Lorenzo in hopes you might weaken the alliance once you had spoken with the representatives of Venice and the Holy Roman Empire.”
“Did I succeed?” the earl asked.
“Nay. But while King James suspected you would not, he felt he had to try. We stopped in Paris on our way home to reassure King Louis of Scotland’s fidelity,” Rosamund finished. “You recall none of this?”
He shook his head. “Nothing, madame. I cannot believe I went back there.”
“You were reluctant,” she told him, “but we did go. And we were happy together in San Lorenzo.”
There was a long, awkward silence, and then he said, “I am sorry, madame, that my memory seems to have fled me.”
“What is the last thing you recall, my lord?” she questioned him.
Again he shook his head. “I was, I think, at Glenkirk,” he told her. Then he asked, “What year is this, madame?”
“It is April in the year of our Lord, fifteen hundred and thirteen, my lord,” Rosamund told him. “And we are in Edinburgh.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “Fifteen hundred and thirteen,” he repeated. “I thought it was the year fifteen hundred and eleven, madame. I seem to have lost two years of my life. But I believe I remember most of the rest of it.”
“I am glad for that, my lord,” Rosamund said softly. She blinked back the tears she felt pricking at her eyelids. Weeping would change nothing.
“When,” he asked her, “do you think I shall be well enough to return to Glenkirk?”
“I believe we must ask Master Achmet,” Rosamund responded.
“I do not like these dark-skinned Moors,” he noted. “A dark-skinned slave betrayed my daughter.”
