She’d been so young—tooyoung. Only eighteen. If she could go back and do it all over again with the perspective of age...
She sighed. Nay, it was too late to change the past. But not the future. Her thoughts returned to the present where they must stay, and she focused, as she always did, on the best thing to come out of that painful time. The thing that had pulled her out of the darkness and forced her to live again. Her five-year-old son, Eachann—or as they called him in England, Hector.
Eachann had a small chamber adjoining hers in the manor house that had been their home in England for the past four years, since her father had been forced to flee Scotland. But she and her son would be leaving Temple-Couton for good this morning. After the wedding ceremony, they would remove to Barnard Castle with her betrothed—herhusband, she corrected, trying to ignore the simultaneous drop in her stomach and spike in her pulse (two things that definitely shouldn’t happen simultaneously!).
Instead, she forced a smile on her face and gazed fondly at her son, who was sitting on his bed, his spindly legs dangling over the side and his blond head bent forward.
The soft silky curls were already darkening as the white blond of toddlerhood gave way to the darker blond of youth.Like his father’s. He was like his father in so many ways, looking at him should cause her pain. But it didn’t. It only brought her joy. In Eachann she had a piece of her husband that death could not claim. Her son was hers completely, in a way that her husband never had been.
She smiled, her heart swelling as it always did when she looked at him. “Do you have everything?”
He looked up. Sharp blue eyes met hers, startling again in their similarity to the man who’d given him his blood if nothing else. Eachann nodded somberly. He was like his father in that regard as well, serious and contemplative. “I think so.”
Stepping around the two large wooden trunks, Margaret glanced around the room to make sure. Just below his small booted heel, she spied the corner of a dark plank of wood.
Following the direction of her gaze, Eachann attempted to inconspicuously kick it farther under the bed.
Frowning, Margaret sat on the bed beside him. He wouldn’t look at her. But she didn’t need to see his face to know he was upset.
“Is there a reason you don’t want to take your chessboard? I thought it was your favorite game?”
His cheeks flushed. “Grandfather said I’m too old to play with poppets. I need to practice my swords or I’m gonna end up a traitorous baserd like my father.” The little boy’s mouth drew in a hard, merciless line, the expression a chilling resemblance to her father. Why is it that she’d never noticed the negative aspects of her father until they appeared in her son? “I’m no traitor! I’ll see that bloody usurper off the throne, and Good King John restored to his crown, if it’s the last thing I do.” Another chill ran through her. St. Columba’s bones, he sounded exactly like her father, too. His head tilted toward hers. “But what’s a baserd?”
“Nothing you could ever be, my love,” she said, hugging the boy tightly to her. This was one word that she wasn’t going to worry about correcting.
If she needed proof of why she was doing the right thing, she had it. She loved her father, but she would not have her son warped by his disappointments. She would not see Eachann turned into a bitter, angry old man who thought the world had turned against him. Who reveled in being the last “true” patriot for the Balliol claim to the throne, and the only significant Scottish nobleman who still had not bowed to the “usurper” Robert the Bruce.
Margaret understood her father’s anger—and perhaps even commiserated with him about the source—but that did not mean she wanted her son turned into a miniature version of him. Despite Eachann’s “traitorous bastard” of a father, Dugald MacDowell loved his only grandchild. Indeed, it was her father’s mention of having Eachann fostered with Tristan MacCan—hisan gille-coisehenchman—so the lad could be close to him that gave Margaret the push to accept Sir John Conyers’s proposal.
When the time came next year for her son to leave her care—God give her strength to face that day!—Sir John would see to his placement and not her father. Being a squire to an English knight was vastly preferable to being fostered by a man so completely under her father’s influence, even one who was a childhood friend. Her son’s safety came above everything else.
“Chess pieces are not poppets, my love.” She pulled out the board etched with grid lines and the lovingly carved and painted wooden pieces. Some of the paint had begun to flake off on the edges, and the carefully painted faces had faded with use. She’d taught Eachann to play when he was three. He played against himself mostly, as despite prodigious efforts otherwise, she’d never had the patience for it. But he did. Her son was brilliant, and she was fiercely proud of him. “It’s the game of kings,” she said with a bittersweet smile. “Your father played.”
That surprised him. She rarely mentioned his father, for various reasons, including that the memories pained her and mention of him drew her family’s ire. They all tried to pretend that the “traitorous bastard” never existed around Eachann, but if the eager look on the boy’s face was any indication, perhaps they had been wrong in that.
“He did?” Eachann asked.
She nodded. “It was he who taught me to play. Your grandfather never learned, which is why he...” She thought of how to put it. “Which is why he doesn’t understand how useful it can be to a warrior.”
He looked at her as if she were crazed. “How?”
She grinned. “Well, you could throw the board like a discus, or use the pieces in a slingshot.”
He rolled his eyes. She couldn’t get anything past him, even though he was only five. He always knew when she was teasing. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. It wouldn’t make a good weapon.”
His expression was so reminiscent of his father’s she had to laugh so she didn’t cry. If anyone needed proof that mannerisms were inherited, Eachann was it. “All right, you have me. I was teasing. Did you read the rest of the folio Father Christopher found for you?”
They’d been reading it together, but he’d grown impatient waiting for her. Like with chess, her son had quickly outpaced her hard-wrought reading skills.
He nodded.
She continued. “King Leonidas was a great swordsman, but that’s not what made him a great leader, and what held off so many Persians at Thermopylae. It was his mind. He planned and strategized, using the terrain to his advantage.”
A broad smile lit up Eachann’s small face. “Just like you plan and strategize in chess.”
Margaret nodded. “That was what your father did so exceptionally. He was one of the smartest men I ever knew. In the same way that you can look at the chessboard and ‘see’ what to do, he could look at an army on the battleground and see what to do. He could defeat the enemy before he even picked up a sword.”
Though Eachann’s father had favored a battle-axe like his illustrious grandfather for whom he’d been named: Gillean-na-Tuardhe, “Gill Eoin (the servant of Saint John) of the Battle-axe.” He’d been good with it, too. But she didn’t want to mention that. In spite of her son’s auspicious name, harkening to one of the greatest warriors of ancient times, Hector of Troy, Eachann was small and had yet to show any skill—or love—of weaponry. Her father had begun to notice, which was another reason she had to get her son away. She wouldn’t mind if Eachann never picked up a weapon and buried himself in books for the rest of his life. But Dugald MacDowell would not see his grandson as anything but a fierce warrior. Another MacDowell to devote his life to a war that would never end.
