Ruark stared down at his uncle from his place on the stairs, a man he had both loved and hated for most of his life. But Ruark had come to believe of late that it was toosimple a thing to throw blame at another for one’s ails. Though most would claim the skirmishes started with the English, all of them seemed to forget that it was a bout of cattle raiding that got Jamie caught in the first place.
“A new letter of terms will be drawn up for Jamie’s release. You will leave tomorrow to dispatch the terms to Hereford.”
Ruark wasn’t asking, a fact his uncle recognized and fully appreciated. “I would have gone without your telling me, Ruark. I do not take my responsibility lightly either,” Duncan said. “I know that boy is there because of me. Do ye think I would no’ trade places with him if I could? With any of those two lads with him? Do ye no’ think I blame myself every bluidy day?”
Some of Ruark’s anger dissipated and his mind seemed to momentarily clear. Jamie’s life needed to be the most important thing between them for now.
Then at the sound of merrymaking in the dining hall down the long corridor, Duncan’s mouth tightened, as his eyes revealed a less subtle sentiment. “There’s family and friends in the dining hall willin’ to give their lives for ye, Ruark,” he said. “Do no’ be forgettin’ that.”
Duncan left the entry hall, and watching his uncle go, Ruark swore beneath his breath.
“Duncan means well,” Julia said on the landing above him. “He loves this family, and has practically been a father to Jamie, as he was to you. You of all people know the kind of man your father was.”
Ruark did not intend to discuss Duncan or his father with anyone. What was between him and his uncle would remain that way.
She reached out her hand to his arm as he ascended the stairs and passed, turning him. “You have risked much bringing Hereford’s daughter here ...”
“Did you think I would do less because the boy is your son, Julia?”
She shook her head. Her wet eyes took in the gallery at the top of the stairs, where nine generations of Roxburghe earls stared down at her from their various places of honor up and down the long antechamber. His father’s portrait stood at the other end. With an effort, she finally straightened, her gaze darting to the shadows where Duncan had disappeared.
“He has no’ been the same since your father died. Duncan blamed Hereford from the beginning. Duncan was not taking the Kerrs across the Borders for a bit of cattle lifting when Jamie was captured. He was taking them to burn Kirkland Park to the ground. They ran into dragoons.”
She wrapped her hand around Ruark’s forearm. “Make no mistake, Ruark. Ye may hold the Roxburghe title, but ’tis Duncan’s fealty that makes you laird. Or you would no’ be so.”
Ruark smiled, his eyes softening briefly, for she had meant the warning sincerely. “I know, Julia.” Noise from the dining hall drew her up. “Now go to your chambers,” he said. “Downstairs is no place for a woman right now.”
She nodded. She turned in a swish of silk and expensive French perfume, and he found himself thinking of lilacs and springtime instead.
Turning away to go to his own chambers to wash and change, he sought to unravel emotions that were becoming increasingly complicated in his mind.
Julia had been only partially right when she said that Ruark might hold the Roxburghe title but ’twas Duncan’s fealty to him that made him laird.
Except time and the whims of fortune had changed his life. He was not the man he had once been when shehad asked his help to save her from a marriage to his father. And Ruark made it a rule never to play another’s game again.
As his thoughts turned to Rose, ensconced not so far from his own chambers in the east wing, he knew only that he had already decided the fate of Hereford’s beautiful daughter.
Chapter 8
Descending the path to the stable, Ruark still wore a leather jack and the red-and-hunter-green plaid, border-raiding attire, reminiscent of a long night of drinking with his men. The rain had dissipated just after dawn, but under the plum trees, the ground was still damp. Ahead of him, a half dozen stone buildings appeared out of the early-morning mist.
The stable block and distant carriage house was Angus’s dominion here at Stonehaven, a man in whose capable hands every Roxburgh earl of the last four decades had entrusted the care and breeding of his horses. Ruark was no different.
As he entered the stable, all around him the air was redolent of sweet hay, saddle soap, and linseed oil, and the ever-present pungency of manure that one found with a careless step. The grooms and younger stable lads mucking the stalls looked up as he strode past them, his thick boot heels echoing on the flagstone floor. He carried a note in his pocket that Colum had delivered to him shortly after Duncan left this morning. Ruark’s ally, friend, and second-in-command, Colum was one of the few men Ruark trusted with his life.
Colum had returned during the night. He had a room at the house but rarely used it.
Nor, being British, did he take part in ceremonial or clan activities, preferring to bide his time in more favorable pursuits. Thus, Ruark found him asleep on a pile of straw spooned with a naked woman. They lay tangled in woolen blankets. The light picked out their shoulders and the curve of the woman’s breast.
No matter the place or the circumstance, Colum managed to find a woman. But even with his angel’s face and crown of golden curls, he looked nothing like the gently born solicitor he was when Ruark rescued him from a press-gang ten years ago near a dockside chophouse in London.
Ruark made no attempt at stealth as he knelt next to the two sleeping forms. Colum slept with a ten-inch dirk beneath his head, and as many a man had discovered, he took exception to being abruptly awakened. But then so did Ruark.
“Bloody hell, Ruark,” Colum mumbled without opening his eyes. “You couldn’t allow me an hour’s respite?”
Ruark rubbed the soft fur of an orange tabby that had run up to him as he crouched in the straw. “I need you to take Friar Tucker a letter.”
Colum disengaged himself from the sleeping maid and focused a jaundiced eye on Ruark’s face. “Did we not just return from the abbey?” he kept his voice low. “Did I not just spend two days searching the rocks beneath a waterfall for your blood-spattered remains? Did I not just spend those same two days trying to evade a platoon a’ dragoons chasing the thief who stole their captain’s horse?”
