“Come forward out of the shadows,” he said, with the cultured arrogance of one used to obedience. At least he did her the service to stand. “Let me see you.”
A hand on her shoulder stopped her.
Ruark stood behind her, his eyes hard on her father. Dressed as he was in leather breeches, white shirt beneath a leather jack clasped shut with a heavy buckle, Ruark looked far more disreputable than her father, and infinitely more dangerous in his boots and spurs and a sword belt fastened at his waist. She almost leaned against him, even dared to touch the fold of his sleeve before she stiffened herself to stand alone.
Rose had an image of the two men facing each other in much the same way across the bows of their ships. Whatever this meeting was today, it was personal between them.
“You will abide by our agreement, Hereford,” Ruark said. “You have seen her as we agreed. Do you confirm her identity?”
Her father stepped around the table only to be stopped as a guard dropped the end of a pike in his path.
He laughed though his eyes bristled with umbrage. “Surely I am no threat, Roxburghe.” Obviously, for the benefit of those standing around them, he spread his arms. “I am unarmed. As are my men.”
“Aye.” Ruark’s smile was all teeth. “But not the three hundred you have awaiting your return outside the walls of this abbey. Or did you think you need such a force against forty men?”
The comment stirred the men to laughter.
“For it will take a siege to retrieve what is left of you should you break your word, Hereford. Answer my question.”
Her father’s gray eyes lingered on her and, for a moment, something inside her responded. Then his gaze shuttered as his attention moved to the hand resting possessively on her upper arm then to the man standing behind her. “You are more priceless than you know, Roselyn.”
“Then you do not deny her?” Ruark asked impatiently.
“Nay, I do not.”
Voices rose to a murmur around her.
Until this moment, she didn’t know how much those simple words would affect her. No one had ever publicly acknowledged her existence.
She felt shaky, for as a part of her life had been returned to her, another part was now gone forever.
“Am I allowed to approach my daughter?” Hereford demanded. “Or will your man run me through?”
Ruark looked down at her, a question in his eyes. An infinitesimal nod signaled the guard to allow Hereford to pass.
Her father walked to where she stood but not so close that he could touch her or she him. Only slightly taller than she was, he was still a big man, remarkably fit for a man of fifty years. Remarkably ruthless, and she dared not forget it. She was not a fool to think he had ever cared anything about her. He wanted her ancestral home. He wanted her Kirkland Park. She had accepted long ago that it would be the price of her freedom. And now he would abide by his agreement and grant it.
“Do you remember your mother?” he quietly asked.
“Nay, I do not.”
“You are more beautiful even than she was,” he said. “Beauty is a curse to women and a bane to men. Is it not, Roxburghe?” There was something sinister in his tone as he voiced the query. “Your mother wasalsoa whore, Roselyn,” Hereford said. “It appears her daughter is of the same ilk.”
Ruark had gone stiff behind her. “Apologize, Hereford.”
“Or you will do what? Defend the honor of my Sassenach daughter?” He laughed, his eyes like daggers as they pierced Rose through the heart. “Do you want to know the last words your mother ever said to me as I went off to serve my king and my country? She hoped God would have the foresight to send me to the bottom of the sea. I see a certain irony in the fact that it was she who was ultimately sent to die in the cold, black depths of hell. Irony and justice.”
He looked past her. “And you, Tucker ... is this what you think I promised you when I let you keep her? A happy ending?”
Friar Tucker stood in the doorway, his hands folded in front of him. “Tucker!Loverto my beloved wife. Man of God. The man who swore on his life to the world that my daughter had boarded that ship with my wife. Does she know your own part played in this melodrama?”
Friar Tucker did not defend himself. Rose met Tucker’s gaze in confused accusation.
Her mother’s lover?His own part?
“Enough!” Ruark said, handing Rose back to Colum, who stood behind them, and she stumbled on the uneven stone floor. “Our agreement was that you would see her, and then let her go. You do not need her to get what you want. Tucker has agreed to our terms. This interview is over.”
“This interview has only just begun,” Hereford shoutedabove the growing din. “And what I have to say is best done in public for all to hear so there will be no mistaking what passed this day.”
