The Heather Moon (53 page)

"Will Scott," Malise said. "I had no hand in your father's death. I want you to understand that. I confined you, as a lad, because 'twas my appointed task to do that. But I didna hang your father myself. You saved my life this night, and our queen. I owe you the truth, and I will tell you the tale of that day, when we have time to talk together."

William stared at him, numb, exhausted. All he could do was nod. Malise got to his feet, but did not take the hand William offered. He stepped into the shallow part of the bog and made his own way back without a word, as William did for himself.

Ahead, near the two black horses, William saw Tamsin. She waited for him with the infant queen wrapped in a gypsy horse blanket, safe in her arms. William trudged the last few steps toward them. He reached out.

She ran to him with a faint cry of relief. He scooped her, and the babe, into the circle of his arms, profoundly glad to feel Tamsin's slender warmth against him, and content to hear the queen of Scotland squalling indignantly at his ear. Tamsin was laughing and crying all at once, and he smiled against her damp, peat-scented hair.

He laughed again, as she did, wordlessly, breathlessly. While the baby sucked at her dirty little fist, he kissed them both, slimy and sweet and tearful under his lips.

Tamsin looked up at him, and he tipped her chin up with a finger, grazing his fingers along her besmirched cheek. He touched his lips to hers again. She was warm and gentle under his mouth, and she was all he would ever need in his life.

He looked up and saw Perris coming toward them. He clapped William on the back, and then bowed to Tamsin.

"My lady," he said. "Lady of Rookhope. We all owe you an enormous debt. You kept Scotland's queen safe."

"We all did that," she said, smiling at him.

Perris held out his hand. She offered him her grimy right hand, and he kissed her fingers as if she were a queen herself. "I will certainly recommend some reward for both of you," he said.

William saw that Tamsin fisted her left hand, burying it out of sight in the baby's wrappings. He frowned and put an arm around her. Then he realized that she might do that for the rest of her life, out of habit. No matter how often he told her that she was beautiful, or how often he told her that he loved her—and he would do that daily, he knew—she might always keep some of that uncertainty about herself.

"Lovely lass," Perris said. "Fortunate man," he said to William, and smiled ruefully. Then he walked away.

William turned to Tamsin, and lifted the little queen out of her arms, balancing her sweet, blessed weight in the crook of one elbow. Tiny hands grabbed his neck, and a round, warm, silky head rested against his cheek. He hugged the infant to him, and closed his eyes briefly as a powerful flood of love, of simple, endless thankfulness, washed through him.

Then he reached out and took Tamsin's left hand in his, and kissed the small wedge that curled over his fingers, never taking his gaze from hers.

The tearful smile she gave him, lit by moonlight and by her own inner happiness, made her incandescently beautiful in his eyes. And her happiness, he thought, was reward enough.

Epilogue

"There's comfort for the comfortless,

There's honey for the bee,

There's comfort for the comfortless,

There's nane but you for me."

—'The False Lover Won Back"

"Nine hardheads!" Archie stared across the table at Tamsin. "You took all nine hardheads again!" He made a sound of disgust and threw his cards down on the table.

Tamsin scooped the pile of small coins toward her. "Be glad you dinna play with better coin than that," she said. "I willna empty your pockets this way, either of you. Hardheads are near worthless." One by one, she dropped the dull, thin coins into a velvet pouch, letting them clink to underscore her victory. She grinned mischievously at her father and her great-uncle.

"There, see ye," Cuthbert said. "She has yer own wicked smile, Archie Armstrong. Och, Tamsin, tell true. How is it ye win at the cards each time?"

"'Gyptian tricks," Archie muttered. "Fast-and-loose."

"Luck," Tamsin said, frowning at her father. "And skill with remembering the cards."

"Luck! 'Tis near impossible to play Ombre wi' ye, lass. I've won thrice in all these months o' riding here to Rookhope for a bit o' the cards. But thrice."

"She is good wi' the picture cards," Cuthbert admitted.

"I dinna know why you fuss each time I win," she said. "When you play at the cards with Lady Emma, you never fuss about losing. And she is just as good as me, if not better."

"Why begrudge Tamsin a wee bit o' luck?" Cuthbert asked. "The gypsies used to think her muckle bad luck to be around."

"Aye," Archie grumbled. "Bad luck for those who play at the cards wi' her."

Tamsin smiled and stood, smoothing her skirts. "'Tis late. I must go see to the bairnies."

"Wi' our hardheads?" Cuthbert said. "What are we to gamble wi' when ye've gone up to sing ballads to yer bairnies?"

"If 'twasna so cold, we'd be out riding a raid into England, and nae sitting here at the cards," Archie said.

"My bones are too auld for that, if yers are nae. And 'tisna the merriment it used to be," Cuthbert reminded him, "now that Jasper Musgrave sits in his bed all the day and barely speaks, and eats porridge like a bairn."

"Aye," Archie grunted. "I willna steal livestock from a man who's had an apoplectic fit." He slapped the cards down on the table to mix and restack them. "I barely got Jasper back home to his castle before he took ill, that time I took him by the sly—and I'll remind ye o' my cleverness, for I bagged his head good on the way home, and he never knew 'twas me had him fast for a week. And when the regent sent men to arrest him, we had the news that he was so upset that he had a muckle bad fit, and lost his speech and was put to bed. Now that his son is in a Scottish prison with that Malise Hamilton, I feel pity for Jasper, I do."

"You and Jasper have plagued each other since before I was born," Tamsin said. "I think you both must miss it."

"Aye," Archie said. "But I've other matters to take my notice, now." He wiggled his brows.

"Did ye ask her yet?" Cuthbert said in a low voice.

Archie flushed pink. "Nah."

"Ask her," Cuthbert hissed.

Tamsin pinched back a smile, watching her father glance across the chamber. Lady Emma sat sewing on a bit of linen, and talking quietly with Helen and Perris. As if she knew Archie watched her, Emma looked over her shoulder and smiled. Archie cleared his throat and dropped the cards.

Tamsin glanced around the room, and realized that William, who had left their company a while ago, still had not returned. She wondered what delayed him. She found herself immediately listening for his step, and for his laugh, which had grown louder and heartier, and far more frequent, in the eighteen months since their marriage before a priest.

Archie reached into the leather purse at his belt and withdrew a copper coin. "Look what I have," he said, holding it up so that the firelight glinted on the shiny metal.

"Ababbie!" Tamsin said.

"Aye, a babbie, minted in honor o' the wee queen's coronation at Stirling, two weeks after you and Will rescued her from that wicked plot. Rare they are to find, too."

She held out her left hand. He dropped it in the little cup of her palm, and she held it up. "Oh! A bonny wee portrait of our Queen Mary."

"Hah, our lass likes a sparkly thing well, she does. 'Tis that dark gypsy blood in her," Archie said to Cuthbert. He reached up and snatched the coin from her hand. "Ye'll see that again when ye win it from me, lass."

"I'll play Primero, then," she said. "My nine hardheads for the babbie."

"Bah, Primero," Archie said. "'Tis a bairnie's game!"

"What is a bairnie's game?" William asked over a loud din as he entered the room.

"William! Oh, and the wee rogues! Dearlings, what is the matter?" Tamsin hurried toward William, whose arms were filled with two blanketed bundles. Their twin, dark-haired sons, six months old and wailing to a crescendo, looked around tearfully and hopefully when they heard their mother's voice.

She took one of the boys, Allan, from his arms, and left William to joggle little Archie. "I'm all out of bairnie's games," William said. "I went up the stair, and heard the wailing, and found the poor nurse exhausted. I told her I would take them down here for a bit. And Katharine too, who wanted to come down as well—" He turned around. "Kate? Where did you go, lassie? Ah, there you are!" His voice lifted with delight.

She toddled around the door and peered up at him silently, her thumb securely in her mouth, dark blue eyes wide and staring beneath a cap of thick, dark curls.

"She looks tired," Emma commented.

"Come here, sweetheart, come see the babbie I have!" Archie called, holding out his bright coin. Katharine waddled over to her grandfather and climbed up into his lap. Helen swept forward and lifted little Archie from William, while Emma came and took Allan from Tamsin, the women eager, as always, to lavish their love on the children.

Perris sat down to begin a new game with Archie and Cuthbert, and William took Tamsin's arm, leading her toward the window. They stood looking through the open lower shutter upon a winter twilight, the sky streaked with violet, orange, and indigo, reflected over the snowy hills.

Silhouetted against the brilliant sky, a single oak tree rose from the crest of the hill opposite Rookhope, its bare limbs twisted in a dense, lacy pattern. Tamsin glanced at William and saw that he focused his gaze on that solitary, magnificent old tree, beneath which his father, Allan Scott, was buried.

"He would be glad to know that there are two new rogues at Rookhope now," she murmured. "Allan and Archie. Both dark-haired and hot-tempered, and, I hear, the image of your father. And you," she added, slipping her arms around his waist.

"Aye," he said softly, nestling her against him. "'Twould make him glad to know that." He kissed the top of her head, and continued to gaze out at the old oak tree.

"Will," she said. "My father may be asking your mother an important question soon. Did you know?"

"I wondered," he said, and she heard the smile in his voice. "He did hint to me that he might be interested in courting some one, and in marrying again, after all these years."

"I think he has always loved your mother a little, since the days when he and Allan Scott were young rogues," she said quietly. "He once told me he was disappointed that she left after your father's death, and married another man."

"Perhaps she wasna ready, in those days, to be with someone who would remind her so much of Allan Scott," he said. "But now she is ready at last. I would be honored to have Archie for my stepfather—since I have him for a good-father already. If he asks her, I think she'll say aye. She blushes like a lass when he looks at her."

Tamsin smiled. "And have you seen the way Perris and Helen look at each other of late? There is a wedding there too, if I am not mistaken."

"Oh, well," he said. "I always expected that. I dinna know why he's waited so long. Helen and Paris loved each other in the legends, after all. 'Tis fate." He rested his chin on her head for a moment. "Tamsin," he said. "I want to show you something." He reached into his unbuttoned doublet and took out a folded bit of parchment.

"What is this?" she asked, taking it.

"I finally opened the box that my mother gave me, which holds my father's things," he said. "I confess, I didna have the heart to look in there until now. But I am accustomed to being a father myself, now, and I thought 'twas time to... visit my father again, in a small way. I didna expect, though, to find that. 'Tis a letter in his own hand."

She did not open it, sensing that his father's writing hand should remain private for him. "What does it say?"

"He wrote the letter a few weeks before his death," he said. "He put down his wishes in writing."

"A will?" she asked in a whisper.

"Nay," he said. "A statement of his desire that his son and heir, William Scott, thirteen years old then, should wed the wee daughter of his close comrade, Archibald Armstrong of Merton Rigg. He wrote, there, that this match was his dearest wish."