Knight of Grace

Lachlan cursed this ridiculous farce.

More than twenty years of selfless service to the King, repaid by the fetter of marriage to a woman who was scared of her own shadow. If it wasn’t so permanent he might have laughed. Indeed, he had seen the puzzled faces of his men as they tried to fathom out the character of his new wife and failed.

She had hit him!

His frightened mouse of a wife had hit him. Hard. And in the shadowed depths of her amber eyes he had recognised what he so often saw in his own.

Secrets.

Sophia James lives in a big old house in Chelsea Bay on Auckland’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist, three kids, two cats, a turtle and a guide dog puppy. Life is busy because, as well as teaching adults English at the local Migrant School, she helps her husband take art tours to Italy and France each September. Sophia has a degree in English and History from Auckland University, and she believes her love of writing was formed reading Georgette Heyer, with her twin sister, on the porch of her grandmother’s house, overlooking the sandhills of Raglan.

Previous novels by Sophia James:

FALLEN ANGEL

ASHBLANE’S LADY

HIGH SEAS TO HIGH SOCIETY

MASQUERADING MISTRESS

Sophia James

MILLS & BOON

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KNIGHT OF GRACE

It is 1360 and Scotland is in chaos. King David has just returned to Edinburgh after eleven years of captivity under the English and the vacuum of power created in his absence brings a crisis. While some landowners want to retain their hard-won sovereignty, others side with the English and the claims of those disinherited under Robert Bruce. Border politics is murky, and David himself makes things more difficult when he thinks to cede his crown to the Duke of Clarence, Edward of England’s son. A few honourable men support the concept of a self-determining Scotland, based on the principles of freedom written in the Declaration of Arbroath.

Laird Lachlan Kerr is one of these men…

…we will never on any conditions be subjected to the Lordship of the English. For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.

Words from the Declaration of Arbroath, April 1320, and affixed with the seals of forty Scottish nobles.

Chapter One

August 1360—Grantley Manor, Clenmell, Durham, England.

Lady Grace Stanton watched the man walking towards her. Tall, dark and beautiful.

She had not expected that.

This beauty worried her more than the danger that cloaked him or the distance he wore like a mantle, and when he finally stood before them and the dust of the horses had settled, she schooled her expression and looked up.

He was disappointed. She could see it in his eyes. Pale shadow blue with suspicion simmering just below the surface. Her heart sank and she felt the aching cold of his distrust. With a feigned smile she took his offered fingers into her own, hating her bitten-down nails and the way the red dryness on her skin looked against the brown smoothness of his.

She had been burdened with this complaint for the whole of her twenty-six years. But today at least the skin beneath her eyes was not crusty raw and weeping.

‘Lady Grace.’ He relinquished contact as soon as he had said her name.

‘Kerr.’ Her uncle was the Earl of Carrick and his tone was anything but welcoming, his furrowed gaze including the twenty or so clansmen who sat on horses behind Kerr. ‘We expected you a week ago.’

‘Ye have the priest, then?’ Kerr cut in, dispensing completely with any pretence to manners.

‘We do. Father O’Brian has come up from—”

‘Then bring him here.’

‘But my niece is not even dressed.’

‘A dress is the least of her worries given the decree of my king.’ His words were flat. Insolent, almost. Teetering on the edge of treason. As Grace looked around at her uncle, the harshness of light made him seem old; a man who had outgrown the demands of battle and wanted now to amble towards his dotage with some semblance of peace. When her glance fell on the weaponry that the Kerrs bristled with, she knew more plainly than ever before the true price of politics. One false move and her family would suffer, for innocent pawns were easily expendable against a background of political frustration.

‘I th-th-think, U-Uncle, that you should ask F-F-Father O’Brian to c-c-come out to us.’ Lord. Her stammer was far worse than it usually was. Grace heard rather than saw the way the men behind Kerr murmured and her pulse quickened so markedly that she wondered if she would fall over from a lack of breath.

No, she would not!

Biting down on her bottom lip, she was very still, centring calm across panic until she felt the alarm recede.

‘You would be married here? Outside? But you had hoped…’

‘Nay, Uncle. Here will be g-good.’

Hopes! She scanned the face of the warrior opposite, fully expecting mirth or at the very least pity, but saw neither.

Just a duty, she suddenly thought. This marriage was a duty, a way of appeasing his monarch and filling the coffers of his own keep.

‘Tainted with a skin condition, but with good child-bearing hips.’ The envoy from Edward the Third of England had uttered exactly those words as she had been summoned for the first time before him. She remembered her uncle’s momentary fury as the decree was laid in his hands, a piece of paper that would change their lives for ever. If he did not comply, Grantley Manor would be at risk. Grantley! The family seat lost if not for the sacrifice of marrying a plain and ageing niece off to a chosen spouse. Even her uncle had limits as to what he was prepared to lose.

The will of kings. A union forged while all grappled with the concept of the self-determination of Scotland.

She could see the outline of impatience in Lachlan Kerr’s eyes, sky blue see-through-you eyes with just a hint of grey. Eyes that said he surely knew the extent of her reputation at court, where the rumours of who she was and wasn’t were touted in the songs of unkind jesters; a figure of fun to give the ladies and lords a moment’s respite against the harsher realities of intrigue. Stephen had told her last summer, after he had returned from London, her cousin reciting the faults, thinking he did her a favour with the warning.

Perhaps he did, Grace mused. A year ago she might have missed the censure and pity so plainly etched on Kerr’s face and imagined it merely as nerves. Today the full shape of an undisguised gall was evident in his frown, in his stance and in the way he stood before them, one hand on his hip and the other on the hilt of a sword.

His brother’s seconds!

This was not his choice, not his want. She pulled the sleeves of her dress down lower, glad when the lace covered even the very tips of her fingers.

A movement from the front door drew everyone’s attention as Judith, Anne and Ginny bustled down the stairs towards them, their fair hair burnished gold by the sun. Individually her young cousins were pretty; together they were much more than that. She felt the interest of the men behind Kerr as a sharpening of awareness, a distinct and utter masculine appreciation. She refrained from seeing if her husband-to-be was watching them in the same way, reasoning that even a slim shadow of doubt was preferable to the knowing of it.

Judith leaned over to her and whispered exactly what it was Grace was thinking. ‘He is far bigger than we had thought.’ Her husky lisp contained both tremor and question.

Nerves, Grace decided and squeezed the hand that threaded through her own, trying to give some sort of reassurance. Anne and Ginny crowded in behind. Waiting. She felt their collected fear like an ache and gestured them back, behind her, where she could stand between any threat of violence, should it come from the Scots.

‘These are m-my cousins.’ She felt she had to say something as an awkward silence hung across the group and was pleased when her uncle tried to ease the tension.

‘The envoy led us to believe that you would be at Grantley before the last Sabbath, Laird Kerr.’

‘I was…detained.’

Detained. The word held an edge of dark despair.

By what? By whom?

A woman, perhaps? The thought slipped into Grace’s mind as she observed him, for he had been married before. She knew, because Judith had overheard the king’s man saying so to his travelling companion, just before he had spoken of the lack of coinage the Kerrs were cursed with, and the desperate need of the Laird to find a woman of means.

Means. Indeed she had that.

With a substantial inheritance and a bloodline that was the very zenith of pure, her dowry would go far to help the ailing finances of any family down on its luck.

Marriage! Would this stranger demand his conjugal rights this very evening in front of his band of men? Lord, even the idea of removing her clothes had the blood rushing to her cheeks.

He would see.

He would know.

He would understand the truth of what before had only been whispered at and if he thought her ugly now… She shook her head. Hard. And feeling the sharp ends of Anne’s nails digging into the flesh of her inner arm, she tried to take charge.

‘W-Would you c-come inside and have a meal?’

Better, she thought. Much better. At least every word was not cursed with a stammer. Raising her glance, she looked straight at the man who would be her husband. In the direct sunlight he had squinted his eyes and the gathering lines to each side of his face were…attractive. No other way to describe them. Much more attractive than his brother had been, and he was deemed a handsome man! Angry at her wayward musings, she spoke again.

‘Father O’B-Brian is still at prayer and could be so for a while. If you could p-p-poss-poss…’

He stopped her simply by laying his hand across her own and she had the distinct impression of help.

Help?

Confused, she looked around. Judith’s eyes were filled with tears and weepy, and Anne and Ginny’s faces were pale. Lord, she prayed her cousins would not burst forth into noisy wailing. Not in front of these men. Not when the safety of Grantley depended on a marriage, signed, sealed and delivered.

Sacrifice. Expediency. Words that had shaped her life for all her years and would now continue doing so. It was written in the blood of men and in the ink of kings.

Irrevocable. Unalterable. Settled.

There could be no going back or refusal. Her life for her family’s lands.

She imagined herself with a sword in hand, beating back any enemy, protecting them with her finesse, winning a battle that no other ever could have…

The thought was so ridiculous she began to smile, but caught back the humour as flinted steeled eyes met her own. And swallowed. Now was not the time for foolish flights of fancy.

‘My uncle has some f-fine Rhenish wine.’

When Kerr inclined his head and gestured to his men, she felt a sigh of relief. Not quite time to leave, then. Still an hour or so before she would be wrenched from here and transplanted to Belridden, his keep a good forty miles to the north.

With a heavy heart she led the men in and, conscious of the fact that the Laird of Kerr walked directly behind her, tried her hardest to minimise her limp.

Following Lady Grace, Lachlan decided that her hair beneath the ugly skullcap was long and red. Not the quiet red of auburn or the burnished red of copper, her hair was a bright gilt shade that showed up in her brows and on the freckles that her cheeks were blemished with. And the skin on both her arms was strangely marred by dryness.

She was not at all the girl he had expected. Nay, woman, he corrected himself, for he knew her to be twenty-six. Long past the more usual time of marriage, long past the silly vacuous age of rising hope. For that at least he was glad. He frowned as he remembered back to the things that were said of Lady Grace Stanton.

Frightened. Temperate. Plain. A dreamer. Aye, and for these things she would do. And do well.

No temptress to dole out her favours to other men when he was away from the Kerr land. No competition to Rebecca, either; with the quick tongue of his mistress silenced, he knew that life at Belridden would be much easier than if he had brought home a beauty.

Lady Grace would suit him admirably. A homely and well-dowered wife. A woman who would not complain. A lady who would have the means to run his castle and the hips to bear his children. It was enough, and, if life had taught him anything, it had been not to expect too much.

The flash of humour as she had tempted him with the wine had been worrying, though! He had seen that look before in the eyes of experienced courtesans. A certain arrogance and self-assurance that came with the innate confidence of beautiful women.

Grace Stanton was hardly beautiful.

And yet she was not ugly either. Not when the sun hit the light velvet of her eyes or shadowed deep dimples on each cheek. Not when her fingers had touched his arm and he had felt something more than mere indifference.

Frowning he glanced over at the younger cousins. Frail, fragile and fearful.

She protected them, supported them, held their shaking fingers in her own and shepherded them inside, like a mother hen might do to her chicks when the rowdy farmyard dog was nigh.

He looked at his men and saw that their interest was firmly placed on his wife-to-be, and on the ring she wore.

He had seen it immediately when first he had taken her hand.

His brother’s ring.

The gold insignia burnished by time.

Ten months since Malcolm had been killed in an accident at Grantley with the explanations of his demise as patently false as the proffered sympathy. No body had ever been found, the ravine he had fallen into deep and craggy and a river at its bottom channelling out to sea. Lach’s brows drew together as he remembered the Earl of Carrick’s oldest son Stephen giving his grandmother and him a version of the death with lying eyes and a shaking voice. Fallen during a ride after giving his troth to Stephen’s cousin? Looking at the lady herself, Lach could not believe her to have inspired a proposal from a brother who had courted and left many of the beauties of both England and Scotland.

Curtailed by politics, however, any revenge was compromised by the unchangeable declaration of meddlesome kings.

A wife of means would be provided to pacify the Kerr clan for the loss of their kin. One brother for another and half of the spoils of the Stanton dowry to fill the empty coffers of Belridden. A quarter would go to Edward; a sop perhaps for Lionel, the Duke of Clarence, in his own bid for the Scottish throne, and the rest to David, a welcome windfall with the merks of the Berwick Treaty largely unpaid. When Lachlan had protested against the offer, it was made clear to him by David that he had no choice. Marry the girl or risk his lands! Put so succinctly, he had packed his things and headed south to get her: his brother’s intended, the Kerr ring still on her finger carved in gold and rubies. Unhidden.

The bile rose in his throat. Had it just been he, he might well have laid his hands around the slim column of her neck and squeezed the truth from her about what had happened to his brother.

But he couldn’t. Not with the fate of his people resting so firmly in her traitorous palms. Not with the threat of winter looming, close and long, and a hundred clan children who would not see the next spring should he take unwise retribution.

He hated the feeling of helpless anger he was suddenly consumed with. Hated the knowing smile on Grace Stanton’s face and the muted sobs of the group of yellow-haired girls. Hated Grantley and its luxury. Hated the problem of poverty he was faced with, and no way short of marriage and a rich wife to solve it.

When the front doors were opened by myriad servants, the opulence of the manor made him stop. The whole of the bottom floor of Belridden would have fitted into this one single salon, wealth screaming from each priceless piece of furniture. He wondered what Grace Stanton would make of the hall at his keep and knew the answer with a sinking heart. She would probably have one peek and burst into tears and take to her bed for a week. Wasn’t that the way of wealthy women?

Her bed. His bed? Their bed? Lord, he had not even had the time to think through the sleeping arrangements before being summoned south on the orders of his king. A niggling worm of doubt turned inside him.

To bed her?

To unpeel the high-necked gown from her body and discover the woman underneath. To enter her with the legality of the king’s missive between them and produce an heir? To see her stomach full swelled with the seed of his loins, ripe, womanly, available.

Even with his brother’s band on her finger, the idea was not repugnant. Not repelling. Nay, the very idea took on a breathless possibility and shimmered between them as they took their seats at the table.

Sensual. Shocking. Raw.

He noticed how she slid her chair as far away from him as she could manage.

‘S-S-Stephen will be here t-t-tomorrow.’

Her stutter made her strangely vulnerable and as their eyes caught close he saw something in them that garnered his pity. Pure and utter effort marked the velvet, and a light sweat beaded her upper lip.

‘We will be gone long before then, aye.’ No point in pretending otherwise. He was annoyed with his sudden want to make things a little easier for her. Annoyed, too, when the softness that had been in her eyes sharpened and she turned away.

A wife to provide a suitable heir. That was all he needed.

That and her sizeable dowry.

And as soon as he could rip Malcolm’s ring from her finger, he would.

Chapter Two

The party from Belridden hardly ate a thing.

They hardly touched the fowl or pork or salmon that appeared in course after course from the generous kitchens of Grantley. Nay, they sat there like a sullen solid wall of plaid and muscle and helped themselves to wine. But that was all.

Did they think the fare poisoned? Or was it food so unlike the nourishment at Belridden that they just could not steel themselves to try it?

A headache that had begun outside blossomed and the zigzagged beads of light that tore through Grace’s vision widened. She would be married under the name of God to a man she would only be able to half-see.

Blinking hard, she caught his glance.

No, his half-glance. One eye, no nose and the glimmer of a neck, and the rest of his body disappearing into jagged nothingness.

Wiping wet hair from her forehead, she no longer cared about the welts of thickened skin hidden beneath her fringe as she counted slowly backwards from one hundred. Sometimes that helped. Today it didn’t.

The arrival of Father O’Brian lifted the silence, his lilting accent welcomed.

‘I had it from the cottagers that the Kerr party were here, Lady Grace, and wondered when you’d be having a need of my services?’

He stopped as he came fully into the room and stared at the strangers opposite. She’d always thought Patrick O’Brian a large man, but compared to Lachlan Kerr he suddenly looked small. Still, to give him his due, the cleric tried to stand his ground as his eyes slid across the numerous swords. ‘I cannot marry you in battle gear, Laird Kerr. In the face of our Lord such a thing would be sacrilege.’

‘Then you cannae marry me at all,’ Kerr returned, no waver in his voice, just a cold, hard certainty. ‘And when ye don’t comply with the demands of your liege, the way forward from here for you might well be an uneasy one.’

Her uncle began to splutter, a red sheen covering his cheeks. Grace could see it because she had massaged the tight muscles in the back of her neck for the past two minutes and felt the instantaneous relief to the pain behind her eyes. As if by magic the spots of jagged light disappeared to be replaced by a headache. Dull. Heavy. Constant.

But she could see. See Lachlan Kerr’s anger and the gritted teeth of his twenty men. See the pale faces of her cousins and the nervous demeanour of both the priest and her uncle.

And in that moment Grace knew that, unless she took charge of this farce, everyone in her family would be at risk. More than at risk. Death lurked easy when one disobeyed the commands of the king, and her uncle’s building rage worried her the most.

‘I am certain that G-God’s will would not be slighted.’

Lord, if the Laird of Kerr were to walk out now she doubted the aged priest’s superiors would be easy on him for making such a mistake and the token of this truce to secure a fragile peace would be trampled beneath the weight of error.

Her cousins. Her uncle. Grantley.

In danger.

There was only one thing to do.

‘I w-wish to be m-married, now.’

Judith burst into tears and knocked over her wine, the red blush of it staining the tablecloth, a wider and wider blot along the pristine fold of linen. A sign? A portent? Was history repeated in such a simple action? The weight of uncertainty in Ginny’s eyes deepened and the smooth cold gold of Malcolm Kerr’s ring bound the past with the present.

Fickle and faithless and laughing, the secret of his death lay in the room like a shout, like a screaming echo of unrightness, like a shroud of shame that had brought them all to this pass, this penance.

Father O’Brian trembled against the lintel of the door, his fingers clutching the cross at his neck whilst he uttered a prayer, the dull monotones reflecting the mood as her uncle turned an even deeper shade of red.

Her wedding hour.

Chaos.

Her dress hanging in the corner of her cupboard, shrouded in calico. Unworn.

The flowers she had imagined to fashion into a fragrant bouquet, unpicked.

And a would-be husband that looked at her in the manner of a man who did not care at all.

‘He will take my hand and stare into my eyes and a single tear will run down his handsome cheek as he tells me how much he loves me, adores me, cannot live without me, his finger softly tracing the smile on my face…’

Grace shook her head. How often had she told her cousins this story as she lay beside them in the hours before wakefulness became slumber, dream-time cameos where knights of honour and chivalry and faithfulness rode into Grantley demanding love. Her love, despite the itchy rash and cursed stutter. In these stories she had none of them. Even her hair was a less fiery shade of red.

Dreams?

Reality!

When Kerr dragged her into the space beside him, his hands were neither soft nor careful. When he demanded that the priest give the oath to bind them together, she heard hatred rather than love.

And when he gave her his answer two words kept repeating again and again in her head.