What had compelled him to warn her in such an alarming manner to make friends? She had given him no reason to become her defender, but he wondered if he had been wrong about the cause of her distaste. Perhaps it was the thought of her future husband that caused her dislike for Scotland. And, Ewan thought as he followed behind, who could blame her for that.
* * *
‘I did not know you had been married before,’ Marguerite said as Duncan escorted her down the side of the Great Hall.
‘Did your father not tell you?’ Duncan laughed. He looked down at her with an expression of surprise. ‘I’m five and thirty, my sweet. Did you expect your husband to be a virgin like yourself?’
‘Of course not.’ Men had wants and needs. No man would be content to wait until marriage, or would be censured for not doing so. Sometimes she could almost understand them, when impulses raced through her and her body cried out for fulfilment of something she could not explain. ‘You have never spoken of her and I wondered why not. She was English?’
‘Aye, she was from close to the borders near Berwick. And why not, when our King married an Englishwoman himself. Elizabeth died from a childbed fever.’
‘Did you love her dearly?’ Marguerite asked softly.
‘Yes. Yes, I truly did.’
Duncan looked down at his hands and for the first time since they had met she felt she was seeing his true thoughts. She knew then that his heart belonged to a dead woman and he would never love her. When he raised his head again, his face was hard, all emotion under control.
‘Her death was tragic, doubly so as she died before she was able to give me an heir. Our child is a daughter.’
‘You have a daughter?’ Marguerite couldn’t hide her surprise at the revelation she was to be a stepmother. ‘When will I meet her?’
‘Soon. When we travel to England. Liza lives with her aunt and uncle. Better placed for stability and good alliances for a girl than living with a father who travels between lands.’
He gave Marguerite a look gleaming with desire. ‘I hope you shall be more successful in providing me with a son than Elizabeth was.’
Nausea flowed over Marguerite. How easily a man spoke of such matters as childbirth!
‘I hope so, too,’ she said faintly. ‘I do not wish to die.’
Duncan smiled warmly and chucked her under the chin, but his eyes were iron. ‘Of course. That is what I meant. A flower as delicate as you should be cherished and kept safe from harm. Don’t fear. We’ll get you with child as soon as we are able.’
Her mother, Dominique, had warned Marguerite and her sisters that a wife’s path was perilous and, sure enough, she had been proved right. Visions filled Marguerite’s mind of her sister Marie lying limp, her pallor grey, pleading weakly for some relief from the agony of childbirth. Marie had been granted her release and now lay cold in her grave. Marguerite could not bear the thought this would almost certainly be her fate, too.
Duncan gestured for Marguerite to approach the dais where Queen Margaret sat and it took all her strength to walk there.
‘I hope my fiancée might favour us with a song from France our court might not have heard. She plays excellently.’
Marguerite could gladly have screamed at Duncan for bringing her to the notice of the court. Nevertheless she gave her prettiest smile and, amid murmurs of assent, took her stool before the instrument that had been brought into the room and placed at the foot of the raised dais beside the last of the great stone fireplaces. The heat was stifling and she had an urge to feign illness and run to the safety of the courtyard, but such a thing was impossible.
She bent her head over the clavichord, taking longer than necessary to feel her way around the keys, giving herself an opportunity to compose herself. She picked a merry tune that the peasants in the nearby village used to sing at midsummer. She knew it well enough to play without thinking and let her fingers find their positions. She played the first refrain, then began to sing as she repeated the melody.
A murmur rippled through the audience and Marguerite drew courage from their astonishment. She played well enough to pass in company, but her strength was the voice that dipped to lower notes and greater heights than her size would indicate. She was proud of it. Now she dared to look at the audience and see what effect her performance was having. Duncan was nodding his approval. Other faces she recognised smiled at her or stood rapt.
Her eye fell on Lord Glenarris. He alone looked unmoved. He stood with his arms folded across his chest. His face could have been carved from the same granite that the castle stood on. His eyes flashed cold as they met hers. The hostility that emanated from him was strong. He didn’t like her. He found her attractive, though, she could tell from the way his eyes caressed her almost as freely as Duncan’s did. Oddly, knowing this did not make her shrink from him as she did from Duncan, but she needed privacy and time to untangle why not.
His words had made her shiver with a sense of foreboding. Why would she need to win friends? Possibly he only meant as a stranger in an unfamiliar country, but, remembering his heated exchange with Duncan, Marguerite could not help but imagine a more sinister reason. It had sounded more like a threat than friendly advice.
She finished the song and dipped her head at the applause. Duncan wore a smile of approval and gestured to continue. She shot him a look of entreaty, but he did not appear to understand and called for another song.
Marguerite began to play a gentle air that her mother had loved, but realised instantly it was a mistake to have chosen a song with so many memories attached to it. The words spoke of the coming of dark nights and winter snows, something her mother would never experience again. Her back and neck grew damp and she knew from the heat rising in them that her cheeks and throat would be starting to flush. The song required more subtlety than Marguerite felt capable of, but she continued into the refrain with a voice that was growing breathy and frail. Her eyes blurred as each note seemed to echo into the high rafters, with no end in sight. She had only sung one line of the second verse, in a voice she could tell would not last out the song, when she heard someone starting a gentle clapping. Others joined in.
Marguerite’s fingers faltered and she looked up. Lord Glenarris was striding towards her, hands raised before him and leading the applause. She could no longer be heard over the increasing volume and dropped her hands to her lap. Had her performance been so poor that he could not bear to listen any longer? She was torn between a sense of humiliation that he had interrupted and relief that she would not reveal her weakness to the entire court. She would no longer have to continue playing.
‘Beautifully played and sung, Mademoiselle Vallon,’ he said. ‘You remind us that the Auld Alliance benefits our country in matters of culture as much as in politics and trade.’
His eyes glinted and his lips were twisted into a smile that looked sincere enough, but which Marguerite suspected was as false as his praise. ‘Forgive me for bringing an end to your performance, but this is a time for celebration, not slumber. Who will give us a song from Scotland and lift our hearts?’
Voices cried out as quarrels between men promoting the songs of their clans broke out. Marguerite slipped from her stool with relief that she was now forgotten. She adjusted her hood and slipped away, coming face to face with the Earl, who was leaning against the carved fireplace. He had assumed the same position he had in the courtyard, arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle and head resting back. The top point of his doublet was unlaced and it displayed his throat and a small V-shape of skin between the nubs of his collarbone. Still uncomfortably hot from the fire and her ordeal, Marguerite felt her back and chest grow warmer still and a slight trickle of perspiration began to make its way down her lower back. He had been watching her and she had been unaware.
‘You are not offering to sing, my lord, since you have interrupted my performance?’
The