CHAPTER ONE
THE COUNTESS
“Ow! Ye wee brute!” Marjorie Bruce, Countess of Carrick, arched her back and pulled away from the infant suckling at her breast, but her youngest was teething and was not at all inclined to relinquish his hold on the nipple. The baby’s nursemaid sprang forward, her face twisting in sympathy as she took the baby out of its mother’s hands.
“Take him away, the wee cannibal,” the countess said, adjusting her bodice to cover her breast. “He’s finished, anyway, so he’ll sleep all afternoon, and I have to start getting ready. Mother of God, what a morning. Make sure you break his wind, or he’ll howl like a wolf. And send Allie in when ye leave. I’ll need her to help me, for Earl Robert should have been here by now and I hae no wish to greet him looking as though I’ve spent the night in the byre wi’ the kine. The King himself will be here come tomorrow and our Nicol should be bringing young Robert and Angus Mohr this afternoon, and God knows there’s much to be done ere any of them arrives, so hurry you up, and be sure the rest o’ the bairns are fed and clean.”
The nursemaid bobbed her head and hurried away, clutching the baby tenderly in her arms, and her mistress stood up with both hands on her hips and flexed her spine, back and forth. She was pregnant again, and though it had not yet begun to show, she was starting to feel it, aware of the familiar changes in her body. This child would be her eighth, God willing, and there were times when she was tempted to wonder, slightly ruefully, if there had ever been a time in her adult life when she had not been heavy with child. She would never complain about that, though, for Marjorie of Carrick believed, with all her being, that she had been put on God’s earth to mother a large and happy brood in a time when many women despaired of ever birthing and rearing a single child successfully. In that, she believed herself blessed. She had spent too long a time, earlier in her life, fearing that she might never mother a child. Now, thinking about that, she lowered herself into a firmly upholstered chair by the big stone fireplace and looked around the comfortably furnished family room on the second floor of the castle keep, making a mental list of all that needed to be done to make the place clean, presentable, and welcoming for her husband’s return. A discarded garment caught her eye, and she bent and scooped it up, a tiny knitted woollen cap, still retaining a trace of warmth from the baby’s head. She sat staring down at it, kneading it with her fingers and smiling to herself, wondering about the ways of God and the futility of trying to discover what He had in store.
As the sole heir to Carrick, her widowed father’s only child, Marjorie had been married, at the age of eleven, to a man fifteen years her senior, and had then been abandoned before she reached the age of puberty, when her headstrong husband rode off with Prince Edward of England to join the Christian armies bound for the Holy Land in the ill-fated Ninth Crusade. He had died at a place called Acre, killed in some pointless skirmish against the Mameluke Sultan Baibars—a name still incomprehensible to Marjorie— leaving her both virgin and widow at the age of fourteen.
Devastated by the news of her husband’s death, she had come close to despair over her situation, isolated and alone as she was, miles from anywhere in her father’s remote seaside fastness of Turnberry with little prospect of ever meeting anyone else who might take her to wife. Her father the earl was a fine man, but he seldom ventured far from home, and Turnberry, with its ancient and massive sod-built walls and austere, almost inaccessible location, received few visitors of any kind, and almost none were marriageable, eligible males.
Marjorie’s very real fear of a manless, childless future began to seem justified over the three years that followed, for her mother’s only remaining sister, a thin-lipped and humourless man-hater called Matilda, had been a nun since girlhood, and she took it upon herself to ensure that the young widow would find solace in becoming a bride of Christ.
Thanks be to God, Earl Niall disagreed with his good-sister. He had no sons, but he took great pride in his boisterous, hard-working, and irrepressible daughter, who was, he liked to claim, his natural heir and the equal of any man around her, blessed with strength of mind and body and the determination that was needed to look after her lands and her people and to make her way in the world. And all of that, he would add fondly, in spite of the undeserved misfortune thrust upon her by the tragic loss of her husband while she was yet scarcely old enough to understand what had befallen her.
Earl Niall died soon after Marjorie’s sixteenth birthday, of a lingering putrefaction from the tusk of a wild boar that had savaged him in a hunting accident, but thanks to his friendship with King Alexander, he had made sure, long before his death, that the succession passed to his beloved daughter in her own right as Countess of Carrick, with the blessing and support of the King himself. Marjorie was as nobly born as the man she soon married, the sixth Robert Bruce, and perhaps even more so, for her nobility stemmed from the royal blood of the ancient Gaelic kings, while his was entrenched in the Norman French heritage that gave him his mother tongue.