He gave her a wry look that said otherwise. “I survived.” Why did she think he left out a “barely” in there? “But it’s not anything I’m anxious to repeat.”
“The swimming?” She knew he’d been worried about that.
He didn’t bother hiding his grimace. “Let’s just say I got a lot better—quickly—but I will always prefer mountains to the sea.”
Knowing there was only so much he could tell her, she didn’t question him any further, but promise or not, she intended to do a very thorough inspection of him later.
She hadn’t realized she’d been watching the door until Thom asked, “Are you waiting for someone?”
She shrugged, which only seemed to increase his curiosity.
“I hope I do not have cause to be jealous?” There might have been a certain sharpness to the question behind the lazy tone.
She had to bite the inside of her mouth to keep from laughing and couldn’t resist teasing him. “Well, he is extremely handsome and talented and is doing a great favor for me.”
Apparently, he wasn’t in the mood for teasing. It had been too long for both of them. “Ella . . .” he warned.
“There he is right now.”
Thom’s eyes moved to the door and a moment later, his gaze turned back to hers. “Which one?”
“Both, but in this case I was referring to the younger of the two.”
His father and Johnny had just walked into the room, Johnny carrying the favor. Elizabeth rushed forward to greet them, and a space beside her and Thom on the bench was made for them to sit. If anyone thought it odd that the village smithy and his son were seated at the high table, no one said anything.
“Is it ready?” she asked Johnny.
Thom’s younger brother nodded. “Aye.”
He handed it to her, and she in turn handed it to Thom.
“What is this?” he asked, eyeing the long, linen-wrapped package.
“A gift. Something to show how proud I am of you.”
He took it in his hands. Having made enough of them—including the one that hadn’t left Jamie’s side since he’d been given it (and had inspired all the envy Elizabeth knew it would)—Thom had to know what it was.
He gave her a questioning look and unbound it. Jamie and Jo knew what she’d done, but the others were watching with interest as he drew out the long sword.
It was nearly the match for the one Thom had made Jamie in skill and design. The blade was strong and perfectly balanced and weighted, the handle and grip tight and molded for his hand, and the hilt and scabbard were decorated with enough gold and precious stones to be fit for a king. Indeed, she suspected when the king saw this one, he would be demanding that Thom finish the one he’d promised to make for him after he’d seen Jamie’s.
One day Johnny might even surpass his brother in sword making. But the design and the scene and words etched on the blade—that was all her. Maybe Thom wouldn’t be the only one in the family making swords for kings.
She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Thom speechless before as he took in the picture of the famous castle on the Rock etched on the blade. “You did this?”
She beamed with pleasure. The work on the sword had kept her busy, but she’d also liked it. A lot. Enough to make her hope that it might keep her busy some more in the future. “Johnny and I work well together,” she said with a wink in Johnny’s direction.
They already had plans for a few more. Thom would be busy in the months ahead readying for war and so would she. She’d found a cure for her restlessness—although she suspected it might have something to do with the man at her side as well.
“I hope I did the words right,” Johnny said. “Lady Elizabeth”—she cleared her voice and he smiled sheepishly—“Ella said you had an affinity for French.”
Elizabeth was trying not to laugh.
Thommy shot her a look. “She did, did she?”
“It says ‘Climb high where honor leads,’ ” she translated.
Their eyes held. “It’s perfect,” he said, his voice thick. “Thank you.”
She nodded. Seeing how moved he was, her chest swelled to bursting. But then one of the maidservants passed by with a tray of mutton and it was her stomach that swelled—and turned upside down. The wave of nausea hit her so hard she had to grab the edge of the table to steady herself.
Thom reached for her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The smell,” she said, fighting to keep the contents of her stomach in place.
Thom must have looked so worried that Jo took pity on him—on both of them because Elizabeth was just as unaware of what was going on as Thom.
“I think you might need to move up the wedding a week or two,” Jo said to her husband.
“Why?” Jamie asked.
Jo looked around at all of them as if she couldn’t believe they could be so dense. Only Thom’s father seemed to have guessed, and he was almost as pale as Elizabeth.
“Because as it is, your first nephew or niece is going to be awfully big for eight months.”
Elizabeth was stunned, but she recovered quickly. Her future husband, future brother-in-law, future father-in-law, and brother, however, didn’t demonstrate such resilience. Good gracious, she had never seen so many big men look close to fainting before!
“Will they be all right?” she asked Jo worriedly.
“In about eight months give or take. Just get ready for the—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish before the fussing started. Thom growled for someone to get her a pillow—ten pillows, damn it!—not listening when she said she didn’t need one; Jamie called for wine, whether it was for himself or for her, she wasn’t sure; and Johnny and Big Thom took turns asking her if she needed anything and if she felt okay—every five minutes.
It was going to be a long eight months.
But the good news was that a few days later, she found herself standing before a priest with Thom—her brother and sister-in-law at their side just as they’d been all those years ago—repeating the vows that would bind her to the noble man who’d captured her heart when he’d rescued her from a tree.
It had taken her awhile to recognize it, but she would never forget it again. Thom had always been her rock, and she would hold on to him forever.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE TAKING OF Roxburgh Castle on Shrove Tuesday 1314 by Sir James Douglas and—not to be outdone—the taking of Edinburgh Castle three and a half weeks later on March 14, 1314, by Sir Thomas Randolph are two of the most renowned events in the almost unbelievable Bruce journey to kingship.
Douglas’s taking of Roxburgh during the Shrove Tuesday celebration happened much as I described it: he and sixty or so of his men took advantage of the garrison’s inattention and crawled through the field of livestock on all fours in black cloaks to disguise themselves. Using their ingenious rope scaling ladders, they scrambled over the wall and took the castle. I fictitiously gave credit to my sharpshooter Gregor MacGregor, but the incident with the keeper did happen. Guillemin Fiennes, the Gascon commander, had holed up in a tower but was compelled to surrender after being wounded (mortally it turned out) by an arrow to his face.
Historian David Cornell has posited that Bruce hadn’t ordered Douglas to take the castle, but that it was a “rogue operation” by Douglas, who decided to try on his own after watching the castle for a while (David Cornell, Bannockburn: The Triumph of Robert the Bruce [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009], 118). Noting the “audacity of the operation,” Cornell calls it a “momentous feat of arms” (ibid., 118, 120), which is probably putting it lightly.
There is a great story by Sir Walter Scott surrounding Douglas’s capture of Roxburgh. After climbing the wall and dropping down into the castle, Douglas comes upon a woman who is singing to her baby the infamous lullaby about the Black Douglas: “Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye, Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye, The Black Douglas shall not get ye,” after which Douglas puts a hand on her shoulder and sa
ys, “Do not be so sure of that” (Ronald McNair Scott, Robert the Bruce King of Scots [New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982], 139). After presumably scaring the life out of her, he gallantly promises to protect her. Whether there is any truth to it, I have no idea, but as we’ve seen before, Sir Walter sure knows how to spin a good yarn, and his tales often find their way into the history books as truth.
Edward Bruce, Earl of Carrick, either already entrenched in the siege at Stirling Castle or on his way to start, was indeed ordered to Roxburgh by the king to “receive local submissions” (Michael Brown, Bannockburn: the Scottish War and the British Isles, 1307–1323 [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008], 107) and oversee the destruction of the castle, which was effected much as I described it, by the digging of “shafts” underneath the walls, and then the “firing” of the “timber supports” with “the tunnels collapsing inwards and bringing the great masonry walls of the magnificent buildings crashing thunderously to the ground” (Cornell, 121).
Randolph, who’d been entrenched in the siege at Edinburgh for well over a month by this point, had to have felt the pressure to do something equally daring and “momentous” after his rival’s great triumph at Roxburgh. He proved equal to the task by climbing the never-before-ascended Castle Rock to take the Edinburgh garrison by surprise.
Thom MacGowan is my version of the local man who was said to have led Randolph up the rocks: William Francis. The possibly apocryphal story is that as a young man, Francis had a sweetheart who lived in the castle and he’d snuck in to meet her. Whether the romantic part of the story was true or not, Francis was rewarded with lands in Sprouston, Roxburghshire, for his extraordinary efforts (G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005], 256).
The castle also was taken much as I described it (with the exception of the makeshift pitons—see below) with a diversion at the south gate, and then the thirty or so rock climbers, “before the art had been invented, inched their way in darkness up the steep and slippery north precipice” (Barrow, 256). This route was “so steep and treacherous that it was considered unscalable” (Cornell, 121). Some of the descriptions of this feat in the accounts are wonderful: “the sharp edges of the rocks cut into their hands” (Cornell, 122) as the Highlanders from Moray ascend the crags “with finger holds and toe holds in the crevices . . . clinging to the rock face” (Scott, 140).
John Barbour in his poetic recounting of the story in The Brus, probably written about sixty years later, mentions a stone tossed down by the watch above, but the rescue of Randolph by Thom was my addition.
The momentousness of Randolph’s feat is still apparent today. One of the first things visitors see upon arriving at Edinburgh Castle is the plaque dedicated to Randolph commemorating this event on the outer wall by the main gate. If you are surprised by the 1313 date like I was, apparently this is the result of a calendar change to what we now consider 1314.
How big were the English garrisons at the castles? The best guess (Cornell, 114) is about 123 men at Roxburgh and 194 at Edinburgh.
Militarily, the importance of the taking of these two castles was enormously significant—it took away key places of refuge for the English on their march north in the coming summer, as well as eliminated places for resupplying the troops. But I suspect the moral victory of wrenching away these two strongholds in such dramatic fashion so close to battle was just as important. To both friend and enemy, it must have seemed as if God was truly with the Bruce, giving the Scot “Davids” confidence as they neared the battle with the English “Goliath.”
Despite his late addition to the Guard, Thom “Rock” MacGowan was one of the first stories I came up with when planning the series. I knew I would need a climber for this part of the story and couldn’t help but be inspired by the romantic tale of Francis climbing the rocks to sneak in and see his sweetheart.
Both MacGowan and Elizabeth Douglas are fictional characters. It is possible James Douglas had a sister, but his family tree is particularly sketchy (as noted in The Knight), although he does appear to have had two half brothers, Archibald and Hugh.
Douglas was sent to France after his father was killed for his safety, which inspired Elizabeth’s later trip. The Douglases—including his English stepmother, Eleanor de Lovaine—were dispossessed of their lands by a virulent Edward. James Douglas’s inability to get his lands returned to him eventually set him on a path to join Bruce in 1306. Eleanor, however, was more successful and was able to get her lands returned about three years after William “the Hardy’s” death in about 1298. Wondering what happened to the widow and her two young sons in the interim inspired the difficult period faced by Elizabeth.
Because rank and station were so important in medieval times, I knew from the outset that I had to find a way to write about it. The sister of the powerful Lord of Douglas and the smithy’s son seemed like a perfect way to do so. I’d already decided on the clan MacGowan (in Ireland McGowan), which in its Gaelic form (Mac Gobhann) means son of the smith, but in one of those serendipitous research moments that I’ve had a few times while writing this series, the connection seemed meant to be when I discovered that there was a branch of the clan in Nithsdale in the fourteenth century, which just happens to be the location of an old Douglas castle.
Smiths, sword makers, and armorers were specialized fields at this time, and in the burghs and big cities would have been distinct and likely undertaken by different people. Indeed, most of the different parts of sword making would have had their specialists: from the person who actually smelted the ore, to the swordsmith who shaped the blade, to the cutler who made the hilt, and yet another who might make the scabbard. An important lord might have his own armorer, but in small villages a blacksmith might have been more a jack-of-all-trades—from making everyday items like horseshoes, farm implements, and cooking pots to fixing armor and making swords.
When combining my smith’s son with climbing, I couldn’t resist having him decide to use a spike to help climb Castle Rock, pre-inventing the first piton, which was reputed to have been used by a climber in France in the next century (in the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue).
One of the most difficult things in writing this novel was trying to import the rigid social structure and the stigma against marrying down to the modern sensibility. It wasn’t just “not done,” but it was really looked down upon as offending the social fabric, social order, and to some extent, I think seen as failing the duty (and thus a justification) of being noble. Nobles were “different” from the rest of us, and for their place in society were expected to put aside personal desires for the good of the family dynasty.
Society was clearly stratified, and there was a permanence of where you were in the “estates.” The three estates were the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners (later there would be a fourth estate for rich merchants, burghers, and the like). People didn’t move around a lot—you were what you were born (except in the church, of course)—and everyone had their place and role. The idea of upward mobility is probably somewhat anachronistic, although you could improve your lot by entering the church, to some extent through marriage, or through warfare.
Whereas today we would just say to marry him if you love him, that clearly wasn’t the way people thought seven hundred years ago. In the late Middle Ages there would have been real pressure against a marriage like Elizabeth and Thom’s where the difference in rank was so extreme. Blacksmiths in times of war were definitely very important people, but they were of lowly status.
It was very hard to get a sense of how common or uncommon marriages between nobles and people of lower status were, but my sense was that from the few examples I was able to find they were very infrequent. The examples I did come across were more like James and Joanna—the difference in rank more mild. Nowhere did I come across a situation with the disparity of Elizabeth and Thom, which isn’t to say that it couldn’t have happened.
What is clear is that marriages between unequals were s
o likely to stir controversy and discord that it was thought they should be hidden and kept private, which flew directly in the face of the medieval belief that marriages should be public affairs, requiring the reading of the banns. Significantly, one ecclesiastical author on the subject at the time—a French priest by the name of Pierre de la Palude—counted as one of the six reasons for dispensation from the reading of banns: “Marriage between a person of noble rank and a non-noble, since these unions excited opposition and scandal” (James A. Brundage, Law, Society, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 442–43). Another one of the six was, “Marriage of a rich person to a poor one, as these upset the social order” (ibid.).
Historian Alison Weir, in her book The War of The Roses, referring to the marriage of Owen Tudor to Queen Kathryn, states, “What is likely is that the wedding had to be kept private because in marrying a man so far below her in rank the Queen had ‘followed more her own appetite than her open honor’ ” (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011, 80). Keep in mind that the “lowly” Owen was the grandson of a Welsh prince.
Elizabeth’s fear of poverty would have been a reasonable one; going from rich to poor in medieval society would have been a drastic change in the standard of living. Recent scholarship on the standard of living in England in the late fourteenth century before the outbreak of the plague suggests that peasants were actually a little better off than originally thought, with a per capita income of $1,000 (rather than $400 as was believed). Relative to our poorest nations today, this is similar to Afghanistan ($869) (www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/medieval_england_twice).
So if we assume peasants (who might earn up to £2 a year) were living a life similar to today’s people in Afghanistan, a blacksmith, who might have earned about £12 a year (Thomas Thomson, Earliest Times to Death of Robert Bruce 1329 [London: Black & Son, 1896], 201) would have certainly been better off, but nowhere near the barons (£200–£500-plus) and earls (£400–£11,000-plus). (Kenneth Hodges, List of Price of Medieval Items, http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html.) Talk about one percenters!