Fair Border Bride Read Free Page A

in his saddle as he headed up the gentle rise to the old Port Gate in the Roman Wall on the ridge behind Corbridge.
    A hundred paces from the tavern, he left the cots and cabins behind and rode on between high hawthorn hedges. Moonlight showed him the dried mud of the track slanting gently uphill.
    The gentle huff of wind from the ridge failed to disguise the burble of water flowing across the track. The mare hesitated. Harry looked east. A dark mass of trees reached out across the hillside and swallowed up the stream. This must be the Ay burn that led to Aydon, Alina’s home. He hesitated and then turned Bessie to the east.
    ‘A quick look won’t hurt,’ he murmured, and allowed the mare to pace slowly along the grassy bank.
    The trees swooped in from the slopes around him. In no time at all, he and Bessie walked through woodland, and he had to duck now and then to avoid a low branch. He pressed on over last year’s leaf fall, moving slowly and carefully between tall, fat-girthed trees.
    The land rose swiftly on his right and rapidly became a cliff face to which trees clung with roots like gnarled hands. Moonlight fought its way through the summer foliage, and showed him where a small tributary dashed in from the left. Following it up the slope, he reached smooth meadows that ran up to a dark bulk of a building. Aydon Hall, perched above the ravine.
    No lights showed at the windows. Harry grinned in the dark.
    Father would call him a romantic idiot for this. Father excelled at strategy, in confusing his enemies, in always being in the right place at the right time, and despised pointless excursions that brought no reward. Harry’s talents veered more in the direction of seizing opportune moments and following gut instinct.
    He shifted in his saddle, clicked his tongue and urged Bessie on. This diversion wasn’t romance, but sheer nosiness. He drew rein and stood beneath Aydon Hall in the darkest half of the night.
    After two years of boredom confined in the stuffy, tension ridden rooms of King Henry’s court, where the heady mix of perfumes and fright made a man’s head ache, what could be better than being out in the cool night air, with an adventure about to begin? No hanging about at court waiting for greedy men to decide if they should petition the king before dinner, after it or wait until morning.
    Harry looked up at the hall. Imposing, but not overlarge, and crenelated. Marauding Scots and greedy English reivers had pushed the owner into building a parapet; something to hide behind while he aimed arrows at his attackers.
    He hoped to own something grander than this one day. With a good education behind him, a strong physique and his father’s support, he should manage it before he was much older, and he was prepared to risk his neck to get it.
    Urging Bessie up the slope, he wondered if there would be guards peering through the crenels. He didn’t want an arrow in his back. Suddenly wary, he studied the parapet. The length of the wall ran away from him into the darkness of the forest on the other side of the ravine.
    Not a guard in sight. He rode on, and halted Bessie before the massive gateway. A beast bellowed in the byre behind him, and another answered.
    He looked around. All was in shadow but for moonlight hitting the rounded curve of a high drum tower midway along the wall. He could learn nothing more about Aydon or its young mistress tonight.
    ‘Come, Bessie. Time to move on.’
    Probably just as well. Charming as Alina was, she was not the rich heiress of his dreams. Foolish whimsy had brought him here. He rounded the corner of a farm hind’s cottage. Shadowy grey in the moonlight, the lane stretched away into the distance, heading to the ridge where the Romans built their wall so long ago.
    A muted cry reached him, and another.
    Harry pulled his horse to a stand. Frowning, he looked around.
    He caught the faint sound of hooves thudding against the earth, then the moan and bellow of disturbed