The Hostage Bride Read Free Page A

son, I lay upon you now the most solemn trust: that you will be avenged upon the house of Granville, and you will bear our name with pride even in the face of those who call it dishonored. You will by your deeds make the house of Rothbury a watchword for truth, justice, and honor even though you are condemned to live outside the law, to create your own world, your own truth, your own honor.”
    Rufus swallowed as he took the rolled parchment. His throat seemed to have closed under the dreadful weight of his father’s words. He was eight years old, but his shoulders stiffened as if all the better to bear the great burden of this responsibility his father had laid upon him.
    “Do you swear so to do?”
    “I swear.” Rufus found the words, though they sounded strange, as if coming from a great distance.
    “Then go.” His father laid a hand on the boys head in a moment’s benediction, then he kissed his wife and urged her toward the priest’s hole. Rufus looked back for an instant, his hair ablaze in the light of the oil lamp the messenger held high; his eyes, no longer the innocent, candid eyes of an eight-year-old boy, were filled with the foreboding of loss and the dreadful knowledge of duty. Then he turned and followed his mother into the darkness.
    The messenger followed them, and the stone on well-oiled hinges closed silently behind them.
    William strode from the chamber. He walked down the wide sweep of stairs to the stone-flagged hallway and out into the dusk, to stand on the top step and survey his accusers. To look in the eye of the man he had once called friend … the man who had now come to dispossess him of his house, his lands, his family honor.
    For a moment the two men looked at each other, and the silence stretched taut as a bowstring between them. Then William Decatur spoke, his voice low, yet each bitter word thrown with the power of lead shot. “So, this is how you honor the vows of friendship, Granville.”
    George, Marquis of Granville, urged his horse forward, away from the line of cavalry. He raised one gloved hand as if in protest, “William, I come not in enmity, but in—”
    “Don’t insult me, Granville!” The furious words cut through the other man’s speech. “I know you for what you are, and you will pay, you and your heirs. I swear it on the blood of Christ.” His hand moved from his side, lifted, revealing the dull silver barrel of a flintlock pistol.
    Rooks wheeled and shrieked over the gables as the hideous shock of the explosion faded into the stunned silence. William Decatur, Earl of Rothbury, lay at the foot of the steps to his house; blood, a thick, dark puddle, spread beneath his head. His eyes, sightless now, stared upward at the circling rooks, the scudding clouds, the first faint prick of the evening star.
    A soldier stepped forward, carrying a pitch torch. The flame flared, blue and orange under a gust of wind. He stepped over the fallen man and hurled his torch into the open doorway.
    George Granville sat his horse, immobile. He had comehere to oversee the kings justice. He had come to mitigate that justice, to work with his old friend to avoid the worst. But his intentions were so much chaff in the wind now.
    The earl of Rothbury lay dead at the foot of his burning house, and his heir, a lad of eight summers, was cast out into the world beyond the laws of man with a burden of vengeance that sat ill on the shoulders of a child, but that, George Granville knew, the lad would grow into. Rufus Decatur was his fathers son.

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    E DINBURGH , S COTLAND , D ECEMBER, 1643
    A crid smoke billowed around the windowless room from
the peat fire smoldering sullenly in the hearth. The old crone stirring a pot over the fire coughed intermittently, the harsh racking the only sound. Outside, the snow lay thick on a dead white world, heavy flakes drifting steadily from the iron gray sky.
    A bundle of rags, huddled beneath a moth-eaten Blanket, groaned, shifted with a rustle of the straw