Jane Feather: The Hostage Bride

Edinburgh, Scotland, December, 1643

Acrid 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 beneath the stick-like frame. “Brandy, woman!”

The crone glanced over her shoulder at the hump in the corner, then she spat into the fire. The spittle sizzled on the peat. “Girl’s gone fer it. Altho‘ what she’s usin’ to pay fer it, the good Lord knows.”

The bundle groaned again. A wasted arm pushed feebly at the blanket, and Jack Worth struggled onto his elbow. He peered through slitted eyes into the smoke-shrouded room. Nothing had improved since he’d last looked, and he sank back into the straw again. The earth floor was hard and cold beneath the thin and foul-smelling straw, pressing painfully into his emaciated body.

Jack wanted to die, but the flicker of life was persistent. And if he couldn’t die, he wanted brandy. Portia had gone for brandy. His enfeebled brain could hold that thought. But where in the name of Lucifer was she? He couldn’t remember what time she’d gone out into the storm. The blizzard obliterated all signs of time passing, and it could as well be midnight as dawn.

His pain-racked limbs were on fire, his eyes burned in their sockets, every inch of his skin ached, and the dreadful craving consumed him so that he cried out, a sound so feeble that the crone didn’t even turn from the fire.

The door opened. Frigid air blasted the fug, and the smoke swirled like dervishes. The girl who kicked the door shut behind her was wire thin yet exuded a nervous energy that somehow enlivened the reeking squalor of the hovel.

“Brandy, Jack.” She came to the mattress and knelt, drawing a small leather flask from inside her threadbare cloak. Her nose wrinkled at the sour stench of old brandy and decaying flesh exuding from the man and his sickbed, but she pushed an arm beneath his scrawny neck and lifted him, pulling off the stopper of the flagon with her teeth. Her father was snaking so hard she could barely manage to hold the flask to his lips. His teeth rattled, his lifeless eyes stared up at her from his gaunt face, where the bones of his skull were clearly defined.

He managed to swallow a mouthful of the fiery spirit, and as it slid down his gullet his aches diminished a little, the shivers died, and he was able to hold the flask in one clawlike hand and keep it to his lips himself until the last drop was gone.

“Goddamn it, but it’s never enough!” he cursed. “Why d’ye not bring enough, girl!”

Portia sat back on her heels, regarding her father with a mixture of distaste and pity. “It’s all I could afford. It’s been a long time, in case you’ve forgotten, since you contributed to the family coffers.”

“Insolence!” he growled, but his eyes closed and he became so still that for a moment Portia thought that finally death would bring him peace, but after a minute his eyes flickered open. Saliva flecked his lips amid his thick uncombed gray beard; sweat stood out against the greenish waxen pallor of his forehead and trickled down his sunken cheeks.

Portia wiped his face with the corner of her cloak. Her stomach was so empty it was cleaving to her backbone, and the familiar nausea of hunger made her dizzy. She stood up and went over to the noisome fire. “Is that porridge?”

“Aye. What else’d it be?”

“What else indeed,” she said, squatting on the floor beside the cauldron. She had learned early the lesson that beggars could not be choosers, and ladled the watery gruel into a wooden bowl with as much enthusiasm as if it was the finest delicacy from the king’s table.

But it was a thin ungrateful pap and left her hunger barely appeased. Images of bread and cheese danced tantalizingly before her internal vision, making her juices run, but what little she could earn in the taproom of the Rising Sun, drawing ale, answering ribaldry with its kind, and turning a blind eye to the groping hands on her body so long as they pushed a coin into her meager bosom, went for brandy to still her father’s all-consuming addiction. The addiction that was killing him by inches.

“Port… Portia!” He gasped out her name and she came quickly over to him. “In my box… a letter… find it… quickly.” Every word was wrenched from him as if with red-hot pincers.

She went to the small leather box, the only possession they had apart from the rags on their backs. She brought it over, opening it without much curiosity. She knew the contents by heart. Anything of worth had been sold off long ago to pay for brandy.

“At the back… behind the silk.”

She slipped her fingers behind the shabby lining, encountering the crackling crispness of parchment. She pulled it out, handing it to her father.

“When I’m gone, you’re to s… se…” A violent coughing fit interrupted him, and when it subsided he lay back too exhausted to continue. But after a minute, as Portia watched his agonizing efforts, he began again. “Send it to Lammermuir, to Castle Granville. Read the direction.”

Portia turned the sealed parchment over in her hand. “What is it? What does it say?”

“Read the direction!”

“Castle Granville, Lammermuir, Yorkshire.”

“Send it by the mail. When I’m gone.” His voice faded, but his hand reached for her and she gave him her own. “It’s all I can do for you now, Portia,” he said, his fingers squeezing hers with a strength she hadn’t known he still possessed; then, as if defeated by the effort, his hand opened and fell from hers.

An hour later, Jack Worth, half brother to Cato, Marquis of Granville, died much as he had lived, in a brandy stupor and without a penny to his name.

Portia closed her father’s eyes. “I must bury him.”

“Ground’s iron hard,” the crone declared unhelpfully.

Portia’s lips thinned. “I’ll manage.”

“Ye’ve no money for a burial.”

“I’ll dig the grave and bury him myself.”

The old woman shrugged. The man and his daughter had been lodging in her cottage for close on a month, and she’d formed a pretty good idea of the girl’s character. Not one to be easily defeated.

Portia turned the sealed parchment over in her hand. She had no money for postage, knew no one who could frank it for her. She didn’t even know if the mail services still operated between Edinburgh and York now that civil war raged across the northern lands beyond the Scottish border. But she could not ignore her father’s dying instructions. He wanted the letter delivered to his half brother, and she must find a way to do so.

And then what was she to do? She looked around the bleak hovel. She could stay here throughout the winter. There was a living of sorts to be made in the tavern, and the old woman wouldn’t throw her out so long as she could pay for the straw palliasse and a daily bowl of gruel. And without Jack’s addiction to supply, she might be able to save a little. In the spring, she would move on… somewhere.

But first she had to bury her father.

“M y lord… my lord… Beggin‘ yer pardon, my lord…”

Cato, Marquis of Granville, looked up at the voice, ragged for lack of breath, gasping behind him in the stable courtyard of Castle Granville. He turned, his hand still on the smooth black neck of the charger he was examining.

“Well?” He raised an eyebrow at the lad, who, unable to catch his breath for further speech, wordlessly held out a sealed parchment, then hugged his frozen hands under his armpits against the vicious January wind blowing off the Lammermuir hills.