The Ghost Read online

  Past the point of caring about her father’s anger, she tried again. “Please, Father, I’m begging you. Please do something to help her. You can’t leave her like this.”

  But he could. And that’s exactly what he did, dragging her sobbing and pleading from the castle.

  Joan had never felt so helpless in her life. She’d failed. Her knees collapsed, and she would have slid to the ground had her father not been holding her up.

  The pain and devastation on her face had finally penetrated the black haze of his anger.

  Too late he seemed to realize that he might have gone too far. He held her up against him as if she were one of the pretty poppets he used to buy her as a child. “I’m sorry you had to see that, daughter. But it was for your own good.”

  She looked at him as if he were mad. How could that possibly be for her own good? She would never forget it. Just as she would never forget his cruelty in bringing her here.

  What he saw in her expression must have alarmed him. He looked truly uneasy as he wiped some of the hair back from her face. Feeling the chill on her skin, he jerked off his plaid to wrap around her. “Your mother is dead to us both. We will not speak of her again.”

  He was right in that. They didn’t speak of her again. But it wasn’t her mother who died, it was her father, who didn’t rise from his bed after a fever struck him down two years later.

  She didn’t mourn him. He’d been dead to her since the day he’d taken her to see her mother hanging in a cage. Her father had taught her a lesson that day, although not the one he intended. The image of her mother treated so brutally and Joan’s inability to do anything to stop it would stay with her forever, as would her hatred toward the king who’d put her there and the man who had refused to lift a finger to help her. She never saw her father in the same way again.

  She would never see many things the same way again. No longer was she a spectator in the war between Scotland and England. From that day forward, seeing Edward of England defeated and Robert Bruce on the throne became all that mattered. She’d failed to free her mother from the cage, but she would do everything she could to ensure that her mother’s suffering had not been in vain.

  She should have taken the lashing. At least those scars might have had a chance to heal.

  1

  Carlisle Castle, Cumbria, England, April 16, 1314

  YOU ARE DRIVING me wild,” the young knight said as he frantically pressed his hot mouth all over her neck. “God, you smell so good.”

  Joan wished she could say the same, but as Sir Richard Fitzgerald—the second-in-command of the Earl of Ulster’s Irish naval forces—had cornered her after the midday meal, he smelled distinctly of smoked herring, which needless to say was not her favorite.

  When he tried to press his mouth on hers again, not even the prospect of learning the movements of the entire English fleet could have stopped her from turning her head. “We can’t,” she said softly. The slight breathiness in her voice was not from passion, but from the effort of fending off a determined would-be lover tired of hearing no. “Someone might discover us.”

  Which was why she’d chosen this as a place to meet. It was private but not too private. She never left herself without a means of escape.

  Deftly twisting out of his tentacle-like embrace with the ease of someone who’d had practice escaping men with hands like a hydra many times before, she looked around anxiously as if to prove her point.

  They stood in a quiet section of the garden in the castle’s outer ward, where she’d announced that she was going to take a stroll after the long meal. As she’d intended, Sir Richard had followed her there and had pulled her behind one of the rose trellises.

  The young captain scowled, his face flushed with frustrated desire. With his light eyes, blondish-red hair, ruddy, wind-burned complexion, and sturdy build, he bore the marked stamp of his Irish forebears. He was not unattractive. Not that it mattered. She’d lost her weakness for handsome young knights a long time ago.

  “No one would discover us if you would agree to come to my room. My squire can sleep in the barracks for the night.”

  “I couldn’t,” she said, as if the suggestion shocked her, though it was hardly the first time she’d heard it.

  His smile might have been charming to someone with less experience in the ways of men. “Nothing untoward will happen,” he assured her with a gentle brush of his finger on her cheek.

  Right. Every time she heard false promises like that, it became more difficult to feign wide-eyed innocence. With some effort, she managed. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, his voice turning husky. “We can just spend a little time alone together. I thought you wanted that.”

  She gnawed anxiously on her bottom lip, as if contemplating the illicit offer. His gaze heated as he obviously contemplated equally illicit things about her mouth.

  “Of course I do,” she said. “But it’s too risky, and there is plenty of time—”

  “No there isn’t,” he snapped, losing patience with the two-week-long seduction that he no doubt thought would have progressed much further than a very few stolen kisses by now. She was supposed to be easy prey. “I received orders yesterday. I’m to leave in three days.”

  Finally, the information for which she’d been waiting! Joan had begun to despair of ever hearing anything of import from him. Young knights were usually so eager to boast and brag—which is why she targeted them (that and they weren’t married)—but Sir Richard had been frustratingly closemouthed.

  Until now.

  She hid her excitement and relief behind a mask of concern. “Orders? You are leaving? But I thought you had until June to muster at Berwick.”

  “I’m not going to Berwick.” He sounded distracted. His eyes had dropped to her chest again—a frequent occurrence. “God, you are so beautiful. There isn’t another woman like you.”

  As he looked like he might try to kiss her again, she shuffled “nervously” and spoke quickly. “You’re not? Has the war been called off, then?”

  He glanced up from his lustful study of her breasts. She hoped he thought her as stupid as she sounded. If his amused but slightly patronizing smile was any indication, he did.

  “No, the war hasn’t been called off. But my duties are on the sea in advance of the army.”

  Which is why she was here with him. It was rumored that the Earl of Ulster—Sir Richard’s commander who was currently in York meeting with King Edward—would be in charge of supplying the castles in advance of the English invasion. King Robert the Bruce would love to know of their plans. Though Ulster was Bruce’s father-in-law, he was Edward of England’s man.

  She acted as if the news of his leaving was devastating. “But where are you going? When will you be back? Will it be dangerous?”

  Whether he would have answered her questions, she would not find out. The sound of approaching voices put a quick end to the conversation. Leaning over, he pressed a quick kiss on her lips that she could not avoid. Herring.

  “Meet me later,” he whispered before slipping away.

  Not a chance in Satan’s garden, she thought with a shudder. At least until she had a means of escape.

  Cursing, knowing she might not have another opportunity like this again, she walked out from behind the trellis to greet the ill-timed interruption as the group of ladies came around the corner of a large hedge that surrounded some of the raised flower beds.

  Joan had been so close. But her contingency plan had worked too well. She hadn’t wanted to risk being alone with him too long. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep putting him off. It was a dangerous game she played, and she knew only too well what a fine line she walked.

  This was not the first time she’d encouraged a man to get information. She’d been spying for Robert the Bruce for almost six years now.

  Shortly after her father’s death, the Bishop of St. Andrews, William Lamberton, a loyal supporter of Bruce’s who was being held in England at the