My Lady Lucia

Caerrwellon Castle, St Abb’s Head, Scotland, 1479.

The sound came first.

Not the crack of bone, but the heavier sound that followed, the dull, final thud of a body meeting stone. It was followed by a silence so complete it seemed to draw the air from the stairwell. Lucia did not scream. She remained where she was, one hand on the doorpost, her breath held. For a heartbeat, she did nothing. Then she stepped forward, her skirts brushing the stained rushes, and walked downstairs.

His body had stopped at the foot of the stairs, one arm bent beneath him at an angle that made her stomach tighten. His head had struck the edge of the lower step. She could see where the stone had split the skin, dark already. Blood was seeping in a slow, deliberate pool across the stone. His eyes were half-lidded.

The spiralling staircase had always been treacherous, uneven in places where the stone had sunk with age.

She lowered herself to her knees, careful not to touch him. Her reflection wavered faintly in the dark spill on the stone; pale face, hair loosened from its pins, the fair gold of it dulled by shadow. She lifted her fingers, almost without thought, to the tender swell on her cheek where the heat had not yet faded. She had always been small beside him.

Her first thought was not of death. It was of witnesses. Her gaze went to the top of the stairs, then to the passage beyond. The castle was quiet but not asleep. The sea breeze pressed against the shutters, steady and unfeeling. Somewhere, a door creaked softly, followed by small footsteps retreating into shadows. “Tam,” she said. The voice echoing off the walls did not tremble. That frightened her more than anything else. She listened.

There was no answer. Her chest tightened, not with grief, but with calculation. Good.

She leaned closer, pressing two fingers against his throat. A faint pulse beat beneath her fingertips, and she pulled hastily back, wiping the blood on her skirt. Her breath left her in a slow, controlled exhale as his eyes fluttered open. His mouth worked, the sound that came from it more animal than speech. “You,” he rasped, his voice catching and wet. She did not move back. “You think this ends me?”

The smell of him grew sharper as she leaned closer, sour with blood and fear. “You fell,” she said so low only he could hear it. “The stair finally did it.”

His lips pulled back into something resembling a smile. “I’ll see you... ruined,” he wheezed. “I’ll have that devil boy sent south... You’ll watch them... take him.”

The words struck where he meant them to. She felt it, sharp and cold, but she did not let it show. “You won’t,” she said.

He coughed violently, sending a splatter of blood against her cheek, making her flinch hard. He tried to move and grab her, but failed, his hand scrabbling weakly against the stone. “You belong to me,” he hissed.

Lucia straightened her spine. “No,” she said, not loudly. “You never understood what was never yours.” She stayed to watch his eyes glaze again, then close, listening to his strained breathing and counting the intervals between his heaving breaths. It did not take long before he quietened. She rose then and stepped back, careful not to step in the bloodstain crowning his broken skull.

Her decision was already made. Her fear had taken shape into something she could use. She would not alert anyone. He would bleed out and die there, on the floor. She knew by the sight of him that it would not take long.

She rose and leaned her forehead against the cool stones of her home. Thank you, she whispered. It was not to God.

She ascended the stairs slowly.

The chamber beyond hers lay in darkness. Tam’s bed was empty, the blanket half kicked aside. Ella was sleeping soundly, thumb in her mouth, nestled like a little kitten in the covers and furs. She turned to leave but was stopped by Fenella, appearing in the doorway. Her hair was unbound, a shawl pulled tight against the chill. “My lady,” she said, and then she saw the blood. Her eyes widened. “W-what happened?”

“Something horrible. Or a blessing. I haven’t decided. He fell down the stairs,” Lucia whispered.

“Hugh?”

“Yes. And by dawn, the truth of this will belong to more than me. I must speak to Tam before that.”

“Tam?”

“Yes. I think... He was there.”

“We’ll find him,” Fenella promised, tight-lipped.

They did not call the boy’s name. As the passages narrowed deeper within the keep, Lucia took a cresset from its hook, shielding the flame with her hand. The light barely reached the walls, but it was enough. She moved as she had learned to move. Quietly, with purpose, never drawing attention to herself.

First, they checked the places where a child might hide without thinking. The empty bedchambers. The small alcoves in the corridors downstairs. Empty. Fenella touched the door to the old dungeons and shook her head. “My Lady,” she said quietly. “He would not go there. He hates that place.”

“I know.”

They moved past the servants’ quarters, where the night still held. Lucia listened for breath, for movement, for the smallest sound that did not belong to the wind or the sea.

The hall was dark when they entered, smelling of damp wool and fires long gone cold. Benches stood where they had been left after supper. Nothing in the room bore witness to what had happened. Lucia paused beside the trestle table at the dais and closed her hand around its edge. His seat stood empty now and would never hold him again. She released the table and went on. Panic had no place here. Panic made noise.

“Lucia. Over here.”

Fenella’s voice came from ahead, low and urgent. She turned toward it at once, her heart racing. The flags beneath her feet dipped where they always had, worn hollow by generations passing through before her. Walls remembered longer than men.

She kept the light low as she went after her maid, letting it skim the edges of doorways without revealing their depths. A frightened child would hide deeper where light fell fully. She had taught her son that without meaning to. Her thoughts returned, unbidden, to the stair. Not the body below it, but the space above, the narrowing of air where voices had risen and then been cut short.

Fenella waited for her at the foot of the passage leading to the old cellars and storerooms. Lucia braced herself. Not because she heard him, but because she didn’t. The keep had its own sounds at night, the settling of damp stone, the sigh of wind through narrow slits. Now there was something else, a careful absence, as though the air itself were holding still.

She lifted the light a fraction before she descended into the darkness. There, along the inner curve of the wall, a mark brightened the slick stone. The trace of a small hand, drawn tight and steady. Her chest tightened once. She went down slowly, placing her feet where the step did not curve.

At the turn of the stairs, a door stood not fully closed. A door shut fast drew notice. One left ajar did not. She pushed it open with her fingertips.

The room lay in shadow. An empty sack was pushed against the wall, the lump beneath it the size of a small boy. She set the light down and went to her knees. “Tam,” she whispered. A sniff answered her. She reached out and felt him there, small and rigid, pressed into the stone. He did not cry when she drew him out and held him against her, her hand cradling the nape of his neck. For a moment, she could not breathe. “God...” she said, the word torn from her before she could stop it. She pulled back just far enough to look at him, her hands sliding up to cup his face, her thumbs rough with stone dust against his cheeks. “Oh, Tam...” Her voice shook now. She did not try to steady it. “I don’t know,” she said, low and broken, “I don’t know what you heard tonight. I don’t know what you did.”

His eyes flicked away from hers at that, quick and frightened. He swallowed. “I killed Papa.”

She felt the words like a blade. “No,” she said at once, her grip tightening. “Listen to me. You mustn’t say that. Not now. Not ever. You did nothing. He fell.” The words came fast and urgent. “You are not to speak of this. Do you understand me?”

Tam nodded, a small, desperate movement. She pulled him against her again, hard enough that he made a sound, a thin sob caught and swallowed. She held him, rocking once, twice, as if the motion might carry them backwards in time to a moment before stone and falling and silence.

“Will they hang me, Mama?”

The question tore something out of her. She did not answer at once. Her arms tightened around him, protective and fierce. “No. Not as long as I am here. No one will take you from me. Not tonight. Not tomorrow.”She drew back only when his breathing slowed, when his body slackened against hers in exhausted obedience. “Listen to me, Tam. I need you to stay here a wee bit longer,” she said again, quieter now. “Wait for me.”

He nodded once, eyes too old for his age.

Lucia stood, her legs unsteady, her chest aching as though something had lodged there and refused to move. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, squared her shoulders, and turned toward the stairs. What waited would get only what she chose to give. After she had closed the door behind her, she leaned against it. She remained there for a heartbeat longer than she meant to. Her chest hurt with the effort of breathing. She pressed her hands flat to the old wood, then forced herself away.

Fenella waited for her at the top of the steps, the light held low, her face set. She took one look at Lucia and did not waste time with questions that did not matter. “You found him,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Hurt?”

Lucia shook her head once. “Not as they would see it.”

Fenella exhaled slowly. “Thank God.”

“Not yet,” Lucia said, her voice dropping as she leaned closer to her maid. The stones carried sound too well. She lowered her voice until the words barely formed. “We need to be careful. You go see if anyone has discovered Hugh. Make sure I’ll have a clear passage with Tam. He stays in his room tomorrow morning until it’s over. If anyone asks, the boy sleeps off a fever and must not be disturbed.”

Fenella nodded. She understood that kind of knowing. “What do I say when they ask how it happened,” she murmured.

“You say he fell, no witnesses,” Lucia said. The words came too easily. “You say the stairs are old and have taken worse. You say nothing else.”

Fenella reached out and touched Lucia’s bruised cheek, firm and steady. “I’ll keep watch, my lady,” she whispered.

By morning, men would try to take the truth from them. Until then, Lucia would prepare. She let herself imagine it for a single breath. The quiet that would follow. The relief of certainty. A fall. An old stair. A man too drunk to mind his footing. It would be believed. It wanted to be believed.

“You always thought Caerrwellon would hold you,” she whispered quietly into nothing. “It never did.”