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him. His clothes wereunfamiliar. They were well made, but they hung loosely on him. She had never seen him so thin. His face – she had known to expect the four long scars on his cheek, wounds that she had seen in spring, but not the tidy beard that partially hid them. Nor had his hair been so cropped then and sprinkled with grey – he was fifteen years older than she, but he had not looked it before. Strangest of all were his eyes. They had been his least attractive feature, unflinching and, perhaps because they were such a pale blue, icy. She knew they could not have darkened, but they seemed so, darkened with sorrow, pain, suffering, she thought. The changes in him frightened her more than anything had since his cousin Jack’s death.
    ‘Am I much changed?’ he asked.
    She was glad to find his voice familiar, deep and warm.
    ‘I had not thought what you might have suffered,’ she said. ‘I knew of the wounds on your face, but I had not seen how thin you had become.’
    ‘I am stronger than I was.’
    She could think of nothing else to say. It was as if she had convinced herself that their factor’s murder, Edinburgh’s transformation into a town scarred by fires and bloodshed with the townsfolk terrified by Longshanks’s soldiers who watched every move, her uncle’s dangerous missions, the unexplained disappearances, the corpses, the dread rumours of battles – all the horror of the pastmonths had been but a waking dream and Roger’s changed appearance now proved it real. There was no going back. Her old life no longer existed.
    Roger touched her face. ‘You are as bonny as ever.’
    The tender gesture closed her throat and brought tears. ‘Roger,’ she sobbed, and stepped into his embrace. He smelled of sweat, wood smoke, horses and leather. His body was harder, his grip tighter than before, and she knew that though he was her husband in name he was yet a stranger. He murmured tenderly how he loved her, had missed her, had worried about her. Although she feared his words false, all the old hopes for their marriage stirred within her. Roger pressed himself against her and she grew warm with desire, her body betraying her.
    He lifted her and carried her to the great curtained bed, laid her gently on it. ‘It has been too long, my Maggie.’
    She found her resolve and rolled away from him, into the curtained darkness. ‘I cannot erase the months so quickly,’ she said, ‘no matter what you have suffered. When we met for a moment on that cold, rainy day in spring you did not reach out to me, you ran. Why?’
    Roger said nothing as he finished pulling off his boots, dropping them on the floor one by one. Then, with his back to her, he said in a quiet, patient voice, ‘I thought I could protect you,Maggie. Some of the English know of my work for the Bruce, and if they had witnessed our meeting they would have followed you, found some reason to question you.’ He unlaced the sides of his tunic, pulled it off, then sat cross-legged on the bed facing her.
    She wanted to wrap her arms around him and sink back on to the pillows clutching him tightly. But she was frightened to lose herself in him, to fall into the role of wife as blindly as she had before. ‘And afterwards, when Janet Webster told you why I’d come here, could you not see that you couldn’t protect me in such wise?’
    ‘I thought you’d gone mad. My young wife, safe in Dunfermline, had suddenly decided to abandon all sense and come here, walking among the English. Don’t you remember that soldier in Perth?’
    She knew of whom he spoke, one in Longshanks’s army who had grabbed her as she walked to the kirk. ‘I do, Roger. I remember how you ran from the house to defend me. I count it as one of my best memories of you – I thought at that moment that you loved me, that you had not married me simply for the show of having a young wife.’
    ‘What? How could you not know how much I love you, Maggie?’ Roger reached for her. ‘Come