She looked into my eyes, asking me to forgive her for the choice she was making, begging me to understand. Only, at the time, I didn't--I couldn't. All I knew was that I saw my life flying over that cliff along with her. I had no choice other than to follow.
She had been ravaged by the bloody brutes, and was battered and worn. They had dragged her from the carriage by her voluminous hair as the soldiers saw me approach. It was me they really wanted, after all; she had been nothing to them but bait.
My wife, the Countess of Buchan and Lady Beaumont of the Isle of Man, took a single step into nothingness, and plummeted to the crags below, her skirts billowed around her as she fell from the cliff.
Stripped of my titles and lands, I had become one of the disinherited nobles wandering without means, ousted from my homeland by the very parliament I enabled. I, who had been born first to a Scottish King, and subsequent to his death had been crowned at Scone, have been forced to beg a pittance pension from the English King. This whole despicable affair has not been easy for Katrine, nor for me.
I had thought that with my father's alliance with France I could reclaim my usurped throne. I had thought that King Henry would support me as he has in the past. But, I was sorely wrong. And, now, here I stood, protecting my very own, on the coast of Manx, opposing a writ for my arrest issued by the conniving Privy Council, and fighting The Bruce, and most recently the High King of Ireland, for the right to defend my honor.
Three months previous, I had escaped with my life by crawling naked through a hole in the castle wall, evading the attacking clansmen surrounding Solway Firth, making my way in the pitch of night to Carlisle. After another month in hiding at the Château Gaillard, I sailed to my fortress, Rushen Castle perched on the southern tip of the Isle. I had expected Katrine to have already arrived there, but alas, she was still en-route--in disguise--among an envoy of monks and clerics. Or, so I had thought.
For five days my knights had been defending the walls. On the sixth morning, just after day break, I received a message telling me that she had been captured and that her life would be spared in exchange for my surrender. I was promised exile, and so I had agreed, despite the arguments issued by all my advisers.
My war horse paced and snorted behind me when I reached my arm, futility, for my fallen wife. And, without thought, I ducked beneath the on coming mass of plaid and soared off the bluff and dove towards my wife as I had seen the plovers do thousands of times. In hind sight, perhaps I did her a dishonor in doing so, but at the time, it was all I could think to do.
I caught her in time to roll her on top of my body shield and to whisper into her ear and I pressed her bones against my muscle, that I loved her. Only her, for always.
I felt the shard of stone pierce my spline and splinter my pelvis. I felt my spine crack and my head smack against the basalt. I felt the heat of her life's blood flood through my fingers as the thrashing waves swallow my last breath with the rising tide.
She had died for me so that I might live. She had had the courage to die, rather, so that I might live to set things back to right. Only, I hadn't thought of that at the time. At the time, i had only considered my love for her, and the unbearable loss I'd suffer without her. And, so I, too, had chosen death.
I see now how cowardly my choice had been, leaving the clans still divided, and the Scots without their true King. I see now, in retrospect, how it's what he had wanted all along, what he had expected of me all along. That love of a woman would prove more than my love for Scotland. In that single blind but amorous act, I had forfeited not only my life and freedom, but my home and the last refuge for Scots in support of my rebellion. So, it is true that I am a coward, when all is said and done and the history's been written. Because I had simultaneously forfeited the lives of all those sworn to me, to the hypocritically unforgiving, now murderous Bruce. For he left none alive to ever again stand with England. He left none alive but those willing to crown him King of the Highlands and the Hebrides.
Blood was spilled that fateful day on the fields of Bannockburn. The Bruce's sword dripped and severed heads lined my turreted walls. Blood would spill for centuries still, though it only took ten high tides to lift our bones from the rocks onto which we fell, and to deposit them in torn pieces on the soft shoals where scores of fishermen spread their drying nets.
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