“You know I cannot do that.” He brushed her lips with his. “Come. Walk with me downstairs. The men wait.”
She summoned her last argument. “John, I’m afraid. The dream I told you about came again and another one with it. This one was even stranger than before. ’Tis almost as if someone is trying to warn me.”
He sighed and sat down on the chair, pulling her to his knee. “Tell me what you saw.”
She settled against him, breathing in the reassuring warmth of his scent. “First, the same as before,” she began. “I saw my own face, and yet I knew the lady was not myself. She beckoned me down a tunnel here at Traquair. It looked like the cellar where the wine is stored. She refused to speak, but I knew her thoughts. At the end of the tunnel was a large antechamber and a flat gray stone set in a place of honor. The stone glowed with a light that came from nowhere. We knelt together, the lady and I. I knew her mind as well as I know my own.” She turned to him, flushed with excitement. “It was the Stone of Destiny, John. The stone that sits under the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey is not Scotland’s true stone. The lady in my dream was Mairi of Shiels, and she did not give the true stone to Edward the Hammer.”
John took her hands and rubbed them between his own. They were very cold. “Why is this so important to you? The deed is done. Mairi’s guilt or innocence makes no difference to us now.”
Her eyes, wide and gray as the North Sea, entreated him. “We must find the stone. If we do not, something terrible will happen. I know it.” She saw the doubt in his face, and frustration surged through her. “Trust me in this. Please, John.”
“What of your other vision? Was that one a warning as well?”
Jeanne frowned. “I know not. I was here at Traquair but in a room I’ve never seen before. There were people wearing strange clothing and speaking a language that was familiar and yet different from ours. I saw myself in the glass.” Her voice grew whispery soft. “It was a wonderful glass, like looking into the clearest stream. Again, my face was the same, and I carried a bairn. I could feel him close to my heart.” She rested her hand on her stomach. “My clothes were odd. I wore hose like a man that made my legs look long and thin, and my hair was clipped close to my head.”
John frowned. The hour grew late, and he hated to leave her like this. Ever since Isobel’s death, Jeanne had suffered from nightmares. Jamie’s invasion of England could not have come at a worse time for Scotland and for his family. At first, the news that Jeanne was carrying a child had seemed like a godsend, but now he wasn’t sure. She seemed so distant, so removed from life at Traquair. Even Andrew could no longer coax a smile from her. She woke at night, slipping out of the great laird’s bedroom to walk aimlessly through the freezing corridors, a silent, wraithlike figure in a white nightshift, ethereally pale, her figure slight as a child’s except for the small mound at her belly. In moments of despair, John feared that her trauma had been too great and that the woman he had loved for most of his life was lost forever. He looked at her now, her cheekbones striking and carven in her still face.
“Jeannie,” he murmured. “I must go. Do not make it more difficult than it already is.”
She looked at him, her eyes darkening briefly with the old rebelliousness he remembered so well. His breath caught in his chest, hoping against hope that his wife had returned to him. The look faded, replaced by the vacant stare he had seen so often in the past weeks.
“I’ll watch from the window,” she said. “You know how I feel. ’Tis too much to ask anything more.”
He nodded and held her chin so that she looked directly at him. “Take care of yourself,” he ordered gruffly, “and don’t forget to eat. You’re dreadfully thin. A man wants more in his bed than skin stretched over a bag of bones.”
She looked mutinous again, and again his heart rejoiced at her words. “You told me you preferred a slim lass,” she retorted, “and I’ll