The Blackwood Bride

Chapter Originals

In the year 1524 there is a valley in the west of Scotland with two families in it, and between them in nineteen years they have killed forty-one people. Ailsa Kerr is five and twenty, which in that valley makes her an old maid, and the reason is that she has been betrothed twice and both men were dead inside a year — one at a ford and one in a barn, and neither of them by anything you could take to a court. Magnus Blackwood is thirty and has been head of his name for four years, since his father and his elder brother were killed on the same afternoon, and he has spent every one of those four years doing arithmetic that nobody else in his family will look at: there are ninety-one men of fighting age on his land and there were a hundred and forty in 1505, and at this rate there is no Blackwood in that valley by 1560. So the two of them are married in the March, in a chapel with armed men on both sides of it, by a contract that neither family believes in. She has four servants she trusts and a brother in the ground. He has a mother who will not speak to her and an uncle who has already decided how this ends. And somewhere in that valley is the man who actually killed her brother, and he is not a Blackwood.