Macbeth the King Read Online Free PDF Page A

see."
    Presently he left them there, and returned to his house.
2
    The sanctuary MacBeth provided for the Lady Gruoch and her son, for the next few months, was in fact the hall-house of Rosemarkyn itself. It is to be feared that he did not very seriously search for some hidden and remote refuge such as she had suggested. He himself returned to his principal dun and headquarters at Inverpeffery, partly for her reputation's sake and partly the better to deal with the situation that developed out of the changed conditions in the neighbouring Mormaordom of Moray. But he kept an eye on the young woman and her child, saw her fairly frequently, and made sure that Malduin, his seneschal, respected her needs and privacy. She asked more than once when he was going to find her a place of her own, but always he put her off.
    She represented a problem, to be sure, and a major unsettlement. Even if he could keep her safe, there was no means by which he could enforce secrecy or prevent talk. All Scotland knew that the Mormaor of Ross held the Lady Gruoch. And all would draw their own conclusions.
    On two more occasions he suggested marriage—and with a little more enthusiasm than before, although it had not really been he who had made the suggestion previously, but she who had forestalled it. The forbidden has its own desirability, especially when physically within one's grasp; and she was a highly attractive woman in more than just her beauty of person. So that he began to have a preoccupation with her—which was notably unlike MacBeth.
    She did not spurn his tentative advances unkindly. Indeed, she was quietly friendly when they met, acknowledging her indebtedness. But ever with her guard up, as it were. Perhaps her guard was permanently in position.
    Less personal but as persistent a preoccupation over these months of the year of Our Lord 1032 was that of the province and mortuath of Moray. He desired it also, inevitably. Not only because it would greatly enhance his power and status, but because it was the fairest and largest province in all Alba, his family heritage and where he had been reared, his childhood's home, the rambling island palace of Spynie in the Laigh. As a youth, twelve years before when his father Finlay the Mormaor had been slain by his own cousins Malcolm mac Maelbride and Gillacomgain, he had sworn that one day he would avenge his sire and regain Moray. The vengeance had been taken by others, and both the brothers were dead. But now Moray lay awaiting him.
    He could have simply mustered his fighting-men and marched in—as undoubtedly Thorfinn would have done and as Neil Nathrach and many another advised. But this would mean war. And although MacBeth did not shrink from bloodshed, where necessary, he did not wish to impose the inevitable battle, sack and rapine on his beloved Moray.
    He could, and did, make all arrangements for a swift assembly of his Ross forces, however, so that he could have 1200 men on the march, if need be, at two days' notice.
    MacBeth was, in the event, called upon to put his assembling procedures into practice unexpectedly and at sufficiently short notice, in the Ides of April, the call coming from an unlikely source. It emanated from Scone indeed, in Fortrenn, and from Malcolm the Second, King of Scots, in the form of a royal command of the Ard Righ to one of his lesser kings of the ancient Pictish realm, to march southwards in fullest strength and with all speed, to help counter the invasion of the kingdom by Knut the Dane, King of the English, known to the Sassunach as Canute.
    This summons, needless to say, put MacBeth into a major quandary. His first thought was that it was a trap to lure him into Malcolm's clutches. But, in that case, would the Destroyer have invented so tremendous a threat as the invasion of the mighty Canute the Great, Emperor of the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians, as he called himself these days? Or urged him, MacBeth, to come with all possible strength? Surely