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Mary wept during the entire trip back to Scotland. After months of searching, her father's men had finally found her. The nightmare of seeing her husband's bloody body slumped on the floor appeared over and over in her mind. She had no way of knowing whether her husband of such a short time was alive or dead for she had been torn from the life she had chosen to be thrust into a life chosen for her by her father.1
Now, she held her head high as she entered the chamber where her father waited. However, it was not the sight of her father that caught her eye, but James. The young but very powerful Lord Hamilton appeared as a pitifully rejected bethrothed as he stood beside her father and held his hand out to her as she approached the dais where her father sat. Mary ignored his hand, lowered her head, and curtsied to her father - a sign, she felt, of submission and obedience, but not defeat and, certainly, never surrender. In her heart she knew the only consolation of her love for Thomas was the babe that only she knew grew inside her.
Before her marriage to James Hamilton, Mary had been secretly married for a short time to an honorable young man. It was he whom she would always love and whose babe she carried. Lord Hamilton refused to recognize the boy child as his son or heir. Ilwyn, one of Mary's ladies, stole the child away at birth, saving him from certain destruction. The maid took Mary's son back to the home of his father's family and raised him as her own.
But Lord Hamilton was not without sin himself - he had fathered a son of a young serving girl at a friend's castle on the island of Arran.2 Thomas Boyd, Earl of Arran and friend of lord Hamilton, had such compassion for the maid and child that he raised the boy as his own. At the death of his adopted father, the boy, young James Hamilton, became the first Earl of Arran.
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