Chapter 35
Madelyn
walked through the village, holding Patrick’s hand, and feeling quite grateful she was doing both.
After three days spent either in bed or taking invalid-paced walks, she was feeling almost herself again.
She still wasn’t sure her back would ever be the same, but Patrick was convinced that with a few more herbs and a visit to the chiropractor when they got home, she would be fine.
When they got home
. He made it sound as if they were just on vacation.
She hoped it wouldn’t be a permanent one.
At least her time at Club Medieval had allowed her body to begin to restore itself to its proper working order.
Either that or it was aiding her in avoiding having any more serious conversations with Patrick by propelling her out the keep’s front door where there were many things around that would serve as a distraction from the more serious matters that lay between them like a heavy bolster.
Matters such as: How would they get home and how would they live once they got there? As man and wife?
She just could bear to know yet.
That imaginary bolster hadn’t, however, stood in the way of several quite lovely kisses and a great deal of snuggling. Patrick had seemed quite enthusiastic about both—and more, truth be told.
After all, they were wed.
As far as Father John was concerned, at least.
She supposed they weren’t going to get a decent opinion on the matter from a man who was continually drinking himself into stupors because of unrequited love.
The object of his affections being one Grudach MacLeod.
Grudach was having none of him, it seemed, or so Robert said with disgust. Madelyn wondered if that meant the friar would spend the rest of his life pining and drinking.
She supposed it could have been worse. He could have been drinking and golfing.
At least this way, no one was going to get beaned by stray golf balls.
All of which left her in the unenviable position of now knowing just how authentic her marriage was.
She started to ask Patrick about his command of Latin the night before at supper, but he’d been distracted from his answer by a call to go help them settle the prisoner in the dungeon.
For all she knew, he had a coliseum full of words at his command.
If it came right down to it, though, she didn’t really want to ask him what he had understood—in case he didn’t think their marriage was worth the parchment it was written on.
She’d also begun to wonder how long they were going to be guests in Grudach’s room.
She’d broached the subject with Patrick at breakfast, asking him in an offhanded way what he thought the keep was thinking about them being sequestered in their room for so long.
He had lifted his sword, admired it, then looked at her and asked her if she thought they would actually dare inquire.
She’d said she didn’t suppose they would.
He’d assured her he would take care of any questions. After all, they were wed, weren’t they?
Madelyn hadn’t wanted to discuss it further, and she’d been more than willing to escape the house that day so she didn’t have to face that issue.
Cowardly? You bet.
Preserving the fragile state of her heart? Most definitely.
All of which left her holding Patrick’s hand—silently and not offering any answers to questions she didn’t want asked—while they walked through the village on their way to a particularly useful bit of countryside he was certain would still have a few of the herbs he was looking for.
Apparently one of the things on the docket for the day was the resetting of Robert’s fingers.
She wondered if the priest would give up some of his grog for the occasion.
She shivered as she walked and found herself immediately with a strong arm around her shoulders.
She was growing far too accustomed to the feeling of it—and to the sight of his sword strapped to his back, the sound it made as it occasionally slapped against various parts of his anatomy, and the thought of having it used in her defense.
She’d obviously been too long in the Middle Ages.
“Cold out,” he remarked.
“It is.”
“We won’t be long.”
She nodded and continued on with him, torn between looking at a village that boasted the kind of poverty she’d never seen before and looking at Patrick, who strode through that village like some Roman deity come down to survey his domain and offer his sword in their defense.
She would have been willing to let him.
Based on the looks he was getting from the villagers, she suspected they would have as well.
He nodded to elders, he bowed to women, he ruffled the hair of children and generally left all in his wake looking as if they would have liked to have trailed after him forever.
She understood completely.
He kept her close as they left the village and started out into the meadow.
It was indeed quite cold out, far colder than she would have supposed it to be, but it was, November after all.
Maybe it was even colder in the past than it was in the Novembers of the future.
She didn’t protest when Patrick put his arm back around her.
“Are we actually going to find anything useful in this frigid wasteland of winter?” she asked, her teeth beginning to chatter.
“Winter?” he asked with a snort. “This is but late fall. Winter is much worse than this.”
“I don’t know how you survived it,” she said honestly. “The cold. The food.” She almost brought up the sanitation issues, but she’d had more than enough experience with medieval sanitation to suit herself, so she let it slide.
“I told you I grew up being cold all the time.”
“Were you never warm?” she asked.
He winked at her. “Aye, of course. In July.”
She rolled her eyes. And she declined the offer of a seat on a fallen log while he was about his searching.
What he thought he was going to find in the patches of weeds he was searching in, she didn’t know.
Sunny probably would have been perfectly content, grubbing around and looking for things with strange names like yarrow and mullein.
She preferred things like antibiotic and antiseptic, but when in Rome . . .
She was contemplating the fine view presented by Patrick’s backside as he bent over to pluck up a few things to help him with Robert’s fingers later on that morning when she had the unsettling and quite familiar feeling that she was being watched.
Patrick froze. If she hadn’t been watching him, she wouldn’t have noticed. He very carefully pulled his last weed, turned, and came over to where she was standing.
“Is your knife in your boot?” he asked quietly in English.
“You bet.” Iolanthe’s old boots were tight, but they sure held a knife next to her calf like nobody’s business.
He smiled, handed her the herbs to put in the cloth she’d brought for that purpose, then took her hand and walked back to the village with her.
It was all she could do not to break into a run.
Patrick, however, walked at his normal pace, but she could feel every bit of him transformed into some kind of enemy antenna.
The feeling followed her, and apparently Patrick as well, until she was in the middle of the village, and then it dissipated.
Patrick didn’t stop this time to make polite conversation.
He told the people he saw to stay inside their houses unless the laird called for them to come up to the keep.
“War?” Madelyn asked.
He shook his head. “I think there was only one of them. It wouldn’t surprise me to find it had been a Fergusson scout.
I think our troubles with them are far from over.
” He looked down at her and smiled gravely.
“It might behoove us to make our way home in a pair of days, lest we find ourselves in the middle of a battle we’ve no stomach for. ”
“Can we leave?”
“It isn’t our war. At least not this century.”
“No wonder no one likes Hamish Fergusson.”
He smiled, a true smile. “Now you understand why Jane was less than forthcoming with her last name the first time she met Jamie, though we don’t hold her parentage against her. We have much to hold the Fergussons accountable for.”
Madelyn chewed on that one for quite a while, that thought of war.
She contemplated it during the setting of Robert’s fingers, a miserable, terrible business she could hardly bear to watch. She’d watched them be broken the first time. She should have known better than to watch them be broken a second time, even if that subsequent breaking was for his good.
She thought about it during lunch, during which time Grudach sat next to her and disparaged her as bluntly as she could manage with her father in earshot.
Madelyn hardly noticed. She smiled politely, thought about bodies strewn on a battlefield, and suggested to Grudach that she stop being such a pain in the butt and pay some attention to that nice priest who was in love with her.
And Grudach, for a change, shut her mouth, blushed furiously, and had nothing further to say for the rest of the afternoon.
Madelyn knew just exactly how little Grudach had to say because she spent the afternoon watching Patrick and Malcolm discuss the Fergusson threat.
Afternoon turned into evening and she excused herself to go upstairs.
Patrick promised he would follow, which raised a quite vocal chorus of suggestions, only half of which she understood.
Robert apparently hadn’t seen her as educated as he might have, but she decided to complain later, when her face had stopped flaming from the things she had understood.
She went to bed and fell asleep.
She woke at some point during the night to the sound of the door shutting.
“Patrick?”
“The very same.”
She put the dagger back down on the floor. She heard him set his sword down on the other side of the bed, then he lay down next to her. She went into his arms as if she’d been doing it for years.
It was frightening, how easy it had become.
“What did you decide?” she asked.