Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The fire in the tavern hearth was the only source of warmth in Dunmore, and even that was doing a poor job.
William MacGregor held out his cup without looking up.
The young, tired barmaid—the kind of tired that came from working too long for too little—hesitated.
“I’ve paid,” he said.
“Ye’ve paid for two, sir. That’d be yer third.”
“And I’m askin’ for a third.” He looked at her then, with the patient, slightly pitying expression of someone explaining something to a person of limited understanding.
“So either ye bring it, or ye fetch yer master, and I explain to him why he’s losin’ a customer who happens to ken three of the magistrates in this county by their first names.” He smiled. “Yer choice, lass.”
She brought the drink, but he didn’t thank her.
Across the table, Fergus, a border trader and small man, watched the exchange with the wariness of someone trying to correctly identify what kind of trouble he was sitting with.
“Ye were sayin’,” William said, settling back. “About the castle.”
“Aye.” Fergus wrapped his hands around his own cup.
“The whole household’s talkin’ about her.
Village lass, nay family, showed up with Esther after the bairn went missin’.
Harris, they call her.” He paused. “Word is the Laird brought her back himself. She’s in the rooms adjacent to his chambers now. ”
William turned his cup slowly on the table. “His chambers?”
“Aye.”
“A village lass,” he said it the way you would say a stray dog. Not quite contempt, but the category of things that did not belong in certain spaces. “And the clan just accepts this? Nobody questions it?”
“The clan loves her, from what I hear.” Fergus shrugged, with the diplomatic caution of a man who sensed he was conveying information his audience didn’t like. “She’s good with the bairn. Esther’s well. Better than she was, they say.”
William said nothing for a moment.
Esther. His daughter, his blood, his bargaining piece, and apparently now devoted to some tavern girl with a kind face and no name worth mentioning.
“Of course she’s better,” he said, with a smile that didn’t touch his eyes.
“Children are resilient. They recover. Esther would have been fine regardless. She has MacGregor blood, whatever me brother likes to pretend about how I left her.” He took a drink.
“Noah’s always had a talent for makin’ himself the hero of a story he arrived at late. ”
Fergus said nothing, which was the appropriate response.
“What else?” William said.
“That’s most of it. The lass runs the schoolroom, eats at the Laird’s table, has the staff half charmed.” Another pause. “People like her. She isnae tryin’ to be anythin’ she’s nae.”
“Everyone’s tryin’ to be somethin’ they’re nae,” William said pleasantly. “Some people are simply better at hidin’ it.” He leaned forward slightly. “Does she have family? Anyone who might have a claim on her, or a reason to want her somewhere else?”
“Nae that anyone kens. Father’s somewhere, nobody kens where. Mother’s gone.”
“So nobody would come lookin’ for her.”
Fergus went a little still. “Sir.”
“I’m thinkin’ out loud,” William said, leaning back again, easy as anything. “Nay need to look like that. I’m nae plannin’ anythin’ dramatic. I simply like to understand the full picture.”
He gestured with his cup. “Me brother has me clan. He has me daughter. He has me father’s castle and me father’s title and every acre of land that should have come to me when the old man died.
” He set the cup down with a soft, precise click.
“All I’m lookin’ for is leverage. Somethin’ that makes him want to talk. Ye understand.”
Fergus clearly did not find this reassuring, but also clearly lacked the standing to say so.
“There’s one more thing,” Fergus said, after a moment. “Might be nothin’.”
“Tell me.”
“She started from being a tavern maid and went on to help run an orphanage in the village. Was givin’ half her wages to the orphanage, might still be doin’ so.”
William looked at him. Then he laughed, a short, genuine sound, the first real one of the evening.
“She’s poor,” he said. “Genuinely, practically poor, and she’s in there spending her own coin on other people.
” He shook his head. “Me brother always did have a weakness for the self-sacrificin’ type.
Our mother was the same way.” He picked up the cup again.
“It’s an attractive quality. Right up until it becomes a liability. ”
Fergus left shortly after, with the look of a man who had done what he was paid to do and would rather not think too much about what would come next.
William sat alone.
The barmaid passed, and he waved her over. She came with visible reluctance, which he understood. He had that effect on people when he wasn’t performing. He found it, on balance, more honest than the alternative.
“Another,” he said. “What’s yer name?”
She blinked, surprised. “Maisie, sir.”
“Maisie.” He looked at her properly for the first time. “Tell me something, Maisie. If someone took everything from ye, yer home, yer position, yer future, and the law said it was all perfectly fair and proper and nothin’ to be done about it, what would ye do?”
Maisie looked deeply uncertain whether this was a genuine question. “I... I daenae ken, sir.”
“Ye’d find another way,” William said. “That’s what ye’d do. Ye’d find the door they left unlocked.” He picked up the refilled cup. “Everyone leaves somethin’ unlocked.”
She retreated to the bar.
He thought about his brother the way he always did. Not with grief anymore, but with a flat, methodical attention like a man taking stock of an enemy.
What Noah possessed, what that signified, and what could be utilized.
Noah had the title, the land, and the clan’s loyalty. Noah had, apparently, found himself a woman who made him feel human in ways he’d never bothered with before.
And the woman had no family, no protection, and no name that mattered. She’d been spending her own wages on the orphanage, probably on his daughter, too.
One thing he cannae afford to lose, of course, was his daughter.
He looked into the fire and let the plan take shape, piece by piece, in the patient and methodical way of someone who had nothing left to do but wait and think and eventually move.
He signalled for one more drink.
He had time.
Noah always forgot that William had time.