Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
"Who told ye to open those?"
The maid stood in the doorway of James's chamber with a pile of fresh linen pressed to her chest and an expression caught squarely between alarm and apology.
She was young, fair-haired, round-faced, the same one who'd gone soft-eyed over Fox in the courtyard on the first day.
"Nay one," Catriona said, without looking up from the boy's breathing. "I told meself."
"But the cold, Miss, the Laird always says the room must be kept closed."
"The Laird says many things." She adjusted the shutter she'd eased open. Two fingers of gap, no more, enough for the air to move without sending a draft across the bed.
"Right now his lungs need air that isnae thick with peat smoke and four people's breathin'. So they'll have it."
The maid set the linen on the chest at the foot of the bed and hovered in the particular way of someone who wanted to object further but hadn't yet decided it was worth the cost.
Catriona looked at her properly. "What's yer name?"
"Mairi, Miss."
"Mairi." Bright eyes, thoughts moving visibly across her face before she could organize them.
The kind of girl who knew everything that happened in a household and couldn't help sharing it. Catriona had met a dozen like her over the years and found them, on balance, genuinely useful. "Are ye any good in a sick room?"
Mairi straightened immediately, the way people did when they were offered a thing they'd wanted to be asked.
"Aye. I helped the old healer sometimes. Before the fever took her last winter."
"Then stay." Catriona turned back to her satchel. "I need to ken what's in the stores and where they're kept, and I'd rather have it told to me than spend half the mornin' findin' out by wanderin' the keep and annoyin' everyone I meet."
Mairi's face opened into something approaching delight.
"The stores are in the lower corridor, off the kitchens. There's dried lavender, nettle bundles, some sage I think, and there was a jar of something brown and earthy that Cook keeps for the stew, but I suspect isnae for the stew."
"Lungwort?" Catriona asked.
A pause. "I daenae think so, Miss. I wouldnae ken what that looked like."
"Nay." She'd expected as much. "Elecampane root?"
"I'm nae certain."
"Brown root. Smells like violets when ye cut into it." She glanced sideways at her. "Go and look. Bring back whatever ye find and I'll sort what's of use."
Mairi was already moving toward the door, clearly pleased to have a purpose, when it opened inward from the other side and she stopped short.
The room changed quality before Catriona fully registered the cause.
A collective stilling of the servants who'd been moving quietly around the chamber, Fox lifting his head from beneath the bed frame, the particular shift in air pressure that happened when Anthony McArthur entered a space.
She'd noticed it before. The man didn't announce himself. He didn't need to.
He stood in the doorway with arms folded, gaze going around the room in one clean sweep before landing on the open shutters. Then on her.
"Ye rearrange me keep boldly."
She didn't turn from what she was doing, hands measuring dried herb into the mortar with the same steadiness they always had.
"I rearrange illness."
The silence he let follow was deliberate. She'd clocked that about him by now. The way he used quiet the same way other men used volume, dropping it into a conversation and waiting to see what it flushed out. She went back to grinding.
He spoke again. "Those shutters were closed for a reason."
"Aye." She set the pestle down and turned to face him. "The wrong reason."
She met his gaze directly, the way she'd learned to meet the gaze of men who mistook certainty for aggression.
"His breathin' was worse at midnight than it was at dusk. The room was sealed tight, fire burnin' high, the same air being breathed and breathed until there was more smoke in it than anything else. I opened the shutters two fingers' width, banked the fire lower, and sat with him for an hour."
She held the pause the same way he had. "He settled. His breathin' evened. He slept better than he has in a week, by the look of him." She tilted her head slightly. "So aye. I rearranged."
He looked at the shutters. Looked at James, chest rising and falling in the quieter rhythm of genuine sleep rather than exhausted collapse. Looked back at the shutters.
Then he unfolded his arms and said nothing, and she was learning, already, to read that particular silence as the closest thing he had to ye were right.
Around them the servants had gone very still in the manner of people storing up material for later.
Catriona could feel it. The particular quality of held breath that meant every person in the room was watching without appearing to watch, cataloguing every word for later circulation through the kitchens.
She caught the flicker of movement in the doorway. The young maid from the courtyard, frozen mid-step, eyes moving between them.
"The stores," Catriona said to her, without breaking eye contact with Anthony. "Go."
Mairi went. At some speed.
Anthony stepped back from the doorway into the corridor, not retreating, repositioning. The distinction was visible in how he moved.
"Fergus will escort ye to the market when ye need it," he said. "Whatever ye require, tell him."
"I told ye already I prefer to go meself."
"And I told ye ye'd have an escort."
"One man," she said. "Nae eight and a surroundin' formation like I'm a prisoner being transferred."
A pause. Not the deliberate kind this time, the kind where someone was deciding whether to argue. "One escort."
"And he stays back. I cannae work at a market stall with a man-at-arms breathin' on me neck."
"Within sight."
She considered pushing further. Decided it wasn't the battle that mattered today. "Fine."
She heard something that was almost, almost, the exhale of a man who'd anticipated a longer fight.
Then his footsteps moved away down the corridor, even and unhurried, the way they always were.
Catriona turned back to James. He slept on, chest rising and falling with the slightly improved steadiness of a body beginning, cautiously, to trust the air it was being given.
"Better," she told him quietly. "Keep goin'."
She spent the better part of the morning learning the keep the way she learned any unfamiliar terrain, on foot, unhurried, filing everything.
The kitchens she found by following the smell of woodsmoke and fresh bread.
The herb stores were where Mairi had said, in the lower corridor, cool and slightly damp, the kind of storage that kept things from rotting.
She went through the shelves methodically: lavender, nettle, sage, some dried rosemary that had lost most of its potency, willow bark still good, a jar of something that was absolutely not for stew. She took what was useful, left the rest, and carried it back upstairs.
The kitchen staff had watched her come and go with the cautious politeness of people who hadn't formed an opinion yet and were reserving the right to.
An older woman - broad-shouldered, efficient, the kind of person who ran a kitchen the way a general ran a field - had acknowledged her with a single nod and returned immediately to her work.
Catriona respected that.
Fox, naturally, had found his way into the kitchen, examined the room thoroughly, and fixed his attention on a joint of cold meat sitting on the far table.
"He willnae steal anything," Catriona said to the lad who'd frozen mid-step.
Fox looked at the meat. Then at Catriona. Then back at the meat.
"He might steal one thing," she amended.
From across the kitchen, without looking up from her work, the broad-shouldered cook said, "Move the joint, Tam."
The lad, whose name she now knew was Tam, moved the joint.
Fox watched it go with the dignified resignation of an animal too proud to give chase.
She had her worktable set up in the small room adjacent to James's. Eidith's arrangement, made without being asked, which told Catriona more about the woman than an hour of conversation would have. Practical. Observant. Not warm exactly, but not unkind either.
She filed that away too.
She was grinding elecampane root, focused on the consistency of it, when Mairi appeared in the doorway with a small basket and the expression of someone carrying both herbs and information, and considering which to deliver first.
She delivered the herbs first, to her credit. Set the basket on the corner of the table.
"Comfrey, and the brown-rooted thing ye described, I found two jars of it. And Cook says there's dried thyme if ye need it."
"Good." Catriona sorted through the basket without looking up. "Leave the comfrey. Take the thyme back, I daenae need it yet."
Mairi removed the thyme. Didn't leave.
Catriona looked up.
"The servants are talkin'," Mairi said. Dropped it simply, like a fact, with the slight forward tilt of someone who considered this information a gift rather than a warning. "About ye. About James breathin' better this mornin'."
"I'd imagine so."
"Some of them think," Mairi hesitated, choosing her words with more care than usual. "Well. Some of the older ones are saying it's too fast. That nothin' fixes lung sickness that fast."
"It isnae fixed," Catriona said plainly. "It's eased. There's a difference." She went back to the mortar. "What are the younger ones saying?"
Mairi's mouth curved slightly. "That ye argued with the Laird about the shutters and he let ye win."
Catriona made a non-committal sound. Kept her eyes on the mortar.
"That's nae nothin'," Mairi said. "He doesnae let people win."
Something about that snagged. Not the words, the certainty behind them. The way Mairi said it as plain fact, the kind of fact that didn't need defending because everyone already knew it.
He doesnae let people win.
She thought about the shutters. About the way he'd looked at James breathing in the quieter rhythm, then at the open shutter, then back. Said nothing and unfolded his arms.