Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
He came in at a gallop and pulled the horse up hard at the courtyard entrance. The sound of it, iron shoes on wet stone, the animal's sudden violent halt, cut through the crowd noise the way a blade cut through rope.
Clean. Immediate. Final.
Nobody had told them to go quiet. They just did.
Anthony dismounted without hurrying. That was the thing Catriona registered first. The deliberateness of it, one hand on the pommel, one boot finding the ground, then the other.
The full unhurried weight of him arriving in the courtyard as though he had all the time in the world and intended to use it exactly as he chose.
Mud darkened his boots to the knee. His jaw was set. His eyes moved across the assembled crowd in a single sweep, touching each cluster of faces in turn, and the clusters that had been loudest a moment ago found somewhere else to look.
Fergus came in behind him, and behind Fergus came two men Catriona didn't recognize. Behind them, on a lead rope, a shepherd in a wet wool coat who was trying very hard not to show that his legs were shaking.
Anthony's gaze found her.
One second. No more.
It moved across her face and down to the iron at her wrists and back up, and whatever he felt about what he saw, he kept behind his back teeth.
Then he turned to face the courtyard and the crowd and the council elder who was already stepping forward with his hands raised in the manner of a man preparing to explain himself.
Anthony looked at him.
The elder's hands came down.
"When I returned to me keep," Anthony began.
His voice carried to every corner of the courtyard without him raising it, which was somehow worse than shouting, the way a very still dog was worse than a barking one.
"I learned the healer had been taken in me absence." He let that sit for a moment. "Taken. In chains. In me own courtyard. On evidence presented to me council while I rode me own land."
His gaze moved across the crowd again, slower this time, and the people it landed on shifted their weight. "So before I returned here, I investigated the accusation meself."
"Me Laird." The elder stepped forward again, finding some reserve of official courage. "The evidence was presented in proper form. The council acted within its power."
"I didnae ask what the council did," Anthony said. "I'm telling ye what I did. Ye'll have yer turn."
The elder closed his mouth.
Anthony turned his head slightly. "Seumas."
Old Seumas detached himself from the edge of the crowd. His movement was slow and deliberate, showing his joints hurt, but deciding the pain was worth it today.
He came forward and stopped beside Anthony and squared his shoulders and looked at the assembled crowd the way he looked at the soil when he was displeased with it, which was to say with profound and personal affront.
"Tell them what ye told me," Anthony said.
Seumas pulled in a breath through his nose.
"Three days past," he said, his voice carrying the rough authority of someone who had been in this clan since before half the people present were born, "I was in the upper herb garden. Early. Before the household was up."
He paused, his eyes finding Moira's maid at the edge of the crowd.
A young woman with a pale, pinched face who had gone very still.
"I saw her. Carryin' bundles from the store near the healer's worktable.
I asked her what she was about." Another pause.
"She said they were prayer tokens for the chapel.
I had nay reason to doubt her." His jaw tightened. "I have reason now."
The murmuring that moved through the crowd had a different quality to the earlier noise. Less certain. More uneasy, the sound of people beginning to recalculate.
"The maid's name," Anthony said, to the courtyard generally, "is Effie.
She has been in Lady MacLeod's service for four years.
" He turned slightly, and the gesture was so minimal, barely a degree of movement, but every eye in the courtyard followed it to where Moira stood on the steps.
"She travelled here with her mistress. She travelled here with specific instructions. "
Moira's face did not move.
She's extraordinary at this.
The absolute composure of her, the held stillness, the eyes that gave nothing, the slight, sorrowful downturn of the mouth that said,
I am grieved by these proceedings.
Without committing to anything that could be answered.
Anthony gestured toward the shepherd.
The man came forward on his shaking legs and stopped in front of the council and swallowed twice before he could make words come out.
"The bones," he said. His voice was thin but present. "In that bundle there." He pointed at the charm, which the council elder was still holding. "I buried a stillborn lamb three weeks past. Near the old wall on the northern boundary." A beat. "The boundary of MacLeod land."
The murmuring sharpened.
"Those are me lamb's bones," the shepherd said, and his voice steadied as he said it, as though the saying of it had been the hard part and now that it was done, he could breathe.
"I'd ken them anywhere. I wrapped them in sacking and put them in the ground meself.
I went to check today, and someone had dug them up and put them in that thing, and I want to ken who, and I want to ken why. "
Anthony reached into his coat and produced a length of rosemary, still bound in the fragment of cloth it had been preserved in, still carrying its sharp, bright smell even in the damp afternoon air. He held it up.
"This was inside the bindin'," he said. "Rosemary. Still fragrant. Which means it was added recently, nae left to dry with the other materials, but placed fresh."
His eyes moved to Catriona for just a moment.
"Catriona Campbell's rosemary stores are dried and pressed.
She uses fresh only for immediate preparation and disposes of the stems the same mornin'.
" He looked back at the crowd. "The rosemary in this charm was placed there the evenin' before the accusation.
Fresh cut. By someone with access to a livin' plant. "
"The MacLeod party," Fergus said, stepping forward, "arrived with a cart of provisions. The provisions included, among other things, a cuttin' of rosemary in a glazed pot."
He was not a man who enjoyed speaking in public, Catriona could see it in the set of his jaw, but he held the discomfort and kept going.
"I have two men here who saw Effie carrying that pot to the lower stores on the night of their arrival. I have one man who saw her leave the lower stores after dark on the night before the accusation." He looked at the maid. "Effie."
Every head turned.
Effie had gone the color of cold ash.
Her hands were at her sides, and her chin was up, but her breathing was wrong, visible from ten feet away. The quick, shallow kind that happened when a body was working very hard on the inside and showing it on the outside despite everything.
She looked at Fergus. Then at Anthony. Then at Moira, and that was the look that told the story. The desperate, searching quality of it, looking for instruction, for a sign, for something that would tell her what to do.
Moira's face gave her nothing.
"Effie," Anthony said.
His voice had changed. Not louder. Not harder. Quieter, if anything, and that was the thing that did it.
The specific quality of quiet that came from a man who already knew the answer and was giving someone the opportunity to provide it themselves before he provided it for them. "I'm going to ask ye once."
Effie's chin dropped.
Her shoulders came up around her ears, and she pressed her hands together in front of her. The sound she made was not words at first, just a broken, desperate exhale, and then the words came through it.
"She said… she said it wouldnae hurt anyone. She said the healer would be sent away and no one would be harmed, and it was only… she said it was only to remove her from the keep, that it was for the better. That the laird needed to be free from the witch's hold."
She stopped. Pressed her fingers to her mouth. Started again.
"She gave me the herbs from the healer's own waste bowl so it would look, so it would seem real." Another stop, her voice cracking through the middle of the word like a green branch. "I didnae ken about the charm. I only carried the herbs. I only carried them."
The silence that followed had the particular weight of a crowd that had been moving in one direction and discovered the ground had changed beneath its feet.
Catriona watched the faces in it.
Watched the man who had shouted witch studying the mud at his boots.
Watched a woman near the back slowly lower the arm she had not realized she still had raised.
Watched another, who had suggested trial on a mountain pass six weeks ago, put both hands behind his back and press his lips into a flat, tight line.
Anthony turned toward Moira.
He walked to her slowly, crossing the courtyard without hurry, and the crowd parted for him and stayed parted. He came to stand at the foot of the keep steps and looked up at her, and waited.
Moira looked back at him.
She is extraordinary.
He meant it without admiration.
The composure held. The chin stayed level. The hands stayed folded. For a long, extraordinary moment, she simply looked at him, and then she descended the last two steps and stood before him on level ground.
The composure, very quietly, came apart. Not dramatically. Nothing about Moira MacLeod was dramatic.
It was a specific sequence of small things. Her jaw loosening, the tight line of her shoulders dropping a fraction, something going out of her eyes that had been held in them with considerable effort.
She looked, for the first time since she had arrived at McArthur, like a person rather than a performance.
"I loved ye," she said. Her voice was very quiet.
"Nae the alliance. Nae what yer name meant. Ye." A breath. "And then the fire happened, and me father said the arrangement was void, that it was better to stop it." She pressed on. "I told meself it was duty. I told meself for six years it was duty."
Her eyes moved briefly, unwillingly, to Catriona, and then back. "And then I came here and saw that ye were whole. That ye could still smile." She stopped again, jaw tightening.
"I couldnae stand it," she said. Simple and flat, stripped of everything except the truth of it. "I couldnae stand watchin' ye give to her what I lost." She pressed her lips together. "I couldnae stand it."
The courtyard was so quiet that the torches could be heard burning.
Anthony looked at her for a long moment. His face held what Catriona had learned by now to read in it. Not the absence of feeling, but the management of it, the specific stillness of a man holding something down that wanted to move.
"Ye used me people's fear," he said. Low, and even, and final as a door closing.
"Ye built somethin' out of their fear and ye aimed it at a woman who came to this keep to heal a child, and ye did it inside me walls, usin' me name, while me hospitality was in yer hands.
" He held her gaze. "That is what ye did.
Whatever else was true before it, that is what ye did. "
Moira's mouth pressed flat. Her eyes were bright, and she held them wide, and she breathed carefully through her nose, and she did not look away from him, which cost her something visible.
"Aye," she said. Barely a word. More like the sound a person made when there was nothing left.
Anthony stepped back.
"As Laird of Clan McArthur," he began.
His voice was different now. Not loud, but it reached the full length of the courtyard, reached the back of the crowd and the guards on the walls above, and the small group of MacLeod riders gathered uncertainly near the gate,
"Keeper of this land and its people, I pass judgment on this matter." He looked at the council elder. "Nae the council. Me." He looked back at Moira.
"Lady MacLeod's guest protection is revoked.
Her alliance privilege is dissolved. She leaves me land before this hour is out, under formal declaration of deception and endangerment against a person under me protection.
" He paused. "She will be returned to her husband's clan under written accusation.
What MacLeod does with her is MacLeod's concern. What happens on me land is mine."
"Me Laird-" the elder began.
"Escort Lady MacLeod to her horses," Anthony said to the two guards at the steps. Not loudly. He didn't need to say it loudly.
The guards moved.
Moira went with them.
She did not look back, which was the last composed thing she did, and it cost her. Catriona could see it in the set of her shoulders as she crossed the courtyard, the rigid and deliberate straightness of a woman using everything she had left to leave with dignity because everything else was gone.
The crowd stepped back to let her through. Not with hostility now. With the quiet discomfort of people who had been part of something and were beginning to understand the shape of what they'd been part of.
The gate closed.
Anthony turned.
He crossed the courtyard to Catriona and stopped in front of her. He looked at the iron at her wrists, and something moved in his jaw, a single tight contraction, there and gone.
He held out his hand to the nearest guard without looking at him, and the guard, who had been paying close attention to the previous ten minutes of his laird's activities, produced the key immediately.
Anthony took it and crouched in front of her and put the key in the lock and turned it. The iron opened, and he caught it before it could fall and set it on the ground.
He straightened.
Her wrists were marked red where the iron had sat.
He looked at them. Then he took her right hand in both of his, turned it over, and ran his thumb along the inside of her wrist. Not a caress, not quite, but something more careful than clinical, following the line of irritated skin with a deliberateness that had nothing to do with assessment, and both of them knew it.
She did not pull away.
"The healer," he said, to the courtyard, to the crowd, to the council elder, to whoever needed to hear it and file it somewhere permanent, "stands under me protection." He did not let go of her hand. "And under me trust."
He looked at her then, directly, and his expression had none of its usual management in it. Just his face, present and unguarded in the grey afternoon light. "Are ye hurt?"
She looked at him.
Her throat had been doing something complicated for the last several minutes.
She had been managing it by not thinking about it, and she could not quite speak yet, so she shook her head once, and watched something in his shoulders come down a fraction, and gripped his hand back, and did not care who saw it.
"Good," he said quietly. And did not let go.