Chapter Thirteen #2
“I see. So ye meant to wed him?”
She thought about this. “I mean, yeah, I guess—what’s the point of dating if you’re not considering marriage? And starting a family. Isn’t that what courting is? Determining, after time spent together, if this is the person you want to spend your life with?”
“Nae entirely.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “No?”
“A man may spend time in a woman’s company before deciding whether to pursue her, but once he begins courting her in earnest, his intentions ought to be settled. Otherwise he wastes both her time and her reputation.”
Anna frowned thoughtfully. “So... you don’t court someone to figure out if you love them?”
“Nae.” He sounded faintly puzzled by the notion. “Ye court because ye believe ye might.” “If I sought permission to court a lass,” he continued, “‘twould be because I’d already decided she possessed the qualities I’d seek in a wife. The courting itself tells me whether I was right.”
Anna hesitated, debating whether the question would seem too personal. Curiosity won. “Have you ever... courted anyone?”
Bram answered so readily she suspected he’d found nothing unusual in the question. “Aye.”
She waited, but when no further explanation came, she ventured, “And you’re married now? Or... what happened?”
He was quiet for a moment, as if simply gathering his thoughts before he answered.
“I discovered I admired the idea of her more than the woman herself.”
Anna smiled faintly. “That sounds... unexpectedly philosophical.”
“Merely truthful,” he stated. “She was comely enough, well spoken, from a respectable family. In truth, there was little to fault.”
“But...?” she prodded, desperate for details.
“She treated those beneath her station poorly.”
“So that was enough to end it?”
She thought she felt him shrug behind her.
“Why would I knowingly choose to spend my life with someone whose character I couldnae admire?”
“So... what do you look for? What qualities would you seek in a wife?”
“Good judgment, loyalty, kindness,” he answered without hesitation. “A willingness to shoulder hardship without complaint.”
Anna smiled and inquired, “Not beauty?”
Bram surprised her by snorting softly. “Beauty fades. Guid sense does nae.” After a moment, he added, “Beauty catches a man’s eye. Character determines whether he keeps looking.”
Anna said nothing, but quietly digested this, somehow not surprised by anything she had learned from him.
They rode on in companionable silence before Bram said, “If ye date a man to decide whether he’d make a suitable husband, what is it ye judge him by? Beyond honesty, I expect.”
Anna wrinkled her nose, surprised by how difficult the question proved to answer.
“Hm. When I was younger, I probably would’ve said I wanted to marry someone funny.
Or handsome. Someone who wanted ten kids or something benign like that.
” She watched a pair of robins dart through the underbrush while she considered her answer more thoughtfully.
“Now...” She shrugged. “I think I just want someone whose actions match his words. Someone dependable. Someone kind.” She fell quiet, the unspoken truth aching in her chest: what she really wanted was someone who chose her every day, without question.
“And at eight and twenty,” he said, “ye’ve yet to find such a man?”
Before she could stop herself, Anna burst out laughing.
Whether he realized how his question might be interpreted or didn’t fully grasp the reason behind her laughter, he said, “Surely ye were courted often.”
Anna glanced back at him and saw only his shoulder and a bit of his beard, yet the certainty in his voice caught her off guard. “Yeah, I’ve dated a bit.”
“And none became yer husband?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Why nae?”
“Different reasons, I suppose.” She shifted in the saddle.
“One wanted to move across the country for graduate school and decided a relationship didn’t fit into his plans.
One wasn’t ready to settle down after all.
” She sank a bit, imagining she sounded fairly pathetic.
“To my knowledge, Aaron was the only one who chose another woman.”
“And ye? Ye chose them? Or ye would have?”
“I guess,” she admitted, feeling suddenly even worse. “Or, at the time I did.”
Well, this conversation had certainly taken a turn. They’d gone from discussing general modern dating versus fourteenth century courting to having her own spectacular lack of success laid out like evidence at an inquest.
Great.
Heat crept into her cheeks. She suddenly felt absurdly self-conscious, as though she’d just confessed to some embarrassing personal failing instead of simply having lived her life with hope.
She managed a weak smile and forced her voice to sound bright. “Anyway, it’s probably not the greatest endorsement of my instincts. I guess I’m just not very good at judging people.”
Bram offered no response, and she was grateful for it.
She’d wondered about this before, usually late at night after a breakup.
She thought she was sensible, and none of the men she’d dated had seemed like terrible choices at the beginning.
Yet her heart had gone to men who, in the end, always chose something else.
Had she simply seen what she wanted to see?
Found the qualities she admired and filled in the rest with whatever she hoped might be there?
The thought was uncomfortable enough on its own. It became considerably more so when she realized she had spent much of the last three days doing something very similar with Bram.
Not imagining qualities he didn’t possess, exactly.
If anything, Bram MacCailin had given her more evidence of his character in three days than some men managed in three months.
He’d escaped captivity, endured torture without betraying his country, and had spoken of both with the same matter-of-fact composure one might use to discuss the weather.
He could break a man’s neck without hesitation if circumstances demanded it, yet he’d spent ten patient minutes removing a thorn from her foot earlier.
She admired his courage, his competence, even the gruff kindness he seemed determined not to acknowledge as kindness at all.
And she was attracted to him—or, at the very least, ridiculously intrigued by him. There was little point pretending otherwise.
But that was precisely why the reminder of her questionable judgment had come at such an inconvenient time.
She had spent three days in Bram’s company and still could not predict him, could not place him beside any other man she’d known and say, there, that is what he is.
More importantly, she knew almost nothing of who he was when he wasn’t fleeing English soldiers, trying to keep them alive, or finding his way home.
She knew what he had done under extraordinary circumstances.
That was not necessarily the same thing as knowing the man.
It was one thing to be fascinated by someone who seemed to have stepped straight out of a history book.
That much was probably inevitable. It was another thing entirely to mistake fascination and attraction for something more—or, worse, to let them become something more simply because she wanted them to.
If her instincts where men were concerned were as questionable as this conversation had just reminded her, perhaps Bram MacCailin was best admired as one might admire a thunderstorm or a tidal wave: from a respectful distance.
***
They rode for quite a while without speaking again. While the silence between them wasn’t exactly companionable, it no longer felt as strained as it had previously.
Bram found his thoughts returning to the curious little square tucked securely into the waistband of his breeches.
He had noticed it lying forgotten on the floor of the collier’s hut that morning, just before discovering the axe hidden beneath a pile of debris, the perfectly captured image of Anastasia and him.
He still could not fathom how such a thing had come into being.
He had spent time in noble halls and royal keeps, had seen portraits commissioned from accomplished artists, yet even the finest among them required weeks, often months, to complete, and commanded coin beyond the reach of most men.
What Anastasia’s curious contraption produced in minutes possessed a realism that defied all explanation, a sorcery he could not dismiss or comprehend.
Even the greatest portraits he could recall had never captured a person’s likeness with such astonishing precision.
Every strand of his dark hair, every crease and strain upon his face, even the threads of gray scattered through his beard had somehow been preserved upon the little square.
More remarkable still, it had not merely captured their appearance, but a single moment in time, complete with the expressions they had worn at that precise moment.
Had he not watched the blank surface slowly reveal itself before his own eyes, he wasn’t sure he would trust its existence.
Yet for all the wonder inspired by the object itself, it was Anastasia’s face inside the image that had held his attention so rapt this morning.
She’d been smiling. And aye, the smile had been contrived, but still her eyes were bright, her cheeks slightly flushed, and the smile itself transformed a face he had already thought pleasing into one that was, in truth, remarkably bonny.
He’d felt then, as he’d studied the smooth canvas this morning, that she was looking directly at him, smiling at him or for him, and aye, he was not unmoved by it.
He told himself he’d taken the picture to return it to her, but that was a lie. She’d said she wanted nothing to do with it. The truth was simpler: he’d tucked it into his waistband because he meant to keep it for himself.