Chapter Thirty
“What goes on between my wife and sister?” Dougal asked Lachlan, even though he doubted Lachy had a fit answer.
“They formed some mysterious bond while Isobel was ill, and now they seem nearly as close as Meg and Aisla were. Meg fights for Isobel like a she-wolf defending her cubs. I cannot get near my own wife.”
To Dougal, it seemed all he had done these many days past was fight. Aye, so, and he had no quarrel with that—the anger inside him desired expression with the sword or any other weapon that might come to hand.
Three weeks had passed since Isobel’s miscarriage, since what Dougal thought of as his final declaration of war with MacNab.
By any account, his wife should be regaining her strength and her health.
Dougal had spent most of the intervening time out riding his borders in the blustery cold, stealing MacNab’s cattle and setting fire to his outbuildings.
He had also, in no uncertain terms, repulsed not one but three visits from Isobel’s father, the first in Randal MacNab’s company on the day after she miscarried.
“You allowed this to happen to her,” he accused, staring Gerald Maitland in the eye.
“As far as I am concerned, you are no longer Isobel’s father, and I will die before I see her in your hands.
As for you,” to MacNab, himself, “the next time you darken my door—you or that misshapen demon you call a son—I will see you dead!”
After that, Gerald Maitland came alone, to be turned away with alacrity. A period of filthy weather ensued, and Maitland did not show his face again. Dougal did not know, and little cared, if he remained at MacNab’s keep or had returned home to Yorkshire.
What did worry him was his wife’s state, both mental and physical. She languished in her room, took little to eat, and worst of all refused to see him.
“What has Meg told you?” he asked an uncharacteristically quiet Lachlan now. “I know you are sleeping with her—’tis the talk of the household.”
“Is it?” Lachlan raised a brow, along with his cup of whisky. The hour being late, the two men shared spirits and a fire in an attempt to defrost their toes.
“Aye. In the kitchens, the maids whisper of little else. They all fancy you, it seems.”
Lachlan smiled briefly. “The maids will have to languish in vain. I waited fifteen years to get into your sister’s bed. If you think I mean to stray from her now, you are very much mistaken.”
“Oh, aye?” Dougal’s attention, very nearly snagged from his own grief, focused on his friend. “So, ’tis love, is it?”
“I thought you did not believe in love—or so you swear, over and over again. Call it enchantment, and have done.”
“I am pleased for you.” Dougal added in mock disgust, “But you may wish to keep a muzzle on your cries of joy—the two of you can be heard all over the keep.”
“What can I say? Your sister is a magnificent lover.”
“Stop, else you will turn my stomach and ruin my sleep.”
“You have not been sleeping anyway, from the look of you.” Lachlan eyed him wisely. “You’re spent.”
“Aye.” Dougal could not tell when he had felt so tired, weary to the bones. His worry for Isobel haunted him. She had sent away the physician, declined to leave her chamber, begged off seeing him. He felt as if he had lost her, though he could not express that even to Lachlan.
“My wife should be recovered by now.”
“Meg says the loss of a child takes women in strange and various ways,” Lachlan offered diffidently. “It follows no map, no set time.”
“Aye, so. But why must she shut me out?” Broodingly, Dougal stared at the fire. “’Tis almost as if she dreads seeing me.”
Lachlan shrugged. “Go to her while she sleeps, be there when she awakens.”
“With my sister guarding her like a mastiff?”
Lachlan slanted a look at him. “I happen to know that in approximately one hour your sister will be well occupied elsewhere. She gives Isobel a sleeping draught—which, I understand, rarely works but does serve to calm her fears—and then retires to her own chamber to wait for me.”
“Aye?” Isobel should have no fears needing calming, Dougal thought, not under his roof and his protection. Yet he had failed to protect her, had he not?
“Aye,” said Lachlan decisively, and put aside his cup.
Some time later, Dougal climbed the stairs to his wife’s chamber, where he had not slept in many nights. The keep was very nearly silent, as if even the night held its breath. Outside, for once, the wind had stilled, and his warriors quietly stood their watch.
Reluctant to frighten Isobel, he eased the door open and slipped in. The room, lit only by a low fire, also lay in stillness. He heard Isobel sigh and shift in the bed even as he closed the door softly behind him.
What dreams possessed her rest, if rest she found? And why would she not turn to him for comfort?
Softly he moved across the room and called her name. “Isobel, ’tis I. Are you awake?”
She murmured something, and the bedclothes rustled. Disrobing as he went, he approached the bed, slipped in, and took her into his arms.
Instant warmth swamped him, and comfort such as he had not known in days. By the devil’s horns, he had missed this—had not realized how much. Still not certain if she slept, he cradled her carefully, as one might a treasured child.
For a moment she stiffened, then eased against him, accepting what he offered. She wore only a thin night rail, and he could feel all of her, fragile and thin—she had wasted to almost nothing. He cared not for the changes—she was Isobel, with the same scent and spirit, all he desired.
“Sleep.” He put his lips against her cheek, and her hair. “Let me hold you.”
She murmured desperately, and he wondered what moved in her mind. He could virtually feel the shadows that enfolded her, yet she did not push him away. A miracle!
She lifted one hand and touched his face. “I cannot sleep,” she confessed. “Not since... I have but snatches of rest before I come awake again, and no peace.”
“Perhaps I may bring you a measure of peace, Wife. Sleep.”
To his surprise and relief, she cuddled in still closer against him but did not relax completely.
“I have something to tell you,” she began, sounding tormented. “But I do not know how.”
“Hush,” he bade, with tenderness foreign to him, and stroked her hair. He knew only that he needed to be here with her, under any circumstances.
She ignored his directive. “I have been remembering things—they return to me whether I want them or not. It has all trickled back in bits and pieces. I now remember escaping from MacNab’s keep. And I recall where, and how, I was held.”
“Do not dwell upon it, Isobel. It is over now.”
That made her stir in his arms, seeking to gaze into his face. “It will never be over, so long as you love her.”
“Her?”
“Aisla.”
Dougal felt himself tense at the sound of the name, as does a man receiving a grievous wound. “What has she to do with it?”
“I know what befell her, in MacNab’s hands.” Isobel barely breathed the words. “I was held, you see, in the same room as she. And Bertram MacNab threatened to do to me what he had done to her.”
Dougal’s throat closed abruptly. Part of him wished to hear what more Isobel had to say, wanted to gather every detail; most of him did not want to know. He managed to say, “Whatever befell her happened long ago.”
“But,” Isobel reasserted, “you love her still.”
Dougal considered the words, as best he could. The tangle of emotions he felt for Aisla certainly could not be expressed in a single word, and he was no longer sure love was uppermost in the mix of guilt, anger, regret, and shame.
“She relied on me,” he said with difficulty. “I failed her.”
“How?” Isobel moved restlessly in the bed, escaping his arms.
“I did not give her the one thing she so desperately needed,” Dougal admitted wretchedly.
“As I have failed to give you a child?”
“It is no’ the same, no’ at all!” Dougal sat up so quickly he knocked her back onto the pillow.
“You could not help what befell you. I failed! Sometimes of a night I lie thinking how it must have been for her, waiting and waiting for me to come, believing I would—for I had pledged myself to her. That is the thing you do no’ understand. ”
“I do,” Isobel whispered. “We all make promises.”
“And now you say you saw the very room where she endured her nightmare? Tell me!”
“Perhaps it is best if I do not. Nothing can now be gained—”
“Nothing but that I may flagellate myself as I deserve. Tell me, Wife—what tortures befell the woman I had vowed to protect?”
He heard Isobel draw a breath, like a woman backing away from a cliff edge. She glimpsed, now, the hell in which he lived day after day, night after night.
At last she said, “Upon consideration, I think such things should not be spoken, even here. Bertram MacNab is a depraved monster who needs to be destroyed, for the good of the world. For all I have suffered, I am yet glad I was able to keep my sister from his hands. And I am grateful, Husband, you snatched me on the road that night.”
Still upright in the bed, gazing down at her, Dougal said bitterly, “Would you rather be tied to a man who cannot keep his promises? Who does not deserve love?”
“Far rather.” To his surprise, she reached for him, pulled him into her arms to lie against her. “You know, Husband, there is such a thing as forgiveness—even forgiveness of self.”
“I will never forgive myself,” Dougal said, and knew the words for truth.
“And I know better, now, than to make pledges I cannot keep. I could not even hold you safe in your own garden. There is naught I would like more than to vow MacNab’s destruction for your sake—and hers.
But I know better, now. I know myself, and him. MacNab does no’ play fair.”
“No.”
Dougal laughed harshly. “Aye, well, during the intervening years I, too, have learned the value of cheating. I can now lie, steal, and deceive wi’ the best of them. For honor gets a man nowhere, and the devil laughs at good intentions.”
“Is that what you have striven to do these many years—make yourself more despicable than MacNab? Is that why they call you Devil Black MacRae?”
“I ha’ learned to fight on my enemy’s terms, and MacNab knows naught of mercy—why should he?” He thought hard on it and added, “The difference between us is, MacNab hides his black heart behind a smiling and compliant face. I, being an honest man, flaunt mine.”
At least, he thought, even in the face of cowardice he could claim honesty. And that honesty kept him silent about what he felt for Isobel now—possessiveness, caring, and a surprising amount of tenderness—because the word she wanted from him he could not, in conscience, give.
“Why can you not forgive yourself?” Isobel asked. “You have forgiven me. Would you forgive Lachlan, if he failed you in some way?”
“Ah, Lachlan!” Dougal laughed more naturally. “He is another thing altogether. By the way, did you know you were right? He is sleeping in my sister’s bed.”
“Yes, and she is quite content with it. I think she will take from him what she needs, and give what she can.” Isobel hesitated. “Not an ideal situation, perhaps, but one that serves them both.”
Dougal grimaced in the darkness. “Meg, you are thinking, is as damaged as I. And are you, too, willing to accept broken and unsatisfactory offerings?”
“Broken, maybe,” she whispered, “but never, never unsatisfactory.”