Chapter 6
Caelan strolled down the aisle of St. Andrew’s Kirk in Lavenween, feeling profoundly grateful that the service was over. The Bean—Alfie—ran down the aisle ahead of him; by the time Caelan made it out the door, the boy was veering around the right of the building into the weedy little cemetery, shouting for his chicken.
Apparently guests were not allowed to cluck during a memorial service.
His brother-in-law, Rory, came up beside him and said, “Gloomy affair, death services,”
adding hastily, “I don’t mean to diminish your grief, but I expect you’d rather remember Isla in your own way.”
Caelan didn’t answer Rory, just glanced at him. They’d known each other since they were boys, skipping school together to explore the dense woods that spanned their adjoining lands. Rory couldn’t possibly think that Caelan was on the verge of tears.
His brother-in-law cleared his throat. “It’s been two years, of course.”
“How’s your whisky coming along?”
Caelan had persuaded his brother-in-law that the liquor would someday be one of Scotland’s main exports.
“The home farm’s stinking with fermented barley and burning peat. The men think you’re daft, aging whisky in casks used for sweet wine.”
“It’s cheaper than buying new ones,”
Caelan said. Even more importantly, his first brew had racked up a bidding frenzy among London merchants because traces of Madeira wine lent it a smoky sweetness.
Ahead of them, one of Isla’s friends, Lady Bufford, sauntered over to her carriage, her aging husband at her side. In the shadowed chapel behind them, Fiona was comforting Mrs. Gillan, the minister hovering nearby. Poor Mrs. Gillan seemed as inconsolable after two years as she’d been after one. Her husband had thought that another memorial service for her daughter might put her grief to rest, but Caelan hadn’t held out much hope.
Caelan started down the steps, Rory following.
They could hear Alfie’s voice off in the cemetery, rising with anxiety. “Wilhelmina, where are you, girl? Come out of there!”
“Fiona had to tell Alfie that the good Lord Himself doesn’t allow chickens in church,”
Rory remarked. “He was inclined to argue when she attributed the rule to a mere bishop. We’d better go see if we can find the bird. He’ll be in floods of tears if she escapes.”
“I can’t stop thinking of him as the Bean.”
“Fiona thinks being called by a grown-up name might make him less emotional.”
Rory glanced sideways at Caelan. “I don’t recall the two of us weeping daily, do you?”
Caelan couldn’t remember ever crying. It wasn’t in him—luckily, because his father would have belted him for being girlish. The former laird had stern ideas about what made a man. “Isla always said that I was rubbish at expressing myself. Alfie will do better.”
“Let’s hope his future wife has already started embroidering handkerchiefs for her trousseau,”
Rory said morosely.
The cemetery’s wrought-iron gate was hanging askew. Upkeep for the Lavenween kirk and its cemetery fell to the MacCrae family, but if a task would cost more than a ha’penny, the former laird had refused to pay it as a matter of principle.
Rory strode into the cemetery, while Caelan swung the gate to and fro, determining that the hinge needed replacing. In the graveyard, Alfie was on his hands and knees, imploring his chicken to emerge from a thicket of lilac bushes.
A snowy-white bird with a startling crown of feathers peered out from the brush and clucked with a rebellious air.
“Wilhelmina!”
Alfie cried, opening the cloth bag he was holding invitingly. “Here you are, old girl. Let’s go home.” Unsurprisingly, the chicken responded by rocketing from the thicket, clucking at the top of her lungs. “Get her!” Alfie screamed. “She might fly!”
Rory went left and Caelan ran to the right—as did the chicken, since she was shrewdly making a beeline for the broken gate. As she neared it, Wilhelmina thrust her head forward and spread her wings.
“Catch her, Uncle Caelan!”
Alfie shrieked.
The hell if he’d be responsible for more tears today.
Caelan dodged a tombstone and lunged forward, managing to catch the bird before she launched into the air—but he tripped. Since the bloody chicken would be a pancake if he landed on it, he thrust out his arms.
He hit the ground with a thump that rattled his teeth and punched every bit of air from his lungs, but somehow he managed to keep hold of the bird.
Rory was laughing like a loon as he took the struggling chicken. “We’re lucky that earthquake didn’t knock over every tombstone left standing.”
Caelan shook his head, trying to catch his breath.
“Oh, my sweet lord Jesus!”
he heard from the gate. “He’s collapsed on her grave! He’s lying there, a broken man!”
“Caelan, that’s Isla’s plot.”
All humor had disappeared from Rory’s voice.
He hadn’t fallen into weeds; he was face down in a bed of bluebells, his dead wife’s favorite flower.
Crap.
The story would be all over the village tomorrow; hell, it would probably be talked about in Inverness. The Laird of CaerLaven had thrown himself on his wife’s grave to mark her death anniversary.
He pushed himself to his knees, but his mother-in-law hurtled across the yard faster than a speeding chicken, casting herself in a puddle of black cloth by Caelan’s side and winding her arms around his neck. “Your heart is broken! You’re a broken man. We are all broken.”
Keeping one arm around his neck, she put her other hand flat on the purple blossoms. “Isla, my dearest Isla, know that while you sit on the side of Jesus, we haven’t forgotten you for a moment. Your husband will never recover from your loss. We will never recover. Never, ever, ever!”
Rory gently kicked him in the leg, muttering, “Get up, man.”
Caelan slipped an arm around his mother-in-law’s waist and hauled her to her feet.
“That’s enough, Mary,”
Mr. Gillan said to his wife. “Let the poor man go.”
“We had twenty-three years of perfect and unalloyed happiness with our beloved Isla,”
she wailed, hiccupping as she took the handkerchief her husband gave her.
“Many can’t say as much.”
With an apologetic grimace, Mr. Gillan took his wife back from Caelan.
Alfie popped up at their side, Wilhelmina safely tucked into the cloth bag he wore by a strap over his shoulder. The chicken seemed resigned to having been caught and was glancing about with curiosity.
His nephew’s forehead puckered. “Are you very sad?”
“He’s heartbroken,”
Mrs. Gillan said. “Broken.”
“Are you serious?”
Alfie asked her, his head swiveling between her and Caelan.
Caelan could have answered that. His mother-in-law was serious about the statement—and about sharing it. Sometimes it felt as if the whole of the Highlands had been informed of his broken heart.
Fiona strolled up and said, “We all miss Isla, but it’s time that Caelan thinks about marrying again. I’ve been talking to him about taking a wife.”
Mrs. Gillan sucked in a breath. “No!”
“You know how fond I was of Isla, but the bald truth is that CaerLaven needs an heir. We all know that.”
At that, the poor woman started sobbing so hard that she choked, and finally the minister and her husband drew her back to the kirk.
Once his mother-in-law was out of earshot, Caelan asked, “Did you have to?”
“Yes,”
Fiona said. “I don’t want my favorite brother in the grave with his dead wife. I wouldn’t want it for Rory, either, if I slipped off this mortal coil.”
“I’m your only brother,”
Caelan pointed out.
“I’d have to grieve my first wife for at least a decade,”
Rory said, his eyes dancing. “I’ll never find another with such a blunt way with the truth.”
Fiona smiled up at him; he bent his head to kiss her. Caelan turned away. Most of the gravestones were old and mossy, and many had tumbled over, their inscriptions covered by ivy.
Not Isla’s, of course. Reportedly poor Mrs. Gillan sat by her daughter’s tombstone every day of the year. A weed wouldn’t dare sprout there.
A small hand crept into his and clung tightly. “I’m sorry you’re broken,”
his nephew said earnestly. “I can lend you Wilhelmina, if you’d like, as long as you give her back before bedtime. Stroking her topknot always makes me feel better.”
Wilhelmina cocked her head and gave Caelan a look that promised a bloody hand if he ever touched her again.
“Are you certain she enjoys being in that bag? Most chickens are fond of their coop.”
“She doesn’t live in a coop,”
Alfie said airily. “She’s lucky that I bought her at market and made her my friend. I keep her with me all the time. If I put her in the coop, she might get made into stew. Also, the other chickens might peck her, since she’s rabbity.” He fluffed Wilhelmina’s topknot, which did have a vague resemblance to a rabbit’s tail.
Caelan nodded. “I understand your reasoning.”
“I would be broken if she died,”
Alfie said.
“I hope not,”
Caelan said. Behind his nephew, his sister was rolling her eyes.
Thanks to Fiona sharing her marital ambitions with Mrs. Gillan, he was dead certain that the morrow would bring his former mother-in-law to his doorstep with tears and recriminations.
“You know, I have some puppies that are too young to leave their mother, but old enough to play with,”
he said, coming damn close to smirking at his sister. “Why don’t you come visit tomorrow?”
Fiona’s eyes narrowed. “Traitor,”
she hissed under her breath.
“I’m not sure that Wilhelmina likes dogs,”
Alfie said. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t.”
“We can leave her at home,”
Rory said. He held out his hand. “Come along, Alfie. Time for Sunday dinner.”
Alfie hung back. “I’m sorry about your broken heart. I really am.”
His eyes glistened with tears. “I wish that hadn’t happened to you—losing the person you love, I mean.”
Caelan smiled at him and then ruffled his hair. “You make up for it, because you’re the best nephew any man could be lucky enough to have, Alfie. Let’s get Wilhelmina home and give her some grain.”
“I’m eating at the big table with you, and we’re having jam roly-poly,”
Alfie said, cheering up instantly. “Mama says that you’re starving to death, and that any day you’ll die of disserary.” He hesitated. “Dysentery. We need to fatten you up.”
His sister reached out and pinched Caelan’s waist. “You’re wasting away,”
she told him, dancing back before he could swat her.
As Caelan strolled after his family, he decided that he would like to have a kindly, intelligent son or daughter like Alfie.
And he definitely would like to stop being viewed as a tragic Romeo.
He narrowed his eyes, thinking it over. Who cared if his wife couldn’t clean a fish? He needed a mature and measured woman, as buttoned-up as Lady Bufford. He refused to be seen as Romeo ever again.
Or was it Hamlet who jumped into his beloved’s grave?
Irrelevant. He wasn’t a man to leap after a woman, dead or alive.