Chapter 5
Ragnall rode out hard, as he always did when the keep grew too small to hold his temper.
He took the trail along the burn and let the cold air hit him, stripping some of the heat away.
He tried—and failed—to stop hearing her voice.
The one she had watched cut down her father.
The one who had killed her brother and ridden off whistling.
She had it so wrong and so terribly right, both at once, and there was no untangling one from the other.
He had not whistled. He had been sick to his stomach for the better part of a week after, sick at the waste of it, at the old man who had thrown himself onto a blow that was never meant for him.
But the dead were dead all the same, however a man felt about it, and no man could argue a corpse back up onto its feet with the truth, however clean and however whole.
He should have told her. Standing there in that small borrowed room, close enough to count the freckles scattered across her nose, he should have laid the whole black truth out plain before her. He had opened his mouth to do exactly that.
And then she had called him a madman, her chin held high and her eyes bright and brimming, refusing on principle to spill over, and the words simply died in his throat. Because what kind of man told a grieving lass that her own brother was the villain of the story?
Coward. Ye let her keep hatin’ ye because it is kinder than the truth. Or because it is easier. Ye will never be sure which.
A soft voice cut across the chatter of the burn. “Ye ride like the devil himself is after ye, me Laird. As ye always do when ye’ve gone and lost an argument.”
Brigid MacKee knelt at the water’s edge with a flat basket of cut greens beside her, her fair hair coming loose from its pins in the damp, her face turned up to him with the easy familiarity of a woman who had known him too long and in too many rooms to bother with deference.
She had been the old healer’s daughter when the two of them were bairns underfoot together, and the healer herself these five years past, since her father caught the coughing sickness one hard winter.
And once, for a while, she had been a good deal more to Ragnall than either, until he had ended it as gently as he knew how, because she had begun to want from him what he did not have in himself to give to anyone.
“I daenae recall losin’,” he said.
“Nay.” She smiled up at him, and there was an edge under the sweetness of it, fine and bright as a filleting knife.
“Ye never do recall it. That’s half of yer trouble, that ye misremember every fight ye’ve ever walked away from as a fight ye won.
” She rose, brushing the wet earth from her skirts with two brisk strokes.
“What are ye on about?”
“Nothin’, me Laird. Only… ye wouldnae be tearin’ up the whole glen like this if ye’d had the plain good sense to take a bride from among yer own people. A Cairn lass. One who’d ken her place and yers, and warm yer bed of a night without makin’ ye chase her around it first.”
“I didnae ask for yer opinion on me marriage, Brigid.”
“Ye never ask. I give it to ye for free, out of long habit.” She tilted her fair head and studied him with those clever green eyes that had always missed very little.
“She is the very sister of the man who broke Kate. The same blood, the same eyes, I have nay doubt. Have ye told her that yet? Or are ye still goin’ about pretendin’ the keep hasnae a single ghost in it? ”
The word Kate did what it always did to him. He gathered the reins up short in his fist.
“Tend to yer plants,” he said, the warmth all gone out of his voice. “And tend to me sister, which is the work I keep ye for. And leave me bride to me.”
He wheeled his black horse around and rode for home faster than he had come out, and he did not once look back.
Olivia lasted until midday, sequestered in her room, and then the walls won the argument they had been making against her since dawn.
She could not stop thinking about how close he had been. She kept feeling it on her skin like a sunburn—the heat of him; the spot where the scar bit and pulled at his mouth; his low, rough voice saying there were things about that day she did not know.
She had come to Cairn certain of only one thing in the whole wide world: that she hated the Laird with her whole heart, and the maddening man stubbornly and deliberately refused to be hateable. It was the most disorienting feeling she had ever known.
I came here with one certainty to stand on. He keeps pullin’ it out from under me, plank by plank, all while smilin’. Nay, nae smilin’. He never quite smiles. That’s worse.
So she went seeking a distraction from her own mind, and what she found was Maisie in the corridor, humming tunelessly to herself over a basket of mending.
The old woman’s weathered face lit up at the sight of her like a hearth catching.
“Are ye allowed,” Olivia asked carefully, “to show me around the place? I daenae even ken where the kitchens are, or whether I am permitted into them, seein’ where I come from.”
“Permitted!” Maisie hooted so loudly that the sound bounced off the stones.
“Ye’re to be Lady of this great drafty heap of rocks, lass.
Ye’re permitted anywhere in it that hasnae a man bathin’ in it, and even then it’s only manners that keep ye out the door and nae any law I ever heard of.
Come away with me. I will show ye the bonnie bits and the damp bits, and there’s a deal more of the second than the first. I will warn ye now. ”
The tour was unexpectedly delightful, and Olivia resented every minute of it.
Maisie had a story for every door. Half of them were scandalous, and the other half she was plainly inventing where she stood, and she told them all with the same wicked relish.
“That’s the muniment room. Nothing in it but rolls and rents and a hundred years of arguin’ about sheep.
That’s where me husband proposed to me, so ye can see what sort of man he was.
” She rapped a door with her stick as they passed.
“And that one ye’ll want to keep shut. There’s a draught in there that could strip the hide off a coo. ”
“Ye’re makin’ that up.”
“Aye,” said Maisie comfortably. “But ye’ll keep the door shut now, will ye nae?”
Tattie padded faithfully behind them the whole way, leaning his great weight against Olivia’s skirts at every pause, and twice the old woman pretended not to have heard a perfectly clear question, only to answer instead a far more interesting one Olivia had never thought to ask.
The kitchens were a realm of copper and steam, ruled over by a woman with forearms like a smith’s, who took one look at the pair of them and reached for her wooden spoon.
“Out.”
“This is the Laird’s bride, Cook.”
“I ken fine who she is.” The spoon did not waver. “And she can be the Laird’s bride out there, where she’s nae standin’ in me light and lettin’ the fire go down.”
But as they went, she pushed a warm bannock into Olivia’s hand without looking at her, gruff as a slap.
Absurdly, Olivia was still holding it halfway down the passage.
“She likes ye,” said Maisie.
“She threw us out.”
“Aye. With a bannock.” The old woman’s eyes glittered. “Ye’ll learn to read us.”
Not everyone was so easily read. In the low corridor by the buttery, two maids stopped dead when they came around the corner, and one of them dropped into a curtsy so shallow it was very nearly an insult, and neither of them said a word until Olivia had gone six steps past. Then she heard it, low and unmistakable behind her.
Blythe.
Maisie’s stick went on tapping the flags, steady as a heartbeat. She did not turn her head, she did not stop talking, and she did not once let Olivia think she had heard it too.
The chapel was the last of it and the only place the old woman’s voice changed.
It was a small stone room at the cold end of the north range, with a plain altar and a single narrow window. The dust lay thick and undisturbed on everything, and the air smelled of stone and old smoke.
“It hasnae been used since me daughter died,” Maisie said.
“Ragnall’s maither. He had it closed up.
He’s never once said why, and I’ve never once asked him, for I’m nae the fool the whole glen takes me for.
” She was quiet for a moment, looking at the altar.
“She planted the roses in the south garden, and she made him swear he’d end the war that took his faither, and then she went and died on him, and he’s been carryin’ both of those things with him ever since like a man with stones in his pockets. ”
Olivia did not want that. She did not want the roses, and she did not want the promise, and she did not want the picture that came with it.
“Why are ye tellin’ me this?”
“Because ye’ll get none of it out of him,” said Maisie.
Then she rapped her stick smartly on the flags and was off down the passage before Olivia could think of a single thing to say.
By the time they had wound their way up to the long upper gallery, with its narrow windows looking down over the inner court, Olivia had forgotten, for whole minutes strung together, to be miserable at all.
That was the moment she heard it.
A thin, rising wail echoed ahead in the gallery. A sound she knew deeply, as every woman did, whether she had given birth or not—the intense fury of a tiny person who had fully decided that the world was unfair and someone needed to answer for it.
A bairn. There is a bairn cryin’ here in this cold keep.
“Did ye hear that?” Olivia asked.
She turned and found that Maisie had suddenly developed a deep and abiding fascination with a moth-eaten hanging on the wall.
That one heartbeat of hesitation was all it took. Olivia was already moving down the gallery, already reaching for the latch of the half-closed door at the far end of it, already pushing it open before the old woman or anyone else alive could think to stop her.
She stopped dead at the threshold as if she had run full-tilt into a pane of glass.
A low-burning fire flickered softly, and nearby was a well-worn chair pulled close. Sitting in the chair was Ragnall—the man who had ridden through her gate and changed her life forever.
He was holding a baby against his shoulder.
A thick, dark-haired, red-cheeked little bundle.
He was gently rocking her from side to side, murmuring softly and nonsensically into her fuzzy hair.
As the cries turned to wet hiccups, he tilted his head and smiled at the child.
It was a smile of such open, helpless tenderness that Olivia, watching from the doorway, did not recognize the man wearing it for even a moment.
He looked up.
The smile vanished as if it had never been.
For one frozen instant, they simply stared at one another across the warm little room.
The baby gurgled wetly into the silence between them, and a hundred ugly explanations flooded into Olivia’s head all at once, each one of them worse and colder than the last.
A child. He had a child. He had stood in her room not three hours past and spoken to her so calmly of heirs, and all the while he had a child of his own hidden away behind a quiet door at the end of a gallery that no one in this keep had meant for her to walk down.
“Excuse me,” Olivia said, her voice sounding distant and foreign to her own ears.
And before he could get a single word out, before her face could betray the precise and terrible shape of what was breaking apart inside her, she turned on her heel and walked back the way she had come. Fast, and then faster, until walking had become almost running.
Behind her, Ragnall rose from his chair, calling her name, but she did not once look back.