Chapter 24
The first night was the worst of it.
She had not expected that. She had expected shouting. She had braced for it the whole afternoon after he had walked out of the nursery and had a different room prepared for her, and she had gone down for supper with her chin up and every weapon she owned sharpened and ready.
He passed her the salt.
“Thank ye,” she said.
“Aye,” he uttered.
And that was the whole of it. That was the entire conversation.
He sat at the head of the table, and she sat at the foot of it with the whole grim length of oak between them, and he asked Alastair about the barley, and he asked Maisie about her hip, and he did not once, not one single time during the whole meal, look at her.
It was unbearable. She had not known a man could be so loud with his silence.
She watched him subtly. She had become horribly good at that. The scarred hand around his cup. The way he listened to Maisie with his head tilted, patient, the way he only ever was with his grandmother.
Once, only once, when she reached for the bread, his eyes lifted and caught hers and held for a beat too long, and something went through her like a bell being struck.
But then he looked away and said something to Alastair about the drainage in the low field, and she sat there with her heart racing like a hare and a piece of bread in her hand that she had no intention of eating.
She got up before dessert was served.
He caught her in the passage. Of course he did.
“Olivia.”
“Me Laird.”
“Daenae.” His jaw was tight. “Daenae me Laird me. Nae after.”
“What would ye have me call ye?” She rounded on him.
“Ye put me out of yer bed. Ye had a room prepared for me by a maid who couldnae look at me while she did it. Ye had it arranged like a delivery of grain, and I’m to sit at yer table and make small talk about the barley and call ye by yer given name? ”
“It was for yer sake.”
“Och, it was for me sake.” The laugh came out of her jagged. “Ye’re all the same, the whole pack of ye. Elders and lairds and braithers. Every wretched thing that has ever been done to me was done for me sake, and nae one of ye has once had the courtesy to ask me what me sake actually is.”
“Then tell me,” he said. “Go on. Ye’re never short of words. Tell me what ye want, Olivia, and I’ll do it, and God help us both.”
She opened her mouth. But she could not say it.
It sat there in her throat, enormous, the whole shape of it, and she could not put a single sound to it, because to say I want ye to take me back up those stairs was to hand him everything and to admit that she had lost, and she had been losing steadily for a fortnight, and she was not ready to lay down the last of her weapons in a cold passage with a maid listening around the corner.
“I want to go to me room,” she said. “Me new room. Ye’ll ken where it is. Ye chose it.”
His face closed like a door.
“Aye,” he said. “I did.”
She did not go down for supper the second night. Nor the third.
Rosie had discovered that if she pulled herself up on her uncle’s knee and let go, she would fall over, and she had decided that this was the finest game ever invented.
Ragnall caught her for the ninth time. She shrieked with joy and set about doing it again.
“Ye’ll drop her,” said Kate from the fireplace.
“I willnae drop her.”
“Ye’re nae lookin’ at her.”
“I am lookin’ at her.”
“Ragnall,” said his sister, with the awful patience of a woman who had known him all his life, “ye have been lookin’ at that corner of the room for the better part of an hour, and there’s nay bairn in it.”
He did not turn round. He was aware of the exact degree to which his ears had gone hot.
Olivia was in the window seat with a book she was not reading.
He knew she was not reading it because, in an hour, she had turned two pages, and she had been on the second one so long that the light had moved off it.
She had her feet tucked up under her, and Tattie’s great head lay across her ankles like a paperweight, and the last of the sun was coming through the glass and doing something to her hair that he had no words for and was not looking for words for.
He had put her out of his bed to keep her safe from him.
It was, he was beginning to understand, the stupidest thing he had done in his entire life, and he had once ridden into a broken gate to fight a man over a woman’s honor with three of his own men and no plan whatsoever.
“She’s nae readin’ that book,” he said before he could stop himself.
“Nay,” Kate agreed. “She isnae.”
“She’s been on the same page since the bell.”
“Aye. And ye’ve been countin’.” Kate turned another stitch. “Do ye ken, Braither, that ye’ve asked me twice this evenin’ whether the fire needs buildin’ up, and it’s July?”
“Kate.”
“I’m only observin’.”
Rosie fell over. He caught her without looking, and she shrieked.
“She’ll nae come to me,” Ragnall muttered, so it would not carry across the room.
“She looks at me like I’m somethin’ she’s stepped in.
And I cannae blame her for it, for I put her out that door meself, and I’d nae take it back, for I daenae trust meself in a room with her.
There it is. That’s the whole sorry arithmetic of me. ”
Kate said nothing for a while. The needle went in and out.
“Can I tell ye something,” she said, “and will ye promise nae to break anythin’?”
“Nay.”
“I’ll tell ye anyway.” She did not look up.
“Ye ken why I stayed so long in that room. Everyone in this castle thinks it was because of the fall, or the arm, or the bairn. But it wasnae. It was because I loved a man who was usin’ me, and I couldnae tell the difference between the two, and after, I couldnae trust me own heart to tell me anythin’ at all ever again.
So I stopped askin’ it. I lay in that bed for half a year, and I let it starve, because a starved heart cannae get ye killed. ”
Ragnall had gone very still.
“It nearly killed me, mind,” Kate said. “It’s only that it takes longer that way, and it’s quieter, and nobody has to be blamed for it.”
“It isnae the same.”
“Nay?” She looked up at last, and her green eyes were perfectly steady.
“Ye’ve a woman in this castle who ye’d walk into the sea for, and ye’ve locked her in a cold room down the passage and locked yerself in a colder one, and ye’re callin’ it protection.
” A small, dreadful pause. “It’s the exact same, Braither.
Ye’ve only made a virtue of it, which is a thing I was never clever enough to do. ”
The fire spat.
Across the long room, Olivia turned a page at last and did not read that one either.
The new chamber was beautiful, which only made it worse.
It was the finest room in Cairn after the Laird’s, high in the south tower, with a wide bed hung in good wool and a fire kept always lit and a window that looked clean down the glen to the silvery thread of the river.
Ragnall had not stinted. Whatever else he was withholding from her, he had not been mean with the walls of her cage.
From the high window, she could see clear down to the river, and beyond its far bank, the dark line of the hills that marked the start of Blythe land. Close enough to ache for, and far enough to be another world entirely.
She had lived in this room for three days now.
Three days of meals taken at the far end of a long table from a husband who passed her the salt with grave courtesy and would not meet her eyes.
Three days of the maids’ cold little insolences and Kate’s anxious kindness and Rosie’s arms, the only true warmth in any of it.
Three nights of lying awake in a beautiful bed that did not smell of him, listening to the wind come down off the hills, and hating herself for missing the sound of another body breathing in the dark.
This is what ye wanted, ye great fool. Ye drew the line. Nay touchin’, ye said. Separate bedrooms, ye said. He’s only givin’ ye what ye asked of him. So why does it feel like he has reached into me chest and taken somethin’ out of it?
On the third night, a maid drew her a bath, sullen and silent, and left her to it. Olivia sank into the hot water in the firelight and let herself, just for a moment, just this once, remember.
The low, relentless voice in the dark. His hand clenched in the sheets to keep it off her skin. How he had called her bonnie. How he had told her that she was his. How he had watched her fall apart and never once touched her, holding to his word like a man gripping a cliff edge in a gale.
She remembered it now with her own hand drifting traitorously down through the warm water.
She was furious at her own body for wanting a man who had told her plainly, to her face, that he would not let himself want her.
That was the cruelty of it. He had not said he felt nothing. She could have borne it if he had said he felt nothing. She could have hated him clean and gone to sleep.
What he had said was that he would not allow it, that whatever was in him, he intended to strangle it in the dark and call the strangling duty.
And he had said it with his hands not quite steady and his eyes on her mouth, and then he had walked out and had a cold room made up for her down the passage.
He wanted her. She was as sure of it as she was of her own name.
And he had decided that the wanting was a thing to be survived rather than a thing to be answered, and there was no argument she could make against that, because he had never once claimed she was wrong.
She would not finish the thought. She would not give him that, even in her own mind, even when alone.
She climbed out of the bath, dried herself thoroughly, pulled on her shift, and slid into the big, cold, beautiful bed. She lay there in the dark for a long time, listening to the strange room settle around her.
I cannae sleep without him. There. I’ve thought it plainly. I cannae sleep in a room the man isnae in, and I’ve ken him but a few weeks, and I hate him, and I cannae sleep for the want of the sound of his breathin’. What is wrong with me? What has he done to me?
She slept at last, somewhere in the small black hours, a thin and dreamless sleep.
And woke to a hand clamped over her mouth.
There was a weight on the bed. There was a hand pressed hard over her mouth, and a knee pinning the blankets, and the cold prick of steel laid against her throat, and a voice breathing low and rank into her ear.
“Nae a sound, Blythe. Nae one wee sound. This is for the river. This is for every soul ye’ve cost us.”
Olivia did the only thing that was left to do.
She bit down on the hand over her mouth with every ounce of strength she had, tasted blood, and as the man reared back, cursing, she filled her lungs and screamed the castle down.