Chapter Twenty
‘It’s dark in here,’ Ailsa’s voice drifted around the cold stones. ‘How did you find your way down the stairs without breaking your leg?’
‘I lit a torch,’ Rory answered.
‘I can see that, but it’s hardly enough to read by if that’s what you’re intending to do in the crypt in the middle of the night.’ She turned the corner and he could see her. Her arms crossed over her body against the cool night air. ‘Ah, you’re not reading. No journals, just a flagon of ale.’
Rory slid over on the bench. ‘With no goblet because I couldn’t drink any more. But my father insisted on celebrating, so I couldn’t leave the room without it in my hand.’
Carefully, she sat next to him. ‘Celebrating?’
Ailsa was dressed in a simple gown with loose laces and plain slippers on her feet.
But nothing was plain or simple about her red hair which was unbound and waving about her shoulders and down her back.
Aside from the ceremonial brooch she’d pinned on her gown, she looked ready for bed and utterly beautiful.
Especially when she curled her feet under her as she sat.
‘Would you believe, as large as I am, my father can drink more than me? So he celebrated, while I became unsteady on my feet. How did you know I’d be here?’
‘You didn’t come to bed and the Hall is still full.’ She played with the blanket that was on the bench. ‘I thought you may have wanted quiet again. But it’s an odd place...being in a crypt.’
He had no defence to that.
‘Why didn’t you come to bed?’ she asked.
‘I thought maybe to read the journals, but they had been put away and I didn’t want to disturb anyone this late at night.’
‘Then you stayed?’
He nodded.
‘Because you’re angry with me?’
Rory grabbed a corner of the blanket and pulled it over them. ‘I feel many things, but anger isn’t one of them. Neither is blame, accusations nor betrayal.’
‘You—you stormed out of here when I tried to talk to you.’ She seemed surprised by the blanket, so he tucked it under her legs, the movements bringing them closer, his body already responding despite the location, his exhaustion and conflicting thoughts.
He knew it would always be thus with his wife, and he looked forward to it.
‘Since then I walked around until we ate. Did you not see the mud on my shoes?’
‘I see the mud on them now, as well as the splatters up your breeches.’
He looked like a beggar next to his wife. ‘I should have taken care with my appearance. You are very beautiful tonight.’
She shifted against him as if his compliment affected her. ‘A significant walk, then. I informed you your entire existence is a lie and that I’ve known it from the beginning and now you’re sharing a blanket.’
‘It was quite a walk. There was even an unexpected rut or two I stepped into which put all matters into perspective.’ He adjusted his arm so she could rest her head more comfortably.
‘I wasn’t angry that you told me. I was angry that my father was—is—Hamish.
You need to know I already suspected I wasn’t Finley’s child.
After all, I’m much larger than Finley and there was always a matter of...
aloofness with my parents. I never felt as though I was a Lochmore. I knew this when I married you.’
Ailsa didn’t want to be right that Rory had spent his childhood alone. How could a child ever feel as though he didn’t belong? ‘Did you think I’d be angry that you didn’t tell me?’
‘You have every right to be. This matter is grave. I am McCrieff’s child.
An illegitimate baby, but all the same his only issue.
What’s more, I wished Hamish dead. For what he did to Paiden, for what he tried to do to the rest of my clan, to you.
If he wasn’t on his deathbed, I would demand an honour match with my own father.
What kind of child wants to kill his own father? ’
Ailsa couldn’t bear the pain in his voice.
‘Don’t. Don’t torture yourself. Hamish is not a man anyone could tolerate.
He was a harsh ruler and the older he became the more punishing his edicts.
My father and myself were often his favourites to exact some petty revenge upon.
If I hadn’t wanted to preserve life or my soul... ’
‘And this man’s my father.’
Curse her choice of words. ‘Please don’t grant him another thought!’
‘I can’t talk to Hamish, even if I wanted to,’ he continued as if he didn’t hear her.
‘Anything I say won’t erase the past, and if I said anything at all he’d know I was his son.
And that can never be.’ A drumming of his fingers as if, despite his words, he wondered what that conversation would be.
‘Useless to even think about these matters, he’s already passing. ’
‘Blame me. If I had told you earlier—’
‘When I arrived? That’s an impossible circumstance. I’ll need to talk to my mother,’ Rory whispered.
‘What will that solve?’ She started to pull away, but Rory held her fast and she let him. ‘Even if you do know with certainty, it changes nothing.’
‘Changes nothing? Hamish, my father, must have raped her. She must feel some resentment for me. I came down here to read the journals, to see if there’s any evidence of my lineage. If we are to go forward, this is something that must not be known.’
She closed her eyes for two breaths. Closed them a bit more before she said, ‘Rory, I have to tell you something.’
‘There’s more?’ he said quietly. ‘I may not like these crypt talks with you, my wife.’
She was the bearer of too great a truth not to tell him, though she feared she would hurt him even more. With every bit of her body and soul, she didn’t want to hurt him more.
‘A clan has secrets and as the healer and midwife Rhona knew of them. When she was ill, she wasn’t lucid.
She’d beg me to cool her fever with fire.
She’d talked nonsense, and mumble details of clan members.
Sometimes she’d look right through me and tell me such matters of healing import, I’d get cross with her for not telling me sooner.
‘I’d call them ramblings, but they weren’t. They were more gasps of memory between the pain. Everything she said was audibly clear, I just didn’t understand the context of what she said. Not until I met you.’
‘Me?’ Rory asked. ‘There’s more to tell about my birth, isn’t there.’
‘There’s more,’ she said. Curse her small stature for her body didn’t feel substantial enough to hold this man. Still, she wrapped herself as tightly about him as she could. Pressed every bit of who she was against him so he’d know she was there.
‘It can’t be worse than my mother raped and my father... Hamish.’
At the sounds of his hesitancy, Ailsa would have ripped her heart out and pressed that directly to his if she could have. Even so, the way she felt, the hammering of her heart and the feel of his... There was no easy way to speak of this.
‘You mother wasn’t raped,’ she said. ‘Because Helen isn’t your mother.’
She felt Rory’s heart stop for one beat, his breath stop for two more before he suddenly released both with force.
It shook her as well as him. Then he slowly extricated himself from her.
It was his fingers first, each lift bringing the fresh chilly air to her skin.
Then one limb before another. His legs next before he shifted his body.
Until the only thing that held them together was the blanket he had over their laps.
It was still tucked around her, but was slowly unravelling from him and slipping to the floor.
She watched it slide down his leg, watched how he didn’t grab to secure it to him.
She hoped, wished, whatever happened next that what they’d found with each other wouldn’t be so easily lost.
‘Finley is not my father,’ he said. ‘And now Helen is not my mother.’
Free from his hold, Ailsa carefully adjusted herself so that she could face him.
What she saw were shadows and light flickering against his dark hair and darker eyes, and she silently cursed the lone torch he’d lit.
What needed to be said next was very important and she wanted to see him! ‘You’re not questioning me.’
‘After everything, the one certainty I have is that nothing is certain.’
Was that true for them as well? She took courage from the fact that he was still in the room with her, that he hadn’t left the bench and was instead turned towards her so they could face each other.
‘If Helen is not my mother,’ he said after another moment. ‘what are you trying to tell me? Am I to assume the McCrieff healer knew that Helen wasn’t my mother? That she talked of this? Did she...?’ He swallowed. ‘Did others hear her?’
‘No one. I was the only one to care for her. Sometimes she’d look at me, grip my arm as if demanding I know things I hadn’t before.
Sometimes she told me matters she didn’t mean to tell me.
When it started, I never left the room. I didn’t want her burned or tortured in her old age if her words were heard by the wrong ears.
She was hurting enough as it was and I made sure no one was there when she was awake.
Others took the linens and the waste pots and came and brought me food. ’
‘It was just you,’ he whispered as if he couldn’t believe it to be true.
‘She wasn’t ill long, death came fast. It was just me.’ Why were they having these conversations in a crypt? No one had died, but Rory was as pale as a ghost and she knew, in a way, she was killing his childhood.
‘You knew,’ he said and repeated, ‘You—knew. How did she?’
‘Hamish is a callous man, who used everyone around him. And he liked young girls the most. As far as I know, none of them consented. Rhona helped one of these girls, Marion, a girl from the McNeill clan, with the pregnancy and the birthing. Rhona, who must have been very young herself, said Marion’s body barely recovered from his use and the birthing was too much. ’
‘Marion was my mother...and she died.’