Chapter 13 #2
He opened it. He turned a page, then another, his expression giving nothing away. Elspeth found herself holding her breath.
He eventually closed it, bent down, and wedged the book’s spine under the nearest leg. The desk stopped wobbling.
“Exactly what I needed, thank ye,” he said with a faint, satisfied nod. “It’s been unsteady for a fortnight. I hadnae found anythin’ the right thickness.”
Elspeth stared at the book, now serving as a wedge beneath the desk leg, its fine leather binding pressed flat against the stone floor.
“That,” she said, “is a volume of poetry.”
“Aye. And a fine thickness for the purpose.”
“I didnae give it to ye to prop up furniture, Magnus.”
“It’s doin’ considerably more good here than it would on a shelf.” He straightened casually and returned his attention to his correspondence as though the matter were settled.
Elspeth pressed her fingers briefly against her temple. “Has it ever occurred to ye that a man might learn somethin’ from poetry, rather than simply findin’ uses for its weight?”
“I’ve learned it’s heavier than most books its size.”
“Magnus.”
He looked up.
“If ye only gave it a chance,” she said, gentler now, “it might surprise ye. There’s more to a man’s life than fences and ledgers. Flowers. Poems. The occasional foolish gesture, made for no reason but that ye wished to make it.”
He considered this as though her words were a problem requiring a practical solution, rather than a feeling requiring acknowledgment.
“Vegetables are far more practical than flowers,” he said.
Elspeth blinked. “I beg yer pardon?”
“Flowers wilt within days and serve no purpose beyond lookin’ pleasant. A vegetable can be eaten. Ye could grow a fine bed of neeps in less space than most men waste on roses, and at the end of it, ye’d have somethin’ to show for the effort besides a room that smells nice for a week.”
Elspeth stared at him.
“Ye are hopeless,” she scoffed.
“I am practical.”
“Ye are thoroughly hopeless, Magnus Wallace, and I daenae ken why I keep expecting otherwise.” She snatched the poetry volume from beneath the desk leg, which promptly resumed its wobble, and tucked it firmly beneath her arm. “This book deserves better than to prop up yer furniture.”
“The desk disagrees.”
“The desk survived all these years without help. It shall survive without a book beneath it a while longer.”
She left him to his correspondence and his newly unsteady desk, and spent the remainder of the day finding reasons not to be in whatever room he occupied. Helping Mrs. McAulay with the linens, walking the kitchen garden twice, though nothing there required her attention.
Sitting with Becky over needlework, she made no progress whatsoever because every few minutes her mind wandered back to a man who could take a gift meant to soften him and effortlessly turn it into a wedge for a desk leg.
By the time the candles were lit for supper, she had successfully avoided him through four separate meals’ worth of opportunity.
She found, infuriatingly, that avoiding him took rather more effort than she had anticipated.
To add to that, it left her considerably less satisfied than she had expected.
She found the flowers when she went to set down her hairpins.
A small bundle of them, tied loosely with a bit of twine, sat on the corner of her nightstand where nothing had been that morning.
Wildflowers, the ordinary sort that grew wild along the fences and the loch path.
Nothing chosen for its rarity, nothing arranged with any particular art. Just gathered, tied, and left.
Elspeth stood there a moment, still in her shift, staring at them.
She knew his door creaked at a particular pitch, low and long, the sound of hinges that needed oil and never got it.
Apparently, he preferred the warning it gave him of anyone approaching.
She knew the hour he generally retired, later than the rest of the household by a wide margin.
She knew the weight of his boots on the stone—heavier than Duncan’s, slower, the steps of a man who never hurried anywhere.
She had never admitted to any of this. She admitted it now, standing there with the flowers in her hand, and found the admission considerably more unsettling than the flowers themselves.
She gathered them up, pulled a shawl over her shoulders that did very little to disguise what she was wearing beneath it, and crossed the corridor.
She knocked softly.
The door opened almost at once, as though he had been standing just behind it. And there he was—coat gone, shirt open at the throat, sleeves shoved back past the elbows, his dark hair loose from its usual tie and falling forward in a way she had never once seen it during daylight hours.
He looked, for the first time since she had met him, unguarded, and it did something uncomfortable to her breathing that she chose not to examine.
“Thank ye,” she said, lifting the small bundle between them.
Magnus grunted, which she had learned by now to interpret as acknowledgment rather than dismissal.
“It was very kind of ye.”
“It was practical,” he corrected. “Ye wanted flowers. I brought ye flowers. Ye’ll be pleased, and pleased is what’s required for this arrangement to work.”
“Practical,” she repeated.
“Aye.”
His gaze, however, had not moved on to the next practical matter. It had settled somewhere below her collarbone.
Elspeth became abruptly aware that she had already changed for bed, that her shift was thin where her gowns were thick, softer where they were stiff with boning and layers, and that the corridor, lit only by a single low lamp, offered no particular cover for either of them.
Her cheeks flushed before she could stop them.
“Magnus,” she said, partly to redirect the conversation and partly because the question had been sitting in her gut for days, “how do ye expect to build a family if ye avoid affection?”
He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed loosely over his chest, and considered the question.
“Families need security,” he answered. “Warmth. Food. A roof that doesnae leak. That’s what matters.”
“And gentleness? Joy? Daenae ye need those to make a family?”
He was quiet for a moment. His eyes, which had drifted back to her face during the question, dropped again, slower this time, tracing the line of her shoulders down to where the shawl had slipped. He did not seem to notice he was doing it. Or maybe he did not care to stop.
“What I need to make a family is ye wearin’ that in me chamber,” he said, his voice rougher at the edges.
His hand came up before she had fully understood the sentence, two fingers catching the thin fabric at her wrist, drawing along the seam of it with a touch so light it barely qualified as contact at all.
She felt it everywhere, a slow heat spreading up from where his fingers traced, and found herself wondering what that same touch might feel like beneath the fabric.
“Lookin’ like that,” he added, quieter.
Her cheeks, already warm, burned. She glanced down at where his fingers rested against her wrist, then back up at him, and took her time answering, mostly because she needed it.
“After we wed,” she said, and was pleased to hear her voice come out steadier than she felt. “Until then, ye willnae see me lookin’ like this again, Magnus, or ye’ll find yer own shift folded neatly beside me bed instead.”
Something shadowed his face. Surprise, she thought, at his own hand still on her wrist, at whatever he had just said and clearly not planned to. He looked, for one unguarded second, as unsettled by the admission as she felt hearing it.
“Me Laird,” she added a beat too late, the honorific arriving with considerably less authority than she had intended.
He cleared his throat and stepped back half a pace, though the doorframe held most of his weight. His jaw tightened as though he were physically forcing the next words out in the correct order.
“Goodnight, Elspeth.”
Before she could form an answer, his hand moved from her wrist to her shoulder, and he turned her around, steering her back across the narrow corridor.
The door shut between them with a soft, final click.
Elspeth stood there in the dim light of her own chamber, flowers clutched in one hand, shawl slipping from one shoulder, and stared at the closed door as though it might yet offer further explanation.
None came.
She looked down at the wildflowers. She looked back at the door and could not decide whether she was furious with him or a good deal more complicated than furious.