Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
The carriage came up the drive at a pace that suggested whoever was driving it had never once considered the weight it was hauling, wheels groaning under a load that had no business belonging to a single family making a short journey between two castles.
Magnus stood in the courtyard and watched it come, and felt, for reasons he couldn’t yet name, considerably less prepared for this than he had been for the fire two nights ago.
“That’s a great deal of carriage,” Duncan said from beside him.
“Aye.”
“For three people.”
“Aye.”
The carriage rolled to a stop, and the door swung open before the driver had even fully set the brake. Liam MacDougal climbed down first.
“Magnus.” Liam clasped his forearm, grinning. “Congratulations on yer upcoming nuptials. Ye look terrible.”
“I’ve had a busy week.”
“Aye, I heard. Fire, was it?” Liam’s grin didn’t fade. “Well, ye’ll have company for the worst of it now, at least.”
Before Magnus could ask what he meant by that, a second door swung open on the far side, and Katherine MacDougal emerged with a hatbox under each arm.
“Elspeth!” Her voice carried clean across the courtyard, pitched for an audience considerably further away than the woman it was aimed at. “Elspeth, where are ye? I’ve brought everything.”
Elspeth appeared in the doorway of the keep, and whatever greeting she’d meant to offer died somewhere in her throat as she took in the carriage properly for the first time.
“Katherine. What is all this?”
“This,” Katherine said, already directing two of Magnus’s men toward the trunks, “is everything a woman requires for a proper handfasting. Ye daenae think I’d let ye marry in whatever ye happened to have on hand, did ye?”
Magnus watched the trunks come off the carriage one after another, and kept watching, because stopping seemed to invite the possibility that there might be more of them than he’d already counted, which turned out to be the correct instinct because there were.
Six trunks. Two hatboxes. A crate that rattled suspiciously of glass bottles.
Bolts of fabric wrapped in oilcloth against the damp.
Three potted plants, roots bound in sacking, that a groundskeeper carried past him with visible confusion as to where such things were meant to live.
Candles. What appeared to be an entire second wardrobe.
And, near the very bottom of the pile, two matching cases that a stablehand set down with a grunt disproportionate to their size.
Magnus stared at those longest. “Katherine.”
“Aye?”
“Why does one woman require two cases of shoes?”
Katherine looked up from where she was directing the placement of a hatbox, unbothered by the question. “To let her beauty shine.”
Magnus frowned. “Can beauty nae shine in one pair?”
“Magnus Wallace.” Katherine had already produced a ribbon from somewhere and was holding it beneath Elspeth’s chin, tilting her head this way and that. “Ye’ve lived among goats and sheep for too long.”
“The goats never required six trunks.”
“The goats,” Katherine said, “have never had to stand up in front of an entire clan and be married.”
Liam had come to stand beside him by then and clapped a hand on his shoulder. It felt more like genuine sympathy than a greeting.
“Me condolences,” he said.
“For what?”
“Ye’ll see.” Liam’s grin widened, and he nodded toward the growing pile of trunks with the look of a man thoroughly enjoying someone else’s coming misfortune.
Magnus did not have to wait long to see.
Katherine had produced, from somewhere within the second wardrobe’s worth of boxes, a hat that could only be described as an act of open hostility toward the head it was meant to sit upon.
It was wide-brimmed, feathered, dyed a shade of purple that existed nowhere in nature that Magnus had ever encountered in twenty-nine years of living close to it.
“Try it,” Katherine urged, already reaching to set it atop Elspeth’s head.
“I willnae.”
“Elspeth.”
“I will throw it in the loch, Katherine, I swear it on everything I hold dear.”
“Ye’ll do no such thing; it cost a small fortune.”
“Then it can drown expensively.”
The two of them dissolved into something that was half argument and half laughter, Katherine brandishing the hat, Elspeth backing away from it with both hands raised in open refusal.
Somewhere behind them, Mrs. McAulay had appeared in the doorway with a basket of linens forgotten under one arm, watching the whole spectacle with an expression that had gone soft and unmistakably damp at the edges.
“Mrs. McAulay .” Magnus crossed to her, frowning. “Are ye weeping?”
“Nay.” She dabbed at her eyes with the corner of a linen anyway.
“It’s only that there are ladies in this castle again, me Laird.
Proper ladies, with hats and ribbons and nonsense, carrying on the way ladies are meant to carry on.
” She sniffed decisively. “It’s been a long while since these walls heard that particular sort of laughter. ”
Magnus opened his mouth to point out that Elspeth had been living within these walls for going on two weeks now and had been, so far as he was aware, laughing rather regularly the entire time, but then decided against it. Some battles were not worth fighting.
A small figure darted past his knee at speed, chestnut-brown braids flying, and he turned in time to see a little girl make a beeline for the stable yard rather than any of the trunks or hatboxes her mother had just spent a quarter hour unloading.
“Agnes,” Liam called after his daughter without much real hope of being obeyed. “Agnes, come and greet the Laird properly.”
“Is Morag still here?” Agnes shouted back, already halfway across the yard. “The goat, nae the other one. I ken there’s two of them now. Is the goat still here?”
“She’s here,” Magnus called after her, and watched the girl’s face light up with satisfaction before she vanished around the corner of the stables at a dead run.
“She’s talked of nothing else the entire ride,” Liam said, not without fondness. “Yer goat has apparently made quite an impression.”
“The goat makes an impression on everyone. Usually by eating something they daenae intend to offer her.”
Behind them, Katherine had abandoned the hat in favor of holding up two lengths of ribbon against Elspeth’s hair, debating their merits aloud.
“The blue,” Katherine said, holding a ribbon against Elspeth’s hair with one hand and studying the effect with her head tilted. “Nay, the green. It brings out something in yer eyes the blue doesnae.”
“I like the blue,” Elspeth said, playfully batting at Katherine’s hand.
“Nobody asked ye, Elspeth.” Katherine swatted her hand right back, not looking up from her comparison.
“It’s me hair.” Elspeth crossed her arms, fighting a smile she didn’t quite manage to hide.
“It’s yer handfasting, and there should be a difference.” Katherine swapped the ribbon back to blue, frowned at it, swapped it again. “Mrs. McAulay , come and settle this. Blue or green?”
Mrs. McAulay set her basket down without being asked twice and crossed to inspect the matter. “Green,” she said, after a moment. “Blue washes her out, something terrible against that stone behind her.”
“Thank ye.” Katherine cast Elspeth a look of pure vindication. “See? Green.”
“I never said I disliked green. I said I liked blue.”
“Ye cannae like both, Elspeth. That’s nae how ribbons work.”
“It is precisely how ribbons work, Katherine. I daenae ken what ye think I’m meant to do with only the one color for the rest of me life.”
“Green for the handfasting. Blue for after, if ye insist on being difficult about it.”
Katherine was already winding the green ribbon into a braid before Elspeth had finished agreeing to the terms, Mrs. McAulay leaning in to offer an opinion on the plait itself now that the matter had been settled.
The three of them fell into another debate over pins that Magnus lost the thread of within a few words.
He watched everything. The trunks still being hauled past him, the purple hat now abandoned on a barrel where it had apparently lost the argument for good, Duncan already helping himself to one of the sweets from an open crate.
He felt something in his chest that he did not have a ready word for, and had no particular wish to go looking for one.
“I preferred the goats,” he muttered, mostly to himself.
Duncan appeared at his elbow, another sweet already vanishing into his mouth, grinning widely enough that Magnus knew before he spoke that whatever came next would not be sympathy.
“Nay, Cousin.” Duncan clapped him once on the shoulder. “Ye’re simply outnumbered now.”
* * *
From Elspeth’s side, the hat war was very much ongoing when Duncan clapped his cousin on the shoulder across the yard. She caught the tail end of it, Magnus’s flat “I preferred the goats” carrying just far enough for her to hear, and filed it away for later.
“I saw that.” Katherine hadn’t looked away from the ribbon debate for even a second. “Yer Laird, muttering about goats behind me back.”
“He mutters about goats fairly often. Ye shouldnae take it personally.”
“I take everything personally; it’s how I manage such a full life,” Katherine said jokingly and threw both arms around Elspeth for the second time in under an hour, squeezing hard enough that Elspeth had to brace against it to keep her balance.
“I was wondering when ye would do this.”
“Well, ye ken me. I’m allowed.” Katherine drew back, and her gaze snagged immediately on the shoulder of Elspeth’s gown, the soot smudge faintly visible despite Becky’s best efforts with a brush that morning.
Her whole expression went from fond to horrified in the space of a single breath. “What is that?”
“A fire. Two nights ago. I already told ye.”