Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Nine Months Later
"Ye're holdin' it too tight," Margaret said. "Look. The stem breaks if ye grip it like that. Hold it the way ye'd hold a bird. Firm enough that it stays, gentle enough that it lives."
Catriona, who was six and had strong opinions about being corrected, looked at her flower with deep suspicion and then at Margaret with slightly less.
She loosened her fingers. The buttercup stem curved obediently into the crown she was building, and her face rearranged itself into the expression of a child who had just been proven wrong and was deciding whether to acknowledge it.
"There," Margaret said. "Now the clover. Thread it under, nae over."
She guided the small hands without taking over.
That had taken her months to learn. Her instinct in the early days had been to help too much, to step in before the fumbling became failure, but she had discovered that children learned nothing from perfection.
They learned from trying. She settled back on her heels, the damp grass cool beneath her bare feet, and watched the circle of children work.
There were seven of them today. Catriona and her younger brother, two of the miller's daughters, a boy called Euan who said very little but watched everything, and the twins from the stable, who were four and could not be trusted with the clover because they ate it.
Margaret had given the twins daisies, which were sturdier, and they were satisfied.
"Ye've got grass stains on yer dress again," Isobel said from above her.
Margaret looked up. Her friend stood on the second step, Isobel's youngest on her hip.
"I ken," Margaret said cheerfully.
"Yer mother would weep."
"Me mother is in the Lowlands and cannae see me." Margaret turned back to Catriona's progress. "Come down. The sun is warm today."
Isobel descended the stairs and stood at the edge of the grass, gazing out over the small chaos of children and flowers. She did not sit down. Margaret noticed this without lifting her eyes. She had learned to read Isobel in the small details—the way she carried herself.
Something was off.
"What is it?" Margaret asked.
The twins looked up. Margaret smiled at them with the gentle, reassuring expression she always kept ready for moments when her face needed to do something her body was not, and they went back to their daisies.
Isobel crouched beside her. Close enough that her voice would carry only as far as it needed to. "Margaret, there is somethin' ye need to ken."
"What is it? Say it plainly."
A pause. One breath, then another. "He is here."
Margaret's hands stilled on the clover she was holding.
The sun was still warm. The children continued talking as Catriona explained to her brother, in a tone of withering authority, that he was holding his stem wrong.
A crow lifted off from the far wall with a sharp, declarative sound and quickly disappeared.
Everything else went on, every simple thread of the afternoon, with Margaret sitting in the middle, her hands in her lap, feeling the ground relearn itself beneath her feet.
"Where is he?" she said.
"The gate. He rode in ten minutes past." Isobel's voice was careful and level, the voice she used when she was trying not to steer. "I wanted to tell ye before ye saw him."
Margaret set down the clover. She pressed her palms flat against her skirts, feeling the fabric, the warmth still in it from the sun. She breathed in through her nose and counted to four the way her grandmother had taught her when she was small and prone to saying things she regretted.
One. Two. Three. Four.
"Are ye all right?" Isobel asked.
"Nay," Margaret said. "Give me a moment."
She sat there in the middle of the children, the flowers, and the bright summer afternoon, and let herself feel it—all of it, all at once, without trying to control it.
The anger that had no clear shape. The thing beneath the anger she refused to name because naming it would give it too much weight.
Nine months of lonely mornings and nights.
Nine months of hearing his name casually spoken by those around her—the Laird, your husband—and learning to answer without flinching.
Nine months of building something entirely her own and gradually, then suddenly, becoming someone she recognized and respected.
And now he was at the gate.
She got to her feet.
"Catriona," she said, her voice entirely steady. "Ye're in charge. If the twins want to eat the flowers, let them. It willnae kill them."
Catriona looked up with the expression of a child who had just been granted significant power and was already thinking about what to do with it.
Margaret walked across the courtyard toward the gate.
She saw him before he saw her. He was standing near the arch, one hand still loosely holding the reins of his horse, looking at the courtyard the way he had looked at everything she had ever watched him look at.
Assessing it. Taking inventory. The children, the laundry lines, the worn stones.
The posture of a man who walked into every room already calculating what would need to be defended and what could be left.
She had nine months of practice to draw on. She drew on it.
She stopped six feet away and waited.
He saw her. She watched something flicker through him. It was brief, controlled, and he buried it before it could be named, but it was there.
"Margaret," he said.
"Fergus." She kept her hands easy at her sides. "Ye made good time."
"I sent word."
"Ye did." She tilted her head. "Three days ago. The word and the man arrived at nearly the same time. It didnae leave much room for preparation."
"I needed to move quickly."
"Aye." The space between them was full of everything that had happened at their wedding and in the nine months that came after, and neither of them addressed any of it, because they were not going to do this in front of the miller's daughters. "Come inside then."
She turned and walked back toward the hall without waiting to see if he followed. He did. She heard his boots on the stone behind her, unhurried and deliberate.
Isobel had vanished from the courtyard with the discretion of a woman who knew when not to be present. Margaret was grateful for it.
She led him into the smaller receiving room off the hall, the one with the window overlooking the herb garden, because it was the right place for a difficult conversation. Big enough to breathe. Small enough that you could not avoid what was being said.
She closed the door and turned.
"There is a child," he said.
He had not waited for her to speak. She had not expected him to.
He would have practiced this in the saddle, shaping it into the most efficient form.
She understood this about him now, through observation, just as she had learned everything else.
He prepared. He strategized. He determined the purpose of a conversation beforehand and acted accordingly.
"Tell me," she said.
He told her. He did it plainly, which she appreciated.
About the pox in the lower glens that caused his advisor and his wife to die.
About the child who was left at his door with just a note.
He told it without any performance or attempt to win her sympathy, and that made it hit harder than it might have otherwise.
She was quiet for a moment.
"How old is the bairn?" she asked.
"Six months. Perhaps seven."
"And how long has she been in yer care?"
Something crossed his jaw. "Three weeks."
"Three weeks," Margaret said. "And how is she?"
"Alive," he said. Then, to his credit, he stopped. He briefly looked at the floor and then back. "Strugglin'. The housekeeper is capable, but the castle is short-staffed, and the bairn needs more than someone capable. She needs..." He stopped again.
"She needs a woman," Margaret said. "She needs someone who willnae treat her as a problem to be managed."
"Aye."
The room held the word between them.
"And ye thought of me," Margaret said.
"Ye are me wife."
"I am," she agreed. "After nine months of bein' yer wife in name only, in someone else's castle, without a word of how long that was to continue.
I am still, technically, yer wife." She watched his jaw tighten.
"I want to understand the sequence, Fergus.
Because from where I'm standin', it looks as though ye remembered I existed when ye needed somethin' from me. "
"That isnae?—"
"Is it nae?" She was not raising her voice.
She had discovered, in nine months of practice, that she did not need to.
"Ye left me here on our weddin' night. Ye told me yer clan was nae ready for a wife.
Ye went north, and ye built yer lairdship, and ye sent nay letters.
Nae one. And now there is a child who needs tendin', and ye've ridden south to collect yer wife.
" She looked at him steadily. "Tell me what I've gotten wrong. "
He said nothing. She gave him credit for not trying to construct an argument around it.
"I made mistakes," he said. The words came out with the difficulty of a man unused to saying them, which meant they cost him something.
"I daenae have a clear explanation for the silence.
I told meself it was for the clan. That the time wasnae right.
That bringin' ye north before things were settled would put ye in the middle of a situation that wasnae safe.
" He held her gaze. "Those things were true. They were also convenient."
Margaret looked at him. "Convenient," she said.
"It was easier to focus on what was in front of me than to think about what I'd left behind."
The honesty of it caught her off guard. She had prepared for deflection.
She had prepared for a version of the conversation where he restated his reasons with more authority and expected her to accept them.
She had not prepared for this, for a man standing in a small room looking at her directly and saying the true thing instead of the defensible one.
She turned to the window. The herb garden shone in the afternoon sun, with tall purple lavender along the far wall. She had planted half of it herself in April, when the ground finally softened. She had not thought, when she put the seeds in the earth, that she might not be here to see them grow.
"I have made a life here," she said to the window. "I want ye to understand that. I wasnae sittin' in a chair waitin' for ye, Fergus. I made meself useful here. I learned what this castle needed, and I gave it. I built somethin' here." She turned. "I am nae the woman ye left."
"I can see that," he said.
She looked at his face for the condescension that sometimes dwelled in such statements, the subtle diminishment of it, the suggestion that he was surprised she succeeded. She did not see it. He appeared to be a man who was rethinking something important.
"Then I'll tell ye me terms," she said.
"Yer terms?"
"Aye, Fergus. Me terms." She clasped her hands in front of her, the way she had learned to do when she wanted to seem calmer than she felt.
"I'll come north. I'll care for the bairn, and I'll learn yer castle and yer clan, and I'll be what a lady of that house needs to be.
I will do all of that." She let the pause sit for a moment.
"But I am nae comin' north to be managed.
I am nae comin' north to be installed in a wing somewhere and consulted on the question of dinner menus while ye go about yer real work.
If I come, I come as yer wife. Fully. That means ye speak to me.
That means ye tell me when things are wrong before they become disasters.
That means I have a voice in the runnin' of that house and ye listen to it, nae as a courtesy, but because ye've decided it has value. "
"And if I daenae agree?" he said slowly.
"Then I willnae come."
She said it quietly. She had practiced it in her head during the early mornings when the castle was still, and she had too much time to think.
She worried that when the moment arrived, her words would come out brittle or too loud, shaped by emotion rather than by decision.
But they did not. They came out steady and clear, and she felt more relieved by this than she let herself show.
Fergus looked at her for a long time.
"Ye've changed," he said.
"I told ye I would."
"I daenae mean it as a complaint." His voice was different now.
The efficiency was still there, the brevity, but underneath was something else, something she recognized as a man trying to find an honest thing to say and taking the time to find it.
"On our weddin' night, I said things I willnae dress up as anythin' other than what they were.
And I left ye here." He paused. "Ye have every right to tell me to ride back north alone. "
"I still might," she said. "I havenae decided yet."
Something crossed his face. It was not a smile; rather, it was the moment just before a smile appeared in a man who had forgotten he could smile.
"I agree to yer terms," he said.
"Which ones?"
"All of them," he said without qualification.
"Ye'll have yer voice. Ye'll have me time when I can give it, and when I cannae, I'll tell ye why.
Ye'll nae be put in a wing. Ye'll be the Lady of me house because that is what ye are, and because from what ye've just said to me in the last ten minutes, it would be a considerable waste of yer gifts to put ye anywhere else. "
Margaret looked at him. She thought about the girl who had stood in the hall at Dunalasdair nine months ago with her fists clenched and her face composed, listening to this man tell her she was a distraction.
She thought about the long walk she had taken from that night to this one.
She thought about the lavender in the garden she had planted without knowing if she would be here to see it bloom.
"I'll need two days," she said. "To pack and say me goodbyes properly. I willnae be rushed out of here like an afterthought."
"All right. Two days," he agreed.
"And ye'll tell me about the bairn. Tonight, at dinner. What she likes, and what makes her stop cryin'. Everything ye ken, which I suspect is less than ye think."
"It is significantly less than I think," he said.
"Aye." She allowed herself, briefly, a small smile. "I ken."
She moved toward the door. She stopped with her hand on the frame and looked back at him, standing in the middle of the small room with the afternoon light falling through the window across the floor.
"Her name," she said. "What did ye call her?"
"Lilly," he said. "I decided in the corridor. Three weeks ago."
"Lilly," Margaret repeated. She turned it over, the sound of it. "That's a good name."