Seven
The gardens at the back of Brenna’s castle were like her: tidy, contained, and modest, also more appealing the longer Michael studied them.
Pansies did well here, and Brenna used their vivid colors for contrasting borders.
She’d found a variety with the same blue as Maeve’s eyes, and used it to edge a bed of something white and frothy.
As white as the sun-bleached sheets on Michael’s bed. He mentally pitched that analogy aside, but a heavy tread on the other side of the hedge stopped him from rising from his bench and getting on with his day.
“Shouldn’t you be up on your parapets, Brenna MacLogan?” Angus’s voice held a note of cajolery, but also a touch of something unpleasant.
And the lady’s name was Brenna Brodie, and had been for nearly a decade.
“Stand aside, old man. Where I go is no concern of yours.” Michael hadn’t heard Brenna’s approach, but he heard her lifting her chin.
“This was my home long before you appeared, young lady, and it will be my home until the day I die. You’d best watch your tongue.”
While Michael debated intervening, a silence stretched. An orange cat—a tom from the dimensions of his head—came strutting along past the roses.
“You had best watch yours, Angus Brodie. I heard you tell Lachlan nobody would miss him if he wanted to enjoy a few minutes of a pretty day.” Brenna’s accusation might have been of murder most foul, for all the venom in her tone.
“He’s a boy, Brenna MacLogan, a species you will never understand, else you’d not have allowed Michael to waste ten years of his life soldiering on the bloody Continent.”
Michael rose, because that was the outside of too much, but a crunch of gravel on the other side of the hedge suggested Brenna was marching herself right up to Angus.
“Do you forget, Angus Brodie, that Lachlan’s mother limped her entire life as a result of a mishap in the stables? Do you forget that the boy works for me, not you, and that his father will punish him if his few minutes in the sun take him rambling down to the stables again?”
Michael sat back down.
“The boy loves horses,” Angus said, though some of the pugnacity had ebbed from his words. “Ann Brodie loved horses despite getting her toes wrinkled. The boy feels closer to his mother in the stables, and scrubbing pots and polishing boots will hardly support him when he’s a man grown.”
The discussion was becoming interesting, and apparently to the cat as well. The beast hopped up beside Michael on the bench and head-butted Michael’s ribs.
“It’s for his father to say where the boy spends his time, not you, and not me,” Brenna added. “For now, Lachlan works in the castle.”
Michael only caught the sound of her fading steps, because he listened very hard, hard enough to hear the cat purring mightily—in his lap.
“Presuming beast.” The damned thing weighed a ton and looked mortally disgruntled to be set on the ground.
In the exchange regarding Lachlan, who had been presuming and about what?
Brenna had the right of it—the child’s father would make any and all final decisions—but in Angus’s side of the argument, Michael heard the echoes of the uncle who’d taught him the sword dances and his first few simple card tricks.
Little boys needed to explore the world, not scrub dirty pots all day.
“Has yon beast corrupted you into lurking behind hedges now?” Angus asked when he’d rounded the end of the hedge.
Michael rose and fell in step beside his uncle. “Yon bright sun has encouraged me to linger in my own garden. When did you and Brenna stop getting along?”
Angus was silent for a moment. The cat leaped out in front of them from among some yellow pansies, then sat on its sturdy fundament and yawned.
“She was a good girl,” Angus said, “the sweetest little thing, and so quiet. When your mother left, she changed, or started changing. I am sorry to say it didn’t help when you left, either.”
“You expected her to stop me from joining up?” Michael posed the question casually, but Angus’s accusation had been grossly unfair, not that he could know that.
“Women have their ways, especially plump, pretty young women.”
The moment was ripe for difficult questions, but Michael disliked discussing his wife this way. That Angus recalled her as plump and pretty was vaguely disquieting, particularly when Brenna was no longer that young woman.
“Brenna has no guile,” Michael said. “I love that about her.”
Angus knelt to pet the cat, the movement slow and a little careful, bordering on elderly, though Angus wasn’t fifty years old. “This one loves the ladies too, every chance he gets.”
Michael did not love the ladies; he loved his wife, though he suspected Angus took that point well enough. Because Michael could not ask the most difficult questions, he asked something else.
“Do you ever get lonely, Angus?”
The cat, in the manner of many felines, went in a blink from purring and rubbing itself against the hand that petted it, to swiping at the same hand with a paw sporting a full complement of extended claws.
Angus casually knocked the cat into the roses. “Bloody beast.” He got to his feet ungracefully. “You ask if I’m lonely. To live in the Highlands is to have some acquaintance with loneliness.”
Michael spared a glance for the cat, who righted itself and bounded off for another flower bed.
“A man could say the same thing about the Spanish plains or the French Pyrenees. Loneliness isn’t a function of geography.
” Nor was it a function of marital status, something Brenna had divined that Michael had not.
While he’d been marching off to war or holed up in the French mountains, his wife had been lonely.
So had he. Brutally lonely. Not homesick, or not purely homesick, but lonely. The realization required some pondering.
“I travel into Aberdeen from time to time,” Angus said. “It’s a fine city.”
Aberdeen was a fine city, with as many brothels as any other port town.
Angus was his only living adult relation, and so Michael persisted, because there was no one else to ask.
“But in winter, when we’re stuck up here for weeks at a time, sometimes months?
When the smell of wet wool is in every room and you’d sell your soul for a bit of birdsong. How have you managed all these years?”
How had Michael’s father managed, when those winters meant his wife was off in Ireland, his daughters too?
“You can’t sell your soul,” Angus said as they reached the stables. “You can only condemn it or hope it merits salvation. This is my home. I’ll not leave it.”
Which stirring declaration had nothing to do with the question on the floor.
“I might ride out with my wife this afternoon.”
“You do that,” Angus said. “I’ll scare up Hugh MacLogan and tell him his boy’s too old for the scullery. With a bit of training, the lad will make a fine addition to our stables.”
Angus talked about Lachlan as if he were a yearling with good bloodlines.
“Leave that to me,” Michael said. “My wife is aggravated enough to have Maeve underfoot without any warning. It won’t hurt Lachlan to scrub a few more pots, and he does a good job with a pair of boots.”
Something flitted through Angus’s eyes, a sort of crafty, commiserating humor. “Aye, I’ll leave it to you then. This is your home too.” He strutted off in the direction of the village, something about his gait putting Michael in mind of the tomcat.
“It’s not my home too,” Michael said to nobody in particular. “I own the bloody place.”
“Are you talking to yourself?” Maeve appeared from the depths of the stables, Lachlan at her side. The boy looked a bit defiant, but knew enough to hold his tongue.
“I was. I assume Lachlan gave you a tour of the stables, for which I thank him.”
“He did,” Maeve said. “You have the biggest horses I’ve ever seen. Lachlan said we might be allowed to clean some harness, but Herman Brodie is off looking at a mare, so maybe some other day.”
Herman Brodie, stable master for the past fifteen years, was probably off looking at a mare of the two-legged variety.
“You two wash your feet at the pump before you go back inside the castle. But first, I’ve been meaning to ask you both something.”
Maeve and Lachlan exchanged a look, which Michael did not begrudge them. Everybody needed allies, whether he or she scrubbed potatoes and pots, was newly arrived from Ireland, or owned the damned castle.
“You, Lachlan, are in the kitchen for much of the day, and I need to learn a certain recipe. Do you know your letters?”
“Some.” The boy’s ears turned red, suggesting “some” amounted to his name or a vague approximation of it.
“We’ll get Maeve to help us, then. I want that shortbread recipe,” Michael said. “The one with the lavender. You can winkle it out of Cook, and Maeve can write it down, but you must tell no one.” That last part had both children smiling. “Can you do this?”
“We can,” Maeve said, her grin impish.
“Yes, Laird. Must we do it today? Cousin made a big batch just yesterday.”
Laird. Lachlan was the first to address Michael as laird, and from the child, the title bore respect and something…something Michael liked, something that eased the homesickness and the loneliness both.
“No rush. The important thing is to be casual about it, so nobody notices what you’re up to.”
“We can do that too,” Lachlan said, grabbing Maeve’s hand.
“Before you scamper off, Lachlan, I need a word with you. Maeve, you’ll find pencil and paper in the desk in the library.” At least, there’s where it had been for the first twenty years of Michael’s life.
Maeve waved to them and skipped away, reminding Michael that Brenna used to skip all over the bailey, when she’d first arrived to Castle Brodie.
Lachlan watched Maeve skipping up to the castle, the way Michael might have watched a plate of fresh, warm shortbread on a cold winter’s day.
“I know I’m not supposed to go to the stables, Laird.”
Loneliness was not the exclusive province of adults.