Fifteen #2
A woman who truly loved her husband would find a way to share not only her body with him, but the truth as well.
“You’ve been seen taking carrots to the stables, my girl, and now half my carrots are missing. What am I to put in today’s stew, I ask you?”
Cook’s great arms were folded over her chest, her apron sported streaks of dried blood, and no hint of a smile suggested to Maeve that this was anything other than the start of a birching or worse.
“I don’t steal,” Maeve said, knowing Lachlan lurked in the pantry and could hear every word. “I don’t even like carrots.” What’s more, Cook had freely given her the only two carrots she’d taken to the stables.
The scullery maid scrubbing sand into the bottom of an enormous pot over at the sink shot Maeve a pitying look.
“Maeve, everybody knows you nip out to the stables without permission, and Wee Bannock could put away half a bag of carrots in nothing flat. If you admit you took the carrots, I’ll not go to your brother about it.”
Her brother? The brother who could not be bothered to do more than quiz Maeve about her day if he happened to glance her way at supper? The brother who seemed to spend all his time mooning after a woman he’d been married to since before Maeve had been born?
“I do not steal,” Maeve said, “and I do not lie, and I do not like carrots.” Besides, Uncle Angus kept a bag of carrots in the saddle room, but Maeve didn’t say that. Uncle had told her the stash of carrots in the stable was one of their secrets, and secrets must be kept.
The scullery maid went back to her scrubbing, but from the butler’s pantry, Maeve heard something scrape and clank as if one of the boxes that held the cutlery had been shifted.
“Are you saying that Lachlan took the carrots?” Cook asked. “Or young Kelsey over there? Are you saying I took carrots from me own kitchen, Maeve? Lying is not an attractive habit for a wee lass to fall into.”
Maeve would never eat shortbread again, not if this fat, unfair old woman was the one to make it.
“It’s your kitchen, and that means you should know where your carrots are. I did not steal them, and I want to go home to Ireland.”
Whatever Lachlan was doing in the butler’s pantry, he wasn’t minding it very closely, because a loud clatter suggested he’d made a mess in there.
Cook drew in one of those offended-grown-up breaths through her nose, growing larger as she inhaled. The strings holding her apron closed disappeared at her waist as hips and ribs met on the tide of her indignation.
“This is my kitchen, young lady, and that saucy talk will not be allowed.”
“Whose saucy talk is holding up my luncheon?” a man’s voice asked from the back hallway. “I cannot have Cook’s sweet temper tried, or the castle will go hungry.”
Michael came sauntering in, his kilt flapping against his knees, his hair sticking up like somebody had messed it. He was smiling, which was good, though he wouldn’t be for long.
“Maeve snatched a bag of carrots,” Cook said, her accusation full of the tsk-tsk tone any child would loathe.
“When I confronted her, she denied her misdeeds, refused to apologize, and told me in my kitchen I should be able to keep track of every wee thief who comes darting through the root cellar.”
“That’s not what I said!”
Michael’s smile vanished as if snatched away by piskies.
“You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head, Maeve Brodie, particularly when addressing your elders.”
Where else would she keep her tongue but in her head? “Cook is lying. I did not take the carrots, and it is her kitchen.”
Cook—blast her to the Bad Place—shook her head in dismay, though Maeve had spoken nothing less than the truth—three truths in fact.
“Go to your room.” Michael said this in the same tones Kevin used to talk to a hound who’d made a mess on the carpets.
The hounds knew to slink away, tail tucked, but Maeve wasn’t a hound, and she hadn’t piddled on any carpets.
“I haven’t done anything wrong!”
Michael crossed the kitchen and stood over her, looking about ten feet tall.
“You compound your errors, Maeve, when you take that tone with me. Apologize to Cook for your disrespect, and we’ll discuss your thievery later.”
Maeve nearly countered that Cook should be apologizing to her, and that when Michael respected his youngest sister enough to spend two minutes with her outside the dining parlor, then Maeve would listen to his orders.
Lachlan saved her from a slap or worse, for when grown-ups made up their minds, they became unreasonable. Maeve had ended up in Scotland on the strength of just such stupid, stubborn, grown-up thinking. Had she tried to argue with Michael further, a birching would surely have come her way.
But the sound of crockery smashing in the butler’s pantry turned all heads in the direction of the hallway.
“I didn’t take the carrots,” Maeve yelled, darting toward the back door. “You’re all mean. You’re unfair, you don’t listen, and I want to go home!”
She pelted past Lachlan, who stared in dismay at the shards of porcelain all around his feet, pelted past the look of horror he aimed at her, and scampered up the winding stairs that would take her away from the only place she’d felt comfortable in the entire stupid castle.
“You’re raising a little girl,” Michael observed as he and Hugh ambled across the bailey.
“Aye. My Annie. She’s the spit and image of her dear ma.” Hugh’s tone said he took vast comfort from the girl’s resemblance to her departed mother.
While Maeve’s look was unique, not fair like Michael, not dark like Erin and Bridget. In the kitchen, the child had been a small red-haired pillar of righteousness, chin quivering with outrage, her meager stores of childish self-restraint flung on a pyre of righteous self-defense.
He’d been reminded of Brenna as a girl. For all her quiet, Brenna had been stubborn, and still was.
“How do you know when Annie’s lying?” Michael asked, because Cook had been certain the carrots were missing, and in fairness to Cook, Maeve had been the logical suspect.
“Annie doesn’t lie. Young children usually have to be taught to lie. What is this errand we’re about, Laird? I have work to do.”
“Let your brothers do it. We’re searching Angus’s quarters.” Saying the words did not make the job any more appealing. Hugh paused in their progress across the bailey and made a pretense of surveying granite walls that had stood for centuries.
“Are you turning me into a thief? I’ll not do it.”
“We’ll take nothing that belongs to Angus, but I’ve been asking myself who benefits from discrediting my wife? Who stood to gain the most from turning the entire estate against her?” Who had subtly undermined Michael’s respect for Brenna from the very day he’d returned home?
“Anybody would benefit from a year’s profit on the wool,” Hugh snorted. “I don’t like Angus, and my brothers purely hate him. Neil in particular can’t abide the man, but even Neil would balk at searching a fellow’s private quarters.”
No, Neil would not. Left to his own devices, Michael suspected Neil might burn Angus’s home cheerfully, with Angus locked inside it.
“Have you ever asked Neil why he hates Angus?”
“I have not, though Annie had her suspicions,” Hugh said, striding off at a rapid clip. “If we’re to riffle Angus’s linen, then let’s be about it. I assume you’ve sent him off on some errand?”
“I sent him down to Aboyne to lay in some supplies for the coming festivities, and his household help has a half day today,” Michael said, catching up to Hugh.
“I’m exercising a landlord’s reasonable right of reentry to inspect my property.
Angus believes in upholding the law. What did you mean about children being taught how to lie? ”
They passed over the drawbridge, the boards solid beneath Michael’s boots in a way stone could not be.
“Annie is a good girl. She’d rather admit she’s misstepped than lie and have the weight of a guilty conscience dragging around wherever she goes.
As long as my punishments are reasonable, she’ll tell me readily enough when she’s done wrong.
If I flew into a rage, hurt her, or kept every transgression hanging before her eyes like some martyr on a cross, then she’d learn to lie well. ”
Hugh’s parenting methods comported exactly with what Michael had found to be the case with adolescent recruits in both French and English armies.
Minor crimes weren’t worth lying over, and yet, in a sense, Lachlan had lied by remaining silent in the pantry rather than coming forward with what he knew.
While Maeve had been telling the goddamned truth.
“This is a lovely property,” Hugh said as they approached the three-story stone dwelling Michael’s father had built as the dower house. “Needs flowers, though.”
Granite could be pretty. Much of Aberdeenshire was built of granite, a soft gray available in local abundance. Stone didn’t burn; it didn’t creak and shift with the endless freezing and thawing of the changing seasons.
And yet, it was cold to look at and cold to dwell in. Michael led the way through a wooden gate painted white and streaked with mud.
“Cook accused Maeve of stealing carrots.”
“Oh, that makes nothing but sense,” Hugh said, closing the gate behind them. “Show me a child who steals vegetables, and I’ll show you a child wrongly accused.”
“Cook has no children, so your reasoning might not occur to her, but Maeve does like to visit the stables.” Alone, when she’d been told not to.
When her brother ought to be the one taking her there.
“The old carrots are reserved for the stables,” Hugh said as Michael fished a heavy iron key out of a pocket. “The carrots that get tough and hairy before they’re dug up. Cook ought to know that.”
Michael hadn’t known that. Lachlan, Maeve’s timid young champion, had had to explain it to him after Maeve had pelted off in high dudgeon.
“I’m surprised Angus even locks his door.” Michael had to use a bit of force to get the tumblers to turn. “Doesn’t he trust his own people?”