Sixteen #3
“Hush. For the love of God, please hush. I do not deserve your forgiveness.” His arms held her in a desperate embrace, and yet he made no move to kiss her. No arousal nudged at Brenna’s sex; no tender caress swept across her brow.
“There is nothing to forgive, Michael. You fought your battles. I fought mine, such as they were.” She tightened her arms around him. “We have the rest of our lives together, and I, for one, am grateful for that. Very grateful.”
He shuddered, as if a sexual paroxysm claimed him, or a great grief. When he rolled back to his side of the bed, Brenna at first let him go.
“What is wrong, Michael? I am your wife, and I will endure much if you ask it of me. Your silence cuts at me.”
“Some silences are meant to be kind. You understand that. You probably understand that far better than most.” A spate of sentences. Brenna drew encouragement from his loquaciousness and possessed herself of her husband’s hand.
“Most silences need to be broken. I’ve been looking for a way to bring up some difficult matters, Husband. Old business, as it were. I haven’t known how, but after we’ve seen to this nonsense tomorrow, I will want some of your time.”
She hadn’t meant to say any of that, though darkness was certainly appropriate to her declaration.
“You have already endured much as my wife, Brenna. I am more sorry for that than I can say.”
“You’re daft.” Brenna cuddled up to his side and slid an arm under his neck.
“You haven’t been home long enough to properly try my patience.
” She kissed his cheek. “Go to sleep, and when we’ve rendered every man, woman, and child in the shire feeble with drink, and the old ladies have danced the lads under the table, we’ll clear up a few matters. ”
She kept her arms around him, though he was inert in her embrace. He’d survived the retreat to Corunna and worse, and yet, Brenna felt as if she held not a veteran, but a casualty.
For the cheek she’d kissed had been wet with tears.
“What has you planted here, quiet as a tomb?” Hugh put the question to his laird, because Elspeth had bid him to keep close watch on the man.
Without any intention on Hugh’s part, the entirety of the previous day’s awful developments had come spilling forth in Elspeth’s hearing, and when she’d finished swearing and stomping about the clearing—Hugh had become very fond of this little clearing—she’d charged Hugh with keeping watch over the laird.
While Elspeth tried to split her vigilance between the child Maeve, and a very busy Brenna.
Michael tossed a sprig of mutilated heather off into the undergrowth. “You were right.”
Neil often spoke in the same fashion—a handful of words wrenched from him, leaving the listener to puzzle meaning as much from the silence as the syllables.
“I am frequently right, though my brothers are loath to admit it.” Hugh took the place beside Michael on the bench. “I am guessing, though, in this case, I will rather I was not such an infallible fellow.”
He would rather his laird had started in drinking, as the men in the village had earlier in the day. A Highland celebration that did not start until sundown would start far too late in the day, and waste hours that might be spent dancing and eating.
“You are a good fellow,” Michael said, rising. “What you were right about is I should have searched all of Angus’s effects when I had the chance. Something sticks in my mind about the contents of that wardrobe.”
The contents of that wardrobe would stick in Hugh’s mind when he was an old blind man.
“These are yours,” he said, fishing some letters out of his sporran. “I didn’t read them.”
He hadn’t had to, because they were letters a young soldier sent home to his even younger wife. They would have been full of love and longing, like every letter Hugh had ever written his Anne.
“These were…”
“With that other,” Hugh said, the word “sketchbook” having acquired connotations worse than any curse word. “I don’t think your lady wife ever received this correspondence.”
The clearing was a peaceful place, particularly in late afternoon when the golden summer sun slanted down through the trees, birds flittered about, and a lone squirrel chattered high above.
Hugh had made some wonderful memories with Elspeth here, and it was good to have those memories now, when Michael rose off the bench and kicked a sizable rock many yards away.
“I am full of murder,” Michael said softly.
“As full of murder as if my regiment had just broken another endless siege, and every soldier fallen outside the city walls is screaming from his unshriven grave for vengeance against the enemy. I am not full of justice, Hugh, I am full of murder. Sick with it, and I fear I’ll find no cure. ”
Crazy talk, but the man had cause. “You cannot do murder. You have a party to host.”
Michael sent another rock hurtling down the slope. A deer went crashing up the path a moment later, and the squirrel ceased making a sound.
“Brenna wants to talk to me. The only reason I am standing here in my lordly finery, the only reason I am not sharpening my dirk and hunting my uncle down like the traitor to decency he is, is because my wife has old business to discuss with me.”
“Then you’ll put aside your murder long enough to listen to her.”
The fight—the murder, disgust, rage, whatever—ebbed enough that Michael’s shoulders dropped.
“It’s myself I want to kill most, you know. I’ve puzzled out that much.”
Hugh was far out of his depth, and yet, Elspeth had raised a few questions, about that sketchbook and Neil, and the names—four younger fellows, two lasses—penciled on those six leases set aside from the others.
“How will taking your own life help Brenna now?”
“It won’t. I am sick and reeling, Hugh, but you needn’t worry that I’ll end my life and leave Angus Brodie laird of anything or anyone I care about. I’m the worst husband that ever took a wife, a poor friend, and a miserable excuse for a man, but I’m not that craven.”
For all he was tall and handsome in his fancy dress, for all that his wife probably shared none of those conclusions, the laird was imperiled by what he’d learned yesterday.
“Angus is down at the pub,” Hugh said, rising from the hard little bench. “Every spare servant is getting the castle ready for the gathering this evening, and that means Angus’s house is again deserted. I’ve wondered where the money came from that supports Angus’s fancy mistress in Aberdeen.”
“I know where the money came from,” Michael said, turning his face up to a shaft of sunlight and closing his eyes. “I know exactly where it came from, though now more than ever, proof is necessary.”
He might have been a saint transfigured by remorse, so sorrowful did the sunlight render his features, and in that sylvan, peaceful, fraught moment, Hugh understood something more painful, even, than what he’d seen in those awful drawings.
“A part of you still loves your uncle.”
Michael opened his eyes. “He taught me the dances, Hugh. He taught me to sketch and to fish. So often, when my father could see nothing except that I would be laird someday and must be tough and strong, Angus was the one who made sense of my childhood injuries to pride and distracted me from my sulks. I cannot…”
This was what imperiled an otherwise strong man, a contradiction of the heart so powerful, Hugh could find no words to comfort the one suffering it.
“What will you do, Laird?”
Michael spoke gently. “If it had been Annie in those drawings, Hugh, what would you do? Or Lachlan?”
Hugh said nothing, for the question was rhetorical and the answer was…murder.
“Exactly,” Michael said, heading for the path. “Keep an eye on Brenna for me, please. The guests will soon assemble, and my wife will expect me to open the dancing with her.”
He strode off through the undergrowth, not along the path, but in a direct line up through the bracken and heather toward the empty dower house.