Seventeen
The day had been busy, lovely as only a Scottish summer day could be, and nerve wracking as hell, for Brenna had hardly seen her husband.
“Where’s Michael?” Brenna asked Milly St. Clair. “I thought he was with your baron.”
Milly and her baron were both in borrowed Highland finery, sporting Stuart plaid, as loyal subjects of the Crown were entitled to wear. Through the passage into the great hall, St. Clair and the musicians were adding a table to the buffet already groaning with food.
“He might be among the crowd outside,” Milly said, peering through a window. “Every man, woman, and child has gathered in the bailey, and it’s quite colorful.”
“Michael and I will open the dancing.” Brenna stole her hundredth glance at the clock and wondered why she and Michael hadn’t practiced dancing together. “If he hasn’t left the shire.”
Would her request for some time to clear up old business have sent him away? Could he have known she’d meant for him to learn of her past with Angus?
“You must not look so worried,” Milly chided softly. “This is a party. It’s Michael’s welcome home, and his first celebration as laird. Everybody is intent on enjoying themselves.”
Elspeth was intent on ordering the menfolk around as she had them pick up the empty table and carry it to the other end of the buffet.
“Have you seen Maeve?” For Brenna had delegated keeping track of the girl to Elspeth and hadn’t spotted Maeve since midday.
“She’s probably out among the neighbors, making all manner of new friends with their children,” Milly replied. “We should be out there too.”
Making small talk, while Brenna wanted nothing more than to find her husband and ask him why, after barely speaking to her before bed, he’d slept with his arms wrapped around her through the entire night.
If he’d even been sleeping.
“Elspeth, you’ll cease giving orders now,” Brenna called. “Let the musicians tune up, tell MacDowell to tap the first keg, and get you out into the bailey to snabble Hugh for the first dance.”
Somebody set his corner of the table down on somebody else’s toe, or near enough to occasion foul language, and Brenna’s impatience coiled more tightly. Violence was an aspect of many celebrations, at least once the whisky had been flowing for a few hours and the children all put to bed.
“Come, you two,” St. Clair said, winging an arm at each lady. “The Baron Strathdee will be along any minute, and if we’re not out visiting in the bailey when he arrives to collect his baroness, my life will be forfeit.”
“Or your toes,” Brenna muttered. “Where is the Baron Strathdee?”
St. Clair suffered a minute hesitation in his progress toward the French doors opening onto the bailey. “He’s on his way, I assure you.”
“Are we in a hurry, Baron?” Brenna asked, for St. Clair had resumed his escort at a brisk pace indeed.
“We are not, but the evening is pleasant, and I’m sure you’ll want to show off your finery as much as I want to show off my wife.”
What Brenna wanted was to be done with the entire gathering, to find Michael and dragoon him off to share a blanket under the stars. A woman could explain some things better that way, with a wee dram at hand and no castle walls to hear her tales.
“There’s your baron,” Milly said as they emerged from the ballroom onto the terrace. “He looks splendid in his formal attire.”
Michael looked…splendidly furious. Coldly, beautifully furious as he strode up the path from the dower house.
“Stay near me,” St. Clair muttered, sliding an arm around his wife. “Both of you women, stay near me.”
Michael was carrying something. Brenna couldn’t see what, though the crowd parted near the back to make way for him.
“Angus Brodie!” Michael bellowed. “Show yourself now!”
Foreboding rose up inside Brenna, a foreboding that had slept beneath her heart for years.
“Michael,” she called, “now is not the time.”
He gave no sign he’d heard her, no sign he could hear any words of reason.
“Angus Brodie, show yourself to your laird!” Michael’s words rang out over the crowd, who came to an uneasy, milling quiet.
“I’m here,” Angus said, sidling through the throng to mount the steps not six feet away from Brenna. “Are we to have a disagreement before the drinking has even started?”
His attempt at brusque jocularity fell as flat as if it had been dumped over the parapets above.
“We are to have an explanation,” Michael said with soft menace.
“All of us here are ready to listen to your explanation.” He spoke from the middle of the crowd, and even as angry as he was, Brenna wanted him closer—wanted him where she could look into his eyes, where she could clap a hand over his fool mouth lest years of silence come to an end in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Something went sailing over the heads of the crowd to land at Angus’s feet.
“Explain that, Angus Brodie,” Michael spat.
“It’s a leather satchel,” Angus said without glancing down. “I suspect half the folk gathered here have owned something similar, and they would not trespass on my privacy to locate this one.”
And abruptly, Brenna was glad for St. Clair’s steadying hand on her arm. Neil MacLogan was at her back, and Hugh on her other side. Wherever Maeve was, Brenna prayed she’d stay there, because the mood of the crowd was anything but festive.
“That,” Michael said, marching up the steps, “is a leather satchel I made for my dear intended years ago with my own hands. It’s a clumsy effort, a boy’s effort, but I labored over it long, wanting the young lady to have the finest gift I was capable of giving her.
The leather on the shoulder strap doesn’t match the hides I used to make the bag, because I could not afford to make the entire satchel of the better leather, and I put extra knots in the lacings, so the bag would be sturdy. ”
Hugh swore viciously under his breath, while Brenna sustained a discordant sense of relief: Michael was confronting Angus about a stolen birthday gift, not bringing up years of intimate perversion.
Then a sensation like vertigo seized her, for that very bag—
“You stole from your own people,” Michael said, his voice a low, vicious lash.
“You took a year’s worth of wool money, saw Brenna and her cousins blamed for your larceny, cast tenants off their holdings when your thievery meant they couldn’t pay their rents, and presented yourself to me as the relation who’d held my estate together when I was soldiering far from home. ”
“I recall that bag,” Hugh MacLogan said, staring at Angus’s feet.
“I recall how Brenna treasured it, for all it was a homely thing for a lady to carry her belongings about in. And you spent the money you stole from us on your expensive whore down in Aberdeen, didn’t you, Angus Brodie?
We went cold and hungry so you could cavort in style, while all held Brenna in contempt for being your victim. ”
An ugly murmur went through the crowd, silenced by Neil MacLogan’s voice.
“Not an expensive whore,” Neil said. “An expensive brothel, catering to men who prey on the very young. The only problem with that brothel is that the woman who owns it then preys on her own clients, charging them exorbitantly for her silence.”
The ugly murmur swelled and blended with a sense of past and present crashing together over Brenna’s head and drowning her in memories and emotions held in check for years.
“Michael.” The roaring in her ears and dimming of her vision said she’d soon lose consciousness. St. Clair’s grip on her arm became necessary if she was to stay upright. “Michael, please.”
He could not hear her over the jeering and accusations of the crowd, and yet, Brenna needed desperately to reach him. “Michael, you must not—”
Words were useless against the rising tide of outrage coming from the clansmen and women in the bailey. As both nausea and darkness tried to obliterate her will, Brenna used the last of her determination to reach for the one source of strength remaining to her.
She grabbed Michael’s hand and held on tight.
Violence rose up in Michael’s mind and body, a gleeful, primitive impulse that would glory in ending Angus Brodie’s life.
He knew bloodlust—any soldier who’d breached the walls of a besieged city knew bloodlust—but this was a far richer inspiration, its current higher, faster, and deeper for being driven by outrage and vengeance.
“Michael.”
Somebody tried to get his attention, a pesky little midge of a distraction as the crowd seized on the horrified, delighted sense of having found an outlet for years of misery and victimization.
Their hatred of Angus Brodie was converted in a few moments from a shortcoming any Christian would wrestle into ashamed submission, to a source of righteous pride.
“I’m sorry, laddie,” Angus muttered. “I am so verra sorry. If you must kill me—”
Laddie.
“Michael, please.”
Laddie.
“This is getting ugly,” St. Clair said. “I’m taking the women—”
Fingernails bit into Michael’s hand as a whiff of lavender assailed him.
“Michael, stop them. You must stop them.” Brenna slammed into his side, the very person to whom Angus had done the greatest injury.
“St. Clair, take my wife—”
“No! I will not be sent away while you do murder because an old man turned thief! Not murder, Michael, never that. This is our home.”
Somebody yelled for a rope; somebody answered that a knife would do, and many knives would do even better.
“Michael, there are children here. You cannot do this.” Brenna’s hold on him became desperate. “You shall not allow this to happen.”
She was asking—begging—that he shut the beast back in its cave, that he find self-restraint when every instinct screamed at him to do murder, and on her behalf.
“Michael, please don’t. I could not live with myself if I condoned such rapacious behavior.”