Eighteen #2
“Brenna, you need not be anxious. My wishes prevailed for nine years, and even had they not…” He could give her this. He could give her absolute control over their fate, and she deserved that, at least. “Even had they not, based on what has transpired, our marriage will be as you wish it to be.”
“You’re daft,” she said, marching off down the hill. “Marriage isn’t a matter of taking turns being the baby or the queen or the laird. We don’t take turns running the castle or scurrying off to France. We’re married.”
He had scurried off to France. Tail between his legs. “You have some definite notions about this marriage business.”
She was quiet for the time it took them to wind down the path to the river, and Michael had to approve of her choice of location.
The sound of the Dee at summer ebb was soothing, the moonlight on the water lovely.
Maybe what they had to say to each other would profane such beauty, or maybe the water could carry all the hurt and misery away, down to the sea, and out of their lives.
Out of their hearts.
Brenna snapped out the blankets and more or less flung them on the grass. Michael tossed his sporran down as well.
“I don’t want to tell you a thing, Michael Brodie. Angus is dead, and I want all his wrongdoing to die with him. Keep marching, you know, like a good Scots regiment, even after the colors have fallen and the pipers are silent.”
Michael could not stand that she was so afraid. Despite whatever he might be feeling himself—nothing at all, too much, and everything in between—he stepped up to his wife and put his arms around her.
“What Angus did will live in your heart and mine unless we deal with it.” Even then, even if Brenna shared with him every jot and tittle of her recollections, she’d still not empty her mental coffers of Angus’s pernicious legacy.
The same way a soldier could be felled by memories of battles past, a shaft of sunlight, a snippet of laughter, any small sensory impression might dredge up more experiences she’d shuffled away from her mind’s notice.
“I am too tired of dealing with Angus to hate him,” Brenna said. “Though I expect to get a second wind on my hatred. I pray for it.”
“Because,” Michael said, looping his arms around her shoulders, “beneath the hatred lies the hurt and the fear. Tell me about the hurt, Brenna Maureen. Tell me all about it.”
Michael Brodie was a brave man, though he’d be years understanding that about himself. For now, he’d see only that he’d abandoned his sixteen-year-old wife, and while there was a story there—one Brenna sensed lay at Angus’s far-from-sainted feet—she’d lead the way and tell her miseries first.
“I was lonely,” she said against her husband’s shoulder. For years and years, she’d been lonely, but she was fiercely pleased that when she stood in Michael’s embrace she was no longer lonely.
“Let’s sit,” Michael said, and perhaps that was wise, because Brenna’s knees had gone weak at the effort to push out three honest words. “I’m sorry you were lonely. If it’s any consolation, I have some acquaintance with loneliness myself.”
When Brenna might have taken up a position beside her husband, the better to keep her thoughts straight and her emotions far from her own notice, he instead sat behind her, hiked his knees up, and drew her down against his chest. She was surrounded by Michael as surely as the keep was surrounded by the bailey walls.
Though Michael was a good deal warmer than granite, he was no less solid.
“I don’t mean I was lonely when you left for the military, though I was.
I mean, I was lonely from the day I arrived to Castle Brodie.
My ma had died the year before, my father and brothers were reeling with it, and there I was.
Eight years old, and I knew not one soul, but that tall, green-eyed boy named Michael, who would someday be my husband. ”
Michael’s lips grazed her temple. “He is your husband. He wants always to be your husband.”
She nuzzled his throat, which bore the scent of vetiver.
“I’ve had some time to think on it, Michael, and while I liked you—you were my Michael—I also did not want you to leave me as my family had.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Leave me when I was small, I mean. I’d watch you, and sometimes, you’d watch me, but if my own father and brothers could pass me into the keeping of strangers, then I was easy to leave, you see. I didn’t want to do anything to make you leave me before you were truly mine.”
“So you were shy and coy, and I was fascinated with you.”
“Angus was fascinated with me too.” While Brenna wanted to focus on Michael’s admission—wasn’t he fascinated with her any longer?
—the part about Angus was what needed telling now.
“Angus was diabolically sly, Michael. He did not approach me indecently—he was kind and understanding. He answered the questions I could not ask anybody else. He offered the occasional pat on the shoulder or passing hug. He made me feel…”
Oh, this hurt. This hurt awfully, to think of how vulnerable she’d been, what easy prey.
“He made you feel special,” Michael said, his voice carefully flat.
“He made you feel safe, and as if you had at least one friend in the world, a friend you would protect and trust. He was the serpent in the garden of your childhood, promising much, though the cost of what he offered you was beyond your ken.”
Brenna’s fingers ached—she’d curled them that tightly in the wool of Michael’s sash.
“Exactly. So when he’d sit me in his lap, even though I wasn’t exactly comfortable, I wasn’t entirely uncomfortable either. I felt privileged to be Angus’s ‘special little girl.’”
For a long moment, the river murmuring to the moonlight was the only sound other than Brenna’s breathing. It was too soon to give way to tears, for they had much more ground to cover.
“He graduated to kissing me, on the cheek at first, and then he offered to show me how a grown-up girl kisses.”
“I’m glad he’s dead too,” Michael muttered against her hair. “Very glad. And then what?”
Somebody started up playing the pipes in the vicinity of the castle above them. Not Davey MacCray, somebody of a more lyrical, lamenting bent. Neil MacLogan, probably.
“Then he wanted to draw me, because I was so pretty. Nobody had hair the same shade as mine. Nobody had such lovely eyes, or such a charming smile. He’d steal into my room at night and draw me in my shift.
It was our secret, of course. What child doesn’t think a grown-up’s confidence some sort of treasure? ”
“Then he took your nightgown off.”
Michael said the words like a catechism, as if to give Brenna an example for how to simply express such base wickedness.
“Then he took my nightgown off.” And she’d hated it, hated how his gaze changed, so he saw not her, a person, but as nakedness that should be forbidden to him.
Worse, she’d hated how shame and a sense of excitement had blended in a child’s heart, to leave bewilderment and powerlessness in place of self-respect.
Along with enormous fears, of abandonment, and of discovery, both.
“What else, Brenna? I know he didn’t stop there.”
Michael held her, as if his arms around her could contain all of her childhood confusion, all the sick dread that bordered on anticipation, all the fear of what might happen next.
“This despoiling took time,” Brenna said.
“Months and even years of cozening and moving by degrees. Angus would take a chair by my bed, ask my opinion on this or that, and draw me sitting on my bedcovers. Then he’d take a place at the foot of the bed, until that’s where I expected him to sit when he wasn’t stealing kisses.
He moved up the bed by slow degrees, like a wasting disease progresses in increments too small to measure. And one night—”
Abruptly, she could not breathe.
“Easy,” Michael whispered, smoothing a hand down her hair. “It will keep for another time.”
Brenna did not want to endure another time. Though her wish was doomed, she wanted this one night under a full moon to be her unburdening, and when the sun came up, she would bury her past along with the man who’d ruined so much of it.
“This was the night I woke up, in one sense. I was about eleven, maybe twelve. Angus had been making odd comments for weeks, about the march of time, about all beauty fading. The closer he crept to me, the more I tried to resist. I told him I already knew how to kiss well enough. Told him he had enough drawings of me. Told him I was not well. He’d grow sad when I made these comments—if I didn’t hate him for what he did to me, I’d hate him for the way he manipulated with his silences and quiet looks. ”
“I hate him. I hate him more with every word you speak. I hate that I’m related to him.” And yet, Michael’s hands on Brenna’s hair were so gentle.
“He got under the covers with me, took his dressing gown and nightshirt off, and laid on top of me. I never saw him, but I’ll never forget the feel of him, either. He stank of his damned pipes, and he had soft, clammy hands, and he—”
“He took his pleasure on your body, though he left your maidenhead intact.”
Those were not words Brenna could repeat. She managed a nod, and wanted so badly to go back in time and pluck the girl she’d been from the clutches of the monster who’d climbed into her bed.
“The w-worst part…” She took a slow breath, because the words must be set free.
“The worst part was that he kissed my hands and told me next time it would be even better. I was crying—silently, but the tears were there—and he told me it would be even better. What sort of man, what sort of creature treats a child thus, so she’s crying and naked and horrified, and then offers that? ”
Michael said nothing—the question had no adequate answer—though to speak it aloud, to cry it out to her husband, unloosed the weeping Brenna had been wrestling back for years.