Nineteen #2
“Ach, Michael. I wanted on our wedding night to prove to myself that I was fine, just like any other young bride. I was nervous about the kissing, but the rest of it…You would have been all unsuspecting, Michael, a new husband having his first romp with his wife. I would have been fighting with my past, and that would not have been fair to you.”
Some time, when his brain could work, Michael would ask his wife to explain those notions again, for they had the ring of import about them. For now, he had a truth to add to their pile of sorry memories.
“I saw Angus engaged in perversions with Neil MacLogan.”
Several heartbeats went by while the piper drew out a cadence.
“Buggering him, you mean. Neil would have been little more than a boy.” Brenna’s body plastered against Michael told him she was not surprised. “My cousin has never said a word about it, though it makes sense.”
“In hindsight, I doubt Neil’s participation was in any way…” The pipes fell silent, and Michael’s arms fell away from his wife. What a boy had decided to tolerate in the interests of keeping a roof over his family’s head was irrelevant.
“I told myself Neil wouldn’t allow such attentions if he weren’t also inclined in that direction,” Michael went on softly.
“The longer I considered it, the less certain I was of what I’d seen.
Perhaps they’d been half-seas over, perhaps I was overreacting, though I’d entirely lost the ability to consummate our vows. ”
Brenna kissed his forehead, encouragement perhaps, or forgiveness. In any case, the gesture fortified him to tell the rest of it.
“Like Neil, I said nothing. When I reached the coast, I sent a letter to my father, telling him I’d seen bitter words between Angus and Neil, and asking him to keep Angus away from the MacLogans. In short, I lied. To my father, to myself.”
Michael wanted to weep with the shame of his silence, with the horror and bewilderment. He wanted Neil MacLogan to confront him and pound him flat, and he wanted Neil to leave the shire forever.
“Did Neil see you?” Brenna’s question was soft and inevitable.
“Nobody was tending the sconces by that time, so no, Neil did not see me, and neither did Angus. I want my flask, though, for I will never stop seeing the look on that boy’s face.
” Despair, rage, and resignation beyond what any adolescent ought to lay claim to.
Neil hadn’t been as small as Brenna, but he’d been several years away from shaving.
Brenna kissed him on the mouth this time.
“Your sporran is by our feet, if that’s where your flask has got off to. Neil has managed, and when he might have seen Angus murdered tonight, he did not. We must take comfort from that.”
What or whom did Neil take comfort from?
“He seems devoted to his family.” Was Neil ever to have a family of his own? “I could not bed you after having seen that. I didn’t bed a woman until I came home to you, Brenna, and Angus is largely the reason why. To think that my uncle…”
Brenna climbed off him, the loss of her weight and warmth engendering panic in Michael’s chest.
“Where are you going?”
“I could use a tot.” She produced his flask, took a sip, and passed it to him, then got settled on the blankets beside him. “That’s fine drink, Mr. Brodie. So Angus queered your efforts at a wedding night, but that’s not entirely why you took off, is it?”
She shook her head when Michael offered her the flask back, so he fortified himself with half the contents.
“He was my uncle. He taught me which birds sing what songs. He tried to help me learn to sketch, and he always had a kind word for me when my father had been too demanding. How could Angus be…?”
“Good and evil?” Brenna eased to her back. “I don’t know, Michael, but he surely was. Shall we make a night of it out here? The stars are beautiful.”
“I’m his nephew, his blood.” There was the problem, the unsolvable conundrum that had hounded Michael across battles, sieges, and even into peacetime.
“I saw him commit what I knew was a grievous wrong, but because I’m his nephew, I told myself Neil could have stopped it, there was drink involved, men get odd notions as do teenage boys, everything gets out of hand when the hour grows late and the whisky’s flowing.
I made all manner of excuses for my silence, because I was his braw, bonny nephew. ”
Brenna was quiet for a long time, and though Michael knew she could offer him no absolution, he waited on her next words.
“A long time ago, I was his special little girl. I was a lot of things Angus Brodie tried to tell me were the sum of me, and I know better, now. You’ll talk to Neil.”
Ah—an unlikely shaft of wisdom amid the night’s sorry recitations. “I can talk to Neil, but still…I was Angus’s nephew.”
She rose over him, bringing the blankets with her. “Go to sleep. You are my husband, I am your wife, and that’s what matters now.”
In a manner that was entirely wifely without being in the least erotic, Brenna kissed him. She pursued the task with enough inventiveness and determination that Michael absolved himself of thinking up a rejoinder to her very accurate observation.
He was her husband; she was his wife.
And that was a start.
“Something bothers me,” Brenna said, shifting a few inches so an unobliging bump of Scottish ground no longer dug into her hip.
“You’re awake.” Michael shifted too, dragging his kilt out from under his backside. “We seem to have bivouacked on our own private alarm grounds.”
The sun wasn’t quite up, but the singing of the birds said it soon would be.
“Are you angry with me, Husband?”
He stopped wrestling the covers. “Nobody can force a man to make love with his wife, Brenna Maureen.”
And yet, he was unhappy. Unhappy was a vast improvement over the previous night’s hard slog through awful memories.
“I wanted to make love with my husband.” She had needed the reassurance that they could still make love, needed emphatically to be Michael’s wife, not Angus’s victim.
Michael’s sporran went sailing several feet off into the grass, followed by a large dancing shoe, laces flapping against the fading stars.
“And I wanted to make love with my wife. I wasn’t sure, after all that had been said”—another shoe went sailing—“that you could stand for me to touch you like that.”
He turned his face up to the fading stars, his mouth bracketed by fatigue for all they’d shared a few hours’ sleep on their blankets.
“I wasn’t sure you could stand for me to ever touch you like that. We should probably get dressed,” he said more softly.
Enough talking, in other words.
“You might touch me like that again first,” Brenna suggested. “You were half-asleep, after all, and not entirely on your mettle.”
He’d been more than half-asleep, and she’d been more than half-desperate. Their coupling had been brief, silent, and entirely graceless.
Also miraculous.
Michael knelt up enough to get his kilt around his hips.
“One swiving proves little, Brenna. We’ll have awkwardness.
Intimate awkwardness. When I think…” He sat back on his heels amid the blankets, his kilt half-fastened.
His hair stuck up in odd directions, and a beard made his jaw bristly by the dawn’s early light.
“Brenna, marriage to me will be so difficult. We’ve made a start, but around any corner, behind any innocent line of poetry will be setbacks and bad memories.
I need to know now if you have any doubts at all about us. ”
He needed to know if she had doubts about him, for nobody fought a battle like they’d waged the previous night alone. And he was right—there would be more skirmishes, none quite so bitter, though.
“I love you,” Brenna said. “We’ll have awkwardness and sorrow, but we’ll have rejoicing and peace too. I daresay we’ll also have children. Where is my shift?”
Michael tossed her a wad of linen.
“Children.” He’d apparently forgotten what the word signified. “Children? You think—” Down he went, into their tangle of tartans, felled by a single word. “Children. God in heaven, children.”
“You do know where babies come from?” Brenna asked, pulling her shift over her head. She went fishing for her stays next. “Wee bairns, who cry and drool, and have their papa’s smile. They do other things too, not nearly so endearing, like grow up and leave home. You’ll have to do my laces.”
He rallied, sitting behind her and pulling her laces not nearly snug enough. “Maybe we should wait before we think about starting a family.” His suggestion was cautious, and offered while he tied off her laces. “You were wearing a skirt and blouse.”
“I’m wearing a smile,” she said, drawing Michael’s arms around her waist. “The time for waiting might already be past, Michael Brodie. Are there any names you favor for our firstborn?”
He knelt up behind her, enveloping her in a snug embrace.
“I love you too, Brenna Maureen MacLogan Brodie. I love you more than I can say, but please let’s not be picking out names just yet.”
He was genuinely daunted, and it had nothing at all to do with…the past. Brenna started to laugh at her brave soldier, Michael wrestled her to her back, and they were still laughing and tussling among the blankets when Sebastian and Milly St. Clair found them twenty minutes later.
“The scouts have found us,” Michael whispered in Brenna’s ear. “Poor St. Clair looks like he’s been up the entire night.”
“Clan attire becomes them both,” Brenna said, batting Michael’s hands away from the buttons of her blouse. “Best put your shirt on, Husband.”
She was so brisk, so fragile, and so wise. They had needed to talk, they had needed to make love, and they had needed—desperately—to laugh so hard their bellies ached. Now, they apparently needed to face the coming day.
And to find some proper clothing. The thought made Michael smile as he pulled his shirt over his head and got it right way around, for life did go on, and that was good.
“St. Clair, good morning. My lady.” Michael stayed sitting on the blankets while Brenna passed him his shoes.
“Strath—Michael. Baroness. I trust we’re not intruding.”