Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Dinnae wait fer me.”
That was what Colin had said, as if sleep were a servant she might summon upon command, and as if his absence from their chamber were not a thing the room would notice.
Elspeth had answered him with admirable composure. “I assure ye, Laird MacKenzie, I have nay intention of arranging me dreams according tae yer convenience.”
He looked at her then, with that still, dark attention which always made her feel as though she had spoken too much and not nearly enough.
There was blood on his sleeve, though thankfully, not his own.
It was merely a grim trace of the day’s violence, the prisoner’s defiance, and the attack that left the castle unsettled from gate to hearth.
Colin needed to question the prisoner again, or watch him be questioned. Or perhaps merely stand in the same room and make silence do what kinder methods could not. Elspeth did not ask. She learned that some questions only sharpened his face, and she was in no humor to be answered by stone.
So she had gone to bed alone. It ought to have pleased her. A sensible woman, recently married against her will to a man who looked as if he had been carved for battle and cursed for endurance, should have rejoiced in the privacy of a chamber unoccupied by him.
Yet sleep refused her with an obstinacy equal to her own.
The bed was too wide. The fire was too low.
The air was too fragrant with lavender and smoke.
Beyond the shuttered window, the wind worried at the walls, and somewhere far below a guard called to another in the yard.
The castle did not sleep and neither did she.
Elspeth turned once, then again, then sat up with a huff so sharp it might have offended the darkness.
“This is absurd,” she informed the room.
The room, being wiser than most men, did not answer.
She slipped from the bed, dragged her shawl about her shoulders, and stood for a moment in the pale glow of the embers.
Her shift clung softly to her skin where the night had grown too warm beneath the covers, and her loosened hair fell over one shoulder in a troublesome spill.
She should have rung for Skye, but the thought of waking her maid simply because Lady Elspeth MacKenzie could not manage her own unease was intolerable.
Tea, then.
That was what she needed: tea, and perhaps a book. There had to be books somewhere in this castle beyond Colin’s ledgers, maps, and grim histories of men killing one another over land, cattle, and pride. If she found one sufficiently dull, it might do what sleep had refused.
She took a candle, shielded its flame with one hand, and eased open the chamber door.
The corridor outside lay dim and cool, the walls holding the day’s chill though June waited beyond them.
Tapestries stirred faintly in a draught, their woven huntsmen forever pursuing beasts that never tired.
The stones beneath her feet were cold enough to make her regret not changing out of her slippers.
She had gone no farther than the turning by the west passage when she heard it.
A giggle.
Elspeth froze. It was not the sort of laughter one heard in halls by daylight, when maids moved with linen and men carried messages under other men’s eyes. It was soft, breathless, and quickly swallowed, as though the person who uttered it wished to be quiet and could not quite manage obedience.
Then came a man’s voice, low and teasing.
Elspeth’s first thought was that she ought to retreat at once.
Her second was that retreating too quickly might make a sound.
Her third, and most mortifying, was that she was standing in a dark corridor in her shift and wrap, with her hair down and a candle in her hand, which was precisely the sort of arrangement from which a reputation could be ruined by a servant with imagination and a lady in slippers.
She blew out the candle and darkness folded around her.
The voices drew nearer. Elspeth gathered the hem of her shawl and slipped into the recess beside a narrow table, half-hidden by a hanging that smelled of dust and old rosemary.
Her heart was beating with foolish force.
She pressed herself against the wall and held her breath as two figures came into view at the end of the passage.
A maid appeared first, fair-haired and small, with her cap clutched in one hand rather than upon her head.
A young man followed, broad-shouldered, with the easy, loose-limbed movement of someone accustomed to stables rather than polished floors.
He caught the maid about the waist. She gasped, then laughed into his shoulder.
“Hush,” she whispered, though she did not sound as if she truly wished him to obey.
“I have been trying,” he murmured.
“Ye have been failing.”
“Aye, but with devotion.”
The maid struck his chest lightly. He caught her hand and kissed her fingers, one after another, with such exaggerated reverence that she made that same helpless little sound again.
Elspeth’s face warmed. This, she thought, was none of her business. It was also directly in her path.
The couple stumbled together toward a small room just beyond the turning. The young man opened the door with a care that suggested practice, and they slipped inside. The door drew nearly shut behind them, but not entirely. A thin seam of warmer darkness remained between wood and frame.
Elspeth waited. She counted ten breaths. Then twenty. Then fifty, because she was nothing if not generous to impropriety when it had the good sense to remove itself from a corridor.
At last, believing the passage clear, she stepped from the recess, but a sound stopped her. It was not laughter this time, but rather a sigh. It was soft and trembling, followed by the young man’s voice, so low she could not make out the words, only the shape of tenderness in them.
Elspeth should have walked away. Truly, she should have. No decent woman, no well-bred woman would creep nearer to a half-open door because a maid sighed behind it.
Elspeth did. She told herself she meant only to know whether it was safe to pass. This was an excellent argument until she reached the gap and looked through it.
After that, she could not pretend prudence had any share in the matter.
The room was small, perhaps used for mending linen or storing household things that had lost their purpose.
A single lamp burned upon a shelf, throwing gold over folded cloth, a stool, a narrow table, and the two figures tangled near it.
The maid had her back against the wall. The stable boy’s hands were at her waist. Her own hands were in his hair.
They were kissing as if they had been starved and found one another necessary.
This was not the brief, alarming press of Colin’s mouth upon hers before witnesses.
Nor was it the dangerous, controlled kisses he had stolen later.
This was hungry. This was glad.
The young man bent his head to the maid’s throat, and she arched with a breath that made Elspeth’s own catch in answer. His hand moved over her bodice with reverence and impatience together, and though Elspeth knew she had to look away, her eyes remained fixed, wide and disobedient.
The maid was not crying. She was not lying still. She did not look as if she endured anything at all. She looked as if every touch pulled light through her.
Elspeth’s mother’s voice returned to her with cruel clarity.
It isnae pleasant.
Lie still if ye can.
Dinnae fight him unless he is the sort made worse by it.
Yet the woman inside the room did not lie still.
She drew the young man closer. She whispered his name against his mouth.
She trembled, yes, but not with fear. When his hand slipped beneath the fall of her skirts, she made a sound so full of startled pleasure that Elspeth’s palm flew to her own lips.
A strange heat moved through her. It was not the heat of shame, though shame came quickly after it.
This began lower, in the secret center of her body, a slow unfurling warmth that left her knees uncertain and her breath shallow.
She remembered Colin’s voice in the dark of their chamber, low and maddeningly sure.
When I touch ye, ye willnae be frightened of wanting it.
She hated him for saying it. She hated the arrogance, the certainty, the wicked calm with which he spoke of her body as though it might one day become an ally to him and traitor to her.
But now…
Elspeth swallowed hard.
Inside the room, the stable boy sank lower before the maid, his hands steady at her hips and his face hidden by the fall of her skirts.
Elspeth’s eyes widened until the lamplight blurred.
The maid covered her mouth with her own hand, but the sound escaped her fingers all the same, broken and sweet and almost pained, though not from suffering.
Elspeth’s body answered with such suddenness that she gripped the doorframe. There was a damp warmth between her thighs.
For one suspended moment, she did not understand it. Then understanding arrived. Her face burned. Her body had become soft and secret and aching, as if some part of her had listened to the scene before her and believed itself invited.
So this was what Colin had meant. Not with his exact words, perhaps. But he had said there could be pleasure. He had said her body might respond. She had thought him wicked. She had thought him amused by her innocence.
Now the maid’s head fell back against the wall, her lips parted, her eyes closed, and the young man between her skirts held her as though her pleasure mattered to him more than his own breath.
The sight shook Elspeth more deeply than fear.
A woman could want.
A woman could be wanted gently, fiercely, gladly.
A woman could be touched and not diminished by it.
The maid’s hand tightened in the young man’s hair.
Her whole body drew taut, then shuddered with a soft cry she barely managed to smother.
The sound passed through Elspeth like a struck string.
She stepped back, horrified by herself, by the heat in her blood, by the ache beneath her shift, by the terrible little question blooming where certainty used to be.
What would it be like?
Not with a nameless man in a ln room but with Colin. The thought was so improper, so vivid, so entirely her own, that she nearly stumbled.
She had to leave at once, before she was discovered, before the couple emerged, before her own body betrayed her any further with its shameful curiosity and its shameful longing.
Elspeth turned, but at that very moment, a hand clamped over her mouth.
Another arm seized her hard about the waist and dragged her back against a solid chest. The scream that rose in her throat died beneath rough fingers.
Her candle fell soundlessly onto the rushes.
The corridor, already dark, seemed to blacken around her.
A breath touched her ear. “Dinnae make a sound.”