Chapter 16 #2
The woman in the mirror is the woman I’m going to be tonight: a woman who will roll with the punches and make Alasdair see stars. The woman in the mirror is calm. The woman in the mirror does not have an oar in her hands ready to bludgeon a stranger to death.
I throw on a raincoat since the rain has already started, coming down light for now but will surely be heavy later as the wind picks up. Even though the walk to my car and back is short, I’d rather not be wet.
I drive his road for the first time as a driver and not a walker.
The trip is so much shorter. The trees close in over the road.
The wipers work in a steady rhythm. By the time I am at the gateway, the rain has thickened, the courtyard is wet and silver, and there is a small lantern lit on a stone beside the place where I should park, as if he has set it out so I will not stumble in the dusk.
He’s at the door before I am out of the car, standing in the doorway. The light from the hall behind him shrouds him in silhouette. He has on a dark green wool sweater with a light plaid detailing at the shoulders, and dark trousers. No kilt, which is mildly disappointing.
“Good evening, Iris,” he says in that low, rich voice of his, sounding so formal.
“Good evening,” I say, matching his tone.
“Hurry in before you get wet.”
The drops of rain are fat as they bounce off my coat and I quickly step over the threshold.
He closes the door behind me. The castle is warm.
The fire in the front room is going; I can see the orange of it down the hall.
He takes my jacket off my shoulders and hangs it on the brass hook where it drips.
He then turns me to him and gives me the smallest smile, eyes blazing with heat.
“Look at you,” he purrs.
“It’s just a skirt,” I say with a shrug, though I’m delighted with his response so far.
“It’s not just a skirt, Iris.”
He kisses me on the forehead. The kiss is brief and warm and utterly disarming.
“Come. I’ve put us in the dining hall tonight.”
“The dining hall? Ooh, fancy.”
“Aye. I never have an excuse to use it, so I’m using it tonight.”
He takes my hand, giving it a firm squeeze, then leads me down the front hall, past the room with the leather chairs and the fire, down the corridor, and through a heavy oak door at the back.
The dining hall is long, and the ceiling is high and beamed.
There are tapestries on the walls—proper tapestries—the kind I have seen in museums and art history books, full of hunting scenes and mountain scenes with stags and women in long blue dresses and men with hounds.
The walls between the tapestries are hung with paintings; more landscapes, the bay, the loch, the mountains in different seasons.
There is no overhead light, and the room is only lit by a long iron candelabra running down the center of a long oak table, by sconces on the walls with candles burning in them, and by a fire in a stone hearth at the far end of the room.
The table could seat twenty. He has set two places at one end, close together, with a small linen runner between them and proper cutlery and crystal glasses and a bottle of red wine open and breathing in a decanter.
“Holy shit.” I breathe.
“Too much?”
“It looks like Medieval Times up in here.”
He laughs, low and pleased.
“Aye. The castle has a sense of itself, doesn’t it?”
He pulls out a chair for me and I sit, and he sits across from me, not at the head.
The dinner, I discover, is fish. A whole salmon from the loch, baked with butter and lemon and herbs from the garden, the skin crisped over the flesh.
There is bread, his bread, and a small dish of greens from the garden dressed in oil, and the wine.
It’s a simple meal that somehow suits the grandness of the room, like I can imagine his ancestors eating this same meal centuries ago.
He serves me first. He fillets the fish on my plate with the same careful, old-fashioned competence he does everything, the bones lifted out clean in one motion. He cuts me a slice of bread and pours my wine.
Then he does the same for himself but he doesn’t dig in right away. Instead, he sits, waits, and watches me.
Despite his rapt attention and the fact that I know I don’t look great shoving food in my mouth, I eat, hungrier than I thought I was.
The fish is delicate and clean and tastes of the loch I suppose, of the cold water that brought it up and the herbs from the garden and the slow careful preparation.
The bread is the bread of yesterday while the wine is red from Spain.
He eats too, albeit slowly. The small careful bites of a man who isn’t as interested in the food as he is interested in the woman eating the food.
Either way, he’s still a damn good cook.
We do not say much as we eat and that’s for the best, since I don’t want fish flaking out of my mouth. Anyway, the silence isn’t awkward. It’s become a comfortable thing between us, even though I know we both have a lot on our mind, at least with regards to tonight.
I finish my fish. I finish my wine. He refills my glass and it’s not long before I finish that too.
My head goes warm from the rioja. The candles and fire add to the heat, to the haze of the evening.
The tapestries are watching us in the candlelight, the women in their long blue dresses eyeing me with disinterest.
He sets his cutlery down.
“Have you had enough?” he asks.
“Of the dinner?”
He nods.
“Yes. Thank you. That was amazing, but I’m quite full.”
A long beat. He turns the stem of his wine glass between his fingers.
“Iris.”
“Yeah?”
“Will you come upstairs with me?”
I stare at him, swallowing hard.
His face is very still, waiting patiently for my answer.
There was always only one answer.
“Yes.”