Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
When I open my eyes again, Alasdair is in my bedroom doorway, and I realize it wasn’t all some crazy dream. I really did wake up here this morning because he took me in the middle of the night because he thought I would want coffee when I woke up.
And now he’s got his pants back on, with a mug in one hand—I can smell the coffee from here, and it’s like I’m instantly awake—and a plate in the other.
The plate’s got bread on it with the soft sheep’s cheese from the village and a slice of the apple I bought a few days ago.
He sets the plate on the nightstand and sets the chipped thistle mug beside it.
The coffee’s perfect. Just a bit of oat milk and sugar. Not enough to bury the flavor of the roast. I try and think when he’s seen me drink coffee, how he could know how to make it exactly the way I like it, but I’m drawing a blank.
“Eat, foxglove.”
“I will.”
“You’ll eat now.”
I raise a brow. “Jeez, you’re bossy.”
“Aye. And I’m just getting started,” he says in his brogue.
I eat. The bread’s gone slightly stale, but the cheese is good and the apple’s cold and tart and I’m hungrier than I thought.
He watches me eat with the same rapt attention he had at the dining hall last night, and I’m no longer self-conscious about it.
I suppose it’s hard to be self-conscious around someone when you’re continuously having their cock inside you.
When I’m done, he takes the plate away, and I hear him doing the dishes in the kitchen.
I glance at the line of salt around the window and wonder what Effie had been so worried about. I know now that she wasn’t keeping out Alasdair, wasn’t keeping out a man who fucks you hard, makes you coffee, and brings you food in bed. She wasn’t keeping out him, so…who was she keeping out?
And do I still have to be worried about them?
I want to ask Alasdair about it, but decide not to. He doesn’t seem to be annoyed in the slightest at my constant questions, but I also know they tend to not get me anywhere. Anyway, I’m too blissed out to rock the boat at this exact second.
After a while, I get out of bed again and dressed in my own clothes, walking into a sparkling clean kitchen where I find him milling around in his own world.
He moves about the cottage with a cup of tea in hand, looking around as if he’s never been inside a building before. There’s a sense of awe on his features.
He appears to go from room to room with no agenda except to look.
The sitting room first. He stops at the mantle and observes the things placed there; a candle, a ceramic dish filled with sea glass I collected from the beach, the framed pressed foxglove I made that has a touch of black at the edges where mold had gotten to it (foxgloves are a bitch to press).
He picks up the frame and looks at it for a long beat then sets it down.
He absently runs his fingertips along the back of the armchair before he moves on to the books on the shelf.
He doesn’t pull any of them down. He just runs his eyes over the spines, slowly, taking in the reading material.
He finally points to the book about lichen that he has at the castle and gives me an appreciative nod. Fucking nerds.
After that, he goes back to the kitchen and I trail behind him like a curious puppy.
He opens the cupboard where Effie kept the herbs.
He looks at the labeled jars of mugwort, yarrow, vervain—the things I haven’t dared throw out because I don’t know which of them is for cooking and which of them is for keeping me alive in some way I’d rather not ponder. He closes the cupboard.
He goes to the back door. He runs his palm flat down the wood of the frame.
Then he turns and looks at me with an inquisitive expression.
“What?” I ask, having parked myself at the table after getting myself another cup of coffee. I’m pretending I didn’t just have my ass cheeks pressed on this runner earlier.
“I’ve never been in here,” he comments.
“I know.”
“It’s strange, it’s somehow bigger that it seems from the outside. You know, once you’re inside.” He smiles a little. “It suits her.”
“Effie?”
“Aye. Suits you, too. Like you were made for this place.”
He says it casually, and yet I take it with some weight because I’ve never felt like I was made for any place. So the fact that he’s saying this now has my chest feeling tight with too many feels that have come out of the cottage’s very old woodwork.
He sits across from me at the table and his eyes go past me to the windowsill, where Effie’s wooden box has been sitting beside the salt jar for three days.
“And that?” he wonders with a nod.
“That’s Effie’s box. No idea what’s in it. I can’t figure out how to open it.”
“May I?” he asks, politely placing an open palm across the table.
“You’ve made yourself at home,” I say wryly as I get up and place the box on the table. “Please, have at it.”
The box sits between us now and he doesn’t touch it, not right away.
Instead, he looks at it for a long beat.
Then he reaches for it, delicately, and his long fingers find the carvings on the lid, those letters in the alphabet I don’t know, the ones I’ve been running my thumbs over for ages now without finding a single seam.
Watching him is like watching someone read Braille—he only stares at the carvings for a moment before his gaze goes off to the window.
With an absent look on his face, he continues to run his fingertips over them.
He carefully turns the box in his hands, slow, two revolutions.
Then he nods, as if deciding something for himself, and presses two of the carvings at the same time, his thumb on one and his middle finger on the other, and then with his other hand he slides the lid sideways instead of lifting it, and the lid comes off in a way I haven’t even thought to try, because boxes don’t usually open sideways.
But this one did.
And he did it.
The box is open.
Ta-da.
He gently sets the lid down beside it on the table and peers into it as I do.
Inside, is a thick pouch of oiled wool the color of old butter.
He reaches in and opens the pouch, pulling out a Gothic skeleton key and laying it on top of the wool.
It’s fairly large. Maybe gold, maybe some tarnished metal. Very old, long shaft, a single bit at the end, the head a worn quatrefoil that’s gone soft at the edges from age.
Both of us stare at the key in the box for a moment, and then he glances up at me.
“Iris?”
“Yeah?” I breathe.
He lifts the key out of the wool. He holds it across the table to me on the flat of his palm.
“This is for you.”
I take it.
It’s heavier than it looks. The metal’s cold and the bit at the end’s worn unevenly on one side from use. I close my hand around it and the shape of it presses into my palm. It feels…good.
And I know exactly where this key leads.
I’ve known since the night I found salt at the base of the closet door.
Alasdair is watching me hold it. The face is the carefully-chosen stillness I’ve seen on him before, but I can see now that the stillness is for me, not for him. He’s letting me have this moment without putting anything of himself into it. He’s letting me find what I need to find.
“How did you know how to open it?” I inquire quietly, feeling like the air we’re breathing from that long-closed box is sacred, or something.
He swallows audibly. “I’ve seen a box like it before, lass.”
“Where?”
“A long time ago.”
Of course.
“Have you seen the key before?”
His eyes lock with mine for a moment and I can see something dark pass over them. “Aye. On your aunt’s neck, from time to time. No, I never asked about it. I don’t know where it leads. That’s all yours to find out. Not mine.”
He stands up from the table.
The standing has a finality to it I don’t like. He moves around the table and stops behind my chair, and he leans down and puts his mouth against my temple and breathes in once, deeply. He kisses me there and then he straightens.
“Where are you going?” I ask
“Home. I’ll come back tonight, if you’ll have me. If you don’t want me, leave the salt at the back step and I’ll know to keep going.”
I stare at him for a moment. “That salt doesn’t really keep you out, does it?”
A ghost of a smile flits across his lips. “It’s only salt. But it’s a signal.”
“And if I want you here?” I ask.
His face changes at that. His smile doesn’t quite fade; it just becomes a touch wicked. “Then ask me, foxglove. In the daylight. With your eyes open.”
What the fuck does that mean?
But he’s already opening the door. The cold off the bay comes in over the threshold, he goes through it, and pulls it closed behind him.
I sit at the table for a long time.
The key’s still in my hand. Heavy and cold, despite being in my palm, but seeming to throb with some energy I’m probably just imagining. The empty box is open in front of me.
I open my hand and I look at the key.
It’s just a key.
And yet I know it will open to something that will finally give me the answers I need.
The only problem is, I don’t know if they’re the answers I want.
The cottage settles around me, feeling quieter than ever with Alasdair gone.
I stand up, walk to the bottom of the stairs, and stand there with my hand on the banister and the key in my palm.
I look up into the dim of the upstairs corridor.