Chapter 35 #2
“Aye, she’s here, she’s up to her elbows in—what is it, foxglove?
—mincemeat, aye, for the mincemeat pie.” Pause.
“No, there’s no actual meat in it. I had the same confusion.
” Pause. “The weather’s been…aye, snow, a wee dusting she says…
” and then he holds the phone slightly away from his ear, and even from the kitchen I hear the pitch of Maddie hitting the word SNOW like a gameshow contestant, because Chicago is getting murdered by lake-effect and she’s coming to Scotland in six days, and if there is not a white Christmas she will be filing complaints with the government.
Six days. They land in Inverness on the twenty-third—Maddie, Andrew, and Rosey, who is six and who has, per Maddie, asked the following questions about me and my life, verbatim: Does Aunt Iris live in the castle?
Does the castle man have a horse? Does the horse live in the castle?
Is the castle man a king? And who, apparently, now demands a turn on every call, because there’s a shuffle and Alasdair’s voice changes entirely, goes soft and serious, the voice of a man addressing a visiting dignitary.
“Good evening, Rosey.” Pause. “Aye, it’s me, the castle man.
” Pause. “I do know a horse.” Pause. “She’s brown.
She lives in the woods, she’s her own horse, she belongs to no one—” Pause.
“…Aye. I’ll ask her. I make no promises on her behalf; she’s a lady of independent mind.
” Pause, longer, and then, gravely: “That’s a fine question.
The castle has forty-two rooms, and I have counted them myself.
” Pause. “No, no dungeons.” A beat. His eyes come up and find mine across the kitchen, and something passes over his face, quick and rueful, gone before it lands. “Not anymore.”
I go back to my mincemeat.
The visit is sorted, mostly. They’ll have the cottage’s guest room for Rosey and the foldout in the sitting room for themselves, because the castle—Maddie lobbied hard for the castle, “we’re not flying five thousand miles to NOT stay in the castle, Iris”—is many things, but it is not yet a place you can put a radiator, and I’m not sure they can tend to any of the fires without burning the whole place down.
They’ll get the tour instead. The hall, the chapel, the view off the seaward wall.
Not the tower, and definitely nothing below ground.
What the castle becomes is a conversation we keep having in circles and not finishing, which I’ve decided is allowed.
I mean, this is all so new to both of us.
There’s talk, his talk, mostly, late at night, thinking out loud with my head on his chest, of the heritage people, of letting the historical trusts at it, of Caisteal Eachainn standing open someday with a gravel car park and a wee laminated guide.
Built in the thirteenth century. Seat of the MacCoinnichs. Local legend speaks of a water-horse.
He finds the idea funnier than I’d have guessed.
“Let them charge four pound fifty to stand in my bedchamber,” he says.
“I’ll donate the audio tour. I’ll narrate it myself; I’m a primary source.
” But then other nights he goes quiet about it, and I understand that too, for there’s one room in that castle that was never built for the public, at least seventy-two names that aren’t legend, and whatever the castle becomes has to become it around them.
So, maybe the trust. Maybe a museum. Maybe just the birds and the weather and the occasional sleepover, the way it’s been for centuries.
We don’t have to decide. That’s the thing I keep arriving at lately, is that we don’t have to decide.
We have time. We bought it at a terrible price and it’s ours, an actual future, sprawling out ahead of us in undecided years, and there are days the size of it catches me and I have to stand still and let it pass through me.
We could do anything. We can do nothing.
The man is going to grow old at the rate I grow old, and the castle can wait, and the road trip can wait until spring (it’s planned now, mapped, argued over a plenty—he maintains Skye will be “crawling with tourists” and I maintain he’s been antisocial since the Plantagenets; in the end, I win) and the only deadline in this whole house is mince-no-meat-pies for the twenty-third.
I pull the first batch out of the oven, and the cottage smells like Christmas, and across the bay the castle stands in the last grey light with the first stars over it, just an old building on an old shore.
Just scenery. Just part of home.
After dinner, with the fire built up and the snow starting again outside the window—fat slow flakes this time, the kind I hope mean to stay awhile—I get out the tarot cards and we settle into the sitting room, sitting around the coffee table.
This is also a thing now. It started as a joke, or I told myself it did, this deck I’ve owned for fifteen years and pulled from lazily, half-believing, the wannabe witch’s deck.
Except I’m not a wannabe anymore, not really.
I’m a woman who closed a salt circle in the fog and felt it hold, and the deck knows it.
The cards come up different now. Or I read them different.
Mhairi says there’s no difference between those two things.
Alasdair takes tarot extremely seriously. He sits on the couch with his drink and his sleeves pushed up, elbows on thighs, frowning at the spreads like they’re charts of a coast he intends to sail, demanding rulings.
Tonight he wants to know about the visit.
“The wee one,” he says, “pull for the wee one’s visit,” because he is nervous about Rosey.
Which I find absolutely adorable, this man who faced down centuries, terrified of a six-year-old’s verdict.
I mean, if she doesn’t get to see a horse, that child is gonna be pissed.
And so I shuffle, and the fire roars, and the snow comes down past the black window, and I lay three cards.
The Ten of Cups. The Sun. And the third card sticks.
It genuinely sticks, two cards clinging as one, which I know happens with an old deck, and dry winter air, and static etc.
And when I go to slide the doubled card apart, the loose one gets away from me entirely, skates off the table edge on a draft I don’t feel, and lands face-up on the floor by the dresser.
By Effie’s dresser, where I’ve arranged a lot of her things to stand watch.
It’s the Queen of Pentacles.
The card I have privately called the Effie card since the first week I lived here, the practical queen, the keeper of the hearth and the land, the woman who tends what’s hers, it’s face-up on the floor of Effie’s sitting room, in front of her dresser, having jumped the coffee table to get there.
Neither of us moves for a second.
“The draft,” I try to explain. “The window’s got a gap, the heat off the stove makes a current, cards are light—”
“Aye,” Alasdair says in a wry tone. “The draft.”
He gets up. He picks up the card with both hands and looks at it a long moment, and then he stands it upright on the dresser shelf, leaned against a ceramic figure of a duck playing bagpipes, facing the room.
“She wants to see the tree,” he says. “Just her way of letting us know.”
So the Queen stays on the dresser, looking at the tree, and I deal the third card—the Nine of Cups, the wish card, of course it is, the deck is clearly showing off now—and we finish the reading, which says, in summary, that the visit will be happy, that the year ahead is gold, and that somebody here is getting everything he wished for, which makes him insufferable for the rest of the evening because of course this ends in me giving him a blowjob.
Later, after banking the stove while he locks up—he locks up now, the man checks the doors and windows like he’s paranoid and it never stops being ironic—I stand a moment outside our bedroom, under a certain spot.
Just above, under floorboards in Effie’s closet turned binding workshop, in a dead witch’s box, there’s a piece of horse hide that lies warm in the dark.
I checked it once, alone, lifted the lid and found it exactly as I’d left it, warm as a sleeping animal, and I understood standing there that checking was the wrong relationship to have with it.
It’s not a prisoner. It’s a promise and it will be fine on its own.
It’s the only thing in this house with more time than we have, and it can mind itself.
What I think instead, standing there with the fire settling and the snow falling softly at the window and Alasdair’s footsteps doing their nightly human round, is the thing I’ve been arriving at all month, the thought the whole year has been walking me toward.
We loved each other before the binding. I know that now.
It’s kind of fucked up, considering the circumstances, but it’s true.
But neither of us could have sworn to it, not with the glamour in the air and the pull in the water and the monster at the wheel half the time.
And a love you can’t swear to isn’t love yet…
it’s hope. Hope under threat, hope holding its breath, hope with salt on the windowsills.
That’s what we had, as summer bled into autumn: two people hoping in the haunted dark, with no way of knowing what feelings were true.
And then the horse went under, and the threat went with it, and what was left standing in my kitchen was just hope. Plain hope, with cold feet and a heartbeat.
Hope, with the threat gone, turns out to be another word for a life.
Alasdair comes back in, rubbing his hands, declaring the night “bitter as a bailiff,” and finds me standing outside the bedroom doing nothing.
“What is it, foxglove?”
“Nothing. Just counting my luck.”
“Aye?” He gathers me in, warm right through, smelling of woodsmoke and the cold outside air. “And how’s it tallying?”
“Rich,” I tell him as I hold him back. “Embarrassingly rich.”