Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Isobel found her at the window.
Margaret had not gone back to the courtyard after she left him standing in the receiving room.
She had gone up the narrow stairs to the room she had slept in for nine months, the one with the uneven floorboard near the door and the window that looked northeast toward the ridge, and she had stood with her hands flat on the sill, breathing.
Below, the children were still in the courtyard.
Catriona had abandoned the flower crowns in favor of organizing a game that appeared to involve a great deal of running and no discernible rules.
The twins were sitting in a patch of sun, eating something they had found on the ground, which Margaret decided, from this distance, not to investigate.
She heard Isobel's step on the stairs. She knew it as well as she knew her own.
"He's agreed to all me terms," Margaret said, without turning.
Isobel came to stand beside her at the window. She did not speak immediately. That was one of the things Margaret had learned to love about her, the ability to be present without filling every silence.
"I heard some of it," Isobel said. "I wasnae eavesdroppin'. The door doesnae close properly."
"I ken. I've been meanin' to ask Donal about it since March."
"Are ye all right?"
Margaret considered this question honestly, the way she had learned to do this year, instead of responding with her first immediate feeling.
She stood at the window, looked at the courtyard, the children, and the gray stone walls she had grown familiar with, and she examined what was really happening inside her chest.
"I daenae ken," she said. "Ask me again in a week."
Isobel was quiet for a moment. "What did he say? When ye gave him the terms?"
"He agreed to them."
"Ye told me that, but what did he say?"
Margaret turned from the window. She sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under her, and looked at her hands in her lap.
"He said I had made meself clear. He said he could see I wasnae the woman he had left.
" She paused. "He said it would be a considerable waste of me gifts to put me anywhere other than where I had demanded to be. "
Isobel was quiet for a moment. "Considerable waste of yer gifts?"
"Aye."
"That is quite possibly the most Fergus MacKenzie compliment that has ever been given by any man in the history of the Highlands."
Margaret looked up. Something in her chest loosened—a small release she had not realized she was holding—and she laughed. It was shorter than her usual laughs, more compressed, but it felt genuine.
"It is, isnae it?" she said.
Isobel sat beside her on the bed, the way she had sat beside her on a hundred evenings this past year, in this room, in the kitchen, in the hall by the fire. Close enough that their shoulders touched. She did not reach for Margaret's hand. She did not need to. The proximity said everything.
"Tell me what ye're afraid of," Isobel said quietly. "Nae what ye're plannin'. Nae what ye've decided. What ye're afraid of."
Margaret looked out the window. The light was shifting as the afternoon inched toward evening, and the ridge changed from green to a darker, purple-tinged green as the shadow of the clouds moved across it.
"That I've built somethin' here," she said, "and I'm about to leave it for somethin' I daenae ken.
And he'll go back to bein' exactly who he was, and I'll have given up this.
.." she gestured, taking in the room, the window, the sound of Catriona below shrieking with laughter, "for a cold keep full of people who daenae ken me yet, and I'll have to start all over again. Alone."
"Ye willnae be alone. Ye'll have Lilly."
"I daenae ken Lilly."
"Ye will. Quickly, I think. From what he said of her." Isobel paused. "And ye'll have him. For whatever that is worth."
"I daenae ken what it's worth," Margaret said. "That's the difficulty."
"Nay," Isobel said. "Ye daenae ken what it will be worth. There's a difference."
Margaret looked at her.
"He rode three days south," Isobel said.
"He came himself. He could have sent a letter.
He could have sent a rider with a formal summons.
He came himself, and he stood in the courtyard, and he accepted yer terms without a counteroffer.
" She held Margaret's gaze. "I'm nae sayin' that makes up for nine months of silence.
I'm sayin' it's a piece of information worth havin'. "
Margaret was quiet. "I planted lavender in yer garden," she said finally. "In April."
Isobel blinked. "I ken. I watched ye."
"I want ye to look after it. I daenae want it to go the way the rosemary went."
"That was nae me fault. Donal overwatered it."
"Tell Donal nae to overwater the lavender."
"Margaret."
"I'm bein' practical." Margaret stood. She went back to the window and looked down at the courtyard one last time.
The twins had abandoned the food and were now attempting to climb Euan, who was tolerating it with the resignation of a very old tree.
Catriona was explaining the rules of her game to the miller's daughters with the intensity of someone who had only just invented the rules and needed everyone to commit to them before she forgot what they were.
She let herself look at all of it. Properly, without hurrying past it. She had earned the right to look at what she was leaving.
Then she turned from the window. "I'll need help with the trunks."
They packed until the light faded.
Isobel worked beside her without being asked, folding things with the swift, efficient care of a woman who understood that sentiment was best shown through helpful action.
They did not talk much. The room filled with the quiet sounds of fabric and wood, along with the occasional, distant cry of one of the children being put to bed in the castle below.
Margaret kept only what was hers. She left behind the shawl Isobel had lent her in January and never asked for back, and the cracked ceramic cup on the windowsill that had been in the room when she arrived and would remain there long after she was gone.
She kept the small book of psalms her mother pressed into her hands at the gate of her childhood home, which she had not opened in nine months and did not plan to open, but couldn't bring herself to leave.
She kept the folded piece of linen on which she had been practicing her needlework, poorly, because Isobel had insisted it was a skill she ought to have, and she had agreed mainly to have something to do with her hands during the long winter evenings.
She kept everything she had made here and left everything that had only been borrowed. By the time the trunks were closed and the room was bare, the castle was quiet.
"Ye leave the day after tomorrow?" Isobel asked.
"Aye." Margaret smoothed the front of her dress. "I asked for two days and he gave them. I intend to use them properly, the goodbyes, the trunks, and a night's sleep that isnae spent on a carriage seat."
They stood in the empty room. The stripped bed.
The bare windowsill. The uneven floorboard near the door that she had learned to step around without thinking, as natural as breathing, and would probably continue to step around by instinct in rooms with perfectly even floors for the rest of her life.
Isobel moved toward her. She cupped Margaret's face in both hands, exactly as she had once before, on the morning after her wedding night, when Margaret finally let go of her composure and cried until she was drained.
It was not a gesture Isobel made easily or often. That was what made it significant.
"Ye are the finest woman I ken," Isobel said. She did not say it with ceremony. "I want ye to remember that when ye're up there in that castle and it's cold, and ye daenae ken anyone and he's bein' impossible. Which he will be. Regularly."
Margaret's throat tightened. She did not cry. She had decided she was not going to cry, and she found she could hold to it.
"Send word as soon as ye're settled," Isobel said. "The moment ye have a sense of the place. And if ye need me, ye send for me. I will come. I believe Fergus already had a conversation with Alasdair."
"I ken ye will," Margaret said.
Isobel released her. Stepped back. Became, again, the composed Lady of the keep, though her eyes were slightly too bright.
"Go to bed," she said. "It's a long road north."
* * *
The carriage smelled of old leather and the dampness of a vehicle that had sat unused through a Highland winter.
Margaret settled into the worn seat and listened to Dunalasdair passing by the small window, stone by stone, until it was gone.
She did not look back.
She could hear him riding alongside. She had known he would, he was not a man for carriages, for the helplessness of being conveyed somewhere by something other than his own will.
She noted it and filed it beside everything else she had observed about him, adding it to the careful inventory she had been keeping since their wedding night.
She knew more than he thought she did. She also knew, in the few times she had seen his face unguarded, that he was afraid of something.
She did not yet know what it was. She planned to find out.
She thought about the baby. Margaret turned it over and felt the ache of it, not pity, which was the least useful thing she had to offer a child.
She was not going to make the mistake of deciding what he was before she had seen it for herself. She had done that before, in the Lowlands, building a man from nothing but hope and second-hand stories. She would not do it again. She would watch. She would pay attention.
The carriage hit a rut. Her shoulder caught the door. She righted herself, looked out the small window at the darkening hills, and straightened her spine against the worn leather seat.
She was not afraid.
That was not entirely true, and she knew it. But she was going anyway, which was the only thing that had ever mattered.