Chapter 7
Her mother held her in the courtyard for a long time without saying anything, which was exactly how Olivia knew that she had prepared herself for tears all the way up the glen and was now stubbornly resolved not to be the first to cry.
“Lucas couldnae come,” her mother said into her hair.
“He’s still learnin’ his letters and his laws from the council, the poor solemn lamb.
He frets he isnae ready, and frets worse that everyone can see he frets.
He sends his love and a great deal of unasked-for advice—he made me promise to give it to ye word-for-word.
But I wouldnae let ye be wed without yer own maither here to fuss over ye and pin yer hem.
And look who I stole along the road to keep me company. ”
And there, climbing down from the cart with her spectacles already sliding down her nose and both her thin arms flung wide, was Anne.
Anne, who had been Olivia’s dearest friend since the two of them were knee-high to the kirk pews and inseparable as two halves of a walnut ever since.
Tall and thin and black-haired, with her spectacles forever sliding down her nose, quiet as a closed door in any company and wickedly, gloriously sharp the very moment that company left the room.
She had a quick wit that she showed almost no one, preferring to be thought meek so she might watch better, and a loyalty so fierce it had frightened more than one person who had been foolish enough to underestimate the quiet girl with the spectacles.
She had received her own summons to the wedding, plain and courteous, a guest’s card with no portrait folded inside it, and none of the cruelty the Council had pressed into Olivia’s.
“Daenae say anythin’ kind to me,” Olivia warned her, the moment she was near enough to hear it. “Nae one kind word. I will come apart at every seam if ye do, and I’ve only just gotten meself sewn back together.”
“I wouldnae dream of it,” said Anne, and hugged her hard enough to crack a rib, which said everything the forbidden kind words would have.
They walked in the gardens together while the carts were unloaded behind them, the two of them and the dog, who had long since transferred all his devotion to Olivia and would not now be parted from her side for any bribe.
The gardens at Cairn were good, Olivia noticed resentfully, better than she wanted them to be.
A kind woman’s gardens, planted with love and long thought, full of herbs gone leggy and late roses past their best, and a stone bench set just where the afternoon sun would find it. She wondered who had tended them.
“So,” said Anne, the moment they were out of earshot. “Tell me the truth. How bad is he, this Laird of yers?”
Olivia opened her mouth to tell her that he was a monster. It was the word she had used in every letter these last months, underlined twice. She found, to her own great astonishment, that she could not get it past her teeth.
“Complicated,” she said instead, which surprised them both.
Anne’s dark eyebrows rose clean above the rims of her spectacles. “That’s nae the word ye used in yer letters. Ye had a great many words for him in yer letters, and that wasnae among them.”
“He’s nae what I thought he was.” Olivia bent and tugged at a weed that did not need pulling, only so she would not have to meet her friend’s clever eyes. “There are things, Anne. About what happened that day. About me braither. About this keep, and who’s in it, and why…” She stopped.
The full and dreadful shape of it was far too heavy to lift into the light of a garden in the afternoon, and her mother was only twenty paces off among the rose canes, and Elspeth must never, ever, so long as she drew breath, learn what her firstborn son had done.
It would simply kill the gentlest woman Olivia had ever known.
“I cannae tell ye all of it yet. Some of it I daenae ken how to say aloud. But the man I came here hatin’ may nae be the same man who lives in this keep. And I daenae have the first notion in the world what I am meant to do with that.”
“And the marriage bed?” Anne asked, ever the practical one, lowering her voice. “If he isnae the monster ye thought him, that changes a great deal, surely.”
“That changes nothin’.” Olivia straightened up sharply.
“I will carry his name. I will keep his peace before the world. But I willnae give meself to him, friend or foe or somethin’ tangled in between.
I’ve told him so to his face. He’ll nae lay a hand on me, nae once, nae ever, and he has agreed to it. ”
“But…” Anne frowned behind her glasses. “How can that be, Olivia? Ye’re to be wed before a priest. He’s a laird, with a laird’s needs and a laird’s pride. He’ll want—”
“He’ll want,” Olivia agreed grimly. “He can want until he has gone gray. Wantin’ costs me nothin’.”
That was the precise and unfortunate moment the man himself rode in through the gate.
He had been somewhere, as he was forever and always somewhere, and as he never once thought to inform his bride where.
He swung down from his black horse in one long, easy motion, his shirt open at the throat against the warmth of the day, and his sleeves rolled up to his forearms. Olivia watched helplessly, noting the muscles flexing in his back and shoulders as he handed the reins to a stable lad.
A slow wash of heat crawled up her neck and spread across her face before she could command it not to.
Anne, beside her, went very still.
“I do believe,” she murmured, so low that only Olivia could have caught it, “that I have never once in all me life seen ye go that shade of red while merely lookin’ at a friend.”
“Anne.”
“I am only sayin’ what I see.”
“Anne, I will throw ye into the loch. I will hold yer head under meself.”
“Ye will have to catch me first, and ye are wearin’ the heavier skirts.”
Ragnall had spotted them. He was calmly walking across the gardens toward them, exuding his usual unhurried confidence.
Olivia, feeling the heat in her face, averted her gaze and bent down to examine a cluster of nearly dead roses with great interest, though it was clear to everyone—even the woman with the spectacles—that she was only pretending.
“Ye must be Lady Anne.” He bowed, and the bow managed to be both perfectly correct and entirely unbothered. “There were two names on the card the Elders sent me, and I’ve just been embraced by one of them, so I’ll take me chances on the other.”
“Ye must be the monster, then,” said Anne pleasantly, before Olivia could draw breath to stop her. “There was only one name on the card ye sent us.”
There was a small, dreadful silence. Olivia felt the ground tilt beneath her.
And then Ragnall Crawford, who did not laugh, laughed. It was a short, startled, rusty sound, as if the thing had gotten out of him before he could shut the door on it.
“Aye,” he said. “I’m him.” He straightened, and there was something in his dark eyes that had not been there a moment before. “Ye’re welcome at Cairn, and gladly, Lady Anne. I am glad me bride will have her own folk around her for this, and nae be among strangers on her weddin’ day.”
His gaze moved from Anne to Olivia, and Olivia’s treacherous pulse moved right along with it. “I will be much taken up with the clan for the next days—the river and such—so I willnae be underfoot at yer preparations. Ye will have the run of the keep, both of ye. Take what ye need from it.”
“Of course,” Olivia said to a rose.
He left.
She watched him go, which was a mistake, and Anne watched her watch him go, which was a far worse one.
Anne watched him go the whole way across the courtyard, her spectacles halfway down her nose.
“Well,” she drawled.
“Daenae.”
“I’ve said nae one word.”
“Ye’re sayin’ a great many of them very loudly, Anne, and ye’ve nae opened yer mouth once.”
Ragnall was, in point of fact, very much underfoot over the days that followed, though he took the greatest of care that no one should ever quite catch him at it.
He discovered, somewhat to his own disgust, that a man could attend to the grain accounts, and the disputed boundary stones, and the endless petty squabbles of his tenants, and the whole vexed question of the river all at once, and still always know precisely where in his castle Olivia of Blythe happened to be standing at any hour of the day.
He observed details about her that were none of his concern, but he could not help himself.
He noticed she sang softly and imperfectly to the baby when she thought no one was listening.
He saw her allow the dog to take food from her plate and then dramatically act indignant about the theft for others to see.
He noticed that her true laugh, the rare and unguarded one, was nothing like the brittle, bright sound she armed herself with whenever he came into a room. He was beginning to suspect, with some alarm, that he would do many deeply unwise things to hear that laugh again.
She is a wall I keep findin’ doors in. And every door opens onto somethin’ I have nay right to want.
“And how are the weddin’ preparations goin’, then?” he asked his grandmother one evening, with what he genuinely believed to be a great and convincing casualness.
“Why are ye askin’ me?” Maisie did not lift her eyes from her mending. “Have ye nay tongue in yer head? Ask yer bride. She is the one overseein’ them.”
“I willnae go pesterin’ her with idle questions when she still thinks so little of me.”
“Mm.” Maisie bit off her thread with a sharp little snap of her old teeth.
“And how precisely do ye reckon she is to come round to thinkin’ any more of ye, ye great stubborn lump of a man, when ye spend every day creepin’ about yer own castle, spyin’ on her from behind the pillars like a lad of fifteen, and refusin’ to say so much as a civil good mornin’ to her face? ”
He did not have a response ready, which was a common problem with his grandmother. She was almost always correct, and even more, she took obvious pleasure in being right, leaving little room for him to regain his dignity afterward.
He went to the window of his study to escape the knowing look on her face, and what he saw down below did nothing whatsoever to ease his trouble.
Down in the kitchen yard, in the long golden light of the late afternoon, Olivia sat on the worn well step with Rosie bouncing in her lap, the baby fisting both hands in that bright hair, and the two of them were laughing together at the dog as he chased his own daft tail round and round in the dust until he fell over from dizziness.
It was, Ragnall thought, the finest thing he had seen in a long and weary while, and that was the whole of its danger.
And there, half in the cool shadow of the brewhouse wall, stood Brigid, with her basket on her arm, watching the very same scene.
She was not laughing. She was not gathering her herbs nor going about any errand at all.
She stood perfectly still in the shadow and looked at his bride and his niece laughing together in the sun, with an expression Ragnall had never once seen on her face in all the years he had known her.
It was something cold, patient, and devoid of any warmth.
The hair on the back of his neck prickled as it always did before a fierce storm swept down from the high hills.
She then turned calmly and entered through the brewhouse door, leaving the kitchen yard behind, now just a space filled with slanting sunlight and a baby’s shrieks of laughter.
Ragnall, however, remained at his high window for a long time afterward, feeling cold all the way to his bones.
He had just watched a decision take root in Brigid, who was calm and confident, and knowing her as he did, he was certain she would not abandon it.