Chapter 18
The gardens at Cairn were not grand, and Elspeth had made her feelings on the matter perfectly plain within an hour of arriving.
“Criminal,” she had said, on her knees in the herb bed with her good traveling skirt in the dirt and her hands already black to the wrists.
“Look at it. The rosemary’s gone to wood, and there’s nae been a knife near these roses in three years.
And would ye look at what’s happened to the thyme, Olivia. Would ye look at it.”
“It’s nae our garden, Maither.”
“It’s somebody’s garden,” said Elspeth, in the voice of a woman confronting a moral failing, and went on weeding.
She had left the herb beds in better order than she found them, and had said nothing further about it, and Olivia had not been able to decide whether that was a kindness to the castle or a reproach.
But the morning sun cast a golden glow over the chaotic spread of it, and there was a low stone bench warm enough to sit on, and for a little while, it was enough just to be outside with a baby, a dog, and a woman slowly learning how to be alive again.
Kate carried Rosie. That was a wonder in itself.
She had lifted the baby from Olivia’s arms at the garden gate without being asked, settled her on one thin hip with the unthinking ease of a body recalling what it had tried hard to forget, and walked the paths with her, naming the plants in a low voice for a child who understood not one word of it.
“He brought me flowers once,” Kate said out of nowhere, her eyes fixed on a tangle of bramble. “Magnus.”
Olivia went very still on the bench. “Ye daenae have to talk about him.”
Kate shook her head. “Nay, I want to. I’ve nae said his name aloud to a livin’ soul in half a year, and it’s been rottin’ in me like a splinter left in too long.”
She did not look at Olivia. She looked at the baby, at Rosie’s dark head bent over a fistful of stolen leaves.
“He was beautiful, yer braither. And clever, and funny when it suited him. He’d meet me at the boundary stone in the gloamin’ and tell me the war was a foolishness, that he and I could end it between us, that love was stronger than any feud the old men cooked up.
” Her mouth twisted. “I believed every word. I was so desperate to. I’d have believed the moon was a bannock if he’d told me so with his hand in me hair. ”
“Kate—”
“He never meant a word of it.” Her voice stayed terribly even. “I was a door, Olivia. That is all I ever was to him. A way into me braither’s land without havin’ to fight him for it.”
“I daenae understand.”
“Nay, ye wouldnae. It’s an ugly wee piece of arithmetic, and ye have to be a certain sort of man to work it.
” Kate’s hands lay still in her lap as she sat on the bench.
“A ruined lass has to be married. That’s the whole of it.
That’s his whole clever plan. If he got me with child and it was ken, then Ragnall would have to come to Blythe with his hat in his hand and ask him to take me, and nay laird sends a dishonored sister to a man’s house empty-handed.
He’d have had to send the land with me. The river, and the good grass on both banks, all of it signed over as me tocher, and nae a drop of blood spilled for it.
” She looked up. “He’d have got in one winter what fifty years of war couldnae buy him, and he’d have been thought a fine man for takin’ me forbye. ”
Olivia felt the floor go strange beneath her.
“And when I quickened, he was pleased.” Kate’s mouth moved, not into a smile. “God help me, I thought it meant he loved me. He was pleased, and I lay there thinkin’ it was joy.”
“But ye didnae marry him.”
“Nay.” Now, something came into the flat voice at last, and it was not grief.
It was iron. “I wouldnae. He told me what I’d been for, and I wouldnae give him the satisfaction of it.
I wouldnae wed him, and I wouldnae give them his name, nae to Ragnall, nae to me grandmaither, nae to the priest, nae to a livin’ soul.
I said the bairn had nay faither.” She lifted her chin, and for one moment, she was not a ghost in a chair.
She was a woman who had won something at a cost nobody would ever be able to calculate.
“So his fine plan wanted the one thing he couldnae take by force. It wanted me to agree. And I wouldnae.”
The candle guttered.
“And that,” she said, “is why he came for her instead. Because if he couldnae have the land through me, he’d have the bairn.
Blythe blood, raised in a Blythe house, a wee soldier for the cause, and me left with nothin’ and nay way to prove she was ever mine.
He came into me chamber for her while I was still weak from the birth, and when I wouldnae give her up—”
She stopped. Her hand had gone to her ribs, to the place where the bones had healed crooked. “Well, ye ken the rest. Ye live with the man that came after.”
Olivia’s eyes were burning. “I didnae ken any of it,” she whispered. “I swear it to ye, Kate. I grew up at that man’s side and I didnae ken a thing.”
“I ken ye didnae.” Kate looked at her then, and there was no blame in her ruined green eyes, only a vast and weary kindness. “That’s the cruelty of it, is it nae? The ones who love a monster are always the last to see the teeth.”
And then Rosie coughed.
It was a small sound at first, a wet little hitch, and Kate’s whole body went rigid around it.
Then it came again, harder, and the baby’s face crumpled and went red.
A third cough racked her small frame, and she began to wheeze, a thin whistling sound on every breath, her hands opening and closing in distress.
“Rosie?” Kate’s voice cracked clean in half. “Rosie, what is it? What’s—”
“Her lips,” Olivia said, on her feet already, her heart hammering. “Look at her lips—they’ve gone gray! What has she been at? What does she have in her hands?”
She pried the crushed wad of leaves from the baby’s fist and did not know it was some flowering weed from the bramble bed.
Rosie wheezed and whimpered and pawed at her own mouth.
“The healer. Now. Where’s the healer? Kate—”
But Kate had gone white and frozen, the baby clutched to her chest, and so Olivia took the wheezing child into her own arms and ran.
Brigid took one look at the baby in Olivia’s arms and became, in an instant, a creature Olivia had not looked for. Not the cold, still woman from the doorway. But a healer. Quick, and sure, and without one trace of fear.
“Give her here. On the table. What did she have?” Olivia held out the crushed leaves, and Brigid’s mouth tightened. “Aye. Lamb’s cress. She has done this afore, the wee madam. She cannae be trusted within a mile of the stuff.”
She was already working as she spoke, a pinch of something dropped into hot water, the steam cupped under the baby’s nose, her fair head bent close.
“Breathe, ye wee terror. There. There’s me bonnie lass. Breathe for Brigid, now.”
Slowly, the dreadful whistling eased. Rosie’s color came back. The wheezing gentled to hiccupping sobs and then to furious cries, the healthy outraged howls of a baby badly frightened and wanting the world to know it.
Olivia’s knees nearly gave out under her with relief.
“She is well,” Brigid said, scooping the child up and settling her with practiced ease. “She will be cross as a wet cat the rest of the day, but she is well. Ye did right to run.” A pause, and then without warmth: “Both of ye. The Lady and the Laird’s sister.”
Kate had crept in at the door, trembling, and Brigid handed her the baby with a gentleness she did not waste on Olivia and murmured a low word that made Kate’s shoulders come down from around her ears. Then she turned to Olivia, and the warmth vanished from her face like a snuffed candle.
“And how does the new Lady find married life?” she asked pleasantly, wiping her hands.
“I trust the weddin’ night was all ye hoped.
Ragnall was always…” She paused and let her green eyes drift over Olivia, slow and knowing.
“… attentive. In his own way. He has a great deal of patience in him, that man, when he sets his mind to something. But ye’ll have learned that much by now. ”
Olivia stood very still.
It was the way Brigid said his name. Ragnall.
Not me Laird, not the Laird. Ragnall, soft and worn smooth in her mouth from long use.
It was the slow knowing drift of her eyes, the small private curl at the corner of her mouth.
It was a hundred small signs, and they added up all at once to one large and sickening certainty.
“Ye and he…” Olivia’s voice came out steady. She did not know how. “Ye were—”
“For years,” Brigid said, light as anything, turning back to her herbs.
“Since we were scarcely more than bairns. He ended it, uh, nearly two years ago now. But ye daenae forget a thing like that, do ye? The body has a long memory.” She smiled over her shoulder, sweet and cold.
“I am sure he has told ye all of it. He’s an honest man, our Laird.
He’d never let his bride go to his bed nae kennin’ whose place it was she was takin’. ”
And Olivia, who had lain awake half the night, warm and wondering and undone by a man’s low and patient voice, who had let herself believe for the space of one foolish morning that what lay between them was new and only theirs, felt the bright, fragile hope she had carried out of that bed curdle to ash behind her ribs.
She thanked the healer for saving the baby’s life in a voice she did not recognize, then walked out of the room with her spine straight and her chin high, and did not let one single thing show on her face until she was well alone.
Of course. Of course, there was someone afore ye. Ye fool, Olivia. Ye great soft fool. Ye nearly forgot who ye were, and who he is, and what the two of ye are to one another. She did ye a kindness, the healer. She woke ye afore ye drowned in it.