Chapter 26
He did not argue with her. That was the cruelest part of it.
She had prepared herself for it, lying awake through that dark night in his bed, her shoulder throbbing and his warmth just a careful foot away.
She had gathered all her arguments, sharpened each one, ready for him to forbid it, to command her, to give her the honest, clean fight she could lose herself in.
And in the gray morning, he had only looked at her with his unreadable dark eyes and said, “If it’s what ye want, I willnae keep ye against yer will. I will send word to yer braither and an escort to see ye safe. Ye will go when ye are healed enough to ride.”
And that was that. He had let her go without a single word of a fight, and it hurt worse than any blow he could have dealt her.
It took four days for the wound to close enough for travel.
Ragnall was unfailingly courteous, and he was never once there.
He was in the low fields. He was in the villages.
He was riding out to the river with Alastair before the light came and back after it went, and if she came into a room he was leaving it, and if they passed in a passage he inclined his head and said me Lady and kept walking.
He asked after her shoulder through a maid. He had her food sent up.
He was, in every way, a model of care, and she could not have gotten within ten feet of him with a battering ram.
It was Maisie who found her on the second day, sitting in the window of the south tower with a shawl round her shoulders and nothing in her hands.
The old woman did not ask if she might come in. She sat down heavily, propped her stick against the sill, and looked out at the same grey glen Olivia had been looking at for two hours.
“So ye’re away, then.”
“Aye.”
“Mm.” A long pause. “And has he asked ye to stay?”
“Nay.”
“Nay,” Maisie agreed comfortably. “He’ll nae. He’d sooner take a blade through the belly than do that. It’d hurt him less, and he’d ken what to do about it.” She turned her old bright eyes on Olivia. “Have ye asked him to ask ye?”
Olivia opened her mouth and closed it again.
“Aye,” said Maisie. “There ye are. The pair of ye. Two of the most stubborn creatures God has ever set on this earth, sittin’ in separate rooms of the same castle, each waitin’ for the other to be brave first.” She thumped her stick once on the floor. “I’ll be dead before ye manage it.”
“It isnae like that.”
“It’s exactly like that, and ye ken it fine, and ye’ll be halfway down the glen before ye admit it to yerself.
” The old woman heaved herself up. At the door, she stopped.
“I’ve buried a husband and a daughter and a son-in-law, lass.
I’ll tell ye the one thing I’ve learned out of the whole miserable business, and then I’ll leave ye be. ”
Olivia did not turn around.
“Ye’ll get over the things that were done to ye,” Maisie continued.
“In time. Ye’ll get over grief, and ye’ll get over hate, and ye’ll even get over bein’ wronged, which is the hardest of the three.
” The stick tapped once. “It’s the things ye didnae say that’ll keep ye company till they put ye in the ground. Ask me how I ken.”
With that, she stepped out and closed the door behind her.
Olivia sat in the window until the light went out, and did not manage to be brave that day, nor the next.
Kate did not come to her until the last night. She stood in the doorway with Rosie on her hip and did not come in, and her face was set in a way Olivia had never seen it before.
“Ye’re really goin’.”
“Kate—”
“Ye said ye’d help me with her.” Her voice was quite steady, which made it a great deal worse.
“Ye said it in the garden. Ye said, ‘We’ll do it together, and if ye cannae bear her one day, I’ll take her, and I’ll bring her back when ye can.
’ Ye said that to me.” Rosie reached out toward Olivia and made a small enquiring sound, and Kate’s arms tightened.
“And now ye’re away home, and I’m to manage. ”
“There was a man in me chamber with a knife.”
“Aye, there was.” Kate’s chin lifted. “And ye’re runnin’.”
“That is nae fair.”
“Nay, it isnae,” Kate agreed. “And I daenae care in the slightest, because ye’re the only friend I’ve had in half a year and ye’re leavin’ me in a castle full of folk that talk to me like I’m dyin’.” Her eyes were bright now. “So I’ll be unfair. I’ve earned a bit of unfair, I should think.”
Olivia had no answer.
Kate crossed the room and put the baby in her arms without a word. Rosie fisted a hand in Olivia’s hair, pressed her warm face into her neck, and stayed there.
Olivia stood in the middle of the floor holding her niece and understood, with a completeness that cut the legs out from under her, exactly what she was about to give up.
“There,” Kate said, her voice cracking at last. “Now ye ken.”
Olivia slept badly, woke before the bell, and went down to the hall in the grey dark because she had decided in the small hours that she would say it. Whatever it was. She would stand in front of him and open her mouth and let whatever came out of it come out.
The hall was empty.
“He’s away to the low fields, me Lady,” said a maid, not unkindly, but she would not look at her. “He went out afore the light.”
Olivia stood for a long moment in the cold grey hall.
“Aye,” she said. “Of course he did.”
She had not known. That was the cruelty of it. She had come to Cairn hating it, counting the walls of her prison, and somewhere in the counting, the prison had become, without her leave, the nearest she had to a home left in the world.
Kate wept.
“Ye will write to me,” Kate said fiercely into her shoulder. “Ye made me speak, Olivia Crawford, when I’d given up speakin’ for good. Ye willnae now vanish off down the glen and leave me to go quiet again. I willnae allow it. Ye will write.”
“I will write.”
“And ye’ll come back to us.”
Olivia could not promise her that. So she said nothing, and held her, and grieved.
The baby was worse. Rosie did not understand goodbyes, only that her favorite person was holding her too tight and her face had gone all wet.
She patted Olivia’s cheeks with both fat hands and frowned her small grave frown, and Olivia kissed her dark curls and breathed her in one last time and handed her back before she lost her nerve altogether.
Tattie pressed his great head against her knees and would not be moved. He let out a long, heartbroken groan, for he knew, as dogs often did, that she was leaving.
Maisie held her face in two soft, ancient hands and looked at her with those mischievous, knowing eyes gone sad for once, and said, “He’s a fool, me grandson.
The biggest fool God ever made out of good Highland clay.
But he is worth the wait, lass, if ye ever find ye can bear to wait. Mind that wherever ye go.”
Ragnall did not even come to say goodbye.
Olivia told herself she had not looked for him.
She climbed into the litter they had readied, her shoulder stiff and aching, with Kate and Maisie, and one great mournful dog, and Greer, the round kitchen maid who had brought up her food every day of that black week and who was now weeping into her apron without the least attempt to hide it, to see her off, and she did not look up at the high black window in the study, and she did not let herself wonder whether he stood behind it.
“Whisht, lass,” Maisie said, without much conviction. “Ye’ll set the dog off.”
Olivia did not look up at the high black window.
She was aware of it the way one was aware of a fire at one’s back.
She knew exactly where it was, and how high, and how black.
She did not look, because if she looked and found it empty, something in her might simply stop, and if she looked and found it not empty, she would have to climb back out of the litter, and she had spent the last of her courage getting into it.
“He isnae comin’ down, is he?” she asked.
Maisie’s old hand closed hard over hers on the rail. “Nay, lass,” she said. “He isnae.”
And that was the whole of the goodbye she got from her husband.
At the bend in the road, the place where the glen turned and Cairn would forever disappear out of sight, Olivia did the one thing she had sworn to herself she would not do.
She looked back.
The castle stood gray and silent on its hill, giving nothing away, and the high study window was a blind black square that told her nothing at all.
Nothing. Not a shadow, not a movement, not so much as a candle. He had not even come to the glass to watch her go.
She faced forward again with her jaw set and her eyes stinging, and told herself it was only the wind off the hills, and rode on toward Blythe, toward home, toward the whole long rest of her life without him.
It’s better this way. It’s safer. It’s the sensible thing. I’ll say it enough times, and one of these days, I’ll believe it.
He willnae let himself want me. He told me so to me face, and he never once lied about it, and I’ll nae make a liar of him now just to comfort meself.
And I am a fool, and it’s over, and it’s better. And oh God, why does it feel so much like dyin’?