Chapter 21
The study had not changed. Same desk, same cold stone, same smell of tallow and old leather. He closed the door behind him and told himself that was enough.
He sat down, picked up the mill steward’s letter about the eastern wall repair, and read the first line three times without retaining a word of it. He set it down, added a block of peat to the fire, and stayed crouched in front of the grate longer than the task required, watching it catch.
Her laugh kept coming back to him—the wool blanket. The plum jar was sitting crooked in the corner of the basket. The way her whole face had changed when he had sat down without objecting, before she had had the chance to hide it.
Nay one has done this before.
He’d said that aloud to her. He had not meant to, same as he had not meant to say the rest of it, the field, the grass, the only place he’d ever felt good, before he caught himself and shut the door on it.
He picked the letter back up. Read the first line a fourth time.
‘It was the only place I felt good.’
The one place his father had never bothered to walk to. Edward had not been worth the trouble. That had been the one mercy of it.
He pressed the heel of his hand flat against his chest and stared at the ceiling instead of the letter.
The knock, when it finally came, was unmistakably Mrs. Donnan’s. Two measured, solid strikes, neither tentative nor presumptuous.
“Come.”
She was carrying a fresh batch of tallow candles. The ones resting on the desk had burned dangerously low without his noticing.
She moved quietly around the stone room, replacing them. She said nothing while she worked, and the fire ticked in the grate as the new candles bloomed one by one around the room, throwing long shadows.
She paused at the window.
“The castle has nae felt this alive,” she said softly, “in many years.”
He picked up the mill steward’s letter. “Nothin’ has changed.”
She did not argue the point. She set the very last candle in its iron holder and straightened it with two fingers. The braided wick caught the flame.
“Ye were eleven,” she said, her voice dropping into memory, “when ye learned to put yer own fires out at night. Because ye were afraid that if ye called for someone, they would nae come.” She paused.
“Ye were twelve when ye started sittin’ in on the steward’s accounts, because ye believed that if ye understood everythin’ that could go wrong, ye would be ready for it.
” Another pause stretched between them, shorter this time. “Ye were sixteen when ye—”
“Mrs. Donnan.”
She stopped instantly. Not because she had been silenced by fear. Because she had said exactly enough, and she knew it.
“Ye have spent most of yer life survivin’, me Laird,” she said, her voice lacking its usual soft, formal coating.
“Survivin’ is what ye ken. It is what ye are very good at.
” She picked up the spent, melted candle stubs and collected them in her palm.
“But survivin’ and livin’ are nae the same.
And ye’ve been standin’ at the border of one of them for three weeks now. ”
He said absolutely nothing.
“She carried flowers,” Mrs. Donnan said, her hand resting on the latch. “For a picnic. For ye.” She moved toward the open door. “I have worked in this castle for thirty-one years, and I have never once seen anyone carry flowers for ye. I thought that was worth remarkin’ upon.”
The door opened.
“Mrs. Donnan,” he said.
She paused on the threshold.
He looked down at the chaotic papers on his desk. At the mill steward’s letter. He had read the first line four separate times without advancing a single sentence further. At the small, dark ring on the wood where his tin cup had sat for an hour without being touched.
“Is her ankle better?” he asked. “Truly.”
A sharp beat of silence followed.
“Beathag says it is sound,” Mrs. Donnan said. “I checked it again this evenin’. She is well.”
He nodded once, his eyes returning to the papers.
The door closed.
He sat in the dark study for another long hour. The peat fire burned low. The candles threw their steady light across the unread parchments.
He thought about a small jar of preserved plum sitting crookedly in a willow basket.
About a drifting cloud that was either a boot or a dog, and the ridiculous argument that had made him laugh before he could stop himself, and the specific way she had kept her eyes fixed on the sky just to give him the physical room for it.
He stood up. He went to the window and looked out at the dark yard, tracking the torches flickering at the iron gate and the massive hills beyond them, entirely invisible now against the black sky.
Somewhere past those steep hills, and the road that wound through them, and the glen that opened out below, the sea was pushing relentlessly at the land, completely indifferent to everything, boundless.
She had said she had never seen it.
He had told her he would take her.
He decided to get some sleep. He lay on the narrow bench in the pitch dark, and the unfinished sentence sat heavy in his chest and would not be put down, and sleep came late and left early.
When the first pale gray light arrived at the window, he had already been awake for an hour and had, at some unknown point in the dark, made a definitive decision he could not precisely identify the moment of.
He rose. He dressed quickly. He went down to the stables and spoke to Tyler, and Tyler did not ask a single question, which was easily one of his more valuable qualities.
Then he climbed the turnpike stairs to find his wife.
He would take her to the sea today.
She woke before the light, staring into the dark of the bedchamber. The room was freezing.
She lay there for a moment, then pushed the furs back before she could second-guess herself.
She’d spent the entire ride home turning yesterday’s meadow over in her mind—three broken sentences and a childhood shut tight faster than it had ever opened—and none of it had gotten better with a night’s sleep.
She rang for Melodie rather than dress alone in the dark. Better company than her own head, this morning.
Melodie arrived within minutes, already talking.
“Ye’re up early, me Lady. I heard William howlin’ from two floors down, cuttin’ a tooth, I’d wager. Isla’s nephew screamed for a fortnight straight when he came in.” She stopped at the sight of Chloe half into her stays. “Ye’ve started without me?”
“I have hands, Melodie.”
“Aye, but ye’ve also got a maid who’d like to keep her position.” Melodie moved in and took over the laces. “Ye look like ye slept in a snowbank. Bad night?”
“Fine night.”
“Mm.” Melodie did not sound convinced, but let it go and reached for the heavy wool dress instead. “There’s a rumor goin’ round the kitchens that the Laird was up at first light, askin’ Tyler about horses for a long ride. Nobody kens where.”
Chloe went still for half a second, then reached for a pin. “Is that so?”
“Aye. Isla thinks it’s Hendry’s lands again. I think it’s somethin’ else.” Melodie’s eyes found hers in the looking glass, entirely too knowing for the hour. “But I am nae one to gossip.”
“Ye are precisely one to gossip.”
“Well. Aye.” Melodie grinned and pinned the last of Chloe’s hair into place. “There. Ye’ll do.”
Chloe checked her reflection once and was out the door before Melodie could ask another question she did not have an answer for.
The castle was caught in that dead, silent space between the night watch and the morning fires.
The air smelled of cold ash and old stone.
She passed two servants carrying empty buckets down the lower gallery; they dipped their heads in silence, and she matched their quiet with her own.
The stone floors felt like ice beneath the soles of her boots.
When she arrived at the nursery, the door was slightly ajar. A thin streak of warm candlelight spilled across the dark floor, accompanied by the small, rhythmic grunts of William, whom she suspected had been awake for a while and was deeply engrossed in his own frustration.
Chloe nudged the door open.
The nursemaid looked up from her stool near the hearth, her eyes shadowed.
In his cradle, William was flat on his back, glaring at the timbered ceiling and making fussing sounds.
The wool blanket had been kicked entirely to the floor, and one small knitted boot was missing, gone somewhere into the shadows of the corner.
“Go,” Chloe whispered, stepping into the warmth. “Sleep for an hour in the small room. I will come for ye if he gets the better of me.”
The woman did not hesitate, slipping out with a grateful murmur.
Chloe reached into the cradle and lifted William.
The boy cut his complaint short mid-breath, his wide eyes fixing on her face.
He stared at her as if deciding whether she was an enemy or an ally, then apparently deemed her acceptable, letting his small body go heavy as he buried his face into the curve of her neck.
She sat down in the low chair by the high window. She pulled his small blanket over them both, set the stray boot she’d found on the windowsill, and held him close against her ribs. There was a clean, uncomplicated relief in the solid warmth of him.
William let out a soft, exploratory sound, his tiny fingers reaching up to find the collar of her gown and twist into the wool with immense seriousness.
“I ken,” she murmured into his dark hair.
She was not entirely sure what she was agreeing to, but the weight in her chest felt less sharp with his heartbeat against her own.
Outside, the light was beginning to bleed into the edges of the ridge. It had always been her favorite hour. There was something steadying about it, a clean slate before the day could decide to go wrong.
Edward would be in his study by now. He was always there, sitting behind that massive oak desk with his tallies and his cold hearth, or out in the courtyard checking the horses.
He would move through his duties today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, revealing absolutely nothing.
She would see him across the salt at supper; they would pass each other in these drafty corridors; he would occasionally stand in this very doorway to check on the boy when he thought she was not looking.
That would be the boundary of their life.
She had known that when she agreed to the contract. She had accepted it when the marriage felt like a transaction she had simply lost.
The problem—the specific, dangerous problem—was that she had stopped being practical somewhere between the long gallery, the muddy courtyard, and that small, rain-slicked tavern room by the sea.
She could not find the exact day she had let her guard down, only that it was gone, and watching him almost say something true yesterday had left her completely defenseless.
Against her chest, William’s small fingers tightened in her collar as his breathing slowed, his weight shifting into the deep density of sleep.
She was still watching the gray light on the hills when she heard footsteps. She turned her head.
Edward stood in the doorway. He was dressed for the road. His heavy riding boots were buckled to the knee, his dark plaid pinned tight, and his heavy wool cloak was already fastened across his broad shoulders.
The biting chill of the courtyard clung to him; she could feel the scent of cold wind and damp earth seeping off his clothes from across the room. He was looking at her, his gaze drifting to the sleeping boy, then to the frosty window, before settling back on her face.
Chloe did not move. She held his eyes, her fingers tightening slightly against William’s back, while her heart gave a sudden, violent thud against her ribs.
He did not linger by the frame; he walked straight into the nursery, his huge frame making the small, low-ceilinged room feel suddenly claustrophobic. He stopped directly in front of her, filling her entire field of view with the sheer, controlled mass of him.
He looked down at William.
“Ye’re up early,” he said, his eyes still on William.
“So are ye.”
He did not answer that. He reached down instead, both hands open, and took the child from her lap. The boy stirred, groaning low in his throat, but settled easily against Edward’s shoulder, his little hand instinctively clutching at the dark wool of his Uncle’s cloak.
For a second, she could not move. She could only look up at him from the low chair, the child tucked against his massive chest, his profile cut sharp by the gray dawn light, the silver at his temple catching the first pale gleam of morning.
Then his eyes came back to hers.
“We leave within the hour,” he said. “Get yer cloak.”
She stared up at him, the breath catching in her throat.
“I told ye I would take ye to the sea,” he said, his gaze locking onto hers. “I am takin’ ye today.”
The air left her lungs completely. Chloe gripped the wooden arms of the chair, her knuckles turning white. She did not trust her legs to hold her if she stood too fast; her body had parsed the meaning behind his words long before her mind could construct a polite response.
“I will need me ridin’ boots,” she said, her voice remarkably clear.
“Aye,” he murmured, his eyes never leaving hers. “Ye will.”
“And I will get the nursemaid.” She stood up.
She stepped past him toward the door, her sleeve brushing the cold, damp wool of his cloak as she went. She kept her shoulders straight, and her face turned firmly toward the corridor, refusing to let him see the sheer, wild havoc his two sentences had just made of her composure.
But she was already smiling as she left the nursery.