Chapter 24
William was awake when she reached the nursery, flat on his back and both fists working at the air. Chloe scooped him up before the nursemaid could reach the cradle, and he quieted the moment her hand found the back of his head, hiccupping once and going still against her collarbone.
“He wouldnae settle for his nap,” the nursemaid said. “Kept turnin’ toward the door. I think he wanted his uncle.”
“He’ll have to make do with me.” Chloe pressed her mouth briefly to the top of his head and breathed him in.
Milk and wool and something faintly of the stables that clung to everything in this castle.
She set him back down when his eyes finally went heavy.
She stood over the cradle longer than she needed to, one hand resting on the rail, not ready yet to let go of anything.
She found Melodie in the corridor with an armful of linen.
“Ye’re back early,” Melodie said. “I thought ye’d be gone the whole day.”
“The wind turned.” Chloe kept her voice light. “Where’s Edward?”
“The distillery. He went straight there when ye came in, didnae even change out of his ridin’ boots.” Melodie shifted the linen to her other hip, watching Chloe’s face with more attention than the question warranted. “Ye all right, me Lady?”
“Fine.” Chloe was already moving. “Truly.”
The distillery sat at the far edge of the yard, a low stone building she'd been inside only a handful of times.
Once on a tour Mrs. Donnan had given her first week, that had mostly consisted of Mrs. Donnan explaining, at length, why Chloe should not touch anything, and once more with Edward, on a night neither of them had spoken of since.
The smell from the distillery reached her before she opened the door, peat smoke and something sweeter underneath it, malted and close.
She pushed the door open without knocking.
Edward stood at the far end of the room, his back to her, one hand resting flat against the curve of a copper still. He did not turn around.
“What are ye doin’ here?”
She let the door fall shut behind her. The room was warm, warmer than the yard, lit by a single lantern and the low red glow of the fire under the still. “I wanted to see ye.”
“I am workin’.”
“Ye’re standin’ with yer hand on a kettle.”
That got him to turn, finally. Enough to look at her over his shoulder, and whatever was on his face was gone again before she could read it properly.
He crossed to a shelf along the wall and took down two small cups, poured a measure into each from an unmarked jug, and held one out to her without quite meeting her eyes.
She took it. The whisky burned going down, sharper than the wine she was used to, and she managed not to cough only through sheer will.
“Strong,” she said, once she trusted her voice again.
“It’s young.” He turned back to the still, checking something at its base she could not see the purpose of. “That’s the whole trouble with it.”
“Trouble?”
“Aye.” He crouched, adjusted something, and straightened again.
“Ye can rush a batch. Pull it too soon, sell it too soon, and it drinks like this. Hot, unsettled, more fire than flavor. Or ye leave it. Cask it and forget it’s there for years and let it work on itself in the dark, and what comes out the other end is somethin’ else entirely. ”
He said it to the copper, his voice level and unhurried, a man discussing a subject he’d discussed a hundred times before. “Ye cannae hurry it along by wantin’ it done. It goes at its own pace, or it doesnae go at all.”
Chloe turned her cup slowly between her fingers, watching the firelight catch in it. “And if it’s left too long? Does it spoil?”
“Nay.” He considered this with care. “It just gets harder to open. The cask, I mean. Wood swells shut over enough winters.” He glanced at her, then away. “Ye have to want it badly enough to break the seal.”
The room went quiet around that, just the low hiss of the fire and the drip of the machinery.
She thought about the sea, about his hands doing up her cloak in a place where nothing had needed doing up, about the field where he’d stopped himself mid-sentence twice in one afternoon and called both silences nothing worth remembering.
“I daenae understand ye,” she said, quietly. “Nae the way I’d like to. We stood in that cave and somethin’ happened, and then ye said one true thing to me and walked the rest of the way back as if it hadnae. I keep waitin’ for ye to open the cask, Edward, and I keep gettin’ the wood.”
He did not answer that directly. He reached for the jug again, refilled his own cup, though he had not finished the first. She watched him do it and understood it for what it was, something to do with his hands that was not looking at her.
She should have left it there. She knew that even as she kept going, the whisky loosened something in her chest that four days of patience had not managed to.
“Mrs. Donnan said somethin’, the day Beathag looked at me ankle.
About ye kennin’ how to care for someone, after all the violence ye’ve ken.
” She watched his shoulders, not his face.
“She didnae finish it. I’ve been turnin’ it over since.
I only meant…” She took a breath. “I only meant I wanted to understand it. Whatever it is.”
The change came so fast she nearly missed the start of it.
His hand, which had been loose around the cup, closed hard enough that she heard the pottery creak in protest. He set it down on the shelf with care, as though setting it down gently were the only thing keeping the rest of him from doing something less gentle.
“Who called me a beast?”
His voice had gone flat and cold, stripped of the warmth that had been in it a moment before over the whisky and the casks, and it was worse than shouting would have been. He turned to face her fully now, and whatever had been open in his expression by the still was shut, bolted, gone.
“Nay one called ye that,” Chloe said quickly. “Edward, that’s nae what she meant.”
“Say the word again.”
“I didnae say it at all. I said violence. I said…” She stopped, hearing how it sounded a second time. “I only wanted to understand ye. That’s all it was. I thought, after the sea, I thought we’d started trustin’ one another.”
“Trust.” He said the word as if it tasted wrong in his mouth. “Ye go askin’ the housekeeper what I am, behind me back, and ye call that trust.”
“I didnae ask her anythin’. She said it on her own, and she stopped herself before she finished, and I have thought of nothin’ else since because ye willnae give me a single straight answer about anythin’ that matters.
” Her own voice had risen to meet his. “What was I meant to do, Edward? Say nothin’? Pretend I didnae hear it?”
“Ye were meant to leave it be.”
“I cannae leave it be. I am married to ye.” She set her own cup down hard, whisky sloshing over the rim onto the stone.
“I sleep two doors from ye. I am raisin’ yer nephew with ye.
And I still daenae ken the first thing about the man whose name I carry, because every time I get close enough to ask, ye go cold like this, exactly like this, and walk away. ”
“I am nae walkin’ away.” His jaw was locked so tight that the words came out barely moving. “I am standin’ right here tellin’ ye to leave it be.”
“That’s the same thing, wearin’ different boots.”
Something moved behind his eyes at that.
Not softening, nothing so simple as softening, but a flicker of something that looked almost like she’d landed a blow he had not braced for.
He did not answer it. He picked his cup back up, drained it in one motion, and set it down with a small, final click against the stone shelf.
“Go back to the keep, Chloe.”
“Edward.”
“Please.” The word came out rough, nothing courteous in the shape of it at all. “Go back to the keep.”
Chloe did not move.
“Edward. I only wanted to understand ye.”
“I ken what ye wanted.” He turned from her, back to the still, both hands flat on the cold copper edge of it. “Ye wanted the story. The wound underneath the man. Somethin’ to turn over at night and feel clever for havin’ found.”
“That’s nae fair.”
“Isnae it?”
He came back around to face her, and whatever had been steady in his chest a moment ago over the whisky and the casks was gone, replaced by something that moved faster, burned hotter, and had no patience left at all.
“Ye stand in me distillery asking after violence like it’s a story with a moral at the end of it. Ye ken nothin’. Nothin’ of what I’ve done, or what was done to me, or what a man learns to become when the only choices left to him are blood or the grave.”
“Then tell me.”
“Ye want it?" His voice had dropped, gone rough at the edges, and he heard himself as though from some distance, unable to stop himself.
"He had me tied to a post in that room. Told me it would make me stronger.
That night I finally got a hand loose, and I wasnae thinking of killing him.
I was thinking of me next breath. That's all.
One breath, then another, and by the time I'd got enough of them, he was on the floor and he wasnae getting up again, and I stood there, and I dinnae feel a single thing ye'd call sorrow. "
Chloe had gone very still, the cup forgotten in her hand.
"That's what I am," Edward said. "A man who killed his own father with his bare hands and felt nothing but relief. Ye want to ken what the beast is, Chloe? That's it. That's the whole of it. Ye should be afraid of me."
He waited for it. The step back. The hand that would find the door behind her, the way every person who’d ever gotten this close to the truth of him had reached for it eventually, one way or another.
She did not move.
She looked at him instead, straight on; she did not flinch even when he was expecting that. She looked, God, help him, like she’d just understood a thing about him rather than learned to fear it.
That was worse. That was so much worse than disgust would have been that he had to look away from it, down at his own hands on the copper, and find them shaking.
If she was not afraid of him, that meant something. It meant she might stay exactly where she was, looking at him just like that. He had no idea what a man was supposed to do with a woman who stared at the worst thing he’d ever say about himself and did not blink.
He did not know how to survive that. He only knew how to survive fear.
“Ye shouldnae be here,” he said, and his voice had gone hard again, hard and flat and nothing like the voice that had just told her about the stairs.
“This house isnae a place for yer curiosity, Chloe. Ye go pokin’ at things ye daenae understand; ye’ll get hurt by them.
I will see to that meself, if naught else does. ”
“Edward.”
“Ye havenae earned the right to ask me these things.” He heard the words leave him and could not stop them, could not slow them.
“Ye think a fortnight of near-kisses and one afternoon at the sea makes ye me wife in truth. It doesnae. Ye’re a woman I married for a debt, and ye’ll do well to remember the shape of that, instead of walkin’ around this castle behavin’ as though ye belong in the middle of it. ”
He saw her retreat, and watching it felt like something being taken out of his own chest with a blunt hand.
“I see,” Chloe said. Her voice had gone very even, very careful. “Forgive me. I forgot me place.”
“That’s nae what I meant.”
“I think it’s exactly what ye meant.” She set the whisky down on the shelf beside his, untouched, the cup’s rim precisely aligned with the edge of the wood, as though even now she could not quite let herself be careless with something of his.
“Ye’ve made yerself plain enough. I willnae trouble ye with any more curiosity. ”
She turned for the door.
He watched her go and told himself this was the correct outcome. This was what he had wanted, was not it? The door shut, the subject closed, the danger of her sent back where it belonged, on the other side of a distance he knew how to hold.
He’d spent thirteen years building exactly this kind of quiet, and here it was, arriving right on schedule, and it did not feel like the relief it was supposed to.
She had her hand on the door just when he caught the tear in her lower lash before she blinked it away, quick, like she thought he had not seen.
She did not make a sound. She did not turn back around to let him see the rest of it.
She just stood there for one half of one second with her hand on the door and her spine very straight, and then she pulled it open.
Call her back.
The thought arrived whole and unbidden, and for one moment his mouth was already shaping the first word of it—her name, just her name, nothing more, enough to make her stop with her hand still on the wood.
He could tell her the truth: it wasn't anger causing this, despite her beliefs. He stood there, watching her not flinch from his worst, unsure what to do but to hide the rest before she discovered it.
He could say all of that. It would take him four words to start it.
Instead, he watched his own jaw lock itself shut, felt the old, familiar weight settle back down over his chest, and said nothing at all.