Chapter 25
The great hall was colder than usual, though the fire burned the same as it always did.
Edward took his seat at the head of the table, and Chloe took hers at his right, and between one heartbeat and the next, she’d folded her hands in her lap. She sat straight-backed, chin level, eyes on her trencher, answering when spoken to and offering nothing beyond it.
“Bread, Me Laird?”
He looked at the basket she was holding toward him. Three days ago, she’d have tossed it down the table at him and told him to fetch it himself if he wanted it so badly.
“Aye.” He took a piece. “Thank ye.”
“Of course.” She set the basket down, folded her hands again, and returned her attention to her plate.
Tyler, across the table, watched the whole exchange. He reached for the bread himself, tore off a piece, and made a show of chewing it slowly while his eyes moved between the two of them.
“Fine venison tonight,” Duncan offered, from further down. Nobody answered him either.
Mrs. Donnan came round with the whisky jug, and before she could reach Edward’s cup, Chloe had already lifted the jug from her hands.
“Allow me.” Chloe filled his cup without spilling a drop, set the jug down at his elbow with precision, and folded her hands again. “Me Laird would like more whisky?”
“I have enough.”
“As ye wish.” She did not argue it. She did not say anything else at all.
He drank from the cup anyway, because it gave him something to do with his hands that was not reaching for hers, which was the thing his hands seemed to want to do most in her presence lately, an urge he had no intention of examining too closely.
She used to say his name like it cost her nothing.
He thought of the night by the hearth, not two weeks past, broth going cold between them while she told him a man deciding she was worth the labor mattered more than he knew. He'd nearly forgotten to breathe over it.
He had not understood, until it stopped, how much of his day had been built around waiting for it.
“Ye’ve gone quiet, me Lady,” Duncan said to Chloe this time, leaning forward around Tyler to catch her eye. “Ye all right?”
“Perfectly, thank ye.” She smiled at him. It was a good smile, warm enough, polished enough that a stranger would not have caught what was wrong with it. Edward caught it. It did not reach anywhere past her mouth. “The venison is lovely tonight.”
“Aye, I said that meself,” Duncan said, “and got naught but silence for it.”
“Forgive me. I was distracted.” She reached for her cup, drank, and set it down at precisely the angle she’d lifted it from. “It’s very good.”
Duncan glanced at Edward, one eyebrow raised, a question in it Edward had no answer for. Edward looked back down at his plate.
William started fussing somewhere behind them. Melodie had him at the far end of the hall, walking him along the wall to settle him before bed, and Chloe’s head turned toward the sound before she caught herself and turned it back.
“He’ll settle,” Edward said. “He always does, once Melodie starts the second lap.”
“Aye.” Chloe did not look at William again. “I am sure he’s in good hands.”
Three days ago, she’d have been out of her chair already, cheese still in hand, crossing the hall to take the boy herself and tell Melodie to sit down and eat something for once.
He watched her stay in her seat instead, spine straight, and understood that this too was a wall going up brick by careful brick, and that he was the one who’d handed her the mortar.
“Ye’ve barely touched yer plate,” he said.
“I am nae terribly hungry tonight, Me Laird.”
Me Laird.
Two words, and they landed harder than anything she’d thrown at him in that distillery.
He’d stood there and told her she had not earned the right to ask him anything, that she was a woman he’d married for a debt and nothing more, and here she was handing that exact sentence back to him across the dinner table.
That was the unbearable part. The anger he could have matched.
This was worse than anger. This was her believing him.
“Eat somethin’,” he said, rougher than he meant it.
“As ye wish, Me Laird.” She took up her fork and ate three small, deliberate bites, then set it down and folded her hands again.
Tyler kicked him under the table. Edward did not look at him.
He did not need to look to know exactly what expression was on Tyler’s face because it was the same one Duncan had, and the same one Mrs. Donnan had worn when she was hovering with the whisky jug a few minutes earlier before she retreated to the kitchen with her mouth set in a thin, disapproving line.
They all saw it. He’d built this himself in a stone room that smelled of peat smoke, and now the whole hall could see the shape of what he’d built, and no one was going to say a single word about it to his face.
“Chloe.” He said her name plainly, with no title, and watched her hands go still in her lap.
“Aye, Me Laird?”
“Edward. It’s Edward.”
She looked at him then, finally, properly, the first time all evening her eyes had come up off her plate and stayed there.
Something moved behind them, quick, gone before he could name it.
Hope, maybe. Or the memory of hope, which was worse, because he had nothing ready to give it that would not collapse the second he opened his mouth again.
“Edward,” she said, testing it, careful, like a word she was not sure she still had the right to use. “What do ye need?”
He had four words in him. He’d had them standing in that distillery with her hand on the door, and he had not said them then either.
“Nothin’,” he said. “Never mind.”
Whatever had come up in her face went back down, folded away as neatly as her hands, and she turned back to her plate.
“Of course, Me Laird.”
Down the table, Tyler set his cup down hard, the sound of it sharp enough to make Duncan glance over, and said, to no one in particular, “Well. This is a cheerful supper.”
Nobody answered him.
Chloe kept eating her three small bites.
Edward kept his eyes on his plate and did not trust himself to open his mouth again for the rest of the meal.
It was only when the trestle boys came to clear the dishes that Mrs. Donnan appeared at his shoulder, bent down, and said, low enough that only he could hear it, “A rider’s just come in from Hendry’s lands, me Laird. Says it cannae wait till mornin’.”
Edward was on his feet before Mrs. Donnan had finished the sentence. “Bring him in.”
But it was not Edward the rider had come for. Mrs. Donnan returned a moment later with a folded letter in hand, mud-spotted at one corner, and set it down in front of Chloe instead.
“For ye, me Lady. Rider said it couldnae wait for the mornin’ post.”
Chloe turned it over. She recognized the seal before she’d broken it.
MacLaud.
Down the table, Tyler had become very interested in his cup. Duncan had stopped chewing entirely, his fork halfway to his mouth, watching the letter.
“Well?” Duncan said when the silence had gone on a beat too long. “Are ye goin’ to open it or stare at the wax all night?”
“Give her room, ye great ox,” Tyler muttered, and kicked him under the table for good measure.
Chloe broke the seal and unfolded it at the table, the hall quieter around her than it had any right to be over one letter, Edward watching from his end with the same careful stillness he’d worn since the distillery.
Chloe, my dear girl,
We think of you often and wonder how you fare in your new home. Is your husband kind to you? You need only say the word, and we will send for you ourselves. You are always welcome here, for as long as you wish to stay, and no explanation is required.
We wrote to you some months ago and heard nothing back. We hope this finds you well and that the silence was due to poor roads rather than anything worse.
With love always, Jenny and Thomas
Chloe read it once, then again, aware of Edward’s eyes on her the whole time and of her own hands, which had gone very still around the page.
“What does it say?” Edward asked.
“It asks if me husband treats me well.” She kept her voice even; the tone cost her nothing to produce anymore, she’d had enough practice at it. “They say I am welcome to visit. Whenever I like.”
Duncan’s fork finally made it to his mouth. He chewed with tremendous concentration and said nothing, which, for Duncan, was its own kind of statement.
Edward’s jaw worked once, then stilled. “And what will ye tell them?”
“I havenae decided.”
“Ye should go,” Tyler said, into the silence that followed, apparently deciding someone at this table needed to say something useful.
“Nobody asked ye, Tyler,” Edward said, without any real heat in it, and Tyler raised both hands and went back to his cup, wisely.
Chloe folded the letter back along its own creases and said nothing further through the rest of the meal.
She ate her venison, more of it than she had for a few nights running, she noticed, as though the letter had loosened something enough to let her be hungry again.
Edward was the first to leave the table, murmuring something to Mrs. Donnan about the ledgers before he disappeared down the corridor toward the study, the way he did most nights now.
Chloe did not let him get far ahead of her. She rose before her own plate was properly finished and followed.
He was already at the desk when she arrived, a ledger open under one hand, a single candle burned down past its first quarter. She set the letter down in front of him without a word.
He read it. She watched his jaw work once more, then still, the same motion twice now in one evening, as though something in him kept trying to say a thing and kept losing the argument with itself before it got anywhere.
“They never had a reply from ye,” he said. Not quite a question.
“I wrote back. The first time.” Chloe pulled the second chair around from where it sat against the wall and lowered herself into it, smoothing her skirts more out of habit than need.
“Whatever became of it, I couldnae say. Poor roads, maybe, same as they think. Or it sat in some saddlebag and never left the yard at all.”
“Ye never told me ye’d written.”
“Ye never asked,” she said. “There’s a great deal I daenae tell ye anymore, Edward. I’d thought ye preferred it that way.”
He did not answer that. He closed the ledger instead, squared it against the desk’s edge with two fingers, a habit she’d come to recognize as the closest thing he had to fidgeting.
“I could take William,” she said, before the silence could set in fully. “If I went. Jenny would like to meet him. And the roads are safer this time of year, Alfie said as much, just last week, going on about the passes clearin’ early.”
“Ye want to take the boy?”
“He’s never been off Wallace lands in his life.
It might do him good, seein’ somewhere new before he’s old enough to remember nae havin’ seen it.
” She kept her eyes on the ledger rather than his face.
“And it would give Mrs. Donnan a rest from him for a while. She’d never admit she needed one. She does.”
Edward pushed back from the desk and crossed to the window, where the shutters stood half open on a yard gone dark and quiet, most of the torches banked for the night.
He stood with his back to her, and she understood she was looking at the identical wall from last night from a slightly different angle, no more scalable now than it had been then.
“If ye wish to go, ye may go. I willnae stop ye.”
“That’s nae what I asked.”
“Ye asked if ye could take the boy. Aye. Take him.” His voice had gone flat. “Might be better. The two of ye away from here a while.”
“Better for who?”
“For both of ye.” He said it to the window glass, not to her. “Safer.”
“Safer from what, Edward?”
He did not answer that. She watched his shoulders for some crack in the line of them, but it was always the same patient search, always finding the same locked seam no matter how long she gave it.
“I will write back tonight, then,” she said. “Tell them we’ll come.”
“We?”
“William and I.” She let it sit there, plain and uncorrected, with no softening added. If this was how he wanted things between them now, she could give him formal and careful right back, and let him feel the exact weight of it. “Unless ye’d rather I go alone.”
“Whatever ye think best.” He still had not turned from the window. “Ye daenae need me permission for it.”
“Nay. I daenae.” She stood, picked the letter back up off the desk, folded it along its original creases, and tucked it into her sleeve, close against her ribs. “I only thought ye might want to ken where yer nephew was goin’, and for how long.”
“How long, then?”
“A fortnight. Perhaps longer, if Jenny has her way. She always does.” Chloe found, standing there, that she could talk about fortnights and roads and Jenny’s stubbornness with perfect steadiness, one careful sentence after another, none of it costing her anything she’d let him see.
“I will take Melodie, if she’ll come. And two of the guard, if ye can spare them. ”
“I will send four.”
“Two is enough.”
“Four.” He turned from the window at last, and there was something in his face for half a second that might have been the start of an argument, or the start of something else entirely, gone again before she could decide which it had been.
“The roads havenae been as safe as Alfie thinks. There’s been talk. ”
“Four, then,” she said. “Thank ye.”
She turned for the door, the letter warm against her ribs where she’d tucked it, and had her hand on the latch before his voice caught her from across the room.
“Chloe.”
She stopped. She did not turn around, not right away, giving him the same half-second he had given her in the distillery, the half-second he had not used then either.
“Aye?”
The silence stretched again, a thing neither of them seemed able to reach across, no matter how short the distance looked. She counted two of her own heartbeats before he spoke.
“Send word when ye arrive safe.”
Not what she’d let herself hope for, though she had not let herself name what that hope had actually been. Not that.
“I will,” she said, and let herself out, and did not let the door show him one thing more on her face until it had swung fully shut between them.