Chapter Seventeen #2
Only it wasn’t the differences between McCrieffs and Lochmores she wanted to explore. It was Rory and his expressions as he...one by one...carefully opened the familial cartularies.
‘What are you searching for?’ she said.
A tightening of his jaw, a shake of his head. ‘Ailsa, there is something I feel I need to tell you, but I—’
He read the document in his hand, his expression one of incredulity.
‘You were right,’ he said, looking back up at her. ‘Lochmore’s nephew who tried to stop the fight and was stabbed by the McCrieff was named John.’ Rory handed her the journal. ‘How could the story of the Great Feud possibly have been switched to my name?’
She read the inscription, the print so small it hurt her eyes. The entire document was written in this way. It was an effective way to preserve parchment and to keep secrets hidden.
‘You keep forgetting that, according to McCrieffs, the baby who died was always named Rory.’
Rory picked up another journal, glanced at it and set it down. ‘Ah, yes, so it’s good I married a McCrieff to remind me.’
One mystery solved. Rory was named after the baby in the Great Feud. According to McCrieffs, Rory was named after a McCrieff baby. Ailsa was beginning to understand why.
Clever Helen. It was her way of telling Rory who he was without telling him.
All her life, Rhona carried the secret of the boy who was secretly born of Hamish and carried away from McCrieff land. She now knew Rory was that baby and that Helen knew it. So she had named him after a McCrieff child.
Helen knew the secret, Ailsa also knew this secret. Of all the women Rory could have married, he had married her.
Was now the time to tell her husband? Her whole life, she spoke exactly how she felt. Now she wished she had gained other ways of conversing so that she could soften her words. Even as she clenched and unclenched her fingers, she suspected there would never be a way to soften these words.
‘Rory, who named you?’ she said.
‘My mother.’ Rory walked to a table, sat and within moments drummed his fingers against it. Each finger was deliberate as if he was counting points or facts in his head. ‘I can’t see my father... I would assume my mother. But my name isn’t important and not the reason I came here.
‘I want you to know, I’m not usually curt with my family, it’s just...you can’t help but notice my relationship isn’t the same as yours with your family. My mother’s recent questions aside, she’s usually polite and kind. I need to talk to you about my father.’
She wanted to ask him so many questions regarding his relationship with his father, but now wasn’t the time. ‘I think we need to talk of your name,’ she said firmly.
He opened his mouth to protest, but she pleaded with him. She needed to tell him the truth, or what she knew was the truth. He’d defended and announced he cared for her, she couldn’t deceive him any more.
At his nod, she continued. ‘With your name, do you think...’ Ailsa swallowed ‘...do you think your mother was telling you something?’
‘I used to believe that she was telling me that she wanted me to be like the nephew who tried to stop the fight between the McCrieffs and Lochmores.’ He stopped his drumming. ‘You think she named me after the baby?’
She pointed to the journals. ‘Look. Your records say the baby’s name was Rory. Could she have read the journals?’
He’d always thought his mother would have been better placed in an Abbey than as a warrior’s wife. Would she have read the old tomes? With certainty. ‘Even if she did know the name of the nephew was John and not Rory, what could she possibly be telling me by naming me Rory?’
‘How long have you known you were left-handed?’ she said.
Rory closed his eyes on those soft, but precise words and ran his hand through his hair.
His left hand. What his mother named him, he didn’t care.
He felt her affection for him, faint and removed though it was.
It was his father for whom he feared he didn’t belong.
‘When I entered the lists with my father and held up my wooden sword to face him.’
‘So you were a mere child. Five, six?’ Ailsa said. ‘I followed Rhona the moment I could walk without assistance. She always smelled so good to me. The lavender and mint, the rosemary and smoke.
‘I watched what she did and listened to the many questions she asked.
She was very observant so I learned to be as well.
The McCrieff clan is large, but with healing you notice family traits and patterns.
How red hair crops up in one family and deafness in another.
How most families use their right hands and a few, a rare few, use their left.
‘Your mother or father don’t use their left hands, do they?’
‘Ailsa,’ he choked out. He hadn’t been this vulnerable, this exposed, this weak since he was a babe.
He’d trained and fought and educated himself so it would never come to pass and this woman, his wife, felled him.
He’d always thought his height was the reason he didn’t match his father—was it his left hand as well?
If so, did Ailsa know Finley wasn’t his father? ‘You’re as direct as ever, lass.’
‘At what point will you admit you like my directness?’
He’d never get used to it, but he was realising he’d always want her words. Even now when she was hammering her point until he couldn’t avoid the truth. He had no defence against it since he wasn’t all that sure he wanted to hide the truth from her any more.
Still, he couldn’t lie to her. Since childhood he’d been kept at a distance and all he could do was study his father.
The way he walked, talked, ate, trained.
His mannerisms as he ordered his edicts, the way he turned his back if Rory entered the room.
His father used his right hand for everything, so Rory taught himself to use his right hand as well.
‘Neither my father nor my mother used their left hands,’ he said.
‘You force yourself to use your right. It’s amazing what you can do with your right hand, Rory, but I can’t help but think how much greater you’d be with your left.’
‘I’m better,’ he said. Since the time he was a child, with a wooden sword in his hand, he’d known he was different.
‘I fight Paiden with my left. Ever up for a challenge, he asks me to.
He asked me to train him with his left as well, thinking it was something I taught myself, but...
he was terrible at it. Is terrible at it.
‘So terrible at it, I did some observing myself and tried to find someone else in my clan with a strong left hand.’
‘There was no one?’
He shook his head.
‘It’s rare.’
He glanced over at his very direct wife, who looked mired in indecision and doubt. ‘What are you not telling me?’
She fingered the straps of her healing pouch.
‘You won’t like what I have to say.’
‘Ailsa, we’re already talking about me not being the legitimate son of Finley, Chief of Lochmore. That I have no political right to marry you.’
‘Now who is blunt?’ She smiled, but it was weak, her gaze softening at every moment.
‘You want more? I married you falsely. I’m not the man you were meant to marry. I’m a liar and a thief, and I’ve known it from the moment my father stared at that blunt sword in my left hand and demanded I change it. You deserve an honest man. Your clan deserves a true leader.’
‘They deserve you.’
‘Did you know I wasn’t Finley’s son when you married me?’
‘I was guessing.’
He was glad he was sitting. ‘You married me anyway. Here all this time... I came here not to find out my name, I came here to see if the records held who my true father was. Do you realise, I’ve been guessing all these years? I wanted you to know my fears.
‘My mother is kind, but I don’t think she knows what to do with me.
My father, however, never approved of me.
When I was young, I thought it was because of trivial things like using my left hand.
As I got older, taller, broader, I began to believe my mother wasn’t faithful.
That I wasn’t my father’s son and that is why he never approved of me.
‘Do you know what a relief it is, that you guessed as well? It shows I’m not unfounded in my wonderings. Do you know what that—? You’ve gone pale. Is this too much?’
She shook her head, her eyes pleading with him, and any relief he felt was gone. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘Left-handedness is rare, Rory,’ she said slowly, almost quietly. ‘But I know one person in McCrieff clan with it.’
‘McCrieff clan! You’re saying the man my mother laid with wasn’t a Lochmore?’ The drumming of his fingers wasn’t enough to centre him. Instead, he slapped the table with his entire hand. ‘And so that is why I was named after a McCrieff baby?’
McCrieffs and Lochmores tightly bordered each other. They also reeved and fought and squabbled for years. If he had another father, the likelihood he came from McCrieffs was the most possible. ‘So I’m partially a McCrieff, that might be good fortune. Unless my father is yours?’
‘No.’
Something alarming flooded through him. Ailsa looked ready to flee, fight, or be sick. She’d hadn’t looked like that when he held a sword point to her neck. Her pale expression and the pain in those wide eyes were enough for him to stand before she said the rest.
‘You know who my father is,’ he said. ‘Who my mother laid with that wasn’t Finley, Chief of Lochmore?’
‘Rory, there’s more to this—’
‘Tell me!’
‘It’s Hamish,’ she whispered.
One moment, two, until staying and standing wasn’t an option any more. Before he’d even thought he was halfway up the stairs and out the door.