Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Grisselle woke before dawn, staring at the dark canopy above her bed with her fingers pressed flat against her own mouth, as though she could still hold the shape of it there.
It meant nothing. Men kiss women they've no intention of keeping.
She'd told herself that a dozen times in the dark and believed it exactly as many times as she'd said it, which was to say, not at all. She rose and pulled the bell.
Cait appeared within minutes, hair still half-pinned from her own bed, blinking at the sight of Grisselle already sitting upright with her nightgown straightened and her hands folded like a woman waiting to be scolded.
"Me Lady." Cait stopped in the doorway. "Is something amiss? It's nae even light yet."
"I couldn't sleep. I thought I might as well be dressed for it."
Cait crossed to the wardrobe anyway, pulling out a plain wool gown and setting to work on the laces without further comment, though her eyes kept flicking to Grisselle's face in the looking glass. "Rough night, was it?"
"Long one." Grisselle held still while Cait's fingers moved briskly down her back. "The wind kept me up."
"Funny. I dinnae hear a breath of wind meself." Cait's mouth pulled sideways, not quite a smile, as she reached for the hairbrush next. "Though I did hear the east door go twice past midnight. Once out, once in."
"Did you?" Grisselle kept her eyes on the glass rather than on Cait.
"Aye. Wondered if it might've been the Laird, restless as he gets. Or a ghost." Cait began working the brush through Grisselle's curls, gentler than the observation deserved. “We have plenty of the second kind in this keep, whatever else is short."
Grisselle said nothing, and Cait, to her credit, didn't push further, twisting the last of her hair into a simple knot and pinning it with quick, practiced hands.
"There," Cait said, stepping back to survey her work. "Though I'll say, me Lady, ye look beautiful today."
Grisselle stood, smoothing her skirts before Cait could study her face any longer than she already had. "Thank you, Cait."
"Aye, well. Mind ye eat something this morning. Ye look pale as a MacKenzie sheet."
Grisselle went down to the great hall hoping the ordinary business of the castle might crowd the thought of the kiss out of her head. It didn't.
Alpin was already at the high table, a cold trencher in front of him, untouched. He looked up once, held her eyes for the length of a single breath, and dropped his gaze straight back to the bread he wasn't eating.
"Good morning," Grisselle said, because someone had to say something.
"Aye." He didn't look up again.
She took her seat across from him anyway. Neither of them said another word, and the silence stretched long enough that Isobel, three seats down, finally set her spoon aside and looked between them both.
"Terrible wind last night," Isobel said, entirely too brightly. "I could hear it clean through me shutters."
"Aye," Alpin and Grisselle said, at the same moment, in the same flat tone.
Isobel's eyebrows went up. She looked from one of them to the other, then back again, her spoon forgotten halfway to her mouth.
Grisselle reached for the bread at the same moment Alpin did, and their hands closed on it together. His knuckles rough against the back of her fingers, his grip not quite letting go before hers did.
Neither moved for a second longer than the loaf required. Then Grisselle pulled her hand back first, wrapping it around her cup instead, and Alpin set the bread down on her trencher without a word, as if that had been his plan all along.
"Well," Isobel said, drawing the word out until it filled the whole silence they'd left behind, "Good, I wasn’t the only one that noticed the wind."
No one answered her.
Alpin finished his ale in three long swallows, stood, and was out the door before Grisselle had buttered her bread.
Back behind the line, then.
She watched the door swing shut.
Not a word about why he crossed it in the first place.
She pushed her bowl away half-finished and went looking for something to do with her hands before her head did something worse. She settled for the kitchen which smelled of yeast and woodsmoke, and Senga was already elbow-deep in dough thick enough to fight back.
"There ye are," Senga said, without looking up. "Well, daenae just stand there hovering, me Lady, roll up yer sleeves and wash yer hands if ye mean to help. I'm nae precious about who kneads the dough."
Flour didn't ask questions. That was the whole appeal of it.
Grisselle washed her hands at the basin and took the dough Senga pushed toward her, driving the heels of her palms into it the way she'd seen kitchen girls do a dozen times without ever once trying it herself. The dough gave, folded, resisted. She pulled it back into a ball and did it again.
Senga watched her over the rim of a mixing bowl, saying nothing.
Grisselle drove her palms in a second time, harder than the first, and something in her chest unknotted half an inch as the dough flattened under her weight.
"There’s a particular loaf that's earned yer temper this morning," Senga asked mildly, "or is it just bread in general ye have a grudge against?"
"It's only dough."
"Aye. It was, before ye started at it." Senga's eyes crinkled, though she let it go for the moment.
Grisselle folded it, turned it, and drove her palms in a third time, longer than any loaf required, until Senga finally reached over and stilled her wrists with one floury hand.
"Ye'll knead the life clean out of it, me Lady. It's bread, nae a grudge."
"Sorry. I didn't sleep well."
"Aye, I can see that." Senga's eyes went to the shadows under Grisselle's own, sharp and unbothered by manners. "Half this castle dinnae sleep, from the sound of the door bangin' at all hours."
Senga's mouth twitched, nudging a bowl of oats toward her instead. "Stir that. Slow, or ye'll have parritch on the ceiling."
They worked a while in silence, the fire snapping, until Senga spoke again without looking up. "Ye miss home, lass?"
"I don't know where home is anymore. England had my parents and the gossips. This has…" She stopped.
"Has what?"
"Wind that doesn't apologize for itself. My grandfather used to say the Highlands never once bothered pretending to be gentle."
Senga barked a laugh. "Yer grandfather sounds a wise man."
"He was the only one who ever made sense to me. He'd have loved this kitchen. Said a good meal was worth more than a good sermon."
"Now that's a man I'd have fed twice." Senga slid a tray of oatcakes onto the hearthstone. "Me own mother died birthing me youngest brother. Da raised the six of us on burnt porridge and worse temper. I learned to cook so I'd stop eating his."
"How old were you?"
"Nine," Senga said it plainly, no weight on it at all. "Ye learn quick when there's no one standing between ye and an empty table."
Grisselle's spoon slowed in the bowl. "I don't know about empty tables. But I know what it is to learn quick because no one's standing between you and anything at all."
"Aye." Senga's eyes flicked to her, something passing between them that needed no further words. "I thought ye might."
They didn't say anything else about it. By the time the loaves went into the oven, Senga had moved on to a tray of oatcakes, cutting them into neat triangles with a speed Grisselle envied.
"Best travel food in the Highlands, these," Senga said, sliding the tray toward the hearthstone. "A man could ride three days on a pocketful and never once go hungry."
"My mother's cook made shortbread for long journeys. MacDuff shortbread. Nothing traveled better."
Senga's knife stopped mid-cut. "Shortbread."
"It doesn't crumble the way oatcakes do, and it keeps for weeks."
"It's butter and sugar pretending to be food, is what it is." Senga resumed cutting with visible offense. "Ye cannae fill a man's belly on shortbread, lass. He'll be hungry again by the time he's finished admiring how pretty it looks."
"It filled mine well enough for sixteen years."
"Sixteen years of a soft London belly, then." Senga slid the finished tray onto the hearthstone with a thump. "An oatcake sits in ye. Keeps a man walking, keeps a man fighting, keeps a man alive on a cold ridge with nothing else to hand. Show me shortbread that's done that."
"I’ll still praise it, it’s reputation is good," Grisselle admitted.
"Reputation," Senga said the word like it tasted bad.
"I'll tell ye what has a reputation, lass — Herston oatcakes, three generations running, and nae one complaint from a single soul who's eaten them.
Ye come back to me once ye've tried a proper Highland oatcake fresh off this stone, and then we'll discuss reputations. "
"That sounds remarkably like you refusing to lose an argument."
"It sounds," Senga said, entirely unbothered, "like me winning one.
" She reached for another tray, not looking up.
"Ye ken what else keeps a man walking a cold ridge and never once complains of it? The Laird. He’s made of the same stuff as these oatcakes — plain, stubborn, and better for ye than he looks. "
Grisselle's hand stilled over the bowl. "I wasn't aware we were still discussing baking."
"Nor was I," Senga said, and slid the tray onto the hearthstone with a thump that ended the conversation.
They both laughed loudly.
Perhaps I do have a home here after all.
She found Mistress Greer an hour later in the linen room, muttering over a cupboard that looked organized.
"Let me." Grisselle was already reaching for a stack of sheets.
"Ye neednae worry."
"I want to." She began sorting by wear, worn linens toward the front. "My mother never let me near the linen press. Said it wasn't a lady's work."
"And what do ye call this?"
"Work I'm good at. Which is more than she ever let me be good at anything."
Greer worked alongside her without answering that directly, matching her pace, and when the cupboard was finally set to rights, she stood back and looked at it with satisfaction.