Chapter 11 #2
Grisselle found herself laughing more than she expected to, sorting swatches and arguing about hem lengths and half-believing, for the length of that hour, that this was simply what her life had become.
Fabric and flowers and a wedding that would happen the way weddings were meant to happen, with a groom waiting somewhere at the end of it who she didn’t know if he wanted her there as badly as she'd started, quietly, to want to be.
Neither she nor Greer said a word about the fact that Alpin hadn't so much as mentioned a date to either of them.
Two days had passed since the afternoon with the fabric swatches, and still no date had come down from the council chamber.
Greer pressed on regardless — fittings in the mornings, endless lists at midday, as though sheer preparation might shame Alpin into naming a day out of guilt alone.
By evening, when the work was done, and the household had gone quiet, Grisselle had taken to sitting alone by the great hall fire with whatever mending Greer had pressed into her hands that day.
She was alone with a torn hem and the last of the evening light when Mòr appeared in the doorway, Sgàil draped across her shoulders the way she always wore him, like a living stole.
"Ye're up late, me Lady," Mòr said, her voice carrying easily across the empty hall.
"I couldn't sleep." Grisselle set the mending in her lap. "The fire seemed better company than my own ceiling."
"Aye. Ceilings are poor conversation." Mòr crossed the floor with a slow, unhurried gait, and settled into the chair across from Grisselle's own.
Sgàil dropped from her shoulders without a sound, landing in the empty chair beside Grisselle rather than staying with Mòr, and curled himself into a tight grey knot on the cushion as though he'd sat there every night of his life.
Grisselle looked at the cat, then at Mòr, uncertain what to make of it.
"He doesnae usually do that," Mòr said, watching him settle. "Ye should be flattered."
Cait told me as much, the first week I came here.
Grisselle remembered it clearly. She was standing in the passage outside the kitchens, watching the old healer pass with the cat draped over her shoulders, and asking Cait, half in jest, whether the creature ever let anyone else hold him. Cait had gone quiet a moment before answering.
“He doesnae tolerate a soul but her, me Lady. Bit Old Tam clean through the thumb once, just for reaching. Strange creature. Strange mistress too, if ye ask me, though I'd nae say it where she could hear.”
"I didn't do anything to earn it," Grisselle said now. "I only sat here."
"Sometimes that's all it takes." Mòr's eyes, pale and unblinking, moved from the cat to Grisselle's face and stayed there a moment longer than was entirely comfortable. "He kens things, that one. More than most folk credit a cat with kenning."
Grisselle reached out, slow, and let her fingers rest against the top of Sgàil's head. The cat didn't flinch away. He sat, watching the fire with those same pale, unblinking eyes as his mistress, as though he'd learned the expression from her.
"This hall used to sit empty most evenings," Mòr said, settling back into her chair, her gaze drifting toward the fire now rather than Grisselle.
"Just the Laird, if he was even in the castle at all, and the wind finding every gap in the stone to complain about.
I've sat in this very chair many a night with nothing for company but that draft and me own thoughts, which are poor company most evenings, if I'm honest."
"It seems a very grand hall to sit empty."
"Grand halls empty faster than small ones, lass. There's more room in them for the emptiness to spread."
Mòr's hands folded neatly in her lap, still as the rest of her.
"It's different now. Ye've filled it up some, just by being in it.
Isobel laughs louder these days. Greer hums while she works, which she hasnae done in years.
Even the Laird…" she paused, the smallest smile touching her mouth, "well.
Ye ken what I mean about the Laird better than I do, I expect. "
Grisselle felt her face warm and busied herself with the mending instead of answering.
"I've watched this family a long while," Mòr went on, unbothered by the silence.
"Watched the old Laird go into that water and never come out of it.
Watched his son follow him down the same road, slower, but just as sure, grief eating at him a little more every year until there was nothing left of the man his wife had married.
And now I watch young Alpin standing at that same water's edge, same as the two before him, and I wonder some nights whether it's simply the shape a Herston man is bound to take, sooner or later, whatever a wife or a sister does to try and hold him back from it. "
"He's not his father," Grisselle said, more sharply than she meant to. "Or his grandfather."
"Nay." Mòr's gaze came back to her, steady, unreadable. "Perhaps he's nae. Ye'd ken that better than an old woman who's only watched from the edges of things."
The fire popped, sending a small shower of sparks up the chimney, and for a while neither of them spoke.
Sgàil shifted against Grisselle's side, resettling himself with his tail curled over his own paws, and she found her hand had drifted back to his head without her quite remembering when.
"A keep only truly wakes up when there are children in it," Mòr said at last, quiet, almost to herself, the words drifting out into the hall.
"I've seen it happen before, in other houses.
All that empty stone waiting, waiting, and then a bairn's cry fills it up and suddenly the whole place kens what it was built for in the first place. "
"I hadn't thought much on children," Grisselle said, which was, she realized even as she said it, no longer entirely true.
"Ye wouldnae have, yet. Ye've been married nae time at all, and there's a wedding still to get through before any of that.
" Mòr's smile was easy, grandmotherly, the kind of smile that asked for nothing in return.
"I only meant it as an old woman muses on an empty hall, lass.
Nothing more than that. Pay it no mind."
She rose not long after, unfolding from the chair with the same unhurried care she'd used to sit in it, and held out one thin hand toward the cat.
Sgàil lifted his head, considered the gesture for a moment with what looked almost like reluctance, and then dropped from the chair and crossed the stone floor to resettle himself across her shoulders, exactly where he'd started.
"Goodnight, lass," Mòr said, already moving toward the door. "Daenae let the fire go out on ye. Cold stone holds a chill long after the flames are gone."
"Goodnight," Grisselle said, and watched her go, the old woman's black shawl disappearing into the dark of the passage with the cat draped over her shoulders like something grown there rather than worn.
Grisselle sat alone a long while after that, the mending forgotten in her lap, the fire burning down slowly toward embers.
A keep only truly wakes up when there are children in it.
The thought lingered more than she wanted it to.
She tried to convince herself it was only an old woman's idle thought, offered by a fire on a quiet evening, nothing more sinister than that.
She told herself so plainly, twice, the way she'd once told herself the kiss on the beach had meant nothing, and believed it exactly as much.
It means nothing. She's an old woman who likes to talk.
But the words stayed with her all the same, settling somewhere she couldn't quite dislodge them from.
When she finally rose to bank the fire and climb the stairs to her own cold bed, she found herself, for the first time since she'd arrived at Herston Castle, thinking of small shoes by a hearth and a cradle in an empty corner of a room that had never once held either.
She pressed her palm flat against her own stomach, standing alone in the dark hall, and didn't examine why.