Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Alpin heard the door bar lift before he was fully awake, the sound carrying up through stone, and he was pulling on his shirt before Dougal's fist even reached his chamber door.
"Bairn at the gate, me Laird. Left this morning, near dawn."
He was down the stairs two at a time, and the scene that met him at the great doors stopped him dead on the bottom step.
Grisselle knelt on the cold stone with the basket open in front of her, a scrap of paper forgotten in one hand, and the other hand already curled beneath a small red-faced skull like she'd done it a hundred times before this morning.
"There now," she said. "There now, you're all right."
The crying, which had filled the whole passage a moment before, hitched and softened, and by the time Alpin crossed the threshold it had dropped to a low, fussing complaint, the bairn's fist working loose against the wool of Grisselle's shawl.
"She's cold clean through," Grisselle said, not looking up, already unwinding the shawl from her own shoulders to add a second layer against the small body. "Someone build up the kitchen fire. Now, please."
Senga was already gone before the sentence finished. Effie stood frozen with the iron bar still half-raised, and Greer arrived at a near-run, one hand pressed flat to her chest at the sight on the step, grief crossing her face and folding away again just as fast.
"Whose is she?" Isobel breathed, cloak thrown crooked over her nightgown.
"Ailie's. Tam Fraser's widow." Grisselle held the note out without releasing the bairn, forcing Isobel to take it from her hand rather than surrender the child even for a moment. "There's no kin left."
Alpin stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched a woman who'd been arguing with a stable boy about brush direction three days past settle a stranger's orphan against her shoulder, as if the two of them had been introduced somewhere long before this morning.
"Ye should hand her to Greer," he said. "Or to one of the maids. Ye've nae done this before."
"Neither have they, apparently, given how everyone's standing about staring instead of helping.
" Grisselle rose, the bairn still tucked against her, and something in the set of her shoulders told him plainly this was not a conversation open for negotiation.
"I have her. Someone find a proper cradle, not a basket that's been sitting God knows where. "
"There's the old cradle in the west tower," Greer said slowly. "Hasnae been used since."
"Then it'll be used again." Grisselle was already moving toward the kitchen, toward the fire Senga would have going by now, and the whole household turned as one to follow her.
Isobel first, then the maids, then Greer bringing up the rear with the abandoned basket in her arms like she couldn't quite leave it behind either.
Alpin didn't move.
He stood in the cold passage a moment longer, alone with the note still in his hand where Isobel had passed it to him, and read it twice before the words settled properly.
The clan does not leave its orphans to chance.
True enough.
He'd known that his whole life.
By the time he reached the kitchen, the fire was roaring, and the bairn was quiet, properly quiet, wrapped now in a blanket Senga had produced from somewhere and settled in the crook of Grisselle's arm. Isobel hovered close enough to touch.
"She's got yer coloring near enough," Isobel said, peering down at the small face. "If anyone asks, we'll say she's a MacKay. They've all got that ear; they'll nae notice one more oddity."
"She's Ailie's daughter, and she'll be raised as such," Grisselle said, though her eyes didn't leave the bairn's face as she said it, one finger tracing lightly along the curve of a tiny ear that showed no crook at all.
"Aye, but ye cannae mean to keep her yerself." Greer said it carefully. "There's the MacTaggarts down the glen, lost their own bairn to fever last spring. Mairi at the smithy has milk enough and to spare. It's how it's always been done, when the Laird's own house isnae settled for it."
"This house is settled for it."
"Grisselle." Alpin's voice came out rough, and every head in the kitchen turned toward him at once. "Ye're nae even wed yet. Ye cannae simply…"
"I can’t simply what? Hold a child who has no one else to hold her?"
She turned to face him fully now, the bairn still cradled against her shoulder. There was nothing uncertain in her at all, none of the careful distance she'd kept in London drawing rooms, none of the deflection she wielded like a blade in every other conversation they'd had since she'd arrived.
"I know what it is to be handed off to whoever's convenient, Alpin. I willnae do that to her before she's even a day old."
The kitchen had gone very quiet.
"That's nae what I meant," he said, though he found, turning it over, that he wasn't entirely certain what he had meant.
"Then say what you did mean."
He didn't have an answer ready, and the longer he stood there without one, the more the silence in the kitchen took on a weight of its own, Isobel's eyes flicking between the two of them, Greer suddenly very interested in folding a length of clean linen that didn't need folding.
"I meant," he said finally, "that it's a great deal to take on, for a woman who arrived here a fortnight past kenning nae one in this castle."
"Then it's fortunate I've had a fortnight to learn how to manage difficult things.
" Something in her face eased, just slightly, the fight going out of her shoulders though not out of her eyes.
"I know who holds command in this keep, Alpin.
But command means protecting those who cannot ask for it themselves.
The child stays by the fire, and you and I can settle the rest once she's warm. "
He should have argued further. He had a dozen reasons ready, the same reasons Greer had already laid out, practical and sound and entirely beside the point. Every one of them died somewhere behind his teeth when the bairn stirred against Grisselle's shoulder and let out a small, contented sound.
Grisselle's hand came up automatically to settle her, the motion so unthinking, so entirely natural.
He'd watched her tame a mare that had thrown grown men.
He'd watched her walk into a village that had nodded politely at him his entire life and have half of it in her hand within the hour.
He'd watched her stand in a ballroom full of people who'd humiliated her and answer every insult with her chin up and her voice steady.
None of it had undone him quite the way this did. A woman he would marry for convenience, standing in his kitchen at dawn with a stranger's orphan asleep against her shoulder, daring the entire household to tell her she couldn't keep her.
"Fine," he said. "She stays."
Isobel's head came up. Greer's folding stopped mid-motion. Even Senga, elbow-deep in warming milk at the hearth, went briefly still.
"But she'll need a name that's her own," Alpin said, before any of them could remark on how quickly he'd surrendered the argument, "and nae one borrowed from the MacKays."
"I've already been calling her Nora; it came with the letter," Grisselle said. "It suits her."
He looked at the small, sleeping face tucked against her shoulder.
It was in the middle of that thought, watching her hum something low and tuneless to a child that wasn't hers, that Mòr appeared in the kitchen doorway, drawn by the commotion, her eyes going straight past everyone else in the room to settle on the bairn.
Mòr didn't come in. She stood in the doorway a moment, her eyes on the bairn, then turned and went back down the passage without a word. Nobody called after her. Nobody had noticed her at all, or so it seemed; the whole kitchen was still arranged around Grisselle and the child.
Nobody except Alpin.
He watched Dougal cross the kitchen toward Grisselle, the old man moving unhurried. He stopped at her elbow, close enough to speak low, and waited until she looked up.
"I ken the plaid," Dougal said.
Grisselle's hand stilled on Nora's back.
"The Frasers use that weave. Different shade of brown at the edge, see it there.
" He touched the corner of the blanket with one gnarled finger, not lifting it, just pointing.
"The father drowned last winter. Off the north point, in the storm that took the MacInnes boat as well.
Tam Fraser, he was called. Good man. Kept nets for the Mackays and never once shorted them. "
Grisselle looked down at Nora. The bairn had one fist curled against her own cheek, eyes shut, the furious red of her face gone blotchy and soft in sleep.
"Three days," Grisselle said.
"Aye."
"She's been kept three days, and then brought here."
"Aye." Dougal's chin dipped once. "Whoever brought her, they'd have waited to be sure there was no one else to take her first. That's the decent way of it. Ye check the kin before ye go to the Laird."
Grisselle's thumb moved once across the back of Nora's head, the softest pass, nothing anyone would have called deliberate. "And when there's no kin?"
"They come here," Dougal said. "Always has been. The Laird's house takes what the clan cannae carry on its own. Been that way since before me time."
Grisselle nodded. She didn't put the baby down.
Alpin watched her from across the kitchen, his shoulder against the stone of the doorway, and said nothing. Isobel appeared at his side with a cup of something hot that he didn't ask for and accepted anyway, wrapping both hands around it.
"Ye're going to let her keep her," Isobel said, not a question.
"I already said she could stay."
"That's nae what I mean, and ye ken it."
He looked at his sister, then back across the kitchen. Greer was talking to Senga in a low voice by the fire, both of them nodding over something practical — the cradle, probably, or the question of feeding. Dougal had moved off to lean against the far wall, his part done, watching the room.
Grisselle shifted her weight, settling Nora higher against her shoulder, and turned slightly so the firelight caught the bairn's face. She said something to her, too low to carry, and her mouth did a complicated thing that she didn't seem to notice doing.
"She told me she didnae want children," Alpin said.
"Aye, she told me that too." Isobel wrapped both hands around her own cup. "Funny what a person finds out about themselves when they're not busy deciding in advance."
He didn't answer that.
Greer detached herself from Senga and crossed back toward Grisselle, stopping beside her with a clean square of linen over one arm.
"The cradle'll be down from the west tower within the hour. In the meantime, there's a drawer, and it can be lined if need be." She looked at the sleeping bairn with something that wasn't quite her usual brisk assessment. "She's a good size for a newborn. Healthy."
"She is," Grisselle said.
"Ailie was a strong woman. Good stock." Greer folded the linen once, precisely, and draped it over Grisselle's shoulder in case it was needed. A small thing, a practical thing. Her hand stayed there a moment before she took it back.
Senga arrived with a cup of warmed milk and a clean cloth twisted at one corner, and demonstrated without preamble how to let the bairn draw from it. Grisselle watched once and then did it herself, and Nora latched on to it. The kitchen settled into something quieter than it had been all morning.
Alpin set his untouched cup on the nearest surface.
He crossed the kitchen, not entirely certain what he meant to do when he got there, and stopped beside Grisselle and looked down at the bairn, who was now working steadily at the cloth and paying him no attention whatsoever.
Grisselle glanced up at him. "She fits in here."
He looked at the small face. The small fist. His hand came up, and he touched two fingers, briefly, to the top of Nora's head — the softest thing he'd touched in years — and pulled them back before anyone could remark on it.
"She'll need a wet nurse," he said, to the room in general, already turning toward the door.
"Someone send word to the MacTaggarts. The woman lost her own bairn in the spring; she may be willing.
" He paused at the doorway without turning back.
"And get that cradle down. I'll nae have her sleeping in a drawer. "