Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He ate breakfast alone for four days running.
Not because anyone drove him out of the kitchen — he drove himself, taking his plate to the study before Nora's morning complaints could start up from wherever Grisselle had settled her for the night, eating standing up over the maps he wasn't reading, and calling it work.
Niall said nothing. He arrived each morning, helped himself to whatever was on the table, and sat in the chair across from the maps with his own plate balanced on his knee, watching Alpin not look at the door.
On the third morning Alpin said, "Whatever ye're thinking, keep it."
"I wasnae thinking anything," Niall said, and bit into his bread.
"Ye've got a face like a man thinking something."
"Aye, I've always had that face. Ye've never minded it before." Niall chewed, unhurried. "Senga says the bairn took the whole feed this morning without a fuss. First time."
Alpin moved a pin on the map. "Good."
"Grisselle was up half the night with her. Cait too, though Cait fell asleep in the chair by the third hour and was nae much use after that."
"Is there something ye need, Niall?"
"More bread, if there is any." He stood, helped himself from the sideboard, and came back. "Isobel says the cradle needs a new side-pin; the old one's worked loose. I told her I'd see to it this afternoon."
"Fine."
"I thought ye might want to come."
"I'm busy."
"Aye," Niall said. "Ye look it."
He left shortly after, taking his plate with him.
Alpin stood alone with his maps and the distant sound of Grisselle's voice carrying down the passage from the kitchen, talking to someone — Senga, from the answering laugh — in the easy, unhurried way she'd developed with the household that still caught him off guard when he heard it.
He went back to his maps.
By the fourth day the study had begun to feel very small. He found Greer in the passage outside the linen room and stopped.
"The bairn should go to one of the maids," he said. "Cait, maybe. She's shown the most interest and her workload's the lightest."
Greer set down the folded sheet she was carrying. "Has she?"
"It's a reasonable arrangement. The child needs consistent care from someone with the time to give it."
"Cait's seventeen."
"Old enough."
"Morag's seventeen as well, and ye said her name to me last week when ye wanted someone reliable for the east tower stores. Ye cannae have it both ways, me Laird." Greer picked her sheet back up. "Besides, the bairn's already settled. Disrupting that now would only—"
"I'm nae asking for an opinion on it, Greer. I'm telling ye the arrangement."
Greer looked at him over the folded linen. "Aye, me Laird," she said, and walked away.
He found out from Isobel two hours later that Greer had told Grisselle. Grisselle found him in the armory.
She didn't knock, which told him everything about the state of her before he'd turned around, and when he did turn, she was standing in the doorway with both hands loose at her sides.
"A maid," she said.
"It's a reasonable choice."
"A maid." She stepped inside. "She's been here five days, and you want to hand her to Morag or Cait, who is afraid of the chickens."
"Morag is a maid and perfectly capable; it’s what she’s trained for."
"She dropped a ladle last week because a cat walked past her.
" Grisselle's voice stayed level, which cost her something he could see in the set of her jaw.
"I'm not asking you to do anything, Alpin.
I'm not asking you to hold her, or talk to her, or be in the same room as her.
I'm asking you to leave the arrangements that are already working alone. "
She paused.
"She sleeps. She feeds. She's warm." Her chin came up. "Which is more than I can say for the welcome she's had from the Laird of this house."
He'd have argued that — he had a response ready, something about practicality, about the nature of contracts and what they did and didn't oblige him to, about the fact that a foundling bairn was not part of any arrangement either of them had agreed to.
"Ye said ye daenae want children," he said instead.
Grisselle's mouth opened, and then closed. Something crossed her face that she didn't cover fast enough.
"That's got nothing to do with it," she said, but quieter.
"Hasnae it?"
"She has no one." Her hands, which had been still at her sides, found each other, her fingers pressing together.
"That's what it's got to do with it. She has no one, and she's a few weeks old, and I'm not…
I can't…" She stopped. Pressed her lips together.
Started again. "You can be as cold as you like to me.
I made that bargain with my eyes open. But she didn't make any bargain. She just arrived."
He didn't have an answer for that. She left.
Isobel appeared in the armory doorway approximately four minutes later, which meant she'd been waiting in the passage, which meant she'd heard most of it.
"Daenae," he said.
"I wasnae going to say anything."
"Ye were, so get it over with."
She came in, pushed a saddle that had no business on the worktable off to one side, and sat on the corner of it. "Do ye remember the summer after grandfather died, when father brought that injured gannet in from the shore and said it was just until it healed?"
"I remember."
"Ye were the one who fed it every morning. Four weeks. Ye'd nae let anyone else near it."
"It was a bird, Isobel."
"Aye." She looked at him steadily. "And ye were ten.
And ye'd just lost someone. And it turns out that's nae a complicated thing, wanting something small to be all right.
" She let that sit a moment. "She's nae asking ye to be its father.
She's asking ye to stop acting like it offends ye that the child exists. "
He crossed his arms and said nothing.
"She's good for this house," Isobel said, getting up. "Both of them are. And ye ken it. Ye've kenned it for a while now, and it terrifies ye, and that's the thing ye should be thinking about instead of standing in the armory moving things." She was already at the door. "Go and find her."
He found Grisselle in the small room off the east passage that had quietly become Nora's room over the course of five days, a transformation he hadn't registered until he was standing in the doorway of it.
The cradle was there, with its new side-pin.
A chair had appeared from somewhere. There was a second blanket he didn't recognize folded over the arm of it, pale yellow, something Isobel must have found.
Grisselle was sitting in the chair with Nora tucked against her, not humming this time, just sitting, her chin tipped down to rest on the top of the small head.
"I was wrong," Alpin said from the doorway.
Grisselle looked up.
"About the maid." He came in, not far, far enough. "It was a poor idea, and I kenned it was a poor idea when I said it."
"Then why did you say it?"
He looked at Nora. The small fist working against Grisselle's collar. The way Grisselle's hand curved over her back without thinking.
"Because it's easier," he said, "to hand things off than to—" He stopped. Tried again. "I'm better with things that can be managed. Fixed. Nailed down."
"She's not a loose side-pin."
"No." Something in his chest did a thing he had no vocabulary for, looking at the two of them in the chair in the room that hadn't existed as a room five days ago. "She's nae that."
Grisselle watched him cross to the cradle and stand over it, looking down at the empty, neatly-made interior, and didn't say anything.
He put his hand on the side of it, rocking it once, testing the new pin Niall had fitted. It held solid.
"She can stay," he said. "Here. As she is." He glanced over at Grisselle, and then at the bairn, and then at some middle point between them. "All of it can stay as it is."
Grisselle shifted Nora against her shoulder. "Was that an apology?"
"It was close enough to one."
"It was," she said, "barely in the same county as one."
"Aye, well." He rocked the cradle once more. "It's the best ye're getting tonight."
Grisselle made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite agreement, and settled back in the chair. Alpin stayed where he was at the cradle instead of leaving, and the three of them were quiet together in the small room.
The fire in the passage threw its light under the door, and he stood there thinking that this was a thing he hadn't broken yet, and trying to decide whether that meant he still might, or whether it meant he didn't have to.
He'd been lying on his back for the better part of an hour, staring at the ceiling, when he gave up on sleep entirely and sat up.
The fire had burned to embers. He didn't rebuild it. He pulled on his shirt and his boots, and stood, and told himself he was going to walk the south parapet the way he did on nights when the sea had its hooks in him, and sleep wasn't coming regardless.
He got as far as the top of the stairs.
His feet took the turn toward the east passage without him consciously knowing.
He kept on going because arguing with himself at this hour had a poor record of success.
The torches were long since guttered, and the castle was entirely quiet, in the way it only was after the second hour of night, when even Senga had gone to bed.
He'd been thinking about the chair.
Not Grisselle in the chair specifically, or not only that. The three of them in the small room, him at the cradle, her watching him without saying anything, Nora's fist loosening around his finger by degrees. The way the room had felt complete in a way he didn't have a word for.
It's a contract, he'd told Niall, three weeks past. It's a practical arrangement between two people who want different things from it.
He stopped outside the door; there was no light under it. No sound. He stood with one hand against the door frame and listened, and heard nothing, and pushed the door open an inch.
Grisselle was asleep in the chair, her head tipped sideways, her hair loose and fallen across one shoulder. She'd pulled a blanket over herself at some point, though it had slipped, bunched at her waist, one hand still curled around the edge.
The cradle was beside her.
He looked at it and found two eyes looking back at him.
Nora was awake. Not crying, not fussing, just awake, flat on her back, looking at the ceiling. Her fist moved against her cheek. Her chest rose and fell.
Alpin stood in the doorway for a moment longer than made sense.
Then he went in.
He lifted her from the cradle the way he had seen Grisselle do a few times, one hand beneath the skull, the other at her back. Nora turned her face toward him and looked at him. He stood very still.
All right, all right, then.
He carried her to the window. The night was clear, the loch below running silver under a near-full moon, the hills black against a sky he'd known his whole life and never found anything comfortable in, not since he was ten years old and learned that it went on whether or not you wanted it to.
Nora looked at the ceiling some more.
"That's the loch," he said, very quietly, tipping her slightly toward the glass. "Ye cannae see it properly from here, but it's there. Ye'll ken it by summer. Loud in a storm and quiet in the mornings."
He paused. She had no opinion on this. "There are seals on the south bank come October. Isobel used to cry about them when she was small. Thought they were cold." He looked down at the small face, the enormous unworried eyes. "They werenae cold. They're seals. They're built for it."
Nora's grip on his finger shifted, tightened again.
"Yer mother was Ailie Fraser," he said, after a moment.
The name sat flat and factual in the air between them.
"I dinnae ken her. I should have. She was clan, and she lost her husband, and I should have kenned the name of every widow we had on the point, and I dinnae.
" He looked out at the water. "That's something I'll be doing differently. "
She made a small sound. Not a complaint, just a sound, like she was really listening to the conversation.
"Aye," he said. "I hear ye."
He shifted his weight, and the bairn flopped, heavy against his chest, her small head bobbing before dropping limply into the hollow beneath his chin.
He found himself standing the way he'd seen Grisselle stand with her — turned slightly inward, one arm angled up to keep her secure. His body working it out without being asked.
He hadn't held a bairn since Isobel, and Isobel didn't count because he'd been twelve and terrified and had handed her back to the nurse after approximately thirty seconds.
This was different.
Not easier, exactly. But different.
He looked at the top of her head. The dark fuzz of hair, still soft. The ear Isobel had compared to a MacKay's, which looked like no such thing to him, just an ear, small and complete.
What do ye make of all this?
Ye've been alive a weekfew s and ye've already got an opinion on the cradle and the quality of the milk and God knows what else. Ye'll fit in here fine.
He didn't say that part out loud.
Outside, something moved on the water — a bird, maybe, or wind across the surface — and the silver of it shifted and re-settled.
He watched it, and Nora watched whatever Nora watched, which was perhaps the same thing or perhaps only the dark behind the glass.
After a while her grip on his finger began to loosen by degrees.
Her eyes closed. Opened. Closed again and stayed closed.
He stood at the window with her for another while after that, not because she needed it, but because the night was clear and the loch was there.
When he finally turned back to the cradle, Grisselle's eyes were open.
She hadn't moved. She was still in the chair, the blanket still bunched at her waist, her hair still fallen across one shoulder. Her eyes were open, and they were on him, and they had been for he didn't know how long.
There was nothing sharp in them. No amusement, no deflection, no careful management of whatever she was thinking.
She just looked at him.
He settled Nora into the cradle, one hand under her until she was down, then straightened.
Neither of them said anything. The fire in the passage had burned low, and the room was lit mostly by the window's cold light.
Grisselle's eyes didn't leave him, and he found he had nothing to offer the moment except to stand in it.
He pulled the blanket up from her waist and resettled it across her shoulders, and her hand came up and caught his wrist, briefly, before she let it go.
He went to the door.
"Alpin," she said, very quietly.
He looked back.
She shook her head, just slightly. Not asking him anything and not saying anything. Just marking that she'd seen him, and meant him to know it.
He went out and pulled the door closed behind him, and stood in the dark passage for a long moment before he could make himself walk away from it.