Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Grisselle came down the stairs with Nora against her shoulder, trying so hard not to jostle the cargo in the process.
The kitchen was already loud.
Senga had a pot going at the hearth and didn't look up when Grisselle came in. "Oats are nearly done, me Lady. Sit down before ye start hovering."
"I wasn't going to hover."
"Ye always hover when ye've had a bad night." Senga pointed with her spoon at the shelf above her head. "Cait, that crock goes on the left. I've told ye twice."
"It fits better on the right." Cait pushed it an inch further right to demonstrate.
"It fits better where I said it goes."
"It doesnae, the handle catches on the—"
"The handle catches because ye put it in crooked; put it on the left."
Isobel looked up from the table, both elbows on the wood, cup at her chin.
"Good morning," she said to Grisselle, entirely unbothered by the shelf debate continuing behind her. "She slept?"
"Eventually." Grisselle pulled out the chair across from her. "You?"
"Tolerably." Isobel tipped her head toward the hearth. "Senga made me drink something last night that tasted of bark and old ambition. Said it would help."
"Did it?"
"I slept like a stone, so aye, I think so."
Alpin was across from her, already into his breakfast.
He looked up when Grisselle came in, took in Nora, set down his bread, and said, "Hand her here."
Grisselle stopped walking. Isobel's cup paused halfway to her mouth.
"Sorry?" Grisselle said.
"Hand her here." He said again, as if it was very normal.
He pushed his plate to one side and held out both hands. Grisselle crossed the kitchen and put Nora into them before her brain had finished understanding what was going on.
She sat down. Picked up her cup and watched him over the rim of it.
He held Nora the way he'd held her at the window — correctly, competently, one hand at the back of the skull — and Nora looked up at his face, studying him.
"She needs her morning feed," Grisselle said.
"I can see that."
"The cloth's in my left."
"I see it."
He reached for the damp cloth tucked at Grisselle's sleeve without asking, and she let him take it. He twisted the corner the way Senga had shown them and offered it to Nora, who took it for approximately four seconds before she pulled back and looked at his face again instead.
Alpin looked down at her. Nora looked up at him.
"She's nae eating," he said.
"I can see that."
Isobel pressed her lips together very firmly and looked at the table.
Alpin tried again, angling the cloth. Nora accepted it, made a brief effort, and then turned her face toward his jaw with the cloth still in reach and seemingly forgot entirely that food was a thing that had ever interested her.
"She keeps looking at me," he said.
"She does that with new things." Grisselle wrapped both hands around her cup. "She'll settle."
She didn't settle. He tried three more times, patient, methodical, the way he approached everything, and three more times Nora took a passing interest in the cloth before finding his face more compelling and abandoning the project entirely.
"She's nae hungry," Alpin said.
"She's hungry, Alpin," Grisselle said. "She's just distracted."
"By what?"
Grisselle looked at Isobel. Isobel looked at the ceiling.
"By yer face, of course," Grisselle said.
A pause.
"Me face? What’s so interesting about me face?" he said. “Nobody ever finds me face interesting.”
"It's very large," Grisselle said, into her cup. "From her angle."
Senga made a sound at the hearth that was almost certainly a laugh converted at the last moment into a cough. Alpin did not look at Senga.
"Perhaps," Isobel said, with tremendous diplomatic care, "ye could try nae looking directly at her when ye do it."
"I'm nae looking directly at her."
"Ye're looking at her the way ye look at everything," Isobel said. "Like she’s a ledger you are trying to understand. She's a few weeks old; she doesnae understand distrust yet, it just reads as interesting to her."
"That is the most confusing thing I’ve ever heard about a bairn."
"Try turning slightly," Grisselle said. "And look at the window instead."
He turned slightly and looked at the window, which meant he was looking at Grisselle's general direction without looking at her specifically, which she decided not to remark on.
Nora, presented with the cloth from a face that had stopped being interesting, took it immediately and began working at it.
"There," Grisselle said.
Alpin said nothing, holding very still, resolutely not looking at the baby eating his shirt.
Greer came in from the side passage, took in the scene at the table, and stopped.
She looked at Alpin. At the cloth. At the angle of his head.
"Ye're holding the cloth too flat, me Laird," she said, coming around the table without breaking stride.
"She has to work too hard for it. Tilt it down, here…
" She adjusted his wrist with two fingers, brisk as setting a bone. "Let it pool at the tip. There."
Nora, presented with a better angle, latched on properly and stayed.
"Oh," Alpin said.
"Aye," Greer said. "Oh." She went to the hearth and said something to Senga about the morning stores and didn't look back. Alpin sat at the table with Nora, eating from the cloth in his hand like he'd been doing it for years instead of eleven minutes.
Isobel caught Grisselle's eye across the table.
Grisselle looked down at her cup.
Outside the window, the loch was flat and bright in the morning. From the yard, Niall's voice carried through the glass, loud enough to make out every word.
"I'm telling ye, she favors the left foreleg. Look at her."
"She doesnae favor anything; she's standing."
"She's standing like that, which is different from standing normally."
"That's how she always stands."
"Then she's always favored it, and nobody's noticed."
Senga turned from the hearth without looking up from her spoon. "Greer, did ye want the rest of this for the midday pot or are we finishing it now?"
"Finish it now," Greer said from the doorway. "There's venison coming up from the village this afternoon; we'll not need to stretch it."
"Cait." Senga pointed. "Left."
"It doesnae fit on the left, Senga."
"It fit on the left for eleven years before ye started working here."
"Then the crock has changed."
"The crock," Senga said, with great patience, "has nae changed."
Nora's fist worked steadily. Alpin sat with his shoulders dropped to a height Grisselle had not previously seen them reach before noon.
She could hear all of it. All at once, the whole loud ordinary weight of the keep.
She picked up a piece of bread, pulled it apart, and decided she wasn't going to name what the morning felt like. She was just going to sit in it instead and enjoy every feeling it brought.
The castle emptied the way it sometimes did on clear afternoons — all at once, without announcement, as if everyone had agreed on it privately and forgotten to mention it to her.
Senga went to the village for salt and would surely come back with opinions she'd air at supper.
Greer took Cait to the linen store. Isobel had disappeared after the midday meal with a book and her boots on, which meant she'd gone to the hill and wouldn't be back until the light failed.
Even Niall, who had no particular business inside the castle walls but turned up in them anyway with reliable frequency, was gone.
Grisselle carried Nora to the window seat in the east room and sat down with her, and for a long time didn't do anything else.
The loch was grey today, a different grey from yesterday's.
It was flatter, the hills behind it blurred at the edges where the cloud came low.
She'd learned in the last weeks that the loch was never the same color two days running, and she'd started checking it in the mornings the way she used to check the London weather for what it would require of her wardrobe, except this required nothing of her at all. It just changed. She just watched.
Nora was awake, working her mouth around something that wasn't there yet, her eyes at the window.
"That's the loch," Grisselle told her. "Alpin already explained it to you, I know.
I'm telling you again because he missed some of it.
" She shifted her to a better angle against her arm.
"It's grey today. Yesterday it was blue.
Last Tuesday it was a color I don't have a name for — greenish, sort of, with a brown underneath.
You'll have to see it in summer, apparently.
Isobel says it goes silver in July and you can see straight to the bottom on a clear day. "
Nora's fist opened and closed against Grisselle's sleeve.
"I told Isobel I didn't want children," Grisselle said. “But honestly, you have changed my choice without even trying much.”
She hadn't meant to say it out loud.
She'd meant it when she said it. She could still find the shape of the thought. The way it had felt like honesty when she'd offered it up in Isobel's room by the fire, the relief of saying a thing plainly without dressing it up.
I don't want children.
Simple. True.
Nora turned her face against Grisselle's arm and made a sound that was almost nothing, just the smallest complaint against the cold coming off the glass.
Grisselle tucked the blanket up higher.
She'd thought she'd understood why, when she'd said it.
She'd given herself sensible reasons, the kind that made a tidy line of logic.
She was too restless, too unsuited to confinement, too accustomed to being overlooked herself to trust that she wouldn't replicate it.
She'd believed all of that. She still thought most of it was true.
What she hadn't accounted for was this.
This specific weight. This specific smell of the top of a head, which she hadn't known was a smell until she had a head to put her nose to.
The way Nora's whole body went slack and trusting in sleep, with no knowledge yet that the world required you to be on guard in it, no understanding yet that the people holding you might put you down.
I know what it is to be handed off to whoever's convenient.
She'd said that to Alpin in the kitchen, angry and certain. She hadn't said the rest of it, hadn't said: I was twelve and I learned early that the way to stop minding was to stop wanting to be held in the first place.
She looked down at Nora.
Nora looked up at her with the dark, unfocused eyes of the very new, who can't yet tell one face from another but turn toward warmth by instinct.
When did that stop being true?
Not the wanting — she understood now that the wanting had never stopped, only gone underground. Not the wanting. The part where she'd decided it was safer to call it a preference instead of a wound.
"I'm not going to hand you off," she said to Nora. "In case you were concerned."
Nora's mouth worked.
"I know you weren't concerned. You're two weeks old.
You don't know enough yet to be concerned, which I think is an excellent way to start.
" Grisselle's thumb traced once across the small forehead.
"I'd recommend it, actually. Not knowing enough to be concerned.
I tried the other way for three seasons in London, and I can report that it's not an improvement. "
The cloud shifted outside, and the light in the room changed briefly, warmer, before it went grey again.
Grisselle had spent three years in London convincing herself she didn't want the things she couldn't have. A house that recognized her step. People who argued at supper and meant nothing by it. Somewhere that would still be standing when she came back to it.
She'd gotten very good at not wanting them.
She looked around the east room. The cradle in the corner Greer had lined with the yellow blanket.
The hook on the wall where Alpin had hung his second riding cloak three days past and not retrieved it, which meant it had become her room's cloak hook now without discussion.
The worn place on the window seat where someone had sat for years before she arrived.
Nora's eyes were closing.
"Don't," Grisselle said, not meaning it.
They closed anyway, slowly, with the complete indifference to instruction that was Nora's primary personality trait so far, and her weight went loose and heavy in Grisselle's arms. Grisselle sat at the window with the grey loch behind the glass and the empty castle around her and the specific warm weight of the baby asleep against her chest.