Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
The ambiance at supper that evening was subdued in a way she could not immediately place.
Magnus sat at the head of the table, with Duncan to his left, already halfway through his ale.
Something was plainly wrong. Magnus kept glancing toward the kitchen door. He turned his cup once, twice, examining it as though it had personally offended him, before setting it down with force.
“Somethin’ troublin’ ye, Cousin?” Duncan asked, having clearly noticed and thoroughly enjoying it for some reason.
“Nay.”
“Ye’ve looked at that cup four times since it arrived.”
“I havenae.”
“Ye have.” Duncan took a long sip, watching him over the rim. “It’s the wrong one, is it nae?”
“It’s a cup, Duncan.”
“Aye, and ye’ll sit there thirsty all night rather than drink from it. I’ve watched ye do it before.” Duncan did not bother hiding his grin. “Man’s more particular about his crockery than his horses.”
Magnus said nothing, which Elspeth was beginning to understand was an answer.
A servant set a plain pewter cup at his elbow and moved on to fill Duncan’s ale without a second glance.
Elspeth set her fork down very quietly.
Magnus’s jaw tightened. He nodded once and said it was fine, though the tight set of his mouth suggested it was very much not fine.
He spent the better part of the next twenty minutes with his ale untouched, eyes drifting again and again toward the kitchen door as though the missing cup might wander back through it if he waited long enough.
Elspeth observed him from across the table and felt something cold settle in her stomach.
She knew precisely where that cup was. She’d found it that morning, buried at the back of a shelf in the stillroom, tucked behind a row of jars with no apparent purpose.
It was an old, worn wooden cup, plain and unremarkable, the sort of thing she had assumed had been shoved aside and forgotten.
She had moved it without a second thought to make room for the herbs she had been sorting and set it on a different shelf, in a different room, because it had seemed like clutter and nothing more.
She watched him turn the pewter cup once more in his hands, his teeth clenched, his eyes distant, and realized with a sinking feeling exactly whose fault this was.
She waited until the meal ended and Duncan had wandered off with a remark about checking the horses. Magnus rose from the table and made for the corridor that led toward the kitchens and the stillroom.
She followed him.
She caught up to him in the pantry, a narrow stone room lined with shelves and barrels, lit by a single low lamp that threw more shadow than light.
He was crouched before a low cupboard, pulling out jars and setting them aside with more force than the task required.
He did not look up when she stepped through the doorway.
“Magnus.”
“I’m busy.”
“I ken where the cup is.”
That got his attention.
He straightened, turning to face her, and in the narrow space among the shelves, there was suddenly very little room between them.
She could smell woodsmoke on his shirt and feel the warmth radiating off his body in the cold stone room. She found it considerably difficult to keep her mind on the matter of the cup and not on the matter of his mouth, which two days past tasted of brackish loch water and raw longing.
“Where?” he asked.
“I moved it this mornin’ while I was helpin’ Mrs. McAulay sort the stillroom. It was shoved behind some jars, and I didnae ken that it was yers or that it was in its spot.” She stopped, gathering herself. “I didnae ken it mattered. I set it on a different shelf.”
A shadow crossed his face, quick and sharp, gone before she could name it. “It’s me father’s cup.”
“I didnae ken that.”
“Nay, ye wouldnae.”
The words landed harder than they should have, delivered flat and cold in the narrow, dark pantry. Elspeth felt her spine going rigid in response.
“I would have ken if ye ever told a single soul in this household anything at all, instead of expecting the rest of us to read yer mind like it’s printed somewhere plain.
” She jutted her chin, daring him to argue the fact.
“Ye daenae ask the servants for what ye need. Ye daenae ask me. Ye walk about assumin’ everyone will divine the rules ye keep locked away in that head of yers, and then look wounded when we fail to guess correctly. ”
“It’s a cup, Elspeth.”
“It isnae just a cup, and we both ken it, or ye wouldnae be standin’ in a cold pantry at this hour tearin’ through cupboards for it instead of using the pewter cup like any sensible man.”
She took a breath. “Ye do this with everythin’. The doors. The chimneys. The lambs bein’ born at two in the mornin’ with no one to help ye. Ye fix it all yerself, and ye tell no one what ye need, and then ye stand there lookin’ wronged when the rest of us fail to guess it.”
His eyes darkened. “Ye ken nothin’,” he said.
“I ken enough.”
“Ye’ve been here a fortnight.”
“Long enough to see a man who trusts no one to touch a single thing that matters to him,” she said, “because he’s convinced himself it’s safer to carry the whole weight alone than to risk handin’ any of it to someone who might drop it.”
His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping once beneath his scarred skin.
For a moment, she thought he might argue further and dig in with the same flat certainty he brought to everything else.
Some reckless part of her almost wanted him to, wanted the fight to keep going rather than end here in the cold and the shadows with barely a foot of space between them.
Instead, he stepped back.
“Ye ken nothin’ about me,” he said again, quieter this time.
There was something underneath those words she could not quite reach. The meaning was gone before she could even try.
“I ken enough to recognize stubbornness when I see it,” she said.
He held her gaze a moment longer. Then he turned and walked out of the pantry, leaving her alone among the jars and the low guttering lamp, the cold settling back into the space where he had been.
* * *
The stillroom smelled of crushed mint when she arrived the next morning, and Mrs. McAulay was already there, sleeves rolled, humming something under her breath as she worked through a fresh crate of dried goods.
“Mornin’, me Lady.” She didn’t look up. “Come to torment more feverfew?”
“I thought I might finish what we started.”
“No need.” Mrs. McAulay nodded toward the shelves, already restored to a precision Elspeth had not managed the day before. Jars aligned by size, bundles hung in tidy rows, the crate that had sat half-sorted now empty. “The Laird was through here before dawn. Put everythin’ to rights.”
Elspeth stood very still. “Before dawn?”
“Aye. The Laird doesnae sleep past it, and he doesnae leave a mess sittin’ if he can help it,” Mrs. McAulay said matter-of-factly. “Ye’ll find that the household runs that way. Somethin’ goes wrong, and he’s already fixed it before the rest of us have finished noticin’ it was broken.”
Elspeth moved further into the room, running her eyes over the shelves he had apparently rearranged. She reached the back shelf, the one where she had shoved the old wooden cup aside the morning before in the interest of tidiness.
It was there.
Not shoved behind the jars where she had left it, and not carried off in triumph to sit beside his ale at supper.
It sat squarely at the front of the shelf now, alone, nothing crowding it, nothing hiding it.
It was set apart deliberately, in a manner that made it plain someone had considered exactly where it ought to go and had chosen this.
She reached out and touched its rim lightly, as though it might still carry some trace of the argument they had had over it the night before.
“That old thing,” Mrs. McAulay said, following her gaze.
“His father’s, that was. The only thing that survived the fire.
He doesnae speak of it, but Duncan told me the Laird’s carried it from room to room for thirteen years wherever he slept, or hid it in the most unbelievable places.
The servants ken to leave it be. Has done so since before I joined the household. ”
“He didnae tell me that.”
“He wouldnae.” Mrs. McAulay plainly stated a fact without meaning offence, while she tied off a bundle of dried thyme. “The Laird doesnae hand out his reasons easily. Ye’ll get the fact of a thing from him long before ye get the why of it, if ye get the why at all.”
Elspeth said nothing. She stood there a moment longer, her fingers resting against the worn wood, and thought of Magnus crouched in the narrow pantry the night before, rummaging through the shelves rather than sending a servant to search, his jaw set, saying nothing of what the cup meant until she had all but dragged it out of him with an accusation.
He had put it back exactly where it belonged. He had not said a word to her about it. He had come before dawn, while the household slept, and set it right quietly, expecting no one to notice and certainly no one to thank him.
She thought of what she had said to him in the pantry, about carrying the weight of everything alone rather than risking handing it to someone who might drop it. She found the words settling differently in the morning light than they had in the dark the night before.
She had meant it as a fault. Standing here now, looking at the plain, careful space he had cleared around the one thing in this castle that still mattered to him, she was not sure fault was the whole of it.
“He does most things himself,” Mrs. McAulay said again, gentler this time, watching her face rather than the shelves. “Doesnae mean he wants to.”
Elspeth looked up at that.
Mrs. McAulay only shrugged, tying off the last bundle, and went on with her work as though she had not said anything worth remarking on at all.
* * *
Magnus had been expecting the MacKinnons for an hour, perhaps less. Land taxes were not a subject that required an afternoon.
He had not accounted for children.