Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Magnus set his quill down for the fifth time and rose from the table so abruptly that the bench scraped loudly across the stone.
“Duncan.”
His cousin glanced up from his whisky, one eyebrow raised. “Aye?”
“Outside. Now.”
Duncan set his cup down with visible reluctance, murmured something to MacKinnon about checking the stables, and followed Magnus through the hall doors into the courtyard, where the cold was sharp enough to clear a man’s head—or ought to.
His own was apparently an exception.
“She has done every single thing except the one thing I betrothed her for,” Magnus said, before the door had fully swung shut behind them.
Duncan folded his arms, leaning against the stone wall. “Which part troubles ye most? I’d wager ye’ve a list.”
“She’s rearranged the stillroom without askin’.
She’s in the kitchens brewin’ herbs with Mrs. McAulay as though she’s been here a decade.
She’s turned me hall into a nursery for half the children from the village, and in four days, Duncan, four days, she hasnae once, nae a single time, so much as looked at the livestock ledgers. ”
“The livestock ledgers,” Duncan repeated.
“I married her for her knowledge of livestock.”
“Ye married her because she answered yer questions at the auction better than any other woman in that hall, and because ye were half in love with the notion of a wife who kent a lamb from a chicken.” His mouth twitched.
“Ye didnae marry a shepherd, Cousin. Ye married a woman who’s runnin’ this household better than either of us has managed on our own. ”
Magnus turned away, his jaw tight, and looked out over the courtyard where nothing required his attention. That made it considerably harder to justify staring at it.
“She’s supposed to manage the household. The livestock. The provisionin’.”
“She’s managin’ everything but the livestock, and doing it better than anyone’s managed since before ye were born.” Duncan pushed off the wall. “Ye ken what I think troubles ye?”
“I didnae ask.”
“I’ll tell ye anyway.” His grin was unrepentant. “Ye’re nae actually angry that she’s failed at her duties, Magnus. Ye’re angry that she’s succeeded at somethin’ ye cannae control.”
Magnus said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say that would not confirm it, and he had no intention of confirming anything to Duncan on a cold afternoon in his own courtyard.
He turned and went back inside.
The Great Hall had grown louder in his absence. He crossed toward the hearth with every intention of retrieving his ledger and removing himself to somewhere quiet, and stopped three steps short of the table.
The youngest MacKinnon girl—Annie, small and round-cheeked, no more than five—had gone pale and rigid on the rug, her lower lip trembling.
Elspeth’s story had apparently taken a turn toward a witch in the woods, and the witch, by all appearances, had proven considerably too vivid for a child of five.
Elspeth broke off mid-sentence. She reached over without any visible urgency and smoothed a curl back from Annie’s damp cheek with two fingers, the gesture unhurried and unremarkable, yet utterly charming.
“The witch is very silly, really,” Elspeth said in a low voice. “She’s terrible at bein’ frightenin’. Trips over her own broom more often than nae.”
Annie sniffed. “Does she?”
“Constantly. Once, she flew straight into a tree because she was too busy admirin’ her own hat.”
A small, wet laugh escaped the girl, and she leaned against Elspeth’s shoulder, tucked there as naturally as if she’d done it a dozen times before. Elspeth let her stay, one arm settling loose around her, already picking the story back up from a gentler thread.
Magnus stood very still. He watched the whole exchange from start to finish, and realized that he could not for the life of him look away.
He found that fact considerably more unsettling than the sight itself.
He made himself sit. He made himself pull the ledger back toward him and dip his quill. When he looked down at the page, he could not recall which figures he had already tallied and which he had not.
“She’s good with them,” Duncan said, dropping onto the bench across from him, too pleased with himself.
“I can see that.”
“Ye’ve been seein’ quite a lot, Cousin.”
Magnus did not dignify that with a response.
MacKinnon, three cups of whisky into the afternoon and considerably looser for it, raised his own toward the hearth. “Amazin’, truly. Yer household’s transformed, me Laird. When’s the handfasting?”
Magnus did not look up from the ledger. “One week from yesterday.”
Across the hearth, Elspeth’s head snapped up. He met her gaze and then fixed his eyes back on a column of figures that had, for the last quarter hour, stubbornly refused to add themselves correctly.
Hamish, apparently unbothered by anything so tedious as adult conversation continuing without him, looked at the two of them with open curiosity. “Are ye like Ma and Da?”
“Nay, lad,” Duncan said too quickly, too delighted. “They dislike each other, apparently.”
Mrs. MacKinnon, who had said very little all afternoon beyond gentle corrections to her children, laughed outright. “Exactly like yer ma and da, Hamish.”
Hamish frowned. “Really, me Laird?”
Magnus looked up. Elspeth had gone very still, watching him with an expression he could not read. Something caught between challenge and curiosity, waiting to see what he would say.
“Aye,” he said.
“Aye,” Elspeth echoed a beat later, her voice light, almost playful.
Isla, who had been quiet throughout all of this, working diligently at the ribbon plait Elspeth had shown her, looked up with a small frown that suggested she had been paying considerably more attention than anyone had credited her for.
“That cannae be true,” she declared.
“And why’s that, dearie?” Elspeth asked.
The girl shrugged, unbothered by the weight of what she was about to say. “Because ye stare at each other so much. Ma and Da never do.”
Magnus looked down at his ledger. Elspeth found something extraordinarily interesting in the bottom of her teacup.
Duncan made a sound that started as a cough and ended as an open, delighted laugh, loud enough that he had to set his whisky down before he spilled it on MacKinnon’s sleeve.
MacKinnon was already laughing, and the children joined him.
“Out of the mouths of bairns,” Duncan managed, wiping at his eyes.
Magnus did not look up. He told himself he did not need to look up because he had not been staring, not in any manner that warranted comment from a ten-year-old who had no earthly business observing anything at all.
He happened to know, without needing to look, precisely how Elspeth’s mouth curved when something amused her, a small tug at one corner before the rest of her face caught up.
He knew the particular shade her cheeks turned when she laughed outright, a rosy tint spreading quickly from her cheekbones down to her jaw.
He knew that she tucked loose curls behind her left ear when she was nervous, always the left, never the right, though he could not have said why he had noticed that or when.
He knew now that she held frightened children against her left shoulder rather than her right.
These were, he told himself, simply things a man observed, living in close quarters with another person. Practical observations. Nothing more.
He turned his attention back to the ledger.
Unfortunately, the figures had grown considerably more difficult to read than they had been an hour ago, the columns blurring slightly no matter how hard he fixed his eyes on them.
He found himself listening for the sound of her voice picking the story back up across the hearth, and a small, stubborn part of himself was relieved when she did.
* * *
The letter to Katherine took three attempts before Elspeth was satisfied with it.
Bring swans, she finally wrote, having discarded two earlier drafts that had grown far too explanatory for a request that ought to require none at all. For the handfasting. He has every creature at Ben Cruachan save swans. Daenae ask why. Simply bring them.
She sealed it before she could reconsider the wisdom of the request, and handed it to the boy about to ride south. She told herself that a man who claimed indifference to romance would have to endure a gift chosen with rather more thought than he deserved.
The letter dispatched, she turned her attention to the second matter.
“The most romantic book in the library,” she told Becky, “and I daenae mean the one with the shepherdess, though I’m fond of her. I mean somethin’ that cannae possibly be mistaken for anythin’ but romance.”
Becky, who had spent the better part of the week watching this particular campaign unfold, went to the shelves without argument and returned some minutes later with a heavy, leather-bound volume that faintly smelled of dust and old glue.
“Poetry, me Lady. Nature poems, mostly. Very fine handfasting.” She turned it over in her hands. “Cost somethin’, this one, I’d wager.”
Elspeth took it, weighed it, opened it to a page at random, and found several stanzas concerning larks and dawn light and a shepherd’s undying devotion to a woman he compared at some length to a mountain stream. It was, by any reasonable measure, exactly what she wanted.
If Magnus intended to go on pretending that he had never once kissed her senseless on a rock while dripping wet and half-dressed, then she intended to make his life considerably more difficult in return.
A man could not indefinitely ignore poetry that was placed directly and repeatedly into his hands.
She found him in his study that evening, bent over correspondence by the light of a single candle, and set the book down on the corner of his desk.
He looked at it, then looked at her.
“What’s this?”
“A book. For ye.”
He picked it up, turned it over, and read the spine. “Poetry.”
“Nature poetry. I thought, given yer aversion to romance generally, that somethin’ about larks and mountain streams might prove a gentler introduction.”