Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Elspeth found Mrs. McAulay in the stillroom, sleeves already rolled up for the day’s work, sorting dried lavender into bundles.
“Mrs. McAulay , I need yer help with something.”
“What is it, me Lady?”
“The swans. I thought they might do well near the pond behind the kitchen gardens, rather than the loch, since Magnus seems…” Elspeth searched for the word. “Unsettled by them. I thought if they were kept further off, out of his way, it might ease matters.”
Mrs. McAulay ’s hands stopped on the lavender. “Nae swans.”
“I beg yer pardon?”
“Nae swans, lass. Nae near the pond, nae near the loch, nae anywhere on this land if it can be helped.” Mrs. McAulay set the bundle down. “Anything but swans.”
“I daenae understand. What’s so terrible about a pair of birds?”
“It’s nae the birds themselves.” Mrs. McAulay glanced toward the door, as though Magnus might be standing just beyond it, and lowered her voice regardless. “The Laird cannae abide them. Willnae say why, exactly, nae to me, and I’ve served this household for many, many years.”
She shook her head, half amused, half genuinely troubled.
“But word’s already reached the kitchens of the color he went this mornin’. One of the lads swore he’d never seen the Laird move so fast in his life, save perhaps the night of the fire, and even then he’d had a purpose to run toward instead of away from.”
Katherine would love to hear this story, but she had peeled off toward the nursery to check on Agnes, which left Elspeth alone by the time she reached the stillroom door.
“Duncan seemed to ken something about it. He was laughing so hard he nearly fell off his rock.”
“Duncan’s ken him since they were bairns. He’d ken things I never would.” Mrs. McAulay returned to her lavender, though not without a faintly amused shake of her head. “Whatever it is, lass, ye’ll want to find him and settle it, before it festers into something worse.”
“I only meant it kindly.”
“I daenae doubt it for a moment. He likely kens that too.” Mrs. McAulay ’s mouth twitched, just slightly. “Go on. Find him. And me Lady, daenae laugh when he tells ye why, whatever it is. A man doesnae go that pale over something small.”
Elspeth found him near the stables an hour later, currying the grey gelding in long even strokes. “Magnus.”
He didn’t stop, though something in his shoulders went a fraction stiffer. “Elspeth.”
“I owe ye an apology.” She stepped further into the stables, twisting her hands together before she caught herself doing it and made herself stop. “I didnae mean to cause ye any distress this morning. I only thought the loch looked bare, and I wanted to give ye something.”
“Ye have naught to apologize for.”
“I clearly do, given ye fled the length of the yard from a bird.”
That made the brush in his hand go still. He glanced at her sideways, some faint, reluctant humor working at the corner of his mouth despite himself. “I didnae flee.”
“Ye repositioned rather dramatically, then.”
“Aye. That.” He set the brush down at last on the rail, and rolled his sleeve back partway, revealing a thin, pale scar along his forearm she’d never noticed before, half-hidden beneath the dark hair there. “When I was a boy, me sister had a swan.”
“A swan. As a pet.”
“She found it as a cygnet. Wing hurt, half-starved, nae more than a fistful of feathers and bad temper. She nursed it back whole over the course of a whole winter, fed it from her own hand every morning before anyone else was awake.”
Something at the corner of his mouth almost moved, there and gone. “It grew into the meanest creature I’ve ever encountered in me whole life, and it decided, for reasons ken only to itself, that I was its mortal enemy.”
“Ye’re jesting with me.”
“I am nae jesting. That bird chased me the length of this land for the better part of three years. I couldnae walk to the well without it coming after me, wings out, hissing like the devil himself had sent it up from below. I took to carrying a stick everywhere I went, just to ward it off.”
“Did the stick help?”
“Nae in the slightest. It only seemed to make the creature angrier, as though I’d insulted it personally by daring to defend meself.
” He nodded at the scar. “It caught me once, proper. I was ten, maybe eleven. Bled for the better part of an hour, and me sister laughed so hard at the sight of me running that she nearly fell into the loch trying to catch her breath.”
Elspeth pressed her lips together, fighting it, and lost badly enough that a small, helpless sound escaped despite every effort to hold it in.
“Ye may laugh,” he said dryly. “Everyone did. Duncan still brings it up whenever he wants me in a foul mood.”
“I’m nae laughing.”
“Ye are very plainly laughing, Elspeth.”
“I am simply breathing oddly.” She gave up and let it out, and he watched her do it without any real irritation behind his eyes, which told her plainly enough that he’d expected exactly this reaction and had made his peace with it some years ago.
But the laugh faded when his face didn’t follow it, when whatever had been almost-fond in his expression a moment before settled into something considerably stiller, more careful.
“I hated it,” he admitted. “The fear. Flinching back from a bird because of something that happened when I was a lad of ten.” He picked the brush back up and turned it over once in his hand.
“I hate it still, if I’m being honest. Which I suppose is why I didnae laugh along with the rest of ye this morning and let the whole thing lie easy. ”
“There’s no shame in it, Magnus. Every living soul fears something.”
“Aye. And fear makes a man hesitate.” He said it flatly. “A hesitant man is a dead man, more often than nae. Or he’s a man who gets other men killed in his place, which is worse.”
Elspeth said nothing to that, only stepped a little closer, close enough now to see the muscle working in his jaw.
“After me family was slaughtered,” he said, quieter now, “I was afraid. For a long while after. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of a sound in the corridor that shouldnae be there. Afraid every single morning that I’d wake up and find it happening again to whoever I had left to lose.”
He set the brush down on the rail again and looked at it rather than at her while he said the rest.
“That was the last time I let meself be afraid of anything. I decided, somewhere in that year, that fear served no purpose I could find worth keeping. Nor grief. Nor much else in the way of feeling, if I’m being honest. They daenae keep a man’s people alive.
They daenae mend a wall, or sharpen a blade, or stand a watch through a cold night.
So I stopped allowing meself the indulgence of any of it. ”
“All of it?”
“All of it I could manage to root out.”
“And the swan?”
Something almost like a real smile threatened at that, there and gone before it could properly land. “The swan I never quite managed to root out. Which I suppose ye now ken better than most in this household.”
Elspeth studied him for a long moment—the careful, deliberate stillness he wore like a second skin, the scar half-hidden under his sleeve, the brush he’d set down and hadn’t picked back up again—and found herself thinking of a boy who’d once laughed hard enough at his own sister’s teasing that he could still recall the exact sound of it all these years later, buried somewhere beneath thirteen years of a man who’d decided joy was an indulgence he could no longer afford.
She didn’t say any of that aloud. Instead, she reached for the brush he’d abandoned on the rail and set to work on the gelding’s flank herself, matching the rhythm he’d used a moment before, stroke for stroke.
“Well,” she said after a while, “I shall have the swans returned to whatever considerably less personal loch they came from, with me sincerest apologies to whoever raised them.”
“I’d be obliged.”
“Though I make no promises regarding the goat. I understand ye two have an arrangement.”
“The goat and I have reached a mutual understanding built on tolerance. It isnae remotely the same thing.”
She smiled at that, small and private, and kept brushing.
She said nothing further about scars or swans or a boy who used to laugh so hard he nearly knocked his sister into a loch.
Though she found, well after the moment had passed and the two of them had moved on to arguing about which side of the gelding needed brushing first, that she hadn’t stopped thinking about him at all.
* * *
The stable boy took considerably more convincing than Elspeth had expected.
“A stand, ye say. For a cup.” Tam’s grandson turned the scrap of wood over in his hands, squinting at it as though it might explain itself. “What sort of cup needs its own stand, me Lady?”
“An old one. Wooden, plain, about this wide.” She measured it with her hands.
“It needs something to sit in that’ll keep it from tipping or cracking further, and I thought if it had the Wallace crest carved into the base, it might look less like an accommodation for a cracked old thing and more like something meaningful. ”
“Ye want me to carve a crest.”
“Aye.”
“On a stand. For a cup.”
“Aye.”
He’d looked at her the way Duncan sometimes did, as though weighing whether the request was worth the trouble of questioning further.
He eventually shrugged and went to fetch a blade and a proper piece of oak, muttering something about strange requests from strange quarters that Elspeth chose not to hear too closely.
It had taken him the better part of two days, working in whatever hours he could spare between his other duties.
When he’d finally brought it to her—a simple round base, deep enough to hold the cup steady, the Wallace crest worked into the wood with more skill than she’d expected from a boy who spent most of his hours mucking stalls—she’d turned it over in her hands and felt something in her chest settle, the way it hadn’t quite settled since the swans.
She left it on Magnus’s desk herself, rather than trust it to a servant, setting the cup carefully into its new stand and angling it just so before she lost her nerve and left the room.
She did not leave the room. She told herself she was waiting to see his reaction, purely out of curiosity. She sat in the chair farthest from the desk, hands twisting together in her lap, untwisting them the moment she noticed, and twisting them again a moment later regardless.
Magnus came in a while after supper, a ledger under one arm, clearly expecting an empty room, and stopped two steps past the threshold.
“Elspeth.”
“I didnae mean to startle ye.”
“Ye didnae.” He set the ledger down, and it was then that his eyes found the desk properly, found the cup sitting where it always sat, except not quite as it always did—elevated now, cradled, the crest catching the last of the evening light through the window.
He went very still.
“I asked Tam’s grandson to make it,” Elspeth said, because the silence had gone on a beat too long for her comfort.
“I thought practical men likely prefer practical presents, and given yer reaction to the last gift I gave ye, I wanted something considerably less likely to hiss at ye or chase ye across the yard.”
Magnus didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he slowly crossed to the desk and lifted the cup free of its new stand, turning it once in his hands before setting it aside and picking up the stand itself, studying the carving with an attention that made her fingers twist tighter together in her lap.
“It’s meant to keep it from cracking further,” she went on, because his silence was doing considerably more to unsettle her than words would have.
“It’s cracked already along the base, and I thought if it kept tipping the way it does on that shelf, it’d only get worse, and ye clearly…
” She stopped before she said something she couldn’t take back easily.
“I just wanted to help. However clumsily.”
He ran his thumb slowly over the carved crest, back and forth, the way a man tested a blade’s edge or a horse’s leg, checking for something he couldn’t quite name even to himself.
“Who carved this?”
“Tam’s grandson. The stable boy. He’s quite skilled, ye ken, for someone who spends most of his days covering his boots in mud.”
“Aye. He’s always had a steady hand.” Magnus didn’t look up from the stand. “I didnae ken he could carve like this.”
“Nor did I, until I asked.”
He set the cup back into its new place, carefully, adjusting it slightly until it sat centered, and stood there looking down at it a moment longer than the task strictly required.
Elspeth held her breath.
She had been holding it for some while now, waiting for some sign, some word, anything at all that would tell her whether she’d finally managed to give this man something that didn’t send him fleeing across his own courtyard.
He looked up at her.
Does he like it?
How will I ken if ye like it when ye look at me like that?