Chapter 11
Elspeth had opened the linen press and not closed it.
Marjorie watched her in the dressing glass. The maid stood with one hand upon the drawer, her fingers resting among the folded cloths as if she had forgotten what she had come to fetch.
Outside, November light lay thin against the windows. The coal fire had sunk low enough to show red through ash. On the table beside the glass sat a saucer of hairpins, a folded kerchief, black gloves, and the little ivory-handled scissors Marjorie never used but always kept sharp.
“What is it?” Marjorie asked.
Elspeth’s fingers moved once over the folded cloths, then stopped.
“My lady.”
That was not an answer. Marjorie turned from the glass.
Elspeth kept her eyes lowered. “There has been no cloth sent down.”
Marjorie looked at the drawer, the basin of cooling water, the strip of carpet between her slippers and Elspeth’s shoes. The mind, when threatened, sought stupid things to count. Six faded roses worked into the border before the pattern turned beneath the dressing table.
“No cloth,” she said.
“Not for two months.”
Two months.
Marjorie turned back to the glass. Her reflection offered nothing useful: black gown, white throat, hair drawn too tightly from the temples, face composed because faces had learnt what bodies would not.
“There may have been a mistake in the laundry.”
“Yes, my lady.”
Elspeth’s obedience hurt more than contradiction.
Marjorie set one hand lightly against the front of her gown.
There was no swelling fit to name. No stranger would have looked twice.
But her stays, drawn to their accustomed notch, had begun to feel like accusation.
Her breasts had ached when she woke. The smell of boiled mutton three nights before had sent her from the dining room with one hand against the wall.
She had blamed the candles, the grief, the house, the old draught that came beneath the east passage door.
Marjorie looked at the bedchamber door. It stood closed. It had stood closed that night as well. Not locked. Locks were vulgar admissions. A door did not need a lock if every servant in the corridor knew whose hand had closed it.
Rain had been at the windows then, not frost. A hard rain, thrown against the glass in sudden gusts. The lamp had smoked. She remembered that. The wick had been cut badly, and the flame had bent and recovered, bent and recovered, as if even fire must learn submission at Glenbride.
Wine had been on his breath.
Not enough to make him foolish. Enough to make him kind.
That was the worst of it.
He had spoken softly. He had said her name as though it were an answer to something.
Lady Marjorie first, then Marjorie, then nothing at all.
His hand had rested on the back of the chair by the bed, and the carved thistle on the rail had been split at the stem.
She had fixed her eyes upon that split because it was better to count broken wood than the steps between the door and her.
She had not screamed.
“My lady?”
The room returned: grey glass, poor fire, Elspeth’s bloodless face, the folded cloths shut away.
Marjorie lowered her hand. “You will say nothing.”
“No, my lady.”
“To my mother.”
Elspeth did not answer.
Marjorie turned. “To my mother, Elspeth.”
The maid’s mouth trembled once, then steadied. “No, my lady.”
The answer came too quickly.
Marjorie crossed to the chair and sat before her knees failed her.
The room did not tilt. She had thought it might.
Instead, everything sharpened: the coal’s red eye in the grate, the pin lying apart from the saucer, the faint steam gone from the basin.
Her hands lay still. Her back remained straight.
Her voice, when she found it, did not break.
“How far?”
Elspeth looked at her.
“If there has been no cloth since September. How far?”
“Two months, my lady. Perhaps more, if—”
“Do not finish.”
Elspeth stopped.
Two months. Perhaps more.
Marjorie shut her eyes. The dinner where Hugh had spoken to Dr Kerr about tenant fever. The morning he had sent Alexander a carved horse from Edinburgh. The afternoon Lady Isobel had slept in the chair by the window and woken with Hugh’s name half-formed in warning. The night of rain.
Her stomach turned.
Elspeth was beside her with the basin. Marjorie took it and held it in her lap until the sickness passed without result. Even that mercy felt ungenerous.
“Shall I fetch water?”
“No.”
“Shall I send for Mrs Mackay?”
“No.”
A pause.
“Shall I send for Lady Isobel?”
Marjorie looked at the glass again. It showed her seated, a basin in her lap, her maid standing behind her like a shadow waiting for orders neither of them wished to give.
She thought of Alexander in the nursery, his curls damp after sleep, his solemn frown when he built towers from wooden blocks and knocked them down by law of his own choosing.
He was five years old now. Old enough to ask why Uncle Hugh dined at the head of the table.
Old enough to notice when his grandmother’s hand tightened on his shoulder.
If this child were a girl, Hugh would make her disappear under some merciful name.
If this child were a boy—
He would be named. Blessed. Carried through the house as answer and atonement. Men would call him heir, and women would lower their eyes. Hugh would set him where Alexander had been refused and call it Providence.
She would be put aside. Alexander with her.
Marjorie gripped the basin until the rim bit into her fingers.
“My lady.”
“Yes,” Marjorie said. “Send for my mother.”