Nineteen #3
“Another five minutes, and you would have been,” Michael said, lacing up his shoes. “Pardon my blunt speech, Baroness.”
“I like your blunt speech,” Brenna said. “St. Clair, I know you’re a guest, and English, and allowances must be made, but why are you hauling her ladyship about in the morning dew, when the woman needs her rest?”
“I slept,” Milly St. Clair said. “We camped, more or less, by the loch. The entire village was there too. Seems it was a night for admiring the stars. Also drinking whisky and telling stories. Neil MacLogan can make even bagpipes sound sweet.”
What were they trying to say? Brenna had her shoes on, a shirt and skirt, also a few underthings. Her hair was in complete disarray, and the whole of her smelled of lavender and clover.
“I will fall in love with you every day for the next hundred years,” Michael muttered to his wife. Such extravagant sentiments were their due, after the night they’d put in. Also the God’s honest truth.
She winked at him. “I’ll fall in love with you every night, then. We’ll share the work. Yonder baron has something on his mind.”
St. Clair usually did, but for the first time in Michael’s memory, his former commanding officer looked worried. Michael rose, his shirt half-buttoned, his kilt hanging low on his hips, and helped Brenna to her feet.
“Spit it out, St. Clair. Is the clan emigrating en masse? Are we being sued for restitution of the funds that were stolen?” He would not say his uncle’s name, might never say it again.
“It isn’t like that,” St. Clair said. “Your people undertook to do a bit of housecleaning, and they hoped you and your lady would come admire their efforts.”
Whatever this housecleaning was, St. Clair was nervous about it—though his baroness was not.
“The sun will soon be up,” Brenna said, taking Michael by the hand and leading him toward the path along the base of the hill.
“I, for one, need a decent breakfast and some strong, hot tea. I want to explain to Maeve that there’s been an accident involving…
there’s been a sad accident, but we’re inviting her sister for a visit at the earliest opportunity. ”
Of course they were.
Michael let Brenna chatter as they made their way to the shore of the loch, while ahead of them, St. Clair held hands with his wife. As they emerged from the trees, the sun crested the horizon, turning the surface of the loch into a bright blue mirror of the morning sky.
“This looks like the aftermath of a battle,” St. Clair observed, for everywhere, bodies sprawled, some on blankets, some around the remains of campfires. The MacLogans were heaped together near a wagon, no horses or bullocks in evidence.
“I’d say the whisky won,” Michael observed. “What’s piled in the wagon?”
“Have a look,” St. Clair suggested, turning a half barrel bottom up so his lady might take a seat.
The first impression to hit Michael was a whiff of pipe smoke. Then the sunlight landed on the gilt edge of a framed painting that stuck out from a pile of clothing—kilts and cloaks in the Brodie plaid, boots and shoes, a great lot of maroon velvet.
“It’s all from the dower house,” Brenna said. “Everything he owned.” Around them, people stirred, stretched, and yawned. “I can smell that god-awful tobacco. What is it all doing here?”
“MacLogan called it cleaning house,” St. Clair said. “Your people thought the time to remove the last tenant’s effects was now, not when some future Lady Strathdee might have need of the place.”
For even St. Clair apparently understood the present Lady Strathdee would never dwell in that house.
“Thoughtful of them,” Brenna said. “I suppose we’re to burn it?”
“I like the idea of burning it,” Michael said before Brenna’s thrifty nature could ruin a wonderful gesture from their people. “I like it a lot.”
Brenna drew closer to the wagon, though she touched nothing. “I don’t want to see even the ashes on the shores of our loch. I don’t want any reminders at all.”
Footsteps crunched on the stones behind them.
“You’ll want this, if you’re going to light a bonfire.” Hugh MacLogan had a box in his hands, and a crease across his cheek from having slept on something. Neil and Dantry stood a few paces back, looking every bit as disheveled, and slightly worse for drink.
“Tap another keg,” Michael said, “and send word to the castle we need some food down here. Bread, cheese, ham, simple fare, for we’ve a bit more work to do.”
“What’s in the box?” Brenna asked, regarding Hugh as if his offering smelled much worse than pipe smoke.
Michael spared MacLogan the admission. “Journals are in there, Brenna, along with sketchbooks and other garbage that should never again see the light of day.”
MacLogan set the box down. “We opened none of it, and we made sure nobody else did either. We packed up the bedroom and allowed no one through its door while we did.”
Brenna pulled her shawl tighter in a gesture that had nothing to do with the breeze coming off the loch.
“Our thanks,” Michael said, hoping he still had a handkerchief in his sporran. “If you could spare us a bit more effort, that wagon needs to be emptied.”
“Emptied?” Hugh asked. “It took half the night to fill it.”
They’d be a lifetime emptying that bloody wagon, nonetheless. “What I have in mind won’t take long at all.”
The flames were beautiful.
As the sun spilled down the hillsides and the scent of heather blended with a whiff of lamp oil, the rowboat bobbed gently a few feet from the loch’s stony shore. Books caught first—art books, mostly, but not all. The velvet bed swagging caught, and the scent of the smoke became more acrid.
The little vessel rode low in the water, its makeshift sail luffing gently in the breeze. When Michael set the last box aboard at the stern, Neil cast the rope securing the boat to shore into the fire.
The silence on shore was broken by the sound of Michael splashing up onto the beach in his bare feet. He put his arm around Brenna’s shoulders, and that was…that was wonderful.
As wonderful as wrestling the truth with him through the night, as wonderful as making love with him, as wonderful as waking up to teasing and more honesty.
And to friends and family, and this.
“How deep is that water?” Brenna asked, letting her head rest on Michael’s shoulder.
He was quiet for a moment, while the flames rose higher and the boat made a stately progress toward the middle of the loch.
“My father told me it was at least two hundred feet deep at the center. Deep enough.” The boat slowed as the flames enveloped the cargo from bow to stern. “I love you, Brenna Maureen Brodie.”
Their marriage had acquired the loveliest punctuation. Any sentence, any sentiment, might be anchored with those three words, and they’d always be appropriate.
“I love you too, Michael Brodie.”
The crowd on shore watched in silence as flames consumed the sail. The boat floundered and then slipped into the depths of the loch—stern, amidships, then bow.
Until all that was left were placid, concentric surface ripples that faded before they reached the shore.
“Well done,” Neil MacLogan said softly. “Well damned done.” He swung his niece up onto his back and headed off toward the trees, his brothers and his nephew following. The rest of the crowd dissipated with no more ceremony than that, until Brenna was alone with her husband on the quiet beach.
“I favor the names of the angels,” Brenna said, turning to tuck her arms around Michael’s waist. He was lean and strong, full of courage and the occasional flaw, and he was hers. He’d been hers even when he’d been off soldiering too.
“I’m named for—” Brenna felt the understanding blossom in Michael as he went silent. “What if we have a girl, Brenna? Or all girls? You’d name a girl Gabriel or Raphael?”
“Michaela,” Brenna said. “Let’s go home, Husband. I’m in need of a bath, and our bed.”
“I’m in need of my wife.”
Whatever that had to do with anything.
Arm in arm, they wandered up the path, past the clearing, through the postern gate, and into the gardens. All the while, they argued over what to name their firstborn, until Brenna diplomatically changed the subject to how they should go about tearing down the enclosure of the walled garden.
Their first of seven daughters arrived a mere eight and a half months later, and they named her Gabriella Michelle Maureen Brodie.
She was red-haired, freckled, full of energy, and the terror of all save the St. Clair’s oldest boy, who alone among all the children, could safely refer to the young lady as Gabby.