Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Elspeth once believed that a dinner was among the safer trials a woman might endure.
One was seated. One was fed. One spoke only when occasion required it, smiled when watched, and trusted that linen, candlelight, and roast meat might persuade civilization to remain in the room.
The MacKenzies, she discovered within three minutes of entering their hall, made no such agreement.
The hall was long and high, with dark beams overhead, weapons upon the walls, and fires burning at either end.
Smoke curled upward into the rafters. The air smelled of venison, ale, peat, wet wool, and too many people attempting not to stare.
Unfortunately, Highland restraint proved no more reliable than Highland roads.
Every head turned when Colin brought her through the great doors.
Elspeth felt the weight of it settle upon her shoulders more heavily than any cloak.
Men stopped speaking. Women leaned toward one another.
A servant carrying a platter slowed so much that the gravy nearly escaped its dish.
Somewhere near the lower tables, someone whispered, and though Elspeth could not hear the words, she did not require imagination to supply them.
The bought bride.
The Fraser lass.
Beside her, Colin did not slow. His hand rested at the small of her back. Her body knew exactly where his palm hovered. It remembered the bath, the loch, the horse. It remembered being caught, held, shielded, and watched.
Her pride found all such memories impertinent and ordered them dismissed. Needless to say, they did not obey.
“Dinnae touch me as if I require steering,” she murmured.
His mouth remained severe, but she felt the slight shift in him. “Then dinnae look as if ye plan tae stab the first man who speaks.”
“I plan tae wait until the second.”
“A wise strategy.”
“I thought so.”
They reached the high table. Colin drew out a chair beside his own and Elspeth looked at it with immediate suspicion.
To sit beside him before all these strangers was to accept, in public, what had been forced upon her in a cathedral.
Yet to refuse would give them exactly what they wanted: evidence of uncertainty and shame.
So she sat, very calmly and very gracefully, as if she chose the chair, the hall, the husband, and perhaps the Highlands themselves.
Colin took his place beside her, and the room resumed motion with the uncomfortable haste of people pretending they had not been arrested by curiosity. Conversation returned in broken pieces.
Elspeth lifted her chin and looked down the hall.
Let them stare, then.
A man at the near end of the high table was the first to lean forward. He was broad and fair, with steady eyes and the air of someone who had learned patience from long habit rather than sweetness. He did not smile, but neither did he glare.
“Lady MacKenzie,” he said, inclining his head. “Breac Ross.”
The name was offered like a hand, not a weapon. Elspeth accepted it in the same manner.
“Lady Elspeth Fraser,” she replied. “As I havenae yet decided whether tae keep the other name polished.”
A faint cough came from Colin’s other side. Breac’s mouth twitched, though he mastered it quickly.
“Ye have had a difficult journey,” Breac pointed out.
“How kind. I feared it might have looked effortless.”
This time the twitch became almost a smile. “Nay one could accuse ye of that.”
“I should hope nae. I put considerable labor intae me displeasure.”
Colin reached for his cup. Elspeth didn’t look at him, but she sensed the smallest satisfaction in his silence. It irritated her. She hadn’t sharpened her tongue for his entertainment.
On Breac’s other side sat a darker man with a harder face, black hair tied back, and eyes that seemed to weigh everything they touched. He had the look of a man who distrusted first and apologized never.
“So,” Murdoch said, “Fraser sent us a bride who speaks.”
The nearest voices quieted. Elspeth turned to him. Murdoch’s expression did not alter, but his gaze searched her as one might test the edge of a blade. The words weren’t loud enough to start a quarrel, nor soft enough to be ignored.
Her fingers tightened once around the stem of her cup beneath the table. Fear stirred in her. She was tired. She was among enemies, or near enough. Her mother was absent and perhaps harmed. Her maid was upstairs. Her husband was a stranger. The hall waited to see whether the new lady would tremble.
Elspeth smiled, but it was not a warm smile.
“Aye,” she nodded. “A terrible disappointment, I am sure, tae men who prefer wives delivered silent.”
A murmur moved down the table.
Murdoch’s eyes narrowed. “I prefer strangers tae prove useful before they prove loud.”
“How fortunate that I dinnae measure meself by yer preferences. I should be exhausted before the soup.”
Breac looked into his cup, with his shoulders suspiciously still. Colin said nothing. But Elspeth felt him watching her.
She dared not look at him. Had she seen approval there, it might have weakened her more than criticism. Instead, she took a small bite of bread, as if she were perfectly at ease and not aware that half the hall had lost interest in its meal.
Murdoch leaned back. “Ye are far from Fraser land.”
“I noticed. The roads were most determined tae explain it tae me.”
“MacKenzie land isnae gentle.”
“Nor is a forced wedding, yet I survived that before breakfast.”
Silence struck. It was perhaps too much.
Elspeth knew it the moment the words left her.
A woman in polite society did not name humiliation aloud.
She let it sit behind fans, letters, and closed doors.
But the hall had spoken of her already in whispers.
She would not pretend not to hear the shape of them.
Colin’s cup touched the table. That small sound somehow carried. Murdoch’s gaze flicked to him, then back to Elspeth. Whatever he saw in Colin’s face persuaded him not to answer at once.
Breac stepped in with admirable smoothness. “The road from St. Andrews is poor after rain.”
Elspeth turned to him, grateful and annoyed to be grateful. “More like an instrument of punishment disguised as geography.”
That earned a low laugh from somewhere nearby. She looked down the table. A younger man quickly lowered his eyes to his plate.
Good.
Laughter, even reluctant laughter, was better than pity.
Servants brought venison in dark sauce, oatcakes, butter, stewed leeks, roasted onions, and a dish of small fish slivered with herbs.
Elspeth thought herself too tense to eat, but hunger had no respect for tragedy.
She accepted what was placed before her and ate carefully, while conversations rose in cautious waves around them.
Still, the tests continued.
An older woman across the table observed, without looking directly at Elspeth. “Fraser ladies are more used tae softer halls, I imagine.”
Elspeth set down her cup. “A hall need nae be soft if its manners are.”
The woman looked up sharply. Elspeth smiled again. This one was sweeter and therefore, more dangerous.
A man farther down made another comment. “Soft manners willnae stop a blade.”
“Nay,” Elspeth replied. “But poor ones invite one.”
Breac made a sound suspiciously like surrender into his ale.
Colin’s gaze rested on her profile. She felt it as surely as if he had touched her cheek.
The strange thing was that he didn’t interrupt.
He didn’t defend her with thunderous male authority, though she sensed he would have done so had she faltered.
Instead, he let her answer. He trusted her to draw her own blood… or theirs.
The thought unsettled her almost as much as the warmth rising beneath it.
A servant refilled her cup. Elspeth thanked the girl, and the girl looked startled by the courtesy before dropping a small, nervous curtsy. That, too, Elspeth noticed. The servants were watching differently than the councilmen. With curiosity, aye, but also hope, caution, perhaps even fear.
Elspeth softened her voice. “What is yer name?”
The girl blinked. “Mairi, me lady.”
“Thank ye, Mairi.”
It was a small thing, almost nothing, yet the girl’s face warmed before she hurried away.
Then, Colin’s hand moved beneath the table.
For a wild instant, Elspeth thought he meant to touch her.
Instead, he reached for his knife. Still, the awareness shot through her so swiftly that her breath caught.
She took another sip of wine to conceal it and cursed him silently for existing so near.
Dinner went on. Questions came wrapped as remarks.
Remarks came sharpened as questions: Had she ever been this far north before?
Did she find the keep grim? Did Fraser women all speak so boldly?
Had her father truly not informed her? Did she understand that MacKenzie lands were not a courtly game?
Did she know what enemies this clan had?
To each, Elspeth returned what was required.
“As for enemies,” she replied, turning back to the table, “I married intae them before I was offered soup. I shall learn quickly.”
The hall quieted. This time the silence was different. Colin leaned back in his chair, and for the first time that evening Elspeth allowed herself to glance fully at him.
Pride.
It was there, though he hid it poorly beneath that grim MacKenzie stillness. His eyes held hers across the small distance between their chairs, and the approval in them was not indulgent. It did not pat her head or make a pet of her defiance. It recognized it.
That recognition struck somewhere deep in her, where anger had been keeping watch. She looked away first, not because she was defeated, but because she feared she might soften.
The meal ended with spiced pears and oat biscuits she scarcely tasted.
By then the hall no longer stared quite so greedily.
Some still whispered. Some still measured her.
Murdoch remained suspicious, though now with the wary respect one gave a knife found hidden in a sleeve.
Breac, she thought, decided to be amused by her, which was not acceptance but might be made useful.
When the final dishes were cleared, Colin stood. The room quieted instantly.
“Me wife,” he announced, and the two words passed through the hall like a drawn line, “is lady of this house. She is tae be treated as such.”
Elspeth’s spine stiffened. Every face turned to her again. She could feel resentment in some, curiosity in others, a few grudging nods from those who valued strength wherever it appeared.
Colin’s gaze swept the room once. No man spoke. Then he offered Elspeth his hand.
She looked at it. To refuse would be satisfying for a heartbeat and foolish for longer. To accept would tell the room she had yielded… unless she made it clear she had not.
She placed her fingers lightly in his and rose as though granting him a favor. His thumb brushed once over her knuckles. Her breath caught, and she hated him for noticing.
As they left the hall, whispers began again behind them. She was afraid. She was far from home. She did not know whether her mother lived safely, whether Robert Munro would strike again, or whether the man beside her would prove enemy, husband, or something far more dangerous.
But she would not be small for them. She would not bow beneath their curiosity. If the MacKenzies wished to test their bought bride, then they would learn this much first: Elspeth Fraser had not chosen to come among them, but neither had she arrived empty-handed.
She brought her fear.
She brought her fury.
And she brought a tongue sharp enough to make even Highland suspicion bleed.