Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
By morning, Elspeth had formed the decided opinion that pleasure was a most inconvenient discovery.
It did not behave as a proper revelation ought.
It did not arrive, declare itself, and then take up some orderly residence in the mind where it might be considered at leisure.
No. It crept into the body, left warmth where there ought to have been composure, and returned at the most unsuitable moments with no respect whatever for breakfast, servants, or moral dignity.
She woke before Skye came to draw the curtains and lay very still beneath the coverlet, staring at the canopy. Her skin remembered too much. Her mouth remembered Colin’s mouth. Her hands, treacherous things, remembered reaching for him and being stopped.
That will be fer another time.
Elspeth turned onto her side and buried her face in the pillow.
She had asked him. Worse than that, she had not been made to ask. She had chosen it. She stood in his study, with her shawl falling from one shoulder and shame burning her face, and she asked her husband to show her what another woman’s pleasure looked like from within.
A proper woman might have fainted after such a request. Elspeth had not fainted. She had done something far less respectable.
She had enjoyed being answered.
The thought drew a sound from her that was half groan, half protest. Skye, entering at that very moment with a basin of warm water, paused upon the threshold.
“Are ye ill, me lady?”
“Nay,” Elspeth said into the pillow.
“Are ye certain?”
“I am morally injured.”
Skye set down the basin. “Shall I fetch the healer?”
“Only if he has a cure fer humiliation.”
“I dinnae think he daes.”
“Then he is of nay use tae me.”
Skye, who had known her too long to be frightened by dramatic ailments, merely opened the shutters. Morning entered in a pale, bright wash, touching the rushes, the carved chest, the folded gown laid out for the feast, and the place beside Elspeth’s bed where no husband had slept.
That absence should have relieved her. Instead, it sat in the room like an unasked question.
Colin had escorted her back to the chamber after the study and left her at the door with all the dreadful courtesy of a man who had not, a quarter of an hour before, ruined the peace of her body.
He had not come to bed. Or if he had, he had done so after she had at last surrendered to a shallow, restless sleep, and vanished before dawn like a thief too proud to steal anything he had not already unsettled.
At breakfast, she understood the campaign to be mutual.
Colin was present in the hall, which was worse than if he had been absent.
He stood near the hearth speaking with Breac and Murdoch, with one hand resting upon the back of a chair, his dark head bent slightly as he listened.
He looked composed, severe, and entirely untroubled by the fact that his wife could no longer see his hands without recalling what they had done.
Elspeth entered with Skye and immediately looked away.
Unfortunately, looking away required deciding where to look instead, and the Great Hall offered very few objects as safe as they had been the day before.
The long tables were being prepared for the later feast. Women passed with baskets of oatcakes and cloths, while men carried casks toward the outer yard.
Everywhere there was movement, noise, anticipation.
Everywhere there was Colin, never near enough to speak without intention, but near enough to be seen, near enough to be felt.
He crossed the hall twice and never looked her way until he did, and then Elspeth wished he had not.
His gaze touched her with no outward heat, no smile, no hint that midnight had existed.
That cold restraint cut more deeply than wickedness would have done.
So he regretted it. The conclusion arrived swift and sharp.
Of course he did. Men such as Colin could look upon desire as one more appetite to command.
He answered her curiosity because she was his wife, because he took it upon himself to instruct her, because perhaps he found her ignorance amusing.
But by daylight, with his clan in motion and his duties pressing upon him, she was again a complication bought before witnesses and defended because honor required it.
Elspeth took her seat and stirred a bowl of porridge until it became an object of pity.
“Will ye eat that,” Skye murmured, “or beat it intae surrender?”
“I am considering both.”
Across the hall, Colin laughed at something Breac said. It was not loud. It was not even especially cheerful. But it existed, and it had not been given to her. Elspeth hated that this mattered.
She spent the morning avoiding him with such determination that even those who had no interest in domestic matters might have noticed she was always entering a room just as her husband left it, and leaving one just as his shadow darkened the threshold. If Colin noticed, he did not stop her.
That hurt most of all.
By afternoon, the castle had emptied itself toward the meadow as if the walls could no longer contain its need for relief.
After smoke, blood, prison walls, and the ugly whisper of Munro’s name, the feast seemed less an indulgence than an act of defiance.
The meadow lay beyond the lower slope, green from recent rain, bordered by rowan trees and heather, with the mountains rising dark and watchful in the distance.
Long boards had been set upon trestles. Cloths snapped in the breeze.
There were roasted meats, trout laid with herbs, oatcakes stacked beneath linen, cheeses, honey, berries, and great pots of stew fragrant with barley, onion, and pepper.
Smoke from cooking fires mingled with the sweeter scents of crushed grass and heather bloom.
A fiddler tuned his instrument near a circle of young men already arguing over whose feet would disgrace the clan once music began.
Elspeth walked beside Colin because custom demanded it, and perhaps because the entire castle seemed to have arranged itself so that they could do nothing else.
He offered her his arm. She took it, because refusing before half the clan would have made her appear wounded, and she would rather have stepped into a bog than let anyone think Colin MacKenzie had the power to wound her.
“Ye are quiet,” he told her.
“How fortunate that one of us has achieved variety of emotion.”
His mouth moved almost imperceptibly. “Are ye angry?”
“Why should I be angry?”
“That wasnae an answer.”
“It was an invitation fer ye tae consider yer sins and select the most likely.”
“Only one?”
“Begin where ye feel strongest.”
He looked ahead, but she saw the brief shadow of amusement in his expression. She had wanted him to laugh, and because she wanted it, she resented him for nearly doing so.
As they stepped into the meadow, the clan turned toward them.
The cheer that rose was not polished. It was not the delicate applause of halls where ladies praised one another’s sleeves while judging their fortunes.
It was rough, warm, and full-bodied. Men lifted cups.
Women smiled openly. Children shouted Colin’s name, then hers, though some mangled Lady Elspeth into something much less dignified.
She found, to her own surprise, that the sound moved her.
These people had lost a man. They had seen smoke and danger. They knew an enemy waited beyond the hills. Yet here they were, determined to eat, sing, compete, and laugh as if joy itself were a shield hammered from stubborn Highland hearts.
Colin’s arm shifted beneath her hand. Only then did she realize she had tightened her grip.
“Dinnae look so pleased,” she murmured without looking at him. “It will make ye unbearable.”
“I am told I manage that without assistance.”
“A rare talent.”
They were greeted by older clanswomen who pressed food upon Elspeth as if thinness were a moral failing.
A little girl with dark braids offered her a chain of daisies.
Breac bowed with excessive gravity and declared the day would go down in history if their laird could pass three hours among his people without frightening the bread into staleness.
Murdoch, less smiling but not unfriendly, informed Elspeth that there would be archery later and asked whether Frasers could shoot straight.
“Only when properly provoked,” she answered.
“I shall stand elsewhere, then.”
“That would be wise.”
Colin watched the exchange with that unreadable expression which made her want to shake him, kiss him, and strike him with a trencher in equal measure.
The games began soon after. There were contests of strength, which men approached with the solemnity of priests handling sacred relics, though the sacred relic in question was usually a large stone or an even larger log.
Boys raced across the grass, falling over one another and rising muddied but triumphant.
Women judged a baking contest with ferocity enough to settle borders.
A group of young men competed at throwing knives at a painted board, while old men nearby explained loudly how much better it had been done in their youth.
Elspeth ought to have enjoyed herself without complication. Indeed, she tried.
She tasted honeyed berries. She admired a child’s carved wooden horse.
She applauded when Breac won a wrestling match and laughed when his opponent insisted the grass betrayed him.
Yet wherever she went, Colin’s presence followed.
If she crossed toward the singers, she felt his gaze upon her.
If a young man bowed too long while offering her a cup, Colin appeared beside her before the man finished speaking.
If she stepped near the edge of the crowd, one of his guards shifted casually closer.
It seemed as though the man had marked the world around her and made it answer to him. Elspeth told herself she found this insulting. Her pulse refused to agree.