Chapter 27
“There’s a cèilidh tomorrow night at the Arms, a community gathering,” Isobel informed Nate one particularly lovely afternoon. She’d brought him a cool drink as he worked, staying to talk, which had turned to another walk upon the heugh. “Although likely you’ll have heard that.”
“Aye.” He’d become friendly with some of the men.
They’d been suspicious of him at first, showing up out of the blue like he had and English besides.
Protective of Isobel and Lucy, mainly, who’d been embraced into the tight-knit community despite not having grown up in it.
But as time wore on, he’d proved himself to them.
Evenings sharing pints and swapping stories had gone a ways towards that.
He couldn’t speak of the years between Badajoz and Compton’s death, but he found he had stories of his own to contribute from the two decades of his life before that.
“It’s a musical evening,” Isobel told him. “Or rather, there will be music. Those who play are encouraged to bring instruments.”
“I am sorry to disappoint you,” he said drily, “but I haven’t an instrument to bring.”
Her laugh was merry. “You’re more than welcome anyway. Likely I will sing. I so wish that Lucy would . . .” Her mouth flattened, then tipped down at the corners.
“Would sing?” he guessed.
“I’ve always been the one to sing,” she said. “Da’s nightingale. But Lucy can play the fiddle beautifully. Or could. She has not touched it since our return from France. She will not. And she will not say why. I have not tried to force the issue, although it has been hard. I’ve wondered . . .”
“You’ve wondered . . .?” he asked gently.
She startled; she’d been lost in her thoughts sufficient to forget him momentarily.
“I’ve wondered if it has to do with music being something we shared with Maman and Da.
It was such a large part of our childhood.
A happy part. Maman had quite a lovely voice, which it turns out passed to me, at least somewhat.
Da was partial to fiddle music, although he was no proficient.
” She was smiling again, fondly. “But Lucy . . . She picked up a fiddle one day as a young child, and it was clear from the start that she had a gift for it, something inborn that couldn’t be taught.
Until I married and left home, she and I would regularly perform together at entertainments.
She would play, and I would sing. They are dear memories, and I only wish— But that’s it, I believe.
She will not speak of Maman’s and Da’s deaths, which came while she was .
. . gone. And she will have nothing to do with music now. ”
“Perhaps with time.” He wished he had more to offer than rote words.
“Perhaps.” She looked unconvinced. “They do say time heals all wounds. Or is it that time changes all?” She gave a soft laugh. “I suppose it all amounts to the same thing in the end. My own wounds, such as they were, are healing, so perhaps in time hers will as well.”
He hoped so, for both their sakes.
“I am healing. I no longer have near so many nightmares,” she said. “A sign of moving on from that period of my own life, don’t you think? There is still the occasional one, still just as dreadful when it comes, but they have come less and less frequently.”
“I am glad to hear it.” Holding her, waking with her after her nightmare, had been the beginning of his emotional .
. . awakening, he supposed one might call it for lack of a better word.
It had softened him. Or maybe it had only revealed some softness already there that he’d thought long gone after the grueling years with the Rifles and what followed.
“Perhaps someday they will stop altogether.” She paused. “I have remembered more than once your kindness. The comfort and understanding you lent me. And those memories bring me some comfort still, when the nightmares come.”
He might have said truthfully that it was his pleasure, then and now, but it would have been a strange comment and didn’t quite fit the tenor of the conversation. He didn’t wish to leave her words unacknowledged, but he wasn’t sure what to say.
She spoke before he could, smiling a little. “Do you know, it was the first I’d not felt fundamentally alone in some time. Waking with you that morning after I’d had such terrible dreams.”
It was that for him too. That, exactly. Waking with her in his arms. Liking it for no other reason than that holding her had brought him peace. “Aye,” he said softly. “I could say the same.”
Birds were wheeling and diving in the sky, far out over the firth. He tracked them for a time before asking something he’d wondered at since the conversation that morning when she told him of Jamie’s death.
“Why did you remain so long in Brussels after Waterloo?” Rather than returning to a family who loved her, whom she loved in return. Surely tending the wounded had contributed to her nightmares given how she’d described the one to him in France.
Isobel drew up her knees and hugged them to her chest, resting her chin atop one as she gazed out at the water.
“At the time, I could not have articulated my reasons for staying. Certainly I did not do much by way of introspection in those days. Most days I merely put one foot before the other, lived through each next breath.”
She ducked the curve of her cheek against her sleeve.
“But more recently, since coming here with Lucy, I’ve had time to consider it.
Among other things.” The breeze teased strands of hair from around her face and carried faint traces of her soap underlaid by the brine of the sea.
It struck him like a blow, how precious those small details were.
“I suppose I found purpose in tending the wounded,” she said contemplatively.
“And in that, there was comfort. Even when it was at times horribly sad. Perhaps I also needed solitude in some capacity. My grief was too fresh to share. And I also no longer knew who I was, in some fundamental way, because I couldn’t envision what came next.
Perhaps I was trying to find my way to some new understanding of myself.
” Her dimple showed. “Although I must say that any progress I made with regards to that was rather obliterated during my time in France. It was there that I realized I did not know myself yet at all.”
“I’ve had to learn myself anew as well,” he said. “Or rather, I’ve been somewhat adrift these past few months. I’ve told you I travelled to Kent before coming here?”
“Yes,” she said. “Although you didn’t say what you hoped to find there.”
“Truthfully, I’m not certain. Answers, I suppose.” But even then, that cold day in the churchyard, he’d not known to what.
The seeds of his dissatisfaction, however vague, were sown even before the affair with Compton fell into his hands.
He’d become aware of it on some level by the early stages of the operation.
Amélie had noted a change in him, had urged caution.
She’d been worried that he was less attentive to his own safety even as he did his job with diligence.
Baudelaire offered cautions of his own, serious in rare moments.
Quinn had remarked on it after Compton’s death.
“And were there?” Isobel prompted. “Answers?”
“Aye, maybe. It was while I was there that I decided to come here.”
Isobel turned her head so she looked more directly at him. In the sunlight sparkling off the firth, her eyes were several shades lighter than her blue dress. “And that was an answer to something?”
He let the smile creep from the corner of his mouth to something broader, rusty but genuine. “Aye.”
Her answering smile was more in her eyes set aglow than on her lips.
“Have you found the new understanding of yourself you’ve needed?” he asked, picking up the earlier conversational thread.
“I am still working on it. I suppose that is everyone’s plight though, is it not?
For life never stays the same. We are presented with challenges, some we expect but some we can in no way foresee.
So we must respond to them as best we can.
Sometimes we come through them but little changed.
But sometimes . . .” She shrugged. “Sometimes we are fundamentally altered. I could not have foreseen anything to do with my travel to France or with becoming entangled in your operation. With . . . you.” Her color was high.
“As for what passed between us there—” She stopped. Shook her head.
It was the first either of them had broached it directly. He wished very much to know what she’d been about to say. “Have you regrets? About any of it?”
“Certainly not about doing what was necessary to find Lucy—for here she is, with me. I believe I could have accepted any necessity to bring that about. Although I had not conceived it possible that I was capable of intrigues or subterfuge of that nature. But I was, and I did, and the end result is more than I’d truly dared hope possible. ”
He thought at first that was all she intended to say for she fell silent.
He considered his own possible conversational forays about what had passed between them when she said suddenly, “I do not in the least regret what passed between us. Between you and me, privately. That too I could not have imagined—” She broke off again, color high.
“But I welcomed it. Very much. And I did not and have not regretted any of it.”
He drew a lungful of air, having a response to that, at least. “Nor have I.”
“Sometimes it has seemed almost a dream,” she said. “Going about my life here these past few months. Until the day I saw you walking towards me on the path, and I knew I had not dreamed you.”
They’d both shifted during the last minute of the conversation.
Bodies closer, leaning towards one another like flowers seeking the sun’s warmth.
He closed what little remained of the distance, but it was her mouth that found his first. Her lips were cool, but inside her mouth was wet heat that drew him like a bee to nectar.
The soft sound she made when their tongues touched set a frisson up his spine.
She leaned further in, arms going around his shoulders. He stroked down her spine, around to her waist, drawing her in to cradle her in his arms before lowering her to the grass beneath him to kiss her more thoroughly.
This . . . This was the truth he’d sought. One of them, anyway. And possibly also the answer.
Isobel enjoyed the evenings when local residents gathered at the Arms, sharing music and verse and community.
Cèilidhean were infrequent, particularly as daylength and sunlight became more conducive to extended hours of outdoors work, but it was always a welcome chance to socialize with neighbors outside of church, and it fostered a real sense of community.
She felt more and more that she and Lucy truly had a place here.
She did not miss London. Until her return from Flanders, she’d not lived in London other than rare times when Jamie’s postings did not allow for her to join him.
Her parents and Lucy had moved from Kirkcudbright to London nearly four years after her marriage, seeking other doctors for Maman as her health worsened and the most educated doctors in Edinburgh pronounced her unlikely to ever get well.
Da was unwilling to accept that. He’d made the monumental decision to relocate again.
It had done Maman no good in the end, but it had at least offered Lucy a chance to study with some renowned violin instructors.
She was quite gifted and had loved playing.
It was all the more puzzling that she so adamantly refused to do so now.
Often Lucy did not even attend the musical nights, although to her knowledge, Lucy had never been made to feel unwelcome. She hoped each time that perhaps this time, this cèilidh, would be the night her sister not only came but took up her fiddle once again. But it was never so.
Herself, she’d loved singing as far back as she could remember, hence Da’s pet name of nightingale. Mo spideag, he’d called her, always singing. She’d had formal lessons, but she’d most loved casual social gatherings just like the one she attended tonight.
Jamie’s family was of the peerage, as were most of the Greys’ regimental officers and their wives.
It was something of an unwelcome surprise to discover that although ladies were expected to demonstrate some degree of proficiency in a musical art, and even to display it at social gatherings, it was more performative than joyous.
During the years of her marriage, music became less pleasurable and more prescriptive.
Now she was again in a community that valued sharing music with others for the sheer joy that doing so entailed.
She would have been surprised if Nathaniel revealed a hidden proficiency for an instrument, despite his many other talents, and he didn’t seem of a nature to sing in front of others. He was quiet, still often every bit as inscrutable as he’d been in France.
Hardly dour, though. He’d formed friendships with a few of the men in the village; they stopped by to help with repairs on the crofter’s cottage, and he helped them sometimes with stake nets and the like, a communal give-and-take. He went some evenings for pints at the Arms.
He’d come along tonight too. They’d not been at the Arms long when Mr. Bairden shouted over to her in a lull, “Will ye favor us wi’ a song, Mrs. Graham?”
“It would be my pleasure.” She smiled at him, coming to her feet. “Have you any requests?”
“Ye sang a Rabbie Burns song one o’ th’ lest times I’ve a mind to hear agin. ’Twas aboot twa lovers wha’ were pairting. Whit was th’ name o’ it?”
She cast her mind back as that only narrowed Robert Burns’s extensive repertoire slightly. “Perhaps ‘Ae Fond Kiss’?”
“Aye, ’twas that ’un. Will ye sing us it agin?”
“Of course.” She smiled again, but her heart rate kicked up. It was a pretty song that she enjoyed singing. It certainly wasn’t that she was nervous to sing in front of others. The lyrics though . . . It was a song of separating from one’s love, likely forever.
Well, Mr. Bairden had requested the song, and she’d agreed. There was nothing for it now. She took up a place near the front.
The kiss on the heugh yesterday felt powerful and true.
Gentle and tender, just as Nathaniel himself was, and so very right.
It had been in her mind afterwards to ask him if they might become lovers again, but her courage failed her in the end.
She’d been brave enough in France to ask for—no, to demand—what it was she wanted, but they were no longer in that place out of time.
She drew a deep breath, hands on her diaphragm, and sang the opening lines:
“Ae fond kiss and then we sever,
“Ae fareweel, and then forever,
“Deep in heart-wrung tears . . .”
Nathaniel’s dark eyes branded her as she sang. She felt them, although she looked anywhere but at him. Let him make of the words what he would; she must do the same.