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“Good morning,” she said, flushed from the ride, before taking her seat.
Head lowered, she did not look at her sister. Had not been able to meet her best friend’s eyes since they had gathered again in London.
“I am worried about you,” the younger woman started, a puzzled frown on her face.
At that, Catriona snapped her attention to her. “How so?”
“I don’t know…you are different, somehow,” she said tentatively.
Their mother had also been eyeing her elder daughter quizzically for three weeks. “There’s nothing to worry about, Anne.” Catriona tried to imprint a casual tone to her voice, but did not succeed much. The pressure inside was becoming too unbearable.
“Then why are you so quiet…so distant, distracted?” Clearly, she missed her elder sister’s companionship and warmth.
“It’s nothing.” The lie too clear for effect.
Catriona would have to carry the burden of her mistakes alone. She would not allow anyone to suffer for them. Her choices led to this, and she must take the consequences on her own.
“It’s not nothing and you know it!” the girl said with exasperation.
At least, said consequences would not get more serious than they already were. Her menses came during the trip back though she and Fingal had followed nature’s designs to a T.
“It’s just—” Catriona halted, took a sip of tea to moisten her dry throat, “just that I miss Scotland. No more than that.” A half-truth must be better than a lie.
“Oh, sister mine!” Anna stood up from her place and came to hug Catriona, intending to offer solace.
The tender gesture did what no wild ride had accomplished so far—it brought tears to her eyes. The dam cracked, and it all poured out of her emotionally exhausted self. Anna murmured words of support as the crisis drew its course.
For the first time in weeks, she was able to look her sister in the eye. “Anne, you’re such a precious friend,” she said.
The blonde girl smiled. “Let’s do something amusing today,” she proposed. “I got an idea!” She brightened instantly, in her light-hearted way. “Let’s do a puppet theatre. What do you think? Mama could take part, too.”
Puppet theatres were fun with Anna and would serve to take her mind from the last weeks’ events. “A delightful suggestion, I’d say.”
After finishing their breakfast, they headed to the library to prepare their entertainment.
“This isn’t how you do it, Dave,” Fingal irritably scolded as he had been doing to each and every stable hand for more or less three weeks.
“You shovel the dirt like this.” He showed him with a furious, barely contained energy. They were in one of the stables, a rain that would not relent flogging the roof.
It had started the day after the…the…she left and had not lifted since. It was as if the damned woman took the sun with her. Which she very well might have because everything seemed to have become dull, colourless. Soulless.
From the moment his eye opened in the stable that morning to register her absence, something snapped in him. No matter what he did, his damned mood would not mend. He tried everything. Ride Fiadhaich full speed, tick. Cold dips in that full-of-memories loch, tick. Work like a war prisoner, tick.
Thinking of it, he should not have returned to the loch, another thing in a long list for which she spoiled him. The stockyard, tick.
The damned adjoining shed, tick. Wine, tick, because she had splashed him with it.
Every single cursed thing.
The lad stood with him, seeming at a loss what to do. “You go help Craig. I’ll finish here,” he said because he needed to be alone. Again.
“Aye, my laird,” the boy assented and left with a too-relieved expression.
Fingal worked on this and the other stable chores like the hounds of hell chased after him. He worked until he had no choice but to return to his manor where the endless string of memories would haunt him throughout the night.
Rain-soaked, cold, and glowering, he strode to the study in search of the warm—and fleeting—solace whisky would offer. Bursting through the door, he aimed at the sideboard, pouring a more than generous dose.
“They say you’ve been intractable these days,” Drostan said from behind him.
