"I havenae even started," she said pleasantly.
He closed the door and turned the key on his side, firmly and deliberately.
It was a sound that ought to have felt like a resolution, like a battle won, but it did not. He stood with his hand on the cold iron and the fire at his back, listening to the quiet sounds of her settling into the room beyond. The rustle of fabric. The soft clink of a basin. The low, melodic humming as she spoke to the sleeping bairn.
She was making herself at home.
He had prepared this room for her. He told himself it was practical, necessary, the only obvious choice. Now, standing in the dark of his own room with his jaw clenched and his hands trembling with repressed energy, he realized that 'obvious' carried a lot of weight in that sentence.
He released the key. He needed to find something to do.
Chapter Six
The castle woke before dawn.
Margaret knew this because she was already awake. She sat in the heavy oak chair by the window, the wood cold against her spine. Lilly was a warm, rhythmic weight against her chest, and the gray pre-light was coming slowly over the jagged ridge to the north.
She had not slept well. The room was unfamiliar, the stones held the chill of centuries, and the knowledge that Fergus was on the other side of a locked door was a sharp, persistent thought. It was the kind of thought that had no business keeping a married woman awake, and yet it had done so anyway.
Lilly had woken at some point in the small hours. She hadn't cried; she was simply awake, her large, dark eyes interested in the shifting shadows.
Margaret had lifted her without lighting a candle. They had sat together in the gloom, the bairn solid and real against her. Margaret had listened to the castle find its morning voice.
First, the kitchens, a distant clatter of iron, the muffledthudof a heavy timber door. Then boots on stone somewhere below. More than one pair. Unhurried. Then voices, low and brief. It was the kind of exchange that happened between people who had shared a thousand mornings and no longer needed to fill the air with empty words.
She thought about her mother's house in the Lowlands.
She remembered the sounds of this hour—the predictable creak of the third step and her father's dry cough behind his study door. She had missed those sounds during the first, bitter months at Dunalasdair. She stopped missing them sometime around February, when Isobel's castle had become familiar enough to have its own rhythm.
She would not think about that now. She would not look back.
By the time Lilly had gone back to sleep and Margaret had dressed and pinned her honey-colored hair into something presentable, the light had shifted. It was pale gold now, cutting through the mist. The castle was properly awake. She settled Lilly in the crib, checked her twice, and went to find Mrs. O'Halloran.
* * *
"The east corridor first," the housekeeper said.
She led Margaret along the upper landing at a pace that suggested she had been waiting for someone to take an interest in the east corridor for a long time. "The damp started two winters back. The previous Laird… well." She stopped herself, her lips thinning. "It was nae addressed."
"The stone is weepin'," Margaret said. She pressed her fingers to the wall. It was cold and slick beneath the plaster. "It needs to be fixed before the first frost, or the whole section will go, Mrs. O'Halloran."
The housekeeper looked at her sideways, her eyes widening with a flicker of respect. "Aye, me Lady. That's exactly it."
"I'll speak to the Laird about it." Margaret moved on, her boots clicking on the stone. "What else?"
The housekeeper's expression suggested this question was a gift. She began to talk.
Margaret listened. She didn't offer the polite half-attention of a woman waiting for her turn to speak. She listened with the kind of focus that stored details and connected them. She asked follow-up questions that made the housekeeper blink.
There was an issue with the roof of the north storeroom. The kitchen garden wall. The linen. The issue with the well in the lower courtyard.
"And the people," Margaret said, when they had completed the upper floor. "Tell me who they are. Nae just their names. Their stories."
Mrs. O'Halloran took a breath, her posture softening.
"Well, me Lady," the housekeeper began, her voice dropping into the rhythmic cadence of a storyteller.
"There is Donal by the gate. Ye've seen him? He was the previous Laird's master of horses before the fever took his legs and his lord. He remembers Fergus, the Laird, when he was but a whisper of a lad, though he'll nae admit to the softness of it. He's the memory of this place."
