Curse her choice of words. ‘Please don’t grant him another thought!’
‘I can’t talk to Hamish, even if I wanted to,’ he continued as if he didn’t hear her. ‘Anything I say won’t erase the past, and if I said anythingat all he’d know I was his son. And that can never be.’ A drumming of his fingers as if, despite his words, he wondered what that conversation would be. ‘Useless to even think about these matters, he’s already passing.’
‘Blame me. If I had told you earlier—’
‘When I arrived? That’s an impossible circumstance. I’ll need to talk to my mother,’ Rory whispered.
‘What will that solve?’ She started to pull away, but Rory held her fast and she let him. ‘Even if you do know with certainty, it changes nothing.’
‘Changes nothing? Hamish, my father, must have raped her. She must feel some resentment for me. I came down here to read the journals, to see if there’s any evidence of my lineage. If we are to go forward, this is something that must not be known.’
She closed her eyes for two breaths. Closed them a bit more before she said, ‘Rory, I have to tell you something.’
‘There’s more?’ he said quietly. ‘I may not like these crypt talks with you, my wife.’
She was the bearer of too great a truth not to tell him, though she feared she would hurt him even more. With every bit of her body and soul, she didn’t want to hurt him more.
‘A clan has secrets and as the healer and midwife Rhona knew of them. When she was ill, she wasn’t lucid. She’d beg me to cool her fever with fire. She’d talked nonsense, and mumble details of clan members. Sometimes she’d look right through me and tell me such matters of healing import, I’d get cross with her for not telling me sooner.
‘I’d call them ramblings, but they weren’t. They were more gasps of memory between the pain. Everything she said was audibly clear, I just didn’t understand the context of what she said. Not until I met you.’
‘Me?’ Rory asked. ‘There’s more to tell about my birth, isn’t there.’
‘There’s more,’ she said. Curse her small stature for her body didn’t feel substantial enough to hold this man. Still, she wrapped herself as tightly about him as she could. Pressed every bit of who she was against him so he’d know she was there.
‘It can’t be worse than my mother raped and my father... Hamish.’
At the sounds of his hesitancy, Ailsa would have ripped her heart out and pressed that directly to his if she could have. Even so, the way she felt, the hammering of her heart and the feel of his... There was no easy way to speak of this.
‘You mother wasn’t raped,’ she said. ‘Because Helen isn’t your mother.’
She felt Rory’s heart stop for one beat, his breath stop for two more before he suddenly released both with force. It shook her as well as him. Then he slowly extricated himself from her. It was his fingers first, each lift bringing the fresh chilly air to her skin. Then one limb before another. His legs next before he shifted his body.
Until the only thing that held them together was the blanket he had over their laps. It was still tucked around her, but was slowly unravelling from him and slipping to the floor. She watched it slide down his leg, watched how he didn’t grab to secure it to him. She hoped, wished, whatever happened next that what they’d found with each other wouldn’t be so easily lost.
‘Finley is not my father,’ he said. ‘And now Helen is not my mother.’
Free from his hold, Ailsa carefully adjusted herself so that she could face him. What she saw were shadows and light flickering against his dark hair and darker eyes, and she silently cursed the lone torch he’d lit. What needed to be said next was very important and she wanted to see him! ‘You’re not questioning me.’
‘After everything, the one certainty I have is thatnothingis certain.’
Was that true for them as well? She took courage from the fact that he was still in the room with her, that he hadn’t left the bench and was instead turned towards her so they could face each other.
‘If Helen is not my mother,’ he said after another moment. ‘what are you trying to tell me? Am I to assume the McCrieff healer knew that Helen wasn’t my mother? That she talked of this? Did she...?’ He swallowed. ‘Did others hear her?’
‘No one. I was the only one to care for her. Sometimes she’d look at me, grip my arm as if demanding I know things I hadn’t before. Sometimes she told me matters she didn’t mean to tell me. When it started, I never left the room. I didn’t want her burned or tortured in her old age if her words were heard by the wrong ears. She was hurting enough as it was and I made sure no one was there when she was awake. Others took the linens and the waste pots and came and brought me food.’
‘It was just you,’ he whispered as if he couldn’t believe it to be true.
‘She wasn’t ill long, death came fast. It was just me.’ Why were they having these conversations in a crypt? No one had died, but Rory wasas pale as a ghost and she knew, in a way, she was killing his childhood.
‘You knew,’ he said and repeated, ‘You—knew. How did she?’
‘Hamish is a callous man, who used everyone around him. And he liked young girls the most. As far as I know, none of them consented. Rhona helped one of these girls, Marion, a girl from the McNeill clan, with the pregnancy and the birthing. Rhona, who must have been very young herself, said Marion’s body barely recovered from his use and the birthing was too much.’
‘Marion was my mother...and she died.’
There was no reason to repeat the truth, especially when it was cruel. ‘Rhona said her hatred kept her alive until the baby was birthed. Rhona admired hatred and especially anyone that hated Hamish. Because she was weak or maybe because Hamish didn’t care enough to know, Rhona was able to keep the pregnancy hidden.’
