She had grown up hearing that word a lot of times. The people around her had used it with soft voices and harsh hands. Her older sister, Hannah, had once watched her every breathbecause illness had made her fragile enough to frighten the people who loved her.
That had been love, and still it had felt like being wrapped too tightly to breathe.
Laird Moore did not love her. He did not know her. He had simply decided that keeping her was useful, so now his castle would become another place where her choices were rearranged by someone stronger.
What was new?
A woman appeared around the corner, walking with careful steps. Violet recognized her at once.
Moira. The nursemaid.
Moira stopped a few paces away. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and her face held caution, guilt, and a firmness Violet could not easily despise.
“I owe ye an apology,” Moira said.
Violet folded her arms. “For having me dragged to the dungeons?”
“For frightening ye, nae for stopping ye.”
“How generous.”
Moira accepted the blow without lowering her eyes. “There is a bairn upstairs who had already been left once. I wasnae about to let a stranger carry him away.”
Violet’s anger caught. It should have been easy to hate her. It would have been cleaner, but the answer was too close to the one she herself would have given if a strange woman had tried to take Jane’s son under her watch.
“I am nae a stranger to him,” she said quietly.
“Everyone is a stranger to him. He is a bairn.”
The guard looked between them, clearly hoping someone would decide what he should do.
Moira turned to him. “The Laird said she may be taken upstairs?”
“Aye. Shown around.”
Moira looked back at Violet. “Then come with me. Ye wanted to see the bairn.”
Every angry thought in Violet’s head vanished, and her fingers tightened against her sleeve. “Now?”
“Aye. Before anyone changes their mind.”
Violet followed.
The climb from the dungeons into the warmer corridors of Moore Castle felt longer than it had any right to. The servants slowed down when they saw her, then remembered themselves and moved on. A pair of maids whispered near a stairwell until Moira looked at them and they scattered at once.
Violet barely took in the castle. Stone passages. Stone walls underfoot and the smell of peat smoke. There was even a wall hanging with faded red thread. None of it held long enough to matter. Her mind was focused on the child somewhere upstairs.
Her hand brushed the place where Jane’s blue cloth remained hidden beneath her bodice. She had not shown it to anyone. Not yet. Some promises were too tender to lay before strangers.
“What do ye call him?” Violet asked.
Moira glanced back. “The bairn, mostly. Wee lad, when he’s cross.”
Violet swallowed. “He has no name.”
“Nae yet.”
“His mother didnae have time.”
