Father’s brows rose. “I understand ye were no’ in favor o’ this marriage. Ha’ yer feelings changed?”
“Nay. But I would no’ leave a stray cat where Evan could torment it.”
“Your wife is no’ a stray cat, though perhaps fierce as one.”
Alan saw again Annista throwing herself at Evan in the chapel yesterday. She had claws like a cat, aye.
“I suspect,” Father continued weightily, “she can tak’ care o’ hersel’.”
Perhaps. But should she have to?
Father inclined his head and said in a whisper, “She is no’ her sister, that one.”
She was not. Whether or not she was Evan’s match proved still to be answered.
“I will locate her,” Alan said and left the room.
There weren’t that many places she could be. The manor was large, aye, the center oldest portion compact but the wings spreading. All empty of Annista and his mother.
With some misgiving, he climbed to the gallery and thence to Evan’s room.
He pulled the door open onto deep gloom. The chamber stank like a combination of stale ale and a piss pot. Alan half felt his way inside and saw that someone—a servant no doubt—had left a tray on a table inside the door but had not opened the drapes across the window.
Evan lay sprawled in the bed, his raked cheek uppermost. Except for the drool, he looked dead.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Alan swore under his breath.
To his surprise, Evan half opened his eyes. “Jus’ leave it.”
“What?”
“The tray.”
Evan thought he was the servant. Alan could try to set him straight, to get him up. Clean him up. But to what purpose?
He backed out of the chamber. Evan was not beleaguering his wife.
Back in the gallery, he met a maid. “Where is your mistress?”
“She was in the kitchens, Master Alan.”
The kitchens?
Aye, Mother was in the habit of showing her face there, being the sort of mistress who liked to keep a steady hand on the tiller. Harder to imagine Annista taking an interest.
But he found them there being given an account of its running by Marjorie, the cook.
Marjorie, who must by now be in her fifties, was a thin wisp of a woman, gray-eyed as a fairy and highly energetic. She’d been a widow when she came to them, back when Alan had been six or so and Evan perhaps eight. She produced good Scottish fare with very few delicacies or fancies. No one complained.
When Alan entered the big stone chamber, she was explaining how she and her girls produced ten loaves of bread and three of barm brack every other day. By “her girls” she meant the two women and one boy she had working for her, all of whom at the very kindest could only be considered plain.
It had been discovered that having bonnie maids did not work to anyone’s advantage. Even then—
Alan looked at his wife. She appeared bored.
She wore a plain gown of dusty blue and had her hair caught up under her cap so he could see very little of it. Her back—broad and strong for a woman’s—looked stiff, and what he could see of her face from the side was frozen into a parody of politeness.
Aye, bored.
