“White heather,” said Elspeth.
“For luck,” Maisie agreed. “And a sprig of rowan pinned under the hem where nay one can see it.”
“For what?”
“For luck,” said Maisie serenely, “of the sort ye daenae talk about in front of a priest.”
Anne consulted her list. “And a sixpence in the shoe?”
“That’s an English thing,” said Maisie, with vast contempt.
“It’s a lucky thing.”
“It’s an English thing,” Maisie repeated, and Elspeth laughed into her sewing.
Olivia sat in the middle of the warm room with her hands lying useless in her lap and understood, with a kind of horror, that she was enjoying herself.
That was the trouble with the whole business. She had come here to be miserable and hated. She had beenfully preparedto be miserable and hated. She had, in fact, been rather looking forward to the purity of it.
Instead, her mother was arguing amiably about the heather with the grandmother of the man who had killed her husband, and Anne was writing lists, and a baby with Blythe-blue eyes was gumming the corner of her slipper, and the whole thing was so far past bearing that she had to go and stand at the window for a moment and breathe.
That was when she saw him.
He was down in the inner court with Alastair, both of them stripped to their shirts, and he had a sword in his hand and was not using it. He was standing quite still, with his back halftoward her, listening to whatever his man-at-arms was saying, and then his head turned and tilted up, and he looked directly at the solar window.
Olivia did not move. It would have been an admission.
He did not move either. The blade hung forgotten in his hand, and for a long moment, they simply looked at one another across forty feet of open air. She could not read one single thing in his face, and she had the distinct and unwelcome sense that he was reading a great many things in hers.
Then Alastair said something, and Ragnall turned back to him, and the moment closed like a hand.
“He’s been at that all week,” said Maisie from the fire, without looking up.
“At what?”
“Findin’ reasons to be under that window.” The old woman turned a page of the psalter she was pretending to read. “He’s nearly worn a track in me courtyard. I have half a mind to charge him rent.”
“Maisie.”
“Aye, lass?”
“Ye’re a wicked auld woman.”
“Aye,” said Maisie, deeply pleased. “It’s the one thing I’ve kept me whole life, and I’ll thank ye nae to take it off me now.”
Anne looked up from her list, pushed her spectacles up her nose, and then looked back down at it. Olivia had known her long enough to know exactly what that meant, and could have cheerfully strangled her for it.
The dress came up in the evening, finished at last, the seamstress having sat over the hem with a candle for two nights running to let it out where the measurements had been guessed at wrong.
Her room had filled itself while she was still downstairs. Her mother was there, and Anne, and Maisie, and a soft clutch of maids, and Rosie, awake again and propped bright-eyed on Maisie’s knee, and laid out across the width of the bed in all its quiet glory was the gown.
It was not white. The Scots did not hold with white for a bride, and Olivia was glad of it. Instead, it was the deep, soft, living blue of a loch at dusk, with her own clan’s thread worked fine and careful all along the hem and the cuffs.
Someone in this keep had clearly labored over it in secret for days on end, for it was, without any contest, the bonniest thing Olivia had ever owned in her life.
It had been finished too late in the day to be tried, and too near the wedding to be left untried, and so it had come up the stairs to her by candlelight with half the household trailing behind it.
“Try it on,” her mother begged, her voice thick. “Och, just once, lass, before the mornin’ and all its crowd. It’s only just come, and if it wants takin’ in at the shoulders, there’s the whole night to do it and nae a minute after. Let me see ye in it just once, when there’s nay one but yer own to share ye with.”
