“She is better,” she said, and there was no false note anywhere in it. “Nae mended. Daenae go tellin’ yerself she’s mended. But somethin’ has shifted in her this week past, and I’ll nae lie to ye about it to spare me own feelings.” She turned the little pot of salve over in her hands. “She ate this mornin’ without bein’bid to. She asked me the day of the week. She hasnae asked me anythin’ at all since the night ye carried her up off those stones.”
Ragnall said nothing. He did not trust himself to.
“And she’s been listenin’,” Brigid continued, more slowly, as if working it out even as she said it. “That’s the part I cannae account for. She lies there with her face to the wall, and she hears every word said in that room, and I’d have sworn on me faither’s grave a month ago that she heard nothin’ at all.” A pause, and a small twist of her mouth. “It began the day yer bride came up the glen. Make of that what ye like. I’ve nay wish to hand her the credit, but I’ll nae pretend I daenae see it.”
“Then hand it grudgingly and let it stand.” Some hard knot below his ribs loosened by a degree. “Will she bear the morrow, do ye think? The crowd and the noise?”
“I will mix her a draught to settle her nerves if she will take one. She will do well enough.” Brigid wiped her hands slowly down the front of her apron and came around the end of the table. “Ye fret over the whole wide world, do ye ken that? Yer sister. The bairn who isnae yers. This ungrateful clan to the last squallin’ soul of it.”
She halted close to him, a good deal closer than the small room called for.
“And who frets over ye, Ragnall Crawford? Has there ever once been a soul to do that?”
He knew the look she wore. He had known it for a long while. There had been years, not so far behind him, when he had been glad enough to see it.
“Ye used to let me,” she said, and laid her hand flat on his chest where the laces of his shirt hung open at the throat. Her fingers were warm and sure, and they remembered the road. “Before ye decided ye were too fine and too sorrowful a man for the likes of me. I mind every inch of ye, me Laird. I’d lay good coin the wee Blythe lass cannae say the same.”
For the span of one slow heartbeat, he stood and allowed himself to feel it. The familiar warm weight of her palm. The comfort of a touch ingrained deep down.
But nothing in him responded to it. He stood in a warm, close room with a pretty woman’s hand flat on his chest, and all of his foolish mind was elsewhere—on a mouth that had become careful and then not careful at all; on a small, ruinous sound made against his lips; on a heart he felt pounding like a war drum through a borrowed silk gown.
God help me. She isnae even in the room, and still she is the only one standin’ in it.
He grasped Brigid’s wrist gently, lifted her hand away, and then released it.
“Daenae,” he said. “Daenae do that again.”
Her chin came up. “Or what?”
“Or ye’ll be plyin’ yer trade in another laird’s hall by Michaelmas, with a fair reference in yer hand and nae a single word of complaint from me.” He stepped back, and the candle flame leaned and shivered in the draft of it.
“Ragnall…”
“Ye’ve served this castle well, Brigid, as yer faither did before ye, and for that ye’ll have me thanks as long as I draw breath. But I am to be wed in the mornin’. Ye will treat me wife as yer Lady, with yer courtesy and yer hands both to yerself. That, or ye’ll find yerself another roof. There’s nay third road in it.”
He had prepared himself for her anger. Brigid had a fiery temper that he knew well, all heat and sharp words, but it cooled off just as quickly as it flared up, and he had endured a hundred such storms without a second thought the next morning.
What he got from her instead dragged a cold finger straight down his spine.
She went still. Perfectly, terribly still. Still as the whole glen went in the last held breath before the sky cracked open and the storm came roaring down off the high hills. And she looked at him with those green eyes, with not one ember of heat left in them.
“Yer wife,” she said very softly, turning the word over on her tongue as if to learn the taste of it.
“Aye, of course. Yer Lady.”
Then she smiled, slow and all wrong, returned to the table, and bent back over her grinding as if he had already left the room.
“Sleep well, me Laird. Ye’ve a grand day on the morrow.” The pestle turned, and turned, and turned. “I do hope nothin’ comes along to spoil it.”
CHAPTER 11
The morningof her wedding dawned gray and still over Cairn.
Olivia sat very straight on the stool in the middle of her borrowed chamber and let the women of two clans turn her into a bride.
Not one of them had slept. Olivia knew it by looking at her mother’s eyes, which were pink-rimmed and swollen, and at Anne’s, which had gone owlish and enormous behind her spectacles, and from the fact that Maisie had twice called for tea and twice forgotten she had asked for it.
They had sat up half the night over a hem and a scandal and a girl who had walked out of a room in her wedding gown and come back an hour later saying that Kate had spoken, and after that, sleep had not been on offer to anybody.
