“There was a man in me chamber with a knife.”
“Aye, there was.” Kate’s chin lifted. “And ye’re runnin’.”
“That isnaefair.”
“Nay, it isnae,” Kate agreed. “And I daenae care in the slightest, because ye’re the only friend I’ve had in half a year and ye’releavin’ me in a castle full of folk that talk to me like I’m dyin’.” Her eyes were bright now. “So I’ll be unfair. I’ve earned a bit of unfair, I should think.”
Olivia had no answer.
Kate crossed the room and put the baby in her arms without a word. Rosie fisted a hand in Olivia’s hair, pressed her warm face into her neck, and stayed there.
Olivia stood in the middle of the floor holding her niece and understood, with a completeness that cut the legs out from under her, exactly what she was about to give up.
“There,” Kate said, her voice cracking at last. “Now ye ken.”
Olivia slept badly, woke before the bell, and went down to the hall in the grey dark because she had decided in the small hours that she would say it. Whatever it was. She would stand in front of him and open her mouth and let whatever came out of it come out.
The hall was empty.
“He’s away to the low fields, me Lady,” said a maid, not unkindly, but she would not look at her. “He went out afore the light.”
Olivia stood for a long moment in the cold grey hall.
“Aye,” she said. “Of course he did.”
She had not known. That was the cruelty of it. She had come to Cairn hating it, counting the walls of her prison, and somewhere in the counting, the prison had become, without her leave, the nearest she had to a home left in the world.
Kate wept.
“Ye will write to me,” Kate said fiercely into her shoulder. “Ye made me speak, Olivia Crawford, when I’d given up speakin’ for good. Ye willnae now vanish off down the glen and leave me to go quiet again. I willnae allow it. Ye will write.”
“I will write.”
“And ye’ll come back to us.”
Olivia could not promise her that. So she said nothing, and held her, and grieved.
The baby was worse. Rosie did not understand goodbyes, only that her favorite person was holding her too tight and her face had gone all wet. She patted Olivia’s cheeks with both fat hands and frowned her small grave frown, and Olivia kissed her dark curls and breathed her in one last time and handed her back before she lost her nerve altogether.
Tattie pressed his great head against her knees and would not be moved. He let out a long, heartbroken groan, for he knew, as dogs often did, that she was leaving.
Maisie held her face in two soft, ancient hands and looked at her with those mischievous, knowing eyes gone sad for once, and said, “He’s a fool, me grandson. The biggest fool God ever made out of good Highland clay. But he is worth the wait, lass, if ye ever find ye can bear to wait. Mind that wherever ye go.”
Ragnall did not even come to say goodbye.
Olivia told herself she had not looked for him. She climbed into the litter they had readied, her shoulder stiff and aching, with Kate and Maisie, and one great mournful dog, and Greer, the round kitchen maid who had brought up her food every day of that black week and who was now weeping into her apron without the least attempt to hide it, to see her off, and she did not look up at the high black window in the study, and she did not let herself wonder whether he stood behind it.
“Whisht, lass,” Maisie said, without much conviction. “Ye’ll set the dog off.”
Olivia did not look up at the high black window. She was aware of it the way one was aware of a fire at one’s back. She knew exactly where it was, and how high, and how black. She did not look, because if she looked and found it empty, something in her might simply stop, and if she looked and found it not empty, she would have to climb back out of the litter, and she had spent the last of her courage getting into it.
“He isnae comin’ down, is he?” she asked.
Maisie’s old hand closed hard over hers on the rail. “Nay, lass,” she said. “He isnae.”
And that was the whole of the goodbye she got from her husband.
At the bend in the road, the place where the glen turned and Cairn would forever disappear out of sight, Olivia did the one thing she had sworn to herself she would not do.
