“That’s the muniment room. Nothing in it but rolls and rents and a hundred years of arguin’ about sheep. That’s where me husband proposed to me, so ye can see what sort of man he was.” She rapped a door with her stick as they passed. “And that one ye’ll want to keep shut. There’s a draught in there that could strip the hide off a coo.”
“Ye’re makin’ that up.”
“Aye,” said Maisie comfortably. “But ye’ll keep the door shut now, will ye nae?”
Tattie padded faithfully behind them the whole way, leaning his great weight against Olivia’s skirts at every pause, and twice the old woman pretended not to have heard a perfectly clear question, only to answer instead a far more interesting one Olivia had never thought to ask.
The kitchens were a realm of copper and steam, ruled over by a woman with forearms like a smith’s, who took one look at the pair of them and reached for her wooden spoon.
“Out.”
“This is the Laird’s bride, Cook.”
“I ken fine who she is.” The spoon did not waver. “And she can be the Laird’s bride out there, where she’s nae standin’ in me light and lettin’ the fire go down.”
But as they went, she pushed a warm bannock into Olivia’s hand without looking at her, gruff as a slap.
Absurdly, Olivia was still holding it halfway down the passage.
“She likes ye,” said Maisie.
“She threw us out.”
“Aye. With a bannock.” The old woman’s eyes glittered. “Ye’ll learn to read us.”
Not everyone was so easily read. In the low corridor by the buttery, two maids stopped dead when they came around the corner, and one of them dropped into a curtsy so shallow it was very nearly an insult, and neither of them said a word until Olivia had gone six steps past. Then she heard it, low and unmistakable behind her.
Blythe.
Maisie’s stick went on tapping the flags, steady as a heartbeat. She did not turn her head, she did not stop talking, and she did not once let Olivia think she had heard it too.
The chapel was the last of it and the only place the old woman’s voice changed.
It was a small stone room at the cold end of the north range, with a plain altar and a single narrow window. The dust lay thick and undisturbed on everything, and the air smelled of stone and old smoke.
“It hasnae been used since me daughter died,” Maisie said. “Ragnall’s maither. He had it closed up. He’s never once said why, and I’ve never once asked him, for I’m nae the fool the whole glen takes me for.” She was quiet for a moment, looking at the altar. “She planted the roses in the south garden, and she made him swear he’d end the war that took his faither, and then she went and died on him, and he’s been carryin’ both of those things with him ever since like a man with stones in his pockets.”
Olivia did not want that. She did not want the roses, and she did not want the promise, and she did not want the picture that came with it.
“Why are ye tellin’ me this?”
“Because ye’ll get none of it out of him,” said Maisie.
Then she rapped her stick smartly on the flags and was off down the passage before Olivia could think of a single thing to say.
By the time they had wound their way up to the long upper gallery, with its narrow windows looking down over the inner court, Olivia had forgotten, for whole minutes strung together, to be miserable at all.
That was the moment she heard it.
A thin, rising wail echoed ahead in the gallery. A sound she knew deeply, as every woman did, whether she had given birth or not—the intense fury of a tiny person who had fully decided that the world was unfair and someone needed to answer for it.
A bairn. There is a bairn cryin’ here in this cold keep.
“Did ye hear that?” Olivia asked.
She turned and found that Maisie had suddenly developed a deep and abiding fascination with a moth-eaten hanging on the wall.
That one heartbeat of hesitation was all it took. Olivia was already moving down the gallery, already reaching for the latch of the half-closed door at the far end of it, already pushing it open before the old woman or anyone else alive could think to stop her.
