Page 65 of Lady Len and the Mysterious Mac

The Kintail hadn’t argued, though he strongly suggested that Norval should take young Angus under his wing, but the idea made Si twitchy. He couldn’t prove Norval had falsified the ledgers, but something didn’t seem to add up. Angus had been there, while he had not, and might find something in the ledgers that Si was missing. The question was, between Norval and Angus, which man was the right one to trust?

Unable to sit still, Si wandered through the garden, searching the plants but desperate not to find one that matched LeBeau’s description and crude sketch. Searching and not finding, however, relaxed him, and he’d almost given up the game to pilfer warm bannocks instead, when large, green, eight-pronged leaves caught his eye in the bed just outside the kitchen. With feathery white flowers and prickly red pods, the castor plant was unmistakable, and Si gagged up bile. Surely there was a reasonable explanation. He would figure it out, just as soon as his father was safely away.

Bypassing the kitchen, he re-entered Leod through the front door instead, heading straight for his father’s chamber, but he was drawn to the bloody chapel as to his mother’s knee. The walls were pure white, the crucifix rehung, and the pews had been discovered and returned from the larder.

Even now, the lass was holding court with Bram, Dorrie, the MacPherson girl, and—Gawyn? All of them, stitching cushions and reciting and spelling words.

“Let’s see it, Gawyn,” Len said, and the old groom flipped around the square he’d been sewing. “Luceo non uro,” he said, showing the fiery mountain he’d stitched, along with the clan motto in both Latin and English. “To shine, not burn.”

“Perfect,” she crooned, and the old man’s chest swelled with pride, but for some reason Si grew small and hollow as the outsider looking in.

“Dorrie?” Len prompted next.

The little girl grinned, and showed off her crooked stitching, as crooked as the new tooth that was starting to poke through her gums. “As the Lord has forgiven you,” she read haltingly, “so you also must forgive.”

“Excellent. Greer?”

The MacPherson girl glanced shyly at Bram and then turned her cushion around. “And they shall forge their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning knives: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

“Sounds like Si, that,” Bram said, and Len nodded approvingly.

“Let’s see yours, then,” the girl asked him, and Si craned his neck to get a glimpse as well.

His cousin sighed. “I just did…”

“Go on,” Len encouraged him, and he turned it around to show a sun dappled holly tree straight from the forest glade, except made in a hundred shades of green and golden thread. Si hadn’t known a cushion could be a work of art, but it was as fine as any tapestry in a kingly palace.

The lad looked to Len for approval.

“Oh, Bram, it’s lovely,” she breathed, and he beamed at her, completely besotted.

Si knew exactly how he felt.

“There’s heather and horsehair to stuff them when you’re ready,” she said, then glanced towards the door and startled to see Si, catching him in the process of being completely undone, and he was raw as he scrambled to mask his emotion.

“What are you playing at?” he growled, his voice cracking a second time, as it hadn’t really done in a dozen years or more.

She opened her mouth and closed it again, still unable to speak to him, and he lifted his shoulder in mocking question.

Then he stepped inside the chapel, inches from her, close enough to smell the lavender that should have soothed him, but it only stirred his blood. He looked around the perfect room, so beautiful that it made him angry, because she’d have loved it—his mother—but she would never get to see it. Because of him.

“Who asked you for this?” he ground out between clenched teeth.

Gawyn and the smith’s girl had stood when he entered. Both now hung their heads, but when he added, “What’s the point?” the groom shot him a disgusted look.

Len’s face crumpled and her mouth opened and closed a few more times, but still, no words for him.

“The point is because why not?” Bram spoke up. “They wanted to learn to read. And we all wanted to help milady.”

“Didn’t ask you,” Si snapped, hating himself for it as much as Bram did.

“To be useful,” she finally whispered.

“It was useful as storage.” Si stepped even closer, invading her space, daring her to back away, but she didn’t. She tipped her head further back to look up at him. “What use have we for God here?” he asked, the question he had wondered his whole life and never dared to say out loud before. “What use have they for reading?” he added, just to goad her.

Because he wanted her to say something cutting and cruel. He wanted her to fight back. Why could she speak under her breath, speak out loud to Bram and Dorrie and Gawyn, why to strangers like the blacksmith and his daughter, but not to him? Never to him.

“Class dismissed,” she told the motley group, and they all dropped their sewing to scuttle away, the MacPherson girl leading Dorrie by the hand and Gawyn shoving Bram ahead of him. When they’d gone, he’d expected an angry rebuttal. Instead she coldly informed him, “There’s a pipe buried in the wall just here to let incense pass through to the laird’s bedside. There was a bellows, too, before. I’m sorry, I think we threw it out.”