Page 66 of Lady Len and the Mysterious Mac

It was the longest speech he’d ever heard her give, and then she brushed past him and out the door, leaving a trail of lavender and honeysuckle in her wake.

Si breathed it in, closing his eyes to imagine, for a moment, that they weren’t fighting. Then he stormed after her, determined to make those blue eyes flash at him, to make her mutter some cutting remark for his ears alone. “I asked you a question.”

She kept walking towards the stairs.

He glanced back at the pipe, chilly intuition prickling, fighting for attention he didn’t have to spare. “Do not walk away from me.”

Ellen climbed the stairs two at a time, Si’s preferred gait, but a bit steep for her. On the landing he caught her elbow, and she whirled around to face him.

“Tell me why,” he asked again.

She scowled at him. “Why I want to be useful?” she scoffed, her face red with the effort of holding back tears. She jerked free from his grasp and continued towards her chamber door.

Her tears almost made him stop. Why did it seem like she had warm words for everyone else, but only tears and sarcastic mutterings for him? Had he somehow broken her kindness the same way he destroyed everything else?

“Why is it that you seem perfectly capable of conversing with everyone but me?” He held up his arms in surrender. “Am I so abhorrent?”

Her shoulders slumped, but she didn’t look back, so he followed her into the room.

“Why is it you’ll rebuild an entire chapel just to get away from me? Give yourself hives rather than ask for whatever you need? What are you hiding, Len? Tell me, for I know you’re not mute.”

“Fine,” she whispered. Just one word, raw and chilling, but it took the fight right out of him.

She collapsed on the foot of the bed and covered her face with her hands, and he wanted to go to her and take it all back and somehow make it right, but he stood frozen in the doorway.

“Fine,” she said again. “When I was a lass of twelve,” she began, holding her elbows, one in each hand. “Their names were Boyd and Thomas Gordon,” she tried again. “Jory and I were playing in the stable with my kittens.”

A sick dread filled Silas’s stomach, her hesitance about entering the Leod stable suddenly making sense. He was scum. He didn’t want to hear anymore. “It’s all right, lass. I can guess what happened.”

She pierced him with such a stare. “You demanded I speak. You will listen to what I have to say.”

Something flared deep within his chest, and he shut the door to keep it between the two of them, then leaned back, against the wall, chastened, trying to shrink into it and disappear.

“It was Jory they wanted. I suppose they thought they could get away with doing it to an orphan girl of uncertain origin. I should have run for help.”

She shook her head, staring off into nothing.

“I should have stopped them. But I was frozen. I couldn’t move. Even if I could have, the younger brother grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. I tried to call for help. But it was like a nightmare. I screamed and screamed but nothing came out. Jory, she—” The lass shook her head again, a mirthless smile crinkling her eyes. “She had to save herself like always. And me, too.”

Si stared at her in horror and slid down the wall to sit on the floor, regretting every time he’d touched her, every time he’d kissed her, everything he’d done that must surely have added to her trauma.

Len touched her throat. “My voice got scared away,” she said. “And everyone let it go. Poor Wee Ellen. Always so quiet.”

She opened and closed her mouth a few more times before adding, “It isn’t an easy thing to speak freely.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, knowing it would never be enough.

“For what?” she snapped. “Jory and I hid under the bed until my mother found us. She put me in a bath that was nearly scalding. Scrubbed me until I bled. They hadn’t even touched me, I…” she closed her eyes. “I was stained by intention, ruined by what almost happened, by what might have happened.”

That was why she wanted to live a cloistered life away from men. That was why she assuaged her need for purification. Si deserved to have every last ounce of stinging nettles formed into a birch rod for lashing him the rest of his days.

“Did you even want to marry?” he asked, echoing the question he’d asked her cousin before all this began. How differently things might have turned out if someone had simply told him the truth. “Len? Tell me what you want.”

He caught her gaze and held it while her eyes filled up with tears. Then she shook her head. “No. All my life, I wanted to be a nun.”

Si blinked rapidly, almost as rapid as his breathing.

At least if she was with child, she might be safer in a French hospital surrounded by nurses than here, in the mountains, surrounded by coarse men and sheep.