The Laird

by Grace Burrowes

  He had more questions for her, questions he would not ask—yet. Why so few MacLogans among the employed? How did she choose to whom to give employment when so many needed it? Why did she call them her people and not our people, while the bottom land was his not ours?

  “Can we afford to throw a party?” The inquiry was genuine, in light of their discussion.

  “Of course. A celebration will be expected now that you’re home. Choose a date, and I’ll confer with the staff.”

  Her tone was mild, as if they hadn’t been nearly shouting at each other two minutes earlier, and yet, Michael had the sense he’d disappointed his wife—again, some more.

  “A week from Friday. That will allow everybody to sleep off their drunk before services on Sunday.”

  Brenna resumed her place at her escritoire, opened the ledger, and dipped her pen in the glass inkwell.

  “Next Friday, then. Cook will have Davey’s basket ready by now.”

  She was dismissing him, as effectively as if Wellington himself had muttered, “That will be all, Colonel Brodie.”

  Wellington was hundreds of miles to the south, God be praised, so Michael stayed in the doorway, studying his wife. She was pretty, tidily swathed in her hunting tartan, and angry as hell. He was not sure how he knew this, but he would have bet his horse it was so.

  He would not ask her what he’d done wrong, lest he fall prey to that female conundrum that started with: “If you have to ask…”

  When he repaired to the laird’s bedchamber to take off his riding boots, he saw Brenna’s riding habit hanging on the door of the wardrobe, and insight struck, rather like a serving of a bad haggis.

  He’d not only gone riding without his wife, contrary to a previous invitation, but he’d borrowed her mount without even asking her permission first.

  Four

  “He says he’ll eat boiled shoe leather,” Brenna reported to Cook. “I am not sure he was jesting.”

  “Army rations,” Cook snorted. “As like to kill a man as the enemy’s fire. He’ll probably like a beefsteak now and again, if he’s been among the English. Some eggs and bacon to go with his bannocks and scones in the morning.”

  Beef was an extravagance, though not quite a luxury. “We can slaughter a cow next week,” Brenna said. “For there’s to be a celebration Friday next, and roasts will be expected. Send the fellows out after some game early in the week, and let Auld Henry know we’ll tap a barrel of the aged whisky.”

  But what to serve Michael for his meals?

  “Have ye a headache coming on, Miss Brenna?”

  Cook was an ageless fixture at the castle, a force to be reckoned with, whose scones and pastries were as a light and insubstantial as she was solid and phlegmatic. If she had a name other than Cook, Brenna had never heard it, nor had she once heard the woman raise her voice.

  “Not a headache.” A husband. The human equivalent of a skittle ball knocking the pins of Brenna’s routines in all directions. “I didn’t eat enough at breakfast.”

  Or at dinner the previous evening.

  Cook shoved away from the kitchen worktable and fetched a tray bearing a rolled sweet bread of some sort and a dish of butter.

  “Can’t have it bruited about that I let our Brenna get peckish,” Cook said, heaving herself onto the bench across from Brenna. “Master Michael was never a difficult lad. I’d go on as you did before, and let him accommodate himself to life here as best he can.”

  Brenna accepted a slice of bread with raisins, nuts, and spices spiraling out from its center. “You mean with the menus?”

  Cook scooped out a bit of butter and passed it on the knife to Brenna.

  “I mean with everything. Angus will keep him busy calling on the tenants for the next few weeks, and the old laird never bothered much with how the household went on. We kept him fed and his sheets clean, and that’s all most men fret over. That and having a decent fire somewhere in the house come winter.”

  She helped herself to a slice of bread, her big hands curiously dainty as she dabbed butter on the bread.

  “This is good,” Brenna said. “I like the walnuts, but the cinnamon comes dear.”

  Cook took a contemplative nibble. “You were naught but a girl when her ladyship turned this castle over to you, Miss Brenna. Woe unto your husband if he criticizes a good effort made on his behalf in his absence. I daresay you’ve done better with the castle than that old man has done with the land.”

  Her ladyship would be Michael’s mother, who as the daughter of an earl had been born a lady, and whose title was preserved by the household as a courtesy and a point of pride long after the lady had left the earthly realm.

  “I don’t interfere with Angus, and he doesn’t interfere with me.” Which arrangement had worked adequately for years, but Michael’s return would upset that balance as well.

  “You mustn’t fret,” Cook said, patting Brenna’s hand. “Master Michael’s a canny lad, and he knows times have been hard. You ask me, he picked a poor time to go a-soldiering. Not enough the damned English must run off every crofter in the Highlands, but they must send our boys away to make war in the King’s name too.”

  “You can’t blame the English for a crofter deciding life in the New World holds more promise than an endless succession of Highland winters.” The Corsican was also not England’s fault—or Michael’s fault.

  Cook took another bite of her bread, and in the very way she chewed, conveyed a respectful difference of opinion with her employer.

  “I’ll keep to the menus we agreed upon, and Master Michael can let us know how good Scottish fare suits him. Boy never did fancy haggis though.”

  “No haggis, please. He specifically asked we spare him the haggis.”

  “Yes, he did,” a masculine voice called from the direction of the pantries. Michael emerged from the corridor, his kilt swinging about his knees. “When Cook makes so many other wonderful dishes, a man need not aggravate his belly with haggis.”

  He plucked a bite of bread off the tray.

  “This looks good. Mrs. MacCray sends her thanks for the basket and says Davey’s on the mend. Davey says he’s sure to be dead by Sunday if somebody doesn’t get him some decent whisky.” Michael took the place beside Brenna, which trapped her against the wall. “What mischief are you two getting up to?”

  “No mischief a’tall,” Cook said. “I’ll just be fetching that hamper.”

  She bustled away, moving with surprising speed for such a large—and generally dauntless—woman.

  “I believe I’ll finish this loaf,” Michael said, buttering himself another slice. “Spoils of war, and all that. Would you like some?”

  “No, thank you. What hamper is Cook talking about?”

  He dipped his damned bread in Brenna’s tea.

  “We’re picnicking, you and I. Rambling down to the riverbank, spreading a blanket, and wasting some time. I’ve missed the sound of the river when the water’s low.”

  Brenna moved her mug closer to him, for she was certainly no longer inclined to drink out of it herself. She’d promised herself not to berate him, and had managed well enough earlier, but that was before he’d pilfered her tea and threatened her afternoon. “Did you enjoy riding my horse?”

  He paused with a bite of bread poised over her tea. “I’m apologizing. That’s why we’re having a picnic, because you’re entitled to be put out with me for taking your horse without asking.”

  “You are pleased, I take it, to be able to put matters right with a bit of ‘wasted’ time?”

  The canny lad had become a canny man, just not canny enough. He set the rest of his bread down.

  “I would like to relax and be private with my wife, to enjoy a pretty day and a pretty patch of ground while we share a meal. I am sorry I didn’t ask before I rode your horse, but I wanted to assure myself he was a safe mount.”

  They were sitting side by side on the same hard bench, and yet Brenna felt as if she and her husband could not possibly be
the same species.

  “The time to have investigated the beast’s sanity was five years ago, Michael, when your da came to grief. I would not have taken Boru as my mount were he not steady and sound.”

  Frustration seemed to fill the kitchen, even as Cook disappeared into the butler’s pantry, humming a tune in a minor key.

  “Did you forget we were to ride out, Michael?”

  Following on her question, an astonishing thought tried to elbow its way past her indignation: Was he as ashamed of having forgotten they were to ride as Brenna was ashamed on those rare occasions when she failed to execute a task entrusted to her?

  “I didn’t recognize most of the staff this morning, and that unsettled me.” He picked a walnut out of the bread and put it on the plate. “Where did they all go?” he asked softly.

  The question was rhetorical, and yet the bewilderment was genuine and not that different from what Brenna felt when she considered she did not even know what to feed her husband.

  “We’ll picnic,” Brenna said, “though as apologies go, a simple ‘I’m sorry’ will win you more forgiveness than will wreaking havoc with my schedule.”

  She maneuvered herself off the bench, leaving her husband among his spoils of war.

  “If we’re to share a picnic, where are you off to?”

  “I’m fetching my shawl. The sun’s out now, but we’re in the Highlands, and you know the fair weather cannot last.”

  ***

  Michael put aside the sweet bread he’d been eating and resisted the urge to follow his wife so they could finish whatever argument they’d just not had.

  “You never did care for cinnamon,” Cook observed, removing the tray.

  “The Spanish put it in everything—their meat dishes, their desserts, their coffee and chocolate. Perhaps I’ve developed a taste for it.”

  “Don’t be barkin’ at me because your missus is out of charity with you. She treasures that horse.” Cook didn’t retreat to her pantries or larders after firing that shot, but lingered, wiping at a spotless table with a spotless rag.

  “You’re a female,” Michael observed. “Translate that last exchange between me and my wife.”

  Cook had sneaked him biscuits when he’d still been in dresses, and she’d explained to him certain curious aspects of female biology that neither of his parents had seen fit to enlighten him about. If he had an ally at the castle, it might be she.

  Heaving a sigh such as would prove her gender if nothing else did, Cook lowered her bulk to the opposite bench.

  “You’ve been gone a long time, Michael Brodie.”

  He’d been gone so long that even Cook showed the passing of the years. Her hair had been red, and now was faded to the sandy blond that befell a redhead in later years. Her face was lined, and she sat carefully, as if hips and knees protested silently against too many Highland winters.

  On the strength of his childhood memories of her kitchen, Michael felt entitled to some honest grousing.

  “A fellow doesn’t end up with a barony hanging around his neck because he’s dug a few ditches and marched about whistling some military airs. I wasn’t exactly having tea with the regiment for ten years.”

  “Neither was she.”

  When Michael wanted to upend the table and bellow that planning menus and stitching samplers were not the same as surviving for years behind French lines, something in Cook’s eyes stopped him.

  “Tell me.” Because his wife might never make the attempt.

  “Directly after you left, your mother took your wee sisters to Ireland.”

  “Because my grandda, the earl, had more consequence than my father. I understand that.”

  “You don’t understand as much as you think you do, laddie. Because Brenna was your lawfully wedded wife, it fell to her to manage the household. Nobody else could put up with your da’s rages and sulks.”

  The warning—about Brodie males and their tempers—was neither subtle nor appreciated.

  “As my wife, Brenna should have expected to take on that role.”

  “Ye daft mon, she was sixteen years old when you left.”

  And…chubby. Also quiet. “I assume Mother provided some instruction?”

  “Yer darling mother visited in the summers, though whether it was out of regard for your father, for the appearances, or for Brenna, I do not know. She was a good woman, was Lady Catherine.”

  A good woman who’d essentially deserted her husband and taken her daughters with her.

  “You’re saying Brenna faced a challenge.”

  “You never were stupid, Michael Brodie. Brenna faced a war. Your parents were too absorbed with their own dramatics, and everybody from Goodie MacCray to Angus Brodie assumed you’d left to get away from your bride.”

  This was, unfortunately, not far from the truth, though Michael hadn’t expected his departure to be blamed on Brenna.

  “People must gossip about something, and many young fellows join their regiments before the appointed day.”

  “One and twenty is young, is it?”

  So what does that make sixteen?

  “I was due to report in a matter of weeks. Brenna knew that when we married. The whole shire knew it.”

  If he’d been a little boy, Cook’s sad, patient expression would have had him searching his conscience for sins to confess, and his pockets for crumbs. When he remained silent, she shoved to her feet.

  “You’d best be off on that picnic, hadn’t you?”

  Michael rose as well and snatched a wicker hamper from the counter. “Yes, I had best be off, while the beautiful weather lasts.”

  ***

  The meal would have been ambrosial to a soldier on the march—some sort of fowl, more of the cheese Brenna was so proud of, rye bread, and ale—but Michael could not appreciate it.

  “The food doesn’t agree with you?” Brenna’s question was gratingly casual.

  The company did not agree with him, but he’d asked for this picnic, so he’d make use of it. “The food is fine. Would you like to walk for a bit?”

  “Honestly? No. I’m of a mind to take your measurements.”

  “I’m not of a mind to have them taken.” Though taking his measurements would mean Brenna had to touch him, or nearly touch him. She had consumed her food at the very edge of their shared blanket, and let the murmuring of the nearby River Dee serve as their conversation. Any passerby might have thought from their lack of talk that they’d been married for years.

  Which they had, goddammit.

  She hiked her knees and wrapped her arms around them, putting Michael in mind of a citadel raising its drawbridge and dropping its portcullis.

  “What was it like, after I left?” He didn’t want to know, but he suspected this was part of the general apology he owed her.

  “So we’re to talk?”

  “Married couples often do.” They often wrote letters to each other when separated too. She spared him that observation.

  “When you left…” She stared at the river, as if trying to recall the second line of an obscure ballad. “It was a relief, in a way.”

  “Like it was a relief to leave my home and family and everything I knew?”

  Some fool who’d had too much ale in the village had said those words, some fool who could not abide the sadness he’d seen in Cook’s old eyes, or the careful lack of emotion in Brenna’s.

  Her smile now was kind. Possibly forgiving, even.

  “Your da explained it to me. He said young men are restless. They need to at least see the world even if they can’t conquer it, and a wife is sure proof a fellow will never get his chance at that big, wide world.”

  “I wish somebody had explained it to me.”

  “I think you figured it out. What was it like, in Spain?”

  She would be hurt if he brushed her question aside, and yet, he was reluctant to answer it.

  “First came Portugal, then Spain, and then France. They were successive circles of hell on one level, and yet
, the land was beautiful, and there’s much about war that makes a man feel alive.” For a while, and then it made him wish he were dead, and then it made him dead inside if not in the absolute sense. “Cook says you took over the running of the castle from the time I left.”

  She brushed her hand over the grass. “I needed something to do, and the castle needed running. Your father adjusted, eventually, to your mother’s being gone for most of the year, but I don’t think he ever got used to being without your sisters.”

  “Neither did I.”

  Brenna stroked her hand over the grass again, and because Michael did not want to behold her patient green eyes, he lay back on the tartan blanket and folded his hands behind his head.

  “They were too little to be sent away, and Erin was not well.”

  He stared up at a brilliant blue sky full of puffy white clouds, not very different from the sky over Spain, Portugal, France, or Ireland, and yet, a feeling like homesickness swamped him.

  Brenna stirred on the blanket several feet away.

  “Erin rallied a bit, in Ireland. The softer weather probably gave her a few more good years. Your da wrote to them often.”

  While Michael had not written often at all.

  “I didn’t want them to go. A fellow expects to see his sisters married off, eventually, but they were children, and in a sense, I felt responsible for them. I feared I would never see Erin again, and I was right.”

  He closed his eyes, the sun being too bright, and the sound of the river too soothing.

  “Was that part of what sent you off to the regimental offices with your funds in hand? Your mother and sisters were leaving, and your father wasn’t stopping them?”

  “Aye.” Though nobody had said as much openly. In preparation for Michael’s wedding to Brenna, all had been good cheer and bright—false—smiles.

  He dozed off then, which was a mercy, because he’d failed utterly to interrogate his wife regarding the early years of their marriage. She hadn’t been lying when she’d said his absence was a relief, but Michael had the sense she was presenting the only facet of the truth she could bear to look on herself.