The Laird

by Grace Burrowes

The small desperate hope guttered and died amid a blackness without end. Michael could not touch the flowers a little girl had sewn to brighten her papa’s day.

  “I want to kill him.”

  And Michael wanted to die. Wanted to cast himself into an endless desolation as great as the sorrow welling in his chest.

  Hugh eyed the wardrobe as if writhing, slimy things lived inside and were struggling to get free.

  “You saw some sketches. You can’t kill a man for sketches.”

  They were sketches of Brenna, but perhaps Hugh hadn’t realized that. Michael pressed his own handkerchief against his eyes, a bit of silk Michael stored among Brenna’s dresses because he wanted the scent of her near throughout the day.

  “Somebody should go through what’s in that wardrobe,” Hugh said.

  “Nobody should have to do that,” Michael retorted, letting his head fall back to rest against the wall of the window seat. “I saw enough.”

  Brenna in poses far too seductive for tender years, Brenna as the first harbingers of womanhood unfurled in a child’s form, Brenna with trust and hope shining from her eyes, though she wore not a stitch over her small body.

  And for nine long years, Michael had left Brenna to contend with the monster who’d abused her, all because Michael had never imagined a monster might enjoy devouring more than one variety of prey.

  ***

  “You’re quiet,” Brenna observed as Michael dragged a brush through his hair. “Are you planning your apology to Maeve?”

  He studied the brush, Brenna’s brush, actually, as if he weren’t sure how it had arrived in his hand.

  “I forgot to apologize to Maeve.” Then he stood before his shaving mirror, brush in hand, as if he’d also forgotten the next step in his end-of-day routine.

  Rather than puzzle over her husband’s peculiar mood, Brenna turned down the covers on the bed.

  “Maeve probably expected you to apologize at dinner, and that’s why she was so quiet. Then too, we’re all tired, getting ready for tomorrow. Are you looking forward to the festivities?”

  “Yes.”

  That small word conveyed anything but gleeful anticipation. Brenna scooped coals into the warming pan, but wasn’t careful enough with the hearth tools, so a few red embers went spilling onto the bricks.

  “Careful,” Michael said, a bit sharply.

  Brenna dealt with the small mess, closed the lid of the warmer, and aimed a smile over her shoulder at her husband.

  “Tend to your washing off, Michael. Your hair is quite brushed, considering I might well put it all awry before morning.”

  He set the brush down and retreated behind the privacy screen, not a hint of an answering smile to be seen.

  Since coming north from England, Michael had been the soul of patience, good cheer, and consideration. Something had put him off stride today, maybe something to do with working among the men earlier.

  “Are you concerned that we’re spending too much on tomorrow’s gathering?” Because Brenna was concerned. Ever since losing a year’s worth of wool money, she was concerned over every groat and farthing.

  “I am not.” He emerged from behind the privacy screen in nothing but his kilt, his expression unreadable.

  “I’ve shown you my finances,” Brenna said, slipping off her robe. “When will you show me yours?”

  She tossed the question out in hopes it might catch Michael’s interest, because whatever was amiss with him, he was behaving like a stranger—a worrisome stranger.

  The look he gave her, his hands on the fastening of his kilt, his eyes…bleak. That look chilled as surely as the draft sneaking in under the door kept the floor toe-freezing cold.

  “Every penny I have is yours, Brenna. Every pound, every…thing I lay claim to on this earth is yours for the asking.” He sat heavily on the bed, his kilt still on. “We’re man and wife.”

  Brenna sat beside him and laid the back of her hand to his brow. “You’ve no fever. Are you sickening for something?”

  “Possibly.”

  A memory came to her, of their wedding night. She’d begged and begged for him to take her away with him when he joined his regiment, and he’d grown quieter and quieter, until she’d fallen asleep in his arms.

  He was growing that quiet now.

  “Do you need a posset?” Brenna asked, though instinct told her a posset wouldn’t put her husband to rights.

  “I need to sleep.” He rose to push the peat and coals to the back of the fireplace, snugged the screen to the bricks, and blew out the bedside candles. “If you’d oblige me?”

  Brenna rose from his side of the bed, her puzzlement edging closer to panic. “Is something wrong, Michael?”

  He got into bed without taking his kilt off, and that frightened her.

  “Get into bed, Brenna. Tomorrow will be a long day.”

  Every day was long, but the days since Michael’s return had also been good days, mostly. She climbed in on her side of the big bed and did not presume to snuggle up to her husband.

  “You’re still wearing your kilt, Michael.”

  He rustled around beneath the covers until his left fist emerged holding a length of plaid, which he tossed to the foot of the bed. “Good night, Brenna.”

  He hadn’t kissed her. Hadn’t even found her hand beneath the covers and given her fingers a squeeze.

  He hadn’t dusted his big feet together before stretching out on the mattress.

  He’d spoken a truth—they were man and wife, and soldiers home from war could be given to odd moods. Brenna ought to have taken this into account sooner. She punched her pillow, hard, then flopped down beside her spouse.

  “If you continue to behave like this, Michael Brodie, I will soon miss you every bit as much as I did the first year of your absence.”

  “I did not deserve to be missed, but believe this, if you believe nothing else about me, Brenna. I regret leaving you behind. I regret that bitterly.”

  “I got over it,” she said, which was in the nature of a truth belatedly admitted rather than a lie. “I did get your letter about Corunna.”

  He shifted to his side, so he faced her, and yet Brenna remained on her back. Whatever was wrong with him tonight, even the weight of her stare might send him out of their bed, into some dark place she could not follow.

  “Mention the name Corunna to any soldier who served in that campaign, and you will fill him with a sorrow and dread that…” Michael’s voice trailed off.

  Brenna waited, because his letter had been short and factual. A headlong retreat across more than two hundred miles of northern Spain, the French in pursuit, pounding at the stragglers, at times near blizzard conditions ensuring the camp followers were the most vulnerable, and army discipline disintegrating into looting and mayhem.

  When the remains of the British Army had straggled, sick and exhausted, onto the coast, the evacuation ships had taken two more days to reach them.

  “You spared me that, Michael. You spared me all that brutality and violence, all that sickness, injury, and disease. You talked about the horses that had to be shot, hundreds of them, foundered and starving, the wounded left under horrific conditions. I might easily have been with child, or even had a child…”

  He was over her without warning, an avalanche of heat and husband.

  “Hush. For the love of God, please hush. I do not deserve your forgiveness.” His arms held her in a desperate embrace, and yet he made no move to kiss her. No arousal nudged at Brenna’s sex; no tender caress swept across her brow.

  “There is nothing to forgive, Michael. You fought your battles. I fought mine, such as they were.” She tightened her arms around him. “We have the rest of our lives together, and I, for one, am grateful for that. Very grateful.”

  He shuddered, as if a sexual paroxysm claimed him, or a great grief. When he rolled back to his side of the bed, Brenna at first let him go.

  “What is wrong, Michael? I am your wife, and I will endure much if you ask i
t of me. Your silence cuts at me.”

  “Some silences are meant to be kind. You understand that. You probably understand that far better than most.” A spate of sentences. Brenna drew encouragement from his loquaciousness and possessed herself of her husband’s hand.

  “Most silences need to be broken. I’ve been looking for a way to bring up some difficult matters, Husband. Old business, as it were. I haven’t known how, but after we’ve seen to this nonsense tomorrow, I will want some of your time.”

  She hadn’t meant to say any of that, though darkness was certainly appropriate to her declaration.

  “You have already endured much as my wife, Brenna. I am more sorry for that than I can say.”

  “You’re daft.” Brenna cuddled up to his side and slid an arm under his neck. “You haven’t been home long enough to properly try my patience.” She kissed his cheek. “Go to sleep, and when we’ve rendered every man, woman, and child in the shire feeble with drink, and the old ladies have danced the lads under the table, we’ll clear up a few matters.”

  She kept her arms around him, though he was inert in her embrace. He’d survived the retreat to Corunna and worse, and yet, Brenna felt as if she held not a veteran, but a casualty.

  For the cheek she’d kissed had been wet with tears.

  ***

  “What has you planted here, quiet as a tomb?” Hugh put the question to his laird, because Elspeth had bid him to keep close watch on the man. Without any intention on Hugh’s part, the entirety of the previous day’s awful developments had come spilling forth in Elspeth’s hearing, and when she’d finished swearing and stomping about the clearing—Hugh had become very fond of this little clearing—she’d charged Hugh with keeping watch over the laird.

  While Elspeth tried to split her vigilance between the child Maeve, and a very busy Brenna.

  Michael tossed a sprig of mutilated heather off into the undergrowth. “You were right.”

  Neil often spoke in the same fashion—a handful of words wrenched from him, leaving the listener to puzzle meaning as much from the silence as the syllables.

  “I am frequently right, though my brothers are loath to admit it.” Hugh took the place beside Michael on the bench. “I am guessing, though, in this case, I will rather I was not such an infallible fellow.”

  He would rather his laird had started in drinking, as the men in the village had earlier in the day. A Highland celebration that did not start until sundown would start far too late in the day, and waste hours that might be spent dancing and eating.

  “You are a good fellow,” Michael said, rising. “What you were right about is I should have searched all of Angus’s effects when I had the chance. Something sticks in my mind about the contents of that wardrobe.”

  The contents of that wardrobe would stick in Hugh’s mind when he was an old blind man.

  “These are yours,” he said, fishing some letters out of his sporran. “I didn’t read them.”

  He hadn’t had to, because they were letters a young soldier sent home to his even younger wife. They would have been full of love and longing, like every letter Hugh had ever written his Anne.

  “These were…”

  “With that other,” Hugh said, the word “sketchbook” having acquired connotations worse than any curse word. “I don’t think your lady wife ever received this correspondence.”

  The clearing was a peaceful place, particularly in late afternoon when the golden summer sun slanted down through the trees, birds flittered about, and a lone squirrel chattered high above. Hugh had made some wonderful memories with Elspeth here, and it was good to have those memories now, when Michael rose off the bench and kicked a sizable rock many yards away.

  “I am full of murder,” Michael said softly. “As full of murder as if my regiment had just broken another endless siege, and every soldier fallen outside the city walls is screaming from his unshriven grave for vengeance against the enemy. I am not full of justice, Hugh, I am full of murder. Sick with it, and I fear I’ll find no cure.”

  Crazy talk, but the man had cause. “You cannot do murder. You have a party to host.”

  Michael sent another rock hurtling down the slope. A deer went crashing up the path a moment later, and the squirrel ceased making a sound.

  “Brenna wants to talk to me. The only reason I am standing here in my lordly finery, the only reason I am not sharpening my dirk and hunting my uncle down like the traitor to decency he is, is because my wife has old business to discuss with me.”

  “Then you’ll put aside your murder long enough to listen to her.”

  The fight—the murder, disgust, rage, whatever—ebbed enough that Michael’s shoulders dropped.

  “It’s myself I want to kill most, you know. I’ve puzzled out that much.”

  Hugh was far out of his depth, and yet, Elspeth had raised a few questions, about that sketchbook and Neil, and the names—four younger fellows, two lasses—penciled on those six leases set aside from the others.

  “How will taking your own life help Brenna now?”

  “It won’t. I am sick and reeling, Hugh, but you needn’t worry that I’ll end my life and leave Angus Brodie laird of anything or anyone I care about. I’m the worst husband that ever took a wife, a poor friend, and a miserable excuse for a man, but I’m not that craven.”

  For all he was tall and handsome in his fancy dress, for all that his wife probably shared none of those conclusions, the laird was imperiled by what he’d learned yesterday.

  “Angus is down at the pub,” Hugh said, rising from the hard little bench. “Every spare servant is getting the castle ready for the gathering this evening, and that means Angus’s house is again deserted. I’ve wondered where the money came from that supports Angus’s fancy mistress in Aberdeen.”

  “I know where the money came from,” Michael said, turning his face up to a shaft of sunlight and closing his eyes. “I know exactly where it came from, though now more than ever, proof is necessary.”

  He might have been a saint transfigured by remorse, so sorrowful did the sunlight render his features, and in that sylvan, peaceful, fraught moment, Hugh understood something more painful, even, than what he’d seen in those awful drawings.

  “A part of you still loves your uncle.”

  Michael opened his eyes. “He taught me the dances, Hugh. He taught me to sketch and to fish. So often, when my father could see nothing except that I would be laird someday and must be tough and strong, Angus was the one who made sense of my childhood injuries to pride and distracted me from my sulks. I cannot…”

  This was what imperiled an otherwise strong man, a contradiction of the heart so powerful, Hugh could find no words to comfort the one suffering it.

  “What will you do, Laird?”

  Michael spoke gently. “If it had been Annie in those drawings, Hugh, what would you do? Or Lachlan?”

  Hugh said nothing, for the question was rhetorical and the answer was…murder.

  “Exactly,” Michael said, heading for the path. “Keep an eye on Brenna for me, please. The guests will soon assemble, and my wife will expect me to open the dancing with her.”

  He strode off through the undergrowth, not along the path, but in a direct line up through the bracken and heather toward the empty dower house.

  Seventeen

  The day had been busy, lovely as only a Scottish summer day could be, and nerve wracking as hell, for Brenna had hardly seen her husband.

  “Where’s Michael?” Brenna asked Milly St. Clair. “I thought he was with your baron.”

  Milly and her baron were both in borrowed Highland finery, sporting Stuart plaid, as loyal subjects of the Crown were entitled to wear. Through the passage into the great hall, St. Clair and the musicians were adding a table to the buffet already groaning with food.

  “He might be among the crowd outside,” Milly said, peering through a window. “Every man, woman, and child has gathered in the bailey, and it’s quite colorful.”

>   “Michael and I will open the dancing.” Brenna stole her hundredth glance at the clock and wondered why she and Michael hadn’t practiced dancing together. “If he hasn’t left the shire.”

  Would her request for some time to clear up old business have sent him away? Could he have known she’d meant for him to learn of her past with Angus?

  “You must not look so worried,” Milly chided softly. “This is a party. It’s Michael’s welcome home, and his first celebration as laird. Everybody is intent on enjoying themselves.”

  Elspeth was intent on ordering the menfolk around as she had them pick up the empty table and carry it to the other end of the buffet.

  “Have you seen Maeve?” For Brenna had delegated keeping track of the girl to Elspeth and hadn’t spotted Maeve since midday.

  “She’s probably out among the neighbors, making all manner of new friends with their children,” Milly replied. “We should be out there too.”

  Making small talk, while Brenna wanted nothing more than to find her husband and ask him why, after barely speaking to her before bed, he’d slept with his arms wrapped around her through the entire night.

  If he’d even been sleeping.

  “Elspeth, you’ll cease giving orders now,” Brenna called. “Let the musicians tune up, tell MacDowell to tap the first keg, and get you out into the bailey to snabble Hugh for the first dance.”

  Somebody set his corner of the table down on somebody else’s toe, or near enough to occasion foul language, and Brenna’s impatience coiled more tightly. Violence was an aspect of many celebrations, at least once the whisky had been flowing for a few hours and the children all put to bed.

  “Come, you two,” St. Clair said, winging an arm at each lady. “The Baron Strathdee will be along any minute, and if we’re not out visiting in the bailey when he arrives to collect his baroness, my life will be forfeit.”

  “Or your toes,” Brenna muttered. “Where is the Baron Strathdee?”

  St. Clair suffered a minute hesitation in his progress toward the French doors opening onto the bailey. “He’s on his way, I assure you.”

  “Are we in a hurry, Baron?” Brenna asked, for St. Clair had resumed his escort at a brisk pace indeed.