The Laird

by Grace Burrowes

  He peered down at her, looking exhausted, handsome, and worried. “Brenna’s with Michael?”

  “Cook equipped them with a hamper and blankets. Michael could not have a more ferocious guard than his Brenna. She’ll see him through this night.” They’d see each other through all the nights, just as Milly and Sebastian had learned to do.

  Sebastian led her to the enormous hearth at one end of the hall. The remains of a fire burned, the peaty scent oddly appealing, the warmth welcome. “You heard what Michael accused his uncle of?” Sebastian asked.

  Milly pushed him into a well-padded reading chair and climbed into his lap. “He accused Angus of many things, but mostly of betraying Michael’s trust.”

  “And Brenna’s trust, and the trust of every person on the estate. Michael takes his loyalties seriously.”

  Thus, Sebastian could not sleep. “You did not keep him captive in London for two years, my love. You did not tie him to that infernal rock pile in France.”

  Sebastian was not like some, who needed to chatter their way through conflicting arguments and confusing facts. He was a master at keeping his own counsel and arranging details like so many chess pieces until a matter was thoroughly weighed in his mental scales. Milly made herself comfortable upon her husband’s person, prepared to deal with his guilt when he was comfortable admitting it.

  “Michael has suffered enough,” Sebastian said softly. “Do you know, in all the years of my acquaintance with him, I’ve never known him to look at another woman? The ladies were forever sending him inviting glances.”

  Milly had seen how Michael looked at his wife, which was explanation enough for a soldier’s constancy to his lady. She might have remarked as much, but at the great door across the room, a troop of kilted Scotsmen spilled into the hall, their ladies still in evening finery.

  “St. Clair.”

  Hugh MacLogan approached the hearth, while his confreres lingered by the door. Sebastian rose, Milly in his arms, then gently deposited his wife on her feet.

  “MacLogan. I’d thought the evening’s gathering displaced to the tavern. We’ve sent the servants to bed.”

  The servants, as Milly well knew, had gone straight down the hill, to gossip and drink away the upset and excitement of the evening’s developments.

  Hugh inclined his head in Milly’s direction, a Scotsman’s version of the perfunctory bow. Considering that Milly had never aspired to be anybody’s baroness, she made do with his civility and offered him a smile in return.

  “We’ve been discussing matters down at the inn,” Hugh said. “We believe we might perform a service for our laird and his lady, but we’ll need a key. Elspeth says it’s usually kept in the laird’s study.”

  Milly had seen the heavy, ornate key ring hanging in the study, and could well imagine Brenna wearing the keys at her waist, like a chatelaine of old. Sebastian reached for her hand without looking at her, a commanding officer canvassing the opinion of his trusted lieutenant.

  “Listen to him, Sebastian,” she said too softly for any but MacLogan to overhear. “We’re all too overset to sleep, and Michael had the right of it: Angus wasn’t the only one to betray Brenna, and people need to make amends.”

  “Come along then, MacLogan,” Sebastian said. “We’ll find your damned key, and then, by God, I’ll get my lady off her feet.”

  More muttering in French accompanied his departure, but when he came back to the great hall and had sent MacLogan and his fellows on their way, he also brought Milly a warm cloak.

  “Where are we going, Sebastian?”

  “Down to the dower house and then to the loch. It’s not a celebration, by any means, but they’ll drink, and MacLogan thought—” He settled Milly’s cloak around her shoulders and fastened the frogs. “I can see you up to bed if you’d rather. We can’t have you becoming fatigued.”

  He kept his hands on the lapels of her cloak, so Milly wrapped her fingers around his knuckles.

  “What are we about, Sebastian? You need your rest too.” And Milly slept ever so much better in her husband’s arms.

  “You were right: I did not hold Michael prisoner in London, and I did not chain him to that infernal pile of rocks in the French Pyrenees, but something or someone did.”

  “It’s not your fault if a grown man, married to a woman he apparently adores, spent years wandering—”

  He kissed her, which in addition to distracting Milly could also be counted on to make her hush.

  “Something or someone banished Michael or held him captive, and I want to do what I might to end his sentence.”

  This undertaking meant going to the dower house, where Angus had dwelled. Milly kissed her husband, because he hated being helpless, and he looked so worried for the man who might be his only true friend.

  “I want to help too. Let’s be about it, shall we?”

  ***

  The moment had all the elements of sweetness—Michael’s wife was snuggled to his chest, the summer night air was fragrant with the scent of crushed clover, a lament drifted down from the pipes played up on the parapets, and the moon hung rosy and smiling in the sky.

  Michael held on to his wife lest sorrow sunder him from his soul.

  Brenna had led the way, finding words for the unspeakable, offering Michael two comforts: First, the comfort, dubious though it was, of the truth. He need not torment himself with thoughts of Angus inflicting the ultimate defilement on a child, for he had accurate information about what had happened and for how long.

  A very dubious comfort.

  The second comfort was as substantial as the walls around the keep, as substantial as the hard Scottish earth beneath his back and the hills ringing the shire: Brenna had trusted him with her truths. Trusted him to listen, which he’d found harder by far than waging war for years on end.

  Now he must afford her the same awful comforts.

  “On our wedding night, I saw Angus.”

  “Everybody was there,” Brenna said. “Had he not attended, it would have caused talk.” Talk was not something Brenna ever wanted to be the object of.

  “He was in his Highland finery, drinking, dancing, and comporting himself as a benevolent uncle—for all he’d tried to speak against you to me privately.”

  “You didn’t listen to him.”

  “I wanted to call him out.” For the first time in Michael’s life, he’d seen his uncle as an opinionated, self-interested, interfering old besom who’d needed a good hiding. “But neither did I put him in his place.”

  Brenna levered up to undo Michael’s clan sash, then went after the buttons of his shirt.

  “You’d expose me to the night air?”

  “I’d expose you to your wife.” She subsided onto his chest, her cheek against his throat, and Michael rearranged the blankets over her. Next she wedged an arm under his neck. “You were saying?”

  “It was late, I was hoping I might slip upstairs with you, and I went in search of my father, who would offer the parting toast.”

  “I saw you disappear and thought you were stepping out to the jakes. When the whisky flows…”

  “I’d hardly had anything to drink, because drink can dull a man’s—” The memory made him ill now. “I wanted to give a good account of myself when we consummated our vows, wanted a clear head. I expect you simply wanted the wedding night over with.”

  She smoothed his hair back and spoke right in his ear. “You expect wrong. I loved you then, and I desired you. I was nervous, aye—we were both nervous—but I had few qualms about joining you in that bed.”

  “Few qualms” was a far cry from no qualms, goddamn it. “I took that from you. Took away your display of courage and trust, and tossed it aside.”

  He waited for his wife to admit that yes, he’d wrecked their wedding night even more thoroughly than he knew, waited for her to express some honest disappointment in him. A lot of honest disappointment.

  “You must be patient, Michael, and determined. This situation of ours
can be described in a few minutes of blunt speech, but it has been years in the making. We’ll not find our way through it overnight. I’ve learned that.”

  The piper shifted to another tune, the rhythm different, though still in minor key. A ballad, not a tune for dancing.

  “What have you learned, Brenna? For I feel without any wisdom whatsoever. I am all sorrow and confusion and anger.”

  And hurt, of course. Mostly for her. But some for them as well.

  “Ach, Michael. I wanted on our wedding night to prove to myself that I was fine, just like any other young bride. I was nervous about the kissing, but the rest of it…You would have been all unsuspecting, Michael, a new husband having his first romp with his wife. I would have been fighting with my past, and that would not have been fair to you.”

  Some time, when his brain could work, Michael would ask his wife to explain those notions again, for they had the ring of import about them. For now, he had a truth to add to their pile of sorry memories.

  “I saw Angus engaged in perversions with Neil MacLogan.”

  Several heartbeats went by while the piper drew out a cadence.

  “Buggering him, you mean. Neil would have been little more than a boy.” Brenna’s body plastered against Michael told him she was not surprised. “My cousin has never said a word about it, though it makes sense.”

  “In hindsight, I doubt Neil’s participation was in any way…” The pipes fell silent, and Michael’s arms fell away from his wife. What a boy had decided to tolerate in the interests of keeping a roof over his family’s head was irrelevant.

  “I told myself Neil wouldn’t allow such attentions if he weren’t also inclined in that direction,” Michael went on softly. “The longer I considered it, the less certain I was of what I’d seen. Perhaps they’d been half-seas over, perhaps I was overreacting, though I’d entirely lost the ability to consummate our vows.”

  Brenna kissed his forehead, encouragement perhaps, or forgiveness. In any case, the gesture fortified him to tell the rest of it.

  “Like Neil, I said nothing. When I reached the coast, I sent a letter to my father, telling him I’d seen bitter words between Angus and Neil, and asking him to keep Angus away from the MacLogans. In short, I lied. To my father, to myself.”

  Michael wanted to weep with the shame of his silence, with the horror and bewilderment. He wanted Neil MacLogan to confront him and pound him flat, and he wanted Neil to leave the shire forever.

  “Did Neil see you?” Brenna’s question was soft and inevitable.

  “Nobody was tending the sconces by that time, so no, Neil did not see me, and neither did Angus. I want my flask, though, for I will never stop seeing the look on that boy’s face.” Despair, rage, and resignation beyond what any adolescent ought to lay claim to. Neil hadn’t been as small as Brenna, but he’d been several years away from shaving.

  Brenna kissed him on the mouth this time.

  “Your sporran is by our feet, if that’s where your flask has got off to. Neil has managed, and when he might have seen Angus murdered tonight, he did not. We must take comfort from that.”

  What or whom did Neil take comfort from?

  “He seems devoted to his family.” Was Neil ever to have a family of his own? “I could not bed you after having seen that. I didn’t bed a woman until I came home to you, Brenna, and Angus is largely the reason why. To think that my uncle…”

  Brenna climbed off him, the loss of her weight and warmth engendering panic in Michael’s chest.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I could use a tot.” She produced his flask, took a sip, and passed it to him, then got settled on the blankets beside him. “That’s fine drink, Mr. Brodie. So Angus queered your efforts at a wedding night, but that’s not entirely why you took off, is it?”

  She shook her head when Michael offered her the flask back, so he fortified himself with half the contents.

  “He was my uncle. He taught me which birds sing what songs. He tried to help me learn to sketch, and he always had a kind word for me when my father had been too demanding. How could Angus be…?”

  “Good and evil?” Brenna eased to her back. “I don’t know, Michael, but he surely was. Shall we make a night of it out here? The stars are beautiful.”

  “I’m his nephew, his blood.” There was the problem, the unsolvable conundrum that had hounded Michael across battles, sieges, and even into peacetime.

  “I saw him commit what I knew was a grievous wrong, but because I’m his nephew, I told myself Neil could have stopped it, there was drink involved, men get odd notions as do teenage boys, everything gets out of hand when the hour grows late and the whisky’s flowing. I made all manner of excuses for my silence, because I was his braw, bonny nephew.”

  Brenna was quiet for a long time, and though Michael knew she could offer him no absolution, he waited on her next words.

  “A long time ago, I was his special little girl. I was a lot of things Angus Brodie tried to tell me were the sum of me, and I know better, now. You’ll talk to Neil.”

  Ah—an unlikely shaft of wisdom amid the night’s sorry recitations. “I can talk to Neil, but still…I was Angus’s nephew.”

  She rose over him, bringing the blankets with her. “Go to sleep. You are my husband, I am your wife, and that’s what matters now.”

  In a manner that was entirely wifely without being in the least erotic, Brenna kissed him. She pursued the task with enough inventiveness and determination that Michael absolved himself of thinking up a rejoinder to her very accurate observation.

  He was her husband; she was his wife.

  And that was a start.

  ***

  “Something bothers me,” Brenna said, shifting a few inches so an unobliging bump of Scottish ground no longer dug into her hip.

  “You’re awake.” Michael shifted too, dragging his kilt out from under his backside. “We seem to have bivouacked on our own private alarm grounds.”

  The sun wasn’t quite up, but the singing of the birds said it soon would be.

  “Are you angry with me, Husband?”

  He stopped wrestling the covers. “Nobody can force a man to make love with his wife, Brenna Maureen.”

  And yet, he was unhappy. Unhappy was a vast improvement over the previous night’s hard slog through awful memories.

  “I wanted to make love with my husband.” She had needed the reassurance that they could still make love, needed emphatically to be Michael’s wife, not Angus’s victim.

  Michael’s sporran went sailing several feet off into the grass, followed by a large dancing shoe, laces flapping against the fading stars.

  “And I wanted to make love with my wife. I wasn’t sure, after all that had been said”—another shoe went sailing—“that you could stand for me to touch you like that.”

  He turned his face up to the fading stars, his mouth bracketed by fatigue for all they’d shared a few hours’ sleep on their blankets.

  “I wasn’t sure you could stand for me to ever touch you like that. We should probably get dressed,” he said more softly.

  Enough talking, in other words.

  “You might touch me like that again first,” Brenna suggested. “You were half-asleep, after all, and not entirely on your mettle.”

  He’d been more than half-asleep, and she’d been more than half-desperate. Their coupling had been brief, silent, and entirely graceless.

  Also miraculous.

  Michael knelt up enough to get his kilt around his hips.

  “One swiving proves little, Brenna. We’ll have awkwardness. Intimate awkwardness. When I think…” He sat back on his heels amid the blankets, his kilt half-fastened. His hair stuck up in odd directions, and a beard made his jaw bristly by the dawn’s early light. “Brenna, marriage to me will be so difficult. We’ve made a start, but around any corner, behind any innocent line of poetry will be setbacks and bad memories. I need to know now if you have any doubts at all about us.”

>   He needed to know if she had doubts about him, for nobody fought a battle like they’d waged the previous night alone. And he was right—there would be more skirmishes, none quite so bitter, though.

  “I love you,” Brenna said. “We’ll have awkwardness and sorrow, but we’ll have rejoicing and peace too. I daresay we’ll also have children. Where is my shift?”

  Michael tossed her a wad of linen.

  “Children.” He’d apparently forgotten what the word signified. “Children? You think—” Down he went, into their tangle of tartans, felled by a single word. “Children. God in heaven, children.”

  “You do know where babies come from?” Brenna asked, pulling her shift over her head. She went fishing for her stays next. “Wee bairns, who cry and drool, and have their papa’s smile. They do other things too, not nearly so endearing, like grow up and leave home. You’ll have to do my laces.”

  He rallied, sitting behind her and pulling her laces not nearly snug enough. “Maybe we should wait before we think about starting a family.” His suggestion was cautious, and offered while he tied off her laces. “You were wearing a skirt and blouse.”

  “I’m wearing a smile,” she said, drawing Michael’s arms around her waist. “The time for waiting might already be past, Michael Brodie. Are there any names you favor for our firstborn?”

  He knelt up behind her, enveloping her in a snug embrace.

  “I love you too, Brenna Maureen MacLogan Brodie. I love you more than I can say, but please let’s not be picking out names just yet.”

  He was genuinely daunted, and it had nothing at all to do with…the past. Brenna started to laugh at her brave soldier, Michael wrestled her to her back, and they were still laughing and tussling among the blankets when Sebastian and Milly St. Clair found them twenty minutes later.

  ***

  “The scouts have found us,” Michael whispered in Brenna’s ear. “Poor St. Clair looks like he’s been up the entire night.”

  “Clan attire becomes them both,” Brenna said, batting Michael’s hands away from the buttons of her blouse. “Best put your shirt on, Husband.”