A Promise of Love

by Karen Ranney

  It was the perfect place for this conversation.

  Alisdair had not moved from his position near the mullioned windows. The glass had cracked from the heat of the fire, splintered apart and then glazed back together. It was an odd, fragmented picture he appeared, backlit by the sun filtered through a thousand shards of crystal. He had not looked anywhere but at her since he’d led her to this room, a scrutiny she was unprepared to face.

  “You must curse your luck, Judith, for bringing you back to Tynan.” She had returned due to circumstance, not inclination, that was obvious.

  “Malcolm needed you.”

  Malcolm needed you. The words swirled in the air. An indictment of such delicacy that he was surprised at the pain he felt, as if speared by it.

  “And you, Judith, do you not need anyone?” Anger was an easier emotion to swallow than despair, and he’d had a bellyful of that.

  Alisdair didn't know if this confrontation was wise, or foolhardy. All he knew was that he had to understand. Why had she turned her back on Tynan, on him? Once that was answered, once she told him, he would be able to leave her alone. Banish her from his mind the way all the other ghosts of his life had been expunged.

  A wiser man would let her go. A saner man would not question why she’d left him. A prouder man would not, even now, hope to convince her to stay.

  Life, however, was not lived on the brink. It was a pool into which you plunged, headfirst, immersing yourself to the neck. He could no more have loved Judith in half measure than he could have turned his back on his clan and Tynan.

  She did not answer him. He was unsurprised by her eternal silence, prepared for it. What she did not realize was that he had time and endless patience and a budding rage which fueled them both.

  Her knees were pressed together like a child learning decorum, her feet planted on the floor next to each other, toes aligned perfectly. Back straight, the angle of her chin a testament to military precision. She was a perfect example of ladylike manners, but he didn't care if she had a board strapped to her back. Her hands were clenched before her, not folded calmly. Nor was she otherwise composed. He saw how tightly she held herself, as if she would shatter into tiny pieces if she did not. She'd learned to school her features, to exhibit an incredible stillness which masked her emotions to everyone but him.

  Her eyes, however, never failed to give her away. There was pain which dwelt there, surface deep. Pain and resolution.

  He would have gone to her then, had not her hard won dignity and composure been so apparent. He would have encased her in his arms and led her to a cozy corner, near a fire where she would feel safe and warm and protected.

  But he did neither, only stood and watched and felt a premonition of doom steal over him, as strong and as eerie as the morning he'd stood beside Ian on Culloden field and waited for the battle to begin.

  He saw the half smile she gave the room, and wanted to shake her. She was being so damnably English right now.

  Her composure was fragile, tenuous had he known. She suspected he did, and she also suspected he goaded her to see an end to it.

  "What do you want from me, Alisdair?" she asked, forcing the issue.

  "The answer to a riddle, Judith."

  She tilted her head, a questioning gesture, and he complied.

  "Why did you leave me?" Not why did you choose to leave Tynan? Not why do you want your freedom? He had personalized the question, made it intimate, real, painful.

  She closed her eyes against the sight of him standing there with his hands clenched at his sides, the pride etched on his face so strong a blind man could see, the softness of his eyes an odd counterpart to the resolve there. He towered in the room, even as large as it was. He overwhelmed her by his very presence, but in the end it wasn't his size, or his formidable strength, or even his beauty which compelled her to tell him the truth. It was the soft curve of his mouth, the compassion in his eyes. A compassion she did not deserve.

  For a long moment, she stared at the ruined flagstones of the floor, her gaze fixed not upon them, but upon some distant vision imprinted upon her soul. She was summoning the courage from a thousand places, where it had splintered like the glass in the window.

  There was always something restrained, he thought, almost hidden about Judith, as if she were careful to keep a part of herself shielded from him. There was a control about her that still appeared even in their most intimate moments, as if she were afraid of him gleaning her thoughts. He wanted to crush that control, break her silence in two, extract the real Judith from the hard shell she encased herself in, as if she were a nutmeat.

  “And Henderson?” he asked, when she remained eternally silent. “Why did he hate you so much?” Why had he attempted to hurt her from the beginning? Too many times, he’d wondered about the antipathy that boiled between them. Too many nights, Alisdair had waited for her to tell him.

  She glanced at him, knowing that the words must come now. Somehow, they must be spoken.

  "Because he knew I had killed his brother," she said, the words dropping like large, heavy raindrops into the parched silence. “I killed my husband.”

  He didn’t move, didn’t react in any way to her pronouncement.

  "Or I would have, had Providence not decided to end his life that night.”

  She took a deep breath, swallowed, tasting the heaviness of tears. Did she cry for herself, or for Anthony? Dear God, even now she could not lie to herself. She had shed no tears for Anthony. Not even then.

  She could recall that moment with pinpoint accuracy, as if the scene replayed itself, ghost-like, in her mind. The flailing arms, the look of terror as Anthony realized he was choking, clawing at his own throat until the skin grew bloody - all

  these silent, shrieking moments were part of her nightmares. In her dreams, she felt the horror. At the time, she’d felt nothing. She’d stood and clasped her hands over her apron and watched his struggle, thinking of all the times he’d given her to his friends, payment for a debt owing, or simply to see her raped. She thought of the nights Anthony beat her, with a belt or a chain, simply because she’d done something to anger him, or others had, and she was a satisfactory scapegoat. And, too, she thought of Anthony watching as Bennett thrust her across the threshold of hell and laughing as she screamed.

  It was only later that she learned he had not died of the poison.

  Judith had managed to restrain her hysterical laughter when the regimental surgeon had looked into the stiff and arched throat of her husband and pronounced Anthony’s death due to an errant chicken bone lodged in his throat - misadventure - not murder. Still, the intent was the same.

  Her eyes were almost black, Alisdair noted, blurred by unshed tears. Her tale, as she told it, was relayed dispassionately, as if the continual rapes happened to another, as if the sadism and bestiality visited upon her had been perpetrated upon someone else.

  "I could not bear any more, you see," she said finally, the tight rein on her composure slipping a little in the face of his continuing silence. He had not moved, nor had he spoken at all during her tale. How odd that it grew easier with the telling of it. For so many years, to have hidden the truth of her marriage, and within three weeks to have told it twice.

  Bennett had suspected her all along. Nor had she mistaken his whispered word that day in Tynan’s courtyard. In truth, she had never forgotten it.

  Murderess.

  The final indignity had been hers; the final barbarism had not been Anthony's nor Bennett's, but her own.

  She had endured the brutality until she no longer fought, and it was that very submission which had finally pummeled through to her brain and compelled her to survive. It had taken a year to grow the little plant with its silvery leaves - a year in which to hoard enough of the precious buds and grind them into a powder. That night, she’d basted the roasted chicken with her poisonous mixture, painstakingly preparing Anthony's evening meal.

  "I confess to plotting Anthony’s death, may God for
give my eternal soul. If the poison hadn't worked, I was going to cut his throat open in his sleep." Her eyes were haunted, exposing all the pain once hinted at, all the naked self-loathing.

  Courage was not the act of bravery without fear, it was being confronted with the starkest, deepest terror and refusing to retreat. Alisdair had seen many examples of courage on the battlefield - men whose fear resulted in loosened bowels and sweat drenched faces, who had taken up another bloodied sword and marched on despite their trembling panic. Even now, as Judith waited so bravely for him to reject her, to repudiate her, he found himself wondering how much courage it had taken to live in such fear from day to day.

  She bowed her head, her hands gripping each other so tightly that her knuckles shown blue white, waiting for him to speak.

  He moved closer, his steps cautious as if afraid of frightening her, and in a way, he was. He reached out one hand as if to bridge the distance between them. She took it, and he knelt beside the bench. He held her cold hands between both of his, as if the act of warming it would bridge the terrible chasm between them. He bent his head until his forehead rested against her knees, stretched out both arms along the outside length of her legs from knee to thigh. It was a curiously restrained embrace, yet intimate in its imprisonment.

  She looked down at him, kneeling before her as if he were the lowliest supplicant and she the queen.

  Banishment was more than a fitting atonement, an apt punishment. To never see this man again, the only man she had ever loved, the only man who had ever loved her, surely had to be a penance equal to her great sin. To never look upon this man, his black hair as deep and dark as a raven's wing, his long, brown arms flexed with muscle and bristling with hair, his scent as clean as the windswept moors surrounding Tynan, this would be the truest torture of them all.

  God might as well cauterize her brain with a sharp heated sword, blind her to the beauty of the world, and take from her the sense of touch and smell and hearing. And please God, take her memory, also, bleed her mind dry of any recollection of Alisdair MacLeod. It would be the only way not to suffer so.

  "Alisdair," she said, her hand reaching towards him as if listening to a will of its own. Her fingers stopped just an inch from his bowed head, just a small distance, really. She clenched her fist and withdrew her hand, the very skin of it aching to touch him.

  "Alisdair," she began again, her voice filmy with tears, "I am not worthy of this." She spoke of his kneeling before her, of his kindness to her, his humor. She meant the love she'd seen in his eyes, the compassion she'd always seen on his face since the day the English came to Tynan.

  “Shall I banish Meggie, then?” He raised his head, his eyes blazing gold as he demanded an answer of her.

  “What?” Once again, he’d managed to confound her.

  “She has been soiled, Judith, touched by men not her husband. Should she be sent away now?”

  “She was an innocent. She could not help their actions.” As Judith spoke the words, she expected his response.

  “So were you.”

  But Meggie was so much more innocent. She had not killed.

  He enfolded her hands in his own, his grip almost painful; his words, when he spoke, were harsh with impatience, perhaps fear.

  He could feel her slipping away from him, could almost see it. It was as if she were wishing these past months away, forgetting them deliberately, ignoring their import. There were no nights entwined in each other's arms, no tender laughter, no friendly camaraderie. No teasing, no passion, no love.

  “Do you want confession, Judith? Then I give it to you. Freely, willingly, totally. I’m a man who has pledged to heal, and yet I’ve killed. I can remember the face of each man who died at my hand. I can recall the look in each man’s eyes as I took his life, his future, his hope. I wonder at the women I made widow, and the mothers who cry because of me, and the children left fatherless. Each time I killed , it was the most terrible act I’ve ever committed. Yet, I would do it again, in order to survive. I wanted to live and I was given no other option. Is that confession enough? “ He held out his hands, palm up, studying them as if he saw them coated with blood. “I spent so many years learning to wield these hands as tools of mercy. In five short hours, they became brutal instruments of death.” He bowed his head, studying the threadbare cloth of her skirt as if he found the words he needed there.

  “As to absolution, I don’t know about such things. Or eternity or damnation. I am only a man. Leave the idea of judgment to other minds more capable of deciding these truths, or to the angels, I don’t care.” When he raised his head, his eyes gleamed with their own tears.

  He smoothed the hair back behind her ears, then cupped her face with his hands. He looked into her eyes so deeply she feared Alisdair could probe her soul. His voice was earnest, direct. Soft.

  "We have all fought in war, Judith. There is not a man or a woman in Scotland who has not felt the bite of battle. Do you not see that you have been engaged in war, nothing less? Our weapons, our adversaries were different, but we each have struggled to survive. I told you once that I do not think the less of you because of your scars. Either on your flesh or in your soul.”

  Restraint was overwhelmed by the need to have her close. He stood and pulled her into his arms, extending his arms around her, placing her cheek gently against his chest. She should always be here, right next to his heart.

  “Perhaps bringing us together was a form of absolution, Judith. Two people who could not forgive themselves. Perhaps we can forgive each other. Who are we to question such things?”

  For a long moment, he didn't speak. These words must be perfect. They must convince her to throw in her future with the rag-tag bunch of MacLeods, to banish the thought of England and freedom.

  "Scotland is a harsh land, Judith," he finally said, his breath warm against her ear. "Our people have a penchant for lost causes which defies logic. They work hard, with industry and purpose. They have survived against odds that would break the less hardy. Scotland requires sons and daughters who fight for life. I think you well equipped to take on that challenge."

  Alisdair didn't know what else to say to ease her mind, wished he knew something wise and profound to say at this moment. He wanted to show her how it could be. He wanted to bathe in the cove with her and stand on the battlements and watch the sunset. He wanted to outlast the winter and relish the spring. He wanted to hold her in his arms until his joints ached with age and he creaked and groaned and grumbled. But these were all dreams unless Judith dreamed with him. Life was more than the simple absence of pain, or of terror. He wanted to share all its faces with her.

  But, in the end, what he wanted was not as important as what she chose.

  "I'll not force the pace, Judith," he said, his voice rumbling against her ear. "There is more than one way to coerce, and I'll not be guilty of it. You still must choose, I’ll not do it for you. ”

  Her vision was blurred, she could not speak.

  He tilted up her chin with one gentle finger so he could see the watery brightness of her beautiful blue eyes. "You decide, Judith, but make your decision on what you want for your future, not what has already happened in the past."

  She gazed at his face, seeing more than strength or kindness, seeing love in all its guises. Teasing laughter, gentleness, wine deep passion, blazing possession.

  She felt the faint beat of her heart escalate until the pounding of it would surely be audible to him .But it was not, because he slipped from her with a final, soft smile, and left the Great Hall.

  ****

  She found him standing at the cairn stones, at the small enclosure which marked the graves of his father, Ian, Gerald and Sophie. His head was bowed, his stance that of a man carved from rock, a statue of pride and purpose and a resolution almost too strong to touch.

  He turned and the look on his face was so fierce Judith recoiled from it. Only for a second, before she gained what courage she still possessed and glued it to her backbon
e.

  “Alisdair..” It was a tentative peace. She held out her hand. In her face was resolve, in her eyes was the answer he’d dreaded. Her face was awash with tears, and the sight of them made this even more difficult.

  He hated her in that moment with all the passion he’d held in careful restraint. Hated her for visiting so much more pain upon him, at a time when he could barely hold in check the grief he felt. Hated her for being unwilling to chance a life with him, for believing him incapable of giving her enough love and laughter and promise to offset any burdens they might share.

  “Go wait in the courtyard. I’ll summon the twins. They’ll see you safe to Inverness.” The ugly harshness of his voice reflected his rage. It surprised him that the words were not coated in flames, they burned him so.

  Her face was stark white, yet she did not turn, nor heed his unspoken warning. Did she not realize how close he was to tearing out of his self-imposed cloak of patience and tenderness and understanding? The man who faced her now was not kind. This was the man who’d returned from Culloden battle scarred, soul awash with what he’d done, who’d carried his dead father and brother in a rickety cart so many long miles that he might bury them on Tynan’s soil. The man she stared at now was devoid of hope and stripped of dreams. But she did not move, this stubborn English woman, her eyes dark with tears, the fatigue evident in her face, her very stance.

  “Yesterday, a woman laughed, and I thought it was you.” Of all the words he could have spoken, she did not expect these. “I began to crave the sounds of an English accent, only one clue to my insanity.” He turned back to the cairn stones. “Is that why you’re still here, Judith, to witness my submission?”