by Julia London
What if someone came? What would stop anyone from finding her in his study? Margot tossed her hat onto a chair, plainly visible from the door, then removed her coat and laid it across the foot of the bed. People who entered this room would see her things and hopefully assume she was within and seek Nell. Margot didn’t know what she’d do if Nell should come looking for her—she had to make haste.
She moved as silently as she might to Arran’s dressing room, wincing when the door squeaked as she opened it. She squeezed in through the partially opened door and quickly shut it behind her, then ran to the other end and carefully opened the door to the study.
Empty.
Her hands were shaking now, but she bolted to the small cabinet and fell onto her knees. She retrieved the knife she had dropped and kicked beneath it in her terror yesterday, then jammed the hat pin into the lock and jiggled, trying to find the catch that would turn it. The latch would not spring. She tried again, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t get the hat pin to catch the lock. Margot began to panic—surely everyone could hear her trying to open the locked door. Surely men would fall on her at any moment and drag her away to stand before the laird and confess her crime. Surely Jock was watching her now, his eyes gleaming with the satisfaction that he’d finally caught her in an act of perfidy.
This wasn’t going to work. The door would not come open, and just as Margot was giving up, it suddenly sprang free and swung open.
She gasped with surprise and jerked around to look behind her for reassurance that no one had come. Hearing nothing, she reached inside the dark interior, groping about for whatever secrets it held. Her fingers brushed against what felt like paper, tied together with a bit of twine. She withdrew the bundle and stared at the stack of neatly folded vellums. The one on top had the unbroken wax seal of the Mackenzie signet ring. What were these, letters? Correspondence with the French? With Jacobites? Had Arran written them? If he’d written them, why hadn’t they been delivered? And why was her heart sinking like a stone? She could almost feel his guilt burning through the thick parchment.
Her hands shaking, she untied the twine and turned the folded missives over.
“Lady Mackenzie, Norwood Park” was scrawled in Arran’s familiar handwriting across the front. Margot gasped, shocked to see her name, and fumbled with the stack. This was a letter to her? Why hadn’t he sent it? Perhaps this was his last will and testament, not to be sent unless in the event of his death.
She turned another letter over. It was also addressed to her. So was the next. And the next. She was scarcely breathing as she turned over nine folded vellums, all of them addressed to her. All of them sealed. All of them unsent.
She slowly slid off her knees and onto her bottom, the letters in her lap. What could they possibly say? She couldn’t break the seal! What an obscene violation of trust! It was the very thing he suspected of her.
If he’d meant her to see these letters, he would have sent them. She couldn’t stoop so low as to trample on this bit of faith between them. She couldn’t steal them out of a locked cabinet that she’d broken into and read them now.
But neither could she leave them untouched. She glanced at the mantel clock—she guessed she had a half hour before someone arrived to light candles and hearths. She looked again at the letters.
No. No, no, don’t do it. Better you admit you intruded on his privacy than break the seal. Margot tied the twine around the bundle and returned the stack to the cabinet. She shut the door, reinserted the hat pin to turn the lock...but then suddenly changed her mind and opened the door once more. Her curiosity was too strong.
“Just one,” she whispered. She took the first one from the stack, broke the seal and unfolded it. It was dated more than a year ago, in the winter.
It has been six months since last I wrote you, and the winter winds and ice have come to Balhaire. The storm came on us so quickly that we lost a few sheep in the glen, found them frozen together, their wool not thick enough to save them from the worst cold. I would that you were here to warm my bed. I despise myself for wanting it. I wish I’d never heard your name.
She stared at the letter, the words seeming to move on the page in her trembling hand. What had compelled him to write this nearly two years after she’d left him? Why hadn’t he sent it?
There was no going back now—Margot took another one and broke the seal. This one was written a month after she’d fled Balhaire, and she cringed, certain she would read a diatribe against her.
I’ve tried to understand why you left. We had our differences, but none that I would have guessed would lead to your flight. Had I not been so befuddled by your continued unhappiness, perhaps I might have put it to rights. I would that I knew what I did to harm you so, Margot...
He catalogued events—many she’d forgotten—that had led to her tears.
You can be the worst sort of woman, tearful and shrew, secretive and fragile. And yet I miss you here.
Another letter, written a year after she’d left.
Mary Grady was delivered of a son this morning. A happier man than John Grady you’ve not seen. The boy is healthy and has a full cry, and he took to suckling straightaway. The midwife says he will be a healthy lad. I am pleased for Grady, but may I confess to you that my heart is leaden. My hope for my own son is now in England...
There were nine letters in all to her, written in dates spread over the course of her absence. He’d written more frequently at the beginning, expelling his frustration and hurt with her in heavy strokes on the page. But in the last year or so, months had passed between letters. Two or three of them were quite sentimental, telling her of this birth or that death, of people she wasn’t sure she’d ever met, much less remembered. One or two of them were written more formally, the words cold, his anger simmering between the lines.
But every single one of them expressed how he missed her.
And then there was the last one, written seven months ago. It was shorter than the others. He began,
This is the last letter I shall ever write to you. I have resigned myself to the fact that I made a mistake in marrying you. But it is done and it cannot be undone. From the moment I swore to God and the queen that you were my wife, you became the beginning of my world and the end of it, and this is as it shall always be. It is my failing that I never imagined the end could be like this, my burden to bear for the rest of my life. But I release you, Margot.
Tears were clouding Margot’s eyes as she carefully folded and stacked the letters. She’d never known he felt like this. She’d wondered many times why he didn’t come for her, at least send a letter, and had assumed he was glad to be rid of her.
She held the letters in her arms and bent over them, her eyes squeezed shut, her heart pounding painfully. If she’d known...if she’d understood that he esteemed her somehow, would it have made a difference to her? Would she have ever left? Would she have spent the last three years dining with friends and laughing around the gaming tables and sending for gowns from London and feeling so empty, so bereft, so despairing of her future?
She tucked the last letter in between her stays and her stomacher, tied the bundle together again, then returned the rest of the letters to their dark hiding place and shut the cabinet door. She used her hat pin to lock it, picked up the knife and slowly gained her feet.
She didn’t know if it was possible to repair the damage she’d wrought in his life, and frankly, she didn’t know how she would face the damage he might have wrought in hers if he were committing treason. But no matter what else, she couldn’t pretend another moment—she had to tell him the truth as to why she’d come back. She had to tell him the truth about her feelings. She owed him these truths.
Margot fully expected to be removed from Balhaire straightaway, and she deserved no less. But it was well nigh time for her to be the woman he’d clearly hoped he’d married.
She returned to her rooms, her presence noticed by no one. She pulled the bell and waited at the window, her arms crossed over her abdomen, staring morosely out at the landscape and a graying day, thinking of a man closeted in his study, writing letter after letter to his runaway wife and locking them away. The image was heartbreaking. He’d had no more idea how to go about their fracture than had she.
She was still standing at the window when Nell hurried into her rooms. “A ship has come,” she said excitedly. “And Miss Griselda Mackenzie was on it.”
So that was the urgent meeting—Griselda returning from somewhere, probably with news. “Has anyone asked for me?” Margot asked curiously.
“No, milady.”
Margot stood up and walked to the window, looking out at the hills. How did one dress to tell her husband she had betrayed him? “I’ll have the scarlet brocade, Nell.”
“Yes, milady.” Nell went into the adjoining dressing room to fetch the gown.
* * *
NO ONE CAME for Margot, but she could hear a lot of running about beyond her door. Servants, she assumed, lighting candles and hearths. She finally left her room and went in search of Arran.
He was not in the great hall. Nor was he in the dining room. It wasn’t until she saw Sweeney stationed outside the library, as if he was standing guard, that she guessed where he was.
“Ah, Sweeney,” she said, smiling with relief that it was him. “Is the laird within?”
Sweeney’s eyes widened. “N-no, m-m-milady,” he said, his eyes darting nervously to a point over her shoulder. His lips moved, as if he tried to say something else, but no words came. A thin sheen of perspiration suddenly appeared on his brow.
“What is it, Sweeney?” she asked.
Sweeney’s lips curved, but his teeth clamped firmly shut as he tried to say the words he was seeking.
“Never mind,” Margot said soothingly, and put her hand on his arm. She stepped around him.
“N-n-no, m-m-milady,” he said, but Margot had already knocked on the door.
“It’s all right,” she said, and knocked again before she lost her nerve. She heard muffled voices inside, and before she could exhale, the door swung open, and Margot’s heart seized. Griselda.
She stood in the doorway, tall and fit. Her smirk made Margot’s blood run cold. There had never been any warmth between them, but Griselda was looking at her as if she had caught Margot in a criminal act and relished it. She was wearing a long plaid skirt and a velvet jacket fitted tightly to her.
“Aye, so it is true, is it? You’ve come crawling back to Balhaire,” she said coolly to Margot.
“Actually, I came by chaise. Good evening, Zelda.”
“Mmm,” Griselda said. She gestured for Margot to enter.
The room was lit only by a fire at the hearth, but in the shadows, behind Griselda, Margot could see Arran and Jock. Arran was at the window, one arm braced against the frame, the other on his waist, staring out. Jock was standing beside him, his arms folded over his chest. His expression was inscrutable, but he looked as if he were prepared to tackle Margot should she reach her husband.
Margot didn’t know where to go—Arran had yet to turn around and acknowledge her—so she stood awkwardly in the middle of the room as Griselda circled her like a hawk lazily circling its prey from above. “Arran?”
He slowly turned. His ice-blue eyes startled her—they were so deeply wounded and full of fury that she was confused. She hadn’t told him anything yet.
“Has something happened?”
Griselda snorted from somewhere behind Arran now.
Arran’s gaze didn’t waver. He stared at Margot, his jaw clenched so tightly shut that the muscles bulged slightly beneath a shadow of his beard. He folded his arms across his chest. “Aye. Word has reached us that there is a spy among us,” he said calmly.
Margot’s heart began to race. “Oh, I... A what?” she said, shaking her head, as if she hadn’t heard him or understood him. As if she didn’t know what the dreadful word spy meant.
“A spy, Margot. Someone who would see me hanged. And then Jock found this in my study,” he said, and held out his hand and opened his palm. He was holding the figurine the man in the cove had given her.
She’d put it in her pocket, had quite forgotten it. She stared at it now.
“Is it yours?”
Her heart was pounding so hard she was certain Arran could hear it. Her stomach roiled with dread, and she couldn’t form any truly coherent thought. She could not tear her gaze away from Arran’s—his eyes reflected such pain.
“Yes,” she said, her voice barely audible to anyone but him.
Arran’s shoulders sagged. He let the figurine drop from his hand to the floor and turned away.
“I...” Words utterly failed her right now. Nothing could convey the depth of her betrayal or her sorrow. Nothing she could ever say that would convince him that her intentions were to save her father. She was certain of that. She saw very clearly how this would all seem to him, and the fear of hurting him even more than she already had made her practically mute. “I can explain,” she forced herself to say. “In fact, I came here to explain.” Her small voice sounded almost disembodied to her, as if it had come from somewhere above her.
Arran’s expression melted into stone, and behind him, she heard Griselda mutter something in Gaelic. “Did you come to spy on me?” he suddenly roared to the ceiling, his face ravaged with raw torment, terrifying her. “All the promises you made to me, all the excuses you gave me? Were they lies so that you might spy on me?”
“Yes,” she said, breathless. She gripped her hands together and held them at her waist, needing something to hold on to. She closed her eyes, swaying a moment before forging ahead with the unvarnished truth. “That is, at first. They were lies, all of them lies in the beginning.”
Arran said something in his native tongue that sounded as if it would burn her if he said it in English. And Jock, loyal Jock, put his hand on Arran’s shoulder.
Margot tried again. “Arran, please listen to—”
“Get out,” Arran spat. “Now! Go at once, Margot. I donna care where you go, I donna care what you do, but get out of my sight. I never want to lay eyes on you again.”
His words, spoken so acidly, scorched her. She had known this would happen.
“Jock—remove her from my sight,” Arran spat.
Miraculously, Jock did not move instantly to do what Arran bid him.
Arran swung around to stare at him with fury.
Jock spoke quickly but softly in Gaelic. Whatever he said made Griselda snort with derision, and Arran tried to move away from him, but Jock clasped his shoulder and forced him to hold still and listen to him. He spoke earnestly, and as he did, Arran’s gaze drifted to Margot, then quickly away again, as if he could not bear the sight of her.
And then the three Mackenzies looked at her at once, their gazes blistering. Arran folded his arms and said stiffly, “My cousin believes we must first hear what it is you know before I turn you out.”
“Oh God,” Margot whispered. Her mind was whirling, her thoughts going back to the meeting in her father’s study. She shifted slightly to her left and grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself. Her legs felt like river reeds beneath her, swaying unsteadily in the current of her fear.
“Speak, woman,” Arran harshly commanded her.
“I don’t know anything, really,” she started, and Griselda muttered beneath her breath. “But I vow to tell you all that I do know, my lord.”
“I’m waiting!” he shouted at her.
Words began to rush out of her. Unpracticed, jumbled, but truthful words. “My father bade me come. He said that there were rumors in London that you meant to bring in French troops—”
More snorting
and muttering from Griselda.
“—and combine them with your men. He said you meant to put James Stuart on the throne.”
“Why would he say it? What would that give me?”
“Favor with a new king?” she answered uncertainly.
“Aye, and what then?” Jock prodded her, his voice gentler than Arran’s.
“He said that as he had brought you into the union of England and Scotland, and had vouched for you, and had given his daughter in marriage to you, that the suspicion of treason would likewise be cast on him, and that he would hang for it.”
“The coward sent his daughter to do his bloody deeds, is that it?” Arran spat.
“He said I was the only one who could discover it. That no one would suspect me, that I could discover what you were about, and that it was imperative I do so before anyone else.”
“And what did you discover, Margot?” Arran asked, his voice deadly soft. “What have you found that you will scurry back to tell your lord father, then?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Just...” She swallowed. She could scarcely see him now, her vision blurred by tears she would not allow to fall. She couldn’t be that woman anymore. If she was going to salvage this, she had to be as strong as he was. “All I have discovered is that you trade with France in goods. Not arms or men.”
“Anything else?” he snapped.
Margot looked at the figurine on the floor. “Yes,” she said slowly, and looked up at him. “I discovered some letters you wrote.”
At the mention of the letters, Arran froze, his gaze so hard she thought it might cleave her in half. Now he approached her slowly, as if he were stalking her, intending to drive a spear through her and finish her off. “Do you mean to say, then, that you have opened my private mail?”
Margot couldn’t find her voice. She could only nod.
“You,” he said, his voice a verbal sneer, his expression one of pure contempt, “have crossed an indelible line, madam.” He looked for a moment as if he would strike her, but then suddenly jerked about and, with his arm, swiped glasses off a sideboard so roughly that even Griselda jumped when they crashed on the floor. “You have jeopardized everything I have worked so bloody hard to build here! And you have crushed all trust between us,” he said, thrusting his hand out and curling his fingers tightly over his palm. “And now? Do you think I am a goddamn traitor now?”