The Laird

by Grace Burrowes

  “I don’t know yet. The shortbread is nice. Brenna makes it with lavender, and Michael said it’s his favorite.”

  “It’s not your favorite, is it, princess?”

  Had he overheard her? The notion was both unsettling and pleasing. “Lavender is for soap.”

  “And lemon drops are for little girls.” From his coat pocket, he withdrew a sack, one Maeve recognized might contain sweets. He shook it, the sound tantalizing. “Come sweeten your day, little Maeve. You’ve certainly sweetened mine.”

  More teasing. Maeve rose from the grass and advanced on him. He wore the same plaid as everybody else around the castle except Brenna, and he was tall, though not quite as tall as Michael. She had to reach up to get at the sweets, which meant Uncle was still teasing her.

  “Thank you.” She popped the little candy in her mouth, and it did taste of lemon and sugar—also of bitter smoke. She did not spit it out, because that would be rude, and Uncle Angus seemed nice.

  “I used to come here to sketch on a pretty day, but you’re bored, aren’t you, child?”

  Nice, and he paid attention. Maeve watched the cat disappear among the daisies. “Brenna said I might take this garden in hand, but it’s a wreck.”

  “A pretty wreck,” Uncle Angus said. “Like our Brenna.”

  Maeve didn’t know what to say about that. “Preacher likes it here.”

  “Come winter, Preacher will like it much better under your covers. Have you met Lachlan?”

  The daisies rustled, but no desperate little squeak suggested Preacher had put an end to a hapless rodent.

  “I haven’t met anybody except Michael and Brenna. Prebish is resting, and Elspeth is busy.”

  Uncle snapped off a daisy and held it out to her. This was clever of him, a grown-up trick, because daisy stems were tough. “Do you know where the stables are, child?”

  Maeve nodded, twirling her flower and watching the now-still daisies. “I saw them from the parapet. You can see everything from up there.”

  “Take yourself to the stables, and you’ll find a boy named Lachlan who’s about your age. By Highland standards, he’s a cousin-in-law of sorts to you, and he’s horse mad. Ye ken?”

  Bridget’s husband had been horse mad. Kevin’s house was full of pictures of horses, he wore riding clothes until teatime, and in spring, he stayed in the barn all night if a mare was close to foaling. When he talked about his horses, he sounded like he was reading poetry.

  “Lachlan’s my cousin?”

  “Not quite, but he’s Brenna’s cousin, which counts nearly the same in these parts. He’s a good lad, and I’m sure he’ll introduce you to the horses and the stable cats if you ask him.”

  “I like horses and cats, but I wasn’t allowed to have a pony in Ireland. Ponies are expensive.”

  Bloody damned expensive, according to certain grown-ups whom Maeve had been allowed to overhear more than once—purposely, she suspected.

  “Find Lachlan, but don’t tell him I told you where he was. He’s truant from the kitchen, and I wouldn’t want to get the lad in trouble.”

  He winked at her and strode off, his kilt swinging the same way Michael’s did. A flash of orange caught Maeve’s eye, and there, eight feet above the daisies, the cat sat on the top of the wall.

  “I’m going to the stables to find my cousin.” Though in Ireland, she’d had a sister, and Bridget had seldom been good company. Maeve had a brother here…somewhere.

  The cat sat atop the wall, its expression as dour as a preacher’s. When the beast started washing its paws, Maeve felt well and truly ignored—and free to find her cousin.

  It occurred to her, as she tried unsuccessfully to snap off a lovely white daisy, that if Uncle had remained rooted in the doorway, her only escape from the garden would have been over the walls. She spat out the lemon drop, brandished the daisy before her like a sword, and charged off toward the stables.

  Seven

  The gardens at the back of Brenna’s castle were like her: tidy, contained, and modest, also more appealing the longer Michael studied them. Pansies did well here, and Brenna used their vivid colors for contrasting borders. She’d found a variety with the same blue as Maeve’s eyes, and used it to edge a bed of something white and frothy.

  As white as the sun-bleached sheets on Michael’s bed. He mentally pitched that analogy aside, but a heavy tread on the other side of the hedge stopped him from rising from his bench and getting on with his day.

  “Shouldn’t you be up on your parapets, Brenna MacLogan?” Angus’s voice held a note of cajolery, but also a touch of something unpleasant.

  And the lady’s name was Brenna Brodie, and had been for nearly a decade.

  “Stand aside, old man. Where I go is no concern of yours.” Michael hadn’t heard Brenna’s approach, but he heard her lifting her chin.

  “This was my home long before you appeared, young lady, and it will be my home until the day I die. You’d best watch your tongue.”

  While Michael debated intervening, a silence stretched. An orange cat—a tom from the dimensions of his head—came strutting along past the roses.

  “You had best watch yours, Angus Brodie. I heard you tell Lachlan nobody would miss him if he wanted to enjoy a few minutes of a pretty day.” Brenna’s accusation might have been of murder most foul, for all the venom in her tone.

  “He’s a boy, Brenna MacLogan, a species you will never understand, else you’d not have allowed Michael to waste ten years of his life soldiering on the bloody Continent.”

  Michael rose, because that was the outside of too much, but a crunch of gravel on the other side of the hedge suggested Brenna was marching herself right up to Angus.

  “Do you forget, Angus Brodie, that Lachlan’s mother limped her entire life as a result of a mishap in the stables? Do you forget that the boy works for me, not you, and that his father will punish him if his few minutes in the sun take him rambling down to the stables again?”

  Michael sat back down.

  “The boy loves horses,” Angus said, though some of the pugnacity had ebbed from his words. “Ann Brodie loved horses despite getting her toes wrinkled. The boy feels closer to his mother in the stables, and scrubbing pots and polishing boots will hardly support him when he’s a man grown.”

  The discussion was becoming interesting, and apparently to the cat as well. The beast hopped up beside Michael on the bench and head-butted Michael’s ribs.

  “It’s for his father to say where the boy spends his time, not you, and not me,” Brenna added. “For now, Lachlan works in the castle.”

  Michael only caught the sound of her fading steps, because he listened very hard, hard enough to hear the cat purring mightily—in his lap.

  “Presuming beast.” The damned thing weighed a ton and looked mortally disgruntled to be set on the ground.

  In the exchange regarding Lachlan, who had been presuming and about what? Brenna had the right of it—the child’s father would make any and all final decisions—but in Angus’s side of the argument, Michael heard the echoes of the uncle who’d taught him the sword dances and his first few simple card tricks.

  Little boys needed to explore the world, not scrub dirty pots all day.

  “Has yon beast corrupted you into lurking behind hedges now?” Angus asked when he’d rounded the end of the hedge.

  Michael rose and fell in step beside his uncle. “Yon bright sun has encouraged me to linger in my own garden. When did you and Brenna stop getting along?”

  Angus was silent for a moment. The cat leaped out in front of them from among some yellow pansies, then sat on its sturdy fundament and yawned.

  “She was a good girl,” Angus said, “the sweetest little thing, and so quiet. When your mother left, she changed, or started changing. I am sorry to say it didn’t help when you left, either.”

  “You expected her to stop me from joining up?” Michael posed the question casually, but Angus’s accusation had been grossly unfair, not that he cou
ld know that.

  “Women have their ways, especially plump, pretty young women.”

  The moment was ripe for difficult questions, but Michael disliked discussing his wife this way. That Angus recalled her as plump and pretty was vaguely disquieting, particularly when Brenna was no longer that young woman.

  “Brenna has no guile,” Michael said. “I love that about her.”

  Angus knelt to pet the cat, the movement slow and a little careful, bordering on elderly, though Angus wasn’t fifty years old. “This one loves the ladies too, every chance he gets.”

  Michael did not love the ladies; he loved his wife, though he suspected Angus took that point well enough. Because Michael could not ask the most difficult questions, he asked something else.

  “Do you ever get lonely, Angus?”

  The cat, in the manner of many felines, went in a blink from purring and rubbing itself against the hand that petted it, to swiping at the same hand with a paw sporting a full complement of extended claws.

  Angus casually knocked the cat into the roses. “Bloody beast.” He got to his feet ungracefully. “You ask if I’m lonely. To live in the Highlands is to have some acquaintance with loneliness.”

  Michael spared a glance for the cat, who righted itself and bounded off for another flower bed.

  “A man could say the same thing about the Spanish plains or the French Pyrenees. Loneliness isn’t a function of geography.” Nor was it a function of marital status, something Brenna had divined that Michael had not. While he’d been marching off to war or holed up in the French mountains, his wife had been lonely.

  So had he. Brutally lonely. Not homesick, or not purely homesick, but lonely. The realization required some pondering.

  “I travel into Aberdeen from time to time,” Angus said. “It’s a fine city.”

  Aberdeen was a fine city, with as many brothels as any other port town.

  Angus was his only living adult relation, and so Michael persisted, because there was no one else to ask. “But in winter, when we’re stuck up here for weeks at a time, sometimes months? When the smell of wet wool is in every room and you’d sell your soul for a bit of birdsong. How have you managed all these years?”

  How had Michael’s father managed, when those winters meant his wife was off in Ireland, his daughters too?

  “You can’t sell your soul,” Angus said as they reached the stables. “You can only condemn it or hope it merits salvation. This is my home. I’ll not leave it.”

  Which stirring declaration had nothing to do with the question on the floor.

  “I might ride out with my wife this afternoon.”

  “You do that,” Angus said. “I’ll scare up Hugh MacLogan and tell him his boy’s too old for the scullery. With a bit of training, the lad will make a fine addition to our stables.”

  Angus talked about Lachlan as if he were a yearling with good bloodlines.

  “Leave that to me,” Michael said. “My wife is aggravated enough to have Maeve underfoot without any warning. It won’t hurt Lachlan to scrub a few more pots, and he does a good job with a pair of boots.”

  Something flitted through Angus’s eyes, a sort of crafty, commiserating humor. “Aye, I’ll leave it to you then. This is your home too.” He strutted off in the direction of the village, something about his gait putting Michael in mind of the tomcat.

  “It’s not my home too,” Michael said to nobody in particular. “I own the bloody place.”

  “Are you talking to yourself?” Maeve appeared from the depths of the stables, Lachlan at her side. The boy looked a bit defiant, but knew enough to hold his tongue.

  “I was. I assume Lachlan gave you a tour of the stables, for which I thank him.”

  “He did,” Maeve said. “You have the biggest horses I’ve ever seen. Lachlan said we might be allowed to clean some harness, but Herman Brodie is off looking at a mare, so maybe some other day.”

  Herman Brodie, stable master for the past fifteen years, was probably off looking at a mare of the two-legged variety.

  “You two wash your feet at the pump before you go back inside the castle. But first, I’ve been meaning to ask you both something.”

  Maeve and Lachlan exchanged a look, which Michael did not begrudge them. Everybody needed allies, whether he or she scrubbed potatoes and pots, was newly arrived from Ireland, or owned the damned castle.

  “You, Lachlan, are in the kitchen for much of the day, and I need to learn a certain recipe. Do you know your letters?”

  “Some.” The boy’s ears turned red, suggesting “some” amounted to his name or a vague approximation of it.

  “We’ll get Maeve to help us, then. I want that shortbread recipe,” Michael said. “The one with the lavender. You can winkle it out of Cook, and Maeve can write it down, but you must tell no one.” That last part had both children smiling. “Can you do this?”

  “We can,” Maeve said, her grin impish.

  “Yes, Laird. Must we do it today? Cousin made a big batch just yesterday.”

  Laird. Lachlan was the first to address Michael as laird, and from the child, the title bore respect and something…something Michael liked, something that eased the homesickness and the loneliness both.

  “No rush. The important thing is to be casual about it, so nobody notices what you’re up to.”

  “We can do that too,” Lachlan said, grabbing Maeve’s hand.

  “Before you scamper off, Lachlan, I need a word with you. Maeve, you’ll find pencil and paper in the desk in the library.” At least, there’s where it had been for the first twenty years of Michael’s life.

  Maeve waved to them and skipped away, reminding Michael that Brenna used to skip all over the bailey, when she’d first arrived to Castle Brodie.

  Lachlan watched Maeve skipping up to the castle, the way Michael might have watched a plate of fresh, warm shortbread on a cold winter’s day.

  “I know I’m not supposed to go to the stables, Laird.”

  Loneliness was not the exclusive province of adults.

  “You’re certainly not supposed to lark about the stables in your bare feet. Shall we sit?” Michael gestured to a worn bench in the sun outside the barn doors. “Taking a few minutes to show Maeve around is hospitality. We pride ourselves on our hospitality in this shire.”

  The boy scuffed dirty toes in the stubby grass under their bench. “Maeve likes horses.” While Lachlan clearly liked Maeve, or liked having any child to associate with during his long day.

  “She’s my sister,” Michael said, which earned him a curious glance. “You have a sister.”

  “Our Annie. She has the same name as my ma did.”

  “Why don’t you wear your boots if you’re sneaking into the stables?”

  “Boots are for winter, and I don’t sneak.”

  Michael knew that—about the boots—but he’d forgotten it. When every penny counted, something as dear as a pair of boots shouldn’t be wasted on summer weather. Soldiers were equally protective of their footwear, and a regiment’s cobbler was never allowed to volunteer for the most dangerous missions.

  “A man who’s working around horses has to wear his boots whenever he’s in the stables. I don’t care what Herman says, or Angus, or your own father. I’m the laird, and these are my stables.”

  Lachlan scuffed both feet. “Yes, Laird.”

  Which in the dialect of little boys meant “Go bugger yourself.”

  “Lachlan, if I ask your father to let you work in the stables, I’ll provide the boots as part of your pay, but I can’t have Brenna wroth with me for stealing her best kitchen help.”

  Understanding dawned in Lachlan’s solemn blue eyes. “We none of us like to make Annie upset. When she cries is the worst. Only Uncle Neil can manage her when she cries.”

  “Uncle Neil’s a good man.” Whom Michael would probably not recognize if he sat down with him at the same table in the pub. “We must not rush you from the kitchens, and I do need that shortbread recipe.�
��

  “Aye.” The boy looked down, though a grin had appeared.

  “Away with you, and don’t forget to wash your feet.”

  Lachlan shot off the bench, but only as the boy reached the bailey did Michael realize he’d had an audience. The marmalade cat sat in the barn doorway, having a casual wash.

  “You’ll not be tattling on me to my wife, cat, or I’ll tattle on you to all of yours.”

  The cat paid him no mind. No mind whatsoever.

  ***

  “Hold still.” Brenna spoke around a pair of pins.

  “How long does it take to tuck up some damned wool?” Michael groused. “A man wants to find his bed at the end of the day, not serve as his wife’s pincushion.”

  This was the fellow she was supposed to woo? “Turn a bit.”

  He obliged, which meant Brenna had a fine view of the backs of his calves. Hairy, muscular, male…they were interesting, those calves. She took a pin from her mouth and fastened another few inches of hem.

  “What did you find to do with yourself today, when you weren’t serving as my pincushion?”

  “I made the acquaintance of our boot boy, Hugh’s son. I also made the mistake of allowing Herman Brodie to accost me on a sunny afternoon, and nothing would do but I must introduce myself to every equine on the property, including all five foals born to us this spring. Then, of course, we had to have a pint of summer ale, or two.”

  Or six. He’d sent word up from the village not to hold supper for him.

  “Turn again.” She took the last pin from her mouth. “If you found Lachlan in the stables, the boy will hear about it from his da.” Though why hadn’t Brenna thought to look for Maeve in the stables? What girl raised in an Irish squire’s household wouldn’t be horse mad?

  “Are you staring at my arse?”

  “I will never, not if I live to be ninety-four years old, understand the male mind.” Though she might take up admiring her husband’s backside. She pushed the last pin through soft wool and sat back. “I am not staring at your blessed fundament. We’re done here. Take off your kilt and mind the pins.”

  He stepped away. “You were taking overly long about that last part. If you did want to stare at my arse, I’d hardly be offended.”