Michael had been too young to understand that marriage alone did not confer dominion or possession of a woman’s heart on her spouse. The privilege of keeping a lady’s heart safe was earned, and he’d failed his wife miserably.
And yet, that small Brenna had been much like the lady leading Michael into the summer night.
“You’re still a determined soul,” he said as they passed a patch of daisies looking pale in the moonlight. “You still go after problems instinctively. You attack them without any thought they might have no solutions.”
She shot him a look suggesting the moon was affecting his wits.
“They mostly do have solutions, it’s we who lack the vision to see them, and I’m certainly guilty of that.”
She should leave him. That would solve too many problems, and yet he could not bear it if she did.
“Angus stole our letters, Brenna. Yours and mine, both. I don’t know as he even read them. He simply took them from the post. And from us.”
Brenna paused at the postern gate, while Michael shifted the hamper so he could get at the latch.
“He took more than a few letters, Michael. I’m glad he’s dead, though I understand your feelings are more complicated.”
She reported her position with breathtakingly unapologetic assurance, and of the two—her relief at Angus’s death, and her acceptance that Michael’s emotions might not match her own—the second caught Michael’s interest.
“I don’t want to feel anything.” Though Michael loved his wife, and that was…that was still good.
“You will feel me leaving you here by the gate if you don’t get moving, Michael Brodie. Down to the river with you, before the grass gets any more damp.”
“Brenna, you need not be anxious. My wishes prevailed for nine years, and even had they not…” He could give her this. He could give her absolute control over their fate, and she deserved that, at least. “Even had they not, based on what has transpired, our marriage will be as you wish it to be.”
“You’re daft,” she said, marching off down the hill. “Marriage isn’t a matter of taking turns being the baby or the queen or the laird. We don’t take turns running the castle or scurrying off to France. We’re married.”
He had scurried off to France. Tail between his legs. “You have some definite notions about this marriage business.”
She was quiet for the time it took them to wind down the path to the river, and Michael had to approve of her choice of location. The sound of the Dee at summer ebb was soothing, the moonlight on the water lovely. Maybe what they had to say to each other would profane such beauty, or maybe the water could carry all the hurt and misery away, down to the sea, and out of their lives.
Out of their hearts.
Brenna snapped out the blankets and more or less flung them on the grass. Michael tossed his sporran down as well.
“I don’t want to tell you a thing, Michael Brodie. Angus is dead, and I want all his wrongdoing to die with him. Keep marching, you know, like a good Scots regiment, even after the colors have fallen and the pipers are silent.”
Michael could not stand that she was so afraid. Despite whatever he might be feeling himself—nothing at all, too much, and everything in between—he stepped up to his wife and put his arms around her.
“What Angus did will live in your heart and mine unless we deal with it.” Even then, even if Brenna shared with him every jot and tittle of her recollections, she’d still not empty her mental coffers of Angus’s pernicious legacy. The same way a soldier could be felled by memories of battles past, a shaft of sunlight, a snippet of laughter, any small sensory impression might dredge up more experiences she’d shuffled away from her mind’s notice.
“I am too tired of dealing with Angus to hate him,” Brenna said. “Though I expect to get a second wind on my hatred. I pray for it.”
“Because,” Michael said, looping his arms around her shoulders, “beneath the hatred lies the hurt and the fear. Tell me about the hurt, Brenna Maureen. Tell me all about it.”
***
Michael Brodie was a brave man, though he’d be years understanding that about himself. For now, he’d see only that he’d abandoned his sixteen-year-old wife, and while there was a story there—one Brenna sensed lay at Angus’s far-from-sainted feet—she’d lead the way and tell her miseries first.
“I was lonely,” she said against her husband’s shoulder. For years and years, she’d been lonely, but she was fiercely pleased that when she stood in Michael’s embrace she was no longer lonely.
“Let’s sit,” Michael said, and perhaps that was wise, because Brenna’s knees had gone weak at the effort to push out three honest words. “I’m sorry you were lonely. If it’s any consolation, I have some acquaintance with loneliness myself.”
When Brenna might have taken up a position beside her husband, the better to keep her thoughts straight and her emotions far from her own notice, he instead sat behind her, hiked his knees up, and drew her down against his chest. She was surrounded by Michael as surely as the keep was surrounded by the bailey walls. Though Michael was a good deal warmer than granite, he was no less solid.
“I don’t mean I was lonely when you left for the military, though I was. I mean, I was lonely from the day I arrived to Castle Brodie. My ma had died the year before, my father and brothers were reeling with it, and there I was. Eight years old, and I knew not one soul, but that tall, green-eyed boy named Michael, who would someday be my husband.”
Michael’s lips grazed her temple. “He is your husband. He wants always to be your husband.”
She nuzzled his throat, which bore the scent of vetiver.
“I’ve had some time to think on it, Michael, and while I liked you—you were my Michael—I also did not want you to leave me as my family had.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Leave me when I was small, I mean. I’d watch you, and sometimes, you’d watch me, but if my own father and brothers could pass me into the keeping of strangers, then I was easy to leave, you see. I didn’t want to do anything to make you leave me before you were truly mine.”
“So you were shy and coy, and I was fascinated with you.”
“Angus was fascinated with me too.” While Brenna wanted to focus on Michael’s admission—wasn’t he fascinated with her any longer?—the part about Angus was what needed telling now. “Angus was diabolically sly, Michael. He did not approach me indecently—he was kind and understanding. He answered the questions I could not ask anybody else. He offered the occasional pat on the shoulder or passing hug. He made me feel…”
Oh, this hurt. This hurt awfully, to think of how vulnerable she’d been, what easy prey.
“He made you feel special,” Michael said, his voice carefully flat. “He made you feel safe, and as if you had at least one friend in the world, a friend you would protect and trust. He was the serpent in the garden of your childhood, promising much, though the cost of what he offered you was beyond your ken.”
Brenna’s fingers ached—she’d curled them that tightly in the wool of Michael’s sash.
“Exactly. So when he’d sit me in his lap, even though I wasn’t exactly comfortable, I wasn’t entirely uncomfortable either. I felt privileged to be Angus’s ‘special little girl.’”
For a long moment, the river murmuring to the moonlight was the only sound other than Brenna’s breathing. It was too soon to give way to tears, for they had much more ground to cover.
“He graduated to kissing me, on the cheek at first, and then he offered to show me how a grown-up girl kisses.”
“I’m glad he’s dead too,” Michael muttered against her hair. “Very glad. And then what?”
Somebody started up playing the pipes in the vicinity of the castle above them. Not Davey MacCray, somebody of a more lyrical, lamenting bent. Neil MacLogan, probably.
“Then he wanted to draw me, because I was so pretty. Nobody had hair the same shade as mine. Nobody had such lovely eyes, or such a char
ming smile. He’d steal into my room at night and draw me in my shift. It was our secret, of course. What child doesn’t think a grown-up’s confidence some sort of treasure?”
“Then he took your nightgown off.”
Michael said the words like a catechism, as if to give Brenna an example for how to simply express such base wickedness.
“Then he took my nightgown off.” And she’d hated it, hated how his gaze changed, so he saw not her, a person, but as nakedness that should be forbidden to him. Worse, she’d hated how shame and a sense of excitement had blended in a child’s heart, to leave bewilderment and powerlessness in place of self-respect.
Along with enormous fears, of abandonment, and of discovery, both.
“What else, Brenna? I know he didn’t stop there.”
Michael held her, as if his arms around her could contain all of her childhood confusion, all the sick dread that bordered on anticipation, all the fear of what might happen next.
“This despoiling took time,” Brenna said. “Months and even years of cozening and moving by degrees. Angus would take a chair by my bed, ask my opinion on this or that, and draw me sitting on my bedcovers. Then he’d take a place at the foot of the bed, until that’s where I expected him to sit when he wasn’t stealing kisses. He moved up the bed by slow degrees, like a wasting disease progresses in increments too small to measure. And one night—”
Abruptly, she could not breathe.
“Easy,” Michael whispered, smoothing a hand down her hair. “It will keep for another time.”
Brenna did not want to endure another time. Though her wish was doomed, she wanted this one night under a full moon to be her unburdening, and when the sun came up, she would bury her past along with the man who’d ruined so much of it.
“This was the night I woke up, in one sense. I was about eleven, maybe twelve. Angus had been making odd comments for weeks, about the march of time, about all beauty fading. The closer he crept to me, the more I tried to resist. I told him I already knew how to kiss well enough. Told him he had enough drawings of me. Told him I was not well. He’d grow sad when I made these comments—if I didn’t hate him for what he did to me, I’d hate him for the way he manipulated with his silences and quiet looks.”
“I hate him. I hate him more with every word you speak. I hate that I’m related to him.” And yet, Michael’s hands on Brenna’s hair were so gentle.
“He got under the covers with me, took his dressing gown and nightshirt off, and laid on top of me. I never saw him, but I’ll never forget the feel of him, either. He stank of his damned pipes, and he had soft, clammy hands, and he—”
“He took his pleasure on your body, though he left your maidenhead intact.”
Those were not words Brenna could repeat. She managed a nod, and wanted so badly to go back in time and pluck the girl she’d been from the clutches of the monster who’d climbed into her bed.
“The w-worst part…” She took a slow breath, because the words must be set free. “The worst part was that he kissed my hands and told me next time it would be even better. I was crying—silently, but the tears were there—and he told me it would be even better. What sort of man, what sort of creature treats a child thus, so she’s crying and naked and horrified, and then offers that?”
Michael said nothing—the question had no adequate answer—though to speak it aloud, to cry it out to her husband, unloosed the weeping Brenna had been wrestling back for years.
She cried for herself, for the child who’d trusted none to protect her, who hadn’t entirely understood the wrong being perpetrated on her. She cried for the woman she was, who could see with adult eyes the magnitude of the damage inflicted on a lonely girl behind a closed door, in a walled garden, and in small, quiet moments that arose without warning whenever Angus saw opportunity.
“You made it stop,” Michael said, long moments later. “Somehow, you made it stop.”
The pipes went on, still sad, but softer, as if the wind had shifted.
Michael would desperately need to hear this part, to be reassured that his wife had not drifted from victimized child to victimized adult, and Brenna could give him those assurances.
“You made it stop, at least in part,” she said. “More and more, you took to following me about, and I realized—I finally realized—that as long as I stayed around people—as long as I stayed near you, in particular—Angus did not dare approach me. I learned to stick close to the keep, and I made friends with your sisters. I did my lessons in the kitchens, because somebody’s always coming and going in the kitchens, and I became your mother’s right hand.”
“I felt like an idiot,” Michael said. “I was, at sixteen and seventeen, a young man. You were a child, and yet, I liked you. I liked to tease you. I liked to watch you embroider. It wasn’t the same liking I had for my sisters, though I was protective of you all, and yet…”
Brenna struggled to raise herself from his chest.
“What you felt for me was the opposite of what Angus felt. In some way, I sensed that. To you I was a person to be cherished until I could take my place as your wife. To him I was a pleasure to be hoarded up and exploited as long as womanhood eluded me. I asked your mother if I could share a room with Bridget, and then I asked her if Erin might join us.”
Michael gently gathered her back onto his chest.
“Because Angus was looking at Erin the way he’d looked at you. She was shy and sickly, and easily overlooked. Do you think my mother guessed?”
He didn’t ask her if she’d ever gone to Lady Catherine—a kindness to all concerned.
“I don’t know what your mother knew, what she guessed, what she knew without admitting even to herself, or what she confronted your father with in private. She took your sisters to Ireland, though, and Erin rallied. She also made sure we girls had a lock on our bedroom door, and said young ladies must never quibble at demanding privacy when they needed it.”
Brenna’s hip ached, and she had that wrung-out, floaty feeling that came with spent tears. She pushed Michael to his back and cuddled down into his embrace.
“Angus was furious with me. He found me collecting eggs one morning and told me he knew what I’d done, asking to share a room with your sisters and trailing after you like a trained hound. He ranted and railed, and told me I was growing ugly anyway, losing any appeal I’d ever had. I was no end of pleased to hear that part.”
“But he threatened you.”
“Oh, of course. If I ever accused him of untoward behavior, he’d see me sent from the castle. I’d never be allowed to marry the laird’s heir if I told such tales. The laird’s heir, especially, deserved a wife who hadn’t allowed a man into her bed without a peep of protest.”
Michael flipped the blankets up around them.
“War is a delight compared to such diabolical manipulation of a young girl’s fears. Perhaps I shall lead a life of wickedness, so I might meet my uncle in hell, there to inflict upon him every misery I can devise and a few hundred I haven’t thought of yet.”
Hell would be a wondrous lively place, if Michael’s tone of voice were any indication.
“Thoughts of revenge can comfort for a time,” Brenna said. “Knowing it would never happen again was of greater comfort yet. Angus did not feel for grown women what he did for children.”
“And then Maeve showed up. Merciful, everlasting God in heaven. She was lonely, out of place, shy, and ill at ease.” Michael was so quick to grasp a pattern that in Brenna’s case had gone unnoticed for years.
The wool Michael had wrapped around them, and Michael beneath her, made a cozy haven for Brenna, and increasing lassitude meant she must complete her confession before sleep and the blessed pleasure of Michael’s embrace overtook her.
“I was not Angus’s first victim, but I think his attentions to me were the most sustained.”
His chest heaved up and down with a sigh, like the waves on the loch yielding to a passing wind.
“My dearest wife
, I know. And Angus didn’t limit his perversions to little girls. I had thought that young men were his preferred victims—his only victims, in fact.”
Young men. Michael had been a young man. He’d been a braw, bonny fellow, who’d left for his regiment at the first opportunity. All the wool in Scotland could not have kept Brenna warm as that realization washed over her. She sat up, the blankets falling away as she searched her husband’s face.
“Michael, how could you know that Angus did not limit his wickedness to little girls?”
Nineteen
Sebastian had last shown this careful, controlled quality—and sworn at length in French—before Milly had married him. Since Michael Brodie had come striding through the middle of the crowd in the bailey, the entire night had been a series of sacre bleu’s and worse.
“Why aren’t you in bed?” he growled, prowling across the great hall. “I recall sending you up to bed more than an hour ago.”
At his tone, the last of the maids and footmen melted away, leaving a half-dozen trestle tables stacked against the wall in anticipation of a return to storage.
“You did send me up to bed.” After a distracted kiss good night. “You forget, however, that I am not one of your corporals, to scamper off upon your orders. Why aren’t you in bed?” She slipped her arms around him, knowing exactly what had kept him awake.
The Castle Brodie garrison was in an uproar. As a former commander, Sebastian was constitutionally incapable of resting when anyone he cared for was threatened, and he cared for Michael Brodie a very, very great deal.
As did Milly.
As did, happily, Michael Brodie’s wife.
“If you dragged me to bed, I could not sleep,” he said, wrapping Milly in a snug embrace. “Michael has gone missing, and I haven’t seen Brenna for some time either. It’s too much to hope you’ve shooed her to sleep with the proverbial wee dram?”
“She has found a far more bracing tonic in her husband’s company. Come with me, Sebastian.”
The Laird Page 30