“No,” she said. “I require a bedchamber of my own.”
How foolish of her to assume that others wouldn’t find out. That her entire household wouldn’t know the truth about her marriage. That Leah would likely spend her days ignoring her staff’s pitying looks.
“Of course,” William replied, briskly moving past the awkwardness. “Why dinnae ye chose a bedroom tae your liking, and I’ll have Catriona fetch linens.”
Leah had chosen this room, a large bedchamber with a lovely corner turret and sitting nook. Catriona had helped her remove the Holland cloth from the furniture and tuck linens around the tester bed’s mattress. Everything would need to be aired tomorrow. Or . . . at some point.
Now, Leah stared up at the stitched bed canopy, the noise from Fox’s room having tapered off.
The rest of her life stretched before her with frightening blankness. An endless ocean of gray and her bobbing atop it, alone and forgotten.
That was the moment she remembered Ethan’s note, the one he had sent before the wedding. In the tumult of everything, she had utterly forgotten about it.
It only took a moment to light a candle and fetch the letter from her writing slope.
She slipped opened the seal and unfolded the foolscap to find a poem written in Ethan’s elegant handwriting:
Sister—
I see your love, a patient stone,
Rubbed and worn by worshipful hands.
A pragmatic beacon of the sun,
Lighting the path from where it stands.
You drew forth order of chaos,
Harnessed time and tamed hinterlands.
But now, you are set free.
To love . . . practically.
Your world has spun a new axis,
A different sun, your faithful gone.
You, alone, must shape a new form,
A home, a rhythm, a wild song,
Sculpting the stone of yesteryear,
Into a shape where you belong.
And now I pray for you to see
A way to love . . . practically.
Leah was crying by the end.
Had her brother known, with his poet’s intuition, the struggle this new life would present her?
And how kind of him to portray her like this. An ancient standing stone—the central, revered point of a village—marking the solstice and, thereby, organizing the year for peoples long gone. A practical, well-loved icon.
But Ethan was right.
