“Soldiers cook for themselves in the army,” he explained. “I became rather handy at the basics. Just deliver some daily bread and possibly the occasional pastry or sweet.” He quirked a grin.
“Ye always had a sweet tooth,” Lady Mariah sighed. “Very well. That’s settled then. A trusted groom will deliver your trunks this afternoon. I will send up a maid every other day or so to collect laundry and tidy up, if ye need. Until then, I’ll bid ye both adieu.”
Tavish motioned to his sister. “I’ll see ye out.”
The great hall rang with silence in the wake of their departure. Isla unpinned her bonnet and set it on the table, ignoring the tremor in her hand.
The indistinct murmur of Tavish’s voice carried up the stairwell. Lady Mariah said something in response. The great door closed below, and he reappeared in the doorway.
There was a sense of waiting about him. As if he expected Isla to do or say something specific. What? She hadn’t a clue.
“So . . . what are our plans?” Her voice sounded overly loud to her ears.
Crossing the room, Tavish pulled off his hat and tossed it onto the table. He had donned a kilt today in the blue-and-gold Balfour tartan, shedding the finery he had worn at Kingswell House. His coat and waistcoat were neatly pressed, but loose and well-worn.
He gave her an assessing look once again. The skin around his blackened eye was slowly fading from blue and green to a rather sickly yellow.
“At the moment, there isn’t much to do besides wait. Hopefully, we will hear soon from my solicitor about proceeding with our divorce.” Tavish paced the perimeter of the room, studying the tapestries. “I also assume your brother will need a week or two to cool his temper and begin to see reason.”
“Tossing me from the family will have social repercussions he will wish to minimize. Gray hates scandal, as I’ve said.”
“Precisely. I am confident Grayburn will come around to some sort of reconciliation with yourself. That reconciliation will go better if I am well on my way to being out of the picture. In short, it’s all just an enormous tartan knot that we will pick, stitch by stitch, to untangle.”
“And once we untangle it?”
He stopped and looked back at her. “Ye will be free.”
Abruptly, the room seemed far too small to hold the enormity of their shared history. Isla felt like a thief returning to the scene of a crime.
Once, she would have loved nothing more than to marry Tavish and set up house together in this small tower. Now that she had achieved her wish, she and Tavish were scrambling to unravel it.
The irony.
“Free,” she repeated.
“Aye . . . free from this,” he said quietly.
She gave him a questioning glance. For once, she wasn’t quite following the trail of his thoughts.
“This.” He gestured to the space around them. “The humbleness of this existence. ’Tis why I left seven years ago. That lass I had wed deserved so much more than this lowly life.”
He picked up a pewter plate from the sideboard. A far cry from the fine silver dishes and Sèvres china of Dunmore.
And yet . . .
“I don’t think that lass would have cared,” Isla said, sadness whispering between each syllable. “All she wanted was you.”
After Mariah’s departure, the hours crawled by.
Some foodstuffs and their trunks were delivered. Isla unpacked her things. When at Dunmore, her lady’s maid would take care of smoothing her dresses and seeing them properly hung in a wardrobe. But at Malton Hill, Isla had typically done for herself.
She carefully hung her few gowns and underclothes on pegs in the wardrobe and placed her shoes underneath in a neat row.
But once everything was put away, there was little else to occupy the hours.
She took her book,Waverly,by Mr. Walter Scott into the great hall, intending to curl onto the sofa and read. But she hadn’t the stomach for swashbuckling tales of doomed Jacobites—naive idealists who couldn’t accept the harsh reality of their world.
It felt a bit too on the nose.
