“I wouldn’t have sent him this time,” Eachann said.
“I didn’t send Fergus. I sent David. Do you think I don’t know what I’m doing?”
Eachann just shrugged and tossed his horse a piece of nut.
“If ye ken what yer were doing, Calum MacLachlan, ye’d have wed a long time past. ’Tis a puir thing ye’ve done, laddie. A puir thing...”
Eachann groaned under his breath. “Oh God... Here it comes again...” He sank deeper into his chair. His horse rested its muzzle on his shoulder and watched Fergus from heavy-lidded equine eyes. Calum just stood there waiting for the same old lecture.
“... All the auld lairds must be a writhing in their graves. ’Tis a sad day for the clan MacLachlan.” Fergus took a deep breath and shook his big white head. “Yer great-great-grandfather, the MacLachlan Himself, dying at Culloden Moor, spilling his blood for the sake of the clans, and here ye are with no woman, no bairns.” Fergus shook his white head. “Och! This world is no’ for the auld ways.”
Calum glanced at his brother who was mouthing the words as Fergus spoke.
“... And yer great-grandfather, but a laddie he was when he fled to France with the Bonnie Prince, and lived in exile, he did. But did he think of Himself? No, he dinna. He spent years finding a new home for his people. He sailed across the sea, coming here to this wild place and searching till he found this island.”
Fergus paused, then waved his arm around like an evangelist in a room full of sinners. “Aye, will ye look around ye? At yer isle?’Tis like a bonnie Scots’ isle. Then the puir mon sailed back to Scotland and brought his starving clan. Lost his wife he did, yer ain wee grandmother died on that voyage.
“Here ye are, over a hundred years after yer great-great-grandfather, yer own namesake, the great Calum MacLachlan who died for his prince at Culloden, and ye canna even honor the dead MacLachlans by marrying one puir, awee, little woman.” Fergus sighed dramatically.
By then Eachann was quietly snoring, his stallion’s muzzle resting on his head.
Calum planted his hands on his desk and leaned forward, enunciating each word. “Take... the women...back.”
“If ye dinna ken when ye need a thing, well, I ken when ye do.” Fergus raised his chin, crossed his arms and just stood there. “And ye need a wife, Calum MacLachlan.”
“One of those women?” Calum shouted so loudly that Eachann woke up with a start.
“And what ’tis wrong with them?”
“Fergus can’t see worth a damn, brother,” Eachann said. “He has no idea what’s wrong with them.”
“I’ll have ye ken, Eachann MacLachlan, I can see as weel as ye!” Fergus bellowed at the bust of Robert the Bruce.
“Fergus.”
“Aye.” Fergus turned toward Calum’s voice.
“One of those women is old enough to be my grandmother.”
After a few silent seconds, he admitted, “Aye, I suppose Sallie’s a tad long in the tooth.”
Eachann gave a sharp bark of laughter. “She doesn’t have any teeth.”
“Ye need a wife, Calum MacLachlan. Ye need a family. Ye need wee bairns. MacLachlan bairns. Like Eachann. Yer brother’s four years younger than ye and he has bairns.”
“Two bairns,” Eachann added with a grin that was cut short when Fergus muttered something about another letter, scowled, and began to fumble through his coat pocket.
“Ooh, here it be.” He handed Eachann a vellum letter that they all recognized. There had been at least ten such letters from his children’s school in the last year.
Fergus slapped the letter in his hand and gave Eachann an equally quelling “you need to be married” look. “Ye’ve no wife, either.”
Eachann only shrugged. “I’ve already had one.”
“Yer bairns need tae be here, with MacLachlans, not at some auld school where strangers are raising them into wee heathens. They need a mother.”
“Why? I never knew mine.” Eachann cracked another nut, tossed it into his mouth, then scowled and spit it back into his hand.
Calum shook his head. Perhaps Eachann did need a woman. He needed something.
