So they came to the morning worn thin and raw and much too tender, all of them, and it made everything harder to bear.
Her mother worked at her hair with hands that had not stopped shaking since the candles were lit, plaiting and pinning, weaving in small sprigs of white heather for luck, and saying every little while the same soft useless words. “There now. There now, me darlin’. There now.”
Anne sat cross-legged on the end of the bed with the wedding shift across her lap, setting the last stitches into a hem that no living soul would ever see, and pretending with enormous dignity that she was not weeping behind her spectacles.
Maisie had claimed the good chair by the fire as her rightful throne, and Rosie was installed in her lap in a state of total tyranny, gumming a wooden spoon and shrieking her opinion on the proceedings at regular intervals.
“Wheesht, ye wee terror,” Maisie told her, with vast affection. “Ye will have yer own turn to be the bonniest thing in the room. Let the lass have hers.”
Olivia caught the old woman’s eye in the mirror and very nearly broke.
It was a different thing to put the wedding gown on twice. Last night she had worn it to humor everyone asking for it. Her mother was laughing and crying at once, and the baby was clapping from the bed. This morning, nobody laughed. The loch-blue silk slid over Olivia’s shoulders in a room gone very quiet. It was heavier than she remembered, and it settled on her like a decision.
Her mother’s breath caught anyway. Her fingers fumbled hopelessly at the laces, and she had to stop and press the back of her wrist to her mouth and begin again.
“It fits,” Elspeth said when she had command of herself. “The shoulder sits right, after all. I fretted the whole night that it wouldnae.”
“It was never the shoulder ye were frettin’ about, Maither.”
“Nay,” her mother agreed. “It wasnae.”
“Let me,” Anne said. She came around to take over the laces and bent close under the cover of it. “Ye look like somethin’ out of the auld songs,” she whispered. “The kind the lass doesnae come home from. Are ye well? Truly.”
“Nay,” Olivia said, just as low. “But I daenae have to be, do I? I only have to walk.”
I only have to walk down to the kirk and say the words and let a stranger pin his name to me. That’s the whole of it. Folk have done far harder and lived.
The door opened then, without a knock, and the whole room went still as a held breath, because the woman standing in the gap was Kate.
She had dressed herself. Olivia knew it at once, and the knowing of it stopped the breath in her throat.
The gown was soft moss-green and hung loose on her, and the laces at the side had been done up crooked by fingers that had not laced up anything in half a year. There was nobody in the world who would have let her walk out of that room like that if they had been asked. Her hair was pinned anyhow, plainly by her own hand and plainly without a mirror, and she had a fistful of late roses crushed in one thin hand.
She had come down the cold corridors on her own two feet, and she stood there now with her chin held at a brave and trembling angle. Nobody in the castle had known she was coming because she had not asked a single one of them for help.
“I picked them off the south wall,” she said into the silence, holding the roses out. “They’re the last of the year. They’ll nae see out the week. But it occurred to me that a bride should have somethin’ in her hands, and nobody had thought of it yet.”
Olivia was on her feet before she knew she meant to be.
“Kate.” Her mother’s hand flew to her mouth.
Maisie had gone very quiet in her chair. Even Rosie had stopped shrieking and sat staring at the woman in the doorway with round Blythe-blue eyes.
“I am glad it’s ye,” Kate said. She came forward, one careful step and then another, and pressed the roses into Olivia’s hands. She did not let go of them at once. “He doesnae ken how to be soft, me braither. He never learned the trick of it. But he isnae cruel, whatever ye’ve been told, whatever cause ye think ye have.And he has been so alone holdin’ everythin’ together for so long now.”
“Kate…”
Her green eyes were swimming. “Ye’re even better than the stories. Ye deserve to be happy, Olivia. I mean that with me whole heart.”
“Ye…” Olivia’s throat had closed up. “Ye barely ken me,” she managed.
“I ken that ye made me speak when I’d sworn to meself I never would again,” Kate said simply. “That’s enough for me.”
And then Rosie, who had watched all of this with the grave attention of a very small queen, gave a sudden delighted crow and flung both arms out toward Olivia, opening and closing her hands in the ancient, undeniable command of babies everywhere.
Olivia laughed, wet and helpless, and gathered her in, roses and all. The baby seized a fistful of her plaits and hauled on them with deep satisfaction.
“She loves ye already,” Kate said, watching the pair of them, and some old shadow lifted by a degree from her face. “She kent ye before the rest of us did, I think. Bairns ken.” She reached and tucked a loose curl behind the baby’s ear. “I cannae wait to watch her toddle after yer own, one day. A whole pack of weeCairn terrors with their faither’s black scowl and their maither’s wicked tongue.”
