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Lady Mairead put a hand to her mouth. Above it her eyes had filled. Then something broke loose in her face, and she laughed.

It was a real laugh, cracked with disuse, and it went up into the cold rafters and rang there. Iona stared at her.

“Gregor dropped his bonnet,” Lady Mairead said, and laughed again, helplessly, with tears running into the lines of her face. “At the chapel door. He saw me in this and he dropped it in a puddle, and he stood on it, and he never noticed till the priest was done. He wore it home flat as a bannock, and swore to every soul at the feast that it was the fashion in Edinburgh.”

Iona laughed with her. She could not help it. Joy came up in her chest, hot and sweet, because a woman who had sat in the dark for so long was laughing in the light, and Iona had done it. She caught the lady’s cold hands and swung them, and the silk swirled, and Lady Mairead laughed like a girl.

“Ye must have been beautiful in it, my lady,” Iona said. “Laird MacVey was a lucky man.”

“He said so himself,” Lady Mairead said softly. “Every day of his life.” Then the light came back into her face. “Ye’ll no’ tell Agnes,” the lady said, breathless. “She’d have the gown off ye and into the chest before ye could blink. She thinks I’m made of glass.”

“Agnes thinks I’m made of something worse, my lady,” Iona said.

“Then ye’ll get on,” said Lady Mairead, and laughed again.

Below them a door banged, and a man’s voice came up the stairs, sharp with alarm. “Mother?”

Iona knew the voice. Her pulse leapt, and all the heat of yesterday came flooding back with it.

• • •

Alasdair had heard his mother laugh from the foot of the west stairs.

He had come to ask if she had eaten, as he always did, and had found her chair empty and the dust on the stairs scuffed by two pairs of feet. Then the sound had come down to him. He had not heard it since the day they carried his father in at the gate. He had taken the stairs at a run, sure that something was wrong.

He stopped dead in the doorway.

His mother stood in the sunlight with her face wet and alive. And beside her, holding her hands, stood his wife in his mother’s wedding gown. He knew it at once. He had grown up under the portrait in the hall, his mother as a young bride in pale blue silk with silver at the neck, and his father’s hand on her shoulder.

The pale blue silk lay on her like water. Her plait had come loose, and the red of it burned against the sky colour of the gown, and her shoulders rose out of the silver at the neck white as milk. Her green eyes were bright with laughing. She looked like every bride in every song he had been sung as a boy.

His breath went. The want hit him low and hard, worse than on the desk, worse than on the hill. His cut lip throbbed where she had bitten it.

Then he saw the gown for what it was. His mother had worn it to marry his father. Torquil Dunmore had put his father in the ground. And Torquil Dunmore’s daughter stood in it, in his father’s room, and Alasdair wanted her so badly his hands shook.

His stomach turned over. He tasted bile.

Iona let go of his mother’s hands. Her chin came up, and her mouth curved.

“Well, MacVey?” she said. “Have ye nothing to say to yer wife?”

His mother’s laugh stopped as if a door had shut on it.

“Take it off,” Alasdair said.

The smile went out of Iona’s face.

“Yer mother asked me to…” she began.

“I dinnae care who asked ye. Take it off. Now.”

“Alasdair,” his mother said, very low. “I wanted to see it on somebody.”

He could not look at her. Out of the side of his eye he saw her hands come up and find the shawl, and her face go quiet and far off, and the light go out of it. He had done that. He had come up those stairs and put her back in the dark in a single breath.

“Make me,” Iona said.

He looked at her then. She was white with temper, her breast rising and falling under the silver thread, her hands in fists against the silk.