Mrs. Allen looked thoughtful. “You ordered more wagons to go to the Sutherlainns next week. The fabric is very thick, and will help keep a room warm. There must be a dozen or more lengths to divide up, laird.”
“Do it, then.”
“I’ll see to it at once.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Allen. By the way, what do you think of them?”
“Of the Sutherlainns, laird?”
“I was unclear. I mean those window-hangings. What’s your frank opinion?”
Mrs. Allen hesitated.
“Your frank opinion, please.”
“Well, laird, they’re a wee bit much for the room, aren’t they? And with all those tassels—I can’t help but think them rather busy, if you know what I mean?”
He looked at them again. And nodded. “Aye,” he said. “I do know what you mean.”
Change was coming.
Change was coming, and it was good.
It was Fiona’s seventy-second wedding. Seventy-third, she supposed, if she counted her own ephemeral one to Alasdair Penhallow.
But she wasn’t going to.
So: her seventy-second wedding.
She sat once more in the very last pew of the church in Wick Bay, where, far to the front, her fourth cousin, Boyd Iverach, was marrying his fourth cousin, Effie Bain. It was a small, local wedding, and the church was only half-full. Several rows ahead of her sat Father, Mother, Isobel, and Logan Munro. Next to Logan, pretty Helen MacNeillie (yet another cousin) had placed herself just a little too close for respectability, and Fiona, observing them from behind, noticed what a striking pair they made—he so tall and broad, and with his dark hair, Helen so plump and round, with curls of tawny gold.
She herself had come just a tiny bit late, having ridden out past the bogs to visit old Osla Tod, and had to quickly scramble into nicer clothing for the wedding. Now she looked down at the charming kid ankle-boots Mother had let her borrow. Aquamarine. So beautiful, that liminal shade between green and blue. Once in a while, the loch near Castle Tadgh had been that color, rendering it breathtakingly lovely.
The minister was going on and on in his sonorous voice about the duties and obligations of marriage, and surreptitiously Fiona loosened the silken cord of her reticule. She pulled from it a small pencil and a little piece of paper. As it happens, it was the very same piece on which, a few months back on that perfect summer’s day, she had added to her list during Rossalyn’s wedding.
Fiona turned over the paper.
It was blank.
Absolutely, totally blank.
Slowly, secretly, she began to write.
Things I like about myself:
Intelligent
Kind
Capable
Hardworking
Good sense of humor
Strong
Things I don’t like about myself:
Stubborn
Too proud (?)
Insecure
A dull stick
Greedy
She thought for a while.
In the Things I don’t like category, she crossed out Greedy.
She also crossed out A dull stick.
Then she looked up and to the front, where Boyd was kissing Effie, with a boisterous smack that resonated sweetly throughout the church.
She looked back down at her list.
Crossed out Things I don’t like about myself, and wrote instead Aspects to improve.
Yes.
That was better.
She’d work hard to improve on her stubborn, insecure, overly proud aspects.
She gave a decisive little nod.
And finally, in the Things I like category, underneath Strong, she added:
Good enough.
I am good enough.
I am MORE than good enough.
I am worthy.
I am
She paused. What was the right word?
Then it came to her, and she wrote: lovable.
Capable of loving, and worthy of being loved.
Suddenly she noticed that the wedding was over. People were standing up, talking, laughing.
Fiona folded her paper, and put it and the pencil safely back into her reticule. With a firm step, she went to warmly congratulate Effie and Boyd.
Time marched on, relentlessly, inexorably, everywhere around the vast earth, yet for two particular people, in their separate parts of the world, long miles apart from each other, it had a distinctly peculiar quality. Was it going by quickly, or curiously slowly?
It must have been two months after she’d come back to Wick Bay, on a cool, cloudy morning, that Fiona stood at a workbench in the stillroom, using a stone pestle to grind the tough leaves of a house-leek into a pulp for a poultice. Isobel had a headache, and leeks were an excellent remedy. After she had delivered the poultice—Fiona glanced at the long list she’d set near the mortar—she’d go to the kitchen to talk with the cook, then stop by the stables, and after that sit with Mother for a while in the solarium, and do some sewing. Then—
“Hello.”
Fiona paused. There was Logan, very nearly filling up the width of the doorframe with his massive shoulders. She looked up at him. “Hello.” Then she went on mashing a particularly fibrous leaf.