The Laird Takes a Bride(107)

As a child he’d never spent much time looking up at old Raulf, for by some devious trickery the artist had managed to render his eyes in a way that seemed to follow you about, with an expression in them that suggested ill intent. One of the pleasures of adulthood was that he’d become tall enough to meet Raulf face to face, as it were, without a superstitious chill running down his spine.

Alasdair lingered there, his gaze resting thoughtfully on that haughty countenance. Not only was Raulf renowned for his ferocity, he was also notoriously stubborn (which made all his sieges successful). But in the end, evidently, he was undone by his insistence on eating oysters brought in from Cairnryan—against the advice of his ministers, his astrologist, his surgeon-barber, his wife and his mistress, and his priest, for the distance was such to make consuming them hazardous.

He was dead within the hour.

“You bloody old fool,” Alasdair said out loud to Raulf. “Hoist by your own petard.”

He moved on.

At length he came to the portrait of himself and Gavin. How they’d hated standing still for so long! Also, he and Gavin had been in the middle of a long-running feud as to who was better at spitting their saliva the furthest, and the only way the harassed artist could keep them from breaking out into fisticuffs was to abandon his idea of posing them with their arms around each other. But the entire time he and Gavin had muttered crass scatological insults to each other.

Speaking of stubborn.

Suddenly Alasdair grinned.

Christ, maybe it all could have worked out all right, no matter what would’ve happened with Mòrag Cray.

Anything was possible.

His smile dimmed, and he reached out a hand to one of those faint discolorations on the wall.

Then he walked on to the laird’s bedchamber and into his dressing-room. On a low shelf in his armoire was a small box hewn from oak and fitted with ornamental brass along its curved lid. Inside the box was a steel key, and Alasdair took the key, went into the passageway, and stopped before the locked door.

Into his mind came little Sheila’s voice, that odd remark she’d made the day after his thirty-fifth birthday, right after Dame Margery had issued her stunning pronouncement.

A room with a door, a door with a lock, she had said in that dreamy way she had sometimes. An egg that won’t hatch, a bird that can’t fly . . .

There was no doubt about it, Sheila was an interesting child, with those pale blue eyes that could, apparently, see two things at once.

Alasdair unlocked the door.

Without windows, without candles to illuminate it, the room was dark, but Alasdair didn’t need such things to know what was inside.

A dozen portraits of his family, set carefully against the walls.

Father, Mother, Gavin, and himself: painted from the time of his own infancy until shortly before their deaths.

After they were gone, he couldn’t bear to look at these portraits. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to destroy them, and so had placed them in here. Not in the attics, where anyone might go and find them. Here, where they were concealed from prying eyes, and where they had been, undisturbed, for all these years.

Alasdair leaned against the doorframe, his eyes fixed on the dim shapes of the portraits. He felt it coming, the massive wave of grief, but he didn’t brace himself against it or try to fight it, or ignore it, as he’d done before.

Instead he let it roll through him, an overpowering rush of sorrow so intense that for a brief moment or two he wondered if it would kill him.

But it didn’t.

It rolled on and away.

Leaving him not empty, but filled with—why, it was love.

Love for Gavin, clever, mischievous, maddening, impulsive, merry, affectionate.

For Father, intelligent, kind, easygoing, maybe a little weak, but well-meaning and generous.

For Mother, brilliant and moody, a limited person, perhaps, whom he’d never fully understand, but she’d done the best she could, which is, in the end, all that anyone can do.

As for Mòrag Cray, what he felt wasn’t love, or even the remnants of a boy’s fiery infatuation, that was all in the past now, but he didn’t feel the old longing anymore, the dreadful insidious pull of what might have been.

The wave would come again, he was sure of that, but next time, he thought, it would be a little less intense.

More bearable.

It was, he thought, possible, just possible, that he had begun to heal.

Alasdair took in a breath, and slowly let it out.

Then he left the door open, put away the key, and went downstairs to the steward’s office, Cuilean trotting alongside him.

“Lister,” he said.

“Aye, laird?” Lister, at his desk, looked up, promptly set aside his quill.

“You know the rooms off my bedchamber?”