A leaden silence descended as slowly Margery made her way among the crowds thronging the Great Hall. People stepped away from her as if from an Old Testament prophet, respectfully but also uneasily.
At long last the old lady reached the high table.
“How may I serve you, laird?”
“I assume, madam, you are not familiar with this passage in the Tome?”
In a careful, controlled voice, Alasdair read it out loud, and Dame Margery went white.
“Oh, laird, on my life I was not! Surely you must know I was not!”
“Anyone might have missed it,” Isobel put in, anxious to be helpful. “It was in the middle of a tremendously dull section about logging rights and timber sales, which seems like an odd place for such an announcement, when you think about it. It’s a wonder I came to notice it, for I’m not the least bit interested in lumber transactions.”
Margery’s stricken gaze didn’t waver from Alasdair’s face. “I believed I knew the Tome from start to finish, laird, every page, every word, every statute and decree. My arrogance is unforgivable.” She bowed her head. “You must punish me as you see fit. Banishment would be a mercy, but if it’s death, then so be it.”
“Nonsense,” responded Alasdair, in that same controlled manner. “You may return to your seat.”
“I thank you for your lenience, laird. ’Tis more than I deserve. With your permission, I’d like to go home. I’ve no stomach now for the feast, or for the festivities.”
“Of course you can go home. Need you an escort?”
“Nay, laird. In my spirit I am shattered, but my legs will carry me. For your benevolence I thank you yet again.” As sorrowful as a mourner at a funeral, Dame Margery turned and, leaning on her stick, with plodding steps began walking away from the high table.
Alasdair saw before him a sea of stunned, troubled faces, saw the question in their eyes. He said, in a quiet yet carrying voice:
“Those who wish may stay. Those who want to leave may freely go.”
At his words, the crowd quietly dispersed. Nobody actually ran screaming from the Hall, but there was no question, Fiona thought, that they were fleeing as they would from a disaster. A flood, say, or a fire. Possibly a plague of locusts. And it was remarkable how quickly the place emptied. How eerie it looked with the tables still laden, but with the vacated chairs set higgledy-piggledy all around them. Only Duff and Isobel remained, their faces pale and drawn.
“Christ, what an unholy mess,” Alasdair said.
For a few seconds of wild confusion Fiona thought he was referring to the abandoned feast, and the monumental effort it would take to clean it all up, but when she looked at him she realized he was staring grimly at the Tome.
It was then that she finally understood. Not just in her brain but in every particle of her being.
She and Alasdair were no longer married.
Grief slammed through her, hard enough to make her grip her hands painfully together. These past weeks had been awful, worse than awful, yet never in a thousand years would she have dreamed their marriage would be severed in this way. So quickly, so cleanly. So decisively. But in the wake of that sad dark wave there came a sudden thought:
It’s not too late.
What has been put asunder, can still be joined together.
Hope fluttered up.
Quickly Fiona half-turned in her chair, looked at Alasdair.
Even as Fiona turned, Alasdair did the same, within him an inarticulate longing.
Their eyes met.
And held.
A word, a whisper, the slightest smile, a hand extended, any sign of yielding could have brought them back from the brink. There was infinite opportunity in that locked gaze. There was a future.
But between them, separating them, was pride, like a high fence staked deeply into the ground. Fear. Anger. Stubbornness. Old hurts, new hurts.
How could hope stand a chance against it all?
And so the moment passed.
Their gazes fell away.
Accompanying Dame Margery home to their cottage, Sheila suddenly said, “That’s three.” A vague memory floated across her mind, how she had, weeks ago, gotten out of her bed, very early before anybody else was awake, and slipped off to the castle in the gloom of waning night. There she had gone into the Armament Room, an intimidating place under ordinary circumstances, filled as it was with old guns and sharp swords in large glass cases, alarming suits of armor, shields and nasty-looking spears set high on the walls. After Granny had told everyone in the Great Hall about how the laird must marry, and after the great fuss that had followed, somebody had put that big, dusty old book back in the Room, on its elaborate iron stand that looked just a little like an instrument of torture.
She had taken the book—oh, how heavy it was!—upstairs, as quick as any deer of the forest, and gone into that pink frilly room where a big mahogany cabinet stood. She had pulled open one of the little doors and slid the Tome inside.