The bell above the door didn’t so much ring as flinch, one thin note cut short by the weight of the hand that had pushed the door too fast for a Wednesday afternoon.
Walter looked up from the foxglove jar, lid half-turned in his fingers, and took in the woman crossing Una’s threshold the way he’d learned to take in anyone new to the shop quick, complete, unhurried about showing it.
Green silk trim at the cloak’s edge, out of place against Cranesmuir’s homespun the way a diamond would be out of place in a jar of river stones.
Pale skin that hadn’t spent its life at outdoor work.
Eyes that moved over the shop’s shelves with the particular efficiency of someone reading a room rather than admiring it.
“Wormwood, if ye have good stock of it,” she said, and her voice carried the Highland cadence the village used, but underneath it, faint as a second instrument in an orchestra, something else entirely flatter vowels, a rhythm that didn’t belong to any accent Walter had catalogued since arriving.
“We’ve a fair stock, mistress.” He set the foxglove jar’s lid home, locked it, and reached for the wormwood shelf, keeping his own voice in its Veil-softened register, easy, unremarkable.
“How much would ye be wanting?”
“A half-ounce.” She’d drifted, while he measured, toward the counter’s far end toward the locked case, toward the foxglove jar he’d just sealed and picked up a stray leaf from the trimming-tray beside it before he could think to stop her.
She held it up to the window’s grey light, turned it once, and examined the vein-structure with an attention that had no business belonging to a Highland wife buying dried herbs on a Wednesday.
Not curiosity.
Assessment.
The specific, trained way a person looks at a thing when they already know what they’re looking for and are only confirming it.
Something in Walter’s chest gave a soft, formless hiss not the doubled clarity of the Herb-Hand settling over a patient, nothing so clean as that.
This was static, a signal trying to resolve and failing, the mental equivalent of a radio caught between two stations.
He’d never felt it before.
He didn’t need Margaret to name it to understand, with a certainty that arrived faster than thought, exactly what it meant.
Say nothing.
Do nothing.
Let this happen at its own pace, on her ground, not yours.
The woman set the leaf down, precisely where she’d found it, and looked up at Walter with an expression that had gone, in the space of a single breath, from idle to entirely, dangerously alert.
He held her eyes for exactly as long as courtesy allowed and not one beat longer, and measured out her half-ounce of wormwood with hands that had gone, he noted with a professional’s detachment, not quite steady.
“Mistress Duncan.” Una’s voice arrived from the front bench, warm in the particular way she reserved for paying custom, and Walter filed the name away Duncan with the specific weight a man gives a fact he’d half-expected and still felt land.
“I’d not looked to see ye till month’s end.”
“Arthur’s had a craving for the tincture again, Mistress Una.
His stomach’s been poorly this fortnight past.” Geillis Duncan’s public voice slid back into place like a door closing on a room Walter had only glimpsed for a second through the gap.
“I thought I’d not wait on it.”
“Wise.” Una was already moving toward her own ledger, unbothered, the transaction entirely ordinary from where she stood.
“Master Bryce’ll have ye sorted directly.
Mind the foxglove jar stays locked, Walter I’ll not have Mistress Duncan’s custom interrupted by ye hunting the key.”
“Already seen to, mistress.” He held Geillis Duncan’s gaze again, briefer this time, and something passed between them in the half-second the look lasted not words, nothing either of them could have repeated if pressed, but a specific, mutual acknowledgment that neither intended to say anything more in this room than the room itself could safely hold.
He wrapped the wormwood in a twist of paper and set it on the counter between them.
“Tuppence,” he said.
She paid it in coin that rang ordinary against the wood, gathered the packet, and drew her cloak’s hood forward against the grey outside without a single further glance at the foxglove jar a discipline, Walter understood, that had cost her something to perform, the same way his own steady hands had cost him something to fake. Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
She paused at the door, hand on the frame, and looked back not at Una, absorbed again in her ledger, but at Walter, directly, the mask dropped for exactly as long as it took to say one entirely ordinary sentence in an entirely ordinary tone.
“I trust Cranesmuir’s treating ye kindly, Master Bryce.”
“Kindly enough, mistress.” He matched her tone precisely, understanding, with the same certainty that had told him what her attention on the foxglove leaf had meant, that the sentence carried a second sentence riding underneath it I have seen you and you have seen me and neither of us is finished with this and that answering it plainly, in front of Una, was itself the whole of the answer either of them could safely give today.
“Good,” she said, and the bell above the door gave its one thin note again as she went, and the green of her cloak vanished into the grey drizzle that had started up sometime while Walter’s attention had been entirely elsewhere.
He stood at the counter a moment with the smell of foxglove sap still faintly bitter on his fingers, an old, familiar itch he barely registered anymore, and let himself feel carefully, in private, where Una’s ledger-bent head couldn’t catch it the specific, complicated relief of a fact he hadn’t let himself fully hope for since Craigh na Dun: he was not, after all, entirely alone in this century.
The relief came braided tight with something more cautious, a wariness that refused to loosen just because the loneliness finally had.
Two operators in the same small village was either the best luck the Charter had handed him yet, or a complication he hadn’t finished counting the cost of.
“That’s the procurator’s wife,” Una said, not looking up from her figures, in a dry tone that took in a great deal more than her bent head let on.
“A generous account, and a sharp eye for a bargain besides.
Ye’ll want to mind your measure with her, Master Bryce she counts every grain.”
“I noticed,” Walter said, and left it there, because Una wasn’t wrong, and there was no version of the fuller truth he had any business handing her today.
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