Four pounds ten to keep a dead god’s bookkeeper content, and still Father Bain had managed, in the space of a single dry thank ye, Mistress Duncan, to imply she owed the parish rather more than coin.
Geillis crossed the green with her parasol up against a drizzle too thin to properly justify it, more shield than shelter, the black silk beading with rain she’d wipe from her cloak’s hem before Mrs MacNeil could comment on it.
Six years she’d been paying that man’s tithes and receiving that same flat, assessing look in return, as if her coin bought grudging tolerance rather than the genuine welcome a woman of her standing ought by rights to command.
Christ, the sanctimony of him, she thought, and kept her face perfectly, publicly pleasant, because a Highland wife did not scowl at her minister on open ground with two of his flock still visible near the well.
The inn’s door stood open against the drizzle, and there, hatless, wiping rain from a brim he’d forgotten to put back on, stood the Sassenach apothecary she’d been turning over in her mind for the better part of ten days like a coin she couldn’t decide the true weight of.
She’d told herself, crossing the shop’s threshold that Wednesday, that she was testing a hunch.
She’d known, the moment his hands had gone unsteady measuring her wormwood, that the hunch had been closer to a certainty all along.
A man’s hands didn’t shake like that over a stranger’s ordinary curiosity.
They shook like that when something inside him had just been asked a question it had spent every day since arriving braced to answer.
She adjusted her course by exactly the degree needed to intercept him without appearing to have intercepted anything at all.
“Master Bryce.” She fell into step beside him with the easy, unhurried grace of two acquaintances who happened to be walking the same direction, parasol angled just enough to shield the lower half of her face from the two parishioners still lingering by the well.
“A poor day for going hatless.”
“Poorer still for going hatted, mistress, when the wind takes it twice in one crossing.” He fell into the same unhurried pace beside her, and she noted filed, the way she filed everything worth remembering that his voice carried the same faint wrongness under its Highland dressing that she’d caught in the shop.
A man performing an accent he’d built rather than inherited. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Fifteen paces, she judged.
Perhaps twenty before either Margaret Reid or her shadow found a reason to glance over and start counting for themselves.
“What year,” she said, low, the words riding under the drizzle’s soft static, pitched for exactly one listener and angled so that anyone reading her lips from the well would see nothing but idle chat about the weather continuing on its idle way.
He didn’t break stride.
She’d have respected him less if he had.
“2023,” he said, just as low, just as unremarkable to any eye that wasn’t looking for the shape of it.
Christ in heaven.
The thought landed with a force she kept entirely off her face, years of practice at exactly this kind of discipline the only thing standing between her and an expression the whole green would have found worth reporting by supper.
Fifty-five years past her own arrival-point.
A man from a world she could barely picture with any accuracy anymore, walking beside her on an ordinary Wednesday as if the fact cost him nothing at all to carry.
She’d seen the shaking hands.
She simply hadn’t decided yet whether that made him safer to know or more dangerous.
“Ye’ll take supper with us,” she said, the sentence arriving already decided rather than offered, because six years of running a household and a network besides had taught her that an invitation phrased as a question invited refusal, and she had no intention of allowing this one any room to be refused.
“Thursday next.
Arthur will want the company he finds London men interesting, when they’ve something proper to say for themselves.”
“I’d be glad of it, mistress.” A pause, exactly as brief and exactly as measured as her own had been.
“Should I bring anything particular?”
“Bring your appetite, Master Bryce, and mind ye’re punctual.” She let her public register carry the words the whole distance, warm enough for any listening ear, precise enough that he’d hear the second layer underneath it without her needing to spell it further.
“My husband dislikes waiting on a guest.”
They’d reached the green’s far edge, close enough now to the kirk that continuing further in step would itself become the kind of detail Margaret Reid collected for sport, and Geillis drew her parasol back to a more ordinary angle, the conversation’s window closing itself with the same unhurried grace it had opened.
“Thursday, then,” Walter said, and inclined his head with the exact courtesy a stranger owed a procurator’s wife, no more, no less.
“Thursday,” she agreed, and turned toward home before the noon bell could catch her still standing on open ground with a man whose true year she now carried, sealed, alongside every other fact in this century she’d learned to hold and never once set down.