The shutters kept the July heat outside and let every other sound in twice as loud a cart’s wheels on the lane, a dog somewhere past the garden wall, the small domestic clatter of Mrs MacNeil’s kettle two rooms distant, all of it pressing in through the dim, close air of a parlor built for privacy and delivering, instead, a kind of amplified stillness.
Geillis poured the claret herself, no servant summoned for it, and set Walter’s glass down with a precise economy, having counted exactly how much privacy this particular Sunday afternoon was going to cost her before Arthur’s return on Friday.
“Ye’ve the look of a man who’s come to say something he’s rehearsed,” she said, dropping into Glasgow the moment the door clicked shut, sharp and dry and entirely without the public register’s careful rounding.
“I have.” He turned the glass once between his fingers, not drinking yet.
“You’re not going to like it.”
“I rarely do, from men who announce it that way first.” A small, genuine curl at the corner of her mouth the closest thing to a joke either of them had room for before the weight of what he’d actually come to say landed.
“Say it plain, Walter.
I’ve six years’ practice hearing things I don’t like.”
“Culloden,” he said.
“Sixteenth of April, seventeen forty-six.
Drumossie Moor, outside Inverness.
Less than an hour, start to finish.
The Jacobite army goes in exhausted, half-starved, outnumbered near two to one, and comes apart in the first grapeshot volley.
A thousand men dead on the field by the time it’s over.
Hundreds more hunted down in the weeks after.” He held her eyes, level, the way he’d once delivered a prognosis nobody wanted from a doctor with better bedside manner than he’d ever bothered developing.
It’s not a battle anyone wins.”
The curl at her mouth was gone.
What replaced it wasn’t shock she was too controlled for that, too many years of practiced stillness standing between her and any visible reaction but something colder, more deliberate, settling into her shoulders like a woman bracing for a blow she’d half-expected.
“Ye’ve six years less standing in this century than I have,” she said, each word set down with exact, formal precision, “and ye’ve the confidence to tell me the whole of a war I’ve spent that six years preparing to fund.” Her public register was creeping back into her voice, he noticed, formal and rounded, armor going up plate by plate.
“Ye know one fact from a book ye read in another life.
I know men.
I know coin.
I know how risings actually succeed, which is not a thing written plainly in any book ye’ve read, Sassenach or otherwise.”
“I know the fact holds regardless of the men or the coin.” He kept his own voice level, refusing the bait of her rising formality with a matching steadiness.
“I tested a smaller version of this myself, three weeks back.
Jumped two days forward and back, small as I could make it, and it cost me anyway a piece of a song I’ll never get whole again, for a change that didn’t alter one thing that mattered.
Some things don’t bend for wanting them to, Geillis.
Culloden’s one of them.”
“Then what would ye have me do.” Colder now, quieter, the specific devastating quiet she reserved, he understood with sudden and unwelcome clarity, for exactly the moments other people raised their voices instead. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Abandon six years of work?
Tell every steward in my network the cause they’ve bled for is already lost, and watch them scatter to whatever safer treason they can find instead?”
“I’d have you stop funding a slaughter you can’t prevent and start protecting the people you actually care about from being anywhere near it when it comes.”
Something in her face went very still.
“Get out,” she said, and there was no volume in it at all, which was, he understood immediately and far too late, considerably worse than if she’d shouted.
“I’ll not be lectured on the shape of a war I’ve studied for six years by a man who arrived twelve weeks ago with a system and a superior attitude about what I’m permitted to still believe.”
“Geillis ”
“Out, Walter.” Formal.
Precise.
Absolutely, immovably final.
“Through the garden gate, if ye’d spare us both the neighbors’ notice on your way.”
He set the untouched claret down and rose, and she didn’t look up from wherever her eyes had settled on the middle distance of the shuttered room, and there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t have made the closed door worse rather than better.
He let himself out through the kitchen and the back garden, past a bed of comfrey she must have planted herself, and the gate’s latch clicked shut behind him with a small, final sound that carried further than it had any right to in the heavy afternoon air.