The yew’s lower branches brushed Walter’s shoulder as he ducked beneath them, and somewhere past the rose hedge a kettle was already climbing toward its whistle.
Geillis sat on the stone bench with her hands folded in her lap, plain daytime blue instead of the silk she’d worn for company, and she didn’t rise when he came through the gate didn’t perform surprise or welcome either, just watched him cross the last stretch of gravel with the particular stillness of a woman who’d decided, in advance, exactly how much of herself she was willing to show today.
Five o’clock.
The garden.
Come or don’t I’ll not ask twice.
Three lines, no signature, the paper still folded in his coat pocket where it had sat for four days doing considerably more work than its length should have allowed.
“You came,” she said, which wasn’t a question, and wasn’t quite an apology either.
“You asked.” He sat at the bench’s far end, close enough for conversation, far enough that Mrs MacNeil’s next pass through the kitchen door wouldn’t read anything into the distance either way.
“Seemed rude to leave a woman waiting on an answer twice in one month.”
Something flickered at the corner of her mouth not quite the dry curl he remembered from before the fight, but close enough to its shape that he felt the whole garden ease by half a degree around it.
“I will consider what you said.” She delivered it plainly, no dressing on it, looking at the rose hedge rather than at him, which told him more about the cost of the sentence than her tone did.
“That is the whole of what I’ll give ye today, Walter.
I’ll not pretend past that.”
He nodded once.
It was, he understood with a clarity six years of certainty had cost him to earn, considerably more than nothing. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“That’s fair,” he said, and meant it the way he’d meant it every time he’d said it since Craigh na Dun a genuine closing of a ledger, not a concession dressed up as one.
Mrs MacNeil came through with the tea then, precisely on the twenty-minute mark he was starting to suspect she kept by design rather than habit, and set the tray down with the brisk efficiency of a woman who’d worked this household long enough to have opinions about every visitor who crossed its threshold and the good sense never to voice them.
“Will Mistress Duncan be wanting the second pot before the hour’s out?”
“We will, Mrs MacNeil.
Master Bryce is minded to argue with me about meadowsweet, and that always runs long.”
“Aye, well.” The housekeeper’s glance found Walter for exactly as long as courtesy allowed, cataloguing him the way Mistress Gillis once had, and found, apparently, nothing worth reporting beyond ordinary curiosity.
“I’ll leave the pot warming.”
She withdrew, and Geillis’s public register went with her not entirely, but enough that the sentences that followed carried a looseness the last twenty minutes hadn’t.
“The white meadowsweet blooms later than the pink,” Geillis said, reaching to pluck a stray leaf from the hedge beside the bench with the same trained, careful attention she’d once turned on a foxglove leaf across a shop counter, “though half the herb-wives in this parish will tell ye otherwise and swear it on their grandmother’s grave.”
“Una swears the opposite.
Says the pink’s earlier by a full fortnight most years.” Walter turned the leaf she handed him over once, an old habit now, checking vein-structure the way another man might check a coin for its mint.
“Neither of us is wrong.
It’s the ground, not the flower meadowsweet blooms to the soil’s moisture, and Una’s patch drains faster than mine.” She said it with the satisfaction of six years spent learning a trade she had never once expected to need, and something in the specificity of it soil, drainage, the actual mechanics of a thing rather than the folklore around it struck him as the closest she’d come, in either conversation they’d had since the fight, to simply being glad of his company.
They talked comfrey after that, and yarrow’s hemostatic use, and a full ten minutes on whether a particular Highland variant of valerian root Geillis had sourced from a Drumcairn steward was worth the price she’d paid for it forty minutes altogether, by his own rough count, of nothing more dangerous than two people who happened to know things about plants that nobody else in this century could properly appreciate, and Walter found himself, somewhere around the valerian argument, laughing outright at a joke about a Glasgow chemistry don’s opinion of Highland folk-remedies that he’d have had no context to find funny three months ago and found entirely, helplessly funny now.
Neither of them mentioned Culloden.
Neither of them needed to.
The subject sat in the garden with them the whole forty minutes, unaddressed, present the way a held breath is present, and Walter understood, watching her hands move easy and unhurried through the herb-talk, that this was precisely the shape of peace she was capable of offering him today not surrender, not apology, just forty minutes of proof that whatever had broken between them hadn’t broken everything.
She walked him to the garden’s back gate herself when the light started going long and gold through the rose canes, and stopped there with her hand on a late bloom that had held on past its season out of sheer stubbornness.
“Take it,” she said, snapping the stem clean with a decisiveness that suggested she’d decided this before he’d arrived.
“Ye’ll not get another this late in the year, and I’ll not have ye leave my garden with nothing to show for forty minutes of arguing about drainage.”
He took it, thorns and all, one biting his thumb hard enough to draw a bead of blood he didn’t bother mentioning.
“Friday,” she said, which wasn’t an invitation exactly, more a statement of fact she expected him to arrange his life around.
“Come Friday, if the week allows it.”
“Friday,” he agreed, and let himself out through the back gate the way the housekeeper’s kitchen window wouldn’t catch, the rose held careful in one hand and a fresh bead of blood drying on the thumb of the other the whole of the day’s cost and the whole of its reward arriving, as they so often did in this century, in the exact same small, thorned gesture.