“Twenty pounds,” Una said, sliding the folded contract across the counter with the finality of terms already fixed, the conversation meant to confirm rather than negotiate them, “and not an ounce less, or my cousin will think I’ve raised a fool for an assistant.”
Walter turned the paper over, scanning the terms twenty pounds of dried meadowsweet, delivered or arranged for delivery before the autumn fever-season took proper hold, payment against Mistress Fitzgibbon’s own household accounts at Castle Leoch.
His pulse didn’t change.
His face, he made certain, didn’t either.
Castle Leoch.
The name sat in his chest with a weight that had nothing to do with meadowsweet and everything to do with a standing order he’d carried, folded quiet, since a pre-dawn conversation in a priest’s hostel that felt, now, like it belonged to an entirely different man’s life.
A woman who will come through these hills before the year turns, Margaret had told him then.
You are not to seek her out.
He’d carried that warning three months without once needing to test it against a real address.
Now the address had a name, and the name was the same castle his errand was about to send him riding toward.
“Ye’ve gone quiet, Master Bryce.” Una’s eyes narrowed, reading something in his stillness she couldn’t have named but had clearly clocked regardless.
“Ye’re not squeamish about the road, are ye?
It’s a day and a half’s ride, no more, and my cousin keeps a decent enough table for a guest.”
“Not the road, mistress.” He set the contract down, steadied his voice the way he’d steady it before a difficult diagnosis.
“Just weighing the logistics of it properly, is all.
Twenty pounds is a fair quantity to negotiate sight-unseen.” Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
“Ye’ll manage.
Ye’ve a way with a hard bargain when ye put your mind to it I’ve watched ye manage Janet Cameron out of a dose that would’ve done more harm than good, and that’s a harder customer than any cousin of mine, whatever airs Mistress Fitzgibbon puts on for company.” Una pushed a small leather purse across the counter after the contract, coin enough for the road and a little besides.
“Ye’ll want to leave at first light if ye mean Thursday.
She’ll not thank ye for arriving Friday with the autumn stock already half-committed elsewhere.”
Go, Margaret said, into the small, private space behind his ribs where her voice always seemed to know exactly how much room the moment could spare it.
Complete the business.
Do not seek her out.
This is not a test of the order, Walter it is only geography, and geography has never yet been a reason to break it.
“I’ll leave at first light,” Walter said, aloud, to Una, and meant both answers at once.
He wrote the note to Geillis standing at the back-room bench that evening, the candle burned low, the words chosen with the tight economy of a man aware that anything longer risked being read by more eyes than the one pair it was intended for.
I will return Friday.
The matter you weigh, weigh it well.
No signature.
None needed.
He folded it once, sealed it with a plain drop of wax the way her own note to him had arrived, and pressed it into the shop-boy’s hand along with a penny that bought considerably more discretion than its value strictly warranted. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
“Mistress Duncan’s housekeeper, same as before?”
“Same as before.
Into her hand only.”
The boy pocketed the coin and the letter both and was gone into the evening at a run, and Walter stood a moment in the doorway watching him go, aware in the specific, unglamorous way a man is aware of a held muscle he’s forgotten to release that he was leaving Cranesmuir at the exact moment Geillis’s three-day window sat closest to closing, and there was nothing to be done about the timing except trust that a woman who’d survived six years of careful arithmetic could survive three more days without him standing in the room to watch her work through it.
The pony was a stubborn, sure-footed thing Una’s coin had hired from the smith, and it took the first hour of the northward track at a pace Walter privately judged closer to insulting than steady, the beast apparently unconvinced that any errand undertaken before proper daylight deserved its full cooperation.
He rode with the letter of introduction to Mistress Fitzgibbon folded safe in his coat, the same inner pocket that had carried an unopened letter of his own three months and a lifetime ago, and let the landscape unspool past him heather going gold-brown at its edges with the season’s first turn, peat-smoke smudging low villages he didn’t stop to name, a hawk working the thermals above a treeline that could have belonged to any one of the last hundred mornings he’d spent on some Highland road or another.
He thought, somewhere around the second hour, of Iain the herdsman and a comment about a queer walk that had cost him a blister and a week’s careful correction to shed a small, private measure of how much ground he’d covered since a stranger’s first glance had marked him instantly for what he was.
Nobody on this road today had looked at him twice.
The land rose in a long, slow climb through the early afternoon, and Walter crested it with the pony finally settling into something like genuine cooperation, and there, across a shallow valley gone amber with the day’s last full light, Castle Leoch stood grey and towered and entirely real in a way no photograph or half-remembered episode of television had ever quite managed to convey and somewhere inside those walls, unknowing, unwarned, exactly where a standing order had promised him she would be, was the one woman in this century he had been told, from his very first morning here, that he was never allowed to meet.
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