Page 23 of A Promise of Love

T here were evidently more secrets in Judith's life .

Crisscrossing her back and her buttocks were deep red scars.

They ranged from inch wide scarlet welts which faded to a purplish hue to delicate fronds of pink which extended around her waist to her belly.

Her flesh was indented in places, as if chunks of it had been gouged from her back, ropes of muscle torn and not healed properly.

It looked as though she had been scourged, her back mutilated with a cat o' nine tails. Not once, but many times .

Alisdair had seen a man who had been whipped like that, just once. The man had barely survived .

How had she ?

Judith calmly stepped back from the side of the bed, removed the remnants of her torn clothing as if he weren't standing there horror struck by the sight of her exposed back.

She took the clothing he had just ripped and painstakingly folded it without a word, until the torn cloth was assembled into a neat little square.

This she placed on the bed side table and then walked, impervious to her nakedness, around the bed, to the long line of windows overlooking the sea.

She stood there looking at the sun beginning to set, an orange disk disappearing into the dark blue expanse of water .

She was not thinking. She did not think at times like these. She did not feel, either. She shut off her emotions and her thoughts and disappeared somewhere where there was no pain, no anguish, no humiliation. No shame .

She would not beg. She had learned, long ago, that begging only made it worse. It only lengthened her torture. It was simpler just to exist somewhere in a timeless state while she endured it .

Judith heard his soft steps behind her, and despite her resolve, a tiny shudder shook her body .

Alisdair said nothing, only smoothed his hand over her back, feeling the deep indentations on her mutilated flesh. His fingers trailed from the nape of her neck to where her buttocks curved back to her thighs, smooth, long strokes as if to ease the memory of her pain .

She must have been in agony .

"Who did this to you?" he said, unaware that his voice rasped with emotion. "Your father ?"

She shook her head .

Then it must have been her husband .

"Why?" It seemed the only question .

What did she tell him? How many times had she thought of this moment, of this revelation? Too many times and each ended with this question. She never had the answer and now a lie was all she had to offer him .

"The width of a man's thumb, MacLeod," she replied in a low monotone. "It is the law in England." There was absolutely no inflection in her voice .

"What does a wife do in England to deserve such punishment?" It was difficult to touch her as she stood so courageously waiting to be hurt again. He was filled with anger at the monster who had inflicted such pain on the body and on the soul. It sickened him to the core .

It explained, however, both her hatred and her fear .

"Be a woman , MacLeod, that is all. So simple, so ridiculously easy .”

Her loathing of marriage now made sense.

Her resistance to their union, to him, was an act of desperation.

What had she ever learned from marriage, but pain and anguish?

She had experienced nothing of the joys, of the feelings of belonging, of contentment, or solace a union can bring.

Perhaps he had not loved Anne as she deserved, but their marriage had brought him contentment, some measure of happiness .

In that crucible of time, when Alisdair stood mute and still with his hand pressed firmly against her back as if to wipe clean the scars he felt there, he began to be aware of what he, himself, had done to cause Judith pain .

He had called her scrawny. She had only been thin .

He had called her a hag. She had only been tired .

He had called her sharp tongued. She had only been frightened .

He wondered what he would have done, in a similar situation, if he had been uprooted from his home and forced to travel across a country, be tricked into marriage and expected to merge into an alien culture overnight ?

His thoughts stopped suddenly, as he realized with shock that their circumstances were not as different as they appeared on the surface.

He, too, had been forced to march across a country.

His own. Alisdair had been expected to join in the uprising along with his father and his brother, despite the fact that he had argued vehemently against its lunacy.

He had been tricked into this selfsame marriage and the English expected him to be assimilated into their culture with nary a ripple on the surface of his heritage .

And his response? Anger .

The fact that it emerged from him in the guise of determination did not discount its source.

He was still angry at his slain father and brother, at his own country for turning its back on survival.

He was angry that Malcolm had tricked him into this marriage and his honor insisted he continue with it.

He was angry because he was expected to become all things English without a heed to the soul inside him that was blatantly Scot .

His anger had forced him to challenge his world. It was his way of coping with the changes in his life, to the presence of grief and loss. This new world the English had foisted upon him would be altered by his determination. He would not crumble beneath its demands .

He looked at his wife with new eyes .

Judith had fought for her survival by protecting herself in the only way she knew how.

She surrounded herself with a mantle of silence, restraint.

Even now, standing naked in front of him, she did not move to cover herself.

She had retreated into detachment where pain or humiliation could not affect her.

It was as much camouflage as whistling in the dark .

It was her only way of living through the horror she had experienced .

He turned her so that she faced him. The cut on her lip still oozed blood.

He hadn’t noticed it until now. He touched it gently with one finger, thinking it should be washed.

Still, she did not raise her eyes even after he’d gone to the ewer and dampened a cloth, ministering to the cut with the gentlest touch .

He spread his arms around her and she flinched even though the embrace was light and tender. She stood straight in his arms, until he pulled her head down, into the curve between his shoulder and his neck .

Such tenderness was unknown to her. Such compassion suspect .

"I will not beat you, Judith," Alisdair said softly, as if he heard her unvoiced thoughts. "I never touched a woman except in pleasure and passion. My wife had nothing to fear from me ."

"I did not know you had been married before, MacLeod ."

"There seems to be much we do not know of each other. Have you any more secrets to reveal?" he asked, in the first attempt at humor since the scene on the moors .

"I stand before you naked, MacLeod. Surely if there were any more secrets to divulge, you would see them readily.

" Her eyes glittered in the faint light from the window.

She did not speak of other, darker secrets, whose knowledge was emblazoned on her soul.

Those she would share with no one but God .

He moved to the bed and pulled the sheet from it. With infinite tenderness, Alisdair placed it around her, and held her, covered, in his arms .

It came as a shock to him, after he had descended the stairs, tucked her in like a child and left Ian's room, that Judith's presence as his wife could be a benefit.

He had worked hard to acquire legitimacy for them all, and his conditional pardon was a noose around his neck.

However, his English wife could garner them all another measure of freedom .

He wondered if Granmere had already figured that out .

She probably had .