Page 54 of A Promise of Love

T he bench on which she sat was crafted from pine, the wood new, the splinters not yet smoothed by the plane. Still, it was one of the few pieces of furniture in the Great Hall, the others were charred or nearly ash from the fire which had seared the heart of Tynan .

She’d never spent time in this room, it did not urge the inhabitant to linger.

The walls were thick, the ceiling high, shadows occupied the corners.

Its dimensions were too large to feel cozy or secure.

Upon the blackened walls were round iron handles, once used to hold the shields and claymores of the MacLeods.

The weapons were contraband now, the room itself denuded of its ornamentation.

Only the black smoke and the stench of burnt wood remained, traces of the inferno which had raced through Tynan at the Duke of Cumberland’s command .

It was the perfect place for this conversation .

Alisdair had not moved from his position near the mullioned windows.

The glass had cracked from the heat of the fire, splintered apart and then glazed back together.

It was an odd, fragmented picture he appeared, backlit by the sun filtered through a thousand shards of crystal.

He had not looked anywhere but at her since he’d led her to this room, a scrutiny she was unprepared to face .

“You must curse your luck, Judith, for bringing you back to Tynan.” She had returned due to circumstance, not inclination, that was obvious .

“Malcolm needed you ."

Malcolm needed you. The words swirled in the air. An indictment of such delicacy that he was surprised at the pain he felt, as if speared by it .

“And you, Judith, do you not need anyone?" Anger was an easier emotion to swallow than despair, and he’d had a bellyful of that .

Alisdair didn't know if this confrontation was wise, or foolhardy.

All he knew was that he had to understand.

Why had she turned her back on Tynan, on him?

Once that was answered, once she told him, he would be able to leave her alone.

Banish her from his mind the way all the other ghosts of his life had been expunged .

A wiser man would let her go. A saner man would not question why she’d left him. A prouder man would not, even now, hope to convince her to stay .

Life, however, was not lived on the brink. It was a pool into which you plunged, headfirst, immersing yourself to the neck. He could no more have loved Judith in half measure than he could have turned his back on his clan and Tynan .

She did not answer him. He was unsurprised by her eternal silence, prepared for it. What she did not realize was that he had time and endless patience and a budding rage which fueled them both .

Her knees were pressed together like a child learning decorum, her feet planted on the floor next to each other, toes aligned perfectly.

Back straight, the angle of her chin a testament to military precision.

She was a perfect example of ladylike manners, but he didn't care if she had a board strapped to her back.

Her hands were clenched before her, not folded calmly.

Nor was she otherwise composed. He saw how tightly she held herself, as if she would shatter into tiny pieces if she did not.

She'd learned to school her features, to exhibit an incredible stillness which masked her emotions to everyone but him .

Her eyes, however, never failed to give her away. There was pain which dwelt there, surface deep. Pain and resolution .

He would have gone to her then, had not her hard won dignity and composure been so apparent. He would have encased her in his arms and led her to a cozy corner, near a fire where she would feel safe and warm and protected .

But he did neither, only stood and watched and felt a premonition of doom steal over him, as strong and as eerie as the morning he'd stood beside Ian on Culloden field and waited for the battle to begin .

He saw the half smile she gave the room, and wanted to shake her. She was being so damnably English right now .

Her composure was fragile, tenuous had he known. She suspected he did, and she also suspected he goaded her to see an end to it .

"What do you want from me, Alisdair?" she asked, forcing the issue .

"The answer to a riddle, Judith ."

She tilted her head, a questioning gesture, and he complied .

"Why did you leave me?" Not why did you choose to leave Tynan? Not why do you want your freedom? He had personalized the question, made it intimate, real, painful .

She closed her eyes against the sight of him standing there with his hands clenched at his sides, the pride etched on his face so strong a blind man could see, the softness of his eyes an odd counterpart to the resolve there.

He towered in the room, even as large as it was.

He overwhelmed her by his very presence, but in the end it wasn't his size, or his formidable strength, or even his beauty which compelled her to tell him the truth.

It was the soft curve of his mouth, the compassion in his eyes. A compassion she did not deserve .

For a long moment, she stared at the ruined flagstones of the floor, her gaze fixed not upon them, but upon some distant vision imprinted upon her soul. She was summoning the courage from a thousand places, where it had splintered like the glass in the window .

There was always something restrained, he thought, almost hidden about Judith, as if she were careful to keep a part of herself shielded from him.

There was a control about her that still appeared even in their most intimate moments, as if she were afraid of him gleaning her thoughts.

He wanted to crush that control, break her silence in two, extract the real Judith from the hard shell she encased herself in, as if she were a nutmeat .

“And Henderson?” he asked, when she remained eternally silent. “Why did he hate you so much?" Why had he attempted to hurt her from the beginning? Too many times, he’d wondered about the antipathy that boiled between them. Too many nights, Alisdair had waited for her to tell him .

She glanced at him, knowing that the words must come now. Somehow, they must be spoken .

"Because he knew I had killed his brother," she said, the words dropping like large, heavy raindrops into the parched silence. “I killed my husband .”

He didn’t move, didn’t react in any way to her pronouncement .

"Or I would have, had Providence not decided to end his life that night .”

She took a deep breath, swallowed, tasting the heaviness of tears. Did she cry for herself, or for Anthony? Dear God, even now she could not lie to herself. She had shed no tears for Anthony. Not even then .

She could recall that moment with pinpoint accuracy, as if the scene replayed itself, ghost-like, in her mind. The flailing arms, the look of terror as Anthony realized he was choking, clawing at his own throat until the skin grew bloody - all

these silent, shrieking moments were part of her nightmares.

In her dreams, she felt the horror. At the time, she’d felt nothing.

She’d stood and clasped her hands over her apron and watched his struggle, thinking of all the times he’d given her to his friends, payment for a debt owing, or simply to see her raped.

She thought of the nights Anthony beat her, with a belt or a chain, simply because she’d done something to anger him, or others had, and she was a satisfactory scapegoat.

And, too, she thought of Anthony watching as Bennett thrust her across the threshold of hell and laughing as she screamed .

It was only later that she learned he had not died of the poison .

Judith had managed to restrain her hysterical laughter when the regimental surgeon had looked into the stiff and arched throat of her husband and pronounced Anthony’s death due to an errant chicken bone lodged in his throat - misadventure - not murder. Still, the intent was the same .

Her eyes were almost black, Alisdair noted, blurred by unshed tears. Her tale, as she told it, was relayed dispassionately, as if the continual rapes happened to another, as if the sadism and bestiality visited upon her had been perpetrated upon someone else .

"I could not bear any more, you see," she said finally, the tight rein on her composure slipping a little in the face of his continuing silence.

He had not moved, nor had he spoken at all during her tale.

How odd that it grew easier with the telling of it.

For so many years, to have hidden the truth of her marriage, and within three weeks to have told it twice .

Bennett had suspected her all along. Nor had she mistaken his whispered word that day in Tynan’s courtyard. In truth, she had never forgotten it .

Murderess .

The final indignity had been hers; the final barbarism had not been Anthony's nor Bennett's, but her own .

She had endured the brutality until she no longer fought, and it was that very submission which had finally pummeled through to her brain and compelled her to survive.

It had taken a year to grow the little plant with its silvery leaves - a year in which to hoard enough of the precious buds and grind them into a powder.

That night, she’d basted the roasted chicken with her poisonous mixture, painstakingly preparing Anthony's evening meal .

"I confess to plotting Anthony’s death, may God forgive my eternal soul. If the poison hadn't worked, I was going to cut his throat open in his sleep." Her eyes were haunted, exposing all the pain once hinted at, all the naked self- loathing .