Page 31 of Enlightened
He sat on one of the mismatched chairs grouped round the table in the middle of the room. It was a rough-hewn old thing, but the edges of the wood were worn soft by years of use, and he eased into it thankfully, biting back the sigh of relief that wanted to emerge as he took the weight off his leg.
“I couldn’t cook before,” Elizabeth admitted. “But of course, I’m having to learn. I’ve been making lots of mistakes, but I think I’m getting the hang of it now.” She dipped her hand into a can of flour and dusted the wooden table with her bounty. The gesture—ordinary, domestic—reminded David sharply of sitting at his mother’s table when he was a child, and he felt a sudden wave of nostalgia for those simple, uncomplicated times.
“At any rate,” Elizabeth went on, blushing faintly, eyes fixed on the floury wood, “Euan thinks my apple pie is wonderful.”
David watched her, touched by her quietly defiant embarrassment.
“Is he working just now?” he asked, more to put her at ease than to ask a question to which he could already guess the answer.
She looked up then and smiled gratefully. “Yes, but he’ll be back later, for dinner. You’ll stay for dinner, David? He’ll want to see you, of course.”
“I’d love to,” he assured her. The longer he was away from Murdo right now, the better.
“Good,” she said and bustled away to fetch something out of the larder.
David knew that now was the time to speak, now the time to tell her about her father. He knew he ought not to delay further, but it was difficult to find the words, and he couldn’t say them to the back of her head.
She emerged from the larder with a bowl of pastry dough in her hands and began rolling it into a wide, flat circle with a wooden pin, chattering about her cooking adventures. David smiled and nodded, watching her turn the pastry and flour it, all the while steeling himself to speak the words that wouldn’t come.
Once Elizabeth was satisfied with the shape of her rolled-out dough, she curled the flattened disc round her wooden pin and carefully draped it over a dish of cut-up apples that was waiting on the table. The thin pastry settled over the bumpy fruit like a bed sheet, and she nicked a hole in the middle of it before trimming the excess pastry away and pinching the edges closed, her actions deft and sure.
“You look quite the thing,” David said. “I’d’ve thought you’d been cooking for years if I didn’t know otherwise.”
“Apple pie is simple,” Elizabeth said, taking the lid off a huge cast-iron pot and carefully placing the pie dish inside.
David recognised the pot as being very like one his mother used for baking, and just as his mother did at home, Elizabeth used a stout stick to pick up the pot and hoist it onto the fire, covering the lid with a few shovelfuls of hot embers, so that the pie inside was surrounded by heat.
“Let’s have a cup of tea while we wait,” she said, adding after a long pause, “It’s so very good to see you, David.”
“It’s good to see you too,” he said honestly. All these months, he’d worried about her, haunted by the memory of how she’d changed following her marriage. And here she was—quite restored to her old self, wonderfully resilient. The only thing that weighed on him now was the knowledge of what he had to tell her. He took a deep breath.
“Elizabeth. I’m afraid I—”
“Wait—” she interrupted hastily. “Let me get the tea on, and then you can tell me anything you like.” She smiled, her voice almost too bright, and turned away to lift a kettle over the fire and fetch a teapot and small wooden box down from the mantel.
“This is my luxury,” she confided, opening the box and carefully measuring out a small spoon of leaves. “Euan bought me half a pound of this as a little present because he knows I adore tea, and I’ve been eking it out for weeks. Tea’s so expensive!” She was so cheerful, yet so…brittle. He looked at her properly then and saw that she was afraid. She had guessed his purpose.
“I’m honoured that you’re prepared to share your treasure with me.” He smiled.
It was a lighthearted comment, but it made her pause, and her voice was serious when she said, “I hope you know that there is nothing I would not share with you. How can I begin to thank you for what you did? You could have been”—her voice broke a little, and she swallowed hard—“you could have been killed. When I heard what had happened to you, I felt utterly wretched.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. In truth, he hadn’t anticipated Elizabeth’s escape would have such violent consequences, and he felt a fraud to be showered with gratitude. It wasn’t as though he’d known how steep the price would be when he’d offered to help her.
“There is no need to feel wretched,” he said. “I am all recovered. And now, coming here, seeing you happy and whole… Well, I am very glad to have seen that for myself.”
She watched him for several long moments, and he could see she was wrestling with whatever she had to say next. When at last she spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Is that why you’re here? To see how I am?”
The grief in her soft, brown gaze was terrible, but worse was the glimmer of hope.
To David’s surprise, sudden tears welled in his eyes. He’d never been a man for public displays of emotion, but there was so much between them, and he’d never had to bear news like this before.
“Elizabeth—”
She sank into the chair opposite him and reached across the table for his hand. Her small fingers gripped his with surprising strength.
“You are here about my father,” she said. “Is he dead?”