to pay his last respects, having arrived at Errin Mhor on horseback only this morning. Around him, familiar faces anxious to avoid his eye. Across from him, Calumn, the new laird. He had not changed much. Broader, face etched with a few lines, but in essence his childhood friend looked exactly as he had the last time Alasdhair had seen him, setting off to join the King’s army. More than ten years past now.
Memories flitted through his head as he listened to Calumn pay tribute to his father. Sharply sweet memories, piercingly painful, and the darker ones, creeping out of the recesses of his mind like whipped curs or, more appropriately, spectres at a wake. Up here, they said that opening the ground to receive fresh bones released the spirits of the old ones. Today, he could believe it.
Rousing himself from these melancholy thoughts, Alasdhair saw that Calumn was finishing the closing prayer. Standing at the head of the grave, the new Lord Munro was now receiving the formal condolences of the other men. They shuffled forwards, each shaking his hand, some pausing to mutter a prayer of their own over the gaping hole. He watched them nudging and whispering amongst themselves as they left the graveyard, casting surreptitious glances, their expressions ranging from astonishment and embarrassment to downright hostility. A few turned their backs upon him.
Alasdhair’s temper simmered. What difference did it make to them, these crofters and fishermen? What did they even know of the circumstances of his leaving? Not the truth, he’d be willing to bet. It made him furious, that the corpse that lay in the damp soil could still wield the decrepit hand of influence. He did not merit such treatment. He would force them to see that.
The occasion obliged him to bide his time for the moment, but Alasdhair refused to be intimidated, holding himself rigidly upright, his hands clasped behind his back, as the men filed slowly out. At the gate they were reunited with their womenfolk, and the whispers became an excited buzz. Surveying them scornfully, ruthlessly despatching the shadowy figure on his shoulder, the unloved outcast boy he had once been, Alasdhair saw his old friend coming slowly towards him.
‘Alasdhair! It really is you.’
‘Calumn!’
The two men clasped each other in a bear hug of an embrace.
‘It’s so good to see you, old friend,’ Calumn said warmly. ‘I’ve thought of you often these past years.’
Alasdhair nodded. ‘As I have you. I just wish the circumstances of our reunion were different.’
‘Aye, but you’re here, and that’s the main thing. We have much to catch up on, but I need to get back to the castle and my guests for now, you understand, don’t you? We’ll talk properly tomorrow.’
‘Aye, I would like that,’ Alasdhair replied.
‘Good. You’ll come to the wake?’ Calumn asked, but when Alasdhair shook his head he was not surprised. ‘Till tomorrow, then.’ With that, the new laird made for the gate, where the old laird’s horse had been left for him.
Hidden from view by the crowd, Ailsa watched the solitary figure left in the cemetery.
Alasdhair. His name, the name she hadn’t allowed herself to think, never mind say, for fear of the pain it caused, shimmered into her mind.
Alasdhair. A bitter name, acrid with regrets and betrayal, yet it used to be the sweetest of names. Her Alasdhair, he’d been once. Fleetingly.
Around her, the mourners were laughing and talking animatedly with all the gaiety that often follows a sombre farewell to the departed. Life was reasserting itself over death, but she hardly noticed them. They’d be making their way back to Errin Mhor castle for the funeral wake soon. The roast meats, the conspicuous consumption of wine, the regular toasts with whisky glasses raised, and the reminiscing, which would continue well into the night, and culminate with the funeral pyre of the laird’s bedding and clothes that would be lit by his widow. She would join them. But not yet.
Not yet.
Somehow, Ailsa found the courage to step through the gate and into his presence. It were better they get this over now, with no one else around. It had to be done. The pain would ease after this, as it did when a wound was lanced.
‘Alasdhair?’
Pain, pure and bright as the sharpest needle, pierced him.
Ailsa.
She sounded different; her voice was older, of course, and lower, husky rather than musical, but he’d recognise her anywhere. He had assumed she would be back at the castle, with her mother. He wasn’t sure he was ready for this.
‘Ailsa.’ Her name felt rusty with disuse. His voice sounded hoarse.
They stared silently at each other. Six long years. They stood, as if set in amber, drinking in the changes the years had wrought.
Chapter Two
She was taller, and had become much more statuesque in the intervening period. The soft contours of girlhood were gone; her beauty was more defined, no longer blurred by the immaturity of youth. The hair escaping its pins had darkened slightly from fair to gold. Only the wispy curls that clustered round her brow were the same. And her eyes. That strange purple-blue colour, like a gathering storm, they were exactly the same. Ailsa.
She didn’t look as if she smiled much now. She lacked the exuberance that had once so defined her. ‘I hardly recognised you, you’ve changed so much,’ Alasdhair said.
‘Not as much as you.’
‘That’s certainly true. I’m no Munro serf to be used and abused any longer.’
Ailsa flinched. ‘I never thought of you that way.’
‘Aye, that’s what I used to believe, until you proved me wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you think I’d have forgotten? Or forgiven?’
His face was set in forbidding lines. Everything about him was dark and intense. Had Ailsa not been so overwrought, she’d have found time to be intimidated. ‘Forgotten what?’ she demanded. ‘That you broke your promise? One day, and for always, that’s what you said.’
‘And I meant it. Unlike you.’
‘How dare you! I meant it too, I meant every word of it, you must have known that I would not have said it unless I did.’ Ailsa’s voice was trembling on the brink of tears. She bit her cheek, an old trick, to staunch the flow.
‘What I know is that you played me for a fool,’ Alasdhair replied coldly. ‘No surprise, really, with that mother of yours as a teacher.’
‘I am not anything like my mother.’
‘I used to believe that too, but you proved me wrong on that score also.’ Alasdhair’s face was set, his smoky eyes hard-glazed.
Before she could stop them, tears filled Ailsa’s eyes. She brushed them impatiently away. ‘I don’t know why you’re being like this. If anyone has the right to be angry, it is I.’
‘You!’
She
