‘We have cattle and sheep to fill our bellies.’
She raised her brows. Her belly, certainly, had not been filled. ‘Do you not like fish?’
He paused, as if he were trying to remember the taste. ‘I like it well enough.’
‘Then why don’t you serve it?’
‘Not enough salmon to fish.’
‘I ate a plateful, only last week. There’s plenty of salmon.’
‘Plenty for Storwicks because your kind has blocked the cursed stream and the salmon can’t get up this far.’
The thought gave her pause. She had known, of course, that her family had built traps that allowed them to feast on fish, but she had never thought about what that would mean for the families who lived upstream.
‘Well, we’ll have to catch the few there are, won’t we?’
‘Do ye know any more of fishing than of cooking?’
What she knew about fishing wouldn’t fill a leather thimble. But it could not be so hard. Neither was cooking. If the Tait girl had not made her nervous, if there had been unburnt salt … ‘I know enough.’
He leaned away so he could meet her eyes. ‘Do you, now? Do you know how to build a garth?’
‘A what?’
‘A garth. A weir, I think you call it.’
‘Ah, yes.’ She knew the word. It was some kind of construction of sticks that the fish could swim into, but not out of. And she had never touched one in her life.
‘Or perhaps the Storwicks spear the fish by torchlight and slaughter them for sport. That would suit your style.’
Had they? Perhaps. They did not tell her all. ‘What we don’t eat isn’t wasted. There’s plenty who will pay for good fish.’
‘Is that how you pay for those clothes, then?’
She looked down. ‘Clothes?’ She looked down at her dress, now covered with flour outside the apron’s reach. She might have brushed away the flour dust, but now the mist was turning it into white mud.
‘You’ve got sleeves big enough to drag across the table and you’re wearing a gold cross fine enough for some king’s spawn.’
Without thinking, she touched the cross at her neck. The women of Brunson Tower wore coarse wool, laced vests and tight sleeves, as did most of the women in her home. But her parents had always made sure she had something better. ‘A gift. From my parents.’
‘Stolen, no doubt.’
‘You say that because that’s what fills your house.’
They faced each other with stubborn frowns, but there was no answer either could give. Reivers on both sides of the border lived that way.
‘There’s no disgrace in that,’ he said, finally. ‘The disgrace is in what else some men do.’
She knew the man he meant. Cousin Willie had been a disgrace to them all. Her father had even disowned him, but somehow the man had become a symbol, a pawn that the English king and warden had blown all out of proportion, leading to raids and treaties and kidnappings, all because of a man hated by his own kin.
Had the Brunsons killed him? Probably.
Was the world better off with him dead? No doubt. But she would not admit that to Rob Brunson.
She drew herself up to her princess height. ‘If you are unable, or unwilling, to provide good fresh fish for your table, then say so and I’ll go hungry. Don’t mock my clothes or insult my family instead.’
Shock. Anger. A clenched fist and jaw and a face as grim as the bare hills in winter. Would his anger be enough for him to let her out of the tower?
‘Ye want fish. We’ll get fish. But you’ll be the one to do it. And I warn you, you and your clothes will be wet and bedraggled before we’re through.’
And she couldn’t hold back a smile. Because she was sure his would be the same.
Chapter Four
Cate told Rob she couldn’t bear to set eyes on a Storwick, so Rob kept Stella in her room until Johnnie and Cate rode west the next morning.
Now, he was left alone with her and with the promise he’d made. He could not force her into the stream wearing a flour-covered dress, so he persuaded a few of the women to loan her skirt, shirt and vest. Stella emerged from the room looking at once like all the other women he knew and nothing like them at all.
Breasts he had barely noticed beneath her own gown now seemed proudly outlined above the Widow Gregor’s second-best vest. Beggy Tait’s skirt was too short for her, which meant a glimpse of bare ankle. Even the sharp angles of her face seemed softened when she wore ordinary clothes.
But her expression was not.
And still, hanging around her neck was that golden cross, studded with some green stone and with a fleck of flour stuck in the delicate wire. Something finer than he or his father had seen in a lifetime. Her family must have lifted it off the very queen.
But why did she wear it? If Storwick had sold it, his clan could have feasted until the end of days.
Apparently oblivious to the glory around her neck, Stella held out folded fabric, dusted with white. ‘I will leave this with the laundress.’
Well, new clothes had taken no edge off her sense of privilege. His anger was exhausted. Now, he was simply baffled. She was no dullard, yet still she surveyed the tower as if she owned it instead of he. ‘Do you not yet understand that you are the prisoner here?’
‘And do you not understand that I am …?’ She let go the rest of the words and her arms, holding the dress, drooped.
‘What?’
She shook her head, for once, holding back words.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. Just who are you to think yourself entitled to treatment I wouldn’t give the King himself?’
Chastened eyes met his. ‘I am a hostage for the good behaviour of the rest of my clan.’
He didn’t believe she meant a bit of it.
She turned back to the room. ‘I’ll leave the dress on the bed.’
‘Do you know anything more of washing than cooking?’
She looked up, then let her eyes drop as she shook her head.
He sighed. If they didn’t clean her dress, she’d have to be garbed in borrowed clothes the others could ill afford to lend. ‘Bring it. Widow Gregor does some washing.’
They
