who had been one half of Innes’s escort.
‘Donald McIntosh of High Strone farm.’ Expecting another case of rent arrears, Ainsley’s mind was on the banquet, which would be needed to sop up some of the drink that had been taken. She was trying to catch Mhairi’s eye, and was surprised to see the housekeeper stiffen, her gaze fixed on her brother.
‘Your father did wrong by my sister for many years,’ Donald McIntosh said.
‘Dodds!’ Mhairi protested, but her brother ignored her.
‘The laird took my sister’s innocence and spoilt her for any other man. He shamed my sister. He shamed my family.’
‘Dodds!’ Mhairi grabbed her brother by the arm, her face set. ‘I loved the man, will you not understand that? He did not take anything from me.’
‘Love! That cold-hearted, thrawn old bastard didn’t love you. You were fit to warm his bed, but not fit to bear his name. You were his hoor, Mhairi.’
Hoor? Shocked, Ainsley realised he meant whore.
Mhairi paled, taking a staggering step back. ‘It’s true, he didn’t love me, but I loved him. I don’t care if that makes me his hoor, and I don’t know what you think you’re doing, standing here in front of the man’s son. This is a celebration.’
‘It’s a Rescinding.’ Donald McIntosh turned back towards Innes. ‘I beg forgiveness for the curse I put upon your family.’
Along with almost everyone else in the room, Ainsley gasped. Almost everyone else. Felicity, she noticed, was looking fascinated rather than shocked. What Innes thought, she could not tell. ‘What particular curse?’ he asked.
‘That the bloodline would fail.’ Donald spoke not to Innes, but to his sister. ‘I had the spell from our mother, though she made me swear not to use it.’
‘No. Màthair would never have told you her magic, Dodds McIntosh. No fey wife worth her salt would have trusted a mere man.’
‘You’re wrong, Mhairi. Like me, she felt the shame that man brought on our family.’
Mhairi’s mouth fell open. ‘And now she is dead it cannot be retracted. What have you done?’
Donald stiffened. ‘I am entitled to be forgiven.’
‘And forgiven you shall be,’ Innes said, breaking the tense silence. ‘The potency of the Drummond men is legendary. I refuse to believe that any curse could interfere with it.’
The mood eased. Laughter once more echoed around the hall, and another supplicant shuffled forward. Stricken, Ainsley barely heard his petition. Until she came to Strone Bridge, she had not considered herself superstitious, but Mhairi’s tireless efforts to appease the wee people and to keep the changelings at bay seemed to have infected her. By some terrible quirk of fate, Dodds McIntosh’s curse had come true. Ainsley felt doubly cursed.
Faintly, she was aware of Innes bringing proceedings to a close. Mechanically, she got to her feet while he said the final words. It didn’t matter, she told herself. It would matter if she and Innes were truly married, but they were not. Innes did not want a child. He’d told her so on that very first day, hadn’t he? She tried to remember his precise words. No, he’d said he didn’t want a wife. One must necessarily precede the other, that was what he had said. But she was his wife. And she could not— But she wasn’t really his wife. She could not let him down in this most basic of things, because he did not require it of her. She clung to this, and told herself it was a comfort.
‘I declare the Rescinding complete, the door closed on the old and open on the new,’ Innes was saying. ‘It’s time to celebrate. Mr Alexander here will fill you all in on the details of our plans for a new pier and a new road, too. There is food and drink aplenty to be had, but first, and most important, one last toast.’ Innes lifted his glass and turned towards Ainsley. ‘To my lady wife, who made this day possible. I thank you. I could not have done this without you.’
He kissed her full on the lips; the guests roared their approval and Ainsley’s heart swelled with pride. She had done this. She had proved something by doing this. For the moment, at least, nothing else mattered.
It was dark, but the party was only just hotting up, thanks to the fiddlers. A bundle of bairns slept snuggled together like a litter of puppies, some of them still clutching their sugar candy. In the recess at the far end of the room, in front of Robert Alexander’s model of the pier, Mhairi was holding court with a group of local wives. Miss Blair was dancing a wild reel with Eoin. This, Innes decided, was as good a time as any for them to make their getaway unobserved.
The night air was cool. He wrapped a soft shawl around Ainsley’s shoulders and led her down to her favourite spot, overlooking the Kyles. Above them, the stars formed a carpet of twinkling lights in the unusually clear sky. ‘It went well, didn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Save for that curse Mhairi’s brother made.’
‘Stupid man. If he really was so ashamed, he should have done something about it when my father was alive.’
‘From what you’ve told me about your father, Mr McIntosh would then have found himself homeless.’
Innes considered this for a few moments. ‘No. More likely my father despised Dodds McIntosh for not challenging him. His sense of honour was twisted, but he did have one.’
‘Perhaps he did love Mhairi, in his own way.’
‘My father never loved anyone, save himself.’
‘Not even your brother?’
Ainsley spoke so tentatively, Innes could not but realise she knew perfectly well how sensitive was the subject. He hesitated on the brink of a dismissive shrug, but she had done so much for him today, he felt he wanted to give her something back. ‘You’re thinking that my father’s wilful neglect of Strone Bridge is evidence of his grief for my brother, is that it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not so sure. My brother loved this place. If my father really cared, why would he destroy the thing Malcolm loved the most? Besides, Eoin said it was a gradual thing, the neglect.’
‘A slow realisation of what he’d lost?’
Innes shook his head. ‘A slow realisation that I was not coming back, more like. He destroyed it so that I would be left with nothing.’
‘And you are determined to prove him wrong?’
‘I’d prefer to say that I’m determined to put things right.’
‘How will you do that?’
‘I have no idea, and at the moment I have better things to think about.’
He kissed her in the moonlight, underneath the stars, to the accompaniment of the scrape of fiddles and the stomping of feet in the distance. She was not really his wife, but she understood him in a way that no one else did. He kissed her, telling her with his lips and his tongue and his hands not only of his desire, but that he wanted her
