Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 11: She’s no’ what I expected
Callum had a problem.
He had been a laird for six years, which meant he had spent six years solving problems. Harvest failures. Boundary disputes. A feud with the neighboring MacPhersons that had taken eighteen months to resolve without bloodshed. A winter that had been so cold it killed three-quarters of the cattle and left the clan facing spring with their stores depleted and their morale lower than he had ever seen it. He was good at problems. He approached them the way his father had taught him: name the thing, look at it straight, work out what could be controlled and what couldn’t and concentrate your resources accordingly.
The problem of Isolde did not behave like other problems.
The issue was that she was not what he had expected.
He said this to Morag on a Tuesday morning in April, three weeks into the marriage, while standing in the doorway of the stillroom watching his wife help his aunt sort and label the spring herb harvest with the focused, methodical attention of a woman who had been doing this task for years.
She had not been doing it for years. She had been doing it for ten days. She had observed twice, asked questions, and then simply started helping, and Morag had not told her to stop, which said more than anything else.
“She’s no’ what I expected,” he said.
Morag didn’t look up from the yarrow. “Aye, ye’ve mentioned.”
“She was teaching the village children yesterday. Alasdair’s youngest couldn’t read a word last month — now she’s sounding out Gaelic from the primer.”
“I know. I was there.”
“The Gaelic.” He paused. “She’s learning it faster than any outlander I’ve seen.”
“She has a good ear and she’s stubborn about being good at things.”
“I thought she’d—” he stopped. “I thought the English cruelty I knew was the English cruelty she’d have. I found softness.”
Morag looked up at him now. Not the gentle look — the sharp one. “Did it occur to ye that the English cruelty ye knew had nothing to do with the women of England and everything to do with the men who ordered the raids?”
He was quiet.
“She’s no more responsible for what Whitmore’s men did than the children in those cottages were responsible for the politics that sent them there.” Morag put her yarrow down. “She’s a person, Callum. Not a category.”
“I ken that.”
“Ye’re falling for her.”
“No,” he said.
It was reflexive. He heard it as she heard it — the automatic denial of a man whose reflexes were formed before his thinking caught up.
“No,” he said again, with less certainty.
Morag made a sound that required no words.
He stood in the doorway and watched Isolde tie a bundle of dried rosemary with the precise, economical movements she brought to everything she did, and he thought about three weeks on the floor of his own chamber and how he had slept better than he had in three years, and about the morning two weeks ago when he had found her in the stables talking to Rosalind in a low soft voice that was entirely different from every other voice she used, and about the evening she had sat across the fire from old Tam and held his hostile silence with the equanimity of someone who understood grief and was not going to penalize a man for having it.
“She still wants to go home,” he said.
“Aye. Does she?”
He looked at Morag.
“She went to the south ridge yesterday morning,” Morag said. “On Rosalind, alone — ye’ve stopped posting the guard, I noticed. She rode up to the ridge and looked south for a while and then came back.”
He had known she went to the ridge. He had watched her go and watched her come back and had told himself it was the monitoring of a responsible husband and not the particular quality of helplessness that came from watching someone make a decision you couldn’t make for them.
“She came back,” he said.
“She came back.” Morag picked up her yarrow again. “Figure out what that means.”
He wasn’t ready to figure out what that meant. He was, he found, not quite ready for most of what was happening to him, which was an unfamiliar experience for a man who generally preferred to be ahead of events rather than catching up with them.
He went to find Fergus, who was a sufficient antidote to excessive thought, and spent the afternoon discussing the western boundary dispute, and told himself that whatever was happening was happening slowly enough that he had time.
That evening, supper in the hall. She was across the table. She had been speaking to old Tam — not at length, but a word exchanged over the stew, something he couldn’t hear but which made the old man’s expression shift fractionally. Not warmth. But something that was not its absence.
He looked at her for a moment when she wasn’t watching.
She was wearing the MacKinnon tartan sash. She wore it every day now, without being asked to, which he suspected was a practical decision rather than a sentimental one but which he felt nonetheless in the way he was apparently going to feel things for the foreseeable future.
“She spoke to Tam,” Fergus said beside him, low.
“Aye.”
“He didn’t bite her.”
“So I see.”
Fergus picked up his cup. “Ye’re in trouble, Callum.”
“I’m aware.”
“What are ye going to do about it?”
He watched her across the table, and she glanced up at that moment and met his eyes, and looked back down, and it was three seconds of exactly nothing and exactly everything, and he thought: I am going to court my wife. I am going to do it properly. I am going to be patient enough and present enough and whatever enough until she looks at me and sees what I see when I look at her.
“Nothing yet,” he said. “It’s too soon.”
“Aye,” Fergus agreed, and drank, and said nothing else, which was one of the things Callum valued most in him.
He ate his supper.
He thought about the south ridge, and the coming back, and what a man who has been given an unexpected second chance is supposed to do with it.
He thought: *everything.*
He thought: *starting with the floor.*
Reader Reactions