Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 13: My English
He hated being still.
Six years of laird-ship had cured him of many things, but not of this: the particular restlessness of a man who manages by moving, who thinks best in action, who finds the enforced stillness of recovery an experience roughly comparable to being buried alive. He had been confined to the keep for four days — Morag’s instruction, delivered with the authority of a woman who knew exactly which of his particular vanities to address — and he had spent those four days being managed out of trying to go and do things by a rotating roster of clanspeople who appeared to have organized themselves into shifts.
On the second day, Isolde had started bringing him books.
Not from the keep’s meager collection — he had four books, which was more than most, and he’d read all of them multiple times. She had somehow sourced books from elsewhere, from the priest apparently, and from a literate clansman who had a small collection inherited from a scholarly uncle, and she appeared each morning and afternoon with something new and set it on the table beside him with the matter-of-fact efficiency of a woman completing a task.
She did not ask if he wanted to talk. She did not sit with him in the hovering way of people who are attending an invalid. She brought the books and she went to her own work and she came back in the evening and asked him, briefly, how the wound was feeling.
On the fourth day she stayed.
He had been reading — one of the priest’s books, theological in nature, which he was finding more interesting than he’d expected — when she came in and sat at the table in the corner and opened something of her own and they were simply in the same room. Not talking. Not performing companionable silence. Just two people in a space doing the things they needed to do.
He had forgotten this was possible.
He had had it with Elspeth, early on, before she was gone — the particular ease of a person whose presence doesn’t require management. He had spent six years without it and had told himself it was one of the uncountable losses of that winter, not a thing that could be recovered.
He was doing a significant amount of revising of that understanding lately.
“Tell me,” Isolde said, without looking up from her book.
“Tell ye what?”
“Whatever you’ve been not telling me for four days. You look like a man who’s been deciding whether to say something and has decided.”
He put his own book down. He had been deciding. He had been deciding since the yard, since she’d called him *husband* with the particular weight of someone saying a word they’ve been holding at arm’s length and have finally, against their own better judgment, allowed themselves to mean.
“Five years ago,” he began.
She looked up. She set her book down too.
He told her about the raid. He had not spoken about it — not the full account, not to anyone — since the winter when it happened, when there had been a council meeting to decide the clan’s response and he had described the facts in the flat voice of someone who has not yet understood what they are saying. He had not spoken about it to Morag, who knew everything but understood that knowing was different from being told. He had not spoken about it to Fergus, who had been there and had his own account and did not need his.
He spoke about it now, in his own chamber, sitting in the chair by the fire because Morag had told him he could move to the chair on day three, with the grey light of a Scottish spring coming through the east window. He spoke about the night — the smell of smoke, the sounds from the cottages, the hour it had taken to find Elspeth and the child in the lean-to and understand what he was looking at. He spoke about the winter that had followed, which had been the worst of his life not because of the cold or the clan’s grief, though both were real, but because of what he had learned about himself in it: that he was capable of hating something completely, that the hatred was satisfying in the way that only things that hollow you out are satisfying.
“I let it make me,” he said. “The hatred. I let it be my reason. For three years I raided English estates and I told myself it was for the clan, and it was for the clan, but it was also for me.”
“For Elspeth,” Isolde said.
“For her. For the bairn.” He looked at his hands. “I never even named him. He was too young. And then he was gone, and naming him after seemed—”
She crossed the room. He did not hear her move — she was quiet when she chose to be, which was one of the many things he had learned about her — and she was there, in front of him, crouching down to his level the way he had done for her in the camp.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
She said it with the directness of someone who says things because they’re true, not because they’re required. He looked at her face and found it open — not the careful composed management she usually wore between herself and the world, but the real thing underneath.
“Ye’re no’ them,” he said. “I see that. I’ve seen it for—” he paused. “A while.”
“But I am English.”
“Aye.” He held her eyes. “Ye’re my English. Different.”
He felt her register it — saw something shift in the amber eyes that was not tears and not composure but some third thing that existed between them. She reached out, slowly, and put her hand over his on the chair arm.
They stayed like that for a while, her hand over his, the fire low, the spring light grey at the windows.
“His name,” she said eventually. “Your son.”
He looked at her.
“Did you ever — have you ever chosen one? Privately?”
He was quiet for a long time. He had never been asked this. He had not expected to be asked it.
“Seumas,” he said. “My grandfather’s name.”
She said it back to him: “Seumas.” The Gaelic pronunciation, which she had, and which cost her nothing to give.
He looked at her face. He thought about the south ridge and the coming back. He thought about her hand over his, warm and steady, asking for nothing.
He was, he understood with the particular clarity that arrives uninvited, deeply in love with his wife.
It was not a comfortable understanding. It was the kind that required him to sit with it in silence and know that the next part of it — what to do with it, when to say it, whether and how she was getting there herself — was going to require more patience than he’d exercised in his life.
He was good at patience when he had to be.
He was going to have to be.
“Thank ye,” he said.
“For what?”
He looked at where their hands were joined. “Asking.”
She did not let go.
They sat together in the quiet of the chamber while the spring moved through the glen outside, and neither of them said anything else that needed saying, which was because, Callum thought, they had gotten very good at this particular kind of quiet.
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