Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 27: Lord Reginald comes north
Her father came in May.
He rode up the glen on a grey morning with six servants and the expression of a man who has been traveling for four days and has spent at least two of them reconsidering his choices. Lord Reginald Sutherland was sixty-one years old and had not been north of Edinburgh in his life, and the Highlands had apparently made an impression on him that fell somewhat outside his expectations.
He was also, she could see from the gate, shocked by the sight of her.
She was two years into the marriage, fluent in Gaelic, wearing the MacKinnon tartan with the ease of long habit, and she was holding a baby — Mairead at nineteen months, tucked against her chest with the confident grip of a mother who has figured out the logistics. She had forgotten, in the daily normalcy of it, how completely she had changed since the last time he had seen her.
His horse stopped.
She walked forward.
“Father,” she said.
He dismounted — a little stiffly, the four-day ride making itself felt — and looked at her. She saw him take in all of it: the clothes, the baby, the setting. The keep behind her. The clanspeople at a respectful distance who were doing the Highland thing of not staring while very definitely noting everything.
“Isolde,” he said.
She put her free arm around him.
He held her for a moment. She felt him hold her, the familiar quality of her father’s embrace, which had not changed — the same solidity, the same smell of England and good wool — and she felt something that had been quietly aching for a year ease slightly.
“You look—” he began.
“Well?” she said.
“Different.” He pulled back to look at her. His eyes were the same grey as James’s, as her own. “Happy,” he said, with the tone of a man who had not entirely expected to say this and is uncertain what to do with it now that he has.
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
Callum came out of the keep.
The introduction was, in its way, remarkable. She had worried about it in a low-grade way for months — the two men most important to her, meeting across the particular chasm of history and politics and the specific grievance of what had happened to his daughter. She had thought about how to manage it, what to say, how to position both of them for the best possible outcome.
She did not have to do any of it.
Her father looked at her husband. Her husband looked at her father. And Callum said, in the careful English he still used rarely and with the self-consciousness of someone performing in a language that was not his own: “Lord Sutherland. Thank ye for making the journey.”
Her father said: “My daughter seems well.”
“She is,” Callum said. “She made herself so. I provided the circumstance. She did the rest.”
Her father looked at him for a long moment. He looked at Isolde. He looked at Mairead, who had turned her head toward the new voice with the comprehensive attention of an infant cataloging the world.
“Is that my granddaughter?” he said.
“Yes,” Isolde said. “Would you like to hold her?”
He held Mairead for an hour.
The visit was a week. She had prepared herself for discomfort — for the cultural clash, the moments of English incomprehension meeting Highland reality, the particular friction of two worlds that did not have a natural vocabulary for each other. Some of that happened. Her father ate the Highland food with the careful adaptation of a polite man doing something foreign, and he looked at the keep with the expression of an English lord noting the absence of certain specific comforts, and he had a conversation with old Tam that she was fairly certain went well despite the fact that they shared approximately six words of common language.
What she had not prepared for was her father and Callum in the great hall on the third evening.
She came in from the kitchen to find them sitting across the fire from each other with cups of whisky, and her father was talking. Talking properly, not the careful social English of a man managing a situation — the other kind, the kind he used with people he was actually speaking to. She stopped in the doorway and listened.
He was talking about her mother.
She had died when Isolde was twelve. She had been a woman who loved horses and read more than anyone in the county and had been, by all accounts, considerably more interesting than the world she’d been given to inhabit. Her father talked about her sometimes, late in the evenings, and he was talking about her now to a Scottish laird who had kidnapped his daughter and seemed to have no difficulty finding the appropriate response.
“She sounds remarkable,” Callum said.
“She was.” Her father turned the cup in his hands. “Isolde is very like her. I see it more clearly—” he paused, looking up and seeing Isolde in the doorway. He did not look embarrassed. “More clearly here than I did at home.”
She came into the room.
“More clearly here?” she said.
“At home,” her father said, “you were always managed. By the expectations, the arrangements, the—” he waved a hand. “All of it. Here you are simply yourself.” He looked at her. “Your mother would have liked it here.”
She sat down beside her husband, and he put his hand over hers on the arm of the chair in the quiet way he always did, the gesture she had stopped noticing as a gesture and now simply received as a part of the shape of the world.
Her father watched this.
“You’re happy,” he said again.
“Yes,” she said.
He nodded. Turned back to his whisky. He was a man who processed things internally and quietly and eventually said what he had decided, and she let him be quiet for a while.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For the arrangement. For — not asking you.”
She looked at him. “Father—”
“You were never going to be happy in that life.” He said it plainly, with the matter-of-fact quality of someone who has done the honest accounting and is delivering the results. “I knew that and I arranged it anyway. It was wrong.”
She was quiet for a moment. She thought about Whitmore and the walls pressing in and the nights she couldn’t sleep. She thought about the horse who had been restless and the stable and the dark and the large shape of a man saying *who are ye.*
“If you hadn’t,” she said, carefully, “I wouldn’t be here.”
Her father looked at Callum. Callum looked at her father. Some piece of communication moved between them that she was not entirely privy to, which she decided to leave alone.
“No,” her father said, finally. “I don’t suppose you would.”
He drank his whisky.
Mairead woke up and expressed an opinion about it, which moved everyone into more practical territory, and the evening went on in the warm complicated way of evenings that contain more than can be properly said in words.
When he left at the end of the week, he embraced her at the gate and held her for a long moment, and she felt him say something into her hair that was either her name or something adjacent to it.
He shook Callum’s hand.
She watched him ride down the glen toward England, and she thought about mothers and daughters and the particular ways the world passes things on without meaning to.
She turned back to the keep.
Her husband was at the gate behind her. He held out his hand.
She took it.
They went inside.
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