Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 5: The lad doesn’t know
She had been in harder circumstances.
She told herself this while Morag heated water for a bath and laid out clothing — a heavy linen shift, a woolen skirt in MacKinnon tartan, a dark overdress that was warm and plain and nothing like anything Isolde had ever worn. She told herself it while she bathed, behind a screen in the chamber that was now apparently hers, scrubbing three days of travel from her skin with the particular desperate thoroughness of someone who has been very cold and very frightened and is using the practical act of washing to reassert some control over her own existence.
She had been in harder circumstances.
She couldn’t think of when, exactly.
The chamber was spare but not unpleasant — a bed with a heavy wool blanket, a table, a chair by the narrow window that looked out over the valley. Someone had put a candle on the table and there was a small hearth against the wall with a new fire laid in it. These were not the comforts of Whitmore Manor, which had been all velvet curtains and carved furniture and the studied opulence of a wealthy man who wanted you to understand his wealth. These comforts were simpler and in some way more actual — the thing itself, warmth and light, rather than the performance of them.
Morag sat in the chair by the hearth while Isolde dressed, which Isolde found both presumptuous and, in an honest moment, something close to comforting. She was, she realized, extremely tired of being alone with her own thoughts.
“How long has he been laird?” Isolde asked. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
Morag looked up from the mending she had produced from somewhere. “Six years. Since his father died.” She threaded her needle with the practiced ease of long habit. “He was twenty-four. Young for it.”
“He doesn’t seem young for it.”
“Nae. He stopped being young for things a long time ago.” Morag bit off a thread. “The English saw to that.”
Isolde was pulling on the wool skirt and she stopped. “The raids.”
Morag’s hands stilled. She looked at Isolde directly for the first time — a full, measuring look that had nothing polite about it, the look of a woman who has spent fifty years watching people and has formed opinions about this one.
“He told ye?”
“Not — specifically. He said there were losses.”
“Aye. There were losses.” Morag went back to her mending. “His father. Three of his cousins. His wife and infant son.”
The information landed with a weight she had not been prepared for. She stood with the wool skirt half-fastened and thought about the man who had slept on the cold ground and given her his furs in the camp, who had said *I willnae harm ye* in a voice that she had believed against her better judgment, and she thought about what English soldiers had done to his people.
“When?” she said.
“Five years past. Whitmore’s men, though it was never proved.” Morag’s voice was entirely even, the evenness of someone who has processed grief into something workable. “They burnt three cottages. Killed who was in them. His wife — Elspeth — was hiding with the babe in the lean-to behind their house. They found her anyway.”
Isolde sat down on the bed.
She had known, in the abstract, that the English border raids happened. She had known it the way you know about things that occur at a distance, in places you have never been and to people whose existence you have never fully brought into focus. She had known it without ever quite knowing it.
She was knowing it now.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Truly.”
“It’s no’ me ye need to say it to.” Morag looked at her again with the measuring quality. “Though I’ll tell ye for free: the lad doesnae know what to do with ye. He brought an English lass into his house and his whole life’s been arranged around hating the English, and now—” she shrugged. “He’s a good man. He’ll work it out.”
“Send me home,” Isolde said. “If he sent me home, all of this—”
“All of this becomes war,” Morag said, without heat. “Whitmore finds out a MacKinnon raider carried off his intended bride — assuming ye were his intended bride? — and he has the excuse he’s been wanting for two years. The clan gets blamed regardless.” She went back to her needle. “Dinnae look at me like that. I’m no’ defending the kidnapping. I’m explaining why the returning is no simpler than the taking.”
Isolde thought about Edward. She tried to generate the feeling she expected to feel about a man she was supposed to marry in four weeks — anxiety about him, worry, the specific distress of a woman who has been separated from someone she loves. She found, when she looked honestly, that the primary feeling she had when she thought about Edward was the sensation of his estate’s walls pressing in.
That was not something she was going to examine right now.
“The clan,” she said instead. “They hate me.”
“They hate what ye represent. Different thing.” Morag set her mending in her lap. “Give them time. They’ll see what I can already see.”
“What can you see?”
Morag looked at her with the particular expression of a woman who has watched a great many things and has stopped being coy about them. “That ye’re not what they expected,” she said. “That ye’re not screaming and weeping and demanding to be returned to yer fine English life. Ye’re watching. Ye’re thinking. Ye’re adapting.” A small pause. “Ye’re frightened and ye’re hiding it well, but ye’re no’ broken by it.”
Isolde was quiet for a moment.
“The lad is also no’ what ye expected,” Morag said. “I’d wager.”
She did not answer that.
Morag appeared entirely satisfied by the non-answer, which was its own answer, and went back to her mending with the comfortable air of someone who has confirmed a hypothesis she already held.
“The clothes fit well enough?” she asked.
Isolde looked down at the Highland dress. Plain, warm, nothing like anything she’d ever worn, and she had the strange experience of feeling more herself in it than she had felt in the elaborate gowns of the past three weeks at Whitmore. That was a thought she was definitely not examining.
“They fit,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Ye’re welcome.” Morag stood and gathered her mending. “Supper’s in the great hall at seven. Ye dinnae have to come — I can bring something here. But I’d recommend coming.”
“Why?”
“Because hiding in the chamber tells the clan ye’re afraid. Showing up at the table tells them ye’re staying whether they like it or not.” She paused at the door. “They’ll respect the second one more.”
She left.
Isolde sat in the Highland dress with the fire warming her cold hands and thought about Morag’s words: *the lad doesnae know what to do with ye.*
She found, which was unexpected, that this was not entirely unwelcome information.
She went down to supper.
Reader Reactions