––––––––
“Miss Kenna seems like she wait for a something.”
“Close, Elena, but say ‘Miss Kenna seems like she is waiting for something’ without the ‘a’, right?” Olga smiled and intertwined her fingers, then rested her hands on her bosom.
Elena repeated what she was supposed to say, and Olga patted her on the shoulder.
“Very good. But Miss Kenna, it seems to me that she is right, no matter her English. Your wedding is in only a few days, but you seem to be tangled in other thoughts. Is anything the matter?”
“Aye, I’d say there is.”
“You can tell me about it if you’d like. I won’t say nothing to the Laird if that’s what you’re worried over. My job is to you, and to you my loyalty lies. Speaking of that, I’ve mended your necklace.”
“Oh, thank you Olga, you didn’t have to do that. But it’s...no, no, I shouldn’t say anything. I do trust you Olga, and you Elena, but I just can’t. It’d just be whining. Either that or I’d be mewling over a little girl’s silly fantasy.”
“You shouldn’t feel bad about how you feel, no matter what it is, I’m to bet we’ve both thought the same things, or close.”
Elena nodded, pleased that she understood. “Have felt many pangs, Miss Kenna.”
Olga smiled and shook her head.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to tell you things that can get you in trouble with Mr. Macdonald. There’s another thing, I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be calling him. I went through all the ‘what to call your elders’ stuff as a little girl, but it’s all just so confusing, and I canna get my head around it. As a commoner I’m to call him my lord, or Lord Kilroyston. But then my Pa called him Laird Macdonald, and when I do the same he doesn’t correct me. It’s just confusing.”
“Yes,” Olga said with a little smirk. “I understand the difficulty. When I married my first husband, it was a similar kind of arrangement. Better business, you see, for my father. He made chocolates and by marrying me to the man he did, my father got another little store in Munich.”
“How did you get here, Olga? That’s a long way for someone to come, from Munich – where is that? Switzerland? – to Scotland.”
“Ya,” she said. “It is a long way and was a slow trip. He was my first husband, and he beat me, so I shot him. And no, Munich is in Bavaria. I’d love to see it again, but I think it is not likely, at least at my age.”
“You’ll get back there. You’re not old, Olga. My Ma is probably of an age with you and she still works the fields in Fort Mary on the days when my Pa can’t do it...did you just say you shot your husband?”
Olga just smiled, her face round and smooth, but there was a devil behind her eyes.
“He hit me. Hit my son, then he slapped me and then I shot him. I didn’t shoot him in the stomach, so it didn’t hurt. Right between the eyes.”
“Your being here makes more sense now.”
“Oh, lass, it wasn’t because I was on the run. I went to trial, and was turned out free. I weren’t the first girl he hit.”
“But you were the last.”
“And that I was.”
“What about you, Elena? How did you get here?”
“It a strange story, long one.” She grinned. “But I think you have met my husband?”
“I...I doubt that, as I’ve not met much anyone since I got here, not really.”
“Oh, but you’ve met my husband. He tell me about.”
“He told me about it, dear,” Olga said.
“Yes, yes, that.”
“Is he someone who came to the party?” Kenna searched the back of her mind for some clue – any clue who the man might be, but came up empty, except for one horrible thought. “Oh no, you’re not married to that awful sheriff, are you? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”
“Ha! No, no, but he are terrible. But you close.”
“Rodrigo? But he doesn’t talk.”
A warm smile played across Elena’s lips. “He doesn’t need to talk to use his tongue,” she said with a giggle. “But yes, him. I came with him to this country when Alan hired him as a tough, and the sheriff and the Laird, they’re...friend not right words...partner.”
“He was rather a decent man when we met.” Kenna said. “Polite, at least, and seems bothered by his employer’s foulness.”
“Oh yes, dear Kenna, Rodrigo,” she said his name with a beautiful rolling of her tongue, “he can’t not stand the sheriff. That thing sheriff chews, and makes Rodrigo carry. He told me wanted to poison it.”
Both of the ladies laughed, but Kenna pursed her lips and drew them closed.
“Elena! Hush! You mustn’t say that. You’ll get in all manner of trouble.”
“No worry on that count,” Olga said. “The first thing you learn when you’re taken into a household as a servant is that you hardly count as a person. You’re a job that must be done, a worker without whom your master could not survive, but who he doesn’t see as alive. You’re like...a tree which sees everything, can tell secrets to other trees, and to the little birds and the squirrels, but what doesn’t count for anything.”
“That’s awful. You both deserve more. You’re both such good people.”
“Ah, dear Kenna, the second thing you learn is that no one deserves anything. These wealthy barons and dukes and earls, they fall just as quickly as anyone else. And it seems that the bigger they get, the more they risk on strange schemes to make money, and then they fall with a crash as loud as you can imagine. But we? No, we just keep going. Keep listening. You’d be amazed at the wealth of secrets that a couple of silly serving girls can keep.”
“You must know the most terrible things,” Kenna said. “Things that Macdonald would be most upset at you telling anyone.”
“Oh I don’t think that,” Olga said. Elena nodded. “We just keep the secrets and titter about them to other servants. I know about his crookedness and his nastiness, but no, I don’t think there’s anything too terrible. After all, someone has to pay attention to you before you can do any damage. And anyway, what would be the use?”
“Sorry, I just don’t know how to take him is all. Before I came, I had only a few days between his acceptance of me and his arrival, and it all happened very quickly. It feels like my life is ending before it even really started.”
“Ah, dear Kenna, to be young and to worry about young things. Listen to me carefully. This is a world full of terrors and darkness. Full of pain. After I shot my husband and was freed, his brother came to my house and killed my son, killed my daughter-”
“That’s terrible!”
Olga waved her words away. “But everything leads one way. Moving forward doesn’t happen without some reason. If you don’t have anything pushing you you’ll stay still. People, we like to be comfortable, yes? We like to stay in one place. If we’re asleep, we want to stay asleep. Something must to push you.”
“But why is it always something that hurts?” Kenna’s cheeks turned red and Olga put her arm around the girl’s sagging shoulders. “Why can’t it ever be something good that makes us move forward?”
Olga grunted from the back of her throat.
“Everything depends on how you look at it. Nothing has only one side of the story. Every bad has a good. Look here,” she said pointing to Elena. “Elena left her brother and three sisters and her parents when Rodrigo brought her, but since then she’s made a new home here. It looks different, and it isn’t familiar, but she’s here and she’s got new friends and a new family.”
Elena nodded solemnly. “New family like Olga – good because my sisters never have taught me English.”
“That was very good, El,” Olga said. “There must be something you like about coming down here, even if the marriage isn’t what you hoped. He won’t live that long at any rate, if you’ve seen the way he eats.”
Both women giggled at that, and Kenna tried, but just couldn’t make any laughs come.
“The city’s beautiful, what little of it I’ve seen,” she said.
“Yes, yes, good. A beautiful place. Much more...ah...colorful, I think, than Munich. Good, what else?”
“Well I like both of you very much. I’ve been here less than a week and I already feel like you two will take care of me if anything happens.”
“For a sureness,” Elena said with another nod full of gravitas. “Yes.”
“And what else?” Olga said. “I know what you’re not saying.”
“You do?”
Olga’s hand felt good patting softly on Kenna’s back, just the way her mother did. “I don’t know what it is exactly, but I can see something in your eyes.”
“If you already know...”
“It will feel good to say, Miss Kenna. To know that someone else knows your secret, which isn’t much a secret at all if you pay attention.”
Kenna took a deep breath.
“Ach,” she said, “I guess there’s no reason to hide. It’s...”
“Love?”
Kenna nodded, and laid her head on Olga’s shoulder. “Yes, but worse than that.”
“Love is beautiful! What do you mean worse?”
“It is beautiful unless there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Is it someone back home? Someone you’re afraid you’ll not see again?”
“No, he’s here. I didn’t know he was, but then he showed up last night, and-”
“Was he one of those three men that broke up Macdonald’s absurd little party? Goodness, but I did find that big one a handsome creature, though he seemed familiar. Which one was it? And how in the world did you fall for a man who lived a two-day ride from home?”
“He didn’t always live here. And I canna exactly say how I fell for him since the only talking we’ve ever done was in short, whispered bursts. But every time I saw him since I was a little girl, he took my breath away, made my heart beat just a wee bit harder, a wee faster. I canna explain, but it all sounds so ridiculous to say aloud.”
“Not at all, not at all. Before I shot Mr. Herzinger, he did the same thing to me. Gave me a flush, made my skin prickle when I’d see him, he even made me a rather bit hot, you know, down there.” Olga laughed unashamed, but Kenna flushed red. “Anyway, no, it isn’t strange, dear Kenna. Sometimes your mind does things you can’t explain. Other times, you can explain them, but when you do it, the words don’t make sense outside your head.”
“Thank you. Thank you both,” Kenna said. “But there’s one more problem that I’m not sure how to explain.”
“Let me have guess,” Elena said. “He’s going to come to saving you from the married, but you don’t want him to be hurt?”
“Well, aye, but also, from what I gather, he’s not the type to give up until he gets what he wants. I mean, he’s got his little gang, and he goes around doing all kinds of things to the nobles in Edinburgh. He’s so right famous that we even heard some of what he did all the way back to Fort Mary, though that was just from Edinburg newspapers. I’m afraid he’s going to get caught up in saving me from here, and then get himself hurt or worse.”
“So it’s the tall one, then?” Olga said.
“The tall one?”
“The man, Miss Kenna. You’re after the tall one with those big, round shoulders and that flowing brown hair? As I recall, he had it tied back in a pony’s tail, and had a bit hanging down on either side of his face. The mask he wore was a small one, black, like a bandit’s, and those sharp cheekbones, those big, dark blue eyes, he-”
“Olga, it would seem as though you’ve been lusting after him!”
“I may be a while further on in life than you, but I know a big, strong, able lover when I see one. I’m right, no?”
“Well, aye, it’s him. The first time I saw Gavin was when I was very young, he a little older. It was at a dance in Fort Mary. I’d never even thought of a boy like that before then, I don’t know, he just...”
“Did something to you?”
Kenna nodded. “Like I said, just sent my heart to fluttering. I was a wee li’l girl, so I had no idea what it was, but after I got over my fear that my heart was stopping, I didn’t do much else but look forward to the next time I’d see him. And I did, a couple of years later at another festival, and then again when he was leaving for the Bonnie Prince’s war. He made it all the way down here and then I just stopped hearing from him until...well, until last night.”
Olga pulled her lips tight against her teeth.
“On one account, you’ve no worry. On another you’ve got quite a one.”
Kenna looked at Olga’s kind, round face and felt a strange kind of comfort.
“You’re in love with the Ghost of Edinburgh, dear. You’ve got nothing to worry about in regard to him being hurt. He’s broken into this house twice now, broken into Macdonald’s apartments in the city once, and has been slowly building up a whole bunch of people who have made him a hero, whether or not he meant to be one. If anyone can steal a girl from Ramsay Macdonald, it’s him.”
“What’s the thing I have to worry about, then?”
“Dear Kenna, you’re going to have to figure out what to say to him when he shows up tonight. And my only concern is getting you all gussied up for him.”
“But, what? How did you know about that?”
“Your eyes, dear,” Olga said. “You’ve got eyes that give everything away.”
––––––––
Kenna did more fidgeting in the two hours after Olga and Elena left her than ever in her life all gathered up, she thought.
First she stared at her hair in the mirror until she decided that the way they’d curled it was very nice, but not becoming of her face shape, and so she let it down, then kept looking until she thought maybe they were right and bunched it all back up, twisted the ribbon back around it and teased her two tentacles as Olga called them into a frame around her soft, perfectly blushed cheeks.
Mostly satisfied with how her hair looked , although it ended up exactly how it started, Kenna set herself to tugging her sleeves, then pulling them back up and then tugging them down again, convinced that there was something off about the length. After several minutes of tugging and un-tugging, she realized that the dress wasn’t moving very much at all, and let it be. She took a deep breath, held it in for a moment, and then blew it out as she fell backwards onto the bed.
Olga had initially insisted upon putting Kenna back in that awful corset because ‘men, they like the way it makes the bosom stand,’ but Kenna convinced her that he’d be far enough away that the condition of her bosom was not the chief concern. And anyway, she said to Olga, he’s not the sort to worry about that. He loves me for me, she said, not for how I look or how I poke out here or there or suck in one place or another. For some reason, when she said that, Olga had just smiled, and Elena chuckled.
When she finally settled down enough to do anything besides pulling on her clothes or her hair, or worrying that he might never come, Kenna pulled a large volume of Mallory’s Morte D’ Arthur off the shelf and set to reading. It was a book she’d been through a hundred times as a little girl and one that continued to fascinate her. She especially loved the Orkney knights, Gawain and the others, who fought endlessly between themselves, as brothers do. She read and read, finally letting herself laugh at one of the stories which had always been her favorite – when the Orkney knights beat each other roundly and Arthur was concerned whether or not to invite them to the Round Table – when she heard a rhythmic tapping at the window.
She sat up with a start, flinging the heavy tome off of her chest and sent it thudding to the floor.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap-tap.
“The window!” She jumped up with a start.
Cheeks flushed with fire, Kenna ran to the window and opened it, then dodged a stone, and giggled. She squinted out over the horizon, trying to trace the trajectory of the rock and saw – there he stood against the trunk of a tree right on the edge of the space behind the manor. He was far enough away that she could make out only the vaguest glimpse of his features. She had a pair of opera glasses that she’d scrounged up from a trunk in her chambers, and used those. He was a little closer, but not too clear.
“Is that...is that you?” She said out the window.
Of course it is, you fool, who else would pitch rocks at your window at the exact time he said he’d show up.
Even as she gazed at him, the sun deepened its slackening and the deep orange of Edinburgh dusk began to set in around them. She felt a thick heat between the two of them, and knew that if he was in her room she’d have a great deal of trouble protecting her decency since all she wanted to do was have him throw her across the mattress and...
Kenna! What naughty thoughts! Keep yourself decent, at least for now. She giggled to herself, hearing Olga’s voice in her head, filling her with all sorts of trouble.
“Gavin?” She said. “Answer me if that’s you.”
The man lurking among the trees looked left, then right to make sure there were no sentries, then crouched low and advanced to a place behind a bush, halfway between the woods and her window. He never settled down, constantly searching back and forth.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “The whole estate is busy with a dinner party in the north wing. Unless you start screaming, or shoot someone, they’re blind as a black sheep to you.”
Gavin settled down behind his bush and took a drink of something from a skin.
“Ach, it’s good to see you again,” he said. “I canna believe it’s been so long. When Red Ben told me you were goin’ to be at the party, I dinna believe him, though I knew you were coming to marry that greased pig Macdonald.”
Kenna was afloat. She listened to his voice, and although something about it struck her as odd, she immediately passed it off as nerves, or having forgot what he actually sounded like, or any number of other things.
“You too,” she said. “I mean, it’s good to see you too. I was just telling my chamber ladies – ach, I hate these words. I was telling Olga and Elena, the two that take care of me, I was telling them about you.”
“Good things, I hope,” he said. There was the Gavin she knew. Or at least the one she thought she did.
Kenna wanted to talk to him, she wanted to bring him closer and see him, or – God forbid – get him to climb up to her window and let him to wonderful, terrible things to her prickling, excited, overwhelmed body, but something held her back.
“Gavin, I...I’m scared. I have to tell you this, okay? I dinna want you to be mad.”
“I couldna be mad at the likes of you, Kenna. You’re all I’ve cared about since I was a wee laddie. What could you do to upset me?”
His voice, that’s not...there’s something amiss with his voice, Kenna thought. He must be sick.
Before she spoke again, Kenna watched Gavin shift his weight back and forth.
“Are you in a hurry?”
“No,” he said. “Well, aye, I suppose I am. Dinna want to be caught is all. What’s bothering you?”
Gavin was so easy and relaxed the other night. I wonder if he’s having second thoughts about all this. It’s so dangerous, what he’s doing. Maybe he’s just going to give up on me and go back to stealing things and giving it all away. I’d understand that. I mean, he’s taking quite a-
“Ach, I’m sorry but can you get on with it?” He said. “There’s people moving about inside. I think the party’s over.”
“I...” Gavin’s irritation took Kenna off guard. She momentarily forgot what she was saying. Raising the eyeglasses to her face, she looked again. His hair was the same color, and he had blue eyes, she thought. But something about him wasn’t right. Something just wasn’t quite the same. He was hunched up against the back of the bush so she could only see a part of him, so it was hard to tell if it was a trick of the light or if this was some imposter.
“Is that really you, Gavin?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Who else would know to be here? Sorry I’m bein’ curt with you, but if I’m to get you out of here, I canna do it from inside a jail.”
“Aye, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being foolish, of course it’s you.”
She remembered Olga’s words about bad things moving us forward, trouble making people grow, and she decided to just say what was on her mind.
“I’m scared of what will happen to you – to us.”
“What are you on about, girl? It’ll be fine. I’m as well-known as Robin Hood. I won’t be gettin’ myself in any trouble.”
“But that’s what I’m worried about,” she continued. “I’m worried that if you come get me, we’re going to have half the police in Edinburgh looking for us.”
“Don’t be silly, lass.”
“No, Gavin, listen to me!” She said. “Macdonald, he’s come up with a plan that’ll get a lot more attention that you think. We’re to be married in a week...six days now. He said that if a commoner, as I am now, gets kidnapped, his men will look for a few days and then give up. Even if they catch you, the penalty is next to naught. But if I’m married, I become Lady Kilroyston and...”
“They’ll come after me, find me and catch me and throw me in the Tower for kidnapping a noble, and a Lady at that. Is that what you were going to tell me?”
“Well, aye, I suppose it is.”
“Then the answer is to get you sooner, not to be afraid.”
“You knew?”
“It only makes sense,” Gavin said. “And he’s right. That man might be a right steamin’ mess, but if he knows anything, it’s how to make people do what he wants. He’s right and he’s wrong, though. The penalty is a lot stiffer, but the Crown doesn’t care one shite for us now, and won’t care one to send a squad of Crown police after some woman, even if she’s the wife of an Earl. Scots are Scots. Scots are nothin’.”
She stood in silence, and he crouched in silence, for a moment.
“One more thing before I go, which I should be gettin’ to presently.”
“What is it? Can we have another meeting like this soon? Maybe one that’s less rushed? I can lock my door, and...”
“Aye, perhaps, but listen to what I’ve to say. You need to get away from here and meet me in the city. However you can. We’ve a plan but we canna do it out here. There’s too much what can go wrong. Do you understand? Move for a shake.”
She backed away, and a rock whizzed past, then hit the wall with a muffled sound.
“When I’m gone, look at that paper. On it’s an address. Wha’ever you got to do, get to that address tomorrow eve. You do that, we’ll be safe. You don’t, well...I’ll have to think of somethin’ else. Aye?”
“Y...yes, alright. I’ll try my best.”
When she looked next, he was gone.
Vanished without a trace. Not a word, not a wave.
Kenna collected the stone-delivered note, glanced at it long enough to read an address on Queen’s Street and then folded the paper and tucked it into one of her pouches.
With her head on her pillow, she closed her eyes and stuck her hand underneath the soft lump and closed it around a harder one.
Her thistle.
Her anchor.
Her Gavin.