Page 36 of Bonetide

I take a deep breath to steady myself and cross the courtyard quietly, the way you’d cross a church with reverence and a bit of fear of being smote. The north range door is there, heavy, dark wood, set under a low pointed arch, but I ignore it and walk along the wall to where the first of the glazed windows is, low enough that I can see in if I stand close.

I peer inside carefully, the glass old, slightly warped, but clean.

The room inside is grand.

Stone walls hung with tapestries, faded, but the colors still readable, deep red and gold and a green like the moss on the stones outside. A great hearth on the far wall, dark, no fire in it. A long table with candles burning in a brass candelabra. A chandelier overhead, the candles in it lit as well, throwing a low warm gold across the room. Leather chairs. A wall of books. A wall of more books. A heavy desk angled toward the hearth.

And in one of the leather chairs, his back to the window, his back to me, sits Alasdair.

He’s reading.

I can see only the line of his shoulders, the dark of his head against the leather, the long fall of his arm with a book held open across his knee. He’s wearing what I think is a dark sweater, sleeves pushed up. His other hand is at his temple, fingers in his hair, the gesture of a man who has been reading for a long time.

So he wasn’t lying after all. The shopkeeper and the cop were wrong in some shape or form, or maybe it’s a grey area where he’s not supposed to be here, but he is. What did MacRae say about “kipping?” Regardless, that’s none of my business, and the truth remains that he does live here. He’s my neighbor through and through.

You should go, I tell myself. Go before he sees you.

Instead, my body turns toward the door, as if operating on its own accord, and need starts tugging at me from deep inside.

I want to be on the other side of that glass.

I want it so badly the wanting has its own compass. I want to push the door open, and cross the stone floor, and stand behind his chair, and put my hand on the back of his neck, and feel his skin again. I want him to look up from his book and not be surprised to see me. I want to be the woman who has come to find him, the woman he expected, the woman that is ready…

My feet take one step toward the door.

My hand leaves the wall.

I’m going to knock on the door of a half-ruined castle to see a man who has come to see me more times than I can count now, and I’m going to do it because something in this courtyard wants me to…

I can’t tell if the wanting is mine or not.

Which is what finally makes me pause.

Because the wanting is not mine. Or it is, but it is not only mine. It’s like it was been placed in me long ago, by someone else, a culmination of slowly building desire.

Am I doing this because I want to?

Or because someone else does?

I take one step back.

Then another.

Then I turn, and I go through the courtyard the way I came, faster now, through the gateway, down into the ditch and up the other side, and I do not look back at the windows because I am afraid that if I look back I will see him standing at the glass instead of reading, and I am not ready for that. Not now.

The access road is gentle going up.

I walk it fast enough that my body is going to make me pay for it tomorrow.

I am almost to the main road when I see the horse again, briefly, in a different clearing on the other side of the track. White and still, watching me go.

This time I do not lift my hand.

I just keep walking.

I’m home before noon. I rinse the cut flowers, set them in a jar on the kitchen table, and stand at the back window with my hands on the sill, breathing as if I have just stepped back from an edge. I look across the bay at the castle.

The fog has lifted a little. The castle has come back out of it.