Page 43 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

By now the doorway had filled behind her. Isobel first, then Greer arriving at a near-run with her own shawl thrown crooked over one shoulder. Senga close behind with flour still dusted white across her forearms, clearly pulled straight from whatever she'd been doing in the kitchen at this unholy hour, and two more of the younger maids hovering just behind them, drawn by the commotion and too curious to stay in their beds.

"Is that…" Greer stopped short at the top of the step, one hand pressed flat to her own chest.

"A bairn," Isobel finished, though her voice had gone strange and quiet, none of its usual quickness in it.

"Whose?" Senga asked, though something in her face suggested she already half-suspected the answer before it came.

"Ailie," Grisselle said, still kneeling, still reading the note over, though she already had every word of it fixed in her mind. "Tam Fraser's widow. She died birthing this one. There's no kin left to take her."

A short, heavy silence fell over the doorway.

"Ailie," Greer said the name slowly, testing it, grief crossing her weathered face before she caught it and folded it away again. "Aye. I heard she'd passed. I dinnae ken there'd been a bairn born of it that survived."

"The note says the clan doesn't leave its orphans to chance," Grisselle said. "That they come to the Laird's door."

"Aye, that's the old way of it," Greer said quietly. "Been done that way longer than I've been alive. A bairn with no kin left standing, brought to the castle, and the Laird sees her raised proper, one way or another. Fostered out, most times, to a family with room and a willing heart."

"Who takes her, then?" Effie asked, from somewhere near the back, young enough still to ask the question plainly that the older women were clearly all turning over in silence.

Nobody answered right away. Isobel looked at Greer. Greer looked at the basket. Senga looked at the note still held in Grisselle's hand, her flour-dusted fingers twisting once in her apron.

"There's the MacKenzies, out past the mill," Isobel offered, uncertain. "They've room, and Mairi's always said she'd have taken in three more if her own knees allowed for the chasing."

"Aye, or the Frasers might."

"She's cold," Grisselle said, cutting through whatever list was forming, the bairn's crying having climbed back to full pitch now that the initial shock of the open door had worn off. "She's been out here long enough to go half-blue at the fingers, and we're standing about discussing which household has room, as though she's a piece of furniture wanting a place to sit."

The doorway went quiet again, this time with a different weight to it.

Grisselle lifted the baby out of the basket, plaid and all, settling her against her own shoulder in the same motion she'd used without thinking a day past in the village lane. One hand cupped firm beneath the small, furious body, and the crying hitched, faltered, dropped half a register at the sudden warmth and the sudden stillness of being held properly.

"Me Lady," Greer started, "ye neednae do that yerself, we will take care of the bairn."

"I'm not asking anyone to decide anything this morning," Grisselle said, already turning back toward the door, the bairn's cries settling further with every step she took away from the cold. "I'm simply taking her inside, out of the wind, before we all stand here arguing about households while she catches her death on the front step."

Nobody stopped her.

She carried Nora through the hall, past the banked embers of last night's fire, up the first flight of stairs, the small body warming steadily against her own, the crying dissolving by degrees into hiccups and then into the low, hitching breaths of a bairn finally settling toward sleep.

Behind her, the household was still gathered at the open door, voices rising over one another in the grey light.

"Effie, warm milk, and daenae let it scald," Greer was saying, already moving. "And a clean cloth from the press, the soft ones, nae the ones we use for scrubbing."

"Warm milk. Clean cloth." Effie repeated it back and fled toward the kitchens before she could be given a third instruction.

"Do ye think the MacKenzies would take her happily, or out of duty?" Isobel murmured to Senga, low, though not so low, Grisselle didn't catch the shape of it. "There's a difference, and a bairn ought to have the first, nae the second."

"I couldnae say," Senga murmured back. "Though I'll say this, Mairi MacKenzie's never once looked happy about anything in her life and still raised four bairns that'd walk through fire for her. Happy's nae always the measure worth taking."

"Should somebody wake the Laird?" Cait's voice came out higher, cutting through the rest. "Surely he'll want to ken, straightaway, that there's a bairn left at his own door."

"He'll ken soon enough," Greer said. "Let the sun come up proper first. There's nae sense waking a man for a decision that'll still be sitting there in an hour."

"But shouldnae he be the one to say what's done with her?"

"Aye, eventually. But the lady's already seen to the most pressing part of it, which is getting the poor mite in out of the cold, so unless ye mean to chase after her and take the bairn back out into the wind to wait on the Laird's opinion, I'd say the question can wait same as he can."

Cait had no answer for that, and the voices dropped back into the low, busy murmur of a household sorting itself out around a problem none of them had expected before breakfast.