Eleven days after Brendan came home, I was out in the barn when I heard a voice in the woods, singing the “True Lover’s Farewell.” I stood in the barnyard and looked in every direction, for the voice echoed all about. I had forgotten what a nice voice he had to listen to, every note on the right pitch. “Cullah?” I spun on my heels as I called with all my strength. “Eadan!” Searching the meadows and fields, I saw him at the edge of the woods. He had a huge sack over one shoulder and his sword lashed over the other one. What was more, he was clean and his beard neat, his hair in a tail at the back under a tricorn hat, wearing not his tartan but new clothes made of skins. He stepped out toward me and I to him. Then he put down the sack and sword and ran full out. “Eadan!” I cried again. At last his arms closed about me and swung me about, both of us wanting to melt into the body of the other. “Husband. Oh, my husband, you are home.”
Close up now, I got a look at his eager expression, his weary eyes. He said, “My Resolute, thou art the blithest maid e’er walked the dews of Skye.” Then he kissed me so hard my lip felt crushed. He swung me into his arms and hefted me two or three times, then said, “Beauty walks in your being. Light as a fairy. Are you sure you are not a fairy? I am enchanted by this maid, who weighs less than a pennyweight of feathers.”
I laughed again. “I have so much to tell you. Take me to the house.”
“Oh, wife, I have some to tell you also. Is the boy here?”
“Well and aye.”
“And his friend? Did he live?”
“Yes. And well. He is with Gwenny in the barn, milking.”
“The two of them alone?”
“Well, Cullah, he’s so ill.”
“Not that ill. Let me greet my bairnies, then send one of the other children, no, send them all to keep them company. We have aught to speak of, alone.”
I smiled. “How came you to these clothes? And to return cleaned, and”—I sniffed—“you smell as you did on our wedding day.”
“Ah, so many questions. Would you have me covered in filth and gore? I stopped and enjoyed the kindness of others so I would not frighten you. Come along, Resolute.”
We held hands and found our children. I told them all, Jacob and Brendan included, the silliest things and promised them treats and puddings and sweetmeats aplenty, if only they would go and watch Gwenny and Rolan milk the cows. When the last had gone toward the barn, Cullah and I raced up the stairs and bolted our door.
A couple of days later, when we settled our fluttering hearts and had time to speak of other things, I asked him, “Husband? How did you fare? I feared so often that you would be called less than a soldier for refusing to fight the French.”
“I found that I could fight anyone who pointed a musket at me. A man’s will to survive is greater than his cause, I reckon. Armies count on that, lest no one would fire and we should all sit and have a game of whist and call it finished. One man fires and the lot of them feel threatened. I told Brendan to watch for that. Never to be the first to fire, unless there is no choice, and never under any circumstance be the second, for the first could have been accidental until you know. Many a battle was worked to our advantage by officers who knew that. One shoots from a crafty position. All the men hiding in the brush and trees then are threatened and fire, giving away their position. Now, that is enough battle strategy for my wee brain. Tell me, gentle wife, of what has happened in my home?”
It was not easy to confess to the one I loved yet another way my angry tongue had worked to my disfavor. He listened to the story of the stocks, and the safekeeping by my brother and her ladyship. In the end he laughed. I could but ask his forgiveness, and plead that I lost my senses for lack of his presence. I told him of Patience and August, of my sister’s death and my brother’s vengeance against the man who would have despoiled our daughter. All the little things we had left unsaid, we said. The way the summer turned. The way the air smelled this November, so like other Novembers that it carried with it the promise of roasted meats and sweet pies as well as blizzards and long, long nights.
“I can think of ways to fill a long night,” Cullah whispered to me.
“I can think of one,” I said. “I hope your nights were not so long while you were gone.”
“Every one of them, an eternity without you,” he said. “And you are worried that I have played the rogue? Fear not. I simply added each night to those I will spend with you from now on. I will never again leave your side, my Resolute, not if dragged away by a team of horses.”
CHAPTER 31
January 20, 1757