“I don’t know, Coop. Maybe. But that is sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you see your Mom over there?”
Of course he saw her. He’d been watching her sad face all day. She didn’t want to leave here either. “Yeah, she’s sad. She doesn’t want to leave E-o, but she feels like she has to. For us.”
Dad kissed him on his head, messing with his hair, bouncing around his curls. “You are such a smart kid, Coop.”
“If I don’t want to leave, and you don’t want to leave, then Mom doesn’t need to feel like she has to either. We could all just stay.”
Dad stood suddenly, smiling down at him. “My thoughts exactly, Coop. My thoughts exactly.”
Chapter 25
Dinner consisted of a meaty and delicious stew served with a loaf of bread that, while tasty, was hard enough to serve as a weapon should the need arise. I’d hoped to retire early, not to sleep, but just to seek some time alone. I seemed to be needing a lot of that lately—to think and perhaps sulk a while. It didn’t happen.
I’d gotten half a dozen steps out of the dining hall before Kenna McMillan stopped me. Eoghanan’s mother was a stunning woman who showed only the slightest signs of aging with a few perfectly-placed strands of hair turning gray. On her, it was rather fetching.
She was also one of the most kind and open-minded women I’d ever met. Mitsy’s blunt way of speaking and no-nonsense attitude came as no surprise, she’d been born in the twenty-first century, after all, but Kenna rivaled her.
I’d expected a woman born so many centuries earlier, in a time when women were often thought of in a very different way, to be more reserved in her speech, more judgmental perhaps of situations that differed from societal expectations. She was none of these things.
She’d opened her son’s home and her arms to my family, never questioning the odd situation, never making us feel unwelcome or “less-than”. She said exactly what she thought and took bull from no one. I hoped that if I spent more time around her and Mitsy some of that attitude might rub off on me.
“Grace, do ye have a moment?”
I slowed my pace, allowing her to catch up to me. She quickly looped an arm with mine and deftly steered me in the opposite direction of where I’d been heading.
“I verra much wish that…what is it that Mitsy has called it? Email? I wish the invention of such a thing could arise now and no hundreds of years after I’m dead.”
I laughed, patting her hand sympathetically as she walked me out the back door of the castle and into the garden. “News travel too slow for you? I have to admit, I’m enjoying the break from it all. It’s nice not to be so connected, to know that people can’t reach you every second of every day.”
Kenna nodded. “Aye, I wouldna want to be that available perhaps, but I can see how it would be verra helpful when guests are arriving. They could send news of their arrival more than just the morning before.”
“Are you expecting guests?”
“Aye, the Conalls are coming to stay with us until the arrival of Mitsy’s babe. They sent a messenger some three days before they were to arrive here, but the man fell ill and only just arrived today.”
“Oh. Well, what can I help you with?”
She shook her head, laughing, “Oh, no a thing, dear. ’Tis only that the bedchamber that ye are staying in…I’m afraid we willna have enough rooms for everyone if ye stay in it alone.”
“Oh.” For a moment, I wondered if she meant to ask us to leave, but she quickly continued to clarify.
“Now, doona think I’m giving ye an opportunity to slip away from here, for no one of us wants that. ’Tis only we must find some other room to place ye.”
I took a deep breath, relaxing the sudden anxiety that had built up. I was glad she wasn’t ready for me to leave. I wasn’t ready to either, no matter how much I knew I needed to.
“I’ll just stay with Cooper and Jeffrey. It will be no problem. I can sleep on the floor, or Jeffrey can.”
Kenna regarded me as if I’d just suggested we run the length of the garden completely naked. “Sleep on the floor? No. I’ll enter me grave before I have a guest in me,” she corrected herself, “me son’s home, sleep on the floor.”
She made the correction because technically it was correct, but I didn’t believe for a second that she was any less hands-on in the running of the castle than she was before her husband’s death. Mitsy had mentioned to me, when she’d told me Eoghanan’s story, how Kenna had been so ill for so long, reduced nearly to death. Standing before this strong, beautiful, headstrong woman now, I couldn’t begin to picture it.