Chapter 24: The Wife

By Candlemas there were forty people living in the keep, and Morag had never been so happy.

The snow had shut the glen road for a week.

Half the township had come up the hill with their bedding rather than sit out the storm in cold cottages.

They filled the kitchen and the hall and the stairs.

They slept on the flagged floor in rows, and they ate at a table that Niall had ordered brought up from the cellar.

It was twenty feet long, and nobody had used it in a hundred years.

I came down at dusk and found the widow's grandchild sitting on the end of it in a clean smock.

The child was a year old and fat as a pudding.

She had a fistful of Niall's silver hair.

He sat still as a post with the baby on his knee, and his black hand held out of reach of her.

He looked at me over her head with a face I will keep until I die.

"She will not let go," he said.

"Then don't make her."

"I have been bitten by a great many things," said Niall, "and none of them has been so determined."

The widow laughed from the fireside.

By the hearth sat a thin pale woman in a travelling cloak.

Who had come on the coach three days earlier and not yet said what she wanted.

I had told her tomorrow.

Tonight was mine.

"Ailsa," Niall said.

"I should like to do something."

"Name it."

"I would like to be married to you in a kirk."

I stared at him.

"We're married."

"We said it at a gate, to a constable, with a gun on us."

"I would like to say it again, with candles, and have the glen watch me mean it."

I put my hand on my mouth.

He looked at the baby, who was chewing a lock of his hair.

"At dusk," he said.

"It is the only time I have."

The kirk at dusk was lit from the porch to the pulpit.

The minister stood in front of the altar rail in his clean black gown, and he did not shake.

He had asked for forgiveness at the manse door the night after Hogmanay.

With his two children on his hip, and Niall had given it at once.

I stood in the doorway with my hand on the miller's arm.

The widow had put me into her own wedding gown.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Vampire Husband Wants to Bite Me Every Night from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.