Murchad is offered a towel

“Oh, no!” Synne cried as she came to a running stop before Murchad. “Is it raining again? It looks sunny from here.”

She ran away from him again to look out the window. To the south, the sky was brilliantly blue, but it was true that the light on the landscape was a sickly yellow, and the swallows skimmed low and brushed their wingtips against the swaying heads of the grass stems.

“Look north,” Murchad said from the opposite window.

Synne ran across the hall to stand beside him. To the north, the sky was lurid and gorged with storm clouds.

“Oh, this is no good for the harvest at all,” she groaned.

“Are you thinking of the harvest or your rides?” he smiled.

“Why—the harvest! I can always sit and sew when it rains, but the people can’t eat my pillow slips.”

Murchad blushed, as he did whenever she mentioned anything that was remotely connected with beds and bedding.

“But it isn’t raining yet,” he said quickly. “How did you know?”

“Oh—were you crying?”

“What?” he gasped.

“You have tiny drops of water in your lashes,” she said. Her hand darted up briefly towards his face, but skirted away like a swallow before she quite touched him.

“Oh!” He rubbed his fingertips over his eyelids and found them cool and damp. “It was a sort of heavy mist of a rain.”

“You have some ‘mist’ in your eyebrows as well,” she giggled, and this time when her hand came up it brushed his face. Her touch was cool and his brows damp indeed.

“And my shirt!” he said, patting his sleeve. “I never felt a thing!”

“And your hair!” she cried, and stroked back the hair that fell over his temple.

Murchad held his breath until her hand dropped away again.

“Where was your head?” she laughed. “You’re like Uncle when he starts thinking while he’s walking, and he never notices where he’s going until he’s ankle-​deep in a puddle!”

“I’m not that wet.”

“No, but you came right through a rain shower and never knew it. Uncle only wets his feet, but you’ve a wet head, and you’re likely to catch your death. A mist indeed!”

She laughed her childish laugh and stalked away from him to grab a square of pale linen from her sewing basket. “Bend your head,” she commanded when she returned.

He did as she asked before he quite understood what she was about. At once she tossed the cloth over his head and began to towel off his hair in firm strokes that gently rocked his entire body.

He was blind with the cloth over him, and humble with his head bowed before her, and he was trying to remember the last time anyone had touched him in such a way—surely when he was a boy too small to towel himself off alone. It was strange at his age to have found himself again in such a position before a woman. But her touch was nothing like a mother’s or a nurse’s—at least it did not feel so to him.

He would never know her, he feared. Every time he thought he had explored the length and breadth of her and had become comfortable in her company, she would reveal some new aspect of herself, as large again as everything that had gone before.

Now, in the space of a few moments, she had gone from hesitating to touch his face, to touching his face, to toweling off his head with a possessive, matter-​of-​fact competence that he envied. He had not yet dared to touch her hand!

With the towel over his head, with his head humbly bowed, all he could see was the hem of her gown. It was the only part of her he felt he was worthy to touch, and he so longed to touch her. He felt a dizziness rising from the nervous knot in his stomach, and he was beginning to feel that the best way to relieve it would indeed be to throw himself at her feet.

Fortunately, she whipped the towel off his head in time and stood before him again: simply Synne, laughing, never dreaming the half of what he had been thinking.

“But your nice cloth!” he gasped when he realized the prosaic aspect of what she had done.

“Oh!” she laughed. “It was only to be a towel anyway. It gets you just as dry without a hem.”

“A towel for—” he began, and then he blushed. Whenever he saw her sewing, he always wondered for whom she was sewing, and he never dared ask.

“For us? It was just a towel,” she smiled. “But it can be for us if you like. It shall be your head-​drying towel for when you are thoughtless—or rather, too thoughtful—and don’t notice the rain.” She expertly folded up the cloth as she spoke. He was a little sorry to see it put away. “How do you say that in Gaelic?” she asked.

He told her as best he could, and she laughed and said, “Luckily for you I can’t write, or I would embroider it all around the edge. Oh! I wish I could! No one here can read Gaelic anyway except for—whom? Malcolm and Aengus?”

“My sister can read and write a little.”

“Perhaps you aren’t so lucky after all,” she winked and went to put the cloth away. “I might ask her to help me next time I see her.”

“That would be an odd thing to embroider on one’s linens.”

“If that’s the oddest thing I ever do to you, you will be a lucky man indeed.”

“Even if it isn’t,” he said.

His boldness was rewarded by a beautiful smile.