Read Online The Selkie Bride by Melanie Jackson - Free Book Online Page B

and I was lured onward by the rare sunshine and the increasingly smooth sand bar. I decided that if the next day were as nice, I would make a trip to the cockle beds and dig up my own dinner. Herman always enjoyed digging in the sand and I was ready for a change in diet.
    As I walked, I discovered that my brain was soon back to pondering the same two questions that had bothered me since Lachlan’s visit. Why, if my husband had in fact known that his family and mine were participating in some kind of family feud, had he married me? It is said that in Scotland it is a tradition for enemies to put rings on each other’s fingers and dirks in each other’s hearts, but he had come to America to make a fresh start and knew well that this wasn’t our custom. It made his behavior confusing and mysterious.Perhaps even sinister. Was he something more than he appeared? Certainly he had been keeping secrets.
    And now, more urgently, I wondered who and what Lachlan was—and could I trust him? After all, my current relieved supposition that my husband may have had some compelling outside reason for disliking me came from this stranger. How did I know that he was telling the truth? My instinct was to believe him, but my instincts had been wrong before. Attraction affected judgment and I had to admit that at some level, and against all wisdom, I was attracted to Lachlan, whomever and whatever he was.
    Ponder as I did, no answers came to me and my bafflement remained, somewhat spoiling my walk. Duncan’s name had stupidly been invoked, and like a zombie he rose from where I had buried him and hurried across the sea. The mind is determined to relive certain events, and I recalled with some pain standing in the judge’s chambers with my heart, if not in my hand, then at least as open as hope in the face of parental disapproval could make it. I smiled happily while we said our vows in front of a clerk who stood as witness to our marriage, and for a while I remained emotionally undefended and expecting we would have a happy marriage, because Duncan, though a lot older and sometimes impatient in manner, was kind and affectionate in an offhand way. He was even a helpmate when my parents died and I was left feeling guilty for my unhealed breach with them. Had it all been an act? Was there never any affection in his heart?
    One day, Duncan had received a letter from Scotland.What it said I never knew, because he burned it, but he locked himself in the parlor he used as a study and when he emerged hours later, he was drunk and rude. From that day forward, I don’t think he was ever entirely sober again. He never touched me after that day either. His words and manner grew increasingly cruel and repulsive as he strove to drive me away. I offered sympathy, but my pity only infuriated him.
    He did touch whores. Many of them. And he turned to a new love: cocaine. Duncan’s sudden passing had left me with a bittersweet incense of tragic memory that smoldered in my thoughts for weeks after his death. I thought I had doused the last spark, but apparently some embers lingered.
    Had Fergus Culbin been the author of the letter that caused the change in my husband? It seemed that I might never know the answer. One thing was certain, though. My failed marriage had cast a long dark shadow over my life, deepened by the loss of my parents before we made up our quarrel, and I was tired of being lost in memory’s evil twilight. Duncan was dead and buried, and I needed to find my way out of his shade. I had to become my own woman again and put this blight from my soul once and for all.
    On this thought, I rounded a headland and came face to cliff face with the Sithean Mor . The sight immediately shook me from my unhappy reverie and caused my nerves to shrill with awed alarm and unhealthy fascination. The mound was not the green of grass or moss that I had expected, but rather a salmon pink stone shaded through with the colors of a strongsunset. It stood some two