Mother of the Bride

She didn’t. She opened her eyes, forced a smile and said, ‘Oh, my goodness—so what did you say?’ As if she didn’t know what the answer would have been.

Jenni laughed, her happiness radiating unmis- takeably down the phone line. My baby. My precious, precious baby.

‘Yes, of course! What on earth did you expect me to say? Mummy, I love him! You’re supposed to be pleased for me! You are pleased for me, aren’t you?’

There was a note of uncertainty, of pleading, and Maisie sat up straighter and forced some life into her voice. ‘Oh, darling, of course I am—if it’s what you really want.’

‘You know it’s what I want. I love him, and I want to be with him forever.’

‘Then congratulations,’ she said softly. And then, pretending she didn’t already know, she added, ‘I wonder what your father will say?’

‘Oh, he’s really happy for us.’

‘That’s good.’ Her voice sounded hollow, echoing in her ears, but Jenni laughed again, unaware of Maisie’s inner turmoil.

‘Alec asked him first, apparently. They’re really close, and he wanted his blessing—it’s so like him. He really wanted to do it right, and I had absolutely no idea. It was amazing. He took me up to the ruin and got down on one knee— and I just burst into tears. I think he was a bit shocked.’

‘I’m sure he wasn’t, he knows you better than that. So, when are you talking about? Next year? The year after?’

‘As soon as I graduate—we thought maybe the third Saturday in June, if the church is free?’

‘But, Jenni, that’s only a few weeks!’ she said, her mind whirling. Surely not—please, no, that would be too ironic if Jenni, too.

‘Ten and a half—but that’s fine. We want to get it over before the really busy summer season, and the weather will be best then. If we wait until autumn the weather up here could be cold and wet and awful.’

‘Up there?’ she said, the timescale forgotten, blanked out by this last bombshell.

‘Well—yes, of course up here, Mum! It’s where I live now, where everyone is, except you. We’re all here.’

Jenni was right, of course, and she should have seen it coming. They all did live up there, light years away in the wild and rugged West Highlands. Everyone except her. Jenni’s fiancе Alec, his family, Jenni’s uni friends in Glasgow, Alec’s friends—and Jenni’s father.

Robert Mackenzie, Laird of Ardnashiel, king of his castle—literally. And she’d been nothing, a nobody; in the words of the taunting kindergarten rhyme, the dirty rascal, the girl who’d got herself knocked up with the heir’s baby and then, little more than a year after their wedding, had walked away. Why had he let her go without a murmur, without coming after her, without trying to fix what was surely not that broken? She didn’t know. She might never know.

And now her darling daughter—their daughter—was getting married, in the very church where she and Rob had made their vows over twenty years ago. Vows that had proved as insubstantial as cobwebs …

She shuddered and sucked in a breath, the silence on the phone hanging in the air like the blade on a guillotine.

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, darling. Sorry. Of course you’re having it there,’ she agreed, squashing the regret that she wouldn’t be married here, in Cambridge, from the home where she’d grown up. But that was unrealistic, and she was sensible enough to recognise that now. ‘Where else, when you’ve got such a lovely setting? But—only ten and a half weeks?’ she said, her voice perilously close to a squeak of dismay as she thought of the reasons that might exist for their haste. ‘Don’t you need longer to plan it?’ she hedged.

The lovely ripple of her daughter’s laughter made Maisie want to cry again. ‘Oh, it’s all planned! We’re having the wedding here in the church, of course, and the hotel in the village can do the catering. They’ve got a brilliant restaurant, so the food will be great. And we’ll have a marquee on the lawn and if it rains there’s plenty of room inside, and we can have a ceilidh in the ballroom— it’ll be wonderful! But you have to come now, because I need a dress and I’ve only got a week and a bit before I have to go back to uni, and you have to help me choose it. And we have to look for something for you, too—you’ll need something really lovely, and I want to be there when you choose it. I need you, Mum. Say you’ll come.’

Her voice had dropped, sounding suddenly hesitant, and Maisie knew she had no choice. Wanted no choice. This was her baby, her only child, and she was getting married, whether Maisie liked it or not.

‘Of course I’ll come,’ she said, squashing down her apprehension and concentrating on being positive. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

‘Great. I can’t wait, it’s going to be such fun! Look, I have to go, we’ve got to tell Alec’s parents before they go to bed, but I’ll hand you over to Dad. He wants to talk to you.’

Oh, lord. Not now. Please, not now, not again. She needed to crawl under the covers and have a really good howl, and the last thing she needed to do was make small talk with the man who still held her heart in the palm of his hand.

‘She wants me to come up,’ she told him, sticking firmly to business.

‘Yes. It needs to be soon, so I hope you aren’t too busy. When are you free?’

Never. Not to go there, to the chilly, forbidding castle, with his mother still there despising her and him indifferent to her feelings, doing what was right instead of what mattered and riding roughshod over her heart. Except apparently he wasn’t indifferent to her feelings any more. Maybe he’d grown up. Twenty years could do that to you.

‘It’s not too bad for the next couple of weeks. I interviewed someone today for a feature that I have to write up, and I’m doing a wedding tomorrow—’

‘Can’t you hand it over to someone?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Not this one.’

‘Why not? Surely some other photographer.’

She sucked in a breath, stunned that he could dismiss her so easily, implying that any photographer could do the job as well, as if it was just a case of pressing the right button at the right time. So much for him not being indifferent to her feelings!

‘I don’t think you quite understand the process,’ she said drily, hanging onto her temper. ‘Quite apart from the fact that they want me,not some other photographer,’ she told him, ‘you have to understand that brides are very emotional and there’s no way I’d let her down at this point. I gave them my word—to quote you. And you have to respect that.’

There was a heartbeat of silence, then a quiet sigh. ‘All right. So you have to do the wedding. What time will you be through?’

‘Five? Maybe six, at the latest. It’s in Cambridge, so it’s local.’

‘So—if you get the seven-fifteen from Cambridge to King’s Cross tomorrow night, you can pick up the Deerstalker from Euston that gets to Fort William at ten the next morning. Will that be OK?’

The overnight sleeper? It would cost an arm and a leg—but she’d do it, for Jenni. ‘Yes, I’ll book it.’

‘I’ve done it. I’m doing it on line now. I’ll have the tickets waiting for you at the station to collect, and I’ll pick you up in Fort William the day after tomorrow. And, Maisie?’ he added, his voice dropping.

‘Yes?’

‘I know this is going to be difficult for you. It’ll be difficult for me, too, but we have to do this for Jenni.’

‘Of course we do,’ she said wearily. ‘And it’ll be fine. I just wish I felt they were doing the right thing.’

‘It is the right thing. It’ll be all right, Maisie. You’ll see.’

Those words again, echoing back at her over the years, reminding her of just how frail a thing love could be under pressure. She hoped he was right—heavens, how she hoped it, but she wouldn’t bank on it. They were so young, so eager, so unaware of all the pain.

‘I’ll see you at ten on Thursday,’ she said, and switched the phone off.

Thursday morning. Only—she glanced at her watch—thirty-six hours away. No time at all to shore up her defences and get her armour plating up and running.

She’d need days—

Ridiculous. She hadn’t done it in twenty years, what made her think a few more days could make any difference?

She got off the bed—the very bed where he’d loved her so tenderly, so sweetly, so patiently. So skilfully. She stroked the quilt smooth, her mind back in the long-ago days when love had been sweet and laughter had been the order of the day.