Excerpt

Ursilla Balfour, the only daughter of the laird of Stronsay—or at least the only daughter he would acknowledge—was many things, but mostly she was true: a woman who held little as holy as a word given, a heart offered. For this, she was loved. For her beauty, she was wanted. And yet despite both these traits, she was her father's despair for Ursilla of Stronsay, freckled and fair, would not marry for fortune.

"For the last time," said her father. "Marry and double our fortunes."

Like her, he was beautiful, a bear of a man, hirsute and imposing, so tall he had to stoop to enter the hovels of his constituents. Despite his age, there was no frost yet in his beard or his hair, both of which were lush, the red of the light through autumn's last leaves.

Ursula sneered in answer. "If that bothers you so much, you take a husband then."

Her father sighed. Five years ago, he might have spluttered at her insolence, or looked askance at Ursilla's coarseness but he knew better than to do so. Ursilla would not be bent or moved and though she vexed him, he had no desire to see her broken. Like Stronsay itself, like his long-gone wife, she was an elemental thing, one to be admired and accommodated.

"Why won't you marry?" demanded her father. "It's not as if I have asked you to marry an old widower, one barely able to remember his name. You have your pick of the sons of the isles."

"Because I don't. Because I like being free." said Ursilla, attention returned to her cooking. "And that is that. I will now, sit. We're having breakfast."

Again, her father sighed but he sat himself at their table, the bench groaning beneath his weight. Their manor was not large. It sat on a shrug of land above the local village, and close enough to the graveyard that Ursilla saw its church grim on occasion, usually outside the door to the kitchen, scratching to be let in for sausages. Before Ursilla's mother fled to Ireland with a younger man, the manor had swam with music and softness. She had loved tapestries and needlework, furs and rugs bought at enormous cost from the distant East. She took all of it when she left.

Now, the manor was stone and the smell of Ursilla's restless cooking.

"If you marry, my daughter, you will have again the things your mother enjoyed," said her father as Ursilla set down a fan of tattie scones, a stack of oatcakes, squares of spiced sausages; the mushrooms she had sizzled in the lard coating the pans, and the tomatoes she had fried in the same.

Ursilla brought over baked beans, black pudding, a jug of milk before she answered, finally settling on the opposite bench. "I did not enjoy them. She did."

"You could have a cook to prepare your breakfasts for you."

"We could have one now," Ursilla observed. "But you like my cooking better than anyone else's."

Her father scowled and ladled the beans into his bowl. "You could have dresses."

"I have them now."

"Better ones. Ones with no signs of mending."

Ursilla shrugged. "This might be a compelling reason if my needlework wasn't as perfect as it is."

"Marry then to give me grandchildren."

"You hate infants. You've told me such."

"Fine," growled her father. "Do it because I said so."

To which Ursilla responded with a baying laugh, and her father gave up then on any further argument, the two sinking into a communal silence as they ate. The food was as good as it always was, and perhaps it might have even been too fine. Halfway through his second helping of beans, Ursilla's father, who ate and drank with no thought about his health, pressed a palm to his chest and mewled a small, confused noise. Before Ursilla could answer, he collapsed onto his breakfast, dead before his head touched the grease of his plate.