“At first,” Frederick said, “with more coin than I liked spending and more patience than Lennox liked watching.”
“I object to that description,” Lennox muttered.
“Nay, ye daenae,” Caitlin said.
Frederick continued as though neither had spoken. “After that, by asking the right people in the right order. Some had remarried. Some had found kin. Some had none at all. A few had gone farther than I expected, but not so far that letters couldnae reach them eventually.”
Iona lifted the first one with fingers that had begun to tremble.
She recognized the handwriting before she unfolded it.
The red-haired woman. The one from the dungeon. The one she had seen again in the hunting lodge, older and scarred and still somehow alive enough to weep when the bonds came away.
Iona read the first lines and had to stop because her eyes blurred too quickly to continue.
“What does it say?” Jamie asked, her voice hushed now as though she already knew this was something sacred.
Iona swallowed and tried again.
It took effort to make the words sound aloud.
It was thanks, first. Gratitude written in a handmade clumsy by old injury and disuse. Then, more than thanks. The woman wrote that she would come if the land was truly meant for women such as them. That if Iona Pearson was to be the lady of such a place, then she could think of nowhere safer. That safety, once imagined impossible, had begun to sound like something one might perhaps deserve.
Iona’s lips parted, but no more words came.
She pressed the letter briefly to her chest and looked at Frederick through tears she could not stop now, even if she had wished to.
He did not appear embarrassed by them. Only steady. Certain. As though he had hoped for this and would not shame her for meeting it honestly.
“Read another,” Ariella said softly.
So Iona did.
One letter spoke of a widow with two small sons who had never had a roof that belonged properly to her and would come if the offer remained. Another came from a woman who had taken work in a distant town and had thought herself as safe there as she might ever be, yet confessed that the idea of a place built not merely to hide women but to honor their survival had made her cry in the street when she first read Frederick’s hand. Another wrote simply that if Iona had survived and if Iona were there, then she would come too.
By the third letter, Iona was no longer pretending at composure.
She laughed once through tears and covered her mouth at once as though that might somehow restore dignity. It did not. Jamie crawled nearer and leaned against her side, reading what she could not yet understand from her mother’s face alone.
“They want to come,” Jamie whispered.
“Aye,” Iona said.
“Because ofye.”
The words undid her all over again.
Frederick crouched before her then, taking the letters gently from where they had begun to slip in her lap and setting them aside so his hands could close around hers instead.
“Because of what ye did,” he corrected softly. “Because one frightened maid saw what decent people would rather not look at and chose to act anyway. Because ye gave them a chance to live.”
Iona shook her head once, overwhelmed beyond speech.
Jamie, however, had no such difficulty.
“Me ma is very brave,” she said with complete certainty. “And so is me da.”
Lennox looked at the sky as if asking it for patience. Caitlin dabbed discreetly at one eye and pretended she had only been troubled by the wind. Erin let out a low Gaelic murmur that sounded suspiciously like approval.