The naked whitebeam tree, standing lone like a guard at the north end of the glen, shivered beneath the weighty sop of an early snowfall. It rippled like the frightened skeleton it was, shaking off the heavy wet coat, and left to the mercy of the brutal winter winds coasting their way along Loch Ranza.

But Mr. Kettle, standing to his full five-foot-ten inches, with a firm hand to his hat, was not afraid. He walked by the quaking tree -How cowardly, thought he- and threw open the stable doors. The horses neighed loudly. But Mr. Kettle told them to hush. The storm would pass soon enough.

He lovingly caressed the nose of a particularly unsettled horse- yet to be named-, whispering succoring murmurs into its whiskey colored coat. Instantly, the horse abated its flagrant show of displeasure at the confining storm and was made content beneath his master’s surprisingly capable novice hand.

The stable at quiescence once more, Mr. Kettle saw to the beasts’ provisions. He stacked their stalls with plenty of hay, brushed their coats, and left snow to melt in a makeshift trough he’d crafted out of an old copper basin left by the previous owner of the eighteenth century stone cottage, Douge. Not a particularly alluring name, no. But Mr. Kettle had been romanced nonetheless by the ancestors of the grey stone and had promptly informed Mrs. Kettle that they were to take residence at Douge immediately. And so it was, that Mr. and Mrs. Kettle procured the remote cottage, Douge, some two and a half kilometers through sloping crags and rocky glens from civilization- if one could call the bantam society of the Isle civilization. Mrs. Kettle, most assuredly, could not.

As it were, Douge was now their home. Chamber pots and all. Along with the copper basin, Mr. Kettle most conveniently inherited a stable in which to house the yet-to-be-named horse. Thrown somewhat precariously into the deal was Patrick, a large muscled black coat, whose gait was thankfully well adjusted to the arduous landscape across the Highlands of the Isle.

Though never a horseman before, Mr. Kettle found a sort of comradery among the horses he very much liked. He spoke to them congenially as he laid out their hay.

"Just in case the storm should worsen and I be unable to make my way through the drifts beginning to form. Wouldn’t want you to go hungry, now would we fella?”

He said this to Patrick, who neighed and shook his head vigorously as though in agreement. Mr. Kettle paused for a moment, mid stoop, grasping a handful of hay. He imagined just for a moment that Patrick was speaking to him, and smiled slightly to himself. Shaking his head somewhat ruefully, he got on with his work. He was no longer a child. Nay, he was a man of thirty-six this next May, with black hair beginning to gray at the temples. His wife, he knew, would not think so kindly of him engaging in conversation with horses whom he very well knew could not speak. He chin tipped with the fanciful possibility. He shook his head once to rid the ridiculous thought. Nonsense, he knew horses could not speak as humans did.

Mrs. Kettle, Caroline, just a skant four years younger than he, was a practical woman at the edge of her patience. Tight-lipped and rigid in exterior, her eyes spoke for her. And their words were not unkindly, but riddled with frustration and distance. After nine years of marriage, it was alarmingly clear that the two did not see eye to eye. The childlike girl of twenty-three he had wed on a remote New York field lying fallow, had grown weary with the frequent battering winds of life. He recalled how she had made his blood thicken until he’d felt weighty with desire. Or how the fringed curls at the nape of her neck had set his heart on a war course against all obstacles to procuring her heart for himself. How things had changed.

Mr. Kettle slumped on a bale of hay beneath the whinnying of Patrick. He rubbed his face and head with two large palms leaving the short dark curls disturbed, unawares of the ever-growing rage of the snowstorm. But the warmth of the barn swathed him. He closed his eyes, just for a moment and drifted along in the way of the unguarded and subconscious dreaming.

***

A bleary mistral blew in off the coast, embittered and beating against the white stone of Douge making the Loch Ranza look rather formidable. The cottage window rattled with the winds release of a heavy burdened snow. A direct shipment from the blasted Father Winter himself, no doubt.

Mrs. Kettle shared the winds’ distaste with a guttural sound of derision. Quite akin to the raw enmity of a heavy burden as dictated by another, she was. What with Mr. Kettle off to his frivolous and fantastic pioneering intentions, Caroline had been left alone in the cottage again.

She swept the floor. Cleaned the fireplace. Fixed the bed. The clothes she washed in water warmed over the fire. And just when she’d finished all of that, it was time to cook a supper. She glanced outside, nearly blank as a sheet of fine white cotton paper. Her jaw clenched, fingers twitched with nervous energy. “Where is my husband?” She clucked her tongue.

By the time the sun had fully set, the soup had congealed and the bread had gone cold as ice. She began to worry. Bad enough that she was stuck out here with a silly dreamer like Mr. Kettle, but to be left alone was an entirely different monster which she was not fit to face. And it filled her with the oddly colored nightmares of a child.

Caroline had often made a habit of chewing the inside of her lip, from when was a little girl and her Mama would yell at her, “Caroline, quit chewing that lip like a cow chews cud!” It was childish. Mostly a dead habit. But every once in a while she resorted to its comforting effects. Like on the ship voyage from New York. She’d laid down in her bunk at night and had chewed the inside of her lip raw while Mr. Kettle was snoring his dreams. And on their first night at Douge. She’d drawn blood that time. But mostly, Mrs. Kettle had learned to step over her fears and displeasure and do what needed to be done. So when she felt her lip caught between her teeth, she set it free and stood to make herself busy. Idleness was a breeding ground for fear. Fear was a weakness. She could not afford to be weak. But when she’d finished her work, and saw no sign of Mr. Kettle, she began to pace back and forth across the small cottage, feet scraping against the stone floor, chest swelling with defensive indignation. She angrily clawed at the floor with her broom though there was not a mite and wiped off the table and counter, again, though they were spotless. And then she fixed the fire and rearranged the bed. And all the while her anger boiled hot until it left a thick reduction of fear within her until that reduction crystallized like crumbling sugars, leaving her in pieces and breaking her bitter resolve. She cowered on the fireplace stool, head in her palms, rocking herself back and forth like a child.

***

He didn’t know the hour. But the storm was worse than when he’d nodded off. And as he made his way through the blowing snow, he dreaded what he would encounter on the other side of the cottage door.

Mr. Kettle saw her silhouette stalk in the window with the disquietude of a hungry wildcat. There seemed no end to her dissatisfaction. Her nagging was worse than a leaky pipe. His eyes crossed, nauseated. But filling up his chest, he summoned all gumption and pushed in the heavy wood-slated door with an uncomely crackle. Eyebrows raised. Surreptitiously. He was scoping out the enemy territory.

Crossing the threshold of the cottage, Mr. Kettle appeared chiefly deiform with a snowy aura about him to a whitewashed Mrs. Kettle.

His dark curls had been thickened with the frozen slush of snow thawed and then frozen again so that he looked as if he’d been dipped in cold cream head first. Lips, cherry red and cracked, bled at the corner of his mouth at a failed attempt to smile. Her jaw tightened.

“Oh, thank God.”

Mr. Kettle released a loud, “Umph!” when she pressed herself against him. Were these paws clawing to grapple round his neck, teeth belligerent in their quest for flesh?

“What-” But Mr. Kettle’s words were cut short by the earth-shaking sobs of his wife as she burrowed into him.

He regarded her, taking notice of that which at first had escaped him. Her blotched face, tears freely falling down her puffed cheeks, making her nose look like a small cherry tomato. And when he did, in fact, notice this, it absurdly brought to mind a memory, which played like a short film reeling through his mind’s eye; Caroline kneeling in the rich, fertile dirt of her father’s tomato garden, delightfully drawing a tomato, freshly plucked from a vine up to her nose, face euphoric at the sweet scent.

Utterly confused at the unprecedented show of raw emotion, he awkwardly sought to soothe the frantic woman in his arms, “There- there, there now. It’s alright.”

“I didn’t know where you’d gone! I thought- I didn’t know if…,” she haltingly said.

As Mr. Kettle struggled to maintain his presence of mind, Mrs. Kettle continued to hold on tightly, tear stained face pressed deeply into the folds of his coat smelling strongly of hay, cold sweat, stone and horse feces.

“I thought that you’d gone.” She breathed heavily and the tears stopped, leaving her shaken and hiccupping like a child.

“But, Caroline, gone where?” He pushed her out from him to look her square in the face.

Her eyes fell away and she turned. He watched her shoulders set and the vulnerable child was suddenly gone. Her neck stretched to heights no man could climb. Tears brushed dry on her face, her voice leveled. “I don’t know.” The fire in her eyes snuffed out, and her features cooled back into stone. “I only thought that you weren’t coming back.” Sobered, she moved to draw the pot of water over the fire to heat.

Mr. Kettle dropped his hands to his sides and rolled his eyes, shivering still. “Well, you’re more than strong enough to survive, I’m sure. You’d be fine.”

“Yes.” Caroline nodded, lips tight. His remark was offhand, said with so little thought. It was a jab; the ‘On guard!’ of the night. But Caroline left her sword. The fire crackled behind her; Mr. Kettle shivered. She reached to remove his coat and began undressing him to dry beside the fire.

Mr. Kettle, bared down to his skivvies, raised his eyebrows and looked sharply at his wife, a shadow of shame in his gaze at her gentle touch. She shrugged almost imperceptibly, pushing back a loose strand of hair, the line of her jaw visibly clenched.

He scooted closer to the hearth to bare his palms to the warmth of the fire, clearing his throat. “Get me a sweater, will you?”

The old dresser drawer creaked open. “This one?” Caroline held the sweater up.

He turned to see. “No, the red one that itches miserably.”

“But you hate that one. It itches.”

“I’m aware. It feels like a flock of flea-infested sheep on my skin. But I’m that cold.” He grabbed the sweater from her hands, lips blue, and teeth chattering pressed close to the hearth. Not being able to draw his arms away from his frigid frame, huddled as he was, made it difficult for him to put the sweater over his head. He struggled and squirmed in vain until Caroline took charge and managed him into the sweater.

“Thanks,” he said through his teeth.

She stood for a moment. “You’re welcome, John.” He glanced up sharply. She looked down at her toes, then into the fire and took a seat beside him.

Tentatively, she put a hand on his icy one. For what seemed like a very long time, the two sat side by side before the hearth like this, Mrs. Kettle staring into the fire and Mr. Kettle staring at his wife. Then Caroline closed her eyes, the fire making her face bloom with warmth while John’s gaze narrowed into the flames, his brows pressed in thought.