“I’ve brought Fergus home.”
Her face changed, became a porcelain mask, cool and expressionless.
“You couldn’t even do the one thing I asked of you, Gordon?”
“Evidently, I couldn’t,” he said, annoyed at her. Instead of behaving with a modicum of politeness, she’d launched a verbal salvo at him. “He seems pleased to be at Gairloch,” he added, a comment that did nothing to ease the look on her face.
She glanced behind him to his carriage.
“Fergus was not healthy enough for the journey.”
Where had she learned that frosty tone? The Countess of Morton was very much present in her speech and demeanor at the moment.
He took another step toward her, annoyed at her, at him, at the situation.
“He fared quite well,” he said, lying. “He isn’t a bairn, Shona.”
Her face stiffened and those lovely eyes cooled. “Where were you for the last six months, while he suffered from his wounds? Partying in London?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling at her look of surprise. “I find I’m quite good at it. I’m told I’m very charming, perhaps even influential.”
She shook her head, then glanced back at Miss Paterson. Did having an audience mitigate her words?
“I still don’t want to sell, Shona,” Fergus said from behind him.
“Dearest Fergus,” she said. “Why have you come?”
“To stop you,” he said, smiling faintly. “It’s not a good thing you’re doing, Shona.”
She bent her head, staring down at the steps. A moment later, she took a deep breath, exhaled it, then glanced up, the look of pity on her face annoying Gordon.
Damn it, she didn’t have to treat Fergus as if he were helpless. He’d been wounded, but he’d survived. Granted, the minié ball had nearly taken off his leg, but he’d kept it. He might limp for the rest of his life, but Fergus had such tenacity that it wouldn’t hold him back from whatever he wanted to do.
The man had been awarded the Victoria Cross. For that reason alone, he should be treated with some dignity.
Gordon stepped in front of her when she would have reached out to her brother.
“He’s not a bairn,” he whispered to her. “Let him do it.”
She looked as if his words lit her anger. Those gray eyes were the smoke of a fire that burned inside.
The climb up the steps was slow and difficult for Fergus. He was standing on his own, but it was doubtful that he would continue in that position for much longer.
Shona simply turned and entered the doorway, leaving the rest of them standing there.
Gordon wasn’t entirely certain he’d won that battle, but the war wasn’t played out yet.
Chapter 4
“H
as he been starving?”
Shona stared at the almost empty shelves of the pantry. What had Old Ned been eating? From the looks of the larder and now the pantry, not very much.
Shame pierced her.
“Perhaps he has friends in the village,” Helen said, carefully placing her finger in the ledger to mark her spot. She turned to Shona. “Maybe that’s where he is now.”
Old Ned hadn’t been at the gatehouse when they’d arrived. Nor had calling him resulted in his appearance.
“I hope he hasn’t starved to death,” she said.
“Isn’t he a grown man?”
“He’s my clansman,” she said, glancing over at Helen. “I should have thought of him earlier. But I didn’t.”
“He should have been able to fend for himself.”
A true statement, but she still felt a sense of responsibility for the man.
The pantry was located off the cavernous kitchen. Three sides of the room were covered with wooden shelves. And only a small portion of one lone shelf held any supplies at all. The larder had been likewise as empty.
“Well, it’s obvious we need to acquire some food,” Helen said, a note of determination in her voice.
Yes, but with what funds? Foolishly, she hadn’t given any thought whatsoever to these days at Gairloch, but it was all too evident that she needed to do something and quickly. The two of them—and now Fergus—could hardly subsist on a bag of oats.
She had the clan brooch, an heirloom set in diamonds and emeralds. She wouldn’t sell it, unless she was desperate.
At the moment, she was reaching the outer fringes of desperation.
“I don’t suppose we have any tea anywhere,” Helen asked.
She shook her head.
Three large tables stood in front of her, their surfaces scarred from decades of sharp knives. She could recall Cook using the one in the middle to knead bread, her large hands turning the flour mixture into a magical rising bubble in the bowl. Above her hung pots and pans capable of producing a meal for a hundred people, now connected by a dozen or so dusty cobwebs. The windows on the far side of the room overlooked the bluff above the loch and had been opened so the breeze could clear out the smell of mold and mildew.
“We should have packed more provisions,” she said. But even in Inverness, the larder was nearly bare.
“Would you be able to borrow anything from one of the neighbors?”
“We have no neighbors,” she said. “Other than the MacDermonds. And we shan’t be borrowing anything from him.”
Her stomach felt cold at the thought. She fixed a smile on her face so Helen wouldn’t see the degree of her distress and left the kitchen.
Gairloch was pining for care; the signs were there in the festooning of cobwebs in the corners, in the palpable air of neglect. Each room held its own version of a musty smell. The floors were dull, the surface gritty and needing sweeping.
The castle had been designed for protection and not for the comfort of its inhabitants. In the main keep there were no windows, only arrow slits that had been bricked up when the rest of Gairloch was added. The kitchen was toward the back of the castle, in the most remote area, attached to the rest of the building by a long, narrow hallway. For that reason, cooking smells never tainted the dining room. But the distance from the kitchen also guaranteed that their meals were often cold as well.
Almost in the center of the original keep was the staircase, winding up to the second floor. In later years, a banister had been added, but the steps had been built for a right-handed swordsman to defend his home, and they still canted down, making them difficult to climb. The servants’ stairs, located in the rear of the castle, were much easier, a suggestion she would make to Fergus.
She did not treat him like a bairn, and who was Gordon to suggest that?
Seven years ago, a mountain of debts faced them. Bruce had offered for her at the best possible time. Had Fergus ever hated her for that? Had he ever resented her for disregarding his pride in her rush to save them from their hopeless situation?
She’d never asked.
What had he expected her to do? Starve to death with him in Gairloch? Defer to him simply because he was male?
At least, with Bruce as her husband, she’d had the money to purchase Fergus’s commission. He’d never mentioned that, either. Had he, at least, thanked Bruce?
To her right was the Clan Hall. The ceiling soared upward, the arches resembling a cathedral. Sound echoed strangely here. If the laird, sitting on his thronelike chair in the corner of the room, so much as whispered, the sound would carry throughout the cavernous room.
In the next quarter hour, she and Helen discovered that most of the linens were usable. All the mattresses were lumpy and needed to be plumped back into place.
Their work, however, couldn’t take her mind from the two questions plaguing her: where was Old Ned and what were they going to eat?
As they made their way up the sloping stairs, Gairloch was too still, almost as if the castle were grieving for its crowds, for the merriment once inside its walls, for the sheer tumult and noise of its clan.
If tears would help, she’d indulge in a bit of weeping, but when had tears ever been of use? They wouldn’t change the situation, and they certainly wouldn’t magically provide any tea or biscuits. Or money. If tears would have helped, she’d be a wealthy woman by now.
She waited for Helen on the second floor landing, then turned and headed for the third floor. Here, the staircase was newer and easier to navigate.
“It’s a very large place,” Helen said.
“Some of the rooms are very small, and hardly count as rooms.”
“Unless you have to clean them,” Helen said.
“There is that,” Shona agreed with a rueful smile.
How would they manage? The Americans would want to see everything, especially since they were thinking of buying the place.
Gairloch seemed to sigh around her, as if hearing her thoughts.
She hesitated at the end of the corridor. “I haven’t any idea which room Old Ned might have taken as his.” Glancing at Helen, she smiled. “Pick a direction, and we’ll begin looking there.”
Helen pointed to the right, and they headed toward the south wing. Each of them began on opposite sides, knocking on doors before pulling them open.
“How many servants did you have?” Helen asked from the other side of the corridor.
“Four dozen when I was growing up,” she said.
The days of plenty, when no one spoke of penury. Days of wealth, when the clan brooch had been designed as a bauble for the laird’s lady, and people would come for miles around to celebrate any number of events at Gairloch.
She shook her thoughts free of the past.
At the end of the corridor, they looked at each other.
“The family quarters are in the north wing,” she said. “Perhaps he’s there.”
“You do think he’s dead?” Helen asked hesitantly.
“I hope not,” she said. Not only would she hate that he’d died caring for Gairloch, but his death would weigh heavily on her conscience. She should have sent him word before now. She should have inquired as to his health and well-being.
Why hadn’t she?
Because she’d been too consumed with her own survival.
Besides, what would she have done if Old Ned had said he needed funds? What excuse could she give him if he’d told her that Gairloch was in need of repairs? Something always needed to be fixed, shorn up, remortared. The castle was so large that they could begin on one side, and by the time they were finished, that first side would need repairs again.
“What’s that?” Helen whirled and stared around her.
“What is what?”
“That noise. It sounded like someone was crying.”
Now was perhaps not the best time to discuss the ghosts of Gairloch, so she only shook her head. “No doubt another window is open somewhere and it’s the wind.”
Helen glanced at her. “It doesn’t sound like the wind.”
“We have a great deal of wind at Gairloch. It’s always blowing hard,” she said. “Because we’re on a bluff overlooking the loch.”
Helen didn’t look as if she believed one word.
They found Old Ned fast asleep in the middle of the laird’s bed, in the Laird’s Chamber, in the very suite of rooms her parents had occupied and which she’d planned to ready for the Americans.
Not only was he fast asleep on the counterpane, fully dressed—a fact she secretly blessed—but he was soused. A half-empty whiskey bottle lay at his side, attesting to the source of his condition. The odor of whiskey and onions, a particularly odd combination, wafted through the room. He was snoring, loudly, evidently having missed their arrival and subsequent inventories.
His brown trousers were stained, his boots caked with dry mud. The white shirt he wore had been new a dozen or so years ago, but she had no idea when it had last been washed.
“Is he a drunkard?” Helen whispered.
She shook her head. “Not that I ever knew,” she said. “I’ve never seen him look so disreputable.”
At least his boots hung over the counterpane. A blessing, since it had been made in France and was still a lovely blue. Gairloch blue, her mother had called it.
She grabbed the top of one muddy boot and shook his foot.
“Ned,” she said, in a voice just this side of a shout.
One hand rose in the air as if to greet her, then descended to the mattress while he snorted in his sleep.
Like it or not, he was her charge. She grabbed his pants leg, shook it, and shouted his name.
“Ned! Wake up!”
Ned rose up like Lazarus, eyes open wide. A second later, his mouth opened as well and he began screeching like a banshee.
I
n the Family Parlor, Gordon turned to Fergus. “What’s that?”
The other man simply shook his head, both of them looking upward.
Gordon put down his glass—their arrival at Gairloch had called for some reminiscences among good Imrie whiskey—and stood.
Fergus waved his hand toward the second floor. “Go and find out what’s amiss, Gordon. Try not to strangle my sister.”
He didn’t promise anything as he followed the sound. Abruptly, it stopped, but he headed toward the family quarters. He’d been here to visit Fergus once when he was ill. He’d never been inside Shona’s room, but he knew exactly where it was. The second floor, third window from the left, facing Rathmhor.
“Shona?”
Miss Paterson peered out from around a heavily carved door at the end of the corridor.
“Colonel Sir Gordon! Whatever are you doing here?”
“The screaming, Miss Paterson. What’s wrong?”
“I’m afraid it’s the caretaker, sir.”
Helen stood aside, an almost welcoming gesture. He entered the room to see Ned sitting on the edge of the bed on the dais, Shona standing beside him, patting him on the shoulder.
“It’s sorry I am, Miss Shona,” he was saying. “I thought you were the
bean tuiream
myself, I did.” He raised rheumy eyes to stare at her. “I sleep when I can during the day so as to be on guard for the ghosts at night. I don’t live here, truly. Not in the Laird’s Chamber. I’d never do that.”
“It’s all right, Ned.”
He shook his head mournfully. “It’s to keep the ghosts guessing,” he said. “If they don’t know where I’m sleeping, it confuses them.”
Shona turned to look at Gordon. “I thought you left,” she said, in the coldest voice he’d ever heard. He was surprised icicles didn’t form in the air between them. She stepped down from the dais, but didn’t approach him.