Amanda Scott (7 page)

“Too good to be true, you mean,” Chuff said from the window, proving that he had not been entirely deaf to Lady Agnes’s chatter.

“Aye, lad, and so it would be,” Duncan said, “if they had not suffered tragedy as well. I beg you, ma’am, not to prattle of John Campbell’s affairs in company. Remember that he and his lady lost their only son less than a year ago.”

“Aye, that’s true, and a tragic loss it was, too,” the dowager said.

Before she could launch herself into what Pinkie was certain would be a recitation of every detail of the child’s final hours, Mary said hastily, “If you have finished your tea, Pinkie love, perhaps we should ring for someone to show us to our bedchambers. I want to change my dress and look over the rest of the house.”

The door to the gallery opened as she was speaking, and the Master of Dunraven entered with his usual haste and lack of ceremony. His dark hair was tousled, his shirt had come untucked from his breeches, and he had a smear of something on his right cheek that looked suspiciously like strawberry jam.

Mary exclaimed, “Roddy, where have you left your manners, my love?”

“Well, I ha’ been searching for you everywhere, and yon blathering fool, Peasley, said you didna want to see me, but I kent you would, so I came. Please, sir,” he added, looking up with a beseeching air at his scowling father, “I want to go into the garden. The lass who brought up our supper said it is a fine garden, and if I do not go out at once, it will soon be too dark to see anything.”

Sternly, Duncan said, “Does Lucy know where you are?”

“Nay then, but she willna care,” was his heir’s unabashed reply. “She’s busy helping Anna get the bairns off to bed.”

Mary got up at once. “I must go up to them, then. Thank you, Roddy, for reminding me. You have been a very good laddie today, and I am quite pleased with you.” Shooting a speaking look at her still frowning husband, she added, “Pinkie, if Mama Agnes will excuse us both, perhaps you should come upstairs with me. We must make a list of questions to ask Maggie tomorrow.”

“I’ll go, too,” Lady Agnes said, glancing warily at her son and grandson. “We must ask Maggie to tell us where to find George Hitchcock’s silk warehouse. I have it on excellent authority that he sells the very best silks in all London—somewhere near St. Paul’s Cathedral, I believe.”

Duncan still had not spoken, and for once his son was showing the good sense to keep silent. Pinkie glanced at Chuff as she got up to follow Mary and the dowager, and she saw that he, too, was watching father and son.

Chuff smiled reassuringly at her, and as she left the room with the other ladies, she heard him say calmly, “I mean to walk in the garden myself, sir, just to stretch my legs after being in the saddle all day. If you like, I’ll keep an eye on the scamp whilst he explores a bit. ’Tis likely he’ll sleep better for the exercise after all the hours he’s spent this past week cooped up in the coach with his sisters.”

“Aye,” Duncan said evenly. “He’d better sleep well, for he is going to have a tutor just as soon as I can hire one—a good, strict man who will thrash him soundly when he gets up to mischief or fails to learn his lessons.”

“I dinna mind if he’s strict,” Roddy said cheerfully, “just so long as he knows all the best places to see in London. This is a fine city, is it not, sir? May I please go out with Chuff now?”

“Aye, rascal, you may, but do not let me hear about any misconduct or it will be the worse for you. Do you hear me?”

As the boy assured his father that he did, Pinkie shut the door, grateful to Chuff for intervening, and wondering what imp of Satan got into Roddy that he dared talk to Himself so. Neither she nor Chuff would have dared say such things to him when they were Roddy’s age. The lad didn’t always get away with it, of course. He had been lucky today.

On the gallery near the stairway, a stout woman in a striped buff-and-brown taffeta gown and petticoat over a wide oval hoop awaited them. Had the chatelaine of keys dangling from her waist not proclaimed her status, Pinkie would not have known her for the housekeeper. Her demeanor was as dignified as her attire was elegant. Her coiffure was simple but well powdered, and one could easily have mistaken her for a lady of consequence.

“Your ladyships,” she said, acknowledging Mary’s rank and that of the dowager with a gracious curtsy, “pray, allow me to show you to your bedchambers now. I have taken the liberty of ordering hot water for you, and for you, too, of course, Miss MacCrichton,” she added with a polite nod. “If you will all follow me, the stairs continue from this hall, just along here.”

As she spoke, she gestured toward a door on the opposite side of the grand stairway from where they stood. The gallery was semicircular, and at its center a corridor led away from the head of the grand stairway to other rooms.

The door to the stair hall matched the one through which they had entered the saloon.

“Thank you, Mrs. Peasley,” Mary said. “We appreciate your thoughtfulness.”

“It is my pleasure to serve you, my lady. This way.” She walked into the stair hall, moving with the ponderous grace of a ship at sail.

Small gilt chandeliers suspended from the ceiling at each half-landing lighted their way to the next floor.

When they entered the countess’s bedchamber, Mrs. Peasley said, “His lordship’s rooms are there just beyond yours to the west, my lady, overlooking the back garden and the park. Your dressing room adjoins his. That doorway on the other side leads to your sitting room, and I have put Miss MacCrichton in the room next to that. The dowager Lady Balcardane will have the set of rooms next to hers at the end, and Lord MacCrichton will have the bedchamber across from hers, which faces South Street. I trust these arrangements will suit you.”

“They will suit us very well, Mrs. Peasley,” Mary said. “Thank you.”

Before leaving them, the housekeeper said, “With regard to meals, my lady, it has been our practice at Rothwell House to serve breakfast at ten and dinner at four, with a light supper to follow at nine-thirty or at the mistress’s convenience. Will those times suffice for you, or do you wish to alter them?”

Exchanging a look with Pinkie, Mary said, “It has been our custom to breakfast much earlier than ten, Mrs. Peasley, so perhaps you had better expect at least some of us to do so here, as well, although I daresay we shall quickly adapt to London ways. Tonight, however, I believe we will all want our supper at eight o’clock. I, for one, intend to retire early, although the gentlemen may desire to go out afterward. In any event, they will be hungry soon. It has been a long day.”

“I will see that everything is as you wish, ma’am, and may I say that we are all delighted to welcome you and your family to London.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Peasley. Pinkie—and you, too, Mama Agnes—as soon as you have washed and changed your dresses, please come to my sitting room. We must make some decisions, you know. There is a great deal for us to do.”

In the bedchamber the housekeeper had allotted to her, Pinkie found Ailis, her maidservant of many years, waiting for her. The room, if not as ornately decorated as the others she had seen, was spacious and quite acceptable. As she performed her ablutions and allowed Ailis to help her change from her traveling dress to a dimity frock in her favorite shade of pale green over a hoop not nearly so wide as the housekeeper’s, she decided that London might be a pleasant place, after all. She certainly looked forward to dinner at Rothwell House.

The only cloud casting a shadow over her pleasure was the memory of what Chuff had said to her the day they had walked together from Shian to Dunraven. She could not help but wonder if knowledge of her parentage—of Daft Geordie and Red Mag—would affect Lord and Lady Rothwell’s behavior toward her. Then, recalling that Maggie intended to present her to the queen, and that the Rothwells meant to give a ball in her honor, she grew cheerful again. Surely they must know her history, and if they did not fret about it, who else in London would dare?

Castle Mingary

T
HE WOODS WERE LUSH
, green, and alive with chirping birds and other, shyer creatures that moved like shadows through them. The air around him felt warm, and although the woods were dense and filled with shadows, sunlight streamed through every opening in the canopy overhead, glinting on branches, needles, and leaves. Where rays touched flowers on the forest floor, they brightened their colors, making them look like jewels dropped by some previous visitor.

He felt a sense of hope and expectation, and a stirring in his loins that increased as he progressed, as if it fed both from his expectation and his pleasure in the beautiful woods. He was nearing his destination. He could feel it in every fiber of his body. Weary though he was from his long journey, his step lightened, and when he glanced down, the big dog moving gracefully beside him looked up and wagged its tail. He stroked its head and lengthened his stride.

Emerging from the woods into bright sunlight from a cloudless sky, he saw the castle below at the foot of a heather-clad hill, a castle as unlike his own sprawling pile as a castle could be. The curving, crenellated curtain wall enclosed a five-spired tower house on a point of land that jutted into a sparkling blue loch.

Instinctively—for he had no conscious awareness of the castle’s name or even where he was, exactly—he knew that it was the place he sought.

Anticipation changed to urgency, and he began to run. With every step, his urgency increased. He was flying now, moving so swiftly that he had no sense of his feet touching the ground, yet the castle seemed no nearer. If anything, it seemed to grow smaller, more distant. The faster he ran, the smaller it grew, as if a mouth to another world had opened and was swallowing it whole. Urgency turned to terror. He tried to shout, to tell it to stop, to wait for him—please, please, to wait—but no sound came from his throat.

The sky darkened. Wind blew. Thunder clapped without lightning, rolling and surrounding him, like a vast chamberful of drums. His knees grew weak, and his legs no longer responded automatically to his wishes. Every step required more effort than he could spare, as if he slogged through a thickening quagmire. Despair overwhelmed him when black darkness enveloped the castle, and Michael awoke, sitting up in bed, his heart pounding, his mouth dry.

A cold, wet nose pressed against his hand, startling him. Coming slowly to his wits, he silently stroked Cailean’s furry head, realizing that once again the huge dog had managed to sneak into his bed during the night. Despair subsided, but a sense of loss swept achingly through him and made it impossible to speak.

He felt clammy with sweat, although the air felt chilly. At least he was no longer slogging through whatever muck it was that had kept clutching his feet. Nor was the room around him as black as the horror of his dream.

Early dawn light outlined the curtains over the two arched windows, and he could make out the shapes of the furniture in his bedchamber. He guessed it must be nearly six o’clock, time to get up, but he gave himself a few more minutes to let his heartbeat return to normal while remnants of the dream faded from his memory.

The dream was not new. He had dreamed it many times—not, however, in quite the same way, because except for the castle and its Highland setting, the details varied from dream to dream. Sometimes he was inside; more often he was outside looking down on the castle from the hill. Although frequently, as in the most recent example, he felt as if he were approaching it for the first time, other times it was as if he lived there. Even then, however, he was aware that the castle did not belong to him. “His” castle was always somewhere else. Indeed, he was as certain as he could be that “his” castle remained Mingary, although in the dreams he never had any sense of being the Earl of Kintyre.

The dream had recurred so many times since his childhood that he suspected it sprang from a family legend about an ancient heir who had disappeared on a journey. Shortly before the dream’s first occurrence, a well-meaning uncle had related the tale to him as a bedtime story, and the dream had recurred two to three times a year since. Consequently, Michael knew the castle and its lands intimately.

What altered most were the physical feelings the dream engendered. Generally, it would begin with warmth, either from the sun or—if he was inside—from a hearth fire. It nearly always began with a sense of anticipation, as if he were looking for something special and expected to find it. What it was he did not know, although frequently, like today, it seemed to be a woman. The ancient heir had supposedly gone off to seek his fortune, a mission that Michael had always thought foolish, since the chap had expected to inherit Mingary and all its lands. The estate had been worth a fortune in those long-ago days before the English had imposed their rule on the Highlands and destroyed the old clan system.

Whatever it was that he sought in the dream, he never seemed to find it. Frequently, the dream began pleasantly and ended in fear or distress. Other times he would wander around the walls of the castle, or through the woods, without incident. In the latter dreams, his sense of anticipation was slight, but likewise the ending did not cast him into black despair. Sometimes, he met people in the dreams, children or folks he recognized as peasants or others who seemed to be his peers. One thing was consistent: The stronger his sense of pleasurable expectation felt at the beginning, the stronger was the sense of doom that struck at the end.

Inhaling deeply to clear the last shadows of the dream from his mind, he got up, hooked back the curtain from one window, and rang for his man to bring him hot water. He had much to do if he and Bridget were to be away the next morning.

Despite his desire for haste, it had taken nearly a fortnight to receive the desired replies to his two letters, but the second had arrived the day before, and he wanted no more delay. Time was short. Even if they encountered no major obstacles, it could well be May first before they reached London.

Twenty minutes later, washed, shaved, and dressed for the day, he went downstairs to break his fast, the great deerhound following faithfully at his heels.