The Adept Book 2 The Lodge Of The Lynx (2 page)

Chapter One

THE SILVERY JINGLE
of snaffles rang clear as sleigh bells in the frosty air of a fine November morning as two men on horseback approached the crest of the wooded hill overlooking Strathmourne House. Sir Adam Sinclair’s grey thoroughbred pricked his ears and snorted softly at the scent of the stables below and would have quickened his pace to a trot, had his rider not applied legs and reins with gentle firmness.

“Easy, Khalid. Walk,” Adam said.

The big gelding crested and tried a few tentative, prancing steps in
piaffe,
all but floating just above the ground, then settled back to a resigned, sedate walk, as if there had never been any difference of opinion between horse and rider. The second rider, a younger man with gilt-bronze hair and gold-rimmed spectacles, chuckled aloud at the sheer artistry of the partnership.

“Ah, the master’s touch,” he remarked with a grin. “He really
is
an exceptionally fine animal, Adam. You must let me capture the pair of you on canvas one of these days—perhaps something along the lines of that study of your father and
his
grey hunter in your drawing room.” He cocked his head appraisingly at the older man.

“What about it? Shall I do you an equestrian portrait for Christmas?”

The question elicited a companionable chuckle and a pleased smile from Adam.

“Do you think your painting hand is up to the strain? If so, there’s nothing I’d like better!”

Peregrine Lovat lifted his gloved right hand from the reins of his own mount, a blood-bay mare with a silken mouth and a coquettish disposition, and flexed the leather-clad fingers so that Adam could see them.

“Oh, not to worry on
that
account,” he said cheerfully. “My hand’s virtually good as new, thanks to your exacting supervision of the repair job. As a matter of fact, I’ve been back at my easel for nearly a week now, and haven’t had more than an occasional twinge.”

“All the same, I wouldn’t overdo,” Adam cautioned. “It was a nasty laceration that might have ended your painting career once and for all. I’d hate to think you might yet jeopardize it through impatience.”

Peregrine set his hand back on the reins, all at once very conscious of the protective bandage under the glove that he continued to wear when engaged in strenuous or dirty activities. The circumstances of the injury itself still gave him cause to cringe, whenever he thought about it too long. Sword cuts were not exactly common in this day and age. But in fact, it was precisely the sharpness of his recollection that had prompted him to take up his paints and brushes so quickly, as soon as the sutures were out and he felt able to hold a brush properly again. He bit at his lip thoughtfully, trying to find words to explain his recent sense of compulsion.

“It isn’t really impatience,” he told Adam. “Perhaps I pushed myself a little, but—well, this may sound a bit odd, but the fact of the matter is, I didn’t think I dared delay it. The—ah—studies I’ve been doing are all connected with what happened at Loch Ness.”

Adam gave him a sharp look from under his velvet riding cap. The two had met little more than a month ago, but that initial, brief social acquaintance, sparked by professional concern, had led to an esoteric partnership that was as welcome as it had been unexpected. Without Peregrine’s unique and hitherto unsuspected talents, employed both at Loch Ness and in the days leading up to it, the outcome might have been far less satisfactory. The young artist might not yet understand a great deal about that part of his talent that went beyond the mere artistic, but he was learning every day—and obviously had been busier than Adam expected.

“I haven’t yet dared to try that self-portrait you suggested,” Peregrine said, guessing the possible direction of his mentor’s speculations. “Somehow, it’s seemed more important, for now, to make a pictorial record of everything I could remember about that night at Loch Ness. My recall of it seems to be somehow linked to this cut on my hand—almost as if the wound itself is the very thing that ties me into that part of the affair. Right after it happened,” he continued, “all my mental impressions were crystal-clear, right down to the smallest details. But since my hand’s started to heal, those impressions have begun to fade. I can still recover them, but it takes much more effort.”

Adam now was watching him closely, as their horses picked their way down the last of the sloping trail.

“That’s an interesting speculation,” he said. “What makes you so sure that it isn’t simply the passage of time?”

Peregrine grimaced and gave a snort. “Well, maybe
you
could get at the memories by using hypnosis or something, but the only way I seem to be able to do it is by first concentrating my attention on the cut on my hand. And since that’s healing, I thought I’d better push on with the paintings before I maybe lost the recall.”

A smile lit Adam’s dark eyes. “You’re learning more quickly than I thought. I think I’d like to have a look at what you’ve done.”

“Somehow I thought you might,” Peregrine said, with an easy grin that would not have been possible for the tight-wound young man of a mere month before. “I brought them along in the back of my car this morning. I thought they might make for interesting conversation over breakfast.”

The ring of steel-shod hooves on the cobbles of the stable yard summoned John, the ex-Household Cavalry trooper who looked after Adam’s horses. With a grin and a wave that was almost a salute, he came to take the reins as Adam and Peregrine dismounted.

“Did you and Mr. Lovat have a, good ride, sir?” he asked, as Adam ran up his stirrups on their leathers and loosened Khalid’s girth.

“Yes, splendid,” Adam replied. “We had a good, long canter along the ridge in the upper field, and Mr. Lovat even tried a few easy jumps—successfully, I might add. At this rate, we’ll have him legged up enough to hunt by Christmas!’

Peregrine, tending his own mount, rolled his eyes in good-natured self-deprecation.

“In this case, I’m afraid that
successful
is a very relative term, but I did manage not to fall off!”

Adam chuckled as the horses were led on into the barn, and Peregrine fell in beside him as they walked briskly on through the garden adjacent to the back of the house and headed for the back door. There Peregrine diverted briefly to collect a portfolio from the back of a green Morris Minor Traveller. When he joined Adam in the mudroom, hanging his riding helmet on a hook beside Adam’s, the older man had already exchanged his boots for velvet slippers crested with the Sinclair phoenix and was drying his hands on a monogrammed towel.

“I’ll take those on into the morning room while you wash up, ”Adam said, relieving Peregrine of the portfolio. “Humphrey’s left a second pair of slippers there by the bootjack. If we track mud on Mrs. G.’s clean floors, she may not speak to any of us for days.”

Grinning, Peregrine peeled off his riding gloves and applied the bootjack to his own muddy boots, then thrust stockinged feet into the indicated slippers. After ducking into the adjoining washroom to douse his face and hands and run a comb through his hair, he followed the way his host had gone, along the service corridor and on into the gold-damasked morning room.

Humphrey, Adam’s butler of more than twenty years’ service, had set up for breakfast in the sunshine of the room’s wide bow window. As always, the table was an immaculate array of crisp Irish linen, fine china and crystal, and antique silver. Adam was sipping fresh-squeezed orange juice from a Waterford goblet while he glanced at the front page headlines of the morning paper. Humphrey was pouring his master’s’ first cup of tea. Both men looked up as Peregrine entered, Adam raising his glass in salute and Humphrey poising the silver teapot over the cup set before Peregrine’s place.

“Good morning, Mr. Lovat. May I pour you a cup of tea?”

“Yes, thank you, Humphrey. Good morning.”

“Sir Adam tells me that you’ve moved the last of your boxes into the gate lodge,” the butler went on. “’I trust that the new accommodations are proving satisfactory?”

Peregrine grinned as he pulled out the Queen Anne chair and sat, shaking out his napkin with a flourish. It was barely two weeks since he had accepted Adam’s invitation to come and live in the vacant rear gate lodge, and already he was finding it a decided improvement over the cramped studio loft he had occupied in Edinburgh.

“More than satisfactory, Humphrey,” he said happily. “You know, I thought I’d miss the hustle and bustle of the city. Oddly enough, though, I find myself settling quite contentedly into the life of a country gentleman. There really
is
more room to breathe.”

This expansive remark gave Adam cause for private amusement, for he knew that literal breathing space was not at all what Peregrine had in mind. If the truth were strictly to be told, he suspected that Peregrine’s new-found sense of liberty was due as much to a change in outlook as it was to a change in environment. As a psychiatrist, Adam was not unfamiliar with the general phenomenon, but Peregrine’s case had presented factors Adam encountered all too seldom. Though reserved and withdrawn at their initial meeting, brooding like a hawk in captivity, Peregrine gradually had been given the opportunity to try his wings. Even now, though Peregrine himself was not altogether aware of it, the young artist was in the process of joining the Hunt in earnest, like the falcon-breed for which he was named. And if Adam Sinclair was reading the signs aright, the process was rapidly nearing completion.

“Have a scone, Peregrine,” he murmured with a smile, as Humphrey offered the younger man a linen-nested basket. “And you ought to know that Mrs. Gilchrist brought these by fresh this morning, especially for ‘that nice young Mr. Lovat.’ Apparently she’s taken quite a fancy to you.”

Peregrine had started to take just one scone, but now he plucked a second out of the basket before Humphrey could offer it across to Adam.

“I’d better have two, then, hadn’t I?” He grinned wickedly.

“After
all,
I shouldn’t want Mrs. G. to think I wasn’t properly appreciative. Good housekeepers are worth their weight in fresh scones!”

“Aye, and you won’t find a better one in the entire county,” Adam agreed. “She accomplishes more for me in three half-days a week than most folk could manage working at it full-time. I don’t know what Humphrey and I would do without her. If she’s offered to do for you, down at the lodge, don’t let her get away, whatever happens!”

“Oh, I shan’t!”

As breakfast conversation ranged on from appreciation of domestic staff to their morning’s ride and the clouds now glowering to the north, the scones slowly disappeared, washed down with cups of tea. Humphrey, eyeing the portfolio Adam had set casually just inside the door, brought in a folding rosewood card-table from the adjoining parlor and set it up beside the breakfast table while they ate.

“Suppose we have a look at what you’ve brought now, shall we?” Adam said, when Humphrey had retired to the kitchen and they were about finished with breakfast.

Peregrine, after popping the last bite of his last scone into his mouth, wiped his fingers hastily on his napkin and shifted his chair around to the rosewood table to unzip his portfolio, delving deep inside to draw out several sheets of watercolor paper, cut to varying sizes.

“My hand was still a bit stiff for pencil work when I started these, and oils take too long to dry,” he explained, as he handed one across to Adam. “I managed to get a fair amount of detail, though, even with the watercolors. Besides, I’ve always felt that watercolors were the best medium for capturing the feel of rotten weather.”

The first painting showed three figures crouched in the driving rain in Urquhart Castle’s car park, eerily backlit with a wash of luminescent green. The figures meant to be Peregrine and Adam himself were little more than vague suggestions of form, glimpsed from behind, but the third, brandishing a long, metal-cased police torch, quite clearly was Detective Chief Inspector Noel McLeod, Adam’s professional and esoteric’ colleague of many years’ standing. Rain spattered the inspector’s wire-rimmed aviator glasses and streamed off his short-clipped grey moustache as he turned slightly to glance back at them, and both he and Adam wore the dark green waxed jackets peculiar to country pursuits all over Britain. Peregrine sported his familiar navy duffel coat.

“Yes, indeed,” Adam murmured, smiling as he turned the painting face-down and read the caption Peregrine had penciled lightly on the back:
Master Huntsmen and rank amateur.
The smile died as Peregrine handed him the second painting.

It had the same greenish luminance as the first one, but the perspective had shifted down to the rain-lashed shore of Loch Ness. Marching across the center of a night landscape, silhouetted by lightning flashes, was a procession of four dark-robed and hooded men. The two in the middle were struggling to carry a small but heavy chest of archaic design. The one bringing up the rear bore what appeared to be a framed picture above his head, ducking beneath it like a shield.