Once Upon a Highland Autumn (9 page)

“No, not Rossington,” Devorguilla said quickly. “Your Aunt Eleanor is quite right. There are other English lords. Dozens and dozens of them. You might shoot one of them—I mean,
with
one of them. That’s what you meant, isn’t it Eleanor? More amenable gentlemen, just as rich, just as handsome.”

“Are you suggesting I go to London now?” Megan demanded.

“No, she means the ones coming here,” Eleanor said.

Megan turned. “Have you invited
more
guests like Rossington, dozens and dozens of them? Mother, I don’t want—”

“Don’t be silly, Megan. Autumn in Scotland is hunting season—they’ll come on their own,” Devorguilla said, the look in her eyes cheerfully predatory once again. “You will simply be a pleasant surprise. A new quarry.”

“The Earl of Marion has a shooting box not five miles away, and Lord Berry’s is nearer still. There are always properties rented out for the hunting season by English lords.” Eleanor chuckled. “And you, my pretty squab, will be fair game when they get a look at you. Don’t fret.”

“I’m not fretting,” Megan said, but they ignored her.

“Of course she will,” Devorguilla said. “I don’t see how any gentleman worth the name could resist such a lovely girl. I expected that I’d be announcing your betrothal to Rossington, but we’ll simply put it about that there is an earl’s unmarried daughter, fair of face and well dowered, here at Dundrummie. I daresay we’ll have to drive off hopeful suitors with a pike. Then won’t Lord High and Mighty Rossington be sorry that he was so hasty? We’ll stop at nothing short of a duke, with ten—no, twenty—thousand a year.”

Megan stared at the canny look on her mother’s face, and an uneasy feeling settled in her stomach. She’d be trapped. “What if the Earl of Berry and Lord Marion are already married?” she asked. Oh where was Eachann?

“It’s the Earl of Marion, and Lord Berry,” Eleanor corrected. “It doesn’t matter. They always bring their sons, and cousins, and assorted aristocratic friends up for shooting parties.”

“You make it sound like a seasonal migration,” Megan said. “Don’t Englishmen bring the females of the herd?” She imagined flocks of English lords flying into the windows of the castle, honking like geese, their feathers fine, their manners abysmal.

Eleanor chuckled. “Of course they do. Just be careful out in the hills, all of you, lest they mistake you in earnest for a grouse. Poor Bessie Fraser was grievously wounded that way one year.”

Her mother’s eyes were glowing. “It’s all the better if they do bring their sisters and daughters. If you befriend the ladies, the gentlemen will follow.”

“But I don’t want to marry an Englishman!” Megan tried the truth, holding her breath.

Her mother waved her handkerchief. “Don’t be silly Margaret. You saw Rossington,” her mother sighed. “What a fine figure of a man, tall, handsome, elegant—”

“And completely uninterested in marrying me,” Megan said. “If you liked him so much, why don’t you marry him, Mother?”

Devorguilla smiled. “Perhaps I will.”

“Mother!” Megan looked at the countess in surprise. Devorguilla crossed to the mirror and peered at herself, touching a hand to her cheek, still soft and smooth despite her years, and met her daughter’s gaze in the glass.

“What? I’m still young enough to marry again. Would you have me sit and knit and grow roots like Eleanor? She is more oak tree than woman now.”

Eleanor merely cackled at the description.

Devorguilla turned to her daughter. “But my first concern is seeing you married—and Alanna and eventually Sorcha after you. You are the eldest, and the match you make will set the standards for your sisters. They will see how very happy you are with your English lord, and wish to marry English lords themselves.”

“But what if a Scot could make me happier still?” Megan asked.

“The heart obeys the head,” Devorguilla quipped.

“Not if you’re lucky,” Eleanor murmured.

Megan put her hand in her pocket, touched the tiny ring that Eachann had given her the day he left. She dared not wear it. She tried to picture his face, remember how his kisses felt. But she saw only one face, one pair of horrified, disdainful gray eyes. She felt her skin heat all over again. Apparently beauty by Scottish standards was quite different from what was considered beautiful in England.

Eleanor squeezed her hand. “Never mind. We’d best take our supper before it’s time for breakfast. I don’t see any point in letting a fine roast of beef go to waste.”

“I’m not hungry,” Megan said. She wanted out of the creaking stays before they strangled her.

“Poor Margaret. It’s understandable,” Devorguilla sighed. “Your first broken heart. I remember my own. I didn’t eat for three days.”

“It’s not—” Megan began, then paused. Why bother to explain? She wasn’t hurt—she was furious. “It’s just been a long day.”

“I’ll send up some tea and toast, then. Tomorrow we’ll make a list of eligible English lords arriving to hunt, and prepare to bag ourselves a prize. I suppose we’d better have the seamstress make at least two or possibly three suitable outfits for hunting.”

Megan watched them leave her room, almost numb with horror. If her mother had her way, she’d be married before the first snowflakes fell on the hills and glens.

She had to do something. She paced the floor and racked her brains, trying to think of a way to make herself the most unmarriageable lass in Scotland. But perhaps all English gentlemen would share Lord Rossington’s opinion and find her hideous.

But the idea was not as comforting as she’d hoped it would be.

“O
ld Glen Dorian Castle needs to be pulled down, of course, and I daresay an English lord like yourself would want something more modern—a grand and glorious hunting lodge, perhaps, to spend a few weeks of the year visiting. The Highlands are grand indeed for hunting,” Angus Grant, canny Inverness solicitor and man of affairs, said. “There’s excellent game here in the glen with those woodlands there—” He pointed to a lush stand of deep green trees that filled half the glen. “Or the loch could be stocked with trout if you prefer to fish.”

They sat in Kit’s carriage on the hillside, looking across Glen Dorian at the castle on the island. The day was sunny and warm, and birds wheeled over the broken towers. The loch sparkled, the deepest blue he’d ever seen, and Kit wondered if there existed a finer view anywhere. If he climbed the hills on one side of the glen, he would have an endless view of other lochs, rolling green hills, and the narrow silver edge of the sea beyond. If he walked the other way, there’d be snow-capped peaks as far as he could see. Here in the glen itself, all was peaceful. There wasn’t a single matchmaking mama, or one simpering debutante for miles and miles. He took a deep breath of the soft air pouring through the open window of the coach.

“I’d thought only of renting it for a few months,” Kit said.

The man’s expression turned sharp. “But there’s no house to stay in, save that little cottage on the hillside, there—Mairi’s Cottage, it’s called—if it’s still habitable after so many years.” He pointed to a small stone house. “Glen Dorian was once a fine holding, but the castle has been unoccupied for some seventy years, the cottage for well over twenty.”

“Why?” Kit asked. He doubted Angus Grant, a sensible man of cashboxes, leases, and bills of sale, would give him some foolish story about curses and legends.

The solicitor took off his beaver hat and scratched his head. “We-ell, living in the castle was banned after the Forty-five, to punish the Jacobite rebels. Lady MacIntosh stayed, so they say, and made her home in the glen in that very cottage, determined to hold the land for her husband’s return.” He paused, and withdrew a flask from his inner pocket and held it out to Kit, then sipped when Kit refused.

“And then?” Kit prompted.

“Then? Well, I suppose there’s some that say she’s waiting still,” Grant whispered. A gust of wind buffeted the coach, and Grant frowned and sipped his whisky again. “Wild deer graze in the glen, my lord, and the otters and birds nest by the loch, but no one else has found a welcome here. There’s no heir to claim it, and it wants a buyer. I daresay the government will gladly allow the purchase of it.”

Kit considered. He could hardly look for the castle’s hidden treasure without some kind of legal right to do so, such as a lease, or a deed.

Angus Grant took out a pencil and scrawled a number on a scrap of paper, then passed it to Kit. “’Tis all it would take,” he said.

Kit looked at the cottage. It stood patiently on the hillside, the small windows staring down at the old castle, like a hopeful wallflower at a ball, waiting to be asked . . .

It could serve as a home for a few short weeks, a place to stay as part of the adventure.

“Done.” He took the paper and tucked it into his pocket. “I will write to my man in London at once, and you may conclude things with him.”

H
igh on the hillside, Megan McNabb stood with her hand shading her eyes, watching the coach. After a number of minutes, she saw the Earl of Rossington get out and begin the steep walk down the hill toward the causeway, and the coach trundled away, up and over the lip of the glen on the narrow track.

“Trespassing,” she breathed, and the wind snatched the word away, dragged at her skirts.

She watched as he crossed to the castle, stopping to watch the otters playing in the water, and to look up at the hills that surrounded him. Megan ducked low.

Even from here, it was plain to see he loved the old place. She could see it in the way he took note of the details of Glen Dorian—the heather-covered hills, the loch, the hot sun on his back that made him take off his coat and sling it casually over his shoulder. It was exactly the same way her brother looked at Glenlorne—with pride and awe at the beauty of the land, down to the last rock, and the very grass.

But this Englishman did not belong here. Megan felt anger surge, and she pulled out a tuft of grass and threw it. She waited for the castle to throw him out, to frighten him away and send him back where he belonged, but after an hour, he still hadn’t emerged.

With an oath, Megan picked up her skirts and hurried down the hillside.

K
it looked around the ruins of the great hall, noted the charred wood, the broken stones, the hideous scars war had left on the castle. Surely somewhere there was a clue to guide him to the treasure. He took Nathaniel’s journal out of his pocket, found Mairi MacIntosh’s letter and read it again. “
I have our treasure safe, hidden where the English thieves will not think to look for it. Again, you will know the place,
” she’d written. Now where would a lady hide her most valuable possessions? He could see three fireplaces. A secret space under a loose hearthstone made sense, but how could a lady lift such giant slabs of stone? The walls were three feet thick, and formidable, but the stones stood close together without any secret gaps that he could see. The room was filled with rubble, wood and roof slates, heat-shattered stone, and nothing else. The castle had obviously been looted before the English troops set fire to it. Had they found Mairi’s treasure?

He looked across at the staircase, blocked by a mountain of debris. The floor above that part of the room was intact, the wood there barely scorched. Perhaps there was a bedchamber or a solar there. It might be a place to look, but the rubble between himself and the steps was twenty feet across, and too sharp and dangerous to climb over.

Kit sighed. He’d wanted an adventure. It seemed it couldn’t begin until he’d moved the debris out of the way, one piece at a time. He tossed his coat aside and rolled up his sleeves. He grunted as he grasped a chunk of charred stone and tossed it aside. Under it lay three other pieces of stone, and he shifted those too, and considered what had happened here, and wondered how well his uncle might have known the people who lived here. “What’s the secret, Nathaniel?” he murmured, and the whisper echoed back to him, sending a prickle up his spine.

Near Inverness, Scotland, February 1745

C
aptain Nathaniel Linwood sat in his tent, huddled beside a brazier that provided little warmth in the damp, frigid cold. In England, snowdrops were blooming. Here, the ink was frozen, and he held the bottle close to the glowing coals for a few moments to warm it enough to allow him to continue writing yet another report for the Duke of Cumberland. According to the spies, Charles Stuart’s army was scattered across the Highlands, and there were rumors that there was no money and no weapons to continue the Jacobite fight to claim the thrones of England and Scotland from George II. The loyalty of the Highland clans was split between the King of England and the prince, who fought for his father James, whom the Jacobites called the King in Exile.

Nathaniel stared at the feathered end of his pen in the firelight and considered the next sentence. When would they come?

There was a scuffle outside his tent, and Nathaniel rose and threw back the flap. His sentries forced a man to his knees, a Highlander, his hands bound behind his back.

“He came into camp bold as you please, Captain, and armed to the teeth, demanding to see you, but he swears he’s not a spy,” the sergeant told him, his bayonet pointed at the Scot’s throat.

The man tried to rise, his eyes on Nathaniel, defiant and angry, but the sergeant shoved him down again. The Highlander sighed and stayed where he was in the mud. “I’m not a spy. I care nothing for the concerns of Charles Stuart. I am simply here to find my wife’s young brother.” Despite the accent, his English was excellent. He wore a fine brooch, indicating his wealth the way his proud bearing—even on his knees—indicated authority. Nathaniel glanced at the weapons his sentry held—a fine sword with a jeweled hilt, a pair of Highland pistols, and a dirk.

“You came well armed for someone just looking for his brother,” Nathaniel said.

“I haven’t killed anyone,” the man said calmly, as if he could easily have done so if he’d wished it. Judging by the size of the man’s broad frame, Nathaniel was inclined to believe him.