The Secret Gift (25 page)

It took about a half hour to arrange her things about the room and set up her toiletries in the bathroom. Libby ducked into the hidden stair, leaving the door open behind her to help light her way. But two turns onto the stairs and she found herself descending into complete and utter darkness. There wasn’t any light anywhere on the stairs, so she had to flatten one hand against the wall as she continued, tentatively, to follow wherever the steps might lead her.

When she emerged into the kitchen, coming through an equally small door, it wasn’t Flora she found waiting there.

“Oh,” she said when she saw Graeme standing at the center butcher block, quietly munching on a sandwich.

He looked at her, but said nothing, turning his attention back to his lunch plate.

Libby crossed the room, took up the teapot Flora had left steeping for her and began straining off the leaves. She chanced a glance at him. “Do you know where Flora—”

But he had turned, taking up his plate as he headed for the hall door.

“Graeme ...”

He stopped, turned to face her, silent as a stone.

“Is this it? Are we supposed to pretend we have never met, that we aren’t living in the same house? Don’t you think there are things we should discuss?”

“What could we possibly have to discuss?”

He was drawing an invisible line between them, choosing the path of avoidance over that of facing the situation head-on. But Libby wasn’t interested in playing it that way.

“Well, Flora, for one thing.”

From the expression on his face, Graeme clearly hadn’t expected that response from her. “What about Flora?”

“Since I’m to be living here, I would like to contribute to paying for her services.”

“That is not necessary.”

“No, I really think—”

“I said it wasn’t necessary.”

His tone was stark, final, and utterly uncompromising.

Libby tried another approach, cutting straight to the very heart of the matter. “Graeme, I wanted to tell you the truth. In fact, I tried to tell you more than once, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t risk it. Surely now that you’ve heard everything, you can understand the difficulty of the situation I was placed in.”

Graeme looked at her. The truth was he
could
understand. He of all people knew what it was to be unable to trust. In fact, he’d begun to believe he would never trust another again.

The only problem was he
had
begun to trust.

He’d begun to trust
her,
only to discover that she, too, had deceived him.

“I’ve got to return to my work.”

Graeme turned for the door, leaving Libby no choice but to watch him leave.

After half of a ham sandwich and tea in the kitchen, Libby found herself alone and wandering the halls of the castle. She had no idea where Flora had gone, but she was glad for the opportunity to acquaint herself with her father’s childhood home alone, so she could take the time to take it all in—and to imagine.

What a place it must have been to grow up in. The castle was much bigger than it had at first appeared, running through a seemingly endless collection of rooms, halls, stairwells, and even several outbuildings. It took an effort just to try not to get lost. In one of the back hallways, she found a board fixed high upon the wall; attached to the board were a number of small bells of differing sizes with wires that ran the length of the ceiling. On the board, painted above each bell, were words like “Ld M’kay’s Chamber,” “Ldy M’kay’s Chamber,” even “Blue Room,” “Green Room,” and “Nursery.” And those were just the main rooms. There were countless other bells that were merely numbered to distinguish them.

Walking the halls and opening doors as she came to them, Libby lost count of the different rooms she’d found at twenty-six. Imagine the games of hide-and-seek that must have been played by Lady Isabella and Calum’s twelve children!

But most of the rooms—in fact almost all of them—had been closed up, the furnishings shrouded with dustcovers, and the windows shuttered against daylight for decades.
As if to forget the very lives that had been lived there.

As she stood in the doorway to one of them, perhaps even the “Blue Room” noted on the bell board, since its walls were painted in a dull, fading periwinkle, Libby tried to envision a family,
her
family, spending quiet winter nights there. But she just couldn’t picture it through the deathlike shrouds and darkened windows.

Seized by emotion, Libby started yanking away the covers, throwing back the shutters to allow in the sunlight.

Dust that had collected for years, undisturbed by human hands was sent flying. Libby unlatched the windows, some stuck from years of disuse, and threw wide the sashes, welcoming in the sea air as she continued her work. At some point Flora appeared in the doorway, no doubt wondering if Libby had lost her mind.

“Here,” Libby said, handing her the corner of one cloth that draped what appeared to be a very tall standing cabinet. “Give me a hand.”

They worked up a sweat, attacking the furnishings and the floors with lemon oil and beeswax. They polished and dusted and scrubbed and polished more. Paneling that had been banished to darkness and layers of dust gleamed warm as honey beneath their diligent ministrations. They laughed as they rolled up the huge, worn carpets, sneezing from the dust as they carried them outside to beat against the old stable block with a broom.

As they worked, they talked. Libby told Flora about growing up an only child in New England, about life in America, about living in New York City. Flora, in turn, told Libby about growing up in a Highland village, about the carefree childhood she and Angus had had with the whole of the Highlands as their playground. Their father had worked on an oil rig in the North Sea, just as Flora’s husband, Seamus, had. In fact it had been her father who had first brought Seamus home, a Glaswegian who’d had no family this far north. The MacLeiths made him family even before he and Flora had fallen in love and married to make a life together.

“He was a fine husband,” Flora said, sitting with Libby a couple of hours later, sharing a pitcher of lemonade. “Och, I’d stand at the kitchen window and just watch for him to come home. Made my heart fly the moment I saw him sauntering up that cottage path. He gave me three beautiful bairns, he did, afore he ...” Her voice dropped off. She breathed deeply. “The wee one was still in my belly when I lost him. I miss him, miss him like I’d miss my own arm if it were gone.” Her voice dropped. “My own heart ...”

Libby blinked against her tears, touched by the raw burden of this woman’s loss and the obvious love that Flora still had for her husband, a love that reached beyond life, and even beyond death.

“And what of you?” Flora asked her, shaking the grief away as she put on a smile. “How is it you’ve not been marched down the aisle afore now?”

Libby took a sip from her glass, hoping to ease the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. “There was one. Back in New York, but he didn’t truly love me for me. I suppose I was lucky I found out before the vows were said.”

But Libby didn’t feel so lucky.

Flora took her hand, squeezing it. Her eyes told of an unspoken understanding. “Oh, but there will be someone, someday. You must hold that hope in your heart always. Even I do.”

At Libby’s startled look Flora smiled. “Oh, I’ll ne’er love like I did Seamus, that’s for certain. But that doesna mean I winna long for someone just to hold me whenever I need the holding. Everybody needs holding once in a while, miss. And perhaps someday we’ll each find us a man who’ll do that holding, eh?”

Libby returned the smile, nodded. If it was all she had, there was at least that hope.

“So,” she said, eyeing their most recent undertaking, freshly broom-beaten of dust, “we’d best get that carpet back up those stairs, then, hmm?”

They got through just that one room that afternoon, a drawing room complete with a Steinway grand piano. A pull on a wire fixed inconspicuously near the door revealed it was indeed the “Blue Room” from the bell board, and Libby made a mental note to call in at Ian M’Cuick’s the next morning in search of a more vibrant shade of blue for the walls. Besides the fact that the color was graying from age, the far wall showed signs of having once featured a sizeable collection of hanging plates, the ghostly shadows of them still marked in precisely measured rows. Libby determined to find those plates, and after a great deal of searching, she did find them, packed away in crates under one of the castle garrets.

“They’re beautiful,” Libby said as she and Flora sat cross-legged on the garret floor, sorting through them.

They were Meissen porcelain, thin as eggshells, and decorated with a Scottish thistle trim around the edge. Together they carefully carried the plates down to the kitchen for a much-needed soak, leaving them to dry in the dish racks.

Much later that afternoon, around four o’clock, Flora had to hurry home to make supper for Angus and her children. She invited Libby to join them, but Libby asked if she could take a rain check. All she wanted was a long, hot bath to ease her aching muscles and wash away the layers of dust that she could feel even now coating every inch of her. After rooting around in the garret and crawling across floors and under chimney breasts, she surely had four hundred years of grime and soot smudged across her face.

Libby pulled out the barrette that hung limply in her hair and shook her tangled locks as steamy water filled the massive claw-foot bathtub. It was long enough for her to stretch out her legs, with a curved edge that allowed her to lean her head back as the decadent warmth of the scented bath enveloped her.

Heaven ...

Turning off the tap, she closed her eyes and let the bathwater work its magic. She was too tired to even care that she’d forgotten her bathrobe in the other room. She simply lost herself in the magnificently simple pleasure, all the while wondering if there was a single muscle in her body that wasn’t aching at that moment.

Graeme didn’t surface from his office until he noticed the daylight fading outside the windows.

Where had the time gone? He’d been so caught up in working with his drawings, he hadn’t even realized the hours were breezing by.

The hallway outside his office door was dark, cast in the shadows of the ending day. Where the devil was Flora? She would usually pop in to tell him she was leaving. He had come to measure the passing of the day by Flora’s appearances, bringing the day’s post, usually around nine, lunch at noon, an afternoon pot of tea at two, then four or five when she was leaving for the night. Try as he might, he couldn’t recall her having done so today, but then, he was beginning to lose track of what day it was, let alone whether his housekeeper had said good night to him, so anything was possible.

He walked downstairs, passing empty rooms and closed doors. He came across Murphy stretched out on the rug at the foot of the stairs, but found the kitchen curiously empty. Flora had left a plate for him warming in the oven, as was her custom. Roast beef and some small potatoes. There was a single dish of salad chilling in the refrigerator. There wasn’t any indication that the castle’s other tenant would be having supper in.

Apparently Libby had decided to go into the village, where she’d become quite the local hero, the native daughter come home at long last to save the village from ruination. Even he had to admit a certain admiration for her.

In the past several days while he’d been holed up in his office, Graeme had had a lot of time to think. He’d gotten past most of his initial anger. He wasn’t at all thrilled about the prospect of losing the castle. Although he certainly wouldn’t be homeless if the court ruled in Libby’s favor, as he fully expected it to do, over the past months Graeme had grown attached to his remote hideaway and was more than a little reluctant to give it up to return to the glaring spotlight reserved for the dual heir of the Duke of Gransborough and the Countess of Abermuir. In fact, he fully intended to remain exactly where he was until he was legally obligated to leave.

But after learning the circumstances surrounding the estate, and Lady Venetia Mackay’s plans for it, he had no choice but to admit that Libby was doing the right thing. The
only
thing. In her place, he would have done the same.

When he’d arranged for the purchase of the castle, he’d worked only through Lady Venetia’s solicitors. He had never met the Mackay matriarch personally. He’d just figured her to be another absentee landlord, like so many across the Highlands, who left the administration of their estates to others and showed up once or twice a year. At no time had anyone indicated that the bulk of the estate was to be sold to any mineral drilling company. In fact, he’d offered to purchase the estate in whole, but had been refused, told that Lady Venetia didn’t intend to part with it. In fact, they’d even assured him that if she did decide to sell, he would be the first to know.

As it was, he’d been among the very
last.

Graeme brought his supper plate and a glass of Pinot Noir back up to his office, thinking he would put in a couple more hours of work before calling it a night. He was making good progress. It was as if ever since Libby had made the suggestion of working with the historical features of the building, a light had turned on in his head.

But as he reached the top of the stairs, he paused, looking down the hall. He found himself wondering which of the bedchambers Libby had chosen to take. If she came back from the village late, her room would be ice-cold. She wasn’t used to living in a drafty castle with dodgy radiators. He rather doubted she had thought to light the hearth before she’d left.

He left his plate on the side table and walked the length of the hall, checking the doors as he went. But she’d taken none of the rooms on the first floor, and so he headed for the back stairs that led to the upper chambers.

As soon as he emerged from the stairs, the temperature dropped noticeably. Since he’d been at the castle, he’d kept the upper floors shut away to conserve the heat. In fact, he’d scarcely even looked at any of the other rooms since moving in.