White Regency 03 - White Knight (18 page)

When she had been a child, Grace could
recall having come dangerously close to losing her fingers when she’d been
playing near some farm equipment. She had been reckless, racing about in the
tool shed, upsetting an axe that had been leaning against a wall. But for some
reason, when the axe had fallen, it buried its blade but a half inch from her
fingers. Grace could recall having stared at the axe blade stuck in the ground
so close to her hand and thinking how stupid she had been. For if her fingers
had been but an inch further forward, she would have lost them and would never
then have known her love of sketching, her joy at playing the pianoforte.

There were other things, too. At a time
when young girls played with dolls and tiny china tea sets, Grace had only been
interested in building blocks. She had studied the engravings of the master
architects—Wren, Adam, Inigo Jones. Later, when she had grown older and she had
taken to sketching, it was not birds and flowers that filled her sketchbooks,
but buildings, houses, churches— whatever structure that might have captured
her eye. At ten years, when she might have been spending her daylight hours
learning various dance steps and needlepoint stitches, Grace was designing a
tree house. She spent hours planning it, sketching and then resketching it
until it was just as it should have been, complete with sash windows and a
dumbwaiter. With Nonny’s encouragement and the help of some of the estate
workers, Grace saw that same tree house constructed atop a grand oak tree along
the banks of the River Tees at Ledysthorpe. It had been Grace’s special place,
where she had gone to dream and reflect while the birds had perched beside her.
She remembered how she would look out from her treetop tower with the periscope
her father had gifted her with, wishing for her parents to return off the North
Sea, miraculously alive once again.

All of her life, no matter how she’d
tried, Grace had never been able to conform to the image of what she should
have been—the accomplished lady able to sing sweeter than a bird and dance as
if the wind was at her feet. She realized now she had spent all that time
trying to be a person that in her heart she knew she could never be. It had
taken her marriage to Christian, and her failure as his wife, for her to
finally realize the truth she had been avoiding for as long as she could
recall. Only now it was suddenly so clear.

Use your special talents to see Skynegal
restored.

The words her grandmother had written were
like the opening of a door, the door to her future. No more would she avoid it,
refusing to heed the call. It was time she took charge of her life instead of
blithely following the wrong but “proper” path.

It was time Grace embraced her destiny.

Grace left the study sometime later and
returned to the parlor where Mr. Jenner still awaited. He looked up from his
tea, his mouth crumbed with one of the cook’s lemon biscuits, and smiled.

“Mr. Jenner, thank you for waiting. I
am ready to sign the papers you have brought to me.”

As the solicitor began setting out the
documents for her, she went on, “After we are finished, I wonder if I
might trouble you to stay a bit. There is a matter I should like to discuss
with you.”

“A matter, my lady?”

“Yes. I should like to hire you, sir,
to act as my personal solicitor for the estate of Skynegal. There is something
I should like to do, but I must warn you it is a matter that will require some
delicacy and a great deal of fortitude on your part, for there may be
opposition from my husband. He is an influential man, sir. His grandfather, the
Duke of Westover, is even more influential. I do not know you, sir,” Grace
went on, “but I can see that my grandmother trusted you and that is enough
to recommend you to me. Would you be willing to help me?”

Mr. Jenner didn’t immediately respond. For
a moment, Grace thought that he might refuse her. The Westovers were, after
all, one of the most powerful families in England. Few would dare oppose them
for fear of the reprisals. The longer the solicitor remained silent, the more
Grace convinced herself he would decline.

A few moments later, however, Mr. Jenner
stood and extended his hand toward her. “I have always been a man inclined
to a challenge, my lady. Serving your grandmother through the years I did was
one of the greatest tasks of my professional life. She was a true and
remarkable woman. You remind me of her somehow. Thus, I would be honored to be
of service to you, my lady, in whatever capacity you seek.” Two days
later, Grace was gone.

Adieu, She cries!

and waved her lily hand.

— John Gay

Wester Ross, Scottish Highlands

Skynegal Castle lay nestled inland off the
Minch, a restless sea channel separating the Hebrides from the western Scottish
coast amid a copse of oak and Caledonian pine in a small cove along the pebbled
shores of Loch Skynegal. To some, this remote part of northwest Scotland was
considered wild and primitive—far too uncivilized for the Bond Street set. But
to Grace, it was as beautiful a land as she could have ever imagined, vividly
splashed with blues, greens, purples, and pinks—majestic mountains and
heather-swept hills flanking a landscape as colorful as any tartan.

She had left London with her maid Liza
nearly a fortnight earlier after leading the Knighton servants to believe she
was going out on a visit to see her uncle, Lord Cholmeley. They would have
found out soon after that she had never arrived at Cholmeley House. Instead she
had taken a hackney coach to the offices of Mr. Jenner at Lincoln’s Inn and
from there had gone to meet the post chaise that would start them on their
journey.

The two women had traveled first by land
across the midlands of England to Liverpool, then north by sea, since few roads
ran through the rocky Highland terrain, and none wider than a pony trail as far
north as Wester Ross. It had been a tiresome journey and the weather had only
hindered their progress, raining nearly every day since they’d left London. Yet
despite her fatigue, Grace found herself standing on the deck of the small
packet boat that would bring them to the close of their voyage, captivated by
everything around them.

Early that morning, the skies had cleared
and a brisk Scottish wind blew chill against her nose and cheeks, filled with a
scent that seemed to characterize the Highlands—earthy heather, the salt sea
wind, and the fragrant pine of the tall fir trees. They passed a scattering of
small whitewashed cottages set beneath heavily thatched roofs that gave them
the appearance of large mushrooms dotting the rocky shoreline. Word of the
sloop’s sighting spread quickly from one to the next, bringing the cottagers
outside to curiously watch the unfamiliar vessel skimming past on the rippling
blue-gray waters of the loch. Dogs barked in excitement and children waved,
running barefoot to the water’s edge as if to give chase. Shaggy orange
Highland cattle barely gave them a moment’s glance before returning their
attention to the pasture beneath them.

Fed by the sea, the vast loch was studded
by a string of small islands, each thickly wooded and ringed by the mist that
skirted the water’s surface. Rugged shoreline stretched farther than the eye
could see and several small herring boats floated like bobbing apples in the
distance. At the farthest end of the loch, like a doorkeeper to this mystical
secret retreat, rose the age-old gray stone towers of Skynegal.

From the moment its silhouette first took
shape through the mist, the castle had brought Grace to drawing in her breath
in wonder. It stood in a setting older than time and looked every bit as
magical as she could have ever imagined it, filled with rich history—
her
family
history. It was a place to which she could finally belong.

Atop a high slope, or
leathad,
the
main tower house was tall and rectangular, with a steeply pitched roof flanked
on either side by smaller rounded towers no doubt added at a later date. It was
these two towers, outstretched to the sides, that gave the castle its Gaelic
name,
Sgiathach
—the winged castle. The closer one came, the more vivid
the image grew, until it appeared as if the wing towers were somehow
fluttering. Kittiwakes and terns were everywhere, hundreds of them, stark white
against the weathered stone, perched upon the tower parapets, soaring overhead,
nesting in the crenelles, calling out in noisy welcome to them.

It was as the sloop pulled aground upon
the pebbly beach beneath Skynegal that Grace caught her first glimpse of the
castle’s crumbling fence lines and overgrown brush. They disembarked, trudging
up a weed-thickened path from the shore to stand beneath the tall central
tower. Grace craned her neck up at least seven stories past windows with
weatherbeaten casements that hung unhappily off their rusted hinges and broken
glazing that blinked at them in the fading daylight. She could only think that
it was more a ruin than a dwelling and even the cries of the birds looking down
on them from the wing towers seemed suddenly mournful as if bemoaning the
castle’s sad state of neglect.

Grace chewed her lip, but she wasn’t discouraged.
Perhaps the castle was not as grand as some might expect, but with a bit of
work to bring it back to its former splendor, Skynegal would soon soar again.

She looked past Liza, who stood beside
her, to the two men who’d accompanied them there from Mallaig. McFee and McGee
had met the two women at the dock, bearing a letter signed by the
ever-resourceful Mr. Jenner. He had hired the men, he’d written, to guide them
along the last leg of their journey into the Highlands. They would remain at
Skynegal to help Grace to settle in afterward.

They presented a peculiar picture, each
draped in differing ragged tartans, their noses reddened from frequent exposure
to the sea winds. The bottom halves of their faces were hidden behind full
shaggy beards—one red, the other peppered gray. The only way Grace had managed
to successfully tell them apart during their journey was to remind herself over
and over again that McFee had the beard that was
fire-red
and McGee had
the beard that was pepper-gray. A simple method, yes, but it worked.

With them had come the stout Flora, a
woman who wore a perpetually serious expression set beneath mud-brown hair that
was scraped back beneath a colorless linen kerchief. She was sister to one of
the two men and had yet to utter a single word since leaving Mallaig two days
earlier. While McGee and McFee would see to the provisioning of the castle with
adequate peats for burning and the purchase of necessary livestock, Flora would
undertake any needed household tasks until other staff could be arranged for.

“Please, my lady,” Liza said to
Grace then, “please tell me they’ve got it wrong. Tell me this broken pile
of rocks cannot be the right place.”

Grace glanced at Liza before asking
politely, “Excuse me, sirs? You are quite certain this is Skynegal?”

McGee grinned at her, scratching his
grizzled head beneath his tattered blue bonnet. “Aye, my leddy, I sure ye
‘tis
Skee-na-gall,
it is.”

McFee nodded his agreement from behind the
swirling smoke of his clay pipe, stroking his fiery beard as he said,
“Dunna t’ink ‘tis changed a’sudden. Been
Skee-na-gall
for nigh hand
six hunder years, it has.”

“Aye, and looks as if it hasn’t been
lived in for at least that long either,” Liza muttered.

Flora, of course, said nothing.

Grace turned once again to regard the
structure, this time looking on what had been her grandmother’s childhood home
with the even more discriminating eye of someone who had studied a good many
structures in years past.

It stood, of course, in dire need of
improvements, first and foremost a roof, at least a complete one for what was
there seemed to be degenerating in patches. The walls would need immediate
repair where they were crumbling and the windows would have to be replaced.
Grace could not see anything further of the actual structure because the sun
was setting behind them, casting the tower in a bit of a haze. A good deal of
what she could see of it was covered by an overgrowth of dark ivy that crept
thickly along the weathered stone walls. Grace frowned, her brow knit as she
cocked her head slightly to the side, staring at the places where the stone was
crumbling away from the curtain wall. She wondered if perhaps it was the ivy
that was keeping the castle standing at all.

“Won’t make it any better looking at
it that way,” Liza commented.

“Well, it cannot be completely
devastated. Mr. Jenner said there has been a steward living here at all times.
Perhaps it is time we met him.”

Grace proceeded to the nearest door she
could find, small and inconspicuous on such a large structure, with a heavy
iron ring hanging from its center. When she lifted the ring, it screeched as if
it hadn’t been moved since the castle’s first stone had been set, and flecks of
black paint fluttered from it to the toes of her half boots.

Not a good sign, she thought as she
dropped the knocker back against the door with a resounding
thunk.

They waited to the accompanying sound of
the sea and the perpetual
ock-ock-ock
of the birds perched in the
various apertures above them. When there came no answer to her knocking, Grace
looked to Liza. The maid raised a skeptical brow but wisely said nothing. Grace
tried the door again, this time whacking the ring several times hard against
the solid wood of the door. Moments passed. Again no response. Grace could hear
McFee and McGee shifting behind her. “Odd,” she murmured. “I’m
certain Mr. Jenner had said that—”

The door scraped open suddenly and a
figure presented itself in the doorway. He was short and round and really quite
bald, reminding Grace immediately of the childhood story of Humpty Dumpty—a
Humpty Dumpty in tartan, she amended, wearing a suit of crisscrossed red and
white straining across an expansive girth with skin-tight trews covering his
thin legs down to his buckled leather shoes.

The man took one look at them and
immediately turned his back to them.

“Hoy, Deirdre,” he shouted to
the castle interior, “you were right! Someone has come to visit us. Come,
come help me to greet our guests!”

He was joined by a petite woman, perhaps
four and a half feet tall, who wore an earthy-hued plaid cut long on her slight
body, wrapped around her shoulders with the fringed ends of it trailing upon
the stone floor. Her face was one by which age was not easily determined—she
was somewhere, Grace guessed, between twenty and forty. Her hair was completely
hidden beneath an elaborately knotted kerchief and she wore full faded skirts
that might once have been black beneath a bluish shirt, cut not unlike a man’s
waistcoat. Her feet, Grace noticed, were bare on the stone floor underneath.

“Welcome, welcome to Skynegal,”
said the man of the pair, coming forward to greet them. “I am Alastair
Ogilvy, the castle steward, and this is Deirdre Wyllie. Deirdre is a widow to
one of the former tenants here and she comes to keep house at Skynegal.”

Grace nodded, smiling to the woman.

“And who do we have the pleasure of
knowing?” asked Mr. Ogilvy, his curiosity beaming on his rotund face.

“She’s the newly come leddy of
Skynegal,” Deirdre answered even before Grace could respond.

Alastair turned an expression of
astonishment on the small woman. “You knew this afore she told it to us,
eh, Deirdre? How’d you do it? Was it the sight, Deirdre? Did the spirits tell
you this, lass?”

Deirdre shook her head. “Nae,
Alastair. I’ve told you and told you I dinna have this ‘sight’ you keep buffing
aboot.” She tucked her hand inside her plaid and took out a folded letter.
” ‘Twas this letter that was delivered yestreen.”

Alastair took the letter and read it
quickly, his dark eyes growing large over the top of the parchment. “Och,
Deirdre, why did you not tell me afore now that the lady of Skynegal was to be
coming?” Before she could answer, he bowed his head reverently to Grace.
“My lady, please forgive me for not having greeted you properly afore you
could reach the door. I wasn’t aware of your coming, else I would have been
watching the loch for you to arrive.”

Grace shook her head. “There is
nothing to forgive, Mr. Ogilvy. I prefer not to stand on ceremony. Might we
come in and sit a spell? We’ve been traveling for some time and I think we’re
all nearly ready to drop from exhaustion.”

“Hoy!” Alastair put both hands
atop his head. “Where are my manners? Of course! Please, my lady, please
come in! All of you!”

He moved quickly for a man of his width,
taking them down a narrow corridor and up two rounded flights of stairs,
chattering apologies all the way. They arrived at a cavernous room that rose
easily two stories, nearly as wide as it was high. Grace heard several small
birds chirping above, where they had no doubt nested in the great oaken
hammered beams that traversed the cracked and crumbling plaster ceiling.

The scene of many a Highland feast, the
great hall had once played host to Robert the Bruce himself. According to Mr.
Ogilvy, the original tower had been constructed in the twelfth century, the
side wings centuries later. The tower birds had been residents from the very
beginning.

“Legend has it that long afore a
castle was ever built at this place, the Celtic goddess Cliodna came to visit.
She was beautiful and fair and it is said ‘twas she who brought the birds,
magical birds whose sweet song would soothe the sick into a healing
sleep.”

As Grace listened to Alastair’s recounting
of the legend, she walked slowly about the chamber. The hall was mostly vacant
except for the two armchairs and a single crude table set near the cavernous
stone hearth. A fire burned low in the grate with a small copper kettle hanging
from a chain above it, giving off an earthy scent, most unlike the coal to
which she was accustomed. The only other light in the room came from two tallow
candles burning in holders atop the table, throwing shadows onto the bare stone
walls. There weren’t any windows, not a one, on any of the four walls.