Ann Lethbridge (16 page)

The next morning, Niall plodded along beside the cart, Jenna marching alongside him in her jaunty red skirts and black bodice, and he in a drab waistcoat and a bright blue neckerchief in the open neck of his shirt, looking for all the world like a family of gypsies on the move.

Clearly taken with her part, Jenna had tied a red kerchief over her bright auburn hair. It didn’t take away from her beauty one bit. But it was apparent from the moment they awoke that they were back in the proper places. She was formal to the point of stiff whenever she spoke to him.

She must really regret what had happened the previous night. Not him. Not one bit. He did regret the loss of what had been a burgeoning friendship. No, it was more than friendship, but that was all he would dare acknowledge, even to himself.

Last night they had become two different people, a man and a woman under the stars, without a care in the world. Today, they were real people, not those wild footloose folk of their imaginations.

He should never have kissed her, let alone made love to her. Even if he hadna’ taken her in the full sense of the word, he’d led her down a path to carnal knowledge no innocent should experience before her marriage.

A vision of her in her bridegroom’s arms made his anger rise higher because, after last night, he could not get past the desire to possess her again and again and again. He wasn’t sure he would ever get her out of his blood.

He felt sick with anger at his failure. He was supposed to be protecting her, not taking advantage of her to assuage his own desires.

Lady Jenna stumbled over a clump of heather. Wherever this mysterious gypsy track was supposed to be, Niall could not see it. The ground was as rough at their feet as it was all around them.

He glowered at Sean, lounging on the driver’s seat. ‘Let Lady Jenna ride beside you.’

‘Gypsy lasses walk. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves now, do we?’

Niall glanced around pointedly at the empty landscape of rolling hills covered in heather and gorse. ‘All these people will notice, I suppose.’

‘I am quite capable of walking, Mr Gilvry,’ Jenna said with her wee faery hauteur.

‘You are lucky he is not making you go barefoot, which is also what most gypsy lasses do,’ he grumbled.

‘Gypsy men, too,’ Sean said, grinning wickedly.

Niall caught the hint of a smile on her face, a sparkle in her eyes. He crushed the urge to grin back. It was better they kept their distance.

They crested a hill and a wide glen opened up before them, rolling meadows in the flat plain at the bottom and stands of pines on its craggy hillsides.

‘Do you see it?’ Jenna said. Speaking without being spoken to for the first time that day. ‘Braemuir.’

Nestled against one of the hillsides was a three-storey stone house. ‘It’s a grand house,’ Niall said gruffly, his gut twisting at just how grand it was, with its magnificent stone façade and formal gardens. What had he expected? A hovel, or something in between, like the house where he was born, where he and his brothers had shared a bed? This was the house of a nobleman. It looked just as she had described.

They started downhill and the house was lost to view behind the undulating land and the trees.

Jenna was looking around her eagerly. ‘I used to ride these hills with my father,’ she said. She frowned. ‘But there were houses. Crofts. Tenants.’ She looked around. ‘Or perhaps I misremember.’

‘The crofts were in the way of the sheep,’ Sean said.

‘But those were my father’s people...’ She bit her lip. ‘I should never have left.’

‘A fourteen-year-old girl running Braemuir?’ Sean’s voice was without rancour.

Jenna shook her head. ‘I should have been told. Your people should have been allowed to camp the way they did in my father’s time.’

The gypsy shook his head. ‘There was no work for us. No fields of crops. We moved on as we always do.’

‘Did you?’ she asked, looking at him directly.

‘Most did,’ he said.

Another evasion. Niall glared at the gypsy, but it didn’t do the slightest bit of good.

Jenna subsided into silence, clearly busy with her own thoughts. Niall didn’t feel he had the right to intrude. He was her escort again, little more than a servant even though Carrick had named him guardian.

A guardian doing his proper duty would have made their predicament known to Lieutenant Dustan. He deserved a whipping for that piece of foolishness.

‘Where are you taking us?’ Jenna finally asked.

‘We go to Mr Hughes. He is expecting you.’

‘Is he? Oh, I am so looking forward to seeing him.’ A flush glowed on her cheeks.

Something sharp stabbed at Niall’s chest. Jealousy. He beat it back. ‘Is there a post office in the village? We need to get word to Lord Carrick and Mrs Preston before they are driven mad with worry.’

‘There is a post office in the next town,’ Sean said.

Of course it would be in the next town. ‘Then while you are renewing your acquaintance with Mr Hughes, I’ll be going there.’ No doubt on foot. A thought occurred to him. ‘I assume there is some sort of female presence at Mr Hughes’s house. A chaperon for the Lady Jenna.’

‘Mrs Hughes,’ Jenna said with a teasing twinkle in her eyes.

All this while she’d let him think... He felt as light-hearted as a condemned man given a reprieve. It didn’t make any sense to feel anything at all, but he grinned at her all the same.

* * *

The Kirk was the first thing they came to, and beyond it a few cottages lined the lane. A bend in the road obscured what lay ahead. ‘The entrance to Braemuir is further along,’ Jenna said wistfully.

Sean drew up outside the house beside the church. ‘I will leave you here.’ He handed Jenna a bundle. ‘Here are your own clothes. Give my regards to the vicar.’

‘Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘A rest?’

‘Other business is calling, but thank you.’ He touched his hat, turned the wagon around and headed back the way they had come.

Jenna looked after him with a frown. ‘Surely he didn’t think Mr Hughes wouldn’t make him welcome?’

‘I have no clue what that man thinks,’ Niall said, and he wasn’t going to guess. He gestured her to go ahead of him up the garden path.

She glanced longingly down the road. ‘We could go up to Braemuir. Just for a quick peek.’ There was longing in her voice and her face.

‘We can hardly go visiting, dressed as we are,’ he said, taking in her gypsy clothes and the thick plait hanging all the way down her back to her hips. ‘It might be wise to send a note.’

She sighed. ‘You are right, of course. We might not be welcome even then.’

‘They will no doubt be honoured you wish to visit.’

Seemingly satisfied, she headed through the gate and up to the front door of the two-storey stone house. Before they could knock, it opened.

An elderly gentleman, his thinning white hair a halo around his head, came rushing out. ‘Jenna,’ he said. He stopped short as if collecting himself. ‘My lady. Look at you, all grown up and just as beautiful as your mother.’

Jenna laughed and opened her arms. ‘Mr Hughes, you haven’t changed a bit.’

Niall held out a hand. ‘Mr Hughes. Niall Gilvry, at your service.’

The older man turned to greet him, but even as he shook his hand, he was looking puzzled. ‘Lady Jenna,’ he said in a querulous voice, ‘where is your maid? Your lady companion? Do not tell me that mad gypsy brought only the two of you?’

‘That mad gypsy saved our lives,’ Jenna said. ‘Can we go inside, so I can tell you all about it?’

‘Oh, indeed. Indeed. Mrs Hughes has the kettle on the hob. It only wanted you to arrive for tea.’

Jenna turned to Niall, her face alight with mischief. ‘Mrs Hughes always has the kettle on the hob for tea.’

‘This way. This way,’ Mr Hughes said, ushering them in. ‘Straight into the parlour, my dear. You surely remember the way.’

* * *

The news relayed by Mr Hughes was not good. At least half of the people in the village had left. Most of the crofters had been put off the land by the lessee and their houses torn down. Apparently with Lord Carrick’s permission. ‘Where did they go?’ she asked the vicar.

‘Some to America. Some south to find work.’

There was a cold feeling in the pit of her belly. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t write sooner to let me know.’

The older man’s face took on a pinched expression. ‘I wrote. Your cousin required me to desist at once. My interference was unwelcome.’

Her chest tightened painfully at the hurt in his voice. ‘He never mentioned you had written.’ She put down her teacup, afraid she would spill her tea she was shaking so badly. With anger. ‘He had no right to keep your letters from me.’

The old cleric shook his head. ‘I gather the lease on the land is due up in a month and there is talk of renewal. I thought I should give it one more try.’ He rubbed his hands on his thighs, looking embarrassed. ‘I thought to go around Lord Carrick by way of Sean. I wanted you to see for yourself what is happening here. I hoped that once you did, you would care again. The way your father did. The way you did when he was alive.’

‘I do care. I have always cared. I just...’ Her heart ached so badly she couldn’t speak. But she had to be honest with him, with herself. ‘But with Father gone, I just couldn’t quite face it to begin with. Not on my own.’

‘Aye, lass. I can understand it. You were always close to your father.’

‘It was just so sudden. Such a shock.’ Her eyes started to burn and she stared at her clenched hands in her lap.

‘I know. I know. But we must accept God’s will for us, ye ken. But it is time you came back and took up where your father left off.’

‘I would very much like to visit the house if you think the tenant would be amenable.’

His eyebrows climbed his forehead. ‘There is no one there but the mice.’

Confused, she gazed at his sorrowful face. ‘You mean he is away at present?’

He shook his head. ‘No one has lived there since the day you left.’

‘But that isn’t possible. The land is farmed. I saw sheep.’

‘Whoever leased the estate from your uncle, turned around and sublet the land to Mr Drummond in the next glen. It is his sheep you see in the pastures.’

‘The house is empty?’

‘Aye. The servants all paid off and long gone.’

‘But my father’s horses. His cattle.’

He stared at her sadly, shaking his head. ‘Gone. Sold off to pay your father’s debts. I think Carrick did all he could to make sure you didn’t lose the house or any more land.’

Niall shifted. He had been silent throughout her conversation, but when she looked at him, there was a strange expression on his face. ‘What is it?’

He grimaced. ‘Something I saw. In Carrick’s account book. Not the one in the office where I worked, but in his desk drawer.’ His cheekbones tinged red. ‘I was sent to find some receipts by McDougall beneath a ledger. I glanced through it.’

‘What did you see?’

‘It was a private accounting. I believe it showed payments to him personally on Braemuir’s account.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He got up and went to the window, looking out with his hands behind his back. He turned and squared his shoulders. ‘I can’t say I do, either. Perhaps we need to find out who leased the land in the first place.’

‘The land agent Lord Carrick assigned to find a tenant might be able to assist you.’

She sieved through her memory and recalled a slender youngish man with dark hair and eyes. ‘Mr Stuart? Is he still here?’

‘Stuart left shortly after you did.’ Mr Hughes said. ‘It was Carrick’s man, Tearny, I believe was his name.’

Her eyes widened. She looked at Niall whose stance had become rigid. ‘The same Tearny as...’

‘There were payments to Tearny in the ledger,’ Niall said. ‘We at Dunross also had dealings with the man, and not to his credit. But as you know, he can’t be much help to us since he is dead.’ A thoughtful looked passed over his face. He shook his head sharply as if deciding not to speak his thoughts out loud.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘It is better not to give voice to suspicions that cannot be proven.’

‘This concerns me. My land.’

‘Carrick is my relative also. And my chief. There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. I will no blacken a man’s name on the basis of gossip.’

She recoiled at the fierceness of his tone. He was right. He was Carrick’s relative. Set to watch over her by that very man, his clan chief. He would not go against him without very good reason.

She turned back to the vicar. ‘So there is no one to prevent me from visiting the house.’

‘No one,’ the old man said. He laced his fingers together. ‘I am not sure I did the right thing, sending for you. It was an old man’s fancy that you could turn things around, but I fear it cannot be. The people are gone. The house, in a sad state of disrepair...’

She gasped. ‘Disrepair?’

‘It was never very good in your father’s time, but it is much worse now, I think.’

‘There was nothing wrong with it.’

‘You were young. Perhaps you did not see. It needed a new roof even then. And he had closed one wing completely.’

She remembered a long corridor where the furniture was covered in holland covers. She’d thought nothing of it then. ‘The house is huge. There were only two of us living there. We had no need for all those rooms.’

‘It would probably be better to look at it before you make up your mind,’ Niall said gently, clearly believing Mr Hughes’s account.

‘It can’t be that bad,’ she said firmly. ‘I am going to be married. We are going to live there.’ She winced and looked at Niall, whose face showed nothing of his thoughts.

‘You are affianced?’ Mr Hughes said, his face lighting up. ‘To this young gentleman? You will let me perform the marriage ceremony, will you not?’

‘Actually it is another gentleman who is the bridegroom.’ She hadn’t barely given a thought to her betrothed since the night they left the cave on the beach. She’d been too busy trying to survive. Oh, was she going to lie to herself? The truth of the matter was that she’d been too taken up thinking about Niall Gilvry. She straightened her shoulders. ‘A Mr Murray.’