Chapter Five
Bella limped back to the castle kitchen. Flinty was chopping carrots. The repetitive slice and tap of her knife against the board instantly soothed Bella’s frayed nerves. ‘Can I help with anything?’
Cooking always centred Bella. Even the most mundane prep tasks brought her a peace she seldom felt outside the kitchen.
Flinty shook her head. ‘I’m fine here, love.’
‘Right.’ The feeling that Bella was surplus to Lowbridge’s requirements edged up on her again. The thought of actually living here as lady of the manor, in the way Darcy seemed to, sent a physical shudder through her. What would she do all day?
‘Why don’t you take a proper look around inside?’ Flinty suggested, in a tone that instantly cast Bella in the role of troublesome child who needed to be entertained and kept out of the way. ‘You only got as far as the second ballroom corridor last time.’
‘Sure.’ She wandered through to the main hallway before Flinty’s comment hit her. The second ballroom corridor. Did that mean the second corridor near the ballroom, or did it imply the existence of a whole other primary ballroom somewhere else in the labyrinth this crazy family insisted as referring to as ‘the house’?
Opposite the entrance way was the staircase. The front staircase, as she’d now learned. Based on an instinct that Veronica was most likely to be in the office or one of the innumerable living rooms on the ground floor, Bella headed up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs was a grand landing, with doors and further corridors in every direction. Bella froze. Presumably these were bedrooms. You couldn’t wander into a random bedroom. Years working in the hotel trade had definitely taught her that.
She turned back towards the staircase, before a sound from further down the hallway stopped her. It was a sob. She was sure it was a sob. She stopped and listened. It wasn’t coming from the first door, the room nearest to her. She crept down the hallway. At the second door, she paused. Another sob, louder this time. Bella tapped gently on the door and pushed it open.
Darcy was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, the raggedy-looking man’s dressing gown wrapped around her shoulders, clutching a shiny-covered paperback. She didn’t look up as Bella came in.
She moved alongside her. ‘Darcy? Are you OK?’
Darcy looked up, as if noticing her companion for the first time. ‘I gave him this for his birthday.’ She opened the book to the bookmarked page. ‘He said he’d been wanting to read it for ages. He didn’t get to finish it.’ She turned the book over in her hands. ‘What should I do with it now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Veronica says we should clear this room out for Adam.’
Bella shook her head. ‘Oh no. We’re fine in the coach house.’
‘Veronica said…’
‘It’s not a problem. It’s a really big house.’
‘It’s a castle, sweetie.’
Bella all but punched the air. ‘I know! Adam keeps calling it a house.’
Darcy managed a watery smile at the long-running dispute between her and the rest of the family. ‘His dad always said the same. I’d say castle and he’d say, “Well, barely.”’
‘It’s definitely a castle. We should have a ticket booth and charge admission.’
‘We used to.’ Darcy took a deep breath. ‘But then Covid, you know.’
‘You didn’t reopen?’
Darcy shook her head. ‘Alexander didn’t really have the heart for it. He was never that keen on having people around the whole time. This was supposed to be his room.’
Bella looked around. The dark wood furniture did have a distinctly masculine air, but there were clear signs of Darcy’s presence. Tubs of moisturiser on the night stand. Women’s clothes discarded on the chair in the corner.
Darcy pointed towards the door in the side wall. ‘That goes through to a bathroom. Like a…’ She wrinkled her brow. ‘Is it Jack and Jill? En suite to two rooms.’
Bella nodded.
‘And then through the other side is officially my room.’
‘You didn’t share a bedroom?’ Bella asked the question before she checked herself. ‘I mean that’s fine. Whatever works…’
‘No. We shared this room.’ Darcy giggled slightly. ‘Veronica doesn’t know. I’m thirty-eight years old and I spent my whole marriage pretending to my husband’s mother that we slept in separate rooms and then sneaking through here.’
‘Every night?’
Darcy nodded. ‘I used to mess the sheets through there up, but after about three months Flinty told me not to bother cos it was only making laundry, and Veronica would never dream of just charging into someone else’s boudoir.’
Bella frowned. ‘So the whole bedroom thing? You could stay in here and me and Adam could go in your room?’
‘Oh no. Not sharing a room is apparently key to a healthy marriage.’
‘How do these people ever produce heirs?’
Darcy giggled. ‘I think they have a butler carry a little sample through on a velvet pillow.’
‘And the lady just lies back and thinks of England?’
‘Scotland.’
‘Right.’
‘Of course we never did.’
‘Sorry.’ She was a second behind.
Darcy wiped her eye. ‘Produce an heir. Or rather spare.’
Bella winced at her own insensitivity. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK. We wanted to.’ Darcy shook her head. ‘It never happened, and Alexander wasn’t keen on having doctors poke into all of that. He said that if it was meant to happen it would.’
Bella wasn’t sure how, or even if, to fill the silence that followed.
‘It’s a ton more straightforward with horses. Just send them off to stud and they come back in foal.’
‘Right.’
Darcy rubbed her hand across her cheek. ‘Do you want to come out to the stables with me?’ She looked around the room. ‘I thought it would be easier in here. I thought I’d feel closer to him.’
‘You didn’t?’
Darcy half-smiled. ‘I did. It just wasn’t easier.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Darcy pulled herself up to her feet and they made their way down the stairs and out across the courtyard – through a door Bella would happily have sworn wasn’t there yesterday – towards the stables. ‘Oh, is your ankle OK for this?’
Bella nodded. ‘It’s improving.’
‘It’s such a joy to live somewhere I can keep horses. I could only dream of it growing up.’
‘In New York?’
‘Yeah. Grew up having one bottom bunk with someone above me and someone right next to me, and now all of this. Until I met Alexander, I thought New York was everything.’
‘And now?’
Darcy leaned against the fence alongside the paddock. ‘I think Veronica thinks I’ll go back there. I don’t know. I can’t think beyond right now.’
‘You don’t have to. And you can stay here as long as you want.’
‘Is that what Veronica says?’
Bella sighed. ‘Well, it’s not up to her, is it? Adam will say the same. This is your home. You do not need to go anywhere.’
‘You’re kind, but there’s a way these things work. The dowager moves into the dower house. The laird and lady live here. What should happen is that I should go to the dower house, but then where does Veronica go? You’re not supposed to have two dowagers, are you? My Alexander died too young.’ Her previously matter of fact tone cracked. ‘I’m not ready.’
Bella bent her head towards Darcy.
‘And I don’t want to leave my girl. Liberty.’
Of course. The horse.
‘Or Larry. Who’d be fool enough to look after him if I wasn’t here?’
‘Then stay.’ Of course Darcy should stay. Bella turned and looked back at the castle. She could now see a staircase down the outside to a lower level that seemed to have grilles across the entrance. ‘Is that a dungeon?’
Darcy followed her gaze. ‘Oh, don’t be silly. That was the kennels for a long time.’
‘How many dogs did you have?’
‘Well before my time there was a hunt. Adam hated it though. Don’t think Alexander was really that keen himself.’ She paused. ‘So after the hunting dogs had gone it was just Wren and whichever pups we kept.’ She looked for a second as if the tears were going to come again. ‘Only Dipper left now. We lost Wren last year. That broke Alexander’s heart.’ Almost on cue Dipper came darting across the courtyard.
Darcy bent down to pet her. ‘You’re the last girl standing now, aren’t you?’
Darcy was sweet when she wasn’t screaming at her mother-in-law. Bella wanted to comfort her. There was only one way of giving comfort that Bella really understood. ‘Let me make you some lunch.’
‘That’s very kind.’ Darcy smiled. ‘Oh, you didn’t really think that was a dungeon, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Right, because the dungeon’s over under the scullery.’
Of course it was.
Adam wished Bella had joined him on his walk. Her presence was a balm but also a distraction from the nagging voice that had lived in his brain for as long as he could remember but was now moving from a whisper to a shout. It was the voice that told him that whatever breeding, and the rules of inheritance, and the imperious insistence of his grandmother, said, he was not cut out for this.
He couldn’t even keep the peace within his own family. What chance did he have managing a sprawling estate? Going through the accounts was like trying to learn to read Greek with his eyes closed. And the in-tray in the office of letters and bills and goodness knows what else made him thank the heavens for his business partner back in Edinburgh a thousand times over. Ravi was an organisational genius. And Adam was a good horticulturalist and a decent designer. They both knew they needed the other. Here he was expected to be able to do it all, and that was before he’d even got started on the layers of responsibility and public duty that seemed to come with ‘being the laird’. The family, the estate, the village – they were all spokes on the wheel. Adam was the hub. If he failed, nothing else held together.
From what he remembered of his grandfather, and, to a lesser extent, his father, being the laird involved a lot of wearing tweed and shooting game, neither of which really appealed to a man who’d scandalised his grandparents quite enough by briefly going vegetarian as a teenager.
He walked around the outside wall of the house and up towards the fields, but rather than continuing up the hill, he followed the line of the castle wall. This was a walk he’d done a thousand times with his father. The path split as the wall turned a corner. To the left, taking you further around to the far side of the house, there was another wall, with a small wooden door cut into it. To the right, the path went up hill along the coastline to the north, and then followed the clifftop around to the large headland that enclosed the sea loch and protected the house and the village from the elements.
He turned to the left, following the wall down to the old wooden door – the gateway to the castle’s walled kitchen garden. The garden had been established in the 1800s by the son of the seventh baron, desperate to prove that modern gardens and imported tropical plants weren’t the exclusive preserve of those fancy English lords and ladies. The pineapples hadn’t lasted long, but the garden had thrived.
Adam stopped with his hand on the round metal handle. This garden had been his father’s pride and joy. It was where Adam had first put his hands into the soil. It was where he’d learned about the rhythms of the seasons and the thousand and one ways in which a novice gardener could conspire to kill the things they planted, and the thousand and one ways nature had of surviving despite his interventions.
This garden was also where Adam and his father had spent most of their days in those strange disjointed weeks and months after his mother had gone. They hadn’t talked. Adam’s father had never been a great talker, but they’d worked side by side, planting, weeding, thinning out, tying up, and eventually harvesting. The cycle of the year from spring into summer and then autumn had carried them through the confusion and the emptiness that his mother’s departure had left in her wake.
His hand rested on the worn wood of the doorway, warm under his touch, compared to the cool stone of the wall. When Adam thought of his father this was where he pictured him, peering at a seed tray with one pair of glasses on his nose and another resting on the top of his head, or kneeling next to a bed pulling out interlopers and chatting absent-mindedly to his seedlings as he did so.
If Adam never opened this door then he could keep that picture alive. His dad could be always here, pottering in his garden, just about to take a break and pop inside for a cup of tea. Adam removed his fingers from the handle and turned back towards the house.
Bella left Darcy to gather herself, and made her way back into the kitchen. Flinty was sitting at the island, cup of tea in front of her, eyes closed and head resting on hands. She looked up, rearranging her glasses, and smiling briskly when she heard Bella come in.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Absolutely fine, dear.’
Bella raised an eyebrow.
‘Maybe a little bit tired.’
Bella had already worked out that ‘a little bit tired’ was the closest she was going to get from Flinty to any acknowledgement of illness or fatigue.
‘Why don’t you go home? You’ve been here all hours.’ Bella smiled. ‘And people do keep telling me that you’re retired.’
‘Oh fiddle faddle. What would I do at home?’ Flinty took a deep breath in. ‘Right. Veronica thinks lunch is an unnecessary indulgence but I should get on with something for you and Darcy. And Adam, if he’s coming back.’
Finally something Bella could help with. ‘I can do that. I told Darcy I’d make her something anyway. You finish your tea. If you won’t go home and rest you can at least take a proper break here.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘You don’t know where things are.’
‘Well you can sit there and tell me.’
‘It’s really less bother for me to do it.’
They were both being super polite but there was a definite hint of territorial defence in Flinty’s attitude. Bella tried a different tack. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told Darcy I’d get her something before I asked you. But, now I have, I feel like I should follow through, you know.’
Flinty hesitated. The appeal to her sense of duty seemed to be working.
‘I don’t want to put you to any bother.’
‘It’s just lunch for Adam and Darcy.’
‘Aye well, I suppose it’s not for the lady,’ Flinty muttered.
Bella grabbed the hint of acquiescence. ‘What were you planning on making?’
Flinty’s expression suggested that she knew she was beaten. ‘Well there’s eggs in the back pantry, and bacon in the fridge I think.’
‘Right. Start me off with where the back pantry is.’
‘On the left down there.’
She followed Flinty’s directions, and found the walk-in larder. A larder that truly had the potential for greatness, and in reality seemed to mostly house tinned soup, baked beans and some jars covered in a layer of dust and cobwebs that made her feel slightly terrified of checking the use by dates.
She could almost carry out an archaeological analysis of the shelving. At the back of the pantry was the stuff that looked like it hadn’t been touched in years. She made a definite decision to steer well clear of that. Then there were the tins. Again there were a lot that definitely weren’t super recent, but that was fine for cans, wasn’t it? It took her back to childhood and her nan’s famous ‘mystery teas’ which were the contents of whatever the supermarket down the road was selling off because the label had, at some point, become disassociated from the tin. Peaches in sugar syrup and mushroom soup, for example.
Darcy probably needed something a little more obviously edible.
Flinty appeared behind her. ‘I should clear this out really. They had a girl came in for a bit after I retired. She wasn’t use nor ornament.’ She started systematically sorting through tins on the farthest shelf.
‘You’re supposed to be having a break,’ Bella reminded her.
Flinty didn’t budge. ‘Veg are in the baskets.’ She picked up a carton from the shelf beside her. ‘And I’ve got your eggs.’
Bella followed Flinty’s instruction to find big ripe red tomatoes and a punnet of smaller tomatoes too, flecked with streaks of orange and yellow.
‘From Hugh’s garden, those little ones.’
‘Hugh at the shop?’
Flinty nodded.
‘Have you known them a long time?’
‘A wee while.’ Flinty laughed. ‘Hugh’s my brother.’
Bella was still working out the interrelationships of the village. ‘And he’s married to Anna?’
‘Aye.’
Bella tried to make those details stick in her head. ‘Well his tomatoes look wonderful.’
‘Used to grow our own here. The laird, the old laird, had green fingers.’
‘Well so does Adam.’ Her brain served up a flash of the orange grove in Malaga, how at peace he’d been among the trees and flowers, and how certain that their place was together.
‘I was forever scrubbing soil from under that one’s nails.’
Bella surveyed the rest of the pantry. At the very edge of the middle shelf was the carrier Flinty had brought back from the village shop a day earlier. Bread, potatoes, onions, and more fresh veg. Bella could picture Flinty staring into the pantry with the same trepidation she was feeling and just giving up and buying her own stuff and keeping it separate.
It wasn’t going to be a fancy lunch, but it would be good honest cooking. She grabbed the tomatoes and a small onion from Flinty’s bag. Some fresh herbs would be good, but she could make do. Bella carried her haul through to the kitchen and added mushrooms, bacon and cheese from the fridge to her pile.
She sliced two rashers of bacon into thin strips quickly and professionally. Knife skills were a point of pride for any professional cook and hers had been honed by years and years of vegetable prep in her first kitchen on the lowest rung of the ladder. Her boss had been insistent that anyone who even aspired to call themselves a chef ought to be able to prepare a perfect omelette, and equally insistent that the definition of ‘perfect’ was individual and specific. Some people swore by egg whites alone. Bella had quickly concluded that those people were idiots without the palate or discernment to appreciate the warm inviting colour the yolk brought to the finished dish, or, more importantly, the rich, more luxurious flavour. Bella tried, at her grandma’s instigation, to approach everyone she met with an open mind and no judgement. People who preferred egg white omelettes tested that ethos close to its limit.
Bella cracked her eggs into a small bowl and added salt and a twist of black pepper before she beat them together.
Aaaa-choo!
The noise behind her made Bella start. ‘Bless you!’ she laughed.
‘What?’
She turned towards Flinty. ‘Bless you. Because you sneezed.’
Her companion looked utterly blank for a moment and then nodded. ‘Right. Yes. Of course I did. You’re using black pepper aren’t you?’
‘Oh sorry. Are you allergic or something?’
Flinty shook her head. ‘No. No. You carry on.’
Bella tossed her bacon into the pan where it sizzled satisfyingly, and left it to crisp up while she chopped her onion and mushrooms. There were a thousand and one techniques for chopping onions without weeping. None of them worked. The only thing for it was to power through. Bella zoned out from everything else around her, absorbed by the rhythm of her knife against the board.
‘You’re good with that knife.’
‘Thank you.’
Bella checked on her bacon, and turned back to her board. The long chef’s knife she’d been using to chop the mushrooms wasn’t lying on the board. She looked back behind her. Had she taken it with her when she’d checked on the pan? Of course not. She knew better than to wander around a kitchen with a blade in her hand.
‘What are you looking for?’ Flinty asked.
‘My knife.’ Bella tapped her board. ‘It was right here.’
Flinty looked around and pointed to the worktop at the far side of the kitchen. ‘That knife?’
And there it was, several feet away. When had she been over there? ‘Did you…?’
Flinty laughed. ‘Not me. Poppy.’
‘Who?’
‘Poppy.’ Flinty shrugged. ‘I mean we don’t know she’s called that, but Darcy said she ought to have a name.’
Even in a castle there couldn’t be a whole other person clattering around that Bella hadn’t noticed. ‘Who’s Poppy?’
‘The ghost.’ Flinty seemed entirely matter of fact about this. ‘Well one of them. The only one that really bothers us anyway.’
‘A ghost moved my knife?’
‘Aye. She likes moving things. I don’t know why. Must be boring being dead though.’
Bella shook her head. She hadn’t been born yesterday. ‘Nice try. Messing with the new girl.’
‘I’m serious. It was her that sneezed too. She does nay like black pepper.’ Flinty looked unconcerned. ‘That’s probably why she moved your knife. She’s not happy with you making her all sneezy.’
Flinty didn’t sound like she was joking, which was impressive. Bella would not have suspected her as an accomplished prankster. She decided to play along. ‘So, you’re saying the castle is haunted? Seriously?’
‘Well it’s very old. More surprising if it wasn’t, I’d say. When Darcy first came here she got this woman in to wave sage about the place and commune with the spirits and that. She reckoned Poppy was a restless Victorian girl. But I don’t know. Ghosts are always Victorian aren’t they? Especially little girls.’ Flinty shrugged. ‘She don’t mean any harm so we let her be and accept that sometimes your shoes won’t be where you left them.’
‘Okaaaay.’ Bella tipped the now perfectly crisp bacon into a bowl and tossed the onion, and then the mushrooms, into her pan while she added a dash of milk to her eggs and grated a small block of cheese. Once the mushrooms had browned ever so slightly she added the bacon back in, and it was time for the eggs.
This was the pure joy of making an omelette. Through honing and repetition she’d come to understand why so many thought it was the bedrock of good cooking. It came together quickly but every single ingredient needed to be cared for and added at precisely the right moment. Nobody wanted weird flavoured scrambled egg. They wanted something smooth and slightly unctuous. You could add a twist more pepper at this point if you chose. Bella often did, but that was when she was cooking in kitchens not already occupied by a curiously anti-seasoning spirit.
Bella tipped her beaten egg into the pan. The temptation now was to mix and prod and poke but you had to resist, just for the first minute or two. She tilted and swirled the pan to spread the mixture evenly over the bacon and mushrooms, but she didn’t stir. To Bella’s mind, if you’d beaten and seasoned your egg well enough to start with you had to keep the faith and simply let the heat of the pan work its magic.
And finally the cheese. Another bone of contention. Some people flipped the whole omelette, like a pancake, added the cheese right at the end after cooking both sides, and then folded the omelette to create a cheesy pocket within the half circle of fluffy eggy loveliness. Bella preferred to sprinkle her grated cheese onto the top side of the omelette just at the last moment while the egg on top was still slightly runny, and then fold, without flipping at all, and trust the heat of the pan to cook the final few millimetres of egg and melt the cheese into the whole.
It was when she’d worked that out that she’d finally understood what her old boss meant about every chef having their own individual idea of the perfect omelette. Finding her own hadn’t been a test so much as a rite of passage. Less than ten minutes, the most basic ingredients and a lot of care and love. That was the perfect omelette.
‘That smells good.’ She’d been so lost in the reverie of heat plus ingredients plus care that she hadn’t heard Adam come back in. ‘I’ve never really seen you cook before.’
‘I was cooking when you met me.’
‘You were fending off half a stag do when I met you.’
‘While making Crêpes Suzette at table.’
‘I was too mortified to pay attention to the cooking.’
She kissed the top of his head as he took a seat next to Flinty at the island. ‘And I thought you were hypnotised by my beauty.’
He smiled slightly. ‘Sure. Let’s say it was that.’
Bella slid the omelette onto a plate and placed it in front of him.
‘For me?’ he asked.
‘No, actually for Darcy, but she’s not down yet so I can make her another.’
He looked at the omelette. ‘I’m not sure how hungry I am.’
She knew she was staring at him. Since they’d arrived at the airport and Flinty had delivered her dagger to their plans, Bella had become fixated on Adam’s face, checking it for signs of distress, or perhaps for signs of hope. Right now he simply looked exhausted. ‘You still have to eat.’
‘Fine.’ He took his first mouthful and closed his eyes for a second. ‘That’s really good. Thank you Bel.’
‘That’s OK. I enjoyed making it.’
‘I saw. You were in your own world.’
Flinty cleared her throat. Bella realised, with a slight start, that she was still in the room, sitting right there, but somehow fading into the background. ‘I was telling your lass how we used to grow a lot of our own vegetables here. Well your father did.’
Adam nodded, but Bella saw his jaw tense a little.
‘You used to love that garden. You should get out there.’
He shook his head. ‘Too much else to deal with at the moment.’
By the time Bella had made omelettes for Darcy, and Flinty – in the face of much insistence that Flinty was fine and didn’t need Bella to do for her – and for herself, the atmosphere in the kitchen was almost convivial. Darcy looked brighter for having eaten. Adam felt slightly more himself. For a few minutes, at least, everyone was getting along, everyone was fed, and nobody was asking him to do anything.
‘So this is where you’re hiding?’ Veronica’s voice cut through the companionable quiet in the kitchen.
‘Not hiding.’ He tried to smile. ‘Just having lunch.’
‘Well thank Flinty, but it’s time to get back to work.’
‘Nothing to do with me,’ Flinty explained. ‘All Bella’s handiwork. Very nice to be waited on for a change.’
Adam saw his grandmother’s jaw twitch slightly. ‘Miss Smith made lunch?’
Bella nodded. ‘Do you want some? I can whip up another omelette, no problem.’
‘No thank you.’ She hadn’t moved her gaze from Adam for a second. ‘And the laird needs to get back to work.’
That was exactly what he needed to do. ‘Actually we were about to go out.’ He grabbed his fiancée’s hand, silently willing her not to give away that this intention was news to her. ‘I want to show Bella a bit more of the estate.’
Fortunately she nodded enthusiastically. ‘Great. Maybe I’ll get a bit further with a proper guide.’
She followed him down the corridor. ‘You know I can’t actually walk very far, don’t you?’ she whispered.
Oh damn. Of course. ‘That’s OK. We don’t have to go far.’
‘Just looking for a break?’
‘Something like that.’ He pulled her towards him. ‘And some time with you.’
Five minutes later, she was waiting for him by the kitchen door, turning one way and then the other to show off her new footwear.
‘You got wellies?’
‘After my little misadventure I figured I needed to start dressing for the Highlands.’
‘Very nice.’
He took her hand and led the way outside.
‘You were so lucky to grow up here.’
He was. He couldn’t deny it.
‘Darcy said the castle used to be open to visitors.’
He nodded. ‘They closed for Covid.’ He hadn’t got a straight answer out of his grandmother about why they’d never reopened.
‘Will we open it up again?’
The ‘we’ made Adam pause. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘It’s so stunning. It would be an amazing wedding venue. Have you ever thought about…?’
Adam shook his head.
‘Sorry.’ She stroked his arm. ‘Getting ahead of myself. We probably won’t even be here that long.’
Would they be? ‘One thing at a time,’ he suggested.
They made their way towards the gate. Bella stopped by the three small steps a few feet away from the back door. ‘So is that the dungeon?’ She peered down.
‘It’s not really a dungeon, more a sort of cellar,’ he explained. ‘With iron bars on the exit.’
‘The nearest my childhood got to that was the time out corner at nursery school.’
‘We don’t send people to the dungeon. Not for like centuries.’ He hesitated. ‘I think Hugh ended up sleeping in there the night before my dad’s wedding to Darcy, but that was just cos he didn’t want go home and have Anna see how drunk he’d got.’
They walked slowly away from the castle, ignoring the path up to his father’s garden, and following the road towards the burn. ‘So, are you going to show me the famous Low Bridge then?’
Why not? That was as good a reason to say he’d chosen this route as any. The riverbank dropped in a shallow slope at first, before getting steeper down to the stream. Adam stopped. The Low Bridge was the heart of Lowbridge. It was the very reason the village, and by extension the castle, were here at all. It was the only crossing point on the Crosan for centuries, until the modern road bridge was built roughly sixty years ago.
‘Oh.’ Bella came to a halt alongside him. ‘It doesn’t look like much.’
She was right. The bridge had always been the main route from the estate to the village. As an infant he’d been pushed over here in his buggy by his mother, or by Flinty, almost daily. He’d run across here as a child to play with his village schoolfriends. And visitors to the house had parked across the river and walked over, getting their first glimpse of Lowbridge Castle from the riverside.
He’d been told that the bridge was in need of some TLC, but this needed more than a lick of paint. It needed knocking down and rebuilding from scratch. It was a simple wooden bridge, probably not that different from the first crossing ever built here, but it was wide enough to get a buggy or a wheelchair across, or a quad bike if you really wanted to. Nobody in their right mind would try that now. Adam didn’t fancy trying the rotting structure himself and he could see perfectly well that the drop was no more than two feet and the river only a few inches deep.
Bella took his hand. ‘A bit of paint, a few new boards?’
‘It needs replacing.’
‘OK, well how hard can that be?’
The rational part of Adam’s brain said not hard at all. He was a professional landscaper after all. He could get the materials at cost and probably even lure a few mates over to do the work for beers and a slap-up dinner. The rational part of Adam’s brain was holding on to the controls with its fingertips though. The other part, the part that wanted to run back to Edinburgh and deny that any of this was anything to do with him, was telling him that a broken down bridge wasn’t just a bridge at all. It was a symbol of everything that was wrong here. Adam wasn’t the laird. His father had been Laird of Lowbridge, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before that. They were proper lairds. They had tweeds and elbow patches and grown-up beards. Adam wasn’t them. The bridge was falling down. The estate needed someone at the helm who wasn’t falling apart themselves. It needed someone with ideas, someone who could make plans, someone who wanted to be here.