Chapter One #2
“The laird of Kinloch is just a farmer and a herder of livestock. He lives in a ruined tower. This is a poor glen. The laird is called MacGregor. He raises cattle and sheep and makes only the legal allotment of whisky. At least, that is what he reports to the government. None of these Highlanders can be trusted where whisky is concerned. I expect you will meet the farmer laird since you will be teaching in the glen school. Fiona, you might help me out a bit while you are here,” he said, stopping.
“How so?” She bent to scratch the dirt from the surface of a flat rock.
“Listen for any mention of this laird of peat reek, a rogue smuggler. We want to find that sly lad.”
“Peat reek? Is that a poorer variety? The whisky we tasted at Mrs. MacIan’s was very nice, I thought. Strong, but mellow.”
“Excellent brew. The peaty flavor is admired in a good Highland whisky. But do keep your ears open and let me know if you hear anything I should know.”
“I doubt I shall encounter any smugglers, but if I do, you shall be the first to know. Oh, look!” She knelt, dusting a bit of rock clean with a cloth pulled from a skirt pocket. “An ammonite fossil.” She pointed to a curled shape impressed on the rock surface.
“A what?”
“Ammonite—an extinct marine mollusk, rather like a cephalopod. Oh, look, there are several here!” She rubbed at the rock with a gloved finger, exposing curled, striated forms as big as her thumbnail.
“I believe there may be a massive limestone bed beneath this hill, with deposits of greywacke along with the Old Red Sandstone layer, and liberal evidence of a great ancient flood. I cannot wait to tell James about this!”
“Your geological babble is lost on me, dear lass, but your twin will love it. Fiona, come along now. I must get back soon. I have a dinner engagement at Auchnashee. You definitely must explore this hill with James once he returns to the Highlands.”
“James and Elspeth will be in Edinburgh for another month or so.” Her twin, James MacCarran, Viscount Struan, was an accomplished geologist and professor of natural sciences, while Fiona considered herself an amateur with a keen interest in fossils.
“He must finish his lecture series for the university before he and Elspeth return to Struan House.”
“Ah, true, Elspeth was insistent that their expected little one be born in the Highlands. Well, Struan House is just a few hours from here, so you will see them now and then once they are back—if you are still in the glen.”
“I plan to be. And you, I imagine, will be too busy to visit any of us. Thank you for coming with me today, but please do not feel obligated to keep watch over me.”
“Ah, you know I will if I can. For now, I have a good deal of work to do with the new tax laws in effect. Smuggling continues at full pace along this loch, despite the new regulations that locals want to deny.”
“I thought the new laws might make your work easier.” She stood, brushing her skirts.
“Not as much as I hoped,” Patrick said. “Taxes were lowered to make it less tempting to smuggle whisky out of the Highlands. The government also recruited hundreds more revenue officers to catch offenders, and penalties are much stiffer. If a still is discovered and dismantled but no one claims it, the laird of that land is responsible, no matter what. But they continue, regardless.”
“I suspect Highlanders enjoy the adventure of free trading too much to stop. Highlanders tend to ignore authority.” She smiled, for she had always enjoyed the vein of rebellion that ran through Highland history and Highland character.
“At any rate, you will be busy, and must not worry about me. I may visit you down the loch, though, since you are staying at Eldin’s new hotel. ”
“He offered me a free room at Auchnashee, and invited me to dine with him and some Edinburgh businessmen tonight. Oh, did I mention Eldin has decided to become a revenue officer?”
“What!” Fiona stared, astonished. “Nicholas MacCarran, Earl of Eldin, stooping to regular work? I cannot imagine it. He is too concerned with his comfort, and too arrogant to care.”
“I was surprised, I admit. He was not always that way, but after his family perished, he was never again the Cousin Nick we knew as children. But a law officer? That I did find hard to believe.” He shrugged.
“But it is a formal title only. He paid a fat sum for it, and will probably never ride out. He wants some authority here, and the Crown needs money, so he applied for the rank and paid the fee.”
“It is another reminder not to trust the Earl of Eldin.” Fiona sighed.
“I liked him well when we were children,” Patrick said. “But if we cannot meet the conditions in Grandmother’s will, then Eldin inherits the bulk of the estate, and we four will have next to nothing.”
“We will find a way. Patrick, go on ahead. I want to gather a few more fossils along the hill before I go back to Mrs. MacIan’s.”
“MacDuff arranged to take me down the loch by boat so I should meet him soon.” Patrick chuckled. “A gentleman who escorts a lady on a nature walk is rude to abandon her on a hillside.”
“But a little brother can leave his big sister if she insists he go.” Smiling, she waved him onward, then knelt on damp turf to brush dirt from a rock that looked promising.
“I doubt you will discover what you truly need here, Fiona.”
“Fairies to satisfy the will? They are not thick upon the ground here, true.” She laughed ruefully.
“I wonder how I can ever fulfill Grandmother’s requirement to sketch fairies from life—of all things!
—for the book James is piecing together from her notes.
She approved of my charitable teaching work, and I will continue that regardless.
But finding fairies, along with her odd requirement that I marry a wealthy Highland husband, seems just mad. ” She sighed.
“I have been thinking,” Patrick said. “We could contest the will—a mad old woman, however well-meaning, may have left a will in her dotage that is not coherent. I will speak with our solicitor about it.”
“But if we do not satisfy the clauses, everything goes to Eldin. It is an extraordinary situation.” Fiona stood again.
“We can manage without a fortune if we must,” her brother said. “Easier than finding spouses with fairy blood, or sprites to sketch, and so on. Invent some fairy portraits and have done with it,” he urged. “No one would ever know.”
“I would know, so I have to try. You’ve said little about what the will asked of you, and William has not said much either.”
“I have no intention of marrying a forest sprite, or whatever impossible creature my demented grandmother thought I should find,” Patrick replied.
“Do not frown so! I honor her memory, but it is not easy to agree with her will. Think of it. William is a physician. He could be labeled a quack if he went about collecting spells for fairy medicine, or whatever he was assigned.”
“But James did manage to find a fairy bride. Was it a coincidence that he fell in love with a darling lass with a legend of fairy blood in her family? They say the MacCarrans have fairy blood too.”
“Why look for more if it is already there? James thinks Grandmother wanted us to refresh the fairy bloodline or some such lunacy. I mean to look into things to see if we can oppose the will and end this nonsense. First I must determine if we have a case, then everyone must agree. It would save you searching under rocks for fairies.”
“I am searching under rocks no matter what for ammonites and trilobites, for extinct arthropods and plant forms. And I intend to stay in the glen to teach. The Edinburgh Ladies’ Society is relying on me. No one else could take this assignment.”
“No one else wanted it,” he pointed out.
“I do not know why. It is such a lovely place,” she said, glancing around.
“Steep, rugged terrain rife with smugglers and rascals. And rocks.”
“But Patrick, if I stay in Edinburgh, I am just another spinster attending charity meetings and social events and finding dull ways to fill the time. The charitable work is interesting. It allows me to travel the Highlands to have some adventure in my life.”
“You will never end a spinster, lass, I guarantee it,” her brother said. “What does your group call itself—the Edinburgh Ladies’ Society for the Betterment of the Gaels? Haughty as it sounds, you all do good work.”
“The ladies are genuinely dedicated to helping Highlanders.”
“And delighted to have an unattached lady fluent in Gaelic who is willing to climb into the remote hills to teach English, thus allowing the other ladies to stay home and find safer ways to pass the time.”
“Some do what I do. The Deputy Lord Provost’s daughter, for one.
Miss Graham—well, not unattached now, since she found her Highlander.
That same notorious smuggler you mentioned earlier.
” She smiled, thinking of her friend Ellison Graham, who had indeed made a good match to a fascinating, devastatingly handsome Highlander called Lord Darrach.
“That smuggler was a notorious lawyer, as I recall,” Patrick said with a chuckle.
“She would never have met him if she had not spoken Gaelic, you know. Besides, Patrick—if not for the distraction of the charity work, I would have given in to grief after Archie’s death.”
“I know. But not you, lass. You are too strong.”
“Am I?” Fiona shook her head. Very nearly a widow, in the end she was just a deeply bereaved third cousin.
Yet Archie had been everything to her, and they had talked of marriage, even elopement.
But she had been young, and now she was determined never to make the mistake again of loving someone so completely that she would give up her life for him, only to lose him suddenly.
She should have learned to avoid hurt when her parents had died, leaving her and her brothers at such young ages.
Well, now she knew better and had steeled her heart against loving too deeply.
“Best go and meet your boat,” she urged. “I promise to return to Edinburgh by summer, with or without fairy drawings.”
“What about the required wealthy Highland husband?” Patrick lifted a brow. “Though that is a contradiction in terms.”
“We will not find one in this poor glen, that is true. I can think of many qualities more desirable than wealth in a husband—but I may yet resign myself to spinsterhood.”
“You are a lovely and intelligent lass. And you have rejected every suitor.”
Not Archie, she thought, glancing away. “Most are only interested in what I might inherit from Grandmother. Ironically, we all lack a fortune until the conditions are met.”
“Nonsense, however well-meant, is still nonsense.”
A breeze stirred her bonnet ribbons. She looked around. “It is so beautiful and mystical here that I could believe any legend about this place.”
“Not I, dear sister. How much longer will you be on this hillside?”
“A little while yet. It is a good area for fossils. They could help prove the new theory that a catastrophic flood brought primeval waters as high as these mountains.”
“I cannot imagine.” He groaned. “Ancient marine insects on mountaintops! But be careful, Fiona. Glen Kinloch is not all pretty legends. You need to be aware of that.”
“I am, sir. Go!” She kissed his cheek, and he turned to descend, waving a hand.
Retrieving a small hammer and chisel from her canvas knapsack, Fiona knelt to angle the chisel point against a rock, smacking the handle with a hammer.
Her grandmother’s intentions were not entirely demented, she thought as she wrapped the dislodged stone chunk in a cloth and tucked it in the canvas sack. She would be happy to marry a Highland man who possessed a title and fortune, provided he was a good man with a good heart.
Yet her grief over losing her fiancé and distant cousin lingered.
Eight years earlier, Archibald MacCarran had died a hero on a bloody field at Quatre Bras, a day just before Waterloo.
Her brother James had been injured in the same battle.
In the aftermath, Fiona still carried the hidden scar of a broken heart.
But she had come to accept that she had lost a cherished dream of a husband, family, and home in the Highlands. Perhaps Grandmother had wanted Fiona to have happiness again, but no magical solution would bring that bliss back into her life. Love’s magic was gone.
She hefted the hammer and chisel again, resuming her work. A little while later, she felt a strange prickling along the back of her neck, as if someone were watching her. She paused and heard a sound like a crisp footfall.
“Who’s there?” She looked around. “Patrick?”
Her voice echoed. Shivers ran down her back.
Though she dismissed such things in conversation, secretly she believed in the possibility of haunts, bogles, fairies, and the like.
She was not always the practical, calm, capable, dull girl most thought her to be.
Though she had tucked dreams and hopes away, she had an active imagination.
Suddenly the deserted hillside seemed eerie. Fiona shivered, recalling Patrick’s stories of rascals in the hills. Seeing something glint among the rocks, she startled. But it was only a pretty white quartz crystal, common in limestone and sandstone deposits.
She had work to do. Lifting her knapsack, she walked up the slope.