Chapter 24
Smoke had a memory. Even two weeks after the fire, Isla could smell it as they crested the last rise. Not the sharp, living scent of a hearth, but something older, clinging, sunk into stone and soil.
“Strathmore,” she breathed.
Beside her on the trap seat, Edward followed the line of her gaze.
The castle rose from the brow of the hill as it always had, grey walls shouldering against the sky, turrets punching through low cloud. The south-facing front, with its broad sweep of windows and battlements, looked almost untouched at a distance. It was the east wing that broke the illusion.
Charred stone gaped black where a solid wall should have been. Roof beams jutted like broken ribs. One of the smaller towers was simply gone, the ragged stump of it blackened and twisted, as if some giant hand had ripped it away. Isla’s hands tightened on the reins until the leather creaked.
Morrow tossed her head, feeling the change in her grip. Isla gentled the mare automatically, voice catching. “Easy, lass. We are home.”
Home. The word felt wrong on her tongue. The shell of the place was there, but the heart of it … Her chest ached. For a moment she could not breathe.
Edward’s gloved hand rested briefly on her arm. “Do you want to stop?” he asked quietly.
“No,” she said at once. Stopping would mean sitting and looking. She could not bear that. “We go down.”
As they neared it became clear that the stables to the left of the main house were gutted.
Their stone walls still stood, blackened, but the roof had collapsed inward.
The yard in front was churned mud, marked with hoof-prints and boot-prints, and here and there the pale flash of broken timber.
No horses. No familiar heads over stall doors, no snort of greeting.
The main courtyard was busy. Men and women moved in and out of the east wing’s gaping mouth, faces streaked with soot, arms full of salvaged goods.
A wagon stood loaded with furniture and boxes.
Piles of singed bedding steamed faintly where someone had doused them with water drawn from the well. Isla saw her brother before he saw her.
Alistair Drummond, Duke of Strathmore, stood near what had once been the entrance to the burned wing, one arm braced against the scorched stone, the other directing two men who carried a scorched chest between them.
His usually immaculate hair was damp and matted with soot; his fine features, so often drawn with bored disdain, were set in lines of exhaustion. His shirt sleeves were rolled up. His hands were filthy. He looked up at the sound of the trap’s wheels.
For an instant he stared as if he could not quite place what he was seeing. Then his shoulders dropped, and something old and boyish flickered across his face.
“Isla.”
She pulled Morrow to a halt in the middle of the yard and jumped down before Edward could offer a hand. Her boots splashed in a shallow puddle, cold soaking instantly through leather.
“Alistair,” she said. Her throat was too tight to say anything else.
He crossed the distance between them in six long strides and caught her in a sudden, fierce embrace. She stiffened in surprise, then melted into it, arms going around him, nose full of soot and damp wool and something that was simply her brother.
“You should not be here,” he muttered into her hair.
“You wrote to me about this and expected me to stay in London?” she demanded, voice muffled against his shoulder. “You idiot.”
He huffed a laugh, pulled back, and swiped a forearm across his brow, leaving a darker streak. “Well. You look a sight better than I do.”
“She always does,” Edward said dryly.
Alistair glanced past her, expression tightening as he registered the other man.
“Ravenscroft.” The word held a tangle of things, reluctance, debt, wariness.
“Strathmore,” Edward returned, inclining his head. He had stripped off his gloves and coat, slung the latter over the trap rail. Already his hands looked more like a working man’s than a duke’s.
“Did your mother send you to see the ruin you’ve shackled yourself to?” Alistair asked.
“No,” Edward said. “My wife did.”
Alistair’s mouth thinned. He nodded once, grudgingly. “Well. Since you are here, I won’t say no to another pair of hands.”
“You might consider saying please,” Isla muttered.
She took a step toward the ruin, then another. Her feet sank in the mud. The closer she came, the more the smell hit, the sweet, sick reek of things burned almost to the point of melting. Memories rose unbidden.
Running through those corridors with a ribbon flying loose from her hair. Moira chasing her with a hairbrush, laughing and scolding. Her father’s voice booming down from the gallery, calling to the dogs. The north wind whining through cracks in the shutters during winter storms.
A movement to her right caught her eye. Mrs. Macrae, the housekeeper who had been there since before Isla was born, stood near a line of salvaged blankets, directing a younger maid who held an armful of crockery.
“Mrs. Macrae.” Isla crossed to her. “Are you well?”
The older woman turned. Her face was lined, soot-streaked, but her eyes were as sharp as ever.
“Your Grace.” She dropped a curtsy that was more a brief dip of the knees; Isla waved it off and caught her hands instead.
“You are well?” Isla repeated. “No burns? No smoke in the lungs?”
“I lost a bit of eyebrow,” Mrs. Macrae said briskly. “And three pairs of stockings. I will forgive the fire the stockings. They had holes.”
Isla huffed a shaky laugh. “And the others? Mhairi? Tam?”
“We’re living,” Mrs. Macrae said. “That’s more than I thought I’d be saying when the east wall went up like tinder. The staff are scattered in the meantime. Dugald’s taken three of the lads, Mrs. Henderson’s sleeping half the maids on her parlor floor. It’ll do till …”
“It will not do at all,” Isla cut in. “They should not be sleeping on parlor floors while there are beds standing empty in the family rooms. We will bring them all back in.”
Mrs. Macrae frowned. “There’s no space …”
“There is,” Isla insisted. “We have guest suites we never used even when the house was full. We have rooms in the north wing that have been shut since Grandfather died. Open them. Air them. We will cram people two to a bed if we must, but no one from this house is sleeping on straw in a byre while I breathe.”
Mrs. Macrae’s eyes softened. “Aye. There’s your mother in you. She said the same when the old west tower fell in that storm. Very well, then. I’ll set the girls to it.”
“Good,” Isla said. “And if Alistair complains, send him to me.”
“Gladly,” Mrs. Macrae muttered.
She moved off, already barking orders. Isla turned to another cluster: kitchen maids lifting pots into a cart, the scullion boy whose name she should have remembered but would not pretend to know, the old gardener’s grandson holding his grandfather’s tools like trophies.
She asked after each in turn, brushed ash from a cheek here, squeezed a shoulder there.
They straightened as she passed. Some smiled, briefly.
“You should rest,” Edward murmured at her elbow. “You have ridden hard to get here.”
“So have you,” she said. “Yet I see no chaise drawn up for Your Grace to recline in.”
He smiled faintly.
“Ravenscroft!” Alistair called. “If you are done admiring my sister’s managerial skills, there’s a beam here that thinks it’s a tree.”
Edward shrugged out of his coat the rest of the way and slung it over a wagon wheel. “It has been a while since I wrestled with obstinate timber,” he said. “I am out of practice.”
“You can practice on Strathmore’s spine,” Alistair said grimly.
They went inside. Isla stood a moment, watching Edward disappear into the dark of the ruined wing, then turned back to the flow of staff.
She worked for what felt like hours, though the sun had not yet begun to sink when Mrs. Macrae steered a pair of maids toward the north wing and declared that anyone who did not sit and drink something soon would be no use to anyone.
“Aye, that means you, Your Grace,” she added, when Isla protested. “You wan’ to fall over? I’ve no time to pick you up.”
Isla surrendered, finally aware of the way her legs trembled and her throat burned from smoke and talking. She found herself standing near one of the carts, watching as two footmen eased down a large, blackened chest.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Old tea chest from the attics,” one man grunted. “We thought it’d gone, but it were wedged in a corner. Near took skin off my hands getting it out.”
The chest had been painted once, flakes of color clung stubbornly to the charred wood. One side had partially collapsed. The lid hung askew, its hinges warped.
“Set it down,” Isla said. “Gently.”
They obeyed, lowering the chest to a patch of relatively dry ground near the stable wall. Something rattled faintly inside. Curiosity pricked through the fog of exhaustion.
“What was in this?” she asked. “Do you know?”
“Old papers, likely,” one of the footmen said. “Your mother stored things up there. Didn’t like clutter in her parlors.”
Her chest gave a little twist at the mention of her mother. “Let us see.”
She knelt beside the chest. The charred boards creaked under her hand. The lid, already half-loose, came away with less resistance than she expected. She caught it before it toppled, set it aside, and peered in.
Inside, miraculously intact, sat a tin. It had once been a bright thing, painted with flowers. The paint was blistered now, the lid warped at one corner.
“Tin kept what were in it from burning,” the footman said. “Funny, that.”
“Help me get it out,” Isla murmured.
Together they eased the tin from its blackened cradle.
It was hot only in memory now, the metal cooled under her fingers.
The lid, misshapen, popped loose with a twist. Inside lay letters.
Dozens of them, folded and tied in bundles with ribbons gone brown and brittle.
The edges were singed, some bore small holes where the fire had bitten through.
But the ink, where the paper had been protected, was still visible.
The hand was unfamiliar but her mother’s name was clear on some of the outer folds.
Isla’s breath caught.
“Letters,” she whispered. “From …”
The top bundle was addressed in a hand she knew well. Strong, confident strokes. Lady Catriona Macleod, in a slightly younger version of the script that had written padding lists and birthday notes and shopping instructions all through Isla’s childhood.
My dear Catriona,
I find myself writing to you again when I had sworn I would not. Your last letter was …
The words blurred. Isla blinked, refocused. The tone was intimate, but not familiar in the way of her parents’ exchanges. She turned to the bottom. The signature had escaped the worst of the fire, protected by the way the paper had been folded. It sat there, almost smug in its clarity.
Nigel.
Isla stared.
Nigel.
There were many Nigels in England. Only one had ever mattered in her family.
She checked the top of the page again.
Glenmore
A crest, half-charred, stamped faintly at the top. She knew that crest. She had seen it on the corner of pamphlets, on the lid of a carriage once at a distance, on invitations her father had torn in half. Blackwood.
Her mouth went dry.
“Nigel Blackwood,” she whispered. “Duke of Glenmore.”
The name tasted of old anger. She could see him in memory. Tall, silvering hair, a smile like a knife. Arch-enemy. The man her father had called a vulture. And here, in her hands, a letter from him to her mother. Addressed intimately. Folded and preserved.
By who? Not my father certainly. It can only have been kept by mother. Why? Did she love him? Did they … did they have an affair?
The ground seemed to tilt.
“Your Grace?”
The footman’s voice came from far away.
Isla drew in a breath of smoky air and tasted only ash.
“Find Alistair,” she said, her voice very calm. “Tell him I have found something he will want to see.”
She folded the letter with extreme care, as if rough handling might shake its meaning loose, and held it in both hands, as if it might burn her all over again.
Nigel Blackwood, arch-enemy of Strathmore, wrote love letters to my mother.
The fire had not been the first secret to come out of Strathmore’s walls. It would not, she thought, be the last.