Chapter 10
April 19, 1803
One round turret stood to the right, with another shyly hiding behind. Bathed in morning sunlight, the stone had a lovely sheen that set off a moat planted with bluebells. Clara had never imagined anything as dazzling as a castle swimming in a pool of blue-and-purple blossoms.
Mr. Cobbledick moved to unstrap her trunk, but she caught his sleeve. “You have to leave it on your coach, because my maid would never travel in a separate carriage apart from my clothing.”
“Why the dickens not?”
“Because she’s in charge of my garments,”
Clara explained, turning back to the castle. “Isn’t this gorgeous, Mr. Cobbledick? I’ve never seen such a romantic place in all my life.”
“Romantic? I’d say deserted.”
“No, not at all! See that magnificent arched doorway? It’s ajar. People are already up and about. And all the rows of studs! Do you know why they’re there?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, because while the coachman knew everything about horses and coaches, he didn’t seem to have broadened his knowledge beyond that. “It’s so that marauders can’t chop into the door with their axes!”
Clara clasped her hands together, imagining hordes of warlike Highlanders, faces smeared in blue paint, wearing those funny plaid skirts while besieging the castle.
Mr. Cobbledick grunted and jerked his head at the postillion, who jumped back onto one of the lead horses.
“Go on,”
Clara told him. “You’ll be in Inverness in three hours.”
“Aye, but where are the footmen?”
he said, scowling at the open door.
“If they don’t have a housekeeper, the servants may be taking advantage,”
Clara said. Her mother was always complaining about that. “I’ll get everything sorted out.”
“I suppose you have it to rights,”
he said dubiously. “You’d better take this.” He took out the picnic basket. Up in the Highlands, you couldn’t count on an inn popping up every hour or so, offering a hot meal no matter the time of day.
“I’ll take my books as well,”
Clara said. After all, what if the coach overturned? All the books she’d bought in Glasgow and Inverness would fly around the vehicle and get damaged.
Mr. Cobbledick piled all her new novels on a flat stone inside the gate. “They’ll never believe you’re a housekeeper, not when you’ve arrived with a load of books but nary a stitch of clothing.”
“I’m an unusual housekeeper,”
Clara said. Then she added, “I’ll try not to be fired before you return, but you might find me here waiting.”
“I’ll be back in seven hours, mind. If there’s naught but cackling ghosts in residence, don’t go inside.”
With a crack of laughter that would make a fiend proud, he climbed back onto the box.
Clara watched as the coach trundled out of sight before she turned back to the castle. Her cheeks hurt from smiling so widely.
The sunlight was warm, but she was reluctant to take off her elegant French pelisse before she met the inhabitants of the castle.
Housekeeper she might be, but she’d decided that—like Hortense—she needed to make an immediate impression and ensure everyone knew her rank. She had every intention of working hard, but she couldn’t pretend to be someone other than who she was. She would do anything they asked of her, as long as she had breaks to read and have a cup of tea.
Before they set off that morning, she’d put on a white morning dress topped by her favorite pelisse, pale pink with lace trim and tulle at the neck. It had been designed to be worn alongside a lovely straw hat with silk scarves that tied under her chin. Unfortunately, her unruly hair made the hat sit so high on her head that it felt as if it might catch the wind and blow away, so she had left it in her trunk.
There wasn’t a sound to be heard other than a couple of larks trying to outdo each other and from somewhere behind the castle, the rushing of a stream. No, that must be a loch!
“‘Where wild Loch Katrine pours her tide, blue, dark, and deep, round many an isle,’”
Clara whispered. “‘Our fathers’ towers o’erhang her side: the castle of the bold Glengyle!’” Walter Scott was a marvelous poet—but she pushed the thought away. It wasn’t the right moment to be thinking about literature.
She had to find her employers.
Despite her bravado while speaking to Mr. Cobbledick, she felt a bit shy about introducing herself. Ladies were always introduced; they didn’t do it themselves. To be totally honest, she was also slightly unnerved because Walter Scott’s Castle Glengyle and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto housed shrieking ghosts—with “bursts of ghastly laughter,”
as Scott had put it. Yet surely no ghost would dare inhabit an adorable little castle encircled in flowers.
And this was an adventure, after all.
She walked over the narrow pathway that crossed the moat, admiring the flowers blooming on either side. What a marvelous idea to plant blue-and-purple blossoms to simulate water. Not that she knew much about gardening, but there seemed to be two types of bluebells intermixed. Her employers obviously appreciated beauty and elegance.
Squeezing sideways through the heavy door, she found herself in a vaulted corridor that butted into a spiral staircase at the far end, presumably leading up the foremost tower. Halfway down the corridor, an open archway to the left allowed a glimpse of a kitchen.
Clara reached the arch—and her mouth fell open.
It was filthy.
Not at all charming, flowery, or romantic.
She froze, reluctant to walk on grubby bricks in pink silk slippers. The fireplace was massive and clearly in use for cooking, although the spit and the huge iron pot were so blackened by burnt food that she couldn’t imagine how to clean them.
A tall dresser to one side held stacks of plates that seemed to be the same thin, delicate kind that her mother preferred, with gilded rims. Even from here she could tell they were dusty, and the matching teapot had a broken spout. The sink was full of battered pewter plates, the kind that not even servants in her mother’s home ate from. Pots and pans were piled on the floor in one corner of the room.
The tricks her mother’s housekeeper had taught her so that she might instruct future housemaids—to press uncooked dough into nooks and crannies to remove dust, for example—felt thoroughly inadequate to address disorder of this scale.
Were there no servants at all?
The owners of the castle must be as poor as church mice. They should sell the enormous gold-plated soup tureen that sat on top of the cupboard, dulled by grime. Perhaps it belonged to an ancestor, and they couldn’t bear to part with it.
Thank goodness she had her own money, because presumably they were offering poor Mrs. Potts a few ha’pennies a week. No wonder they had sent for a housekeeper from England! Anyone who lived close by would throw an apron at the laird’s head and take herself home.
Turning around, she found that an arch opposite the kitchen opened onto a room that resembled a huge beer barrel. A long table ran down the middle; its legs had a delicate curve and might have been inlaid with veneer, but it was impossible to see through the thick dust. On one wall, a moth-eaten tapestry hung by a single nail.
Where were the maids? The footmen? Who could live like this?
A horrendous thought struck her.
Perhaps the mistress was bedridden and had no idea about the state of her castle. No one was ensuring that the servants did their tasks. Where was the cook, for example? The household ought to be awake and at work by now, preparing morning tea.
An even more terrible thought followed: perhaps the owner of the castle was dead.
Perhaps evil servants left the poor lady to starve. Her body lay upstairs in the dusty bed hangings, her face upturned to heaven, one skeletal hand outstretched toward the bedroom door.
Clara flew out of that castle as if she had wings on her feet. She ran far enough to be out of the castle’s shadow, hand on her pounding heart. Surely that wasn’t the case. Mr. Cobbledick was right: she had too much imagination.
Out here in the bright sunshine, her fear seemed rather foolish. All the same, after she calmed down, she decided that she wasn’t going back inside until someone emerged or Mr. Cobbledick returned. Instead she began following the moat around the left side of the castle.
A rectangular part of the castle was set at an odd angle between the front and rear towers, presumably containing the grimy kitchen and perhaps a walled courtyard. It was thrilling to see narrow slits for arrows and battlements in the towers, alongside regular windows. She’d seen them on Windsor Castle, of course, but that was huge and royal.
This was far more . . . adorable.
Well, on the outside. Not inside.
Up the whole length of the tower were extra rooms, each with a window, sticking out over the moat and held up by buttresses. She was wondering what those rooms could be for when she realized that a stone shaft extended down to the moat and perhaps below into a pit—those were the privies, then.
As she padded around the curve of the rear tower, the sound of the loch grew louder, so she decided to search for its banks. Perhaps it was washing day, and the maids were scrubbing laundry in the water.
Finding her way was easy enough. A narrow footpath wound through a wood carpeted with moss and ferns under towering pine and hazel trees. The moss had crept across the path in places, as if hardly anyone walked on it. High over her head, trees bent to and fro in a breeze she couldn’t feel, casting sunlit spangles over her arms and face.
The whole day felt magical, the best possible adventure she could have wished from the Highlands. The castle had been so very quiet, and this path was even more still. She found herself almost tiptoeing, her slippers making no sound.
If this was a fairy story, she would soon meet a prince. Or a stag that could talk. Perhaps a child who had lost a golden ball. Or the path would lead to a well, and in the well would be a frog—a frog prince—though she couldn’t quite remember the end of that tale. It had been years since her nanny told her the story.
The path ended quite suddenly. She emerged through a leafy archway into bright sunshine as the sound of rushing water leapt to her ears.
And there . . .
Well, there.
He was not a frog.
He was standing in the midst of rushing water. Naked. Completely naked.
And he was so large, like a giant. A Scottish giant.
Clara clapped a hand over her mouth. She should have stopped, run away, respected his privacy.
Instead she stared.
The man had tousled chestnut hair that gleamed with deep red highlights. His eyebrows were thick and darker than his hair, and his face was stubbled in a way that suggested he had risen from bed without bothering to shave.
He was standing with his side to her, and what she could see of his face was spectacular, rough-cut and masculine, with a strong jaw. Her eyes drifted down to bulging shoulders that rippled as he flicked a fishing rod, then down the ridges and valleys of a strong back that tapered to lean hips. Below his waist, she could see taut buttocks and heavy legs set apart to fight the current.
Suddenly he caught a fish on the rod, and the muscles on his back and shoulders tightened as he backed up, pulling on the line. He muttered something that sounded like bollocks, then jerked the rod into the air. At the end of his line, a glistening fish threw drops of water into the sunshine, its scales shining like golden ingots.
“Oh, bravo!”
Clara shouted, not thinking—until she heard herself, after which she wanted to die of shame. Before she could turn away, he pivoted to face her, water frothing around his thick thighs.
My goodness.
He was . . .
Both hands slapped over her eyes, but every detail of Prince George’s Roman vase—that lascivious brute!—came clearly to mind.
Mylchreest was famous for walking across the London stage without a shirt. The Scotsman’s shoulders and chest were twice the size of the actor’s, and he was just as handsome. But the . . . that part of him?
She had suspected the Roman vase exaggerated a man’s parts. This Scotsman was considerably less worrisome.
Less fearsome.
From the point of view of a virgin, anyway.