Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Me Laird?”
A knock at the door of his study and a hesitant voice drew Archer out of the work that he’d been doing.
He glanced up, spotting a nervous-looking steward standing in the threshold. He was young, someone that he knew Marcus had recently hired and took under his wing.
For the life of Archer, he could not remember the young man’s name.
“Come in,” he grunted, nodding his head in the direction of the steward, waiting as the man filed in to stand before him.
The young man’s brow tugged together with obvious anxiety, and he wrung his hands in front of him as he came to stand before Archer.
“I have news, me Laird,” the steward stammered, staring at Archer as if he expected him to lose his cool entirely at any moment.
“News of what?” Archer prompted.
He was trying not to let his foul mood seep into his tone. The young man standing before him seemed nervous enough.
But a bit of his agitation still seeped through, causing the young man to shift nervously on his feet.
It had been days since he had tasted Emilie in the drawing room. And, in those days, she had barely spoken to him.
She wasn’t outright avoiding him, not like she had been after they had kissed. But the few times when he had seen her, she had hardly looked at him, let alone spoken to him.
Archer was at a loss. And now, his days were filled with little more than thoughts of Emilie while subsequently trying to distract himself from those thoughts.
“What do ye mean by a message?” he asked, his voice still a bit more gruff than he’d intended. “Just get on with it.”
The young man nodded, holding his hands out in front of him as he wrung them more forcefully.
“The distillery, me Laird,” the steward stammered. “Someone just arrived from Thrums. They said the whisky’s been ruined.”
Archer had pushed out of his chair before the last word had been spoken, his worries about Emilie driven out of his mind entirely.
“Does Marcus ken?” he asked, crossing the room in strong, purposeful strides.
“Aye, me Laird,” the steward mumbled, trotting to keep up with Archer as they exited the room and made their way down the corridor. “He’s the one who sent me to tell ye. He said he’s readyin’ yer horses and will meet ye in the courtyard in front of the castle.”
Archer nodded. “Thank ye.”
There was nothing else for him to say. Despite his anxiety, the steward seemed to realize the dismissal in Archer’s voice, and he fell behind.
Archer lost sight of him entirely as he turned a corner, walking as quickly as he could toward the front of the castle where the steward had said Marcus would meet him.
Sure enough, the moment that Archer threw open the front doors of the castle, stepping out into the sun, Marcus was sitting atop a horse, waiting for him.
Archer stalked forward wordlessly, grabbing the reins of his own horse from Marcus’s hands and immediately climbing into the saddle.
“Do we ken anythin’ about what’s been done?” Archer growled, kicking his feet to spur on the horse beneath him into a gallop.
“Nae many details,” Marcus explained, speaking loudly so that his voice carried over the wind rushing by as they rode. “The messenger only said that somethin’s happened with the supply and ye needed to come quickly.”
“Do we ken what caused it? Or who?”
Marcus shot him a knowing glance over the neck of his horse, both of them keeping their body low to fight against the press of the air.
“Ye think it was him?” Marcus asked, cocking one brow in question.
Archer couldn’t bring himself to answer, though. Not as the fury rushed up to engulf him.
He just shook his head, bending lower over the neck of his horse and spurring him to go faster. Marcus followed suit, all conversation dying between the two of them as they rushed for Thrums.
Faster than Archer thought possible, the border of the town appeared on the horizon. He noticed the church in the center of town first, the massive spire reaching up into the sky, the cross at the top of it piercing the clouds.
I wonder if Emilie got the chance to see it. If she noticed it when we were ridin’ in the other day.
Archer cursed internally, immediately stamping down on the thought.
How had she done this to him? How had her presence rooted itself so deeply inside of him that he was thinking of her even now?
Days after mostly ignoring him, he still couldn’t get the taste of her, the sound of her, the smell of her out of his mind. Even now, with something pressing weighing so heavily upon him, it was she who continued to pop into his mind.
“Focus,” he growled to himself, the sound of the wind and the thumping of hooves drowning out the word as they rushed into the boundary of Thrums.
In what felt like no time at all, Archer laid eyes on the distillery. Alistair, the man that he paid to watch over and manage the building, was standing outside the front door looking frazzled.
Alerted by the sound of the hooves coming through the streets of the town, Alistair’s eyes flicked up. A mixture of worry and relief filled his face when he realized it was Archer and Marcus who approached.
“Me Laird,” Alistair said the moment Archer’s horse stopped in front of the building. “I sent the messenger for ye as soon as I noticed.”
Throwing his leg over the side of the saddle, Archer climbed off his horse, his boots hitting the packed earth with a thud. Beside him, Marcus did the same, the two of them striding toward Alistair with purposeful steps.
“What happened, Al?” he asked, not wasting any time as they walked toward the door.
Alistair fell into step with them. He was as large as both Marcus and Archer, but where the Laird and his cousin were filled with bulging, well-defined muscles, Alistair was a bit more portly. His belly was a bit more round, a clear side effect of the whisky and ale that he so favored.
“I noticed that one of the barrels was leakin’ this mornin’,” Alistair explained. “And I ken that couldnae be right, because I checked everythin’ last night and it was dry as a bone. Sure enough, when I looked at it, the seal had been popped. And, what’s more, the whisky seemed to have gone sour.”
“It was only one barrel then?” Archer asked, relief rushing through him.
But that relief was short-lived. Just as the trio made it to the shelves of barrels, he knew that it wasn’t just the one.
“There were several that I investigated,” Alistair explained, his voice fading a little as Archer kept walking further into the shelves, inspecting everything that he found.
“Each one of them had had the seal broken. It was only the one that had been leakin’, like someone had been in a hurry when they’d been tryin’ to redo the seal and hadnae been able to get it just right before rushin’ out. ”
“Finally,” Archer growled, staring at the barrel in front of him.
Just as Alistair had described, the seal on the top of the barrel had been broken. Only a practiced eye would have been able to catch it if not for the leak. And Archer knew they were lucky that Alistair had noticed the leak at all.
There was a wet spot on the floor a few barrels away, and Archer walked toward it. He bent, running his finger through the liquid that had spilled out of the barrel and then bringing it to his nose.
The scent was acrid, filled with the distinct burn that he loved so much about whisky. But there was something else there as well.
Something that took away from the sweetness of the liquid, that was sharp and cloying, burning his nostrils and souring his stomach.
“What is it?” he asked Alistair, turning and finding both the manager and Marcus standing only a few feet away.
Alistair shook his head.
“I daenae ken,” he explained. “But whatever it is, there’s nae way of kenin’ if it’s safe to drink. Nae without drinkin’ it ourselves, and that could prove to be very dangerous.”
“Ye think Finlay would poison us?”
Archer couldn’t stop the doubt that had seeped into his tone.
Finlay Cowan was a nearby laird, overseeing Clan MacKay. He and Archer had known each other growing up; their fathers had been neighboring Lairds who had traded with each other to care for their people.
But then Finlay’s father had decided to get into the whisky business as well, something that Archer’s family had been in for years. Clan MacKay had undercut Clan McGregor’s prices, and slowly, over time, the relationship between their two families had fractured.
By the time they were both grown and both Lairds in their own right, Finlay had grown to hate Archer. He resented him, resented the success that Archer still had in the whisky business, despite all the underhandedness from Finlay and his father.
And now, it would seem that Finlay was up to something again.
Archer had no problem believing that Finlay would do something to ruin their supply. But poison them? Make them ill or worse? Kill them?
“Do ye think that he wouldnae?” Alistair said. “Ye trust that enough to stake one of our lives on it?”
The truth was that Archer didn’t put much past Finlay these days. Especially now, as he looked around at his entire warehouse.
How much of it was contaminated? How much of it was for show?
“Do we have any way to tell if all the barrels are tainted?” Archer grunted, turning back to face his stock.
Multiple pairs of footsteps sounded behind him. Marcus and Alistair appeared beside him a moment later.
“We’d have to pop ‘em all open,” Alistair grunted.
“But that would ruin the whisky,” Marcus interjected, turning to stare at the distillery manager.
Archer did the same, his eyes finally peeling off the barrels and landing on the other men at his side.
“I ken,” Alistair groaned. “It’s nae somethin’ I want to do. But it’s necessary. We’ll have to start this stock all over again.”
“Will we be able to get any from our other stores?” Archer asked.
Alistair nodded. “I’ve sent riders out, one to each distillery. There havenae been any that have come back yet. But I suspect this is the only place he was able to hit last night.”