Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Sorrel spent the next morning in the castle’s records room, searching for references to Emma Gordon. Since she and Tam had found the letter and the old ribbon, Emma had been on her mind. Who was this woman, and why would those references to her be hidden at the Balhennie Inn?
It was weird, not being at work. Sorrel was used to being busy; she’d run her business with Simon for years, and the fact that everything was on a freeze while they worked out whatever was going to happen next was strange.
Bluebell hadn’t replied to the email yet. Sorrel suspected that she’d read it, because Bluebell was Bluebell, and that meant that she was neat-minded and obsessive; she wouldn’t ordinarily have let an email go unanswered even for an hour. Clearly, her sister was still unsure about what to say.
Sorrel had texted Heather to ask how Bluebell was, and Heather had replied,
She’s okay. Quiet. Leave her be for a while.
Okay, she’d replied.
Sorrel felt as though she was in a cocoon, muffled from the world outside Skye while she transformed.
Though, if she was honest, she had no idea what she was transforming into – only that she currently felt as if she was in the stage where a caterpillar disintegrated into nebulous goo.
Still, she did feel a sense of relief after telling her sisters everything – perhaps caterpillars also felt relief when they gave up their bodies to the mush.
There was a relief in letting go, even if you didn’t know what was going to happen next.
So, given the opportunity to follow a mysterious side quest, Sorrel was only too happy to put her worries about Simon, Bluebell, her sisters and the business to one side, and jump into investigating Emma Gordon.
She’d promised to go over to meet Dom at his boat later that morning and to give him some renovation advice, even though boats weren’t her speciality, but she had an hour or two before then.
There wasn’t that much about her on the internet; Sorrel had already done a cursory search and found the basic facts of Emma’s life.
She had been born in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, in 1848, the illegitimate daughter of a washerwoman and an unknown father.
She’d spent her childhood in and out of the poorhouse; she hadn’t been to school, and must have taught herself to read and write, considering that she would have needed some literacy skills in her fraudulent activities.
Despite all of Emma’s disadvantages, Sorrel loved the fact that she had apparently used her striking beauty and charm to defraud merchants, aristocrats, landowners and charitable donors with her elaborate schemes.
What was also truly fascinating to Sorrel was that, upon her release from prison around 1900, Emma Gordon adopted a new identity in the United States and vanished from public record.
That was intriguing. She hadn’t made it to Australia as she’d planned, but she’d still managed to get far away and – what? Start a new life? Sorrel hoped so.
Amongst the general knowledge about Emma that Sorrel could find online, there was nothing about the knotted ribbon; nothing about why anyone would keep an old newspaper article about her in the basement of the Balhennie Inn, and certainly no mention of why the dagger that Emma was supposed to have stolen was stashed away in the fireplace of the same building. The home that Sorrel had grown up in.
The records room turned out to be one of the old bedrooms of the castle in the seldom-used East Wing, which had been repurposed by Uncle James and Aunt Evelinda as a cross between a store room and a library.
Two of the walls of the large, draughty room were given over to antique oak bookshelves, on which large folios, folders and leather-bound record books fought for prominence with battered romance novels, hardback car manuals from the 1970s and various instruction booklets for everything from vacuum cleaners to gas hobs.
The rest of the room was full of boxes and crates.
Claire, the housekeeper, had given her directions for finding the room.
The castle was large enough that, certainly after not being there for ten years, Sorrel could have got lost. There were so many old, narrow staircases that led between floors, and the castle was sectioned off in odd ways.
She’d forgotten that the East Wing was inaccessible from the main corridor that ran along the main ground floor of the castle, or from the first or second floors of the West Wing, where everyone lived, day to day.
Sorrel coughed as she went inside; dust hung in the air like a cloud.
She didn’t know where to start, at first. Claire had told her, as they’d walked over, what might be in there, but she wasn’t sure how many local records had survived from a fire that had ruined a large part of the castle in the early twentieth century.
‘You’ll have to delve in and have a rummage,’ she’d said, as she pointed to the door from outside.
‘Goodness knows what they’ve got in there and what they haven’t.
The Laird and Lady are lovely employers, but they’re not the most organised people in the world.
They’re so busy.’ She shrugged. ‘We all are. Castles don’t run themselves. ’
Diving into some of the older-looking folios, Sorrel found mostly old tenancy records; pages and pages of rents paid, organised in neat columns and completed in a copperplate hand.
The Laird had been the landowner for many years, and Sorrel knew that her uncle still owned some of the rental properties on his land, though many of them had been sold off over time.
She knew that, technically, Uncle James could have asked for rent on the Balhennie Inn, but that he never had: something that Angus generally overlooked when he was complaining about the lairdship and the castle, she thought.
It was interesting to see the old records, but it wasn’t what she was looking for.
She flicked through some old journals belonging to previous housekeepers.
For a while, Sorrel entertained herself with records of old menus, invitation lists for dinner parties, receipts from cleaners and recipes for outdated dishes like meats in aspic, with some more recognisable treats: Beef Wellington, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, potato dauphinoise.
At the back of the second housekeeper’s journal, though, she found an interesting snippet.
21st May 1883. Miss Gordon visited MB. Requested lunch of oysters and lobster, sourced locally.
Sorrel flicked onwards and found another entry.
3rd June 1883. Miss Gordon visited MB. Requested supper of veal. MB requested no breakfast.
‘Miss Gordon. What were you up to?’ Sorrel murmured to herself. She flicked through the rest of the journal, but didn’t find anything else relating to Emma, and, after those journals, the housekeeper appeared to have changed, and covered different time periods in the 1900s and onwards.
It was a known fact that Emma had conned lots of people out of money in the Crofters’ War.
What wasn’t clear was the relationships she’d had with the rich and powerful on Skye at that time.
It seemed that most of the money she’d embezzled was from poor people – farmers trying to make a basic living from the land – but it was also conceivable that she might have made friends with the Balhennies of that time.
The Laird and his family were likely one of the few rich families on the island.
Emma had clearly visited the castle. But who was MB, and what had they and Emma talked about? Had Emma embezzled money from the Laird? And was it significant that the housekeeper had noted that MB, whoever they were, had ‘requested no breakfast’ on the second entry? What did that mean?
Sorrel spent some time working her way through the rest of the records, but couldn’t find anything else that seemed relevant.
After about an hour or so, the dust in the air started to get to her, and she decided to go down to the drawing room for some coffee.
By now she knew that Claire left a pot of coffee there on a tray with a jug of milk and some mugs in the mornings, sometimes with some homemade scones or biscuits.
She would pop down, get a quick coffee, and then head off to the harbour to meet Dom.
She made her way back into the main corridor of the East Wing, closing the door behind her.
It was a little spooky up there, in the part of the castle no one used any more.
Sorrel and her sisters had played there as children, and she’d been guilty of making up ghost stories about what might have lurked in the dim, curtained rooms, behind heavy doors or hiding under dustsheets.
The castle was rumoured to be haunted, like most old buildings were.
At Balhennie Castle, there was the legend of the headless lady, who sometimes appeared silently at the foot of the bed, and the legend of the young Irish harpist who had been tragically killed by invading troops during the Civil War.
Sorrel hadn’t experienced either, but she was open to the idea that the castle could be haunted. There was a definite atmosphere, here and there.
‘Hello, Auntie.’ She had made her way down to the small drawing room, went to her aunt and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Joan was watching what appeared to be a wrestling match on the television.
‘Hello, dear.’ Joan regarded her absently, keeping one eye on the television.
‘Would you like a drink?’ Sorrel asked from a few yards away, where she helped herself to a mug of steaming black coffee and a shortbread biscuit.
‘No, thank you, dear. Makes me run to the bathroom,’ Joan replied, distractedly.
‘Where’s Aunt Chrissie?’ Sorrel asked, instead; her aunts were usually together.
‘We aren’t joined at the hip, you know.’ Aunt Joan sniffed. ‘That might be deleterious for our health, anyway, what with the joys of osteoporosis. She’s in her room, recovering. She had quite an unpleasant experience in the castle café, poor thing.’