Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Rowan arrived at the farm in the middle of what was proving to be a difficult week back to work as chief.
The foreclosure threats from Dick Murdoch had escalated while he had been in hospital, but now all had gone silent.
Even Rowan’s requests to have another bank agent assigned to him had gone largely unanswered.
Their responses had been “Yes, shortly” and “We’re looking into it. ”
Then, since Cole’s brother’s arrival, TJ had set the tempo of the household: anger tangled with proper manners.
Rowan respected the man for his anger; the polite inquiries to his health concerned him.
To be in a fury with Rowan over marrying Cole before anyone in the family had had a chance to meet him?
That, Rowan understood. And believed. Regarding the pleasantness, which did seem contrary to TJ’s God-given temperament, Cole assured Rowan that her brother had been raised to be a gentleman and, every now and again, TJ remembered it. Nurture over nature.
Stepping out of his boxy old all-terrain vehicle, Rowan pocketed the keys and approached the barn that was nestled at the base of the purple-dusted hills, a burn carving through them, the gravel from the freshly mended driveway crunching under his boots.
The barn was on the old MacMillan property north of Glentree; the tall grass pastures and moss-coated rock walls were a testament to the time since the last owner had been there working the land.
MacMillan left in the forties for the Second World War and never returned.
The MacLaoch clan had been caring for it ever since.
The wood building had aged to a silvery gray matching the sky that morning.
Mist hung low as the burble and splash of the stream filled the air.
Double-A, who had been Uncle Jacky’s right-hand man when he was in the chief’s seat, stepped out from inside the partially open barn door. He gave Rowan a grin and stubbed out his cigarette in the gravel before coming up to him, hand outstretched.
“Ye all right?”
“Aye, good, and ye?”
“Good. Good.” He stood there, and Rowan waited with him. Then, as if realizing he’d invited Rowan to him, that he was in charge of the moment and not his chief, he added, “Glad ye’ve come.”
“Me too. It’s good tae see you.” Rowan made a point to look around him. To the barn, to the cars parked on gravel, then back to him. “What’s going on here? I’m worried.”
That made Double-A chuckle and reach back toward the barn door.
“No worry, Guvna.” He mimicked a Cockney accent; then in his learned Scots: “Nae more worries. We got that little problem you had solved.”
“Which one?”
“Ye’ve more than one?”
“Aye, so I have.”
Double-A considered. “That Mickey bloke come back?”
“Him? Nae. He’s in a nonextradition country after seeing…Cole.”
Double-A nodded, happy with the answer, but also: “I’m sorry I missed it. I would have been there, had I known.”
“It’s all right, Alex,” Rowan said, skipping the nickname to indicate his seriousness. “I know that. And I’m glad you and Holly weren’t there—it was a bloody mess.”
“I dinnae wish for another skirmish, but I’ll not miss the next one, I promise.”
Rowan gave him a reassuring smile. “I believe, ye, Uncle. Now, tell me, why am I here this early?”
Double-A grinned before he pushed against the sliding door.
It rattled and complained as the old oak panel moved to the side and slid to a stop with a screeching groan like a rail car.
Rowan stepped forward and squinted into the darkness.
In the damp, dark innards of the barn, he was immediately awash in a cool tannin smell he was intimately familiar with.
He’d expected the smells of a barnyard but was welcomed with the golden memory of oak aging spirits within banded confines.
The overhead lights flickered on. Inside the cavernous space were hundreds of stacked barrels breathing in the salty hillside air.
They towered throughout the barn, replacing the horses and nursing calves he had expected.
“Is tha’ what I think it is?”
“If you’re thinking pure Highland gold, then aye.”
“No,” Rowan said, taking in a long, tasting inhale that invoked memories: The feel of his uncle’s rough and calloused hand in his—walking down the damp halls of the castle’s subterranean floors.
Then excitement, jubilation, and that crisp oak smell saturated with grain alcohol that was being let to rest and metamorphose into liquid gold.
“No, what Jacky called it…MacLaoch’s Glentree Gold. ”
An excited shiver ran through the group of men who had gathered and on whom Rowan now focused with renewed curiosity. “Aye. Tha’s the one,” Double-A said. “So, ye do remember, then? Ye were just a wee lad when the law came and took the holdings at the castle. Didnae think you’d remember any of it.”
Rowan was shaking his head, trying to tease more from the memory. Did he remember damp, gritty boots on the stairs? Or barrels being hoisted out, two men each?
Yes, he thought, the beach, the ocean chase… “I recall. And I remember the smell of whisky in the castle below ground.”
“Aye, tha’s where we stored the majority of it. And some in the outer caves…where you and the missus had your first snog.”
Rowan grinned at the memory and was not at all surprised that the man knew about his first snog with Cole.
Holly, Double-A’s daughter, was Cole’s closest friend—and also the best way to share information to the entire clan at lightning speed.
“Yes, I remember,” he said, meaning both his lips on Cole and the sight, decades before, of stored whisky. “What happened to it, the barrels?”
The men crossed their arms; some smiled at the memory. “Ye don’t remember tha’, then? You were a wee one, your uncle tried to keep it from you, and made us swear on his deathbed tae not involve ye until the staute of limitations was up.”
“Statute!” came from the back.
“Aye, statute of limitations. He was protecting you.” Double-A gave Rowan’s shoulder a squeeze. “That night the authorities confiscated 204 casks and placed them in the quickest place they could, the bunker at the fort left at the fork on McGillvery’s farm on the mainland.”
“I know of it.”
“Aye, well, just as they got the last barrel tucked in nice and tight, there come word of a coke seizure large enough tae supply Glasgow to Miami, and it was all hands on deck… And so goes the story of 204 barrels of whisky in the fort across the bay, long forgot and handily aged.”
Rowan nodded and did a rough count of the rows of barrels in the barn. “There’s more than tha’ here.”
“Aye, and more stored across the county. We pool our monies each year and buy as much raw spirit as we can then barrel it. With you bein’ away in the military, well, it was just last year we started making plans tae tell you.
Then with everything that happened at the gala then after, it seemed like we should wait—yer plate was full.
Now, though, with the seriousness of the finances and all, if you’ll agree to it, we’ll bring all the casks back home to Glentree.
We can start Glentree Gold. Legitimately.
” Double-A motioned for Rowan to follow him and the men.
Rowan had often mulled over the idea of restarting Glentree Gold.
Even if only enough for the clan’s personal use, a cost-effective option for weddings and parties at the castle.
But time had been perpetually against him.
Now, here were the men who’d worked in the big distilleries asking him to start it up.
To continue his uncle’s legacy, to dust off the old stills, and by the looks of the charts and graphs being projected on a hung white sheet they’d led him to, there was a road map to get there.
Small bar tables had been set up near the screen with tasting glasses on each in various shapes and sizes, as if the men’s home cupboards had been raided, and each held amber liquid of varying shades.
“How many barrels do you have now? As ye know we’ll need a continuous supply—”
“Wee Rowan, don’t be getting ahead of yourself.” Double-A was at the laptop, a set of half-lens reading glasses perched on his nose. Rowan’s insides warmed. It had been since Jacky that anyone had called him Wee Rowan. “Take a seat, and we’ll get started…”
But Rowan was looking at the screen. “Two”—Rowan squinted—“thousand?” He felt lightheaded. “But how?”
“We ran the numbers with yer uncle before he left us—God rest his soul—and came up with the plan tha’ the estate purchase grain alcohol and barrel it, hundred barrels a year, roughly, and then in twenty years we’d be able to start bottling it and commit the funds to the town for upgrades.
Maybe even high-speed internet. After he passed and the estate stopped purchasing the raw spirit, we improvised and bought our own. ”
Rowan murmured, incredulous, “Ye bought them on your own?”
“Then we thought of the confiscated whisky barrels, and how we could meet our goals faster with them. Though we weren’t sure if the barrels from the seizure were usable and didn’t want tae drag ye into it if they were still hot.
Just had a solicitor confirm tha’ enough time has passed: The barrels are free and clear.
We got special permission tae take them back, no tax owed. ”
“Aye, so now we can start talks of updating the old stone bridges?” That came from behind him.
Rowan turned and gave Shepherd Rupert a smile.
“Aye, or reopen jobs on the estate?” It was Josh, the estate’s gillie, whom he’d had to lay off the year before.
Rowan felt his cheeks warm with shame at the memory.
But the older man had just given him a quiet, knowing look that said he knew Rowan had no choice in the matter.
As had Simon, now seated on a crate next to Josh, who had overseen the docks, as his father did before him, before the estate had cashflow problems.
“And free drinks for townsfolk!”
The group turned as one toward the man who’d spoken. Charles’s red nose and cheeks gave away his preferred hobby.
“Och, Charles, there will be nae drinking of the profits—”
“Charles, ye taste as ye go as it is; you’re a liability!” Double-A hollered from the projector.
“Thoroughly tasting is the only way to truly know the continuity of the aging spirits—”
Rowan cut in before Charles was hung from the highest beam. “Where are the rest of the barrels now? Are they ready? Where do we—”
Double-A interrupted him. “If you please, Wee Rowan, we have a whole slide deck tae show ye; it’ll answer all your questions.”
An hour later, the presentation ended and Rowan stopped pacing.
He pulled over an old wooden milking stool and sat.
He put his head between his knees and took long deep breaths.
If the data and the buyers lined up to purchase their first bottling were to be believed, the castle estate would be solvent by year’s end and, in another two years, have enough to rehire every one of the estate’s positions back, refurbish the town schools, and hire more teachers.
And in twenty? Who knew… The possibilities were making his head spin.
The level of this planning for the clan and its fortuitous timing couldn’t be overlooked.
Nor the details that had already been painstakingly handled.
He scrubbed his face with his hands to clear his mind and looked up.
All eyes were on him. These same men had been by his uncle’s side.
They’d been there all along helping out.
He just needed to be here, in Glentree, not in Glasgow or London, looking for fiscal help.
He had to be here and here long enough to see them.
“Yer a blessing. All of ye.” He felt his throat clog with emotion. The castle and everyone’s way of life had nearly buckled under modern pressure, and here it was being handed back to him on an amber platter.
“Ye’ll do it?”
Rowan stood. “Do it? It’s done. Ye’ve all done it.
If all you have goes as you’ve planned, this will save the clan, the estate, and our way of life.
” He shook his head at how daft he’d been not to first talk with the people who mattered most to him.
“Ye have my support. Do ye need lands? I can source warehouses too.”
“Aye, good.” There was a shiver of excitement that ran through the crowd. The idea was shaping up into something real. Something tangible. “But we’ll need more than tha’ from ye…”
“Anything.”
Double-A cleared his throat and pulled off his reading specs. “If ye’ll excuse the blunt language. We need yer credit and good name, Wee Rowan, and no’ much else.”
Rowan felt the first speedbump in their progress. “The estate is dodging foreclosure but likely headed toward bankruptcy at the moment. I’m afraid our name and credit aren’t what they once were.”
“We know, but the MacLaoch name has been around longer than we sods”—he twirled his finger to include the men in that room—“and it was only at the mention of your name that we were able to secure the buyers, the distributors, the network. They knew of yer uncle, and it was him that they were keen to work with. You? Just as good.”
Rowan was having difficulty understanding. “But you did all the work, and surely they know of you from when you worked with Jacky, aye?”
“Aye.”
“Ah,” Rowan said, grasping his meaning in his tone. “We’ve left the past behind but not at all, have we? They’ll take an unknown laird and chief over hardworking—”
“Nobodies. We’re nobodies.”
“Ye have it. My name is yours.”
Charles piped up. “How about yer signature?”
Charles was booed and cuffed on the shoulder.
Double-A spoke up. “Be our chief…executive officer.” He gave a rare toothy grin. “If ye don’t mind, we’d have ye take the business in under the castle estates and run it from there. We have a mind to do the work, but we’ve no stomach for the taxes and political handshaking.”
He didn’t either, but he’d take it on with verve. “Aye, point me in the direction ye need and set me loose, boys.”
Double-A grinned back at him. “I knew ye would; we knew ye were your uncle’s lad. He’d be damn proud.”