Copyright Information
Copyright © 2010 by Lillian Stewart Carl.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press, LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
Chapter One
Jean Fairbairn peered over the railing of the footbridge. If sufficiently motivated—chased by bloodthirsty swordsmen, for example—she could have dangled by her hands from the walkway and dropped into the rocky, muddy gully that had once been a moat. She’d be skewered anyway, but giving up and going quietly had never been part of her vocabulary.
Nor was it part of the vocabulary of Scotland, where the past had played out in scenes of blood and thunder, fire and sword. Now popular memory and the Scottish Tourist Board elided here, revised there, and edited fierce bloody-mindedness into high Romance. Though history could still be perilous, as the thud and blunder of Jean’s own, lowercase, romance had proved.
Alasdair Cameron, the object of her romantic inclinations, inspected the ruined castle that rose above the far end of the narrow walkway even as he said, “No need to go chucking yourself over the edge just yet, the wedding’s not ’til the third.”
“Thank you, light of my life,” Jean returned. “Was it this Dunasheen Castle or the other one where Rory MacLeod tried to jump from wall to tower to see his lady love?”
“This one, I’m thinking, it being a medieval tale. Though it goes that he reached his lady love via the stairs, her husband came breaking in, sword in hand, and he made the leap from tower to wall, meaning to escape.”
“Both versions are variations on a theme, the lover’s leap, fatal or otherwise.” That brought Jean back around to the choice she did not, thank goodness, have to make, between a sharp edge and a hard place—her imminent matrimonial plunge notwithstanding.
She hadn’t intended to fall for anyone, let alone a Scottish detective inspector. And now-ex-policeman Alasdair hadn’t meant to fall for a part-time historian, part-time journalist, full-time inquiring mind wanting to know. But their hearts had led, leaving their heads to play catch-up, and here they were, on a bridge both literal and symbolic.
Smiling, Jean also considered the snaggle-toothed battlements of the ancient castle keep. Outside the tower, lichened blocks of dark gray stone imperceptibly became lichened bedrock, knitted together with tussocks of grass and tufted by saplings springing from crevices. Inside the tower, seabirds nested in empty windows and in hollow fireplaces now suspended from sheer walls. The wooden floors where people had stood warming their chilblains, cooking their food, and thanking goodness for strong defenses atop a small, craggy islet—moats and drawbridges making good neighbors—had decayed into nothingness long ago.
The old castle was dignified in its desolation, and yet Jean also sensed an air of sadness for times past and regret for lives spent. She wouldn’t be surprised if it was also haunted, but she hadn’t lingered long enough for her spectral early warning system to activate.
Alasdair raised his camera, took several photos, then jotted something on a notepad.
“Now what? Secret passages? Buried treasure?” Jean pulled her hands up into her sleeves in an attempt to warm them up.
“That path running outside the enceinte, the boundary wall,” he replied. “It’s partially eroded, right dangerous, and wants blocking off. Or rebuilding with a railing, but Fergie’s saying he can afford only what will keep the place standing.”
“Structural faults aren’t really in your line of work.”
“Oh aye, here’s Fergie—and wee Diana as well—thinking I’ll be advising him on locks and the like for the new castle, not on shoring up the old one, but it’s something I can be doing to help. This bridge, now, is likely no more than thirty years old. A bit damp, mind. It wants checking for rot.” He stamped on the walkway, sending a reverberation through the wooden slats beneath Jean’s feet.
A good thing she wasn’t acrophobic. Claustrophobic, yes, and dubious about darkness. She’d declined a visit to the dungeon in the foundations of the old tower, more like a cave than a cellar, never mind Alasdair and his flashlight. The issue wasn’t only its impenetrable shadow and low, vaulted ceiling, but its smell; dead fish, defunct rats, decaying seaweed, mold and mildew.
She inhaled deeply of the cold wind and vaporized Atlantic that scoured her cheeks—out with the bad air, in with the good—and looked up at the sullen gray sky. Sea gulls spiraled like flecks of white confetti, their harsh squawks piercing the thrum and seethe of the waves against the far side of the islet. “What isn’t damp? This is the Isle of Skye. It’s a giant soggy sponge. Look at those clouds, it’s going to rain again any minute. Sleet. Snow.”
“It’s not cold enough to sleet or snow.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
Alasdair glanced at his watch. “It’s getting on for half past three. Sunset, this time of year.”
“Tell me about it. I moved to Edinburgh from Texas last January. That was a shock. It wasn’t until it was still light at midnight in June that I thawed out and dried up.” Not least because it was in June that she and Alasdair stopped circling each other like duelists and surrendered to their mutual attraction.
If he caught her reference, he showed no sign of it. Grasping her gloved but cold hand in his, he pulled her toward the mainland—or main island—side of the bridge. “Skye can have positively brilliant days in December and January. We’ll be seeing one yet. Just now, though, we could do with a cuppa.”
“No kidding.” Tea, Jean thought. Chocolate biscuits. Caffeine and cocoa, two of the basic food groups.
Their rubber wellie boots clumping, they scrambled up the mud-and-gravel path to the top of the brae. This hill might not be nearly as tall as the towering cliffs propping up other stretches of the Skye coastline, but still it commanded a view. Or would, when one of those brilliant days came along. Fergie promised a panorama, from the islands of the Outer Hebrides across several miles of open sea to the north to the peaks of the Black Cuillins to the south, beyond the end of Loch Roy, a narrow inlet of the ocean that formed the eastern boundary of Dunasheen Estate.
Now, though, either sinking cloud or rising mist blotted the horizon, and the waves where loch met sea, below the ramparts of old Dunasheen, gleamed gunmetal gray. The terrain resembled a tattered crazy quilt laid over the bones of the earth. Patches of olive drab, rusty brown, and more gray were lumped around weathered boulders and pocked by reed-fringed pools scummed by ice. A few blots of light in the murk were all Jean could see of the village of Kinlochroy, at the far end of the loch.
But she and Alasdair weren’t walking to the village, not when the magnificent Scots Baronial pile of new Dunasheen Castle lay just ahead. The warm glow of its windows and the red and green fairy lights edging its eaves made the building into a humongous Christmas card. All it needed to complete the effect was snow softening the stark, black limbs of the trees tucked in behind garden walls.
“All right!” Jean pulled Alasdair to a halt. “Take some photos to go with Fergie’s interview. Look, there’s even a guy in a red jacket walking out of the courtyard—perfect timing, very photogenic.”
Muttering something about electricity rates and Fergie not knowing when to stop, Alasdair raised his camera. “The interview’s covering the estate, the renovations, the paying guests and all. You’re not meaning to encourage his fancies and odd notions.”
“Define your terms. You think not putting milk in your tea is an odd notion.”
His slate-blue eyes that could be chill as the North Sea sparkled like a tropical lagoon. A wry crumple only deepened the graceful curve of his lips.
Jean ignored his silent retort. “Sure, that’s the deal, your security expertise and my journalistic skills in return for a New Year’s Eve party and a wedding. The weird stuff is off the record. It would hardly scare away the customers, though.