Early that morning, the skies had cleared and a brisk Scottish wind blew chill against her nose and cheeks, filled with a scent that seemed to characterize the Highlands—earthy heather, the salt sea wind, and the fragrant pine of the tall fir trees. They passed a scattering of small whitewashed cottages set beneath heavily thatched roofs that gave them the appearance of large mushrooms dotting the rocky shoreline. Word of the sloop’s sighting spread quickly from one to the next, bringing the cottagers outside to curiously watch the unfamiliar vessel skimming past on the rippling blue-gray waters of the loch. Dogs barked in excitement and children waved, running barefoot to the water’s edge as if to give chase. Shaggy orange Highland cattle barely gave them a moment’s glance before returning their attention to the pasture beneath them.
Fed by the sea, the vast loch was studded by a string of small islands, each thickly wooded and ringed by the mist that skirted the water’s surface. Rugged shoreline stretched farther than the eye could see and several small herring boats floated like bobbing apples in the distance. At the farthest end of the loch, like a doorkeeper to this mystical secret retreat, rose the age-old gray stone towers of Skynegal.
From the moment its silhouette first took shape through the mist, the castle had brought Grace to drawing in her breath in wonder. It stood in a setting older than time and looked every bit as magical as she could have ever imagined it, filled with rich history—her family history. It was a place to which she could finally belong.
Atop a high slope, or leathad, the main tower house was tall and rectangular, with a steeply pitched roof flanked on either side by smaller rounded towers no doubt added at a later date. It was these two towers, outstretched to the sides, that gave the castle its Gaelic name, Sgiathach—the winged castle. The closer one came, the more vivid the image grew, until it appeared as if the wing towers were somehow fluttering. Kittiwakes and terns were everywhere, hundreds of them, stark white against the weathered stone, perched upon the tower parapets, soaring overhead, nesting in the crenelles, calling out in noisy welcome to them.
It was as the sloop pulled aground upon the pebbly beach beneath Skynegal that Grace caught her first glimpse of the castle’s crumbling fence lines and overgrown brush. They disembarked, trudging up a weed-thickened path from the shore to stand beneath the tall central tower. Grace craned her neck up at least seven stories past windows with weatherbeaten casements that hung unhappily off their rusted hinges and broken glazing that blinked at them in the fading daylight. She could only think that it was more a ruin than a dwelling and even the cries of the birds looking down on them from the wing towers seemed suddenly mournful as if bemoaning the castle’s sad state of neglect.
Grace chewed her lip, but she wasn’t discouraged. Perhaps the castle was not as grand as some might expect, but with a bit of work to bring it back to its former splendor, Skynegal would soon soar again.
She looked past Liza, who stood beside her, to the two men who’d accompanied them there from Mallaig. McFee and McGee had met the two women at the dock, bearing a letter signed by the ever-resourceful Mr. Jenner. He had hired the men, he’d written, to guide them along the last leg of their journey into the Highlands. They would remain at Skynegal to help Grace to settle in afterward.
They presented a peculiar picture, each draped in differing ragged tartans, their noses reddened from frequent exposure to the sea winds. The bottom halves of their faces were hidden behind full shaggy beards—one red, the other peppered gray. The only way Grace had managed to successfully tell them apart during their journey was to remind herself over and over again that McFee had the beard that was fire-red and McGee had the beard that was pepper-gray. A simple method, yes, but it worked.
With them had come the stout Flora, a woman who wore a perpetually serious expression set beneath mud-brown hair that was scraped back beneath a colorless linen kerchief. She was sister to one of the two men and had yet to utter a single word since leaving Mallaig two days earlier. While McGee and McFee would see to the provisioning of the castle with adequate peats for burning and the purchase of necessary livestock, Flora would undertake any needed household tasks until other staff could be arranged for.
“Please, my lady,” Liza said to Grace then, “please tell me they’ve got it wrong. Tell me this broken pile of rocks cannot be the right place.”
Grace glanced at Liza before asking politely, “Excuse me, sirs? You are quite certain this is Skynegal?”
McGee grinned at her, scratching his grizzled head beneath his tattered blue bonnet. “Aye, my leddy, I sure ye ‘tis Skee-na-gall, it is.”
McFee nodded his agreement from behind the swirling smoke of his clay pipe, stroking his fiery beard as he said, “Dunna t’ink ‘tis changed a’sudden. Been Skee-na-gall for nigh hand six hunder years, it has.”
“Aye, and looks as if it hasn’t been lived in for at least that long either,” Liza muttered.
Flora, of course, said nothing.
Grace turned once again to regard the structure, this time looking on what had been her grandmother’s childhood home with the even more discriminating eye of someone who had studied a good many structures in years past.
It stood, of course, in dire need of improvements, first and foremost a roof, at least a complete one for what was there seemed to be degenerating in patches. The walls would need immediate repair where they were crumbling and the windows would have to be replaced. Grace could not see anything further of the actual structure because the sun was setting behind them, casting the tower in a bit of a haze. A good deal of what she could see of it was covered by an overgrowth of dark ivy that crept thickly along the weathered stone walls. Grace frowned, her brow knit as she cocked her head slightly to the side, staring at the places where the stone was crumbling away from the curtain wall. She wondered if perhaps it was the ivy that was keeping the castle standing at all.
“Won’t make it any better looking at it that way,” Liza commented.
“Well, it cannot be completely devastated. Mr. Jenner said there has been a steward living here at all times. Perhaps it is time we met him.”
Grace proceeded to the nearest door she could find, small and inconspicuous on such a large structure, with a heavy iron ring hanging from its center. When she lifted the ring, it screeched as if it hadn’t been moved since the castle’s first stone had been set, and flecks of black paint fluttered from it to the toes of her half boots.
Not a good sign, she thought as she dropped the knocker back against the door with a resounding thunk.
They waited to the accompanying sound of the sea and the perpetual ock-ock-ock of the birds perched in the various apertures above them. When there came no answer to her knocking, Grace looked to Liza. The maid raised a skeptical brow but wisely said nothing. Grace tried the door again, this time whacking the ring several times hard against the solid wood of the door. Moments passed. Again no response. Grace could hear McFee and McGee shifting behind her. “Odd,” she murmured. “I’m certain Mr. Jenner had said that—”
The door scraped open suddenly and a figure presented itself in the doorway. He was short and round and really quite bald, reminding Grace immediately of the childhood story of Humpty Dumpty—a Humpty Dumpty in tartan, she amended, wearing a suit of crisscrossed red and white straining across an expansive girth with skin-tight trews covering his thin legs down to his buckled leather shoes.
The man took one look at them and immediately turned his back to them.
“Hoy, Deirdre,” he shouted to the castle interior, “you were right! Someone has come to visit us. Come, come help me to greet our guests!”
He was joined by a petite woman, perhaps four and a half feet tall, who wore an earthy-hued plaid cut long on her slight body, wrapped around her shoulders with the fringed ends of it trailing upon the stone floor. Her face was one by which age was not easily determined—she was somewhere, Grace guessed, between twenty and forty. Her hair was completely hidden beneath an elaborately knotted kerchie
f and she wore full faded skirts that might once have been black beneath a bluish shirt, cut not unlike a man’s waistcoat. Her feet, Grace noticed, were bare on the stone floor underneath.
“Welcome, welcome to Skynegal,” said the man of the pair, coming forward to greet them. “I am Alastair Ogilvy, the castle steward, and this is Deirdre Wyllie. Deirdre is a widow to one of the former tenants here and she comes to keep house at Skynegal.”
Grace nodded, smiling to the woman.
“And who do we have the pleasure of knowing?” asked Mr. Ogilvy, his curiosity beaming on his rotund face.
“She’s the newly come leddy of Skynegal,” Deirdre answered even before Grace could respond.
Alastair turned an expression of astonishment on the small woman. “You knew this afore she told it to us, eh, Deirdre? How’d you do it? Was it the sight, Deirdre? Did the spirits tell you this, lass?”
Deirdre shook her head. “Nae, Alastair. I’ve told you and told you I dinna have this ‘sight’ you keep buffing aboot.” She tucked her hand inside her plaid and took out a folded letter. ” ‘Twas this letter that was delivered yestreen.”
Alastair took the letter and read it quickly, his dark eyes growing large over the top of the parchment. “Och, Deirdre, why did you not tell me afore now that the lady of Skynegal was to be coming?” Before she could answer, he bowed his head reverently to Grace. “My lady, please forgive me for not having greeted you properly afore you could reach the door. I wasn’t aware of your coming, else I would have been watching the loch for you to arrive.”
Grace shook her head. “There is nothing to forgive, Mr. Ogilvy. I prefer not to stand on ceremony. Might we come in and sit a spell? We’ve been traveling for some time and I think we’re all nearly ready to drop from exhaustion.”
“Hoy!” Alastair put both hands atop his head. “Where are my manners? Of course! Please, my lady, please come in! All of you!”
He moved quickly for a man of his width, taking them down a narrow corridor and up two rounded flights of stairs, chattering apologies all the way. They arrived at a cavernous room that rose easily two stories, nearly as wide as it was high. Grace heard several small birds chirping above, where they had no doubt nested in the great oaken hammered beams that traversed the cracked and crumbling plaster ceiling.
The scene of many a Highland feast, the great hall had once played host to Robert the Bruce himself. According to Mr. Ogilvy, the original tower had been constructed in the twelfth century, the side wings centuries later. The tower birds had been residents from the very beginning.
“Legend has it that long afore a castle was ever built at this place, the Celtic goddess Cliodna came to visit. She was beautiful and fair and it is said ‘twas she who brought the birds, magical birds whose sweet song would soothe the sick into a healing sleep.”
As Grace listened to Alastair’s recounting of the legend, she walked slowly about the chamber. The hall was mostly vacant except for the two armchairs and a single crude table set near the cavernous stone hearth. A fire burned low in the grate with a small copper kettle hanging from a chain above it, giving off an earthy scent, most unlike the coal to which she was accustomed. The only other light in the room came from two tallow candles burning in holders atop the table, throwing shadows onto the bare stone walls. There weren’t any windows, not a one, on any of the four walls.
“Won’t you sit, my lady?”
Alastair motioned Grace to one of the two chairs, its fabric worn through in places with bits of horsehair sticking out from the cushioning.
“Please accept my apologies for the meager furnishings, Lady… uh, Lady…? Dear heavens, I’m afraid I did not read far enough in the letter to know your name.”
“She is Lady Grace, Marchioness Knighton,” Deirdre answered as she stooped before the hearth to stir up the fire beneath the fresh peat she’d tossed there.
“Please, Lady Grace will serve adequately.”
“Lady Grace it is and please do call me Alastair. Whenever I heard ‘Mr. Ogilvy’ I tend to think it a designation meant for my father even though he’s been in his grave for nearly ten years now.”
Grace smiled and leaned back against the cushion of the chair, suddenly aware of how very tired she was. Already her legs were growing stiff beneath her and she could very easily just close her eyes and fall asleep in this chair with its horsehair poking her bottom till morning.
“Alastair it is, then.” She motioned across from her to the opposite chair. “This is Liza Stone, my maid,” then to the others, “and Misters McFee and McGee and sister Flora. They’ve come to assist us in provisioning the castle.”
Alastair’s eyes again went wide and he nodded slowly. “Provision the castle? So you’ll be staying at Skynegal? You’ll be making it your home for a while, will you?”
Home. Grace looked at Alastair and said quite without hesitation, “Yes, Alastair. I plan to stay on at Skynegal indefinitely.”
Alastair nodded on a smile. “And Lord Knighton? I take it he will be joining you here as well?”
Grace blinked once at the question, a gesture only Liza would have noticed. It wasn’t something she’d been prepared for so soon after her arrival and it brought with it thoughts of Christian and London and the life she had left behind. Grace wondered for what must surely have been the hundredth time what Christian had done when he found her missing. Had he rejoiced at her leaving? Had he made any attempt to find her? Grace knew it would only be out of a sense of obligation and not because he held any affection for her. He had made that quite clear that last night in his study.
Still he wouldn’t have found her had he tried. With Mr. Jenner’s assistance, she had traveled under her grandmother’s family name of MacRath so as to avoid the unwanted attention that would certainly come about if it had been discovered that the Marchioness Knighton, kin to the wealthy Westovers, was traveling about the countryside.
But now that she was here, Grace was determined that she should never again look back on what her life had been. She was making a new start and from this day, she would seek her own future, make her own happiness—at Skynegal.
She looked at Alastair, “Lord Knighton shall remain in London. He is not expected to travel to Skynegal anytime soon.”
In fact, Grace continued on a thought, it would be a blessed miracle if he came there at all.
Chapter Twenty
Alastair did not query Grace any further about Christian’s absence. If he found it odd that Grace had traveled across country alone with only a maid, he said nothing, nor did he give any indication that he may have suspected something was amiss in her marriage. Whatever his thoughts, Alastair kept them to himself, and instead began to tell her of just how he’d come to his position as steward at Skynegal fifteen years before. He’d spent most of his childhood on a crofting farm on the estate and his subsequent years of schooling in Edinburgh. Grace listened politely, all the while fighting to keep her eyes from closing.
“And after returning to the Highlands, I—”
“Excuse me, Alastair,” Grace interrupted finally. “I would love to hear everything you can tell me about the estate and your life here, but I fear our journey has taxed me more than I had thought. I can barely keep my eyes open. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, might we review all this in the morning?”
“Oh! Will you have no supper then, my lady? Deirdre’s got us a flavorful stew simmering in the kitchen. And her oatcakes are the finest to be had in Wester Ross. She bakes them with a touch o’ honey that is really quite good. Surely you must be famished after your long journey here.”
Grace smiled obligingly. “It all sounds wonderful.” She turned to Deirdre. “But I fear I am even too tired to eat. If I could trouble you for an oatcake and a pot of tea and direction to the nearest bed, I would be most grateful.”
“Beds!” Alastair wrung his hands together before him. “Oh my lady, I am ashamed to say I haven’t had any beds prepared since I didn’t know you were—”
Alastair looked at Deirdre, clearly astonished to hear that she had completed all the preparations for Grace’s arrival herself and without him taking any notice of it. “But Deirdre, why did you not—”
Deirdre just shook her head. “If I’d have tol’ you they were coming, you widna ha’ given me a moment’s peace a’day. Ever’ting that needs doing is done. Now you take about Lady Grace and show her to the laird’s chamber and I’ll be bringin’ her up her tae and cake of breid.”
Alastair stared at Deirdre a long moment before he remembered his duty to Grace. He took up one of the candlesticks from the table, motioning for her to follow him. “Of course, my lady. I will show you abovestairs. If you’ll follow me, please.”
Grace held up a hand when she saw Liza stand to follow. “Liza, please, don’t worry over me. You stay with the others and eat your supper and come up when you are finished. I can manage well enough on my own tonight.”
“But, my lady, you’ve not eaten since midday.”
Grace shook her head. “I suspect the rough waters we had just shortly before landing caused my stomach a bit of an upset. Either that or I am simply too tired to have an appetite. The tea and cake will be enough, really.”
Liza shrugged and Grace gave her a weary smile before turning to follow Alastair across the great hall toward a far opening in the wall that in her fatigue looked more like a yawning mouth than a doorway. He led her down a darkened corridor that felt a bit chilly away from the fire. The light of his candle threw odd shadows about the walls while their footsteps echoed softly on the bare stone floor. At the end of the corridor, Alastair opened a small arched door and started up a very narrow spiral-turned stairwell leading to the upper floors of the tower.
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