I eyed her the way Dad’s hens do me. Friend or foe? Coming in peace or likely to kick? “Does it matter?”
“To us?” Lissa put in. “Not as far as being friends. But we are your friends. So we care about you.”
“Okay. I care about you lot, too. Not seeing the connection.”
“We love you,” Carly said in her sweet way. “So does God. It’s all one.”
“If you’re asking whether I want to be a Christian like you, I’ve been baptized in the Anglican church. Happy now?”
Gillian and Lissa did that conversation-without-words thing again. “Sure,” Gillian said.
And then Dad called up the stairs. “Girls! I think your mothers have beaten breakfast into submission. Care to risk it?”
I’d never been so glad to see cheese omelettes in my life.
chapter 11
AFTER BREAKFAST, I hid in my room with my computer and the video camera. I knew I was neglecting my duties as hostess, but now that Mummy was here, maybe I could skive off a bit and no one would notice.
She and Patricia seemed to have connected. All during breakfast they exchanged stories of people and clothes and travels, with Gabe and Dad doing their best to chip in details. Gillian, as I’ve already said, is quite the globetrotter, so she had a few stories of her own to tell.
I should have been glad all my houseguests were getting on so well—especially Dad and Mummy, who actually managed to tell one story together and laugh about it.
Instead, I felt out of sorts and a bit cross. Were my friends judging me because I didn’t make a big production out of religion? It wasn’t the sort of thing a person talked about in public. Religion and one’s beliefs were private, to be talked over with the minister, maybe, if you were in trouble and needed spiritual guidance or whatever.
Religion was just sort of there for me. Like the steeple of the church above the trees in the distance. There. I didn’t understand the kind of belief Gillian had, the kind that popped out in daily conversation like it was normal. And look at Shani, talking about things she read in the Bible the way you’d say what you had for breakfast.
I didn’t do that. Nobody I knew did that. I didn’t even talk about the experiences I’d had last spring, when my half-brother came to San Francisco to stalk me. I will admit that there had seemed to be a force at work there that was larger than Carly and me, who were caught in the thick of it. But it wasn’t something I’d collar the neighbors about and discuss, you know?
The closest I’d seen anyone come to this sort of active Christianity was Dad, who went quietly about the business of living and doing the right thing, no matter what it cost him. I guess he’d learned a few lessons since his fling two decades ago with Lisbet Nelson, my half-brother’s mother, the news of which had catapulted my family to the far corners of the earth.
Dad was a different man now. Could Mummy love a different man than the one she’d married?
And how had my thoughts arrived there when I’d begun thinking about my friends and their Christian-ness? Dad was a Christian. At least, I thought so. He was different from the Spencer girls, though. You might say he was halfway between me and the Spencer girls. Just as committed, but not as vocal about it.
Could I be like that?
Did I want to be?
I didn’t have any answers so I focused on the computer screen and got to work downloading the film clips from that morning. Then I began to clip bits and pieces into separate files. The one of Mummy opening her present from me—a lovely pleated Prada clutch that I was definitely going to borrow—came out particularly well, and the fact that I’d managed to capture Dad on the sidelines watching her was a bonus. His eyes held an expression of total concentration, as if he were memorizing her the same way my camera was, so he’d have something to take out and look at later.
Someday they’d thank me for immortalizing our first Christmas as a reunited family.
I saved all the clips where Alasdair appeared into one big file for my viewing pleasure later, and then made a cute little movie of Carly trying on the blouse for Brett. I edited it down, cutting out the part at the end where Shani started to talk and I dropped the camera. But in case she wanted that bit, I saved it for her.
“Mac?” Lissa banged on my door. “Your mom is calling us for lunch.”
Good grief. Was it one o’clock already? “Coming.” The Queen’s Christmas speech was at three, which Dad listened to every year without fail, but we girls could probably skip it and take a walk over the hills instead. And then it would be time to come back to the house for tea and get ready for the neighbors to arrive for a drop of good cheer.
I had to finish this up.
I threw the movie files into a folder, named them all sequentially because it was fastest, and brought up e-mail.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: December 25, 2009
Re: Lady Carolina
Buon Natale, Brett! Hope your day was as merry as ours. Of course, you’ve probably already heard from Carly that it was. Here’s a little movie of her and her Christmas present from me. She loved the antique locket with the picture of the two of you in it, by the way. It went beautifully with my gift.
Cheers,
Mac
[Attachment: Xmas2.mov]
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: December 25, 2009
Re: Xmas cheer
Here’s a bit of video starring my dishy university man. Check it out and then you can help me distract him from the blonde.
xo, Mac
[Attachment: Xmas5.mov]
AFTER LUNCH, Dad and Carly washed up while Mummy and Patricia put on boots and coats in the kitchen passage.
“Where are you two going?” I asked.
“Patricia wants to see the sea, so we’re going to take a tramp up the hill,” Mummy said.
“GMTA. We’ll catch you up.” I went and found Lissa and Gillian, who were hanging round the kitchen, yakking it up with Dad. “Want to go for a walk over the hill? You can see the sea from the top.”
“Does that involve snow?” Lissa’s face wrinkled up in distaste.
“Afraid so, lassie,” Dad answered, handing Carly the cloth so she could wipe up the counters. I wondered where Mrs. Gillie had got to. She usually did that kind of thing.
Then I remembered what day it was. Of course the poor woman would be at home with her husband and her own family, clustered round the telly watching Christmas movies and waiting for three o’clock. Well, it wasn’t as if we couldn’t do without her. At least four of the ten of us could probably put together a dinner party for twelve armed with only a bottle of seltzer and a packet of crisps.
“Then I’ll pass.” Lissa pulled her cashmere plaid closer. “I’m warm and cozy. I’d hate to disturb the balance of this perfect ecosystem.”
“I’ll come,” Gillian said. “I’m used to snow.”
“I’ll come, too.” Alasdair didn’t even look at Lissa, for which I gave him credit. A flush of happiness began in my toes and traveled all the way to the top of my head, where it flamed out in a blush.
Aughh!
“Carly?” I said to distract attention from my face, which was now entirely tomato colored.
“I’m going to call Brett and thank him for the locket, so I’ll pass, too,” she said softly. “He should be up by now.”
“Hearing your voice would be the perfect present,” Shani said loyally. “What did you get him?”
“Gillian drew a portrait of me to give to him.”
“Did she?” I couldn’t draw a line, so I had nothing but admiration for people who could. “You weren’t leaping on a villain and punching his lights out, were you?” Gillian’s art tends to be of the butt-kicking variety.
“No, it was a straightforward portrait,” Gillian told me. “We had to do one for art class anyway, so she sat for me a couple of Friday afternoons before she went to S
an Jose. So there you go. Art credit and Christmas present for boyfriend. I like a nice, elegant solution.”
Of course she would. She’s a math geek.
“Come on, then,” I urged them. If I didn’t watch them, they’d talk all afternoon about walking and never actually do it. “Boots and coats. If you don’t have them, we probably have something that will fit you.”
I should have known that a girl who traveled with two suitcases the size of trunks (“They’re only fifty pounds each, Mac—I weighed them”) would have not only a coat suitable for a Scottish typhoon, but the boots to go with it. Alasdair, unfortunately, had come with a small weekender and not much else.
“Here, take one of Dad’s jumpers, and he’s got a duffel coat here somewhere—ah, here it is.” I pulled both items, smelling faintly of dogs and wool, off pegs in Dad’s office. I measured Alasdair’s feet with one eye and picked a pair of boots from the jumble on the mudroom floor. “These should work.”
He pulled everything on and actually managed to look both debonair and comfortable. I am destined to be a perfect hostess.
“Thank you, Lady Lindsay.”
“Please call me Mac. All my friends do.”
“Mac, then. Though Lindsay suits you better.”
“It does?” I thought it sounded a bit like medicine. If people hadn’t started calling me Mac when I was little, I’d have chosen to go by Eithne, though that would have presented its own set of problems in London, where they don’t know how to pronounce it. Having to explain, “It’s Enya. E-i-t-h-n-e” fifty million times would get tiresome. Mac is much simpler.
“Lindsay.” He drew out the two mundane syllables. “‘Where the linden trees grow.’ How can you not want to own up to that?”
How did he know this stuff? “All right,” I said as I held the door for him and Gillian to walk outside into the kitchen garden. “You may call me Lindsay if you must. I would by no means suspend any pleasure of yours.”
“So you quote Jane Austen to men you barely know.” One eyebrow raised, he opened the gate in the wall, where two sets of booted feet had already trampled the snow. “That could be dangerous.”
“Depends on the man,” I said airily. “If he doesn’t have a clue, no harm done—he thinks I’m eccentric. If he does, I know he has a brain and we have something in common. So it’s a win-win for me.”
“You could always just ask him,” Gillian said from behind us. “Don’t you think it’s manipulative otherwise?”
I moved to one side so the three of us could walk abreast down the snowy expanse of the lawn toward the park. “I haven’t controlled him, so how can it be manipulative?” I asked her. “It’s like a test.”
“But if he doesn’t know about it, how can he try to succeed?”
“If he wants to succeed, he’ll find some other way,” Alasdair suggested.
“You two are making more of this than it deserves. It was just a joke. And Alasdair got it.”
“And if it makes you feel better, I don’t feel manipulated,” he assured Gillian. “Whoops! Take care.” He grabbed her arm as she lost her footing in the snow.
“Thanks. Too much thinking, not enough paying attention.” She set off again, but she wasn’t done with whatever was on her mind. “You have to admit, Mac, you have a talent for it.”
“For what?”
“Manipulation. You got your mom here, and Lissa was one hundred percent convinced she wouldn’t come.” Alasdair gave me a sharp glance.
What was with her? Plain speaking was one thing. Pointing out the defects in my character in front of Alasdair was quite another.
“You forget I know my mother.” I kept my tone light. “She may not have been here in years, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist my having a house party and possibly bungling it.”
“What would it be to her?” Alasdair asked, after a small hesitation. “Not that I’m minding your business or anything.”
I shrugged. “No secrets among friends, right? I think the divorce was a mistake. My parents belong together. They’re just too proud to admit it. So I made a complete bother of myself with Mummy until she gave in and came up here in a howling gale on Christmas Eve, on the train, to help me out.”
“See?” Gillian gave Alasdair an I-told-you-so look. “The manip-meister.”
“I don’t know.” He moved to the front to brush branches out of our way. We made better time under the trees, where the snow wasn’t able to reach the ground. “Your heart’s in the right place, and I think that’s the main thing.”
My nose might be nipped with cold, and my hands jammed into my coat pockets as far as they would go, but his smile warmed me from the inside out.
“What would you have done?” I asked Gillian. “In my place, I mean.”
“Been honest.” Most of the time I like her bluntness, but sometimes it scrapes a little too close to the bone. “Told them how I felt, and asked them both to the next school event I had, so they’d be there together. Or something.”
“And what if they told you to mind your own business?” Never mind that my school events lately had been on a different continent.
“I’d still be honest. At least they’d know how I felt and what I thought about their relationship. After that, what they felt and thought would be up to them.”
We walked out from under the trees, and the wind off the sea caught us sideways. The hem of my coat blew out, and Gillian grabbed the ends of her muffler before it unwound from her neck.
“If I said something like that to my dad,” I shouted against the wind, “he’d curl up like a snail and hide in his shell. As it is—”
“Said something like what?” My mother and Patricia walked up behind us and I realized with a jolt that the treacherous wind had blown my words straight to her.
“Said something like, Why don’t you wear a jumper in brighter colors?” Alasdair turned to her, smiling, and held open his coat so she could see he was wearing her ex-husband’s sweater. “I don’t know. I think this one suits both of us.”
Mummy laughed and buttoned him up as if he were six years old. “You’re quite right. Graham would no more be caught out in a red jumper than I’d wear an avocado mask in public.”
“Or I,” Patricia said.
“Or me,” Gillian added. “Though I think I’m going to need a complete facial after this walk. Wow, what a wind.”
“But look at the view.” Mummy’s outstretched arm took in the whole slope of the strath, the wide river valley for which our land was named, to the wild coast as far as the rocks in the distance. “Out there past the horizon is Denmark, and south of us across the valley, that stone pile you can see on the hill was a sailors’ chapel hundreds of years ago.”
I blinked at her. “It was? How do you know?”
“Daddy told me. We used to ramble all over these rocks and hills when we were first married.”
“Funny the things that stick with you.” Patricia distracted her, giving me time to arrange my expression into daughterly interest. Inside, I wanted to jump up and down, shaking Gillian’s arm and shouting, “See? It’s working already. She’s thinking about when they were married and happy!”
But I didn’t. Instead, I listened to Patricia say, “You should really talk to Graham about it, Meg. You can get grants from places like the Society for Self Sustaining Estates, and once you’re on the Hand Picked Hotels list and the American registries, you have it made.”
“Have what made?” What was she talking about? Self sustaining estates?
“This place is one of the most wonderfully preserved historic castles I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty,” Patricia said. Her gray gaze was steady on mine. “I’ve been telling your mom that it would be a shame to risk losing it when you’re sitting on a gold mine. You could make the castle into an upscale guest hotel with a little work, and it would start paying for itself in no time.”
Losing it? Paying for itself? My brain howled in a vacuum of insufficient information. �
�What?”
“Patricia, I haven’t told her. This isn’t the time,” Mummy murmured, but now the wind did me the favor and blew her quiet words straight to me. Luckily, Alasdair and Gillian had wandered to the lip of the hill, where he was pointing out the distant view of crashing waves to her.
“What do you mean, losing it? Losing Strathcairn? What are you talking about?”
My mother’s face turned white, and the wind stabbed through my coat, as sudden as fear.
chapter 12
I’M NOT GOING to spoil your Christmas by talking about it.”
Mummy fussed with her suitcase, hanging and rehanging things in the tiny guest-room closet while I sat on the bed. She looked about as at home in this room as her vintage Catherine Walker gown looked hanging on the back of the chipped cupboard door. Both of them belonged in the earl’s suite, with its magnificent walk-in closet and carefully bagged dresses.
But that was a discussion for another time. Right now I had to find out exactly what Patricia Sutter was up to—and why.
“Too late,” I said. “It’s going to bother me every minute until you tell me what’s going on.”
“Lindsay,” she said in measured tones, “it’s nothing you need to worry about.”
Honestly. “Mummy, I’m seventeen. You and I both know I’m not a child anymore. If something is going on at Strathcairn, I deserve to know about it. Maybe I can help.”
A laugh jerked loose through her tightly held control. “I hardly think so. Though scaling back the spending would be a start.”
“Are we running out of money?”
She sighed, and her shoulders slumped, as if she were deflating.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” I felt bad for pressing her, but I had to know. “Something’s happened to our money.”
“Nothing more than has happened to everyone. Our income is based on capital and investments. What we live on has shrunk because… oh, the economic times and changing prices on the stock market and all those tiresome details that I never used to think about. But now I’m forced to think about them. My advisors insist that I make some decisions to get us through this.”
Tidings of Great Boys Page 10
