“The duke?” Mikah frowned at Kris, who just shrugged. “But I thought he was mad.”
“Ye know yer history, lass,” he said with a nod. “Yer right, there were rumors that the duke had gone mad after the death of his wife. There are mentions of it in the estate manager’s diary and in some written by his family as well, but after his daughter’s death, other than some forgetfulness that most historians now chalk up to Alzheimer’s, the duke seemed to be a changed man. He returned to London and took back the reins of his dukedom.”
“Good for him,” Mikah said, though she had to wonder if Harry Ashburn hadn’t been happier as he was.
“Are ye ready to come in then?” Smith asked, and Kris readily agreed, his cheeks already looking chapped by the cold winds. “The missus will have tea ready.”
“I would love some,” Mikah said while Kris made a face.
“Are ye sure yer all right? Ye look a wee bit sad.”
“Well, it was a very sad story, wasn’t it?”
They followed Smith back to the castle hand in hand. “Are you all right?” Kris asked softly, urging Mikah’s head to his shoulder.
“I will be,” she said. “Can we go now?”
“First thing in the morning,” he promised. “I’ll need to call and see if I can change our flight.”
Chapter Forty-One
“Good evening, my lord.” Smith stopped next to the table of one of his guests in the restaurant that evening to make the greeting. He knew the earl well, though he had been far friendlier with the earl’s father. Of course, it was hard not to know one’s neighbors, even when they were fifty-five kilometers away. In an area as sparsely populated as this, they might as well have been right next door. “I was pleased to see you could make it to the auction.”
He had, of course, mailed a catalog to each of the surrounding households, more as a courtesy than an invitation. He hadn’t truly expected a showing from the Earl of Ballantrae’s household, much less the earl himself.
“We will all be sorry to see you go,” the earl said politely, “but Mother and I both wish you luck.”
“Aye, it had to be done, ye ken? But the preservation people will take care of what’s left.” Smith studied the earl with a keen eye. He was tall and dark, the image of his father in his prime. If he remembered years past correctly, the earl was in his middle thirties now. He had come to Cuilean often over the years, happily playing in the halls while his mother had taken tea with Smith’s wife.
As an adult, Ballantrae had shown himself a fine example of a Scottish laird. Responsible, patriotic, aristocratic. Never had Reggie Smith seen that veneer slip as it had that day, and innkeeper found he couldn’t keep the curiosity at bay. “Did ye win everything you were hoping to? A few memories of your childhood?”
“Something like that,” Ballantrae responded smoothly, taking a sip of his wine.
Smith raised a brow at that. The earl had bid on a curious collection of items throughout the course of the day, some halfheartedly, others zealously. None of them the playthings of a child. “The music box?”
“As you said, a childhood memory.”
“The jewelry you won?”
“A gift for my mother,” he answered. “You know she always enjoyed those displays.”
Smith frowned. There was more to it, he was certain. Ballantrae had won some jewelry, true, but the auction coordinator had told him that the earl had also asked after another piece of jewelry, a ring, that hadn’t been in the brochure. He had detailed a ring of diamond and sapphire that the earl had been certain should have been among the items at Cuilean. Smith had never seen any such ring in all his years in the castle. Aye, there was something there. “May I sit, my lord?”
“Yes, of course,” Ballantrae responded politely, shifting to the side, and as he did so, a cane fell to the floor.
Smith picked it up as he sat and handed it back. “I had heard ye were injured. Yer mother was in tears when she came to visit the missus.”
“Mother is a worrier,” came the prevarication. Clearly the earl had no desire to speak of it. “What can I help you with, Smith?”
“It’s the portrait, my lord.”
“The portrait?”
“Aye, the portrait of the Third Marchioness ye purchased today,” Smith clarified. “How did ye come to know of it?”
“I believe it hung in one of the bedchambers,” Ballantrae answered.
Smith sat back in his chair and pondered this over his templed fingers. “I can’t imagine when. I was surprised to find the old family portraits up in the attic.”
“My father must have told me about it then,” the earl said irritably. “Is there some problem with me purchasing the portrait, Smith?”
“Nay, not at all,” Smith denied quickly. “I was just curious about it because of the lass.”
“What lass?”
“Hadn’t ye seen her?” the hotel keep asked. “Curious lass to begin wi’, requesting the Lady’s Chambers as she did. Then out wi’ that painting. I swear I was fair startled, as were half the bidders when they brought it out. The resemblance is remarkable, really. I had thought there was something familiar about the lass when I first saw her last night. So curious. Why, she looks just like her.”
“Who does?” Ballantrae asked absently.
“Why, the American lass,” Smith said with some exasperation.
“She looks like who?”
“The Marchioness of Ayr, lad. What do ye think I’ve been talkin’ aboot?” he asked, thinking of the painting of the marchioness. A lovely blond-haired woman with almost turquoise eyes that matched her peacock blue evening gown. The spitting image of his young guest.
“There’s a woman here who resembles the marchioness?” the earl asked, then shrugged dismissively. “So?”
Smith shook his head emphatically. “Not merely resembles, lad. Looks just like her. It’s uncanny. You should have seen the heads turn when the portrait was brought out.”
Ballantrae stilled. “Exactly?”
“Aye, exactly like her. Well, the American lass is a wee bit younger, perhaps. A bit fitter. Other than that, ye couldna tell the difference between them,” the innkeeper insisted.
The already still earl became statuesque, and Smith felt as if he held Ballantrae’s full attention for the first time that night.
He was wrong.
Jason MacAuliffe’s—the Earl of Ballantrae’s—thoughts and focus were more than a hundred years away. It could not be. It must be some kind of cruel joke. Something Smith had said nagged at the back of his mind. “You were saying earlier that she had requested a certain room as well?”
“Aye, the Lady’s Chamber,” Smith said. “Lad, all this is just too incredible. Too coincidental, and I think ye might know something of it.”
Jace ignored the probing words, fighting the urge to take the man by the shoulders and shake the truth loose. “What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can you tell me more about her?”
Smith looked prepared to withhold anything else he knew in favor of pressing more answers from Jace, but the desperation Jace felt must have shone in his eyes because the man relented with a sigh. “Right curious lass, I told ye. Dinnae ken what to make of her. Bid ardently through most of the day, then suddenly left when the portrait was brought out. I followed her to make sure she was all right. It must ha’ been a shock to her as well.”
“I’m sure,” Jace mumbled, but his mind was spinning away. Could it be possible? Could Hero have come to the future? Just as he had gone to the past? It seemed unlikely, yet wasn’t his own experience equally so?
If it were true …
For the first time in months, Jace’s heart raced with excitement, with possibilities. Aware that Smith continued to eye him as curiously as a scientist might examine a disease through a microscope, Jace struggled to remain nonchalant in the face of his examination. It wouldn’t do for Smith or anyone else to see the madness lingering beneath the s
urface. “Anything else?”
“‘Twas odd enough how ye both bid on the same lots,” Smith continued. “And, as I said, I found her a curious lass. Melancholy last night, and then when she left the auction today, she went straight away to the cemetery, to the marchioness’s tomb. I wager the portrait roused her curiosity …”
Reggie Smith was fairly bursting with curiosity, but what could Jace say? That he’d fallen in love with a woman who’d been dead for almost 150 years? Jace scoffed. He couldn’t mention any of that, lest he wanted to experience the fine tailoring of a well-fit straightjacket. But again he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Do you know her name?”
Bloody hell but he felt ridiculous.
“Yes,” Smith replied as he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small stack of business cards. Shuffling through them, he said, “She left me her card. Seems she’s a curator or such for a museum in the States. Here it is. Mikah Bauer.”
Jace was not listening any longer as he held the card in his hand, staring but not seeing. His mind was already on the days ahead. Never had he dreamed that in coming to Cuilean to regain some small piece of Hero, he might find her again. Pocketing the card, Jace looked up at his longtime neighbor, who was waiting with more patience than a man in the throes of such avid curiosity should be capable of displaying. “Thank you, Smith.”
“My lord, really! What is this all about?” Smith said insistently, denying the dismissal. “Ye ken something, I know it!”
“Let’s just say that I believe I might know her,” Jace prevaricated, then smiled. “We share a love of Cuilean’s history. If she is truly the woman I once knew, I will invite you to the wedding.”
“Her young man might have something to say about that,” Smith said with a frown.
“Her what?”
“She came here with a young man,” Smith told him. “They seemed quite close and … well, they did share a room.”
Jace felt his welling hope slither away into disappointment. Perhaps she wasn’t his Hero, then. If she was, she would feel the same as he did and not be able to look at another romantically. Even his girlfriend of some years hadn’t been able to pull Jace away from the love he still held in his heart for a woman long dead, much to her dismay and his mother’s as well.
No. The Hero he had known in the past had remained there and this Mikah Bauer’s resemblance was surely nothing but a coincidence. She had a life of her own, a lover who would be unlikely to understand a man who pursued her only for her resemblance to another.
Who demanded answers to questions to which she couldn’t possibly know the answers.
He would not make such a fool of himself.
Chapter Forty-Two
Frederic Nietzsche once said, “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
Jace certainly felt the madness, but the reason was somehow escaping him. Despite telling himself that he would not seek out this mysterious doppelgänger of his long-gone Hero Conagham, not only had he done so but he was skulking in the shadows like a mad stalker.
He might have escaped Cuilean unscathed if he hadn’t caught sight of her when he left the restaurant. But as he had stood in the door of what had been the Billiards Room in years past, Jace had seen her as she crossed the hall from the base of the stairs and into the Armory. Head high, chin lifted just so. Her blond hair bound in a twist at the base of her neck. In profile, she looked so much like Hero that Jace’s heart began to pound and his body stirred in a familiar response to her presence.
By their own will, his feet had followed, carrying him unwillingly along in her wake. Their wake, he realized as she bestowed a bright familiar smile on her companion. Bloody hell! How had he not noticed the man at her side? In the shadows, Jace studied his competition. He was tall, probably as tall as Jace, but much thinner. His wool trench coat showed that much. His short blond hair was worn spiked up on the top in a trendy style that Jace recognized from his time in London and Edinburgh. A faux hawk, they called it. Conscientiously, Jace ran a hand through his own short black hair.
Objectively, Jace acknowledged that the other man was handsome enough, if so very different from himself. Younger as well, and suddenly uncertain, Jace wondered what the Hero of today preferred.
If she were Hero at all.
Bugger it. He should never have come to Cuilean. His already worn nerves could barely handle the fact that he had walked into his own home once again and yet it was not his at all. And now this! Hope followed by swift disappointment. Jace felt the urge to take the dog-eared auction brochure that had brought him here again and rip it to shreds.
The uncertainty ate at him. Was it Hero? Was it not? Suddenly, Jace had to know. He had to meet this Mikah Bauer face to face, see the blankness that the absence of recognition would bring to her eyes when she saw him, and finally know that it was all pure coincidence.
Nothing but folly.
And finally he could forget the hell the past few months of his life had been.
Almost literal hell.
Over a year ago, he’d gone to Afghanistan … or rather been sent to Afghanistan as a part of his service as a captain in the Army Air Corps. He had served as a helicopter pilot out of Camp Bastian in support of the Joint Aviation Group supporting NATO, combining the skill with a desire to serve his country.
However, more than two months ago, his Apache had been shot down over the Helmand province in Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban territory. Jace had died, they told him. For over three minutes the medics had worked on him amid the fire and shelling as the marines from the nearby U.S. camp kept the insurgents at bay.
What had happened in those three minutes had changed Jace and left him with a life that was not his own. He had been whisked away from the sound of gunfire and alarms sounding in the helicopter and found himself standing in front of Dùn Cuilean, a place he knew well enough, but in that moment he had felt as if he were looking at it for the first time.
Jace had fought against his fate in those first weeks at Cuilean, fought against the madness he was certain would consume him if he gave in. He had lived another man’s life against his will, all the while wondering what had happened to his own. The only moments that had brought him any peace were those spent with his alter ego in silent contemplation of the portrait that hung over the fireplace in the marquis’s bedchamber.
Those were the times he was sure he had died, because he knew the woman depicted there … or rather, he had dreamed of her before.
Then he had seen Hero in the flesh, and Jace had felt the last burning need to return home wither away. The flames of his surprising love for Hero consumed him quickly, and he had been content to stay there in the nineteenth century with her forever.
That decision had not come easily to him. He had a life and a family in the twenty-first century that were very important to him, yet he knew he could not live and be a whole person without Hero.
He had embraced a destiny only to have it torn away in a heartbeat.
The pain of that loss was more terrible than the recovery from his injuries. Jace had been sent to Germany to an army hospital to recover, a difficult task for a man who felt he had little left to live for. Upon his return to his own estate in Ballantrae just a week before, his mother had coddled him within an inch of his life. But through her constant, cheery conversation, Jace had heard of the auction at Cuilean.
In the sales list Jace had seen items he knew, but initially he had equated the familiarity with his previous visits to Cuilean. Until he had seen the family history and made the connection between his experience and documented history, he hadn’t understood what had happened to him. He had not traveled through time but made a journey into another man’s very body and mind.
It was a realization Jace had shared with no one.
For who would have believed him?
Nothing had been left to him but memories until the auction was announced. He had thought to gain some physical
remembrance of Hero …
Was there more to gain?
Would he find the answers in this Mikah Bauer?
Cursing himself and the entire situation, Jace followed the couple out onto the ramparts. In their modern clothing, they were able to walk side by side along the narrow path between the walls. With one arm, the woman clung to the man’s arm as the brisk chill of the winter wind buffeted them.
But her other hand …
It skimmed along the top of the outer wall … and lifted, fluttering over the first gap before descending once more. Jace held his breath as she continued along.
One … two … three … four … five …
Swallowing back the lump that suddenly formed in his throat, Jace curled his trembling hands into fists.
Six.
Keep going, he thought, contrarily. God, please stop.
She did.
Jace closed his eyes, torn between hope and denial.
The waves were crashing against the rocks, just as they had for hundreds of years, and the wild winds of the firth lifted the spray upward until Mikah imagined she could feel it against her cheeks. Bile climbed in her throat as she clung to Kris for support, but still Mikah wasn’t certain she had the strength to do it. The cold winter wind numbed her cheeks and nose before Mikah reached the sixth indentation and stopped.
She couldn’t believe that she had braved a walk out on the ramparts overlooking the Firth of Clyde, but it was the last thing she needed to do to put it all behind her. Now, other than the pagoda where Hero and Ian had wed, she had revisited all the places that held the dearest memories. Remembered them finally without regret and only a touch of sadness. When she left tomorrow, Mikah was certain she would be able to put the past where it belonged.
Still, there were memories specific to this once-favorite spot she couldn’t defend against. She remembered Ian’s arms around her, keeping the chill away. She remembered him softly chuckling in her ear, remembered him nuzzling the back of her neck.
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