A Mackenzie Yuletide

by Ashley Jennifer

  Ian looked up. “Trap it?”

  “Yes indeed.” Isabella’s green eyes sparkled as she gave Ian her wide smile. “We’re off to catch a ghost.”

  “Poor thing,” Megan said, her mouth turning down.

  “It’s only someone playing tricks,” Belle said. “You’ll see. We’ll catch them and give them a good talking-to.”

  “Poor thing,” Megan repeated.

  Ian squeezed Megan’s hand again and slid one of the photographs toward her. “I’m going to find this for your mama,” he said. “Will you help me?”

  Chapter 2

  Jamie Mackenzie spent the miles on the train from London looking through the answers to his inquiries in disappointment.

  He’d thought he could ask about the rare thing he wished to acquire for his parents’ Hogmanay gift, write a few letters, and purchase it. He’d have to go through the Mackenzie man of business for the money and swear him to secrecy, but picturing the joy on his mother’s face on Hogmanay morning was worth the trouble.

  His father showed joy in a different way. Ian’s face wouldn’t change, but he’d go very still, absorbing every bit of information, and then he’d pull his son into a hard embrace. What Ian couldn’t express through words came out in his very firm and thorough hugs.

  But it seemed that buying an antique was more difficult than Jamie realized. Ian made it look easy, but then Dad had a calm stubbornness that made few refuse him. When Ian wanted a new bowl for his collection, no power on earth could stop him from obtaining it.

  Jamie would have to be just as stubborn. He was his father’s son, after all.

  Curry likely could help. The man, a former thief, knew how to discover who had what and how to obtain it. Curry had taught Jamie many lessons over the years that his mother and father didn’t know about.

  Could Curry keep mum, though? He might not tell Ian, but Jamie wasn’t so certain Curry could keep quiet around Jamie’s mother. Beth Mackenzie was a wise woman, and Curry ate out of her hand. Jamie would have to find some way to keep Curry loyal to him for the duration of the hunt.

  The door to the compartment burst open. A young woman in a fur-trimmed blue coat that covered her to her boots bounded in and slammed the door behind her. “I thought that was you! Jamie Mackenzie, the conquering hero, returns from Harrow.”

  Jamie blinked at his cousin Gavina, only daughter in Uncle Cameron and Aunt Ainsley’s small brood.

  “Never tell me they let you out of their sight,” Jamie said, hiding his delight at seeing her. “Fifteen and not yet out—you can hardly travel alone on a train.”

  Gavina wrinkled her nose in an expression very like her mother’s. “Of course not. Mum and Dad are in a compartment farther down the corridor. I became restless and wandered off. Dad gave his consent as long as I don’t leave the car. Goodness knows what I’d get up to in the dining lounge. They’d let me stroll the length of the train if Stuart came with me, but he’s asleep, the lump. Though he’s far too young to defend my virtue. Not that he doesn’t try.”

  She trailed off with a fond look. Stuart Mackenzie was very protective of his older sister.

  “I’m old enough.” Jamie jumped up. “I say we find the dining car. Or perhaps the end platform.” He patted his jacket pocket, and Gavina brightened.

  “Tsk, tsk.” She twitched a finger at him with feigned disapproval. “You have whisky or cigars—or both. Do say you’ll share.”

  “Of course. And defend your virtue.” Jamie regarded her critically, from the feathered bonnet on her red-gold hair to her slim boots. “You aren’t supposed to know you have a virtue or why it needs defending.”

  Gavina rolled her gray eyes. “You cannot belong to this family and not know what the male and female of the sex get up to in the darkness of the night. Nor that there are terrible people out there for whom a young woman my age is a delectable morsel. But I have no fear, because I have a horde of cousins, not to mention a formidable father, who will never let me stray a step alone. Besides, I do know how to box, kick, and shoot a gun.”

  Jamie took a step away from her in mock worry. “Do you have a gun on your person?”

  “Of course not. I don’t need one with my father hovering over me every second. Now, lead on, Macduff,” she misquoted. “I need coffee.”

  Jamie grinned and ushered her into the corridor. They walked down the train toward the dining car, waving at Uncle Cameron and Aunt Ainsley as they passed their compartment.

  Ainsley rose, but instead of stepping out and calling them back, she simply nodded at them. Aunt Ainsley was a canny woman who knew when the young people needed a modicum of freedom.

  Uncle Cameron was not always so understanding, but he, like Cousin Stuart, was fast asleep. The father and son sat facing each other at the window in identical positions—feet and arms crossed, heads slumped, snoring loudly. Aunt Ainsley would need to stuff cotton wool into her ears.

  Jamie and Gavina moved through the dining car, scrounging mugs of coffee from waiters who looked smitten with Gavina, and strode through to the back platform of the train.

  It was freezing outside, but the train blocked much of the wind. Jamie removed the whisky flask from his pocket and poured a dollop of Mackenzie malt into each of their cups. “For the chill. Ladies shouldn’t drink spirits, you know.”

  Gavina sipped her doctored coffee and let out a sigh of satisfaction. “Ladies shouldn’t do so very many things. I plan to be a spinster and shock people all the livelong day. Do say we’ll have a fine time over the holidays. Next year, I shall be sent to finishing school. I am capitulating if Dad promises to send me to university, though everyone knows ladies go there only to catch husbands.”

  Jamie couldn’t help laughing. Gavina’s face fell at the prospect of finishing school, smoothed into happier lines when she spoke of university, and creased into a scowl when she spoke of snaring a husband. Jamie hoped he and Gavina ended up at Edinburgh together so he could watch her rebuff gentleman after gentleman.

  “Out with it.” Gavina fixed Jamie a shrewd look as he plucked a cigar from his pocket and lit it. “What were you looking so determined about when I sprang upon you?”

  “Ah.” Jamie took a pull of the cigar, enjoyed its flavor, and released the smoke. “I might just need your help. But this has to be a deep, dark secret.”

  Gavina crossed her heart and gave him her full attention. By the time Jamie finished explaining what he wanted to do, Gavina was leaning next to him, grinning out at the snowy fields.

  “Excellent,” she said. “You can count on me, Cousin. I’m your man.”

  * * *

  “Did you really see a ghost?” Isabella Mackenzie wiped the last paintbrush she’d cleaned for her husband and set it in the jar with the others.

  She enjoyed watching him paint and invented tasks as an excuse for joining him in the studio. Mac did need someone to keep things tidy up here, and he’d allow no maid or footman in to clean.

  “I did indeed, my darling.” Mac scraped his palette knife over brilliant yellow paint and used it to apply highlights to flowers in the foreground of his painting. He’d been doing more landscapes lately, beautiful things he shrugged about. “Nothing like Monsieur Monet,” he’d say. “Or Cézanne. Man’s a bloody genius.”

  “Belle is right that breathing in too many fumes can make a person see things,” Isabella said.

  Mac burst out laughing, and Isabella’s heart turned over.

  She’d been married to this man for years, and even now his smile, the sight of his muscles working as he turned to her in nothing but his kilt, had her hot as fire. She’d borne him two children who were nearly grown, but when he looked at her with his Mackenzie gold eyes, Isabella again became the debutante who’d tried and failed to scorn away the handsome young Highlander who’d crashed her come-out ball, danced her out to the terrace, and given her a kiss that changed he
r life.

  There’d been plenty of turbulence those first years, but that turbulence had settled into intense, chaotic bliss.

  “You cannae accuse me of being in a drunken stupor.” Mac had not touched a drop of anything inebriating in many years. “Well, you could, but it would be a lie.”

  “I know, love.”

  Mac threw down his palette knife and advanced on her. “And when ye say ‘love’ like that, ye know it undoes me.”

  Isabella lifted her face as paint-stained hands cupped it. Mac closed his eyes and kissed her, his mouth hard, experienced, calling up the heat he’d touched the night of her come-out ball. He’d kissed her, married her, and taken her to his bed in a matter of hours. Isabella had gone happily, and quite willingly.

  A bang somewhere down the hall made them both jump. Isabella wanted to ignore it and continue reveling in her husband, but Mac brushed another kiss to her lips and made for the door, curiosity in every line of him.

  Isabella, admitting curiosity herself, followed.

  Mac led the way to Cam’s wing of the house, where he said he’d seen the ghost. This corridor should have been quiet—Cam and Ainsley and family were still traveling to Kilmorgan—but plenty of noise echoed toward Isabella and Mac.

  At the end of the hall, where a window overlooked the vast gardens of Kilmorgan, Isabella saw a flurry of activity. She heard Daniel’s rumbling tones and the lighter ones of Violet, plus the youthful strains of the younger generation.

  “What the devil are you all doing?” Mac asked the question before Isabella could.

  Daniel busily tacked what looked like wires to the window, while Violet sprinkled powder on the floor. Fleur helped with that, flinging it happily about until Daniel sneezed. Belle assisted her aunt Eleanor to set up a tripod in the corner with a camera on it.

  “Trapping ghosts,” Daniel answered. “At least, trying to find evidence of one.”

  Belle looked up from securing the tripod’s legs. “He means gathering evidence that it’s a person up to no good.”

  “Oh.” Mac sounded disappointed. “I would rather it be a real ghost. Like one of our ancestors Ian is always telling us about—Lady Mary or Celia or Josette from the old days. I’d love to have a good chin-wag with one of them.”

  “If she wanted a chat, she’d have stayed.” Isabella slipped her hand through the crook of Mac’s arm. “Likely you scared her, Mac. Maybe she thought you were your dad.”

  Mac shuddered. “Poor woman. I was hoping I could ask her a few things. Such as why Malcolm Mackenzie chose to punch an open hall all the way to the top of the stairs. Makes for a powerful draft.”

  “Draws the air,” Daniel said. He hammered a nail into the window frame, which explained the banging. “An open tower with a cupola at the top lets air flow and not stagnate. Eighteenth-century engineering.”

  “Uncle Mac, there is no such thing as ghosts,” Belle said impatiently. “This is what we will prove. Aunt Eleanor will take its photograph.”

  “Indeed.” Eleanor, who had remained uncharacteristically silent as she adjusted the camera, beamed Mac and Isabella a smile. “I am rigging lines—well, with Daniel’s help—that will open the camera’s shutter when an unwitting person, or ghost, kicks them. Lighting is a bit tricky, because of course, we expect the ghost at night, but Daniel is rigging another device which will release flash powder at the same time and light the hall right up. Not only will the camera snap the photograph, but while the person is blinded, we can tackle him. It might not work at all, as so many things must happen in tandem, and we can’t count on that, can we? But it is worth a try.”

  “Which is why I am coating the floor with powder.” Violet straightened up and corked a now-empty glass jar. “The simplest way to prove it is a person and not a ghost is footprints. They’ll walk through, never seeing the powder in the dark, and there is our evidence that she is a simple thief.”

  “The lady I saw had no feet,” Mac pointed out. “Or hands.”

  “You saw no feet,” Violet said. “In the dark, or faint light, like moonlight, white stands out well. If she wore black stockings and boots and black gloves, they’d fade into the darkness and create the illusion that she had no extremities.”

  Mac shook his head. “You lot are taking the romance out of it.”

  “If someone is breaking into the house, Hart will want to know,” Eleanor countered. “If he loses his precious artwork again, he’ll be most distraught. If we catch the intruder this way, we can give her a good talking-to and send her off to the police, thus sparing her Hart’s wrath. You know how he is when he is upset.”

  Every head nodded. No one wanted Hart on a rampage.

  “I am sure there is a good reason why the young woman entered the house,” Eleanor went on. “I wonder what it is.”

  Daniel huffed a laugh. “The priceless paintings, Ming bowls, and plenty of jewels, silver, and sculpture we keep lying about. I am surprised there aren’t a flood of thieves here every night.”

  “Our neighbors wouldn’t dream of burgling us,” Eleanor said. “Though thieves could always take the train from the cities and escape in a cart if they prepared well. Or find a place to stash the goods and sell them off a bit at a time while pretending to live virtuously in a nearby village.”

  Isabella gave Eleanor an amused look. “You have planned this well. How often have you thought of ways Kilmorgan Castle can be burgled?”

  “Quite a lot. When I lived with my father and the money was tight, I remembered Kilmorgan’s riches. I invented many ways I could relieve Hart of a treasure or two and use it to feed us through a winter. I justified it by telling myself that I deserved it after Hart tried to trick me into marrying him.”

  “Ye do deserve it,” Mac agreed. “Though you did, after all, marry him, you poor woman.”

  “I did, didn’t I? I suppose I will simply have to put up with him. I too would like to speak to this would-be burglar. Did Hart wrong her as well? Did she, like me, amuse herself while lying awake at night by planning the perfect heist?”

  “She looked a bit young for Hart to have thrown her over,” Mac said. “More Aimee’s age. Hart hasn’t looked at a woman since ye sprang back into his life like a comet. I doubt it’s revenge she’s after.”

  “Then it’s the goods,” Daniel said. He tugged at the wires he was affixing to the window. “These will ring a bell in our bedchamber, alerting us that the intruder has arrived. That way, we won’t have to sit up all night in the cold.”

  “I hope she’s a true ghost,” Mac said, rubbing Isabella’s hand. “Not only would she be interesting to talk to, but I could laugh at you all when your scientific machinations turned up nothing.”

  “That would be fun, wouldn’t it?” Eleanor agreed. “I should adore talking with a ghost. So many questions. Could she even answer, I wonder? One needs breath to speak. And if she’s from so very long ago, perhaps the wife or daughter of Old Dan Mackenzie, would we be able to understand her? Languages change through time.”

  Belle sent her a reproachful look. “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts, Aunt El. That’s why you are helping us.”

  “Oh, I believe in all sorts of things.” Eleanor smiled wisely. “The world is a far more interesting place than we realize. So many possibilities.” She returned to adjusting the camera on the tripod, humming a little tune.

  Belle looked perplexed, but Violet patted her shoulder. “It is a good idea you had to photograph it, Belle. All we can do is leave things in place, and hope Mac didn’t frighten her off forever.”

  Mac grinned. “I was politeness itself. But we’ll see, won’t we?”

  The atmosphere was optimistic, but when Daniel, Violet, and Belle raced back upstairs in the morning, the window remained closed, the powder undisturbed, and the camera in place, and no photographs taken of intruders, either ghost or human.

  * * *


  Beth had to smile at her daughter and husband sitting side by side in the main library at Kilmorgan, heads together. Newspapers and books lay strewn across the table, with Megan scratching notes in her careful handwriting.

  “Jamie will be arriving soon,” Beth said into the silence.

  Megan and Ian looked up with a start, Megan’s alarm turning swiftly to guilt. She quickly covered her writing with her hand.

  Ian, after his golden eyes widened a moment, recovered and assumed his usual calm. “Then we must meet him.”

  He closed all the books, one after the other, taking time to align them neatly. Megan looked as though she was about to eat her notes, and Beth felt both curiosity and amusement at her worry.

  Christmas was coming, as was Hogmanay, and an air of secrecy always pervaded at this time. Ian and Megan were obviously scheming something to do with gifts.

  Ian betrayed no concern but kissed Beth on the lips when he reached her. “Will you come with us, love?”

  Beth shook her head. “You go. Eleanor is certain nothing will be done on time, so it’s all hands to the pump.”

  Ian had long ceased trying to work out what Beth meant when she spoke in metaphors, though he might have a think on it and ask her later. He kissed her again.

  Ian let the kiss turn long, never mind Megan standing nearby. This gave Megan a chance to hide what she’d been writing, which was likely Ian’s intent. That and to keep Beth from asking questions.

  “Keep your secrets,” she whispered to him. “As long as the result is worth it.”

  Ian, for answer, kissed her again. Then he gave her his warmest smile, held his hand out for Megan, and led her away. Megan stuffed her papers deep into her pockets and skipped after her father, her lively step making the rosettes on the back of her sash bounce.

  Chapter 3

  Megan whooshed out a breath when Jamie lifted her from her feet in a crushing bear hug. She hugged him in return, always happy to see her brother, and pecked a kiss on his cheek. The cheek felt rough, and Megan saw with surprise that Jamie had whiskers, like their father, red and catching the light.