Leona found that there were quite a number of middle-aged and elderly men staying at The Castle, who had been out grouse shooting or fishing during the day and had returned eager to talk of the sport they had enjoyed.
To prevent the party being too excessively male, several neighbouring ladies had been invited to dinner. Leona soon realised that the ladies stared at her with undisguised curiosity.
Once again the Duke explained that she was to make her home with him at Ardness Castle.
She thought, although she was not sure, that there was a speculative as well as a curious expression in their eyes as they looked at her.
She enjoyed herself, however, simply because the elderly gentlemen were only too pleased to pay her compliments and to tell her about themselves.
The majority came either from the North of England or from the Lowlands of Scotland.
“We stay here every year,” one of them told Leona, “and the shooting at Ardness is, in my opinion, better than anywhere else in the North.”
As he spoke, he bent forward to say to the Duke, who was several places away from him,
“By the way, Duke, those sheep of yours spoilt our sport today.”
“They did?” the Duke questioned.
“They ran ahead of the line and put up birds before they were within shot.”
“I will speak to my keeper about it,” the Duke promised.
“I hope you will,” the sportsman answered. “The sheep may mean money in your pocket, but they will not improve our game bags.”
The Duke did not reply and the man who had spoken and who was obviously an Englishman, turned back to Leona.
“The Landlords of the North are obsessed by sheep,” he said. “But from what I hear there will be wool coming from Australia that will knock the bottom out of the Highland prices.”
“In which case,” Leona said in a low voice, “perhaps they will find it was a mistake to replace men and women with sheep!”
There was a note in her voice that made her dinner partner glance at her sharply.
“You are thinking of the Clearances.”
“I am indeed!”
“I read some articles about them in The Times and thought it was a damned disgrace!”
“Surely something will be done?” Leona asked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“What can those who live in England do? And from all I hear there are more evictions planned in South Uist, Barra and Skye.”
“Oh – no!” Leona exclaimed. “Why cannot someone appeal to the Queen?”
The man to whom she was speaking smiled.
“Even the Queen has little authority over the great Scottish Landlords like our host,” he said.
Then, as if he thought the subject had become embarrassing, he turned to speak to the lady on his other side.
‘There is nothing I can do – nothing!’ Leona told herself.
She wondered whether, if she persisted in expressing her opinions, the Duke would be really angry and send her away.
He had been so kind to her that she ought to feel nothing but gratitude towards him.
Yet she now felt as if the gown she wore and the pearls round her throat were as treacherous as the thirty pieces of silver Judas had been paid for betraying his Master.
After dinner had finished and the piper had encircled the table in the traditional manner, the ladies retired to the drawing room, which was another magnificent salon Leona had not seen before.
Furnished, she learnt, by the late Duchess, it was very much more elegant than the other rooms, the furniture showing a French influence and the curtains and carpet being elaborate both in colour and material.
There were polished tables on which were arranged objets d’art, which Leona was certain had been collected by the Duchess personally.
There were Georgian snuffboxes set with enamel and jewels; there was Sèvres china and some delightfully carved pieces of jade.
As she was examining some of them, one of the guests who she had learnt was called Lady Bowden came to her side.
“You look as if you were dressed especially for this room, Miss Grenville,” she said pleasantly.
“Thank you for the compliment, my Lady.”
“We don’t often find anyone so young and attractive at The Castle,” Lady Bowden went on, “and the Duke tells me that you are to make your home here.”
“Yes, my Lady. My parents are dead and my mother was a great friend of the Duchess Jean.”
Lady Bowden sighed.
“We all miss the Duchess. She was a charming person, in fact she kept the place human.”
Leona looked at her questioningly and she smiled as she continued,
“I always feel when we come here it is like going into the Ogre’s Palace. Do you not feel that too?”
Leona laughed.
It was in fact very much what she did feel.
They were standing alone in one part of the room and Lady Bowden glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice.
“The Duke has been very difficult locally since his wife died. Perhaps you will have a softening influence over him.”
“I think it unlikely I shall have any influence at all,” Leona answered.
“I suppose you are too young,” Lady Bowden said almost as if she spoke to herself. “When he lost his daughter, Elspeth, I thought he would never smile again.”
“How did she die?” Leona asked.
“She was never very strong and I think she did too much. She was only fifteen and because she adored her father she would go out shooting with him, she would ride with him, she expended all her energy in being the companion he had always wanted.”
Lady Bowden paused.
“It was a very hard winter and she drove herself on when she should have been in bed. Her cold turned to congestion of the lungs, she developed pneumonia and there was no hope.”
“How sad!” Leona cried. “I can understand what His Grace felt.”
“Of course it was worse for him than for anyone else,” Lady Bowden said, “seeing that his son – ”
She checked her words as the Duke’s sister came across the room to ask,
“Are you going to play cards, Lady Bowden? You know how much His Grace enjoys a game of whist.”
“I shall be delighted!” Lady Bowden replied.
She moved away from Leona towards the card table as the door opened and the gentlemen joined the ladies. What had she been about to say? Leona wondered.
It was infuriating that the sentence had not been finished and she had not learnt about Euan.
But there would be no chance of further conversation with Lady Bowden as she was now sitting at the card table and those who were not to play whist congregated around the fire.
“It is strange in this part of the world how cold it gets in the evening,” someone remarked. “It was so hot on the moors today that I wanted to take my coat off.”
“I suppose that is your excuse for having missed an easy right and left!” another man chaffed.
Then they were all talking sport and there was no chance of Leona learning more about the mysterious heir to the Dukedom.
CHAPTER FOUR
Leona had made up her mind that somehow she must cross the boundary onto Lord Strathcairn’s land and if possible see him.
She realised as the days passed at Ardness Castle that it was not going to be easy, for to begin with, whether by design or not, she never left The Castle unaccompanied.
The Duke, who seemed to be doing everything in his power to be pleasant and make her happy, took her riding or she went driving with the other guests.
The first shooting party left and another arrived and there were large dinner parties every night and always a dozen or more people to luncheon.
It seemed to Leona as if every moment of her day was filled with some activity or another, and she would have been extremely ungrateful if she had not been pleased and a little touched by the kindness that was shown her at e
very turn.
More gowns came from Edinburgh and with them were wraps edged with fur for the cold days ahead, and velvet jackets, which it was still too warm to wear even when she was in a carriage.
She found it difficult to find new words with which to express her thanks to the Duke, but she felt almost as if he was watching her to observe her reaction to everything that happened and everything that was said.
And yet however interested she was in the strange new life in which she found herself a participant, she could not help remembering a dozen times a day that Lord Strathcairn must think her impolite and very ungrateful.
She turned over in her mind ways by which she could write to him and thus replace the letter that the Duke had burnt. Although she thought of asking when out driving if they could stop at a Post Office, she felt the questions which would doubtless be asked would be an embarrassment, for she would then have to confess that she knew her first letter had not reached its destination.
However kind and however pleasant the Duke might be, she knew that she was afraid of him.
She was well aware that he could be completely and utterly ruthless when it suited him and there was no doubt in Leona’s mind that everyone with whom he came in contact was in awe of His Grace.
The servants rushed to do his bidding and the local people whom she had met, like the Minister, were so obsequious and so humble in the Duke’s presence that they made her feel embarrassed.
She wondered continually what had happened to the families that had been evicted, but there was no one she could learn the truth from.
It was impossible to question the Duke’s servants about his actions and she was sure that no one else would have any idea what had happened or what would be the consequences of the Clearances she had seen taking place.
She searched the newspapers just in case there should be any more articles in The Times relating to what had happened in Ross.
After Mr. Delane’s disclosures there had been a Society formed for the Protection of the Poor, but Leona gathered that its life had been brief and, of the monies collected, very little reached the Glencalvie people.
She did, however, learn from the newspapers that there had been evictions at Glenelg and at Sollas on Lord McDonald’s land on North Uist. Others were taking place at Strathaid on Skye.
Very few details, however, were given of what had occurred and Leona could only multiply in her imagination what she had seen on the Duke’s land to know what the misery and cruelty was like.
‘I must talk about it to Lord Strathcairn,’ she told herself a dozen times.
Then unexpectedly her opportunity came.
The Duke was asked to shoot with a neighbour on the other side of his Northern border.
This meant, Leona learnt, that he would have to leave very early in the morning and would not return to The Castle until late in the evening.
It was, she told herself, the opportunity she had been waiting for.
When Mrs. McKenzie called her, she looked out of her bedroom window as the curtains were pulled to see if it was a fine day.
If it was pouring with rain, she was well aware that the shoot might be called off or anyway the Duke might consider it injurious to his health to brave the elements.
But it was a perfect September day with a clear sky and a sun that would grow warmer as the day progressed.
Already the trees and shrubs around The Castle were beginning to show their autumn tints and the heather was in full bloom.
‘Soon it will be winter,’ Leona thought. ‘Then I shall be really imprisoned here with no chance of escape!’
But today, whatever the consequences, she would, for a few hours at any rate, be free of the surveillance of the Duke.
She had her breakfast before any of the rest of the party were down and asked for a horse to be brought to the front door.
She was well aware that a groom would accompany her, since it would cause far too much comment and perhaps argument on the part of the Major Domo if she said she intended to ride alone.
Wearing an extremely attractive new habit that the Duke had had sent from Edinburgh, with a hat encircled with a gauze veil, she thought as she took a last glimpse at herself in the mirror that she wanted Lord Strathcairn to see her as she was now.
He would remember her, she thought, in her plain cheap travelling clothes, which she had made herself and which had none of the sophisticated chic or elegance that the Edinburgh dressmaker had imparted to the garments she now wore.
‘If he thought me beautiful then, what will he think of me now?’ she asked herself.
From the moment she awoke she had had an irrepressible feeling of excitement.
As she walked down the stone staircase to see her horse waiting, she felt as if her whole being had come alive in a manner that was almost rapturous.
Only when she set out with the groom riding a little behind her did she wonder if perhaps Lord Strathcairn was away from home and after all her planning she would be unable to meet him.
Then she told herself that he had made it clear that he was always there to protect and care for his Clan and he was not the type of Highland Landlord who was attracted by the amusements and frivolities of the South.
‘He is everything Mama would admire,’ Leona told herself and then had to admit that the Duke also, lived in his Castle amongst his people.
‘But he does not care for them,’ she thought scathingly, ‘it is money that matters most to him – not human beings!’
She thought of the sheep she had seen roaming over the moorlands, great flocks of them white against the heather and hated everything they stood for.
Then, because for the moment it was difficult to think of anything but Lord Strathcairn, she spurred her horse into moving faster.
When they had left the drive of The Castle, she turned South to climb the hill that she knew bordered with Strathcairn moors.
She rode up the side of it, being forced to move slowly because the ground was uneven and there were rabbit holes into which her horse might stumble and strain a fetlock.
As she neared the top, the groom drew even with her.
“Excuse me, miss,” he said in his broad Scots accent, “but ye’re gettin’ verra near to the Strathcairn boundary, and we’re no allowed to ride o’er it.”
“I believe there is a cairn at the top,” Leona replied, “I wish to see it.”
“Aye, that there is,” the groom replied.
As if having made an effort to restrain her, he had nothing more to say and dropped back. Leona moved on as quickly as she could, climbing all the time until The Castle lay beneath her.
It looked almost ferociously strong and impregnable in the sunlight.
The Glen beyond seemed dark and, as she had thought, when she first drove through it, somehow ominous.
‘There is something creepy about it,’ she told herself and then laughed to add, ‘my imagination is running away with me.’
It was difficult, with the freedom of the moors stretching in front of her and the sweet scent of the heather blowing in the wind, to remember her fears in The Castle!
How when she awoke at night she lay listening, although what she expected to hear she had no idea. How the shadows were often menacing.
Ahead of her she saw the Cairn, great grey stones piled one on top of the other and her heart leapt.
She knew that in a few seconds she would be on Lord Strathcairn’s land.
She rode up to the Cairn and pulled her horse to a standstill.
Then she looked to the South and saw first the loch, then Cairn Castle, as she had been longing to see them ever since she had left the beauty and peace of their protection.
The lights on the hills surrounding the loch and its still water were even more beautiful than she had remembered.
The Castle in the distance had a fairy-like quality that made her think it had come right out of a book of Fairy tales she had read as a child.
Her horse was no lon
ger so frisky after the long climb and was content to stand still while Leona looked ahead and was reminded of the Promised Land of the Israelites.
She had thought of it and dreamt of it so often, that she had been half afraid that when she saw it again it would have lost its magic.
But it was just as she remembered it, an enchanted stretch of water and an enchanted castle.
She realised that the groom was fidgeting behind her, undoubtedly afraid of being reprimanded for having brought her up to the boundary, but she did not move.
She knew it would be ridiculous to imagine that, after all this time without hearing from her, Lord Strathcairn would expect her to appear now.
And yet, childlike, she had believed trustingly that he would be there.
‘Dare I ride down in search of him’ she wondered.
She had the uncomfortable feeling that if she did so the Duke would be extremely annoyed, and yet, she reasoned, would he not be almost equally annoyed anyway when he was told that she had ridden to the boundary?
‘I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb!’ Leona quoted to herself and felt it was an apt adage.
She turned her horse’s head and started to ride towards Cairn Castle.
“Miss! Miss!” the groom cried agitatedly. “We’re trespassin’! This is Lord Strathcairn’s estate and we shouldna cross the boundary!”
“I have been invited to do so,” Leona replied and continued to move forward.
The groom behind her was protesting beneath his breath in a manner that told her he was greatly perturbed.
She must have ridden on for twenty minutes and Cairn Castle was getting nearer, so that now she could see its turrets and the flag waving above the grey roof.
She could also perceive the small crofts nestling around the loch and she noted with satisfaction that there were no sheep on his Lordship’s moors.
But, as they rode, they disturbed several large covies of grouse, the cocks cackling in indignation as they flew away to safety.
It was then that in the distance Leona saw a man on horseback and felt her heart leap.
She was not certain at first if it was indeed Lord Strathcairn, for the moors were undulating and, after having seen him for a few seconds, he disappeared out of sight, to reappear some minutes later.
The Secret of the Glen Page 7
