“Can he stop it?”
“He could—but listen, all this is a longer conversation than we’ve time for tonight. Connal’s bringing his daughter ’round for dinner tomorrow night, and we’ll settle everything then.”
Anna’s heart gave an unexpected thump. “Settle what?”
“Well, not so much settle as negotiate. That’s where your lawyer skills come in—and now that’s more than enough for tonight. Away upstairs with you. You’re so tired you’ll fall asleep in your bath if you’re not careful.”
Warning bells pealed loud and long in Anna’s head as she studied Elspeth. Even so, just hearing the word bath brought up a yawn that rippled up from the bottom of her exhausted body.
Whatever fresh disaster was heading in her direction, she was going to have to wait and face it in the morning. After a good night’s sleep.
Meet the Press
The best laid schemes o’
mice an’ men gang aft agley.
Robert Burns
“To a Mouse”
The bathroom was equipped with a heater and a deep, claw-footed tub. Soaking in the water, Anna had a view of the night sky filled with stars splattered bright and moonlight that turned the loch to liquid silver. She lay back surrounded by lavender-scented bubbles, every one of her muscles unknotting. Tired as she was, though, after she set the alarm on her nightstand and crawled beneath the soft comforter with her hair wet, she didn’t sleep for long.
In the middle of the night, her worries all roared back at her as if a storm had churned up the sediment. She tried to coax herself back to sleep. Tried to forget. Even something as simple as thinking of the time difference between Scotland and Washington, D.C. was a reminder that, for her, there was no such place as home anymore. The lease on the apartment she had once shared with Mike was up in just two months.
When she finished here in Scotland, she’d have less than four weeks to move and get her life back in order. No one was going to hire her as a lawyer after she’d missed an EPA filing and cost her firm’s client a small fortune in penalties. She had savings, but they wouldn’t last forever. All the way around, helping Elspeth organize the Beltane Festival for May Day was a heaven-sent opportunity. If she could pull it off, it would give her a new event to add to the many she had helped organize for her mother before she’d left for law school, and the combination might be enough to get her a foot in the door with one of the companies that planned the big D.C. events.
But that meant she had to pull it off. No matter what Connal MacGregor wanted or didn’t want.
The thought propelled her out of bed an hour before the alarm was set to ring. Immediately, she felt better. The walls of the airy room upstairs were covered in a cheery damask Victorian wallpaper that she hadn’t had time to appreciate the night before. The sun filtered through a haze of clouds, casting a glow over the polished hardwood floor and refracting off the antique mirrored dresser.
Outside, beyond the windows, Loch Fàil came to a head at a narrow peninsula where the Sighting took place and slipped into the smaller, oval lake, Loch Daoine. After that, the valley narrowed, wild and lonely, and vanished into steep-sided braes and taller Munros.
The view fired Anna’s imagination. Rob Roy’s house had stood at the end of the smaller loch before the Duke of Montrose had evicted him, branded him an outlaw, and forced him to hide within the untamable Highland hills. The original dwelling had been burned at the time, but an enormous house, almost large enough to be called a castle, stood there now. Built of gray stone, baronial, turreted, and surrounded by a high stone wall that ran all the way down to the peninsula, it was also vaguely intimidating.
Very much like its owner.
On that thought, and the reminder that His Rudeness was coming to dinner that night, Anna’s craving for coffee went from need-it-now to what-the-heck-are-you-waiting for. Why on earth would Elspeth have invited Connal MacGregor to dinner if he was angry about the festival? More importantly, why was he so upset?
She turned on her phone just long enough to send an email to her mother saying she’d arrived safely, then powered it off again and shoved it in the nightstand drawer. After shimmying into faded jeans and a comfortable cashmere sweater that had seen better days, she let herself out into the carpeted hallway and tiptoed down what had once been the servants’ stairs at the back.
Intending to get a jump on breakfast in bed for Elspeth, she mentally ticked through the list of ingredients for cinnamon donut muffins. All of them were basics that Elspeth was sure to have on hand, and the recipe would make the house smell like warmth and comfort. Smiling, she reached the open doorway to a bright kitchen papered in old-fashioned yellow roses. But instead of going in, she stopped dead on the threshold.
Elspeth was there ahead of her, humming as she removed a kettle from the modern, stainless steel cooktop set in among the white cabinetry. Taking the kettle to the counter near the sink, she poured steaming water into a waiting Wedgwood teapot. However, this was not the frail Elspeth who had greeted Anna the night before.
This Elspeth still wore the post-surgery elastic stocking and limped a little, but she’d left the walker abandoned beside the Welsh dresser that displayed china and a collection of photographs on the far side of the room. Abandoned also was Elspeth’s earlier slumped and weary posture. She might have put on a few pounds since the last time Anna had seen her, but she was still clearly fit and as full of energy as ever.
Standing in the doorway, Anna thought back to her mother’s accusation. Which was not something she wanted to think about.
Still humming, Elspeth got down a delicately-patterned cup and saucer from the cupboard and poured herself some tea before turning with it toward the table that sat near the door. On seeing Anna, she gave a startled jump. Tea sloshed over the rim of the cup onto the scrubbed oak floor.
Anna rushed to clean it up. Only when she straightened with the cloth hot and damp in her hand did she meet Elspeth’s eyes.
They looked guilty and more than a little frightened.
Anna gave a sigh. “What are you up to, Aunt Elspeth? Why have you been pretending your knee is worse than it is?”
“Would you have come if I hadn’t?” Flushing a mottled red, Elspeth turned back to the cupboard beside the sink, got down a fresh cup and saucer, and poured out tea for Anna. She handed it to her ceremoniously, like a peace offering. “I am sorry for misleading you, but I didn’t want you going home to your mother when you’ve already been through so much. I won’t apologize for that.”
Anna took the tea, but it was coffee that she craved. She suspected she was going to need to be wide-awake for whatever Elspeth was going to tell her. “What about the festival?” she asked. “About making it bigger and rebuilding the Village Hall? Was any of that true?”
“Aye, it was. After I told you.”
“What?” Anna’s stomach sank.
“The truth is, I’ve gotten the village into a pickle.” Elspeth blew out a breath, as if getting the confession out had freed air trapped inside her lungs, and then rushed on. “It’s your mother’s fault, really. She kept going on about Mike and your job, and all I could think about was you back in that house of hers, having to listen to her badgering. And back in September, when the Village Hall burned down and we realized the insurance had lapsed, we did all talk about expanding the bonfire and the Sighting into a festival and bringing in more tourism. Some of the businesses here are desperate. Only—well, we can’t ever make a decision for all the arguing. Then when I was on the phone with you, I remembered how much you always loved organizing your mother’s charity events. So why not kill two birds? Ailsa always bragged how you had a talent for planning.”
Anna glanced up. “She did?”
Elspeth’s smile kindled with mischief in a way that made her look a decade younger. “It’s one of the few times I’ve ever heard her give anyone their due.”
It was stupid how much that one little bit of praise distracted Anna, how much it ma
de her realize how rarely her mother had ever praised her. She forced herself to concentrate. “I don’t understand, though, Aunt Elspeth. Why is Connal angry about the festival if it doesn’t even exist yet?”
“I’m afraid that’s where I went and did something stupid.” Elspeth shifted in her seat, looking even more uncomfortable. “As soon as you said you would come, some of us in the village got together and came up with a list of ideas a mile long for events and ways to raise money. I told them I would talk to Connal about it in the morning, but by the time I got back here that night, I’d gotten to worrying that you’d think I’d invited you here on a pretext—”
“Which you did—”
“—and I thought if I could at least organize a few things before you arrived, it would seem more like we were further along in the planning. You know how I get. I started looking online, and I found one of those press release services, and the next thing I knew, it was four in the morning, and I’d sent notices out to half of Scotland, and I’d emailed all the travel agents and websites and hotels that send us visitors besides. All without saying a peep to Connal. Now we’ll look like right idiots if we back out—and people could show up even if we try to cancel.”
Anna could picture it as Elspeth talked, the way Elspeth would get swept away on a wave of enthusiasm, wrapping herself within a story until she half-believed it herself. Embellishing it with more and more details until the line between fact and fiction blurred. It was only the Connal piece that made no sense. Elspeth had talked about the village May Day traditions for as long as Anna could remember. Anna’s mother had been May Queen the year she’d left the glen, and Elspeth had been Queen the next two years. No one even knew how far back the tradition of the Beltane bonfire and the Sighting went.
“What is it that Connal’s objecting to?” Anna asked. “The Sighting’s always been in the same place, hasn’t it? Is it just the extra people? Litter? Noise? What?”
“Nothing like that.” Elspeth pushed back her chair and crossed to the refrigerator. “But listen to me going on and on when you must be famished. Do you want a savory breakfast or something sweet? I can do you a full Scottish, or a full English, or eggs and sausage by themselves. There are scones left, too, and I baked up some of that fruited gingerbread you like. I figured you’d be needing a bribe before I finished with you.”
“Bribe away,” Anna said with a faint shake of her head. “You know how much I love your gingerbread, but that won’t get you off the hook. You have to tell me everything.”
Elspeth brought a dessert plate and a small platter of gingerbread to the table. The gingerbread glistened with dried apricots and dark currants, and Anna cut a piece with her fork and closed her eyes as it melted on her tongue. “I’ve missed this.”
“You wouldn’t have needed to miss it if your mother believed in calories. Or joy, or anything to do with where she came from, when it comes to that. Just because she chooses to ignore facts doesn’t make them go away.”
That was harsher than Anna’d ever heard Elspeth speak about her sister, and she looked up in surprise. As far back as Anna remembered, it was always Elspeth who made the effort to come to Ohio, never Ailsa going back to Scotland. None of the rest of them had been allowed to visit Elspeth, either. Summers had always been crammed with pageants and camps and extra ballet lessons, or trips to visit their father’s side of the family in Chicago.
Anna thought back to how upset her mother had been on the phone and the way she’d talked about the festival. “Does the Sighting have anything to do with the reason she won’t come back here?”
“She won’t come back because she’s pig-headed and too selfish to see what’s right in front of her nose.” Elspeth brought the teapot over and refilled first Anna’s cup then her own before sinking into a chair at Anna’s elbow. “Not that she’s alone in that. People don’t always like what the Sighting shows them. That’s part of the reason we’ve always kept the tradition close, just us here in the glen. I know you think my stories are nothing but flimflam, and more of them are than not, but the Sighting is as real as the fact that every glen in the Highlands is filled with braes and lochs and heather, not to mention inns and caravan parks. It’s the one thing we have going for us besides Rob Roy MacGregor’s grave, and if you ask me, it’s high time we use it to help the folks around here do more than scrape out a living. That’s why I need you to work out a solution with Connal.”
“Me?” The idea of getting Connal MacGregor to work with her on anything struck Anna as less than likely. “I’m an outsider here. Why should he listen to me? I don’t even understand the problem.”
“The problem is, half the village will side with him no matter the question, and the other half will side against him. The fact that you don’t have a history in the glen works in your favor. We’d make no headway at all, left to ourselves, and there’s only a month before Beltane as it is. Look, Connal’s afraid, that’s the long and the short of it. He’s afraid the festival will bring attention to him and Moira and end up hurting her the way it hurt his wife.”
Anna stopped in the act of reaching for another square of gingerbread. “His wife?”
Elspeth turned away. “Isobel Teague.”
“So then he is Gregor Mark?” Anna asked softly, as if just saying the words aloud was taboo somehow. In her mind’s eye, she saw Connal MacGregor again: the deep blue eyes, the high cheekbones, the walk that had captivated her as he’d hurried back to where his daughter waited. How rude he’d been when Anna had recognized him, and the pale, odd face she’d seen looking back at her from the car.
There had been public hysteria after Isobel Teague had crashed her car while she was eight months pregnant. Eight months pregnant and too drunk to avoid driving head-on into a truck. The baby had been born before Isobel died of her injuries, but there’d been something wrong that had sent the tabloids into a frenzy of speculation about everything: what was wrong with the child, Isobel’s drinking and mental health, her high-profile marriage to her equally high-profile husband. The tabloids had accused Gregor Mark of everything from abuse to cruelty to engineering Isobel’s death.
“So is this where he’s been all this time?” Anna asked. “How on earth has he kept that secret?”
Elspeth set her teacup down after taking a long, slow sip. “It’s been no secret to any of us, but he’s a MacGregor from the glen. The MacGregors and MacLarens may have been squabbling here since the massacre of 1558, but there isn’t one of us—MacGregor or MacLaren or anything in between—who doesn’t love that little girl of Connal’s. We’d all go a long way to make sure the tabloids don’t make Moira’s life miserable, poor mite, but we do need the tourism and the Village Hall rebuilt, and that’s the truth. That’s why we need your help making Connal see sense. It’s what you did at your law firm sometimes, wasn’t it? Broker settlements when there didn’t seem to be solutions?”
Anna had worked on plenty of land use cases, blocking people wanting to drill for oil in national parks, blocking a pipeline that threatened to degrade the environment. On the flip side, she’d argued cases for public use of private conservation areas. This was Scotland, and she didn’t know the first thing about the laws, but Elspeth was right. The basics weren’t too far out of her comfort zone. How hard could it be?
Shifting Boundaries
The love of books, the golden key,
that opens the enchanted door . . .
Andrew Lang
“Ballade of the Bookworm”
After wandering through the museum and touring the rest of the house, Anna spent the day in the kitchen working through the manila file of press releases, emails, and festival preparations that Elspeth had given her. She’d forgotten, she realized halfway through the task, how much she loved doing this. Breaking one huge task into smaller pieces, making to-do lists, schedules, charts, and spreadsheets on her laptop.
Organizing a big event was like conducting a piece of music or creating a piece of art from thousands of tiny b
rushstrokes. And the press release Elspeth had put together was perfectly phrased to bring in tourists by the busload. Too bad it hadn’t gone out sooner. It hit all the right notes: a range of events that included Highland Games and a bagpipe competition, a craft fair with vendor stalls, the crowning of the May Queen and Winter King chosen by the village, the decorating of the May Bush that would be carried around the glen before it was burned in the traditional fire on Beltane Eve.
There was even a community production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to tap into the fairy stories created by the sober Presbyterian minister, Robert Kirk, who had preached at the old stone Balwhither church in the seventeenth century.
Included also was the translation of the original Gaelic poem about the Sighting:
On the bright day
in the morning dew
to the pure of heart
the Lake of Destiny
will reveal the true love who
will warm the winter of your life
and the Lake of Enchantment
will turn sight to truth.
The morning’s faint-hearted sun had given way to a driving rain, and sitting in the warm kitchen with delicious scents bubbling from the stove reminded Anna of all the Christmas holidays she’d spent in the kitchen in Ohio helping Elspeth cook. This time, Elspeth refused her help rolling out dough for home-baked bread, stirring up a rich cream soup, and peeling the apples for chicken Bonnie Prince Charlie with Drambuie sauce and the apple butterscotch pie that Elspeth claimed was Moira’s favorite.
“She’s got a sweet tooth on her, that child,” Elspeth said as she put the finishing touches on the salmon for the fish course and dusted stray oats off her hands. “You’ve never seen the like, and she’s a little slip of a thing. Looks identical to her mother, at least on the half of her face that isn’t damaged. That same haunting fragility of Isobel’s.”
Lake of Destiny Page 3
