Page 17 of Laird of Twilight
“Thank you, sir.” She shut the door.
James sat back to open the letters. One was from the lawyer, Mr. Browne, another from Lady Rankin, the last from his brother, Patrick. He scanned each one. His great-aunt wrote to inform him—again—of her travel plans, fretting about whether Struan House was acceptable for sophisticated city guests. James snorted a little at that. Patrick reported that he would travel to the area with Sir John Graham, who was interested in a business venture in the north. They had declined Lady Rankin’s invitation to join her party. James laughed softly at that, too. The lawyer’s terse note made him frown. He set it aside; it required no immediate response.
Reaching for one of the books stacked haphazardly on the desk, a volume of Scott’s work on ballads and legends, James flipped until he found a section on fairy lore, then picked up his pen to jot more notes.
“‘Fairies and elves,’” James read aloud, “‘are interchangeable terms in the Highlands.’ Ah. So the elven sort are the fey sort. Right, then.” He scribbled that down.
The most formidable attribute of the elves,Sir Walter Scott had written, was their practice of carrying away, and exchanging, children; and that of stealing human souls from their bodies...the power of the fairies extended to full-grown persons, especially those found asleep under a rock or on a green hill belonging to the fairies...
“Good God, Sir Walter has succumbed to this nonsense too,” James muttered, shaking his head. He flipped pages, skimming the essay. A farmer, he next read, had gone out to wait for a procession of fairies, and then heard “the ringing of the fairy bridles, and the wild unearthly sound that accompanied the cavalcade.”
James sat up, finding that of interest, considering the fairy riding that Mrs. MacKimmie kept mentioning. He wanted to be sure to include these details in his grandmother’s book. Flipping pages, he came to the old Scottish ballad of Tam Lin. Tam had been lured by the irresistible charms of the queen of fairies; appearing to his true love, Janet, he asked her to meet him when the fairies rode in procession. Janet must grab him and hold fast no matter what so that he could be free.
Betwixt the hours of twelve and one
A north wind tore the bent
And straight she heard strange eldritch sounds
Upon that wind which went.
Outside, the wind and rain picked up fiercely, rattling the windows. He glanced up, hoping that Mrs. MacKimmie and the others traveled in safety, for they would be on their way by now. He took up a stack of handwritten pages from Lady Struan’s thick manuscript. More pages piled beside his right hand. To his left, stacks of books teetered on the desk, with some on the floor as well. He placed his own notes in with the manuscript pages.
Standing to fetch another book from a high shelf, stepping on an iron stool to reach it, he limped back to the desk. He moved around as much as possible without his cane. The thing was more useful for distances and handy on cold and rainy days, when the leg ached, as it had done for days now in this dreary weather. He settled in his chair to read again.
“Fairy rings...fairy phosphorous...now that might prove interesting,” he said.
The study walls were lined with books behind mesh-fronted shelves, and the small, cozy library beyond, with its horsehair sofa, wing chairs, and fireplace, was filled with even more books, most of them collected by his grandparents, though some had belonged to previous generations of the lairds of Struan. His great-grandfather had purchased the property in his middle years, having been elevated to a peerage for brave service in the military, so that James had become the third Viscount Struan. A shiny new title, as most went.
He picked up a sheaf of his grandmother’s book, the topmost of the handwritten pages with their curling edges and the smell of ink, years dry, lingering still. Her handwriting was small and certain, and every page was densely covered, some crisscrossed with sentences. There were at least six hundred pages, he had estimated. He had spent nearly a fortnight just reading Grandmother’s close, fine handwriting, or various books on fairy lore and social customs in Scotland. All the while, he had taken new notes of his own, so that the piled papers grew daily.
The scope of the thing was more than he had expected. Lady Struan’s writing was a scholarly study of Highland fairy lore. Some of it fascinated him, he had to admit. He had applied himself diligently to the work, taking little leisure time, though he had gone on a few walks to stretch his muscles and search for rocks to support his geological studies.
Now he rose and went to the window at the back of the house. Gazing at the vast, upward-sloping garden—expanded last year, he understood from MacKimmie, to include a grotto cut from a hill behind the house—he watched the rain.
Then he saw something moving high up on the slope.
For a moment, he thought of the fairy the maid had claimed to see. No doubt that had been just an illusion created by greenery, flowers, rocks, and mist. In rain and twilight, a shadow moved on the hill—
A girl? Wraith, ghost, human, or mist, someone was there.
He narrowed his eyes as he saw her again—definitely a girl. Dark hair, pale face. She looked toward the house, then disappeared behind wet shrubbery.
He frowned. Rain trickled in rivulets down the hillside. If someone was there, they might slip on the unstable hill, running with rivulets of rain and mud.
A flash of lightning showed the girl again. The grotto, completed a while before Lady Struan’s death, was supposedly a fairy portal, or so his grandmother had said in her manuscript notes. Whatever it was, just now it was a precipitous slope.
If someone was mucking about in the grotto in this torrent, he intended to stop them before disaster occurred. Turning, snatching up his cane, he marched out into the corridor. Osgar the wolfhound, who had been sleeping in the hallway outside the door, rose and loped after him.
* * *
Best hurry, Elspeth thought. Two carriages had left the house since she had entered the garden, but someone might still remain in the house. She had hoped the place would be empty, had thought the storm might hold off. She had been wrong on both counts. Now she could only hope Lord Struan himself was not at home.
The staff would be leaving to avoid the fairy riding, and she had thought she would be safe to explore the garden later. But with the poor weather, today had seemed a better time to look for her grandfather’s stone. In good weather, someone might come outside to the grotto.
She had told Mrs. Graham that she would stay with Margaret Lamont if the weather turned poorly. Elspeth was always happy to visit her friend Margaret and her husband and children, and often lent a hand in the process of combing, dyeing, spinning, and twisting the new wools. But she had impulsively decided to stop at Struan House first to look for Grandda’s stone. Now, in this rain, she regretted it.
Well, she thought, since she was here she may as well search. According to legend—and to Donal too—a fairy entrance, a portal into another realm, was hidden somewhere on this hill. Curious to know if Donal’s tales were true, she was wary of the rain and mud, not to mention the risk of lightning; she ought to leave.
