Page 3 of Laird of Twilight
“Never look back,” she repeated dutifully, nodding. “My father looked back.”
He nodded sadly. “They love and live joyfully, but they have a hidden power, and they do not forgive easily, if ever. That’s the Fey.”
“What do they look like?” She had heard the stories often and delighted in hearing them again. She wanted to know more about the realm where her father lived still. Her grandfather had a storyteller’s way about him so that even a repeated tale sounded new.
“Some are golden as sunshine, some dark as midnight. You are like the dark ones,” he added, reaching over to tap her knee. “Hair like jet, eyes like moonlight in that perfect wee face. You take after your fairy mother, though you have your father’s stubborn chin and his temperament, too. You do not always do as Mrs. Graham and I ask.” He looked stern for a moment.
“I listen, but sometimes I do as I please.”
“Just like your father. Willful and smart, with a mind of your own.”
“Are my parents truly in the fairy world?” she asked. Her grandfather was silent. Was this another of his tales, this talk of fairy blood, so she would not be as sad to be an orphan? She shrugged. “Grandda, can I try the game again? Let me guess what page you are looking at in the book.”
“Very well,” he said, and covered the page with his hand.
She closed her eyes. She liked this game, for she often knew the answers. “It says,blue, blue, green, green, and five threads of yellow for the weft threads.It is MacArthur! You are looking at the pattern for our own plaidie!” She opened her eyes.
“It is indeed the MacArthur tartan. My cousin wants a length of wool for a new waistcoat.”
She smiled. “Peggy Graham says I have the Sight.”
“Mrs. Graham,” he corrected gently. “And so you do. The fairies gave it to you.”
“Someday, perhaps I will find the hidden fairy gold they want returned to them. And they will be grateful and happy, and my father will come back to us.”
Donal MacArthur sighed. “I fear Niall and the treasure are lost forever. But anything is possible, aye?” He returned to his notes.Scritch, scratch.
Elspeth looked into the leaping, delicate flames, and wished she could see the fairies too, as Grandda had done. She squeezed her eyes shut. Nothing came.
Sometimes she had lovely dreams in which a handsome young man and a beautiful dark-haired lady came to her, laughed with her, hugged her. She hoped they were her parents, hoped they were of the fairy people, but she did not know. She closed her eyes again. Nothing.
Someday she would see them,she promised herself.
Chapter 1
Scotland, Edinburgh, July 1822
“Fairies!You cannot mean, sirs,” Patrick MacCarran leaned forward, knuckles pressed on the lawyer’s desk, “that a parcel of blasted fairies stands between us and our inheritance!” He glanced at his three siblings, while the two men behind the oak desk, one seated, the other standing, remained silent.
“We need not assume ruination.” James MacCarran, Viscount Struan, gave a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders in good black serge. He strived to maintain an unruffled demeanor as he leaned against the doorframe of the lawyer’s study, though he felt as stunned as the others. “Let Mr. Browne and Sir Walter finish before we decide that we are done for.”
His siblings looked grim—his sister Fiona pale but composed, his younger brothers, William and Patrick, frowning. James remained calm, preferring distance in most things, actual and emotional, which served him well today. Scarcely a farthing would come to any of them from their grandmother until the astonishing conditions of her will were met. Ruination could await all of them.
“What could make this worse?” Patrick shoved a hand through his dark hair.
“A few elves would complement the situation nicely,” William drawled.
James huffed a bitter laugh. William was a quiet-spoken physician who had hoped to open a hospital with his share of the inheritance; Patrick a Signet clerk with ambitions to rise in the courts; and Fiona an independent sort with an academic bent and a knowledge of fossil rock that made her any scholar’s equal. Her research would benefit from some funds. Fiona stood now, stretching out a hand to calm Patrick, who had a strong temperament and seemed about to let his thoughts fly. Fiona smiled calmly, shaking her head.
Their grandmother’s funds would support his younger siblings’ dreams, James knew. As for himself, he had been Viscount Struan ever since their grandfather’s death, but yet uncomfortable with a title. He was content to be a professor of geology and felt he had few needs. But what Grandmother unexpectedly, posthumously, asked of them now was untenable.
“Lady Struan’s fortune will be divided between you when the conditions are satisfied,” Mr. Browne was saying. “Apart from modest funds she inherited after your grandfather’s death a year ago, reduced by his considerable expenditures—“
“He helped ease the suffering of displaced Highlanders during the clearances of so many from their homes,” Fiona said. “None of us begrudge his decisions.”
“Yes. Well. Lady Struan inherited a small amount from her husband, as I said, but she did acquire a personal fortune through her own properties and publications as well. She allowed Lord Eldin to sell off some of her properties recently, but Struan House remains. Now that she is gone, it will go in its entirety to Lord Struan, who has already inherited his grandfather’s title.”
James leaned against the door jamb, silent. As the eldest grandson, he had assumed the title, for their father, the elder Struan’s son, had died when he and Fiona had been nine, their brothers younger. Now a titled but not especially wealthy peer, James had inherited a modest bank account but earned his daily living as a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He had no ambitions to higher circumstances. He enjoyed his work and academic life.
