Page 86 of Laird of Twilight
“Good,” James said. “Ask your grandfather to come as well, to help us search. We will slip away from the group and look for treasure.”
“Charlotte will not like that very much,” Elspeth said.
“She is not my concern. You are,” he replied, and set his arm around her shoulders. She sighed, relaxed against him.
“I know it all seems impossible,” she said. “And I am very grateful.”
“If I can find myself a fairy bride, anything is possible,” he said.
She laughed, though tears stung her eyes. If Grandda was right, this would be dangerous indeed. If they failed, she might never see any of them again.
A rapping sounded on the door. Patrick opened it. “Mrs. MacKimmie!”
“Begging pardon, sir, but Mr. MacArthur is here and asking for Miss Elspeth.”
* * *
He held the blue agate in his hands so that the lamplight glowed through it. The hour was late, and he had removed the stone from the case, planning to present it to Elspeth in the morning. Her promise, at last, to marry him had touched him deeply. Any condition she set seemed attainable.
If stones like this existed in the hills around this glen, he thought, they would find shining crystals and stones, even a bit of fool’s gold, to satisfy Mr. MacArthur’s wish for a horde of treasure. There was no harm trying.
Whatever the outcome, he felt relief and hope now. Had Elspeth set him a Herculean task to test his sincerity and his acceptance of her wild beliefs? His love was sincere, but he understood her need to test it. If he was honest with himself, he had to question how much of his desire to marry her rested with the inheritance.
That was part of it, at least initially. For himself, he would not care. For his siblings—aye, he cared a good deal. Sighing, he set the agate down.
Elspeth and Donal would return to the house early in the morning to join the Highland tour. He had persuaded the weaver to act as a guide. Though he was not versed in Sir Walter’s romantic poetry and novels, the rest of the group was, and they would know what they would like to see.
Had Elspeth told her grandfather about their engagement by now? He thought so, although it was best kept to the few of them as yet.
He was trying to accept this fairy business and the eccentricity in Elspeth’s family, but he was puzzled that she had called her mother a fairy. But all of it would sort itself out to rational explanations someday, he was sure.
Leaning back in the leather chair, he lifted the agate again and held it to the light.Moonlight to midnight, Elspeth had called the color range. At the heart of the stone was a cluster of delicate clear crystals, a toothy formation like a miniature landscape of peaked hills and castle turrets.
He reached over to the leather bag containing his tools and notebooks and extracted the loupe. Adjusting the two lenses for magnification, he tilted it over the agate.
The lenses showed the blue striations to be translucent hues of excellent clarity, and he could see more detail in the central crystals. The outer casing of granite was a thick husk, the agate inside exquisite, particularly the center facets.
He angled it. The crystalline cavity looked very much like a tiny cavern.
“What the devil,” he murmured.
Frowning, he stood and took lamp and crystal into the library, going straight to the painting over the mantel. With the agate perched on his flat palm, he looked from it to the painting.
When tilted, the cavern-like crystal center was nearly identical in shape to the hillside cave rendered in the painting, where the spilling treasure was visible. Even the turf on the hillside looked like the dull rock husk, and the cut in the hillside, painted in blue, green, and earthen tones, had a swirl pattern like the agate rings.
Odd, he thought. Frowning, he returned to the study to sit at the desk. The blue stone had belonged to Donal MacArthur. The man’s son must have seen it, and used it in his painting. That was all.
The hour grew late, and he had work to do. He reached for his grandmother’s manuscript, remembering that she had mentioned Niall MacArthur. Where was that...flipping pages, he found the name and settled back to read.
Niall MacArthur, a young man of the local gentry,his grandmother had written,went into the hills one day to sketch from Nature. Later he lay down to rest on a hill at sunset. A passing shepherd greeted him, and that was the last Niall MacArthur was ever seen by human. He never returned home, and vanished that day.
His father, Donal, searched for his son for months. One evening, as the father, a weaver, sat at his loom, the son appeared to him in a mist. He said that he had been lured away by a beautiful fairy. She had asked him to love her, and forsake the earthly realm to be with her forever. He begged his father to meet him at a certain spot in the hills where the rock hid a portal to the Otherworld. There, the son would explain all.
James stared at the page, covered in his grandmother’s minute handwriting. He had skimmed these pages when he had first arrived, but had read closely. Now he sat stunned. Lady Struan had known about Niall’s disappearance.
He turned the page.The father went to the rock and used a stone as a key to open the portal. There he met his son and the beautiful lady who had lured him into that subterranean realm. With them was the queen of the hills surrounding the glen, the same queen who had won the father’s love in his youth. She still held the tether of his heart, calling him back to her every seven years. He could not refuse the appointments, for he had accepted a gift from her that aided him daily in his craft, and that was the price he paid.
The son and his fairy bride presented the weaver with their infant daughter in a barter for the son’s soul. The bargain they agreed upon allowed the weaver to raise the girl until the fairies called her back to them on her twenty-first birthday. So the weaver took the girl with him to raise and protect. Her fairy kin gave her the gift of The Sight so that she might see what cannot be seen, and know what cannot be known.
