Page 5 of Laird of Secrets
“Excellent brew, and nae sort o’ poison. The peaty flavor is most favorable in a good Highland whisky, so no, peat reek does not indicate poison. But do keep your ears open, and let me know if you hear anything I should know.”
“I doubt I shall encounter any peat reek lairds, but if I do, you shall be the first to know. Oh, look!” She knelt, dusting a bit of rock clean with a cloth pulled from a pocket in her skirt. “An ammonite fossil.” She pointed to a curled shape impressed on the rock surface.
“A what?”
“Ammonite—an extinct marine mollusk, rather like a cephalopod. I believe there may be a massive limestone bed beneath this hill, with deposits of greywacke along with the Old Red Sandstone layer, and liberal evidence of a great ancient flood. I cannot wait to tell James about this.” She rubbed at the rock with a gloved finger.
“Your geological babble is lost on me, dear lass, but James will love it. Fiona, please come along now. I must get back soon. I have a dinner engagement at Auchnashee. You definitely must explore this hill with James, once he returns to the Highlands.”
“James and Elspeth will be in Edinburgh for another month or so.” Her twin, James MacCarran, Viscount Struan, was an accomplished geologist and professor of natural sciences, while Fiona considered herself an amateur with a keen interest in fossils. “He must finish his lecture series for the university before he and Elspeth return to Struan House.”
“Ah, true, Elspeth was insistent that their expected little one be born in the Highlands. Well, Struan House is just a few hours from here, so you will see them now and then once they are back—if you are still in the glen.”
“I plan to be. And you, I imagine, will be too busy to visit any of us. Thank you for coming with me today, though, I enjoy your company. But please do not feel obligated to keep watch over me.”
“I will anyway. I have a good deal of work now, with the new tax laws in effect. Smuggling continues full pace along this loch, despite the new regulations—and despite the denial of the locals. And I always have time for you, lass.”
“I thought the recent laws would make your work easier.” She stood, brushing her skirts.
“Not as much as I hoped,” Patrick said. “Taxes were lowered to make it less tempting to smuggle whisky out of the Highlands. The government also recruited hundreds more revenue officers to catch offenders, and penalties are much stiffer. If a still is discovered and dismantled but no one claims it, the laird of that land is responsible no matter what. But they continue, regardless.”
“I suspect Highlanders enjoy the adventure of free trading too much to stop. Highlanders have a tendency to ignore authority.” She smiled, for she had always enjoyed the vein of rebellion that ran through Highland history and Highland character. “At any rate, you will be busy, and must not worry about me. I may visit you down the loch, though, since you are staying at Eldin’s new hotel.”
“He offered me a free room at Auchnashee, and invited me to dine with him and some Edinburgh businessmen tonight. Oh, did I mention Eldin has decided to become a revenue officer?”
“What!” Fiona stared, astonished. “Nicholas MacCarran, Earl of Eldin, stooping to regular work? I cannot imagine it. He is too concerned with his own comfort, and too arrogant to care.”
“I was surprised, I admit. He was not always that way, but after his family perished, he was never again the Cousin Nick we knew as children. But a law officer? That I did find hard to believe.” He shrugged. “But it is a formal title only. He paid a fat sum for it, and will probably never ride out. He wants some authority here, and the Crown needs money, so he applied for the rank and paid the fee.”
“It is another reminder not to trust the Earl of Eldin.” Fiona sighed.
“I liked him well when we were children,” Patrick said. “But if we cannot meet the conditions in Grandmother’s will, then Eldin inherits the bulk of the estate, and we will four will have next to nothing.”
“We will find a way. Patrick, do go on ahead. I want to gather a few more fossils along the hill before I go back to Mrs. MacIan’s house.”
“Mr. MacDuff arranged to take me down the loch by boat. I must meet him soon.” Patrick frowned. “A gentleman who escorts a lady on a nature walk should not abandon her on a hillside.”
“But a little brother can leave his big sister if she insists he go.” Smiling, she waved him onward, then knelt again on the damp turf to brush away the dirt on a rock that looked promising.
“I doubt you can discover what you truly need here, Fiona.”
“Fairies to satisfy the will? They are not thick upon the ground, are they.” She laughed ruefully. “I sometimes wonder how I can ever fulfill Grandmother’s requirement to sketch fairies from life—of all things—for the book James is piecing together from her notes. She approved of my charitable teaching work, and I will continue that. But fairies—and her odd requirement that I marry a wealthy Highland husband—it seems almost mad.” She sighed.
“I have been thinking,” Patrick said. “We can contest the will—a mad old woman, however well-meaning, left a will in her dotage that is not based in reality. I will speak with Grandmother’s solicitor about it.”
“But if we do not meet the clauses, everything goes to Eldin. It is an extraordinary situation.” Fiona stood.
“We can manage without a fortune if we must,” her brother said. “Easier than finding spouses with fairy blood, or finding sprites to sketch, and so on. Just invent fairy portraits and have done with it,” he urged. “No one would know otherwise.”
“When I make a promise, I keep it. So I have to try. You’ve said little about what the will asked of you, and William has not said much either.”
“I do not want to marry a forest sprite, or whatever impossible creature my demented grandmother thought a good match for me,” Patrick replied. “Do not frown at me. I honor her memory, but not her last will and testament. And William is a physician—he could be labeled a quack if he goes about collecting spells of fairy medicine, or whatever Lady Struan assigned him.”
“Yet James accomplished her request to find a fairy bride. Was it coincidence that he fell in love with a darling lass who has a legend of fairy blood in her ancestry? They say we MacCarrans have fairy blood too.”
“Then why should we look for more? James believes Grandmother wanted us to refresh the fairy bloodline or some madness. I plan to oppose the will to solve it for all of us. First I must determine that we have a case, and everyone must agree to it. Then you need not search under rocks for fairies.”
“Just ammonites and trilobites. Extinct marine arthropods,” she explained. “Regardless, I will stay in the glen to teach. The Edinburgh Ladies’ Society is relying on me. No one else could take this assignment.”
