Page 17 of A Rogue in Twilight
“If you feel comfortable, sir. Mr. MacKimmie will drive me, and he will also take the housemaids to catch the post-chaise in Callander to return to Edinburgh. I will be gone just a few days. Beg your pardon to leave you thus.”
“Not at all.”Locals avoid the Fairy Riding at all costs,he wrote.
“There’s food in the larder, sir, and soup in the kettle today. The groom will come by to see to the horses, cows, and chickens. I also sent word to a local family to ask if their daughter could come round to see to the housekeeping for you until I return.”
“I will be fine with or without. Thank you.”
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” she said. “The mail arrived just now, very late. The postman said the roads are that muddy, he does not expect to be back for a week or more.” She set three letters on the corner of the desk. “I’ll just leave, shall I?”
“Good day, and safe journey.”
When she had shut the door, he 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 if Struan House was acceptable for sophisticated city guests. James snorted a little at that, wondering if they could manage shabbiness and banshees, and realized he did not care.
Patrick reported he would travel to the area with Sir John Graham, who was interested in a business venture in the north, though they had declined Lady Rankin’s invitation to join her party. James chuckled, knowing his brother had no tolerance for Lady Rankin and her so-called sophisticated friends. The lawyer’s terse note only made him frown, and he set it aside; it required no response at the moment.
Reaching for one of the books stacked haphazardly on the desk, a volume of Sir Walter Scott’s work on ballads and legends, James flipped until he found a section on fairy lore.
“Fairies and elves,” he read aloud, “are interchangeable terms in the Highlands. Ah. So the elven sort are the fey sort. Right, then.” He scribbled that in his notes.
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…
“Even Sir Walter believes this nonsense,” James muttered. He flipped pages, skimming the essay. A farmer, he read, had gone out to wait for a procession of fairies, then heard “the ringing of the fairy bridles, and the wild unearthly sound that accompanied the cavalcade.”
The fairy riding? James sat up, thinking of the local tradition Mrs. MacKimmie had mentioned. He wanted to be sure these details were included in his grandmother’s book. Flipping pages, he came to the old Scots 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 had to 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 Mrs. MacKimmie and the others traveled in safety now that they were on their way. Taking up a stack of handwritten pages from Lady Struan’s thickmanuscript, he placed his own notes neatly beside it. The pages were piling up right and left, and stacks of books teetered on the desk and the floor by now. The work was well under way.
Standing, he fetched another book from a high shelf, reaching for it, then limped back to the desk. He moved around easily enough without his cane in a close space, though he needed it for distances. Lately, he had used it often due to the cold and rain, as dreary weather made his leg ache. He settled in the desk chair to read again.
“Fairy rings…fairy phosphorous…now that is interesting,” he said.
The study walls were lined with books behind mesh-fronted shelves, and the small, cozy library beyond, with sofa, chairs, and fireplace, held a considerable assortment of books collected by his grandparents and previous generations of the lairds of Struan. His great-grandfather had purchased the property and had been elevated to a peerage for bravery in the military, making James the third Viscount Struan. A shiny new title, as such things went.
He picked up a sheaf of his grandmother’s handwritten manuscript, its topmost pages curling at the edges. Her handwriting was small and certain, every page densely covered, some sentences crisscrossing. She had left at least six hundred such pages, he had estimated. He had spent nearly a fortnight reading her written pages along with various books on fairy lore and Scottish traditions. All the while he took notes, so that the pile of pages grew daily.
The scope of the thing was more than he had expected. Lady Struan’s book was a scholarly study of Highland fairy lore, and some of it was fascinating, he had to admit. The material captured his interest for the most part, and though he applied himself diligently to the work, he took care to go for walksto stretch his muscles, clear his head, and search for rocks to support his ongoing geological studies.
Now he rose and went to the window that overlooked the back of the house. Gazing at the vast garden, with its back section sloping upward to include a grotto cut into the hillside, he watched the rain. Then he spotted something moving on the slope.
For an instant, he thought of the fairy the maid had claimed to see. No doubt that was an illusion of mist and flowers. In the rain and twilight, the shape moved again.
A girl. Wraith, ghost, human, or mist, someone was there.
He saw her move again. Definitely a girl. Dark hair, pale face. She paused, then disappeared behind wet shrubbery. Fairy indeed. Someone was in the garden.
He frowned. Rain trickled in muddy rivulets down the hillside. If someone was there, they might slip on the unstable hill.
A flash of lightning showed the girl again. His grandmother had written in her manuscript that the grotto, completed just before Lady Struan’s death, was a fairy portal. More nonsense. But there was no doubt it was a precipitous slope in heavy rain.
If a local girl was mucking about on the hill in this torrent, he meant to stop her before disaster occurred. Turning, snatching up his cane, he marched out into the corridor. Osgar the wolfhound, resting in the hallway outside the door, rose and loped after him.
