Master of Glenkeith (7 page)

Hester MacDonald made it abundantly clear that there was no need for her help in the house, no niche she could possibly fill, and although Margaret would have found her something to do outside it was left for Hester to decide.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Hester told her bluntly.

“Unless you want to leave Margaret without a job.”

With no desire to usurp anyone’s position at Glenkeith, Tessa found herself wandering about the farm and walking for miles along the country roads in her inadequate sandals, often coming to grief on the spongy moorland when she ventured farther afield.

It was on one of these excursions that she first saw Andrew really angry. She had watched him supervising the herding of some cattle earlier in the day and knew that he had sold two of his prize heifers to a buyer from the south because he had discussed it with Margaret, only including her in the conversation to explain that Aberdeen-Angus cattle were much sought after all over the world. Later, he had driven off with the two animals in a box-trailer, presumably to take them to Aberdeen where they would be put on rail for their destination.

On a sudden impulse she had almost suggested that she might go with him to buy some shoes, but something shy and half strangled within her had made her hesitate.

In the end he had gone off so quickly that she had not been given an alternative.

Margaret and her mother had been baking when she reached the kitchen. It was Tuesday and the routine at Glenkeith never varied.

“Would you think it fun if I showed you how to make an Italian dish some time?” she had asked, gazing at the large triangular scones which Hester turned on a girdle over the fire with clockwork regularity till she had a sizeable pile covered with a white cloth on the dresser behind her. “There are so many tasty savouries, and my mother taught me to cook when I was quite young. We use wine a lot in our cooking—”

She had broken off, aware of the frigid silence which had greeted her remarks and of Margaret’s embarrassed preoccupation with the partridge she was plucking.

“We’ve managed quite well at Glenkeith for the past forty years on the food I’ve cooked,” Hester had said, “and we don’t like our meat poisoned with wine. These daft-like ideas are best left to the Italians and the other folk that enjoy them. There’s nobody at Glenkeith likes anything other than plain fare, not even Andrew.”

“He liked it well enough in Rome,” Tessa had pointed out before she realized the extent of the mistake she had made.

“He would be too polite to say,” Hester had informed her crushingly, and she had come away and found her sketching-block and carried it out on to the moor.

She had walked fast to cool her indignation, coming farther than she had ventured before. The path she had followed when she had left the main road had begun to climb soon afterwards and the firs and silver birch of the glen had given place to the mountain ash, which she had already learned to call the rowan.

How much nicer a name it was to describe the slim, silver-boled tree with its soft, grey-green leaves almost hidden by the clusters of scarlet berries which she longed to paint against the muted green and gold background of the September hills! Margaret had told her that when the bracken began to die the whole moor was aflame with colour, and already the tips of the first fronds were turning palest gold.

There was amber light, too, in the shaft of birch that speared the pine wood to its heart and a promise of glorious autumn everywhere she looked. There was a sort of colour madness in her veins, she supposed. She loved it, as she had loved the warm Italian sunshine, and the thought of it drew her on irrespective of time or distance.

Soon she was high on the moor, climbing away from the wood, gathering long purple spikes of heather to thrust into the belt about her waist and tossing her hair back in the wind like a delighted nymph who has come across something different and more exciting than her forest glade.

At times she ran, but once or twice she sank deep into unexpected bogland, the wet sphagnum of the hillside, spongy and treacherous as she trod on it. But it was lovely, too, gold-starred with tiny flowers like trapped sunlight!

It was not until the mist came down that she really noticed it. If she had seen it gathering on the hills she had thought it ethereally beautiful, not knowing how swiftly and treacherously it could cut her off.

Finally it was the cold that sent her back by the way she had come, searching for the path that went down beside a rushing brown burn, but the mist caught up with her, rolling across the hills until even the path ahead of her was obscured. There was an eerie stillness about the moor now that the wind had dropped, and the mist intensified it. The birds had ceased their singing and she could not see the sun.

It was madness to run, but she found herself running blindly when the mist lifted for a moment and she could see the path. Her heart began to pound uncomfortably, a step away from fear, and she found herself thinking of Andrew, not as a means of rescue but as the implement of censure.

It was early yet, of course, and he might not have returned to Glenkeith, but she did not feel that she could tide over this adventure without his knowing about it.

Then, out of the stillness, came a sound she had least expected, the muffled beat of a horse’s hoofs as it picked its way across hard ground just ahead of her. She could only judge the distance by the sound, but she ran towards it thankfully, and suddenly a horse and rider loomed out of the grey pall ahead of her.

The horse saw her and reared immediately, startled by her unexpected presence, and a man’s voice exclaimed impatiently;

“What the devil—! Steady, Bess! Steady, old girl! It’s nothing to climb into the air about!”

Horse and rider became one, and Tessa found herself looking up at a tall, dark man with a thin, eagle- featured face who was gazing at her now with a faint mockery in his eyes. Under the straight dark brows they looked almost black, but the flicker of amusement in them gave her confidence.

“Don’t tell me!” he said. “Bess has been frightened by a nymph or a kelpie! ”

Tessa looked at him and her anxiety melted in an answering smile.

“If I knew what a kelpie was I could set about reassuring Bess,” she said.

“Since you’re doubtful on that point you can’t be a good Scotswoman,” he told her, smoothing the mare’s satin neck with a firm, gloved hand. “I was suspicious about that when I first saw you.”

“About me not being a Scot? My grandmother was,” Tessa declared. “Does that make it any better?”

“A little. Didn’t your grandmother warn you not to go wandering on strange moorland with a mist coming down?”

“I didn’t see the mist till it was too late.”

“What were you looking at instead?”

She flushed.

“Everything else. The rowans and the colour of the bracken and the birch trees down in the wood.”

“You’re quite sure you don’t live in the woods?” He dismounted, throwing the rein over his arm. “Where do you live, if it isn’t too great a secret?”

“At Glenkeith.”

She saw the surprise in his eyes and the dark brows went up, accentuating it.

“Glenkeith?” he repeated. “Since when?”

“Just over a week ago. My mother used to live there.”

He said: “You’ve come a long way from Glenkeith. Did you know?”

“I suppose I must have done. Several kilometres, I expect.”

He looked at her more closely.

“So you’re not even English?”

“What makes you think that?”

“You don’t measure your distance in miles!”

“All the same,” Tessa said with a small toss of her head, proving him wrong, “I am!”

He laughed into her challenging eyes.

“This is something!” he said. “You live at Glenkeith and you’re English, but you measure distances in kilometres and you have the faintest—just the barest ghost—of an accent. Not French. I would recognize that, but you’ve spoken some other language, something warmer than English, I think, for many years.”

“You sound like Sherlock Holmes!”

“Believe me, I’m not! I’m labouring under difficulties trying to think who you can possibly be.”

“Perhaps I should leave you believing that I’m a kelpie, but I don’t think I can do that, even though it would be fun to disappear into the mist and keep you guessing!”

“Do you think I’m the sort of person who should be kept in the dark?”

She considered him frankly. He was much too handsome, in a dark, virile way which suggested that much of his time might be spent out of doors, in the saddle, no doubt, where he looked superb. The well-cut riding breeches and hacking jacket might almost be a uniform with him, and he was as tall as Andrew if not quite so well set up.

It did not seem strange to her that she should measure this chance acquaintance by Andrew’s standard. Andrew was the only Scotsman she knew and he had seemed typical of his race.

“I think I should be getting back to Glenkeith,” she said without answering his question. “In a little while they will miss me and begin to look for me, and that might upset them.”

“Do you mean that it might upset Mrs. MacDonald — or Andrew?” he asked.

A smile broke over Tessa’s face, the wide, friendly smile which revealed the attractively uneven line of her teeth and broke a network of tiny laughter lines at the corners of her eyes.

“Then you know the Meldrums,” she said.

“Very well. Or, at least, I know Andrew very well — and Meg.”

She felt relieved.

“I’ve come to live at Glenkeith,” she told him. “My mother was Andrew’s stepmother, but that was before I was born—before she married my father. Does that sound complicated?” she asked. “It means that Andrew and I are not really related at all.”

He looked at her quizzically, puzzled, perhaps, by the strange circumstances which had brought her to Glenkeith, but he said almost instantly:

“We’re neighbours, more or less. My name’s Nigel Haddow, and we were bound to have met sooner or later.” “Because you live near here?”

“I live at Ardnashee, over there beyond these trees.” He nodded vaguely into the barrier of mist where the dark outline of a wood could just be seen. “It’s much nearer than Glenkeith and I propose to take you there.”

She drew back, looking down at her drenched skirt and sodden shoes.

“Oh, but I couldn’t!” she objected. Mrs. MacDonald would never forgive me for paying calls like this. I couldn’t possibly come, thank you all the same.”

“And you couldn’t walk all the way back to Glenkeith in that state,” he told her firmly. “You really ought to have some sensible shoes.”

“Yes, Margaret said so, and I realize that now,” Tessa confessed, looking down at her feet with a rueful smile. “They were all right for Italy,” she said.

His brows were raised just a fraction as he turned from her towards his mount.

“Can you ride?” he asked. “It would be much better if you sat up on Bess.”

“Then you would have to walk!”

He laughed down at her.

“I’m not likely to fall into a bog!”

Before she could so much as protest, he turned and picked her up, setting her in the saddle as if she had been a child. He took up the reins and Bess ambled off at an easy pace while he walked by her side.

The mare’s soft coat was quite wet with the mist, and Tessa could feel it in a little beaded fringe on the hair above her forehead so that she supposed she looked bedraggled and much in need of assistance, but, truth to tell, she was thoroughly enjoying her adventure now.

“How am I to know that all you have told me is true?” she demanded, laughing down from her precarious perch.

“You could quite easily be a Wicked Knight luring me to his baronial stronghold to shut me up in a dungeon for the rest of my life!”

He laughed outright.

“Ardnashee may be baronial, but the dungeon would be the last place I would lodge you in!” he told her. “What makes you think that my intentions are not far and away above reproach?”

He looked up at her with sudden demand in his dark eyes and Tessa was aware that some of the banter had gone out of the situation. She could no longer laugh and fling idle words at him without care. They were known to each other now and in the future they might even become friends.

“How far is it to Ardnashee?” she asked, leaving his question unanswered.

“Four miles.”

“But you said—”

“It was nearer than Glenkeith. It still is.”

“I must have walked a very long way,” Tessa mused. “Do you always forget about time when you are looking at the colour of trees and picking flowers to wear in your belt?”

“I forget about time when I’m happy, and especially when I’m looking for things to paint.”_

He took up her first confession.

“You expect to be happy at Glenkeith?”

A fleeting shadow passed across her face. It was the memory of Hester, but she could not very well tell a stranger that Hester MacDonald was not going to make her welcome at Glenkeith.

“I think you can be happy anywhere if you try hard enough,” she said.