When later she had seen Duncan in Lady Bruce’s garden, curiosity had made her respond to his respectful greeting and spend time talking to him. She had warmed to his admiration of Lady Bruce’s roses and found herself agreeing what a pity it was that his Laird’s Castle had no formal garden.
Now she nodded to the retainer and said she hoped that he was in good health.
“Aye, that I am, miss.”
“Miss Stirling is to visit Castle Fitzalan with me, Duncan. We are to search the place for some heirloom or other.”
“So that’s the way of it, is it? I mind me the Laird once said somethin’ about a missing heirloom.”
“He did?” Rupert enquired eagerly as Celina was helped into the carriage. “What did he say about it?”
“Only that it be a shame he couldna put his hands on it as it might prove an answer to all his problems.”
Rupert looked so disappointed that Celina felt she had to say,
“You cannot expect Duncan suddenly to produce all the necessary details, my Lord!”
He turned to her with a rueful smile.
“Is it wrong to want to solve this awful situation as quickly as possible?”
“Of course not,” she replied, as Duncan clicked the horses into action. “I think we all want it found and Lady Bruce and I certainly do, but, forgive me, my Lord, if I say that finding the heirloom is only half of what is needed.”
“Ah, I do see what you mean. We need to ascertain without a scintilla of doubt its ownership, isn’t that it?”
Celina was grateful for his quick understanding, but feared that he assumed he would be able to prove that the owners were the Fitzalans.
“Suppose,” she responded slowly, allowing him to arrange a rug around her knees. “Suppose it can be proved ‘without a scintilla of doubt’, as you say, that whatever the heirloom may turn out to be, it belongs to the MacLeans, will you hand it over to them?”
She glanced up at him and found he was looking at her with great seriousness.
Once again her bones felt as if they were turning to liquid.
She swallowed a small gasp of distress, tried hard to remove her gaze from his and found that she could not, as she was drowning in the depths of his silvery-grey eyes.
“Like the surface of a loch under a spring breeze,” she murmured as if only to herself.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Nothing,” she stammered, at last taking control of herself.
She tried to remember how much she disliked and distrusted him.
“I was waiting for your response to my question. I think, my Lord, that you imagine just because the heirloom may be in your Castle that it automatically belongs to you. I am suggesting that you may well find proof that it does not. What then, will you do? Prove yourself just a bigoted Fitzalan?”
She finished with a contemptuous toss of her head.
He did not move his gaze from hers.
“Oh, dear, Miss Stirling, what a very poor opinion you have of me and my family. Let me assure you that if the heirloom is found and it does indeed prove to belong to the MacLeans, then I shall have great pleasure in handing it straight over to your uncle, if only to prove that I and my family are men of honour.”
“You could hardly do anything else if I am present when you find the proof!”
She regretted the words as soon as they left her lips.
She watched how his eyes narrowed, their grey now that of flint, saw the stillness that entered his body, the way his mouth tightened.
“I think we shall ignore that remark,” he muttered at last in a cold voice.
She flushed deeply and was at last able to tear her gaze away from his and instead look out at the landscape, but she could not have said what scenery they were driving through.
“Ye’ll no be findin’ yon cursed heirloom at Castle Fitzalan, I’m thinkin’,” said Duncan cheerfully. “The auld Laird knew every inch of the place.”
“I think we have had enough talk of this wretched treasure,” Rupert’s voice was now much more friendly. “I think I should prepare you slightly for what you certainly will find at the Castle.”
Her hand on the side of the carriage as it rattled on over the increasingly rough road, Celina listened to a light-hearted account of his arrival at his ancestral home.
“There was I with a picture in my mind of how it had been when my parents and I had left twenty-two years ago when I was eight, and you could not have been born.”
“I would have been a year old,” murmured Celina.
She was twenty-three now.
And it had taken her some time to agree to marry Hamish. Had she, she still wondered, hesitated for so long because she sensed that the high spirits she loved so much in him could turn into something less attractive?
Had she glimpsed something of his dark side in the way he hunted down stags and then gralloched them with unnecessary force, tearing out their vital parts?
She was not sure that Rupert had heard her confess her age, for he continued,
“I do remember our departure with absolute clarity. My grandfather had locked himself in his room and would not come to say goodbye. My mother pressed my father to make one last attempt to talk to him and to try once again to explain why he felt there was no future for our family in Scotland. He went upstairs – but it was no use.”
He paused for a moment.
“It was a departure full of emotion. Perhaps that is why I remember exactly how my childhood home looked as we left.”
Celina listened intrigued to his story of a medieval Castle little changed from the thirteenth century, but filled with a variety of furnishings gathered over several hundred years of domestic living, giving it a rich and comfortable appearance.
“It was a right bonnie place,” intervened Duncan.
“And that was what I expected to find on my return and instead I was greeted by just an empty shell!”
“Not all empty,” protested Duncan. “I was there to welcome ye.”
“With a blunderbuss!”
“Och, well, that’s the MacLeans’ fault.”
Duncan stopped the carriage on a rise and pointed with his whip.
“There be it, the Castle Fitzalan, Mistress Stirling. Have ye no seen it afore?”
She shook her head.
“Never.”
A square battlement was stabbed with slit windows, as its top blossomed into a fairy-tale collection of turrets. The plaster coating of the grey stone was in a poor state of repair – it came away in parts, as though the whole structure was covered in giant cobwebs.
Celina was familiar with this very Scottish style of architecture, but she had never seen one as captivating or as mystical as Castle Fitzalan.
As she stared, totally entranced, Duncan flicked the horses’ reins and they continued until the carriage finally climbed a steep slope and reached closed gates. There he had to shout at the stable lad to open up before they could enter the sadly neglected courtyard.
Celina could see that Rupert had not exaggerated the state of his home.
In the salon the plaster had completely fallen away from the walls and all was dust and dirt.
She could hardly believe that Castle Fitzalan, the seat of the powerful and supposedly rich Fitzalans could be this rackety and rundown.
The magic of her first sight of the place dissolved into the reality before her now.
Almost as if he could see it all through her eyes, Rupert ventured apologetically,
“I am trying to put an army of women together to perform a spring-clean.”
“If there’s to be a whole load of work done after your smart architect comes down, there’ll be no point in cleanin’ now,” said Duncan. “It’ll only have to be done all over again. I suppose ye’ll be wantin’ somethin’ to eat?”
“A bowl of one of your soups a little later, Duncan, would be great, but I think Miss Stirling and I should start our search right away.”
Rupert l
ooked at Celina.
“Should we start at the top or the bottom?”
“The top,” suggested Celina briskly.
She was feeling uncomfortable at the closeness of this man and the light in his eyes as he looked at her.
Not even Hamish had stirred such a complex set of emotions in her.
If only he was not a Fitzalan!
“Right then that is where we shall start.”
Rupert led the way up a series of spiral staircases.
At the top of the Castle there was a long gallery with a large window at both ends. There were shelves but no furniture – and, apart from dust and the odd book lying on its side, the shelves themselves were empty.
It took no more than a few minutes to ascertain that the walls and ceiling were not hiding a secret cupboard.
Despite herself, as she followed Rupert out of the gallery and then through a succession of small rooms that seemed to cling onto the sides of the Castle, Celina found herself studying her guide.
How thorough and systematic he was in his search.
She was used to the erratic ways of the MacLeans and had not realised how much she had been irritated by their slipshod methods of going about anything, including this matter of the heirloom.
Soon she realised that she and Rupert were working as a team, dividing the rooms to be searched, then meeting again outside each, shaking their heads.
“Do I gather that you are trusting me not to overlook a hiding place or stash the treasure away?” he remarked after they had dealt with several rooms in this fashion.
She flushed at the teasing note in his voice as all her suspicions of him flooded back.
“I’ll know if you try anything like that,” she replied sharply.
He looked exasperated.
“Why do you find it so impossible to believe that what I want most in all the world is to find this wretched piece of treasure, whatever it is? I want to bring an end to a feud I have had nothing to do with, that is ruining my life!”
Then he looked deep into her lovely eyes and his expression softened.
“No, I lie. There is one thing I want more than that – it is for you to trust me.”
Celina found her heart beating so fast she thought it might suddenly fly out from her breast.
“Come on then, my Lord” she exclaimed, “we have only searched half of your wretched Castle!”
They descended to the main floor and he held open the door of yet another room for her.
“Yours, I think,” he suggested expressionlessly.
She strode past him – into a large salon.
Here two armchairs stood in front of a huge stone fireplace and a wooden door was set into one of the walls.
She opened it and was faced with the dusty shelves of a cupboard on which were three ancient bottles of wine. She picked them up and automatically checked their labels.
“Worth drinking?” asked Rupert.
“I thought they might be Napoleon brandy. I heard Uncle Robert say once that it was very valuable.”
“Not in those shaped bottles.”
“You’ve tasted Napoleon brandy?” she asked him, suddenly intrigued.
“I once bid for some in a wine auction, but was outgunned. A shame – I still wonder what it tastes like.”
He picked up one of the bottles.
“Hmm, a very decent claret. Shall we drink it with Duncan’s soup?”
Celina shrugged her shoulders.
For the briefest of moments, it seemed that they had forgotten both their mission and their suspicions of each other.
Had they met under any other circumstances, she thought sadly, they might well have been friends.
Then, as she turned to survey the other side of the room, the portrait hanging there transfixed her.
“What a beautiful woman,” she cried. “Is she your grandmother, the woman Uncle Robert wanted to marry?”
Rupert nodded, watching her closely as she studied the painting.
“I don’t wonder that she had two men desperate for her!”
She felt sad for her uncle.
The woman he had finally married, many years after losing the love of his life, had died giving birth to Hamish, so Celina had never met her, but she had seen photographs that suggested she had been pretty in a faded way, but without much character.
She turned angrily away from the vibrant-looking young beauty on the wall.
“I just wonder how your grandfather forced her to renounce my uncle?”
“She wasna forced,” said Duncan, as he entered the room, “it was a real love match right enough. She died when ye were a wee laddie and the Laird never recovered from her loss. She sent for me before her end and made me promise to stay with him.”
Duncan turned away, but not before Celina had seen a moistness in his eyes.
“I came to tell ye the soup is ready. Ye’ll have to make do with the kitchen, though, Mistress Stirling.”
Celina took a last look at the painting.
“I’ll not be minding that, Duncan, and I could do with some soup – it’s hungry work searching this place.”
“Thirsty, too.” Rupert held up the bottle. “I’ll bring this with us.”
The kitchen was no better than the rest of the house, but the range gave out a welcome warmth and Duncan’s vegetable soup was very tasty.
“You’re an excellent cook, Duncan,” Celina praised him, as she tucked into her steaming dish.
Rupert was still prowling listlessly around opening cupboards and going through to the outer scullery to search there.
“Ye’ll no find what you’re lookin’ for down here, laddie,” remarked Duncan with a scornful snort. “All them cupboards are bare.
“I’ll go check on the horses,” he added and left the kitchen.
Rupert finally sat down at the kitchen table to his soup.
“I do hope that you don’t take offence at Duncan’s informality. He’s been here for so long he’s now one of the family.”
“We’re all used to straight dealing from servants in Scotland,” Celina assured him.
Rupert put down his spoon.
“I have a terrible feeling that we are not going to be successful,” he grimaced.
“But that is what you want, is it not?” Celina could not stop herself saying. “To be able to claim you tried and failed?”
Rupert suddenly thumped on the table with his fist, making the soup slop out of his bowl.
“You are the most infuriating girl I have ever met! Why on earth can’t you believe that I do actually want to find the whatever-it-is we are looking for? Do I look so Machiavellian? So untrustworthy?”
Taken aback by the strength of his attack, Celina almost choked on her soup.
“Just look at me!” he insisted. “What do you see? Someone who is determined to deprive a rightful owner of his property?”
Those silver-grey eyes were now full of passion as they regarded her.
Again she felt that melting of her bones and now it seemed as though a bird was beating its wings against her heart too, making it impossible for her to breathe.
His expression changed once more and he reached across the table towards her.
Celina leapt up from her chair, stormed over to the window and, her back to him, took several deep breaths.
The thudding of her heart gradually quieted, but she could feel his gaze fixed on her.
Finally she turned round.
“You don’t understand, do you? You treat it as a joke. Well, it isn’t! If you had lived with the MacLean family, if you had heard them going over and over the wrongs that have been done them, how they hate all Fitzalans and how this heirloom would solve all their difficulties, you would not speak as you do.”
He looked grim.
“I think I really do understand, Celina. After all, I have been abducted, beaten and shot at. That does rather concentrate a man’s mind, you know? If you had not freed me, I would be in a very sorry state. That is why
I have allowed you to enter this Castle. I would not have allowed any of your relations in.”
“I know,” she muttered simply recalling his bravery facing her uncle and Hamish.
For a moment his eyes narrowed and then he rose.
“Right, we will complete our search and I pray that we shall find whatever cursed object it is that your uncle believes should be his.”
Rupert swept out of the room and Celina hurried to follow him.
*
No treasure was found in any of the other rooms.
The last one to be searched was a muniment room, lined with shelves containing deed boxes, documents and leather-bound books.
“Have you looked at these?” Celina asked him.
“In case they contain clues to an heirloom? I made a quick assessment of them when I first arrived. They are mostly account books and estate records.”
He started taking down some of the deed boxes and opening them.
“These all contain various legal documents.”
Celina looked over her shoulder.
“Suppose that the heirloom is hidden elsewhere, my Lord? Just suppose that after the Fitzalans stole it from the MacLeans, they found a safe place. Wouldn’t the Laird of the time make a note of where he had concealed it? And wouldn’t he place the details with his legal documents in case he died before telling anyone else where it was?”
He looked at her with amusement.
“You have a vivid imagination, Miss Stirling. But we can certainly look through all these boxes.”
It was a boring process.
There were documents concerning land purchases and disposals, letters of contract, long details of marriage settlements and a host of other legal matters – but no paper with a description of how to find a hiding place.
Nothing that looked as though it could reveal the whereabouts of an unknown piece of treasure.
As Rupert began returning the documents to the last box, Celina was taking down several old books of estate records, only to be baffled as they seemed to be written in French.
Trying to put one back on its shelf, she misjudged the height and it fell from her grasp, splaying its pages over the stone floor.
The Revelation is Love Page 6