The Sixth Labyrinth (The Child of the Erinyes Book 4)

by Rebecca Lochlann

  Beatrice frowned as she regarded the stranger, then she blinked as she recognized him.

  “Aye,” Isabel said, “it really is the same pale skinny lad. He’s turned out well, eh? No longer all elbows and shinbones.”

  Morrigan’s maternal aunt quickly regained her composure. “You thought he might turn out poorly?” she said. “I didn’t.”

  “Come, sir,” Isabel said.

  Ramsay handed the mare’s reins to Morrigan. “I hope you’ll join us,” he said.

  She kept silent, her father’s fury bombarding her like a tangible thing.

  Isabel waved the gentleman up the steps and led the way inside, rambling on without pause.

  Hoping to escape, Morrigan brought Widdie around, but as she did, the satchel slipped off her shoulder; A Translated Greek Mythology slid out and fell to the ground. A gust of wind ruffled the pages, causing Widdie to snort and prance. Morrigan tried to quiet her, which gave Douglas time to retrieve the book. Smearing the cover with his grimy fingers, he looked at it then his gaze lifted to Morrigan. She pressed into the pony’s solid, comforting side.

  “So this is what you were doing. Leaving Beatrice to prepare breakfast alone.”

  She said nothing, knowing better. Inwardly, she gave thanks that she and Nicky had left their wooden swords by Loch Ryan, under a stone. Outwardly, she appeared contrite.

  “Get your bloody arse inside.” He jerked Widdie’s reins out of her hand and looped them around the post. “Lazy glaikit.”

  His calling her names wasn’t anything new, but what would he do to her precious book? No doubt he was jealous, since he’d never been taught how to read, and couldn’t decipher more than the simplest script.

  Her sneaked morning rides had always vexed him, but today he was like a boiling thunderstorm. She couldn’t decide what had set him off. Isabel’s arrival? The gentleman friend?

  It’s you. The mere sight of you is all it takes.

  Misbegotten leeches, he called women. What use have they ever been?

  The wild, secret Morrigan spoke up. Well, if it weren’t for women, how would males get their precious rose-scented arses onto the earth?

  They probably had an answer for that, as well.

  Bacon, eggs, and deviled kidneys filled the dining room with a delicious, crackly-hot scent. Morrigan poured tea into china cups, holding herself stiff as wood beneath the paternal stare boring through her scalp.

  With the excuse, “I must tend my cakes,” Beatrice vanished into the kitchen.

  “Mr. Ramsay’s away to Ireland,” Isabel said, spooning eggs onto a plate. “He’s aye kindled about some dog.”

  “Sometimes I race them,” Ramsay said, “but mostly I breed them and sell the pups. A lad I know in Dungarvan deals in greyhounds descended from Master McGrath.”

  “Oh, aye?” Morrigan said without thinking. “The three-time winner of the Waterloo cup?”

  Ramsay rewarded her knowledge with an appreciative smile. “That’s the one.”

  Laughter crinkled the skin around his eyes and deepened winsome lines on either side of his mouth. He seemed to savor every aspect of life. When had she ever enjoyed anything half this much?

  She’d swear a June morning sat on one side of the dining room while a January blizzard darkened the other.

  Could laughter be as contagious as fear… as catching as the dread and misery in this place?

  “You’ll take the new ferry,” she said, solemn-faced, holding on with both fists to cool reserve, as Beatrice had taught her she must always do. “The Princess Louise.”

  “I’ve read about it.” Mr. Ramsay glanced from her to her father, his brows creasing into the slightest frown. “I hear it makes the crossing in less than three hours.” He sat at the table with a small helping of bacon and eggs, and sipped the tea Morrigan had poured for him.

  Douglas Lawton remained in the doorway, a sickle dangling from one dirty hand. Morrigan, who had several more books of Greek myths tucked away under her bed, thought he looked uncannily like Charon, the ferryman who rafted dead people across River Styx.

  “Douglas, will you have your breakfast?” Isabel gestured to a chair. “You’re making my flesh creep, standing there like that. My brother seldom takes time for conversation,” she added. “He’s fair preoccupied with his crops. From the look of him, he’s labored since before sunrise, and seems to have forgotten about washing before coming into a dining room.”

  Grey irises glittered between a wealth of black lashes as Douglas stared at his sister. He looked as though he might be contemplating throwing her across the room.

  Not for the first time, Morrigan wished Isabel possessed more tact. One would think his own sister would know he often vented his rage on those who hadn’t necessarily annoyed him. Well, Ibby was eight years younger. Douglas had already taken a fee to support his mother and sister while Ibby was still a suckling babe.

  She continued on, unaware or uncaring. “And I expect you’ll begrudge me any time with your children, though I’ve come all this way. Where is Nick?”

  “In the fields, where he is every morning. We haven’t a woman’s leisure.”

  She snorted. “I daresay leisure is something Morrigan and Beatrice would find unfamiliar. Go on, then.” She gave a dismissive wave. “But be warned, I’ll steal them when you’re no’ looking. I’ll force them to giggle, sing, and dance, and think of anything other than toil.”

  Douglas’s jaw clenched. He turned, but before he left, he sent Morrigan a glance she couldn’t decipher. On anyone else she might have named it uncertainty, but she didn’t imagine her father capable of such an emotion.

  Why was he leaving? He hadn’t yet had anything to eat. Somehow this was her fault, she knew it.

  “He works them half to death,” Isabel grumbled, then seized Morrigan’s hand and pulled her into a chair. “Mr. Ramsay has a grand old manor house in the hills outside of Glenelg. It’s called Kilgarry. You can see the turrets from the Sound.”

  “Aye?”

  “The estate borders Glenelg to the south,” he said. “The central tower is one of those drafty old keeps, built by the Macleods in the 1600s, but various owners added onto either end, and my father updated it as well. It’s fairly modern now.”

  “I’ll never forget the cèilidh of… 1860, wasn’t it?” Isabel said. “It was the only time we returned to Glenelg after the troubles, and the last time we were fortunate enough to see your dear father and mother.”

  “Oh, aye,” Ramsay said. “There was a snowstorm, and everyone stayed until the roads were passable. We made a bonny long holiday of it.”

  Isabel nodded, smiling. “Thomas Ramsay—” she leaned closer to Morrigan to say, “that’s Mr. Ramsay’s father— loved to throw parties, especially at Christmas. Kilgarry’s windows reflected the sunlight as we sailed by, like great diamonds….”

  Strange, the expression in Isabel’s eyes. Sad. “What’s wrong, Auntie?”

  “Nothing.” Yet Isabel’s fingers tightened against Morrigan’s, and a tear spilled over her plump cheek.

  “Auntie?” Morrigan jumped to her feet.

  Ramsay stood too, proffering a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket.

  Morrigan rubbed her aunt’s hand. “Are you ill? Shall I call Beatrice?”

  Isabel wiped her cheek. “Of course not. I’m a daft old woman, giving childhood recollections more power than they deserve.”

  “Can I do anything, Mrs. Maclean?” Ramsay seemed truly concerned.

  “No,” she said. “I mind Glenelg, you know, and my childhood. Forgive me, both of you.”

  “They weren’t happy years,” he said. “Perhaps they’re best forgotten.”

  “Were such a thing possible,” Isabel snapped. “None but a soul who’d not lived through that would suggest they could be.”

  Ramsay’s face revealed his anxiety and regret.

  “Nevertheless,” Ibby continued, “I’ve a few cherished memories. You’d be surprised. Though we were poor, o
ften hungry, we enjoyed good times before the coming of the sheep. We’d sing the most outlandish ditties. Lasses learned much of life from those songs….” Waving the handkerchief, she added, “Your grandmother used to send me to scratch dulse off the sea rocks to flavor the soup. It gave a nice salty flavor. But after the clearings, for days and days, dulse was the only thing we could find to eat. It got aye wearisome, I’ll tell you, and was scarcely what you’d call filling.”

  “What does Mr. Ramsay know of your childhood?” Morrigan hadn’t missed the color blooming in their guest’s face. “And how did sheep destroy your good times?”

  “I apologize, Mr. Ramsay.” Isabel returned his handkerchief. “My niece doesn’t know a thing of course, being an infant at the time. My brother’s never told her what happened. He won’t allow anyone to speak of Glenelg or those awful days. Maybe he doesn’t want her to be sad. He seems a harsh man, but I remember him before… when he was young, married to Nicky’s mother. I still believe there is a good heart in him, buried deep down inside.”

  She patted Morrigan’s cheek. “Life was hard in those cold mountains, as Mr. Ramsay knows. He was only seven when Thomas moved them to Glenelg, and just eighteen when his father slipped away, isn’t that right, sir?”

  “Aye,” he agreed softly.

  “You lost your folk too soon.” Her eyes refilled with sympathetic tears. “Mr. Ramsay is a fine example of an indomitable spirit. Not yet twenty-six, isn’t that right? But responsible for an estate, a shipping business, and, I might add, the livelihood of a good number of folk.”

  “Mrs. Maclean, please. You flatter me.”

  “No more than you deserve.” Squeezing Morrigan’s hand, she said, “Tea, that’s what I need. Pour me another cup, would you, child? I can’t wait to show you the hat I brought. It has a plume of ostrich feathers. Lord knows where you’ll wear it. Oh, and will you play for Mr. Ramsay? I bragged about you all the way from Glasgow. Chopin… everyone loves your Chopin.” She sent their guest a speculative glance. “No doubt you thought I exaggerated, Mr. Ramsay, but I can prove it. My niece possesses a gift from the angels, as you’ll hear for yourself.”

  Though Isabel’s cheery personality had rebounded, Ramsay’s constraint remained. “I believe the ferry leaves in a half-hour,” he said, consulting his pocket watch. “There’s hardly time to appreciate Miss Lawton’s playing. Perhaps when I return…?”

  What secrets did Aunt Isabel, this man, and her father share? Mr. Ramsay appeared too distressed to ask, but Morrigan vowed she’d get the tale from her aunt at the first opportunity.

  “I’d best check on Beatrice,” Morrigan said. “I should’ve helped with breakfast, but….” She shrugged and made her escape.

  The scent of a golden-white bannock, cooling on the worktable, sent her stomach growling. Beatrice was washing dishes out of sight in the scullery, so she gouged a chunk from the edge and bit into it. Light as a cloud, warm and yeasty, it melted like butter on her tongue.

  Before she could filch more, her aunt appeared in the doorway, wet skillet in hand. “Why d’you test your father’s patience, again and again?” she said, frowning. “I’m beginning to think you enjoy being strapped.”

  “I didn’t hurt anything.” Retrieving a blue-striped towel from a hanger beside the worktable, Morrigan took the skillet, finished drying it, and put it away on the shelf above the range.

  “Your chores were left undone,” Beatrice said.

  “I would’ve been home long since, in plenty of time to help, if Aunt Ibby hadn’t stopped me at the station. Must I spend every moment I breathe doing chores?”

  “Maybe you’d prefer to starve.”

  Sighing her defeat, Morrigan collected the basket of dirty linens and started out to the close, but Beatrice stopped her.

  “Before you do that, go and freshen a room for Isabel. Then I suppose you should spend a bit of time with her. I have better things to do than listen to her complain about being ignored.”

  “But I thought… you said—”

  “Keep a civil tongue, Miss, and do what I tell you.”

  The woman was beyond comprehension.

  “I’ve done it this time, Mama,” Morrigan said as she climbed the narrow rear staircase to the second storey. Conversing with Hannah leant a fancy that the one person she longed to know above all others might not be so completely lost as death implied, and had become a habit so long ago she’d lost its beginnings.

  When she reached her bedroom, she unplaited her hair and worked a comb through it. “To hell with him. I’ll ride again as soon as he turns his back.”

  She knew she was bluffing, though. Experience had long ago taught that bravado, undaunted in her bedroom with the door closed, would thaw like an icicle against her father’s angry stare and the warning slap of the leather tawse, forked at one end, that he kept hanging in the barn for disciplining his children. She suspected the tawse was only meant to instill fear, as he most often used his fists.

  She changed her dress, donned a clean white apron, and rewound her hair into a proper knot. A few months ago, Beatrice had carelessly mentioned that Morrigan’s hair was much like Hannah’s, probably never realizing how from that moment, every time Morrigan put it up, she would think of her mother, and suffer pangs of loss all over again.

  Morrigan often searched Beatrice’s face in hopes of glimpsing something of Hannah. They’d been sisters, after all. But Beatrice’s lined, dour, heavy features never came close to the description Nicky had offered, though his own memories were vague at best, or Morrigan’s own fantasy. Maybe it wasn’t fair to compare the two women. Hannah had died young, still resonating with youthful ardor, and would remain fresh and beautiful forever to all who had known her.

  “I wish you were here,” she said as she hung up her discarded skirt and brushed it vigorously. “Papa wouldn’t be this way if he still had you, would he?” Surely Douglas hadn’t considered his own wife a misbegotten leech.

  Nothing happened, no ghostly voice or any other spectral sign of comfort. Jingling the keys on her chatelaine, she went off to tidy one of the guestrooms, replaying Mr. Ramsay’s smooth manner of speech as she plumped the pillows on the creaky four-poster. Maybe he’d attended one of those grand old English universities, she thought with envy. Though his accent couldn’t compare with good Lowland Scots, it was inviting, like drowsing in a meadow on a sunny day. How strange, when she’d always been told Highland folk were coarse and ignorant. Beatrice often said she should count her blessings to have grown up in the Low Country.

  How would it feel, to be married to such a braw young gentleman? Would being a wife, in the end, be no more pleasant than being a daughter? She was expected to trade her father for a husband, to never strike out on her own or create her own destiny. Sometimes it made her want to punch a hole in the wall. There was no doubt a good reason for all the rules and expectations surrounding females, but what was it? Women possessed no means to threaten men. A woman’s entire existence, whether fine or not, depended solely on the goodwill of the males in her life.

  Such thoughts would probably never have occurred to her if it weren’t for school and the dominie, and the books he’d given her to read, and the hours they had spent talking about ancient civilizations. He’d suggested there may have been places, in long lost times, where women made the laws. And he’d laughed at the way her initial shock had transformed into captivated imaginings.

  Beatrice’s polish, made of beeswax and a drop of chamomile, leant the room a sweet apple scent. Morrigan arranged cut daisies in a glass vase and placed it on the commode. She checked the coal box, cleaned a dead spider out of the china basin, and filled the spill holder with splints, though the weather was grand and there would be no need of a fire.

  Mr. Ramsay doubtless had servants to tend such mundane duties. His wife would have no more to fill her days than deciding what to serve for dinner and which jewel to fasten about her pampered white throat.

  Part of Morrigan’s imagination
urged a coward’s retreat until he’d gone, while another embellished a picture of herself freed of drudgery, dressed in silk, one languid hand resting on his capable arm, the other extended to welcome admiring guests.

  Without a dowry, title, or land, no woman could hope to achieve such a status, and certainly not a country wench with chapped hands and bitten fingernails. Though gentlemen seemed to enjoy flirting with Douglas Lawton’s daughter, they always left without any sign of regret.

  She had been a plain child. When she’d been sent into town, not even the bullies noticed her. She’d liked being invisible. It gave her freedom to observe folk without them knowing. She had overheard bitter arguments between husbands and wives who would have kept silent had they realized someone was listening. She’d watched couples in dim wynds, amazed and shocked at the nasty things they did. She’d seen the bullies take out after boys they wanted to persecute, and harass girls they thought pretty, or ugly, or different.

  Nowadays, she couldn’t take a step in town without drawing attention. She’d developed a habit of walking quickly with her head down, her shoulders drawn up, though the sense of having done something wrong, or of being wrong, merely because of the way she looked, made her inwardly blaze with indignation.

  It felt as though she was more appreciated yet less appreciated at the same time.

  The stares of men told her she was no longer a skinny lass with tangled plaits. It was unnerving, especially when low whistles accompanied the stares, or murmuring was followed by coarse laughter. Only the shameless inner Morrigan wanted to flaunt and flutter and use folk. Even now, as she descended the stairs, the sinful lass suggested that if she would turn the force of her beauty on Mr. Ramsay, she might win her longed-for escape.

  But no. She was not so daft. Gentlemen married to benefit their stations, and lasses who thought they could change that paid a heavy price.

  Theseus didn’t exist. He’d never really lived. He was a myth, a legend, as was her dream-lover, a fantasy of her overzealous imagination.