Scarlet Wakefield 02 - Kisses and Lies

by Lauren Henderson

  “Nothing here that I can see,” says Mr. McAndrew, coming back down the corridor. “Are you sure you saw something, Scarlett?”

  “I think I did,” I say, furrowing my forehead, “but maybe it was just a shadow.”

  “God, I hope so!” he says cheerfully. “There’s always a worry about rats here, with the moat, you know. Really, we should have cats, or a couple of terriers—they’re great for ratting, you know—but Flora can’t abide small animals. Funny, she’s happiest on a horse, but she can’t stand anything smaller. Very odd. Shut the door, did you? Good girl. Right, off to the dungeons it is. And let’s hope we don’t see any rats down there. We do have the pest control people in on a regular basis, but it’s never a hundred percent guarantee. . . .”

  He sets off down the corridor, still talking, and I follow him, darting a glance back over my shoulder at the office door. I just hope that the piece of card worked, that the tongue of the lock is actually held back by the card so it can’t slide forward and fasten the door shut. Because if the card hasn’t worked, and the door is locked, not only will I not be able to get back in, but Mr. McAndrew or his factor will realize what I tried to do the moment they open the door again and the piece of card falls to the ground at their feet.

  We don’t see or hear any rats in the dungeons, thank goodness, because they’re gruesome enough without them. Dank and echoey and very dark—since the moat runs all the way around the castle, there’s no place that the occasional grate could be set into the ground to give some natural light. There is electricity rigged up down here, but it’s pretty feeble, and there are scary shadows everywhere. I can only be grateful that Mr. McAndrew isn’t the type of person who thinks it’s funny to hide and then jump out at me, because I think I would actually wet myself in fear if someone were nasty enough to do that down here.

  “I can’t imagine playing down here when I was little,” I confess to him, looking around me at the bare stone walls and the much-eroded stone flags beneath our feet, damp and worn down from centuries of use, probably by poor prisoners left here to starve to death. “Weren’t they scared all the time?”

  He laughs.

  “I think Catriona used to give the boys a hard time when they were smaller,” he says. “She’d bring them down here to play hide-and-seek. You know, when you’re little, being a few years older is a big advantage. She bossed them around mercilessly.”

  This leads on perfectly to what I really want to ask about: their characters.

  “What were they like when they were little?” I ask as we walk past a series of stone cells.

  “Well, Catriona was a real explorer,” Mr. McAndrew says. “She must know every inch of the place so well she could draw it from memory. I’m not surprised she grew up to want to be an architect.”

  “She seems keen on modernizing Castle Airlie,” I volunteer, remembering Catriona’s comments about the heating and the drafts.

  “Och well,” Mr. McAndrew says with a laugh, “she’s young and enthusiastic, bless her. But it’s not she who’ll decide. Girls marry and leave, Scarlett. That’s the way of it. It’s men who inherit. Always has been here, always will be.”

  I can’t help bristling.

  “I’m going to inherit Wakefield Hall,” I say firmly. “I don’t really know what I’ll do with it, but I know I won’t marry and leave.”

  He smiles down at me.

  “Wakefield Hall can’t be entailed, then,” he says. “Castle Airlie passes down the male line. So there’s always a McAndrew at Castle Airlie. And now it’ll be Callum. He loves Castle Airlie just as much as Cat does—but for him it’s more about the history, the land. Preserving the McAndrew legacy. Dan . . .” He sighs. “Well, Dan was actually the least interested in the castle. Maybe it was because he knew he’d inherit it one day—he took it for granted a bit, perhaps. I liked to think that he’d go off to London, sow his wild oats, and come back to settle here. Meet a nice local girl, raise a family.”

  He clears his throat and looks at his watch.

  “Good God, it’s almost eleven. Time to leave for morning service. Are you a churchgoer, Scarlett?”

  “Not really,” I admit.

  “That’s all right. Flora is expecting me, though. She’s become much more observant about church since . . .” He clears his throat again. “Well, anyway. I must get going.”

  We make our way through the bowels of the castle, and emerge near the main door. As we approach, I see Mrs. McAndrew standing just outside it, on the drawbridge, looking at her watch.

  “Sorry, darling,” her husband says, striding up to her and kissing her on the cheek.

  “We’ll be late,” she frets. Her eyes look strangely unfocused, I notice, and her voice is a little wobbly.

  “Not to worry,” her husband says bluffly, not seeming to notice that she’s in an odd state. “The vicar will wait for us. Didn’t we just give a big donation to rebuild the bell tower?”

  He extends his arm to her, and she leans on it as they walk across the drawbridge. I take a couple of steps onto the drawbridge too, just outside the huge wooden doors, and stand watching them as they cross the moat and walk down the drive to the carriage house. The wind is stirring the moat water, and it laps a little at the foundations of the castle. I stay there until the Land Rover pulls out through the stone arch and away down the drive. I wait until it’s disappeared into the grove of trees where someone shot at me yesterday afternoon, and I wait five more minutes after that, just to be sure that neither of them has forgotten anything and needs to rush back for it, listening to the rattle of the old jeep’s engine fading away, till there’s nothing left but the sounds of the water moving softly below me, and the breeze lifting the leaves of the trees.

  And then I turn and enter the castle once more.

  I’m so nervous that I get lost at least twice trying to find the Great Hall again, even though it should have been very easy by now. But once I reach it, the door that leads to the office passageway is unmistakable. I slip through it and find the main office door. Heart pounding, I push on it, gently at first, and then, when it doesn’t yield, much harder.

  The door’s sliding open. I’m in.

  twenty

  BEYOND DANGEROUS

  I ease the door shut behind me, making sure it’s locked, and then dash across the room and into the filing storeroom. The shelves run all the way around the room, right up to the ceiling, and above the filing cabinets are old cardboard boxes stacked here and there, and dusty piles of old ledgers. God help me if the entail is in one of those, because I’ll never find it.

  Most of the labels on the cabinets are incomprehensible to me, but I scan them in sequence, looking for something to pop out, and when, halfway through the alphabet, I come across LEGAL, my heart leaps. I pull out the drawer and start rifling through the categories. Disappointingly, it seems full of endless letters from the McAndrews’ solicitor about zero-rate band trusts, codicils, land registry filings, and lots of things I don’t understand and really hope don’t hold secrets that I’m incapable of working out. But eventually I find a section marked ENTAIL/DEED OF TRUST, and I pull out the folder eagerly, carrying it through to the main desk in the office and opening it up, careful not to disturb the order of the various papers it contains.

  Again, there are tons of letters from the firm of solicitors, the paper getting yellower with age as their dates go more and more into the past, the neat computer printing yielding to jerky typewriting. Though I squint dutifully at each one, I can’t see that they have any bearing on the fundamental question of how the inheritance for Castle Airlie works. I look at my watch. God, I’ve spent half an hour in here already! How did I use up that much time? And how long does a church service take?

  Probably an hour, I think. Add on a minimum ten minutes each side for the drive to Airlie village, and I still have a bit of time. But take off ten minutes for waiting for the jeep to disappear, and then making my way here, and take off another ten minutes for putting eve
rything away and getting far enough from the office not to raise any suspicions, and that means I only have another half hour in here. And I’ve had thirty minutes already, which has flown by, and in them I’ve found nothing of any use whatsoever. . . .

  Fingers trembling with haste, I rip through the rest of the folder, desperately hoping to find what I need. And there it is, right at the back in a plastic envelope, typed on the wobbly old typewriter, dated April 20, 1924, and titled:

  COPY ENTAIL/DEED OF TRUST FOR CASTLE AIRLIE, AYRSHIRE PREPARED FOR LAIRD MCANDREW ON HIS REQUEST

  Laird, I know, is Mr. McAndrew’s title. It’s like lord, in Scottish, and it means you own an estate. And like lord, it’s passed down through the generations. When Mr. McAndrew dies, Callum will be the next Laird McAndrew.

  I read through the entire entail—it’s only three pages, but the legal phrasing is incredibly dense and complicated. Then I go back and scan through it again. It’s only on the second reading that I come to the crucial bit, and I read the sentence at least three times before I fully take in what it means. It’s very long, like all sentences in legal documents seem to be. My brain is concentrating so hard that it feels twisted up into a tiny little fist. I don’t think I’ve worked this hard on anything in my entire life.

  Castle Airlie and its land and domain shall be given TO THE USE of the said Trustees TO THE USE of the existing Laird McAndrew for his life, without impeachment for waste; with remainder TO THE USE of the first and every other son of the Laird McAndrew according to their seniorities and the heirs male of the body of each such son; with provision however that should the said heirs male of the body of each son fail to attain their majority, which for the purposes of this entail shall be defined as the age of eighteen, the aforesaid estate shall pass with remainder TO THE USE of the first and every other daughter of the Laird McAndrew according to their seniorities and the heirs of the body of each such daughter, with the provision that such heirs shall take the name McAndrew upon inheriting.

  My heart is pounding with what I think I’ve found out. But it’s such contorted wording that I can’t completely trust my own judgment. I get a pen and a piece of paper from the desk and I copy the sentence out, slowly, meticulously, double-and triple-checking to make sure I’ve transcribed every word, every clause, in exactly the right order.

  And just then, I hear someone outside the door.

  I freeze in position, my pen in my hand, as if I’m playing a game of musical statues all by myself. My ears are pricked up, desperately trying to hear if the person outside is just passing by—which I fervently hope—or about to come in—which would be the worst possible scenario.

  For about thirty seconds, there’s complete silence. But I could have sworn that I heard quiet footsteps on the stone flags of the passageway coming to a halt outside the office door. I look around me, quickly assessing potential hiding places. Behind a door’s always good, but I can see both doors from here and they both open flush to the wall, which means there won’t be any space behind them to squeeze myself into. I shove the pen into my pocket and close up the folder as silently as possible, getting ready to move if I have to.

  The silence is still total. I’m just beginning to breathe again when there comes the most ominous sound, in these circumstances, that I could possibly hear.

  It’s a key being inserted into the lock.

  I move so quickly that I probably leave a vapor trail in my wake.

  By the time the door swings open, I’m curled up in a tight ball in the best hiding place I can find.

  I can’t see anything but a small piece of very dusty, cobwebby wall. There’s no way I can turn my head enough to see who’s just come into the office. And since that’s the case, I squeeze my eyes shut and pray that they don’t see me either.

  I hear footsteps, a rubber-soled tread which could be anyone’s. I’m hoping it’s someone who just came in to get something they need, which would mean that they’d grab it and leave straightaway.

  Though, on a weekend, with Mr. and Mrs. McAndrew at church, I can’t imagine who that would be. . . .

  The footsteps walk slowly around the office. I hear a chair being moved, which probably means that whoever’s come in is looking underneath the desk. I’m incredibly grateful I didn’t duck under there, because that was my first idea.

  There’s nowhere else to hide in the main office. The footsteps move closer now, coming through into the filing room. The door is pushed open, against the wall, as if to check that no one’s hiding behind it.

  The dust where I’m lying, stirred up by my arrival, is rising up my nostrils. The lining of my nose is itching. I’m fighting a powerful urge to sneeze.

  Then the footsteps stop and make a sort of muffled squeaking noise, which indicates to me that their owner is standing in the middle of the room, turning round, surveying it.

  I staple my lips together and hold my breath. If I don’t breathe, I can’t sneeze.

  I really hope that’s true.

  My chest heaves with the effort of controlling the itching in my nose, which by now has become so powerful that it feels like it could explode at any minute. For a brief second, I let myself wonder who it is standing so close to me, so close they could maybe even take one more step and reach out and touch me, and then the thought panics me so much I shut it down as tightly as I’m clenching my entire body at this stage, fighting the urge to sneeze with everything I’ve got—

  I hear footsteps again. My heart leaps in my chest with fear. And then I realize that they’re receding.

  They move back into the office again. I’m still not out of the woods: if I sneeze now, they’ll still hear me. I manage a huge swallow, more of a gulp, which seems to help.

  And then I hear the office door being pulled shut again, and the lock clicking into place.

  My right hand’s cramped under my chest, and I take the risk of wriggling it up till it reaches my face, so that my index finger and thumb can clamp over the bridge of my nose. I squeeze it so hard it brings tears to my eyes, but the pain seems to stop any further impulse to sneeze.

  I’m not going to move for at least five minutes. Whoever just came in here might still be inside: they might have shut the door to make me think it was safe to emerge from my hiding place. Or they might be waiting on the other side of the door, to see if they hear any movement inside the office.

  I close my eyes and try to go Zen, ignoring the screaming of my cramped muscles and the soreness of my nose. I breathe slowly, gently, taking little sips of air through my lips, fighting the urge to cough as the dust particles trickle into my mouth. I try, actually, to relax as much as possible, because I know from gymnastics that it’s much easier to hold a position when you relax into it than when you’re tensed up. I pretend to myself that I’m falling asleep.

  I don’t know how long I wait. Long enough to be sure there’s no one in the room with me: I’m sure I’d have heard movement by now. Long enough to take the risk that anyone standing outside the door, listening, will have decided that it was a false alarm and gone away.

  Slowly, painfully, I unwind myself. My feet have gone to sleep, which isn’t good, because I need them for climbing down. I manage to extend my legs a bit along the shelf, and I swivel my ankles in circles, grimacing at the pins and needles till I think it’ll be safe to put weight on them. Then I edge them out into the air, lower them, and, grasping the edge of the shelf with my hands, I lower myself down, walking down the edges of the shelves below me as if they were the rungs of a ladder.

  Thank God whoever built these shelves was a good carpenter. When I was panicking in the office, the only hiding place I could think of in which I might stand a chance of not being caught was to grab the highest shelf in the darkest corner of the filing room, haul myself up as fast as I could, and curl myself into a ball under the ceiling, hoping that no one would think to look up that high.

  People generally don’t, in my experience. It’s always better to hide higher than lower. T
hey’re much more likely to look under desks than at the top shelf of a cupboard.

  I retrieve the folder from where I hid it, under an old cardboard box. I take out the piece of paper on which I copied what I think is the crucial sentence, fold it up, and put it in my pocket. Then, as silently as I can, I slide open the D–H drawer of the filing cabinet marked LEGAL and reinsert the folder in the correct place. I close the drawer and pad quietly out of the filing room, into the office, over to the door. And then I stand there waiting, listening, for another couple of minutes, before I dare to turn the knob of the lock and open the door.

  I’m holding my breath. A pulse is pounding a military tattoo at the hollow of my throat.

  There’s no one there.

  I literally sag with relief. My knees buckle for a moment; I feel as wobbly as a baby animal taking its first steps.

  And then I pull myself together and set off down the corridor—not back into the Great Hall, just in case someone’s sitting on a sofa there reading a magazine, waiting to see if anyone comes out of the door that leads to the estate office. I go in the other direction, with no idea where this passageway might lead and not caring that much either. It has to go somewhere, after all. I’ll follow it round and find my way out of Castle Airlie.

  After what I’ve just been through, finding my way out can’t be that much of a challenge, can it?

  I have an agonizing twenty-minute wait behind the converted stables before Taylor finally shows up on her bicycle. She’s panting, her cheeks flushed, her nose sweaty, which means that she’s really gunned it: Taylor’s so fit that she only shows signs of real physical effort when she’s gone way beyond what most people would consider normal exercise.