Tony Hallowell’s voice was thick with sleep and maybe rum. “Who the hell is this?” he said.
“Your message said to call back tonight,” Els said. “I’ve only just returned from an interminable dinner at Miss Ivy’s. Do we have a deal?”
“Depends on you,” he said. “Hold a minute.”
She heard a muffled “It’s the Jack’s woman. I’ll take it in the kitchen.” She stretched the phone cord to reach the bathroom, slathered on cleanser with one hand, and wiped off her eye makeup with a tissue.
“They’re firm at six hundred thousand,” he said. “Net.” She heard ice falling into a glass, water rushing, Tony slurping.
The deal had tipped. She smelled victory. But instead of the usual surge of triumph, she felt her bluff of a lifetime being called.
“Your promise of a clean deal was what did it,” Tony said. “You just have to take care of all the nits and let her walk away with a tidy little check.”
“Little, nothing,” she said. “Fees, commission, lawyers . . . that jacks it up for me by what, fifty K?”
“Still a steal,” he said.
Lacking her habitual mania for checking her numbers before agreeing to a deal, Els felt herself plunging toward commitment. To what, she wasn’t sure—an alien place, a mysterious, needy house, an obligation as custodian of Jack Griggs’s belongings and perhaps his legacy?
“Her solicitor won’t promise to have papers before Tuesday,” Tony said. “Don’t plan on leaving before Wednesday, just in case.”
“As it happens, I have the flexibility to stay a few extra days,” she said. “Though I hear there’s a storm brewing. I want to get out before it strikes.”
“It’s late for a hurricane,” he said. “Probably just peter out to a little blow.”
“You’d better be right, Tony,” she said. “Tell them it’s a go.”
part two
CHAPTER 6
Scotland
December 1996
Once the priest had given the blessing to conclude Midnight Mass, Els slipped her arm into her father’s and they let Burtie precede them down the aisle, past the waiting villagers and Cairnoch staff. In the last pew, Malcolm stood alone, watch cap in hand. Burtie picked up her pace at first, but she hesitated when she reached him, and he stepped forward and took his mother into his arms. He looked over her head at Els and smiled. Els felt her father stiffen.
Burtie stepped aside and straightened her coat, her face gone ruddy and her eyes full.
Malcolm extended his hand. “Sir Harald,” he said. “I’ve only popped in to wish Mum a Happy Christmas.” Their handshake was perfunctory.
After glancing at Burtie, Harald said, “You’ll come in for a drink, then.”
Burtie’s smile was fleeting, grateful.
Harald and Burtie joined the priest on the steps to bestow both the Lord’s and the Laird’s Christmas blessings upon the departing congregation, leaving Els and Malcolm alone in the aisle. Malcolm’s cheeks had the rosy spots that always bloomed when he exerted himself or was excited. The chapel was ablaze with candles, and in their gentle light, his eyes were their autumn sky blue and full of the amused curiosity that had been his habitual expression as a boy.
“Fàilte,” he said.
“’Tis I should be welcoming you,” Els said. “Where’ve you been hiding all these years, Mallo?”
“I could just as well ask you the same,” he said, and pulled his watch cap over curls the color of rusted iron. “Since the Laird himself suggested it, let’s have that wee dram together and share our tales.” He offered his arm, and when she took it she caught a whiff of wood smoke, wool, and dogs mingling with the chapel’s scent of pine boughs and melting wax.
As they strolled toward the house, he told her that his agricultural degree, courtesy of Harald, had landed him a position managing an estate to the north after Harald kicked him out. He visited Burtie at Cairnoch rarely, and usually when Harald was away.
“So you’re still into the politics,” she said.
“Deeper than ever. I’ve become quite the rabble-rouser,” he said, grinning. “I believe Mum’s tickled to think I might stand for office, but she’d never confess that to the Laird.” He pulled her arm more tightly under his own. “When I come here, it still breaks me heart not to be runnin’ yer lands as we’d always planned.”
“Perhaps he’ll relent.”
“Not once he’s declared his position publicly.”
Up ahead, Harald was guiding Burtie through the front door, and for a moment they were caught in the portico light, a fond and aging couple, upright and proper. Though they’d been living in sin for years and fooling no one—Burtie a widow but Harald still technically married to Els’s mother—they’d just taken communion.
“He makes his own rules, your father,” Mallo said, and his undertone of bitterness sliced through her delight at seeing him again. Harald had shattered their childhood bond by sending Els to a convent school at eleven, where the girls had made fun of her boyish ways. Mallo had found companionship among the village lads and, at the holidays, was shy in her company. She believed she’d lost her only friend.
“How long have you known about them?” Els asked.
“I saw them in the bothy,” he said. “I was about six.” They veered from the chapel walkway onto the drive. “I was terrified he was killing her and that I’d be left an orphan. Then she commenced to giggling, which I’d never heard her do.”
“And you never told me?”
“Never breathed a word of it to anyone. But some o’ the laddies began cracking jokes behind my back, and I knew the whole village was in on it.”
Els mulled over the news that her father and the young widow Burton, given shelter and work as her nanny, had become lovers when she was barely five. To the children and staff, she was Burtie, but Harald had always called her Mrs. Burton, or occasionally by her given name, Hannah.
“Who was the instigator, Burtie or Father?” She’d always imagined his mother the schemer who’d seen her chance at security, preying on disconsolate Harald after her mother’s departure.
“He was,” he said. “And got the better of the bargain.”
“Did you also happen to know why Mum abandoned me?” she asked.
He shifted his grip on her arm. “Ye’d best ask Sir Harald about that.”
“He made a point I was never to bring it up.”
Instead, she’d plagued Burtie with questions, which had brought mumbled responses: “She is nae fit to be around children,” or, “Let her stay with the Napoleons, where she belongs.”
“Ma tells me ye’ve got a blazing career in New York,” Mallo said. “Following in Sir Harald’s footsteps, are ye?”
“He was probably a bit miffed when I chose investment banking instead,” she said. “It was the hot thing when I finished business school. I had other offers, but Standard Heb was just starting its New York mergers team and gave me the best deal.”
“Hard to believe he had no hand in that.”
“He offered to put in a word, but I forbade it.”
“Everything still on yir own terms, I see.” He shouldered the heavy front door open and they stepped into the Great Hall, which smelled of cut greens and ancient stone, like the chapel. Harald and Burtie were in the study, tumblers in hand and feet to the grate. Firelight glinted in the glass eyes of mounted wildebeest and kudu heads and cast corkscrew shadows onto the coffered ceiling.
“Help yourselves,” Harald said, no hint of welcome in his tone, and waved toward the drinks trolley.
They had no sooner selected their single malts—Laphroaig for Els, Glenmorangie for Mallo—when Harald stood up and said, “Past my bedtime. Mrs. Burton, may I escort you to your chambers?” He led Burtie out of the room, and Els smiled to think he was still pretending that Burtie slept in the third-floor suite given to her and three-year-old Malcolm when they first arrived. She imagined all the padding down the servants’ stairs in the middle of the night a
nd trysts in the hunter’s bothy up in the hills. It was oddly erotic to think of their clandestine coupling happening right under everyone’s noses.
Burtie pushed out of her chair, set her unfinished drink on the trolley, and looked at her son. “I’ll see ye tomorrow, then?”
Mallo kissed her cheek. “If it fits in with yir obligations here, I’ll fetch ye for tea in the village.”
“That’d be grand,” Burtie said. She looked at Els and Mallo appraisingly. “Ye’ve a lot a’ catching up to do.” She followed Harald into the Great Hall.
While they sat in the wing chairs with their feet to the fire, Mallo drew out Els’s stories of the cutthroat world of New York mergers and acquisitions, which she embellished only enough to make him laugh. In the childhood tales they’d invented, the hero was always a boy, and she reveled now in being the one carrying the sword and slaying the dragons. He sat back and looked at her as if she was a font of enchantment; she was touched, and a little embarrassed, by the intensity of his listening.
“Ye’ve become the son Sir Harald never had,” Mallo said, swirling his neat scotch.
“That should’ve been you,” she said.
He stared into the fire. “At most, I’d have been a decently paid employee, smart on husbandry, lining his coffers,” he said. “Surely ye’ve discovered for yourself that taking his money comes at a price.” He stood and went to pour them both more scotch. When he returned her tumbler, their fingers on the crystal close but not touching, he held her gaze. She wouldn’t let herself be the first to look away.
“The future—yours, mine . . . ours . . . Scotland’s—lies in breaking from his way,” he said. Excitement crept into his eyes, but he didn’t smile. “I’m beginning to believe I’ve a chance in the election.”
She took the glass from him. “Other than loving you as long as I can remember, tell me why I should vote for you.”
“That’s reason enough for Mum,” he said, and flashed that grin again. “But ye’ve always been a far tougher nut than she.”
For the next few hours, sitting on the edge of his chair, he countered her every argument against devolution for Scotland, challenging her to form her own opinions and step out of the Laird’s shadow, and by the time they called a truce, she was more than a little swayed. When the case clock bonged three o’clock, its chime echoing through the silent house, Mallo rose to leave. He draped his arm around her shoulder and walked her through the scullery to the servants’ door. As intimate as they’d been when children, she found the closeness of this tall, impassioned semi-stranger brand-new and unsettling.
“Come to Stonehaven for Hogmanay,” he said. “I’ve got friends who can put us up.”
“It’s nothing but a sing-along and booze-up.”
“Nah, not if we don’t want it to be,” he said. “Yi can’t go back across the pond without bringing the New Year in with kin and seeing the fireballs.”
In the dusting of snow that had fallen, the footprints of a fox crossed the drive.
“Promise you’ll protect me from those hooligans?”
“On my honor as your sworn knight,” he said, and made their secret sign.
She returned it solemnly, wondering if there was fealty, irony, rebellion, or mere teasing in his mention of their childhood games and difference in station.
He folded himself into a Lotus with a convertible top patched with tape. Standing in the cold, she watched his taillights cross the humped bridge over the lake and wind down the drive until he turned into the lane and was gone.
CHAPTER 7
To the strains of the pipe band echoing down High Street, the fire twirlers set aflame their wire balls stuffed with fuel-soaked rags and paper and began swinging them aloft and marching toward the harbor. Mallo’s friend Will passed a flask. Mallo took Els’s hand and pulled her through the revelers, keeping up with one hefty twirler who was crisscrossing his body with his chain, switching arms, and walking backwards. In the flickering light, Mallo’s eyes were again full of wonder, and the splotches on his cheeks were as round and red as a cartoon clown’s.
When they reached the Old Pier, the fire twirler’s ball was still burning. He gave it one more heroic spin and launched it over the black water, where it flared and sank to the cheers of the crowd.
When the tower clock began to toll midnight, friends and strangers crossed wrists and clasped hands and raised their voices in “Auld Lang Syne.” At the last verse, Els and Mallo locked eyes as well when they sang:
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right guid willy waught,
For auld lang syne.
After the toast, Mallo was still holding Els’s hand. He bent to place a New Year’s kiss on her cheek, but she turned just enough for him to catch the corner of her lips. “Deirdre’s famous for her black bun,” he said. “We’ll stop around there for first foot and another nip if ye’ve got the stamina for it.”
“Lead on, my knight,” Els said, and they strolled with the dispersing crowd back to Will and Deirdre’s flat.
While they snacked on dark fruitcake and peaty scotch and Will, Deirdre, and Mallo debated the way toward devolution, Els studied Mallo for flashes of the tireless hiker, sharp-eyed eagle spotter, and tin soldier military strategist she’d once known. All of that boy was now wrapped into this man bent so passionately on their country’s independence and carrying such bitterness about its social and class divisions. She represented all he wished to defeat, from relics of the feudal system to the financial strings that bound Scotland to the UK, and she mourned their unquestioning friendship of youth.
She drifted in and out of sleep to the rise and fall of their voices and laughter. When she woke at dawn, disoriented, she was caught in Mallo’s embrace. He was spooned against her back on the sofa, both of them still dressed and a thick wool blanket wrapped about them. Before she’d been sent away, Harald allowed them to hunt with the men. She and Mallo would roll up in blankets near the fire and wake up buried in dogs. She snuggled deeper into him and slept again.
When they crested the rise with the view of the Munro to the east and Cairnoch House below, Mallo said, “Do yi fancy a right guid willy waught on this beautiful New Year’s Day? I’ve no been to the Crag in years.” When she hesitated, sluggish from too little sleep and too much whisky, he teased, “What, are yi too soggy from sitting at a desk to make it?”
She laughed, thinking of her daily runs around Central Park Reservoir to sharpen her wits for the battleground at work. “Ye’ll be staring at my backside the way up and back.”
“Just what I had in mind,” he said.
She looked at the profile of the Crag in the feeble winter sun, already past its zenith. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll meet you for breakfast in the village first.”
She pushed herself to stay ahead of him, her long legs barely a match for his own, and they stopped for breath at a favorite outcropping with a view of the house and its western lands. At the Crag, they huddled against the wind. As when they were children, they searched for eagles, but none soared that day.
When the wind swung eastward, the clouds piled in the west began to race toward them.
“Coorie up,” Mallo said, and started down the trail at so vigorous a clip that she realized he’d been holding back on the climb.
She hurried after him, making no comment when he detoured toward the old hunter’s bothy, which was sheltered on two sides by huge pines and a rock face.
He waited for her at the door, then unhooked it and waved her in. Heavy mist followed them into the already dank hut. Empty beer and liquor bottles filled one corner, and a used condom topped the trash in the fireplace. The cot still sat against the wall, the blanket box at its foot.
“Burtie would never have left it in such a bourach,” Els said.
“Nor any self-respecting hunter,” Mallo said. He brought in wood and built a fire, and while she warmed herself before it, he took
a tin cup to the nearby stream and came back with icy water.
“I don’t smell snow in those clouds,” he said. “But we should warm up a bit and go on down soon, just in case.”
They stood close to the fire until she felt so warm she unzipped her parka. As she started to shrug it off, he slipped his arms underneath and around her back, pulled her toward him, and kissed her—as if he was asking permission at first, then again and again as she yielded and kissed him back.
He tossed away her parka and stripped off his own and they came back together, fiercely this time. An avalanche of desire—desire that had accumulated, flake by flake, over a decade—engulfed her. He unfastened the top button on her shirt, looked into her eyes again for assent, then quickly freed the rest.
They shed the remainder of their clothing. She felt shy in the gaze of this tall man with muscles taut from outdoor work. She’d last seen him naked—he nearly twelve and reedy, she barely ten—when they’d debated how a man could plant a baby in a woman, having watched the Cairnoch bulls, stallions, and dogs in action.
He pulled the cot closer to the fire and spread a blanket on it. “I’ve wanted this from ere I knew what to want,” he said. He sat down, pulled her between his knees, propped his chin on her belly, and looked up at her. “Would ye indulge me and climb on top?” he said. “I want to be able to see all o’ ye, so I can convince myself it’s really you.”
She pushed him backwards onto the cot and straddled his hips. He never took his eyes off her, which felt invasive, then teasing, then adoring as they burst through their old familiarity into an intimacy she found both thrilling and terrifying.
At the kitchen entrance, he backed her against the cold stone and they kissed until the sound of a car on the bridge made them spring apart. The car stopped out of sight near the main door, and he stepped back into her embrace. “Would ye ever consider comin’ home?” he said. “The bank must have a spot for ye in Edinburgh or Glasgow. London, even.”
The Moon Always Rising Page 6