The Secret Gift (15 page)

“Have any wine?” she asked.

He looked at her. “With stew?”

“Sure.” She went to the wine rack. “It’s a versatile dish. Goes with either red or white.”

She wasn’t much of a wine connoisseur, but her employer, Mr. Belvedere, certainly was. She recognized one of his particular favorites among the bottles in the rack, an Australian Shiraz. She grabbed it and two of the wine goblets hanging from the cabinet above her head.

“If you’ll do the honors with the wine, I’ll dish out the stew.”

Graham took the bottle and glasses and headed for the dining room.

When Libby came in a few minutes later, he had opened the wine and poured them each a glass. The lighting in the room was low, intimate, provided by the dimmed chandelier that hung glittering above the table. Libby set a plate near each glass, then quickly went back to the kitchen to retrieve the basket of scones.

She smiled at Graeme as she took the seat beside him and picked up her goblet. “Here’s to ...” She searched for an appropriate or witty toast to make, but could think of nothing either appropriate or witty. So she shrugged. “Here’s to stew and scones.”

“Indeed,” Graeme agreed, and raised his glass before taking a sip.

“Good choice,” he said, setting his goblet on the table.

Libby stirred her stew with her fork, took a bite. “You certainly make a fine stew, Mr. Mackenzie.”

“I’m afraid I can’t take the credit for it. It is my housekeeper’s doing. As you saw from breakfast, I’m pretty hopeless in the kitchen.”

They passed the first few minutes of the meal exchanging pleasantries and casual conversation about the weather and the current state of affairs in the world. She asked him which team he supported in soccer (football, he’d corrected), Scotland or England. He asked her whether she went for the Yankees or the Mets.

“The Yankees!” she said, as if the answer should be obvious. “Although I probably shouldn’t admit that, coming as I do from Boston.”

He poured her another glass of wine.

“So,” he said, “what do you do for a living back in the States?”

The wine had melted away much of the tension of his day, and the ease with which he found he could talk to her had Graeme delving into more personal, previously avoided conversation.

“I acquire books for an antiquarian bookseller in Manhattan.”

“Indeed?” He didn’t know why he should be surprised. The occupation suited her perfectly. “Is that what brings you to Scotland? A rare-book-buying mission?”

She smiled. “No. Actually, I’m here for more personal reasons.”

He sipped his wine, waited for her to go on.

“My mother was born and raised here in the village.”

“Oh, did she come along with you?”

Libby shook her head, dropping her gaze to her hands. “She passed away last month.”

Having suffered the loss of his own family so recently, Graeme recognized the rawness of her grief.

“I’m very sorry.” He shook his head. “It’s never easy. I lost both my brother and my father in the past year, as well as a cousin.”

Why had he just told her that?

She reached a hand to his, covered it. That simple gesture touched him more deeply than he’d been touched in a long, long time. Graeme soon found himself telling her the story of it, needing to tell her, needing to purge himself of the sheer weight of it. All the while he spoke, she kept her fingers wrapped closely around his.

“I just wish I could have had one last chance to talk to my mother, you know?” she said later. “To ask her the questions I was always too busy or too afraid to ask her, to tell her the things I always thought I’d have time to say.”

Graeme knew exactly what she meant.

After the meal, Graeme steamed a couple of lattés, and they took them into the drawing room by the fire. Night had fallen, and the room was awash in the hearth’s glow, inviting, enticing.

“So this is a Hob Nob,” Libby said as she sampled the chocolate-dipped cookie. “These are almost as good as the Girl Scouts’ Thin Mints back home in the States. I defy anyone to eat less than a full sleeve of them in one sitting.”

“Well, I’ll have to try them sometime.”

They were sitting on the floor by the fire, Graeme leaning back against the sofa and she sitting cross-legged on the rug. Murphy had his head resting lazily on her lap, and for a brief moment, as he watched her softly stroking her fingers over him, Graeme was envious of the dog.

The firelight was dancing across her face, shimmering in her dark hair. He watched her take a sip of her coffee, close her eyes, and let go a soft breath. When she opened her eyes again, they met his, and locked there.

Opportunity had presented itself. All he had to do was lean toward her, and kiss her. He knew she would let him. He knew she wanted him to kiss her as much as he wanted to kiss her himself. All he had to do was make one move, one gesture ...

But the instincts of suspicion and distrust he’d perfected so well won out so he got up instead and picked up the empty coffee cups for the kitchen.

“Well, it’s getting late ...”

The shadow of disappointment that came over her face wasn’t lost on him. “Oh ...”

As Graeme walked to the door, he’d never before felt so conflicted. For so many months, everyone he’d encountered, most assuredly every woman he’d encountered, had been out for only one thing. He’d been distrusting for so long, he wondered if he even knew any more what it was to trust at all.

Libby spent the next few days out walking the village proper, taking photographs, visiting historical sites, stopping to talk to most everyone she encountered, while in the evenings, she continued her work of cataloging the parish archives on her laptop.

She still hadn’t found a record of her mother’s marriage to Fraser Mackay, but now that she knew the truth, she didn’t press any of the villagers who might have known them further. Lady Venetia Mackay was still their landlord, and knowing the difficulty of their position, Libby kept her conversations with them focused on the village, its history and its daily life. The change in the villagers was remarkable. As Ian had assured her, once they realized she wouldn’t put them at risk, they quickly began to open up and show her the kindliness and hospitality that had been the trademark of the Highlands for centuries.

No one had done a more notable turnabout than Betty M’Cuick.

“Och, your mother had a wicked sense of humor, she did,” Betty said to Libby as they sat together in the M’Cuicks’s parlor one afternoon. Ever since that first day when Ian had revealed the truth to her, Betty had been regaling Libby with memories of Matilde. She even seemed relieved to be able to talk about her friend after holding her silence for so many years.

“When I’d be cleaning the loos at the castle, she’d leave a toy mouse behind the toilet. Once she even put a rubber snake in the bowl! Always getting me into trouble, that one. And she knew I’m terrible frighted of the ghaists—”

“Ghaists?”

“Spirits ... presences ...”

“Oh, ghosts ...”

“Aye, ghaists. That castle is full of them, you know. Your mother’d sometimes slip herself underneath the beds and when I was tucking in the sheets, she’d push the mattresses from underneath and scare me half to death.”

It was a side of Matilde that Libby had never even glimpsed—playful, a young, gregarious, carefree girl.

“Then there were the times she and Fraser would want to sneak off to be alone. Once they were”—Betty looked at Libby, her face reddening—“ehm, they were
together
in the stables, and Lady Venetia took it into her head to have an afternoon ride about the estate. I was out hanging up the wash and spotted her just as she was entering the stables. She must’ve thought me a lunatic, the Lady Mackay. There I was hollerin’ and wavin’ my arms with the bedsheet flappin’ like a ghaist m’self. The lady came running to see what was the clamor about, and all I could think to say was that I’d been frighted by a wasp. Lady Venetia wasna too happy wit’ me, but your mother and Fraser, they managed to slip out of the stables afore she could discover them.”

Libby didn’t know what shocked her more, that her mother had been so daring and reckless or that she herself had possibly been conceived in a stable loft.

“I wish I had known her then,” she said wistfully. “She must have been beautiful.”

“Aye, she was a bonny lass, all that blond hair. Looked like Grace Kelly we used to say ... Och!” Betty sat up suddenly. “Why dinna I think of it sooner?”

She went to a standing cabinet in the corner of the room, fished through a drawer, and came back a few moments later with a small black-and-white photograph.

She handed it to Libby. “This was taken by the young laird that last summer afore ...”

Before her mother had been banished from the village, and the only home she’d ever known, Libby couldn’t help but think.

But the photograph showed a happier time. There were two women pictured, dressed in starched black-and-white maids’ uniforms, arms linked, standing barefoot on a beach. Matilde and the other woman, obviously Betty, were hiking up their skirts above their knees, striking a chorus-girl pose for the camera. Libby knew her mother immediately. Though she was thinner, and her hair was bound behind a white head scarf, her eyes and her subtle smile were virtually the same. But there was a difference. This Matilde was young. She was bold and she was sassy. And from the way she was glancing at the person taking the photo, she was quite obviously head over heels in love.

Libby made to hand the photo back to Betty.

“Nae, ’tis yours to keep, lass,” she said softly, reading the emotions that brimmed in Libby’s eyes. “ ’Tis the least I can do.”

“Thank you,” Libby said, and hugged the woman who had been her mother’s friend. “Thank you for everything.”

From Betty, Libby was slowly coming to know Matilde in a time that had almost been lost to history. From her visits with the other villagers, she began to learn more about the village itself.

Over tea with Elspeth MacNeish (whose husband, Sean, had repaired the loose spark plug in her car), Libby learned that the village was a relatively new one—new in that it had been founded around 1750 instead of centuries earlier like many of the surrounding settlements. It had been Lady Isabella Mackay and her clan chieftain husband, Calum, who had encouraged the settlement of Wrath, providing land for those who had worked on the refurbishment of the castle, encouraging them to farm and fish and set down roots at a time when many of the other Highland estate owners were pulling out their people and discarding them like weeds.

Another villager, Alexander “Sandy” Mackay, told Libby of Calum and Isabella’s marriage—and the twelve resultant children. Amazingly for that time in history, all twelve survived into adulthood, and most of them settled at various places about the vast Mackay estate. Sandy knew the complete lineages of every one of them, as well as those of their many descendants who still lived in the area. Though she may have been an only child all her life, Libby suddenly found she had Mackay cousins aplenty, Sandy himself among them.

It was a wet and rainy late October evening when the call from James Dugan rang in at the Crofter’s Cottage. Libby took the call in the office, leaving Aggie and Maggie in the midst of a rather heated hand of whist.

“Isabella, I’ve checked into the things you asked me about. And I have some news.”

Libby took a breath, waiting. “Yes?”

“Okay, it seems the Mackay estate, like many of the other Highland estates, was put into a trust thirty years ago to protect it from what would be a crippling battery of taxes on the death of the old laird. It was a formality, really, as there was no known heir, but because the laird and Lady Venetia never had Fraser officially declared dead, it was all quite legal. The way in which the trust was written, however, is particularly interesting.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but if your mother truly married Fraser Mackay, and you can prove it, then you, not Lady Venetia, are the rightful landlord of the estate.

Libby blinked. “You’re sure?”

“It certainly seems so. It is because you were born to the estate, and not married into it, that you would take precedence.”

Libby was quickly getting confused in the flood of legalities. “So what does this all mean, Dugan?”

“I’m not sure exactly—” She heard him shuffling through some papers. “Libby, I have a colleague, a solicitor in Edinburgh, who would know far more about the Scottish property and inheritance laws than I do. I think you should contact him. It was he who researched all this information for me. I told him your situation, and he seemed very interested in speaking with you directly.”

Libby quickly scribbled down the solicitor’s direction before thanking Dugan and bidding him good-bye.

She sat for a moment, trying to gather her thoughts. She’d asked Dugan to check into the details of the Wrath estate only for research, to confirm what Ian M’Cuick had implied when he’d told her she was the Mackay heir and to find out what that might mean once Lady Venetia passed on.

But this? She stared at the scrap of paper with the solicitor’s name scribbled across it, trying to decide. The hour was late. The man probably wasn’t in his office. She wasn’t even certain she wanted to pursue this any further. Perhaps she could just leave a message on an answering machine and let the rest be decided by fate.

She picked up the receiver and punched the numbers before she could talk herself out of it.

The line picked up on the second ring.

“Hamish Brodie.”

Libby opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She had been so certain he wouldn’t be there, she hadn’t even thought of what she would say if he were.

“Hallo? Is anybody there?”

“Yes,” she managed. “Hello. Mr. Brodie. My name is Li—, my name is Isabella Hutchinson. James Dugan said I should contact you.”

His voice boomed a welcome from the phone. “Good evening, Miss Hutchinson! Jimmy said you might be calling. I’m so pleased that you did.”

“I don’t quite know why I have, sir. I’m not at all certain what any of this means. I guess I’m just hoping to find out the truth.”