Whence Came a Prince (63 page)

The stables of House o’ the Hill came into view, situated downhill from the inn and sheltered by sycamores. Jamie brought the wagon to a halt in the shade as a young man with a crooked-toothed grin headed his direction.

“Mr. McKie, aye? The laird’s son?”

Jamie narrowed his gaze, appraising the lad. He had a familiar look about him.

“Me name’s George,” he offered. “ ‘Like the king himself,’ ye said tae me that nicht.”

A vague memory surfaced. Of a scruffy stable lad in tattered clothes who’d cared for Walloch the night Jamie had run for his life. Realization dawned. “I owe you a penny, George.”

He ducked his head, clearly pleased. “Ye said ye’d lost yer travelin’ pouch. I’ll wager a Gypsy staw it. The woods are aften thick wi’ fowk.”

“You are quite right.” Jamie dropped five copper coins into his dirt-creased hand, glad to discharge a debt, however small. “The extra is for your patience.” With the lad’s good service assured, Jamie made arrangements for the draft horses to be fed, groomed, and stabled until the herds appeared. “Look for them in the morn’s morn.” Jamie paid for the horses’ care, then unloaded a few light items easily carried on his shoulders. He’d send servants with handcarts for the trunks. “You’ll keep an eye on my goods?”

“Ye can depend on George, sir.” The lad grinned, pocketing his coins.

Jamie and the others continued on foot up a road edged with dykes until they passed the plain stone inn and reached the crest of the hill. “Welcome to the glen,” Jamie said, inhaling the pine-scented air. Steep hills covered with heather unfurled before them, forming a narrow glen with Trool at its heart. Fir woods lined the shores of the long, sinuous loch. From this vantage point, the water was a shimmering thread of silver woven through the pines by a canny hand.

Jamie pointed out the massive mountains, his chest swelling with pride. “Mulldonach and Lamachan rise to the right and the Fell of Eschoncan on the left. Glentrool stands in its shadow. Three miles and we’re home.” He led the way down, with Leana close behind, then Eliza with Ian, and Annabel leading Hastings, carrying goods instead of a rider on his back.

The maids chattered away, their voices swallowed up by the vastness of sky and land, the sound no louder than the warbling of a redstart. Jamie gazed at the distant hills, which folded on top of one another. Though most were rounded at the top, precipitous rocks jutted out below the summits. When the track broadened, Leana moved up next to him, her skirts swinging as she walked. Eager as he was to reach their destination, Jamie slowed his gait to match hers.

“Robert the Bruce hunted deer in this glen,” he told her, repeating the ancient poem, “In Glentrool awhile he lay, and went well oft to hunt and play.”

“And killed a few Englishmen from the heights of Mulldonach,” Leana added.

The lass knew her history. “His men rolled boulders down the mountain from the Steps of Trool, as sheer a drop as any in the glen. The Englishmen were buried at Soldier’s Holm in the meadow at the head of the loch.”

When Leana said no more, he chastised himself for his careless blether. Neither of them needed a reminder of deaths and burials that day.

They’d reached the foot of the hills, where the ford across the Minnoch awaited them. The water level was lower than usual; still, he was relieved when they reached the other side of the stream with naught but wet boots and dripping skirt hems. The narrow footpath, bordered by tall firs with long, drooping branches, followed the meandering contours of the Water of Trool. Any sense of openness was gone; now they were shut in a pine-laden prison. With each step, Jamie’s apprehension grew—keen to be home one minute, dreading it the next. His injured leg was beginning to ache again from the walk, and his new boots had ceased to be comfortable half a mile ago.

Leana finally spoke, the tenderness in her voice penetrating his defenses. “Jamie, I know this is not the homecoming you imagined …”

He slowed his steps. “Nae, it is not.”
Not without Rose
, “But it is my home, and for that I must be grateful.” Jamie stopped for a moment and caught her elbow, pointing ahead. “There, Leana. Beside the loch. ’Tis Glentrool.”

Leana’s eyes widened. “So it is.”

Two stories tall, with a third story in the square central tower, the gray granite house stood among the foothills, surrounded by Scots pines. Though it presented a broad, flat face to the loch, Glentrool boasted a round turret in the crook of its L-shaped design, with a conical roof harking back two centuries or more. As a lad, Jamie had once crawled up the steep roof to plant a triangular flag on top, like drawings he’d seen of French castles. His mother had coaxed him down before he fell and broke his neck, much to Evan’s disappointment.

“ ’Tis a meikle hoose, Mr. McKie.” Eliza held up Ian for a better view. “I had nae idea we’d be livin’ in a mansion.”

Annabel said nothing, only stopped where she was, clinging to Hastings’s reins with both hands. “Sir, d’ye see that licht o’er the hoose?”

Jamie peered through the trees. “The sunlight, you mean, falling across the roof?”

“Nae …’tis higher than the roof. By me soul, sir …’tis the
deid licht!
”

His blood froze.

“D’ye see it, Eliza?” Annabel cried. “Or ye, Miss McBride?” Her freckled face was terror-stricken. “Naught but ane can see the deid licht. And I do, I surely do.”

Jamie knew the superstition.
The deid licht.
Seen by one person at a time, never two. A foreshadowing of death.

Father.

Plunging forward without waiting to see if the others followed, Jamie strode along the widening loch, his eye on Glentrool, his thoughts running up the stair to the bedroom his parents had shared for nigh to five decades. Fearing what he would find there. A loved one. Dying.
Nae. Not again.

L
aird of Glentrool shall be your name.

The words pounded at the door of Jamie’s heart as he crashed through the pine branches barring his path to Glentrool’s gate.
Father, I cannot be laird yet. I have an heir, but no wife. I have your blessing, but no respect in the parish.
It was too soon, much too soon, for the death of Alec McKie.

With each step Jamie took, the rushing waters of Buchan Burn grew louder, and the gray stone walls of Glentrool loomed larger. He was almost to the threshold when he heard Leana walking not far behind him. Guilt brought him to a halt and turned him round. “Forgive my rudeness, lass.” He held out his arm, as any gentleman should. “Come, let me escort you through the door of my home.”

Leana patted her brow with her handkerchief. “Jamie, you’ve no need to apologize for your haste.”

As she caught her breath, Jamie stared at the carved oak door, as old as the house itself. Should he knock or simply barge in? It was his family home, yet he felt like a stranger here.

When the door opened, the matter was resolved.

“Mr. McKie!” The astonished face of Ivy Findlay greeted him. “Ye’ve heard the news then.” She ushered them both inside with a brief curtsy. “We were worried … That is, yer faither … he … I am sae sorry, Mr. McKie.”

A too-familiar pain sliced through him.
’Tis true, then.

The evidence was everywhere: Glentrool was in mourning. Cloth hung over the massive looking glass in the entrance hall, and the mantel clock on the hearth in the drawing room had been stopped at the hour of eight.
Was it this morning? Yestreen?

Jamie looked round for his mother, then realized she would be at his father’s bedside. He would join her momentarily. “Ivy, my … Pardon me, this is my … cousin, Leana McBride.”

Ivy curtsied again, then stepped back as Eliza and Annabel came hurrying up the front path with Ian. “And who might the lasses be, sir? And the wee lad?”

“Leana can explain …” Jamie tugged on the sleeves of his coat, as if so little an effort could improve his unkempt appearance. His mother liked him neatly dressed. Perhaps she’d make an exception, considering the circumstances. “I must see my father at once.”

“Aye, aye, ye must. He’s just in there.”

Jamie turned to face the library door. Odd that his mother had not heard his voice and come looking for him. Though the large front room included an ornate half-tester bed among its furnishings, the bed was seldom used. But then, he could not remember there ever being a lyke-wake at Glentrool. Jamie knocked lightly on the door, then eased it open, steeling himself for the sight of Alec McKie’s wizened body in a state of eternal rest.

But that was not what Jamie found.

On the bed, hands folded across her chest, was Rowena McKie.

“
Nae!
” Jamie stumbled into the candlelit room. “ ’Tis not possible …”

But it was.

At her breast was the dish of earth and salt. At her feet stood his father, hunched over with grief. “Och, Jamie!” Alec held out his trembling arms. “The Lord has brought you to us, lad. We did not ken where to send a post or how to find you. Your mother, your poor mother …”

Jamie had no sense of crossing the room. He was simply there, by her side, stunned. And ashamed. Why had he not come home months ago? Why had he not written her from Gatehouse of Fleet? His mother lay in deathly stillness. Gone from his reach. Just like Rose. “What … happened, Father?”

Alec worked his jaw, his rheumy eyes more watery than ever, the tremor in his hands markedly worse. “Yestermorn we rose early for the Sabbath. Your mother mounted her horse, just as she’s done for most of her sixty-four years. She’d not quite found her seat when the horse
reared back—none of us kens why—and she fell to the ground, landing on her bonny neck.”

Jamie flinched at the image of his lively mother tumbling to her death. Had she suffered? No wound scarred her thin neck. No blood marred her gown.
Not like my beautiful Rose.
How could he come to grips with the awful truth? The two women he loved most in the world had been taken from him on the same Sabbath.

Alec looked at his wife, and his shoulders sank further still. “Rowena ne’er did open her eyes. She died an hour after her fall.”

Jamie remembered the empty pew at Monnigaff. “No wonder you were not at the kirk yestreen.”

“None of us could leave her.” His father came round the bed and touched her arm. “We heard the music, Jamie.” A superstition as old as Glentrool itself: Sometimes while a person was dying, the sweetest music could be heard in the room.

Jamie gazed at his mother, her dark hair stark against the white bed covering, her chin pointed upward, a heidie woman to the end. Age had not diminished her beauty or crushed her spirit. But death had claimed her nonetheless. “I am sorry I was not here, Father.”

“ ’Tis good you’ve come home, lad.” Tears coursed down Alec’s wrinkled face. “I’m a
shooglie
auld man who cannot walk from one room to the next without help. I cannot see well, nor hear …”

“I ken, Father …”

“Nae.” Alec leaned hard on his arm, his bony hand wrapped round Jamie’s wrist. “You do not ken what it is like to lose your wife.”

Jamie nearly shook off his grip. “I
have
lost my wife.”

Alec lifted his hoary head and turned toward the doorway, pointing a shaky finger at Leana standing in the hall. “And who might that be?”

“My cousin.” Jamie kept his voice even. “Leana McBride.”

She looked up at the mention of her name. Ian was now wrapped in her arms. The sorrow in her eyes was unmistakable. Leana had seen enough to assess the situation or had learned from Ivy whose funeral they’d hastened home to attend without realizing it.

“If she’s not your wife,” Alec demanded, “then whose child is that lass carrying?”

Jamie hesitated.
The one in her arms? Or the one in her womb?
“We … were married once, Father. The child Leana bears is … mine.”

“Eh?” Alec squinted at her, as though he might sort it out if only he could see more clearly.

Jamie groaned, his soul so burdened with grief he could no longer contain it. “ ’Tis not the time or place to explain things, Father.” Later, when his father was not so distraught, Jamie would tell him about Rose. And about Leana. About two weddings and two brides. But not this day.

“Come, young James.” His father pulled him away from the bed. “I’ve a blissin to bestow on my son whom the Lord has favored.” Alec held on to Jamie’s arm with one hand and planted the other on his head. His voice shook, whether from age or emotion, Jamie could not tell. He’d heard the words once before, on a dark autumn night when his lies had purchased his blessing. Today, in a brightly lit room, his father’s words, freely offered, rang with sincerity.

“May Almighty God bless you, my son. May he bless your land with rain and sun, your flocks and herds with abundant grazing. May all Glentrool look to you as their laird.”

“I pray they will, Father. Someday.”

“Nae.” Alec said the word with such authority, Jamie straightened. “I am as good as dead now, Son, with your mother gone. You ken verra well how it was with us: Your mother did all that I could no longer do. Come December I will have lived eighty-five years. I have ruled these lands long enough. At the hour of your mother’s death I made my decision. You must assume the role of laird now, Jamie, or Glentrool will suffer.”

Laird of Glentrool shall be your name.
His waking dream. At eight o’ the clock.

Jamie felt the weight of his father’s hand and the significance of his words. He’d never felt weaker than he did this day; perhaps that was by God’s design.

“Aye, Father.” Jamie stood as tall as he could beneath Alec’s hand. “If you believe I am ready, then I am willing.”

“Nae man is truly ready to be laird. But the time has come, Jamie. And so have you.”

G
ray clouds hung low in the sky, and the dry air was uncommonly still as family and friends stood round the granite mausoleum for Rowena’s interment.