Jamie was to meet Edward Graystone in the library at precisely seven o’clock.
As she approached the richly carved double walnut doors, her thudding heart seemed to roar in her ears and she could not stop her hands from trembling slightly. She tried clutching them tightly together, but there was nothing she could do about her racing heart. Her timid knock seemed to fall dead on the thick wood and she doubted the sound had even penetrated into the room. But just as she reached up to try again the door was opened by the tall, lean figure of the head butler, Cameron Reily. As she stepped meekly into the room, she saw immediately that she would apparently not be alone for the interview. Reily stood aside, expressionless, holding the door as she entered but allowing no eye contact to betray the slightest hint of what she should expect.
Standing in a semicircle around a massive wood desk were several other of the household staff. In addition to the dour-faced old butler, there was Sid MacKay, the stableman whom Jamie had had occasion to meet the previous day. Middle-aged and stockily built, his chief feature seemed to be a great supply of reddish facial hair—thick eyebrows, a long heavy moustache, and sideburns that extended down his cheek to meet the edges of the moustache, covering half his face. Next to MacKay stood a man Jamie immediately recognized as the factor, but his glance toward her told Jamie that Ellice did not recognize her. Completing the small assemblage was Dora Campbell. She smiled in Jamie’s direction, helping somewhat to soothe the young girl’s apprehension. Jamie walked slowly forward and took her place beside the housekeeper. The laird made no acknowledgment of her arrival.
“Continue with your report, Sid,” said the man behind the desk in a deep though somewhat forced voice that gave the impression he would rather not be talking at all.
“Weel, ye lai—weel, sir,” answered the stableman, “I suppose the lad were jist too young t’ be oot on’s ain. He jist didna want t’ work, that’s a’, an’ whan I ast him t’ muck oot the stalls he . . .”
Jamie paid little heed to MacKay’s monotone recital of his problems with the stable help. Instead, she was absorbed in the presence of the man of whom she had been living in fear for three days. He stood, rather than sat, with his feet firmly planted on the floor and his hands grasped behind his back. His stance was nearly as rigid as that of the servants before him. Easily the tallest man in the room, his broad shoulders completed the figure which was imposing indeed. Dressed in a tweed riding habit with tall brown leather boots, he looked as if he would be more comfortable upon his sorrel stallion than in this elegant Tudor library addressing his household staff. Yet his clothes and boots were spotless, unlike those of Ellice and MacKay.
This is Andrew’s father, Jamie thought. The impish, round face of the child who had already begun to become her friend came into her mind, with its crop of curly yellow hair, and she tried to detect the similarities between father and son. There were none that she could readily ascertain—at least on the surface. The father’s hair was auburn, rather straight, and showing signs that within a few years it might begin to thin on top. In contrast to the clean boots, his face seemed to indicate much time spent out-of-doors, for it was tanned. The expression bore none of the simplicity of the son’s, but perhaps in time the child’s, too, might harden into the granite-like austerity of the father’s. His brow seemed chiseled into a perpetual scowl, and the dark eyes seemed to defy penetration. His look and bearing were the very personification of his name, and Jamie could not keep from wondering if in some mystical way he had not assumed the character of the very stones of granite out of which his home was made, and for which his ancestors had named their estate. From the inanimate strength of his passive bearing, he looked to be between thirty-five and forty, but his troubles had aged him; he was in reality much younger than he appeared, not yet thirty.
Jamie’s initial reaction was fear, but it was quickly and unaccountably replaced by something akin to pity welling up in her heart. She could tell the man before her had borne much in his life. Intuitively she sensed that the granite features which tried to turn a brave face toward life’s heartaches must one day give way and crumble beneath his feet. And that would indeed be a terrible day for one such as this, whose emotions were hidden so far in the depths of his being.
Her thoughts had no liberty to progress further, however, for the moment she heard the deep voice speak her own name, the initial dread returned tenfold upon her.
“Are you ready with your report, Miss MacLeod?” boomed the voice of Edward Graystone. There were no words of introduction or welcome.
Her voice trembled as she spoke.
“Aye . . . I mean, yes, sir—that is, your Lordship . . .”
She stopped, feeling the redness flood her face.
“Continue,” he said, taking no note of her discomfiture.
“Master Andrew is doin’ weel,” Jamie went on nervously, trying to force calmness into her tone. “He seems t’ be adjustin’ t’ the change in nurses. He’s eatin’ jist fine; he has been a wee bit fussy today, but that’s nae doobt frae—”
“Has he any needs?” the laird cut in gruffly.
“Needs?”
“Yes,” he answered a little impatiently. “The factor and I shall be going into Aberdeen tomorrow, and it is customary for the senior staff to give me lists of purchases to be made. As I am accompanying the factor on this occasion, I will see to it personally. You are in charge of the nursery. Therefore, it is your responsibility to assess the boy’s needs and make me aware of them.”
“I will tend to it this evening,” Jamie replied, her nerves as well as her tongue calming somewhat. “I’ll give it to Miss Campbell in the morning.”
“I shall be leaving well before that. Leave the list with Miss Campbell tonight and she will see that it gets to me.”
His eyes narrowed slightly at her words. She had not yet noticed that rarely did anyone address him by his title, and when they did the words usually met with a similarly odd reaction in his face.
He then turned his gaze in turn upon each of the others who had not yet been questioned, and Jamie breathed an inward sigh of relief. It did not strike Jamie as curious that the man seemed to care nothing about her background, although he was entrusting his very son to her care. For the present she had too many other things on her mind. But such questions would eventually come to her, giving her cause to wonder just what this man felt for his own son—if anything, for he seemed to treat his son’s care with the same emotionless concern for mere business that he did his horses.
Suddenly Jamie realized they were being dismissed. Coming to herself, she also realized her cheeks were still burning. With a flicker of fear, she hoped the man had not noticed. He said not another word to her, and soon she found herself standing out in the hall with the others. The library doors swung closed, and MacKay and George Ellice immediately turned down the corridor without a word.
Staring at the closed library doors, Jamie could not keep her mind from wondering what a man like the laird was doing now that he was alone. Perhaps he had dropped limply back into the great leather chair, at last relaxing the tough exterior stance of the powerful laird. Or had he walked around his desk to the adjacent wall lined with bookshelves, there to choose a book to read before dinner—perhaps Ivanhoe or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or a selection from Burns?
Yet as much as she tried to picture the taut, uncompromising figure as turning toward some more relaxed and human pursuit, the image remained in her mind of the only posture she had seen him in. For all she knew he still stood planted firmly behind that desk, hands gripped at his back, dark gaze fixed forward. What was he seeing now? Now that the faces before him were gone, upon what distant images were those penetrating eyes focused?
No, she thought, he does not look like his son. But there was something she had seen in him, something she could not quite identify, something—
Suddenly she remembered whom the man did look like!
She had forgotten until now. There had been a black-cloaked man, an awesome presence, stepping from a gleaming black carriage drawn by two lively chestnuts . . .
With a shudder at the remembrance of that childhood memory, she forced herself back to the present and sought out Dora’s friendly company as they returned to their quarters.