Chapter Fifteen

 

 

The Sorensons looked refreshingly like Beaver Cleaver’s next door neighbors. Jan had a firm hand on the back of each miniature T-shirt; Mandy’s sported a unicorn, Brian’s read “Here Comes Trouble.” The children’s scrubbed faces peered upward at the height of the castle.

“Thank you for coming out on a weekday,” said Phil, clomping down the staircase. “I want to fix the stain on the ceiling tomorrow so the plaster can dry over the weekend.”

“No problem,” Peter returned, hoisting his toolbox. “I had some comp time.” The men went off talking about wiring and water damage.

Rebecca left the door gaping and settled with Jan on the stone wall where she had first seen Darnley. The children chased a ball across the lawn. Steve crept around the side of the building, rake held like a halberd over his shoulder. Slash whined, his feelings hurt, in the tool shed. Dorothy shook her dust rag out of a fifth floor window.

And there was Darnley himself, ejected through the front door. “Get on wi’ you,” Michael said to him. “You’ll no be gettin’ the soup bone quite yet.” Then, going back inside, “Aye, I’ll take it down.”

“How are you getting along with yon braw lad?” Jan asked.

“Been listening to the tapes he lent you?” returned Rebecca.

Jan grinned, producing a couple of Battlefield Band cassettes from her duffle bag of a purse. “It’s contagious. You should hear me when we’re at Peter’s grandparents in Minnesota. Ya, it’s a fine lutefisk, huff da,” she said, perfectly mimicking a Norwegian accent.

Rebecca laughed, and answered Jan’s question. “Amazing—if I’d said to my brothers some of the things I say to Michael, I’d have been mincemeat. That wee tartan chip on his shoulder can take it as well as dish it out.”

“Sounds as if you can be honest with him.”

“I guess so. The question is whether or not he’s being honest with me.”

Jan tilted her head curiously. “At least his chip isn’t a giant four-leafed green one. Louise got a letter the other day from a group in Belfast wanting money from Americans with Irish ancestry. For Irish orphans, they said, but I told her to forget it, they were probably buying guns to create more orphans.”

Brian and Mandy linked hands and sang, “Ring around a rosy, pockets full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” They collapsed giggling onto the lawn.

“Didn’t I hear once,” said Jan, “that that song is really a grim little ditty about people dying of the pox or something equally nasty? You know, the rosy ring is the rash, and you leave flowers on a grave, and it’s really ‘achoo, achoo, we all fall down dead.’“

“Yeah, I heard something like that, too. Except I thought it was the Black Death, and it really was ashes, because they had too many bodies to bury so they burned them. And the Great Fire of London in 1666 finally wiped out the Plague—there, at least.”

Jan shrugged. “Whatever. The point is that nothing is really what it seems to be, nursery rhymes or anything else.”

“You can say that again,” replied Rebecca, with a sideways glance at the inscrutable face of the castle.

Michael appeared in the doorway, carrying the claymore from the prophet’s chamber. He struck a pose, declaiming, “Once more into the breach, for Charlie, Scotland, and Saint Andrew!”

The children goggled at him. Rebecca laughed. Jan applauded. Michael lowered the sword and rested its tip on the ground. “How’d they carry these things about? No wonder they adapted so quickly to firearms.”

Jan called, “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

“I’m no livin’ wi’ one,” Michael returned. “I’m takin’ it to the ballroom, so Peter’ll no drop the ceilin’ on it.” He vanished into the house.

“Honestly,” Rebecca said, “every time I’m ready to roast him over a slow fire he about faces and does something appealing. His bad moods blow over instantly. But then, so do his good ones.”

The children, scratching their heads dubiously at the weirdness of adults, swarmed forward demanding food and drink. “I got some Animal Crackers yesterday,” Rebecca told them. “Come on in the kitchen.”

Jan resumed her clutch of their T-shirts. Rebecca left the tapes in the sitting room and explained that the pile of cloth and polished wooden tubes on Michael’s chair was a set of great Highland pipes under renovation. “The reeds came in the mail last week,” she concluded.

Jan plunked the children at the kitchen table and started counting out the cookies. “What smells so good?”

“Michael’s making soup. With garlic and onions, even. He thought the mustard and catsup on the Whoppers we ate the other day was spicy but no bad.”

“Went to Burger King, huh? Dutch—or should I say Scotch—treat, I suppose. You’re really big spenders.”

“Neither one of us has money to heat up, let alone burn.”

“Speaking of money to burn,” Jan said, “Eric was telling me out at Golden Age that he took you to the Velvet Turtle last week. Wow! For the price of a meal there I could have that new living room suite.”

“Not quite,” replied Rebecca. “But I’ve never seen so much silverware. I kept waiting until Eric chose a piece and then I picked up the same one. I figure if he can rise above his humble origins, so can I.”

“And what do you two have planned for this weekend?”

Oh. Rebecca blushed, tried to duck, and turned positively scarlet. Either she was going to have to learn better self-control, she told herself in disgust, or wear a ski mask all the time.

Mandy and Brian began clamoring for the bathroom. Jan herded them up the stairs and past the study, where Phil’s and Peter’s earnest voices were interrupted by the patter of falling plaster. She deposited Brian in Rebecca’s bathroom just as Dorothy came down the stairs. The housekeeper had already lit a cigarette and trailed smoke like a crashing plane. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep this place tidy,” she said without preamble, “when things are piled on the floor. Mr. Forbes would never have approved of his things being left on the floor. He was very particular, believe me.”

“We won’t damage anything,” Rebecca assured her yet again.

“Thirty years I’ve worked here.” Dorothy went on down the next flight of stairs, her monologue trailing like the smoke behind her. Mandy coughed.

“Last month,” Rebecca said to Jan, “she was asking why James didn’t throw out all this junk and get some nice things from Wal-Mart.”

“She’s probably going to be out of a job soon. After thirty years you’d expect her to be a little possessive.”

“Oh yes,” stated Rebecca. “You’re sure Dorothy was a flaming youth back in the ‘50’s? She certainly flamed out.”

Jan laughed. “All right, explain that blush. What do you have planned with Eric? An intimate dinner at his condo?”

Rebecca made a throwaway gesture. “It seems like a good idea.”

“I’ll bet it does. He’s a charmer, isn’t he? I’ve been wondering about you two—I mean, you’ve always been so cautious about relationships. Ray must’ve worked on you for ages before. . . Oh, I’m sorry.”

Brian came out of the bathroom and Mandy went in. The little boy started up the stairs while the women played goalie at the bottom. “It’s nothing I haven’t thought about,” Rebecca assured Jan. “When you grow up hearing your brothers talk about women as if they were baseball diamonds you get a bit apprehensive. Ray never hounded me, he was just there. Eric’s not hounding me, either, even though he does come on a lot stronger.”

“He has his talents, definitely.” Jan peered upward. Her son had disappeared around the bend. “Brian?”

“I’ll check on him.” Halfway up the stairs Rebecca heard Brian’s voice in James’s old bedroom, not words, just the bright polite tone the boy used when speaking to adults. Who was he talking to? Michael’s footsteps loped down the stairs above her, returning from stowing the claymore.

Brian stood in the middle of the room, alone, looking at the rocking chair. He must’ve just climbed out of it; it was rocking gently. He turned as Rebecca entered and said gravely, “The man’s scared.”

“What?”

“The man’s scared.”

The nape of Rebecca’s neck chilled. Michael rounded the angle of the staircase and she gestured at him to keep quiet. “Who’s scared?”

Brian pointed at the chair. It rocked twice more, then stopped. “That man there. The old man, like Great-grandpa.”

Rebecca shot a sharp significant glance at Michael. He blinked. She asked Brian, “How do you know the old man was scared?”

“He said,” the child answered, “no, don’t push me, help.”

“Don’t push me,” Rebecca repeated. God almighty. Don’t push me.

Michael muttered something that was either Gaelic or profanity, and added, “The wean’s scared o’ the staircase, Rebecca.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Just an imaginary situation. Kids don’t have preconceived ideas of how things should be.” No, children see things the way they are. They speak to ghosts, and we only hear their steps. I only saw James the once, before I started watching for him.

Michael shied away. “The weans brought a ball, did they? I’ll get the broom from the kitchen and teach them tae play shinty. Show Jan yon scrapbooks. Photos o’ the old days.”

“Okay,” said Rebecca. She stood, fixed to the floor, while Michael ushered Brian down the stairs, collected Mandy, sent Jan up. That’s all they needed, she told herself, to imagine that poor James had been murdered. On the garbled evidence of a three-year-old. Even Eric would be laughed out of court with nothing better than that.

“I’m hallucinating,” Jan announced. “I thought I heard a bachelor say he wanted to play with my kids.”

“He misses his nephews,” explained Rebecca.

“You sure are pale. Did you run into one of the local ghosts?”

Rebecca forced a laugh. “Brian was talking to some imaginary playmate. Gave me a chill, that’s all. This place does get on your nerves.”

“He does that all the time.” Even so, Jan looked over her shoulder. “It is kind of chilly in here. Michael said you had some pictures to show me?”

“Yeah, sure.” Shaking herself, Rebecca opened the top scrapbook.

The first photograph was of a garden scene. John and Elspeth sat in lawn chairs at the side of the castle. Beside them the child James in his sailor hat and short pants clutched a disgruntled ancestor of Darnley’s. John’s face was that of a hawk, beady-eyed, stern, and keen. Elspeth was smiling, a coquettish laugh frozen in time, her eyes turned toward the man standing behind her. He wore a black suit and was proffering a tray with a cup and saucer on it. His dark good looks were no less keen, but much warmer. He, too, was laughing, secretly.

“Ooh,” said Jan. “How’d you like to have that for a butler? The man looks like Valentino. And he knows it, too.”

“So does Elspeth—look at the way she’s eyeing him. And she was so much younger than John. I bet he was jealous of her.”

“If he was he kept it quiet. Louise says he lived for the opinions of his neighbors. We’ll ask her if there’s any juicy gossip from back then.”

“Great.” Rebecca turned the page. There was a casual picture of the girl in the studio photograph, the dark face younger but no less petulant. “Katherine Gemmell (Katie),” read James’s neat handwriting. “There’s a formal picture of her in a diary,” she told Jan. “So she is the Gemmells’ daughter. There goes my story of a tragic love affair between her and James.”

“Why?”

Rebecca laughed. “I only had time to glance at the diaries, but I do remember references to a ‘KG’. And they weren’t flattering. Apparently she took advantage of the expansion of female horizons in the twenties and did some work as an actress. James disapproved.”

“A man of his generation would.”

“Afraid so.” Jan and Rebecca sat turning the pages, wandering among the static images of long ago. Athena Gemmell, it turned out, was a plain, rather dour woman with a white apron. Pairing her with the elegant Rudolph was like mating a pigeon to a falcon, Rebecca thought. I’d be dour, too.

Michael’s and the children’s shouts echoed from the lawn, Phil’s hammer tapped away downstairs, and Dorothy’s vacuum cleaner emitted its banshee wail. Some time later Peter called, “Jan? We need to be going.” Just as Rebecca closed the album she caught a faint whiff of lavender. If Brian were here, would he start talking to the beautiful lady?

Jan was already out the door. Rebecca followed precipitately. They and Peter met Michael on the main staircase. He was flushed and out of breath, and the wind had made the shorter strands of his hair stand on end. “The bairns’re pettin’ the moggie,” he said to Jan, and as her face registered alarm, amended, “The cat.”

“Oh,” Jan said. “Poor little critter. I’d better go rescue it.”

“Here,” said Peter, pulling a wrinkled, legal-sized envelope out of his pocket. “This was under the desk. Just saw a corner of it when I was packing my tools. Fell off the top, I guess, maybe months ago.”

Rebecca took the envelope. The paper was grainy with dust. It was sealed, but nothing was written on it, even though some kind of paper was inside. “Probably soup-can labels or coupons for candy bars,” she said. “I’ve found both in that desk. Thanks anyway.”

She laid the envelope on Queen Mary’s marble bodice as they trooped out onto the lawn. Darnley had managed to escape Brian’s and Mandy’s attentions and was disappearing into the dovecote, the children in hot pursuit.

Jan, Peter, and Rebecca followed the children around the side of the dovecote to its alternate, paradoxical face. Here, on the north side of the structure, the bright afternoon winked out and they plunged into shadow. Brian, unperturbed by the grim ambience of the place, ran up and down the steps while Mandy knocked on the door of the tomb calling “Anybody home?”

Jan snatched her away. “What if somebody answers?”

That was a real possibility, Rebecca thought. Every time she’d come out here she’d had that same sense of being watched, although never as intensely as the first time. Maybe if James and Elspeth’s spirits still moved in the house, John’s was trapped in the mausoleum, his raptorial gaze fixed on his part whimsical, part lunatic castle, waiting possessively for his family. She looked narrowly at the lock. No new scratches. Whoever had the key hadn’t used it.

Back in the sunlight Michael was putting Peter’s toolbox into the Sorensons’ station wagon. The adults strapped the children into the car and said their goodbyes. “Keep me posted,” whispered Jan to Rebecca. “About Eric, you know.” She grimaced, attempting a lascivious leer. But her good-natured features simply couldn’t achieve such an expression.

Rebecca ignored her implication and called, “See you at Louise’s party Sunday,” as they drove away and disappeared.

Michael said from the corner of his mouth, “That’s all right, sweetheart, I counted the silver.”

“That’s the worst Bogart imitation I’ve ever heard,” Rebecca retorted. “Where do you get off going through Peter’s things, anyway?”

He looked at her indignantly. “I thought everyone was a suspect in this little caper. Includin’ you and me.”

“But they’re my friends!”

With a pitying smile Michael shrugged and turned away.

Today Dun Iain was wearing its guise of fairy-tale castle. The afternoon sun slanted through the bare branches, turning the beige harl of the castle to rose and gilding the roofs and dormers. Even the telephone and electricity lines shimmered like dewy spiderwebs where they looped through the trees. The resident ogre, Steve, materialized from wherever he had been lurking and let Slash out of the shed. The dog cavorted around him like some grotesque shadow, then sped off into the trees. The white mail truck advanced up the driveway.

Michael took the mail, handed it to Rebecca, and stood chatting with the young, blond mail carrier. Ever since the woman’s first encounter with the blue eyes and the enticing accent, she’d started bringing virtually everything up to the house. Today it was a package. Rebecca would have recognized those precise letters printing her address as Ray’s even if the postmark hadn’t been Dover.

With a sigh she flipped through the letters. Several ads, an official-looking envelope addressed to James Forbes from the Bright Corporation, and a note from Rebecca’s oldest brother, Kevin. Or from his wife, to be exact. Her family, steady and virtuous people, hadn’t the foggiest comprehension why she was spending three months at an old castle in Ohio, and had been stunned to hear she’d broken up with Ray.

Three blue British airmail envelopes peeked out below the others. The Sheffield postmark was Michael’s sister Maddy, whose husband had been reduced to one of those soddin’ great factories in England. The Fort Augustus was Michael’s chum Colin MacLeod. The third envelope was printed, “Tighnabruaich, 10 Ness Bank, Inverness”, his parents’ hotel.

The mail carrier drove away, Michael waving. Rebecca handed over his letters. “You’ve hit the jackpot today.”

“All right!” he exclaimed.

Steve, absorbed in rewinding his Walkman as he strolled toward the pickup truck, almost collided with them. With muttered apologies everyone dodged. Steve climbed into the pickup, clamped on his earphones, and closed his eyes, effectively raising a “Do Not Disturb” sign.

Rebecca went into the house wondering whether Phil had ever noticed the distinct odor of marijuana clinging to his son. Maybe he thought it was after-shave, like Eric’s sandalwood scent.

She picked up the envelope she’d left on the sarcophagus and found Michael in the kitchen chuckling over his letters. “You’ll like this,” he said, handing her a snapshot. “Only my mum would think of sendin’ it on.”

Oh my, she thought. There he was, kilt, stockings and sporran, brass buttons on his high-necked jacket, plaid over his shoulder. It wasn’t his contemporary haircut that was incongruous, but the ease of his pose. The camera had caught him striding forward, hand upraised, starting to speak some pleasantry. She’d seen him laugh, and his grin was dazzling, but never this open and unaffected, hiding nothing. Body language indeed—here was an honest, happy man. “I’m impressed,” she told him, handing the picture back. “You have very handsome knees. When was this taken?”

“Thank you kindly. At Glenfinnan last August, my farewell appearance wi’ the band. You have tae settle doon sometime, you see.”

“I see.” Maybe she should urge the mail carrier to take him out some evening and loosen him up a bit.

She opened the package. Inside were layers of sprigged tissue paper emitting a flowery perfume that clashed with the odor of soup. Inside that was a lacy semitransparent black negligee. Rebecca held it up, gaping. Ray, spending good money on something like this? Not counting the recent spate of flowers, the last present he’d bought her was a toaster oven.

She crushed the negligee back into the box and glanced at Michael ostensibly reading his sister’s letter. He didn’t betray by so much as the flick of an eyelash he’d seen the filmy garment, but she knew he had. She ransacked the package. No letter. Nothing except the suggestive and damning garment. She jammed the top onto the box.

“Here’s another,” said Michael, with downright malicious nonchalance. She looked blankly at the photo he gave her, then focused. Michael and a wavy-haired man stood on a rocky snowfield wearing parkas, heavy hiking boots, and backpacks. “That’s Colin. I go hill climbin’ wi’ him, he listens to my music. Though I prefer hikin’ and he prefers Bruce Springsteen.”

“Compromise,” Rebecca agreed, “makes the world go ‘round.”

On the remaining envelope James’s name was typed, not a mailing label. The Bright Corporation. Sounded like business, not an ad. She’d give it to Eric.

And there was the packet of coupons or whatever Peter had found beneath the desk. Rebecca slit open the envelope and pulled out the one long paper folded within. The letters, typed on the same ancient manual as the diaries, strobed before her eyes. “I’ll be damned,” she murmured.

“What is it?” Michael asked, tucking his snapshots away.

“The last will and testament of James Ramsey Forbes.”

“What!” He peered over her shoulder. His breath would’ve raised gooseflesh on her cheek if she weren’t already chilled with bewilderment. “His will was probated months ago. That’s why we’re here.”

“Look.” Rebecca indicated the bottom of the paper. There was James’s shaky, almost illegible signature. Below it were lines for two witnesses, only one of which was filled with firm letters reading, “Warren H. Lansdale.” “If the sheriff knows about another will, why hasn’t he told us?”

“Either none o’ our business, or no important,” answered Michael. “This will isna legal, is it? Dinna you need two signatures?”

“I think so. It’s dated August 24; when was the legitimate will dated, do you know? Maybe this is a rough draft of it.”

“No.” Michael pointed at a block of type. “Naething aboot passin’ the goods onto relatives. They all go right tae the museum and the state.”

Rebecca’s mind felt like her stomach did when she’d skipped a meal. “Eric said something about James changing his mind right before he died because he was fed up with paying taxes. I guess this is the version he started out with, and then made the other one once he’d decided.”

“The probated will’s on file somewhere.”

“Of course it is. I’ll ask Eric. He’ll know all about it.”

“Oh aye,” Michael said. He began stirring the pot of soup so vigorously broth splashed over the sides and sizzled on the burner.

“Is something burning?” asked Dorothy from the doorway.

How long had she been standing there? Rebecca shifted her jaundiced gaze from Michael to the housekeeper. “What day did James die, Mrs. Garst?”

“August 27. And yes, he made a new will right before he died. Eric was such a help to him. Don’t know how we’d have managed without him.”

At least she wasn’t pretending she hadn’t eavesdropped. “This will is different from the one that was probated,” Rebecca told her.

Dorothy pulled her shapeless sweater more closely about her shapeless body. “Those taxes were eating him alive. He’d had to sell some things, and that hurt him terribly, you could tell. He loved his things so much. They were his children.”

Michael banged the spoon on the edge of the pot and laid it down. Phil loomed in the doorway behind Dorothy. “I’m leaving the sheet over the furniture in the little room,” he said.

“Thank you,” Rebecca called.

“I don’t know,” said Phil, with a sidelong glance at Dorothy, “about that lawyer fella being such a big help. James was kind of down on him there at the end.”

Dorothy bristled. “Just because he was old and confused and got it in his head Eric was to blame for the high taxes. In spite of that Eric helped him work out the compromise in the will. He’s always the perfect gentleman. Right?” She fixed Rebecca with her dreadful simper. Apparently, as far as Dorothy was concerned, whatever Eric wanted Eric could have.

Rebecca said to Michael, “The barley’s in the pantry. I’ll get it for you.” The door was open a crack; inside Darnley sat licking his whiskers.

“I’ll be back tomorrow to finish the ceiling,” called Phil.

“Thank you,” Michael said. “Much obliged.”

“I’ll be leaving as soon as I get my things.” Dorothy followed Phil into the entry. Rebecca emerged from the pantry in time to overhear her say to him, “I hope you’re going home by way of Ed’s Clip Joint. Steve needs a haircut. He doesn’t have to look like a foreigner; we have standards here.”

Phil didn’t reply. The front door slammed. Dorothy’s loafer-clad feet slogged up the main staircase. Michael stood, one arm braced against the counter, his other akimbo at his hip. “Was she talkin’ aboot me?”

“People of her generation tend to exaggerate the sociopolitical connotations of hair,” Rebecca told him, handing over the barley. “Yours is long, therefore you’re some kind of revolutionary.”

Michael tossed his head defiantly, setting the brown strands dancing onto his forehead. While Steve, Rebecca thought, needed his hair not only cut but washed, Michael’s was always scrupulously clean. Just went to show you couldn’t predict a person’s personal habits from the tidiness of his bedroom.

Michael turned to the soup. Rebecca dialed Eric’s office, only to have a polite conversation with his secretary. “No,” she said, hanging up, “he’s not there. He does have more than Dun Iain to worry about, after all. I’ll tell him about the other will tomorrow. It’s curious, but no big deal. We’d have our funding even if this were the legal one.”

“True enough,” Michael said. He strolled into the sitting room.

Rebecca gathered the box with the negligee, the letter from her sister-in-law, the missive from Bright Corporation, the will. And there was her notebook, abandoned on the table. She hauled everything upstairs to her room. From the window she saw the Pruitts’ pickup, the huge Labrador hunkered in the back, departing up the driveway. A distant screech and wail must be the vacuum cleaner protesting its trip downstairs.

Rebecca sat at the dressing table. Maybe she was the one who should get her hair cut, or color it red instead of plain-Jane brown, or something. She looked twitchy, as Jan would say. Something about the wary lines at the corners of her eyes, or the smoke coming out of her ears. Too much input, she thought. Brain error.

A scream echoed up the staircase. Maybe Darnley had caught a mouse. Maybe Slash had caught Darnley. . . Rebecca was already out the door before she remembered she’d seen the Pruitts leave with the dog.

She shot into the Hall from the landing just as Dorothy, carrying her basket, thumped in from the back staircase. There, backlit by the gold-tinted luminescence of a window, stood Michael playing the old pipes. Except they weren’t old pipes anymore. Now the chanter emitted a high clear note underlain by the bass hum of the drones like silver underlies the glass of a mirror. The sound filled the room and overflowed. A hush fell on Dun Iain, as if the stones themselves were trembling in some subtle harmonic of the music.

Rebecca recognized the melody and her mind sang the words. “I was forced to wander, because that I was poor, and to leave the hills of Caledonia seemed more than I could endure. And when that I was travellin’, oh a thought came to my mind, that I had never seen her beauty ‘til she was far behind.”

The music was piercingly sweet, piercingly sad. Rebecca’s nerves shivered with a delight so profound it hurt.

Dorothy clamped her available hand over her ear, hurried across the Hall and brushed by Rebecca, exclaiming, “What an awful noise! Sounds like he’s skinning that poor little cat!” Her steps rushed down the staircase. The front door slammed.

Rebecca stood enchanted, watching the dust motes dance in the sunlight. “The foreign winds cry Caledonia, it’s time you were goin’ home.”

Her presence didn’t matter any more than those motes of dust. Michael’s eyes were shut. His deceptively delicate fingers moved on the chanter as though he were making love to it. The drones lay trustingly against his shoulder and moaned in response.

Rebecca folded her arms. He was wearing the open face of the pictures, charged with intense emotion. She didn’t want to see that much feeling, that much vulnerability, in him. It was like opening a box of corn flakes and finding it filled with gold dust, startling and disturbing.

“And should some young man ask of me, is it brave or wise to roam, I’ll bid him range the wide world over the better to know his own home.”

The song squeezed Rebecca’s heart until it ached. She was desperately homesick for Scotland, for Alba, for Caledonia, even though she’d been there only five days. Now she understood why, after Culloden, the English had banned the pipes as instruments of war. Their song was gut feeling expressed in rational precision, right brain and left in a formidable, terrifying union.

“Ferry me over, ferry me there, to leave the hills of Caledonia’s more than my heart can bear.”

She wanted to go to Michael and tell him he wasn’t alone. But he was alone. If she interrupted him, she’d only embarrass them both.

Rebecca trudged to her room and shut the door. The portrait of Elspeth looked abstractedly down, as if the painted woman, too, were drinking in the song as potent as whiskey. Home. Home.

Abruptly the music stopped, leaving an odd hollow echo hanging in the air, emotion unfulfilled, love unrequited. Rebecca wanted to scream to fill the empty silence. She was alone, and she hurt. Tears filled her eyes and she dashed them away. Damn Michael. She hated a man who made her cry.

Slowly the light faded and the shadows of evening filled the room.

 

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