MacTarvit, he thought. She wants to meet old MacTarvit, wants me to keep the old man from stealing cattle. How is it any of my business? Trevelyan thought. What do I care about her bloody tradition?
He blew more smoke rings and smiled. She’d been quite pretty when she was raging at him about old man MacTarvit. Her hair, her eyes, that splendid bosom of hers. “Harry doesn’t appreciate her,” he said aloud. Harry doesn’t know she has a mind, he thought. Harry didn’t even know how easily she could be aroused to that passion that was so close beneath the surface, but Harry wasn’t interested enough to try to teach her anything. Harry had never wanted to be a teacher. If she were mine, Trevelyan thought, I would spend the time to teach her all that she could learn, and, if she were mine, I wouldn’t leave her alone for days at a time. If she were mine I’d—
He broke off, frowning, then stood up. “I’m going to bed,” he said and paid no attention to Oman’s look of shock. Trevelyan never went to bed before the wee hours of the morning—he said he had too much to do in his life to lose time sleeping.
Trevelyan rose very early the next morning. Leaving his sitting room, he went up a flight of old stone stairs, opened an overhead door, and made his way up to the lead roof. He walked across the edge of the roof, noting that what Harry had said about the roof being in bad shape was true. When he came to another door in the roof, he opened it and went down a narrow, dirty staircase. It was obvious that no one had used these stairs in many years, for he bent to pick up something and saw that it was a toy soldier. It was either Trevelyan’s or his older brother’s; Harry had not been allowed to play with his siblings.
Trevelyan went down two flights of stairs until he came to a small door and opened it. Just as he knew it would, it opened behind an enormous tapestry.
He made his way from behind the tapestry and into the darkened room and was startled to see a small, round, gray-haired lady standing there watching him. There was almost no light from either inside or outside the room so he had some difficulty making out who she was.
“Hello, Aunt May,” he said, smiling. “Still can’t sleep, I see.”
She studied him for a moment. “You’re Vellie, aren’t you? You’ve grown into a man.”
“No, Aunt May. Vellie died, remember?”
“Ah yes. So he did.” She continued to study him. “Then who are you?”
“Vellie’s ghost,” he said and winked at her.
“As a ghost you should have a great deal of company in this house,” she said and walked out of the room.
“Nothing’s changed at all,” Trevelyan muttered as he went out another door of the room and made his way to a small sitting room, then found a door in the paneling.
When the house had been a castle there had been several entrances and exits that were secret—so the family would have a way of escaping should there be danger. As later generations added on to the house they continued to make secret passages and staircases and concealed doors. In the eighteenth century an ancestor of Trevelyan’s had enclosed the whole structure in a modern, beautiful shell but he had not bothered to change the interior, or, if Trevelyan knew his family, they hadn’t had enough money to do a proper job. As a result, the entire house was riddled with secret tunnels and passageways. Trevelyan and his older brother, and sometimes Leatrice, had explored these passages thoroughly.
He lit a candle and made his way up one stair, opened a door quietly, and entered the room that had once been his father’s. It was as he thought: no one was staying in the room. He went to the chest that was against one wall and opened it. His hand trembled a bit as he opened the chest, for he could feel his father’s presence all about him. It was as though the man might enter the room at any moment.
What would Trevelyan say to the man if he did enter? Would he be glad to see his father, or would he spit on the ground at his feet? Trevelyan honestly didn’t know.
It didn’t take Trevelyan long to find what he wanted. He pulled out the tartan that was the laird’s plaid. It was a deep, rich blue, with a bit of red and some green in it. He smiled as he thought of Miss Claire Willoughby. Let’s see if she can identify this tartan, he thought. Trevelyan didn’t think the pattern was in any book, for this was the tartan for the laird of Clan Montgomery, and only the laird had the right to wear it.
He removed his clothes down to his smalls, leaving his sh
irt on, spread the yards of cloth on the floor, then tried to do what he had so often seen his father do: roll himself in the thing. When his father had done it, it had looked easy, but Trevelyan found it was more difficult than he had imagined it would be. Within minutes he was cursing all things Scottish.
“Never wear the small kilt,” Trevelyan could hear his father telling his oldest son as Trevelyan used to stand in the doorway watching. “A laird has a responsibility. If the lairds don’t carry on the tradition then no one will.”
So now Trevelyan was doing his best to wrap himself into the plaid as he’d seen his father do. If one had to wear a damned skirt then why couldn’t it be an easy one like Harry wore? He smiled at the answer: he was trying to impress a girl and he knew she would be much more impressed with the long kilt than the short one.
At last he got the fabric rolled about his waist and belted into place. He slung the end over his shoulder and pinned it with his father’s brooch. He hung the sporran about his waist, put on the heavy socks, then the shoes with the holes in them, holes that allowed the water of the eternally wet Scottish land to flow out.
When he was done, he looked at himself in his father’s mirror, and for a moment, he could almost see his father standing in front of this mirror wearing this same tartan. His eldest son would be in front of him and Trevelyan would be in the back, watching the two of them.
Now Trevelyan turned away and slipped out the door he’d entered. He went up a flight of stairs, across a landing, then had to crouch as he walked through a short tunnel. He wasn’t sure which room was Claire’s but he had a good idea. His mother was not a woman of great imagination and would therefore probably put her in the third-best guest room—which is what the old hag would no doubt think an American was: third best.
Slowly, so the unused door wouldn’t creak, he opened it, and the big portrait of his great-great-aunt moved with the door.
By now there was a bit of light outside, so he went to the window and drew the curtain back. She was in bed, sleeping on her stomach like a child. He smiled down at her, for the bed was a mess. She had kicked the covers and twisted them until most of them were on the floor.
He looked down at her and marveled at her youth. She wasn’t just young in age, but young in what she knew and had seen and what she believed of the world. He wondered if he had ever been as innocent as she was. He doubted it.
He sat down on the side of the bed and smoothed her hair out of her eyes. She stirred in her sleep but didn’t awaken. The arm of her gown was pushed up to her elbow and he ran his hand down her smooth skin. For a moment it startled him at how much he wanted to run his hands over every inch of her skin.
Wanting to touch a pretty young thing like Claire wasn’t what startled him, but that he wanted her did. He wanted her to look at him with her big brown eyes blazing with all the passion he’d seen when she’d talked of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
She moved, lifted her head a bit, and gave him a half smile. “Good morning,” she murmured, then turned her head to the other side.